Years of participating in contact sports could increase athletes’ tolerance to pain.
A new study subjected athletes to various measures of pain tolerance and measured how much pain they could withstand. The authors found that those who participated in contact sports had dramatically higher pain tolerance in various unrelated sports tasks than non-athletes or athletes who participated in non-contact sports.
The authors suggest that repeated physical contact may desensitize these athletes and have built up their pain tolerance over time.
Conclusions
Pain tolerance can be improved through various mechanisms, and this study suggests that repeated physical contact may be one of those mechanisms. An alternative possibility, however, is that only those individuals who already possessed high pain tolerance levels were willing to pursue participating in contact sports. Unfortunately, there is no way to know from this study which is the case.
Further research is needed to determine the extent to which repeated physical contact can alter pain sensitivity and mediums through this can be implemented towards treating patients who suffer from chronic pain.
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