Being part of a world class support team
At the end of July, top athletes from around the world will be gathering in Birmingham for the Commonwealth Games. It will be a great celebration of sport and human achievement, but just to qualify to be there, each of the athletes will have put in years of hard work, dedication, and sacrifice; training to be the best. As the saying that Jane Fonda popularised in the 1980s goes, ‘No gain without pain!’ In other words, if you want to achieve professional excellence you need to endure stress and pain to train to that level. However, these days doctors and sports professionals caution against that maxim.
If you are going to improve your fitness, by changing or increasing your exercise, then it’s normal to experience delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) the next day. DOMS is a normal response to unusual exertion and is part of how our bodies adapt and increase strength or endurance. However, while discomfort is natural if you push yourself, pain is the body’s protective mechanism. When we feel pain, our bodies are warning us to ease up or protect against an injury. Ignoring this warning risks damaging tissue, can complicate injuries, and extend the time it takes to heal. The professional athletes at the Commonwealth Games have world-class support teams of nutritionists, strength and conditioning coaches, physiotherapists, etc. to ensure the work they put into their training is going to develop their ability, and not cause them an injury.
It may be expressed differently, but the ‘No gain without pain’ concept is often seen in other areas of life. Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th-century German philosopher, famously said: ‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger.’ In our culture, we can find that this idea sometimes surfaces when we are experiencing difficult or traumatic times. We want to rationalise the pain/trauma we are suffering, so we give it transformative powers, believing that we will become a better person because of it.
From an evolutionary standpoint, those who survive a disaster are the ‘fittest’… but it wasn’t the disaster that made them the fittest. Tough and well-designed training regimes may help improve performance, but (and this is a big ‘but’) pain and trauma are not the equivalent of ‘good training’. Dr Noam Shpancer (a professor of psychology) writes that ‘the bulk of psychological research shows that if you are stronger after hardship, it is probably despite, not because of the hardship. The school of hard knocks does little more than knock you down, hard.’ He says that the strength possessed by those who survive a disaster/trauma doesn’t come from the disaster, but from what they’ve learnt and experienced, the love and care they’ve known, before the disaster.
I would add, that it also depends on the support people experience during and after any hardship.
Knowing that we are truly loved provides a foundation in life that can help sustain us through the most difficult times. And experiencing the ongoing love and care from the people who walk alongside us during the trials we face, or help pick us up afterwards, can sustain us and help us in our healing. The love and care we receive are truly how we become stronger through the hardships, disappointments, and failures of life.
We are living through difficult times, and some individuals are experiencing massive challenges. Some people might look as though they have it all together, but you never know what burdens they may be carrying. We’re faced with global political turmoil, the cost-of-living increase, rising COVID infections, and the impact of climate change, before we even get to whatever personal challenges we are facing. So, let’s remember Jesus’ call to love our neighbour, and be a world-class support team for one another. If we love one another in that way, then when we emerge from this time of trial, we will come out stronger.
Rev Barry Jackson