Pain Perception in Sports: Can Pain Tolerance Be Trained? A Complete Breakdown from Science to Practice

Opening: That Afternoon Climbing Wuling When I Questioned Everything

I’ll never forget taking a student, Xiao Lin (pseudonym), to train for the western approach to Wuling a few years ago. After passing Kunyang, he got off his bike, crouched by the guardrail, and said to me, pale-faced: “Coach, my legs aren’t sore, they hurt. It’s a sharp, cramping pain. I feel like if I keep pedaling, something’s going to break.”

That day it was about 8 degrees Celsius, the altitude was pushing 3,000 meters, and his heart rate was stuck at 175 bpm, unable to go up or down. I didn’t tell him to tough it out, but I did one thing: I crouched down with him to look at the bike computer, and said, “We’re not looking at the finish line. We’re only looking at the next utility pole. Tell me, on a scale of 0 to 10, what’s this pain?” He said 7. I said, “Okay, if you can still get a full sentence out at a 7, that means this is a workable zone, not an injury. Let’s trade that 7 out for the next utility pole.”

Three weeks later, on the same stretch of road, with the same pain, he summited Wuling and turned to me, saying, “The pain is actually still the same, but this time I knew what it was, so I wasn’t as scared.”

That statement pretty much sums up the most important insight I’ve gained about “pain during exercise” over the past 15 years—we may not be able to drastically change the intensity of pain, but our relationship with it, our interpretation of it, and our tolerance for it are abilities that can genuinely be trained.

In this article, I want to have a proper conversation with you about: what pain during exercise actually is, why exercise itself produces pain-relieving effects, why pain tolerance is plastic, and most practically—how you can train to hold on for those crucial extra minutes when climbing, sprinting to the line, or hitting the wall at kilometer 30 of a run.

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1. First, Let’s Distinguish: Three Completely Different Kinds of “Pain”

Before we talk about training, the biggest thing coaches fear is students lumping all discomfort under “pain,” then either being too afraid of pain to train hard, or being so unafraid of pain that they train into injury. Let’s break down the sensations during exercise into three categories. This is the foundation for every strategy that follows.

1. Perceived Effort

This is the overall feeling of “being tired, breathless, heavy,” related to how many watts you’re pushing and your heart rate, but it is not the same as pain, and it is not the same as injury. The core idea of the “psychobiological model” proposed by Italian sports scientist Marcora is that when endurance exercise stops, it’s often not because the muscles are truly out of fuel, but because the brain makes a decision based on perceived effort. In other words, many times you’re not unable to pedal; your brain has decided it’s “not worth being this tired anymore.”

2. Exercise-Induced Pain

This is the kind of pain I most want you to understand: that burning, tight, squeezing sensation in your quadriceps when climbing. It mainly comes from metabolic byproducts (hydrogen ions, potassium ions, lactate-related metabolites, etc.) accumulating in muscles during high-intensity contractions, stimulating sensory nerve endings within the muscle. This pain is “functional” and reversible—it fades after a few minutes of rest. It is not a signal of tissue damage. This is also the target we can genuinely train for tolerance.

3. Injury Pain

This is the red line. Sharp, localized, at a single point, doesn’t subside with rest, and even gets worse the more you train. It’s often accompanied by swelling, joint stiffness, or pain at specific angles—like a stabbing pain at the front of the knee, pain when pressing on the Achilles tendon, or a spot in the lower back radiating down the leg. This kind of pain is not meant to be tolerated; it’s meant to be taken to a doctor.

Distinguishing these three is the first lesson I teach every student. Here it is in a table:

Type	Sensation	Source	After Rest	What to Do
Perceived Effort	Breathless, tired, heavy legs, want to quit	Brain integrating signals	Quickly subsides	Can be managed with psychological strategies
Exercise-Induced Pain	Burning, tight, squeezing, symmetrical	Muscle metabolites stimulating nerves	Subsides within minutes	Trainable tolerance
Injury Pain	Sharp, localized, radiating	Tissue damage/inflammation	Doesn’t subside or worsens	Stop, assess, seek medical attention

Coach’s Note: If you can’t tell whether it’s category 2 or category 3, the safest approach is always to treat it as category 3. Missing one day of training won’t hurt you, but toughing it out into a chronic tendinopathy could sideline you for three months.

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2. Conceptual Foundation: Exercise Itself “Relieves Pain”

Many people don’t know that exercise doesn’t just create pain—it’s also a powerful natural pain-relief mechanism. This phenomenon is called “Exercise-Induced Hypoalgesia (EIH)” in the literature—after a moderate-to-high intensity workout, your sensitivity to pain temporarily decreases.

The Physiological Mechanisms Behind EIH

Based on several mechanistic review articles, exercise relieves pain through several layers of action. Let me translate them into plain language for you:

• Endorphins and the Endogenous Opioid System: Moderate-intensity exercise triggers the release of substances like β-endorphin, which directly reduce pain sensitivity. This is one piece of the so-called “runner’s high.”
• Mesolimbic Dopamine System: Exercise activates dopamine networks related to “reward and motivation,” helping you maintain drive even while in pain.
• Muscle-to-Brain Signals (Myokines): Muscle contraction releases signaling molecules like IL-6 and irisin, which modulate the central nervous system and immune response, promoting anti-inflammatory effects and reducing neuroinflammation, thereby lowering pain perception.
• Amygdala and Emotional Regulation: Animal studies have found that voluntary exercise suppresses the activation of certain brain regions triggered by pain, effectively turning down the “volume” of pain from the emotional and fear side.

Here I must be honest: the strength of evidence for these mechanisms varies. The evidence for endorphins and decreased pain sensitivity in human experiments and clinical settings is more solid; details like the amygdala stuff largely come from animal or translational research. So please treat this as “the big picture is correct, details are still being studied,” rather than a precise physiological prescription.

Two Important Distinctions: Threshold vs. Tolerance

This is a key concept for the entire article, so please remember it:

• Pain Threshold: The point at which you “begin to feel pain.”
• Pain Tolerance: The upper limit at which you are “still willing to continue enduring pain.”

Research comparing endurance athletes with the general population reveals a fascinating phenomenon: athletes’ pain thresholds are often similar to non-athletes—meaning, given the same stimulus, they feel pain just the same; but athletes’ pain tolerance is significantly higher—they are willing to stay in pain longer. Moreover, the more training hours, the more pronounced this tolerance difference becomes.

This gives us a very important training insight:

You don’t need to become someone who “doesn’t feel pain.” What you need to train is the ability to “keep working and keep making decisions while in pain.”

Quantifying Sensation with a “Pain Scale”

I strongly encourage students to quantify their subjective pain on a 0-to-10 scale during training. This isn’t about precision; it’s about building the habit of observing and naming your sensations—things that can be named are less likely to hold you hostage. This is also the principle behind “affect labeling” in psychology, which reduces perceived threat. Here’s a simple reference I give my students, so you have a mental scale while cycling or running:

Pain Score	Subjective Description	Corresponding State	Recommended Action
0–2	Almost imperceptible, easy	Warm-up or recovery zone	Can maintain for a long time
3–4	Noticeable but can chat	Aerobic endurance zone	Comfortable sustained pace
5–6	Burning, speech shortens	Threshold edge	Entering the training sweet spot
7–8	Very painful, only single words	High-intensity pain tolerance zone	Main battleground for psychological strategies
9–10	About to break, near limit	Sprint/finish line	Only for short periods, needs full recovery afterward

Please note, this table quantifies exercise-induced pain and perceived effort, not injury pain. Any sharp, localized pain, regardless of score, jumps straight out of this table and into the “stop and assess” protocol.

Why “The Brain Decides to Stop” Matters

Going back to Marcora’s psychobiological model: if the endpoint of endurance performance is largely a “decision made by the brain based on perceived effort,” then it means—as long as we can change the brain’s interpretation of effort and pain, we can change how long we’re willing to endure. This is exactly why, with the same body and the same pain, the time you can hold on differs enormously between the mindset of “I know this is safe, I have a strategy” versus “I don’t know what this is, I’m scared.” This isn’t mysticism; it’s the core operational space this model gives us.

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3. Can Pain Tolerance Really Be Trained? Yes, and There’s Evidence

The answer is yes. Research consistently shows that endurance athletes, through long-term training, develop greater pain tolerance and a more efficient “conditioned pain modulation” system. Simply put, people who train more have a better innate ability to suppress pain.

So where does this plasticity come from? I break it down into three pathways—these are the three levers I actually operate when designing training plans for my students.

Pathway 1: Repeated Exposure (Habituation)

The brain gradually lowers its threat assessment of a pain that is familiar, predictable, and proven “not to actually break anything.” Xiao Lin’s story is this pathway—by the third time facing the same climbing pain, he no longer interpreted it as danger, his fear dropped, and his tolerance naturally rose.

Pathway 2: Physiological Adaptation

Long-term training improves the muscles’ buffering capacity, metabolic efficiency, and capillary density, meaning you accumulate fewer metabolic stimuli at the same intensity, while your endogenous pain-relief system becomes more efficient. This is the “purely physiological” piece.

Pathway 3: Psychological Skills

This is the most underestimated piece, yet it yields the fastest returns. Where you direct your attention, how you talk to yourself, how you breathe, how you “slice” the pain—these are all deliberately trainable techniques, and you can often feel a difference within two to three weeks.

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4. Practical Methods: Concrete Tools to Build Pain Tolerance

Alright, at this point you might be asking: “Coach, so what exactly do I do?” Here are the methods I actually use, divided into “physical” and “psychological” groups.

(A) Physical Side: Using Workouts to Create “Controllable Pain”

The training principle for tolerance is the same as for strength—progressive overload. You need to regularly place yourself in the exercise-induced pain zone, but within a safe, recoverable range. Here’s a framework of introductory workouts I often give riders/runners of different levels:

Workout Type	Intensity Zone	Duration per Rep	Sets	Main Thing Being Trained
Threshold Intervals	88–95% FTP (approx. heart rate zone 4)	8–20 minutes	2–4 reps	Staying in “sustained burning”
VO2max Intervals	106–120% FTP	3–5 minutes	4–6 reps	Short exposure to high-intensity pain
Hill Repeats	Maintain steady output as much as possible	One fixed climb	3–5 reps	Maintaining decision-making under terrain pressure
Sprint Pain Tolerance	Near-maximal effort	30 seconds–1 minute	6–10 reps	Psychological endurance under extreme effort

Important Notes: These are “frameworks,” not “prescriptions.” The actual wattage, heart rate, and number of reps must be individualized based on your fitness tests (FTP, max heart rate) and recovery status. If you have cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, a history of heart disease, are older, or have been inactive for a long time, please consult a physician and undergo appropriate exercise assessment before starting any high-intensity intervals. Most large hospitals and sports medicine clinics in Taiwan can arrange cardiopulmonary exercise testing, and some items are covered by National Health Insurance—it’s worth the time.

There’s a key point that’s often misunderstood: training tolerance doesn’t mean every session has to be painful to the point of misery. That only accumulates fatigue, increases injury risk, and can create psychological aversion to training. I typically schedule at most 2 truly “into the pain zone” high-quality sessions per week, filling the rest with aerobic base and recovery. Quality > quantity.

(B) Psychological Side: Five Strategies You Can Use Immediately

These five are distilled from countless climbs, races, and sessions with students. All of them can be tried on your very next workout.

1. Pain Chunking

Don’t think about “8 kilometers to go”—that total will crush you. Break it into “the next utility pole,” “the next corner,” “30 more seconds.” That’s how Xiao Lin survived that day. Big goals amplify pain; small goals dilute it.

2. Reappraisal

Change “this pain means I’m about to fail” to “this pain means I’m getting stronger; this is my body adapting.” This isn’t just positive thinking—the distinction we made earlier (category 2 pain is reversible and harmless) is the scientific basis for this reappraisal. You can honestly tell yourself this because you truly know it’s not an injury.

3. Attention Direction (Association vs. Dissociation)

There are two opposing but equally effective strategies:

• Association: Direct attention into the body, actively controlling breathing rhythm, pedaling cadence, relaxing the shoulders. Best for key sections requiring precise pacing.
• Dissociation: Direct attention away—counting breaths, listening to music, looking at scenery, doing mental math. Best for long, monotonous stretches you just need to grind through.

The difference between experts and amateurs is knowing which one to use when. Use association to squeeze out everything before the finish line; use dissociation to survive a monotonous straight at kilometer 30.

4. Self-talk

Prepare a few “battle phrases” in advance and pull them out when the pain hits. Research shows that systematic positive self-talk can improve endurance performance. The key is to practice in advance, keep it short, and use the second person (“You’ve got this,” “Hold this stretch” works much better than “I’m in so much pain”).

5. Breath Anchoring

When in pain, people unconsciously hold their breath, shrug their shoulders, and death-grip the handlebars. Deliberately doing a “breathe in for 2 counts, out for 3 counts” rhythm can pull your tense sympathetic response down, moving you from “panicked endurance” back to “calm work.”

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5. Common Mistakes and Corrections

In all my years coaching, I see the same mistakes repeated over and over. Here are the most common ones, along with corrections.

Mistake 1: Swallowing Injury Pain as “Lack of Willpower”

This is the most dangerous one. One student had a sharp, localized pain on the outside of his knee (near the iliotibial band) when descending. He thought he was just “too weak,” kept riding hard for two weeks, and ended up with classic iliotibial band syndrome, sidelined for six weeks.

Correction: Go back to the table in Section 1. Localized, sharp, doesn’t subside with rest, triggered by specific movements—these are signals to seek medical attention, not tolerance targets. In Taiwan, for these issues you can see a rehabilitation medicine, sports medicine, or orthopedic doctor. A physical therapist’s movement assessment is often far more useful than guessing on your own.

Mistake 2: Training to Death Every Session

Thinking “the more painful, the more effective.” The result is chronic fatigue, poor sleep, decreased heart rate variability (HRV), and getting slower the more you train.

Correction: Tolerance is built through “deliberate, intermittent” exposure, not by marinating in pain daily. Use the 80/20 principle—about 80% of training volume in easy aerobic work, 20% in high-quality pain-zone workouts.

Mistake 3: Training Only the Body, Not the Brain

Many people think pain tolerance is purely a physical fitness issue, overlooking that psychological skills offer the fastest returns.

Correction: Treat the five psychological strategies above as “technical skills” to practice. For each high-intensity workout, designate one strategy to work on. Train your brain the same way you train your pedaling technique.

Mistake 4: Pain Tolerance Becoming Blind Toughness, Ignoring Body Warnings

This is the value issue I most want to emphasize. The purpose of training pain tolerance is to unlock your potential within a safe range, not to turn you into a machine that ignores injury. True experts are people who can both endure hardship and know when to back off.

Correction: Establish your own “red line list”—chest tightness or pain, dizziness, narrowing vision, cold sweats, irregular heart rhythm, localized radiating pain. If any of these appear, stop immediately, find shade, and seek medical help or call 119 if necessary. These always take priority over any training goal or race result.

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6. Taiwan-Specific Context: Connecting the Methods to Your Daily Life

No matter how elegant the theory, it’s empty if it doesn’t connect to real life. A few reminders specific to Taiwan:

Climate: Heat and Humidity Are the Invisible Killers of Tolerance

Taiwan’s summers routinely hit 33°C+ with 80% humidity, which massively amplifies the perceived “suffering”—not because you’ve gotten weaker, but because your body is simultaneously handling heat dissipation and exercise stress. Don’t use “pain tolerance” to tough out dehydration and heat injury in hot, humid conditions. Move summer training to early morning or evening, hydrate and replace electrolytes. Dizziness, goosebumps, and stopping sweating in the heat are warning signs of heat exhaustion—this is a physiological limit, not a psychological weakness.

Terrain: Make the Most of Taiwan’s Landscape

Want to train climbing pain tolerance? In the north, there’s Fengguizui and Yangmingshan; in the central region, Route 139 and Dakeng; around the Taipei basin, Maokong and Shenkeng are also great for hill repeats. For runners, riverside bike paths offer long straights (great for practicing dissociative attention) and various staircases/small hills (great for short, high-intensity exposure).

The Reality of Eating Out

High-intensity pain-tolerance workouts demand a lot of energy and recovery. Eating out is convenient in Taiwan, but pay attention: eat easily digestible carbs (rice, noodles, toast) 2–3 hours before training, and replenish with carbs plus protein afterward (like sweet potato plus unsweetened soy milk, tea eggs, or chicken breast from the convenience store). When carb intake is insufficient, perceived effort is amplified—you’ll feel like “today is especially painful and tiring,” when really your tank is just empty. These are general principles; individual calorie and nutrition needs vary greatly. If you have specific conditions, consider consulting a sports nutritionist.

The Medical Environment

Taiwan’s National Health Insurance is convenient—don’t let “it’s too much trouble” be a reason not to see a doctor. The longer you let a sports injury go, the harder it is to heal. Rehabilitation medicine, sports medicine, and orthopedics are all reasonable first stops; many hospitals also offer cardiopulmonary exercise testing to help you pinpoint safe training intensity zones.

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7. Actionable Advice for Readers at Different Levels

Finally, let’s condense the methods into an executable ladder. Find where you fit.

Beginners (regular exercise < 6 months)

• The first priority is distinguishing types of pain—save the table from Section 1 to your phone.
• Build your aerobic base first; don’t rush into high-intensity intervals.
• Start with the two simplest psychological strategies: “pain chunking” and “breath anchoring.”
• Any localized, radiating pain that doesn’t subside with rest—rest, observe, and see a doctor if necessary. Don’t try to “tolerate” it.

Intermediate (regular training 6 months–2 years)

• Schedule 1–2 high-quality pain-zone workouts per week (threshold intervals or VO2max intervals).
• Begin consciously “designating” one psychological strategy to practice in each workout.
• Learn when to switch between associative and dissociative attention.
• Use a training log to record “subjective pain vs. objective data,” gradually calibrating your bodily awareness.

Advanced/Competitive (2+ years, with race goals)

• Periodize pain tolerance as an independent training capacity, deliberately stacking pain-zone exposure in the pre-season.
• Do sport-specific simulations for the pain profile of your target event (e.g., Wuling’s long climbing pain, criterium’s repeated sprint pain).
• Build a complete race psychological script: which strategy for which section, what your cues are, where your red lines are.
• The more you can endure hardship, the more you need to train “judgment”—knowing when to grit your teeth and when to back off is true maturity.

Here’s a quick reference table of the key strategies:

Situation	Recommended Strategy	One-Line Mantra
Sustained burning on a long climb	Pain chunking + breath anchoring	Only look at the next utility pole
Monotonous long straight	Dissociative attention	Put your mind somewhere else
Final stretch before the finish line	Associative + self-talk	Squeeze out everything, hold for 30 seconds
Sharp, localized pain appears	Stop and assess immediately	This isn’t tolerance; it’s a warning
Discomfort in hot, humid conditions	Reduce intensity + hydrate	Heat injury isn’t overcome by willpower

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8. In-Depth Case Studies: Two Students, Two Different Pain Challenges

Principles alone are too abstract. Let me share two contrasting real-life situations (names are pseudonyms, data is illustrative), and you might see yourself in one of them.

Case A: Afraid of Pain, May—Tolerance Too Low, Held Hostage by Fear

May is a 42-year-old office worker and mother. She’s been cycling for two years, and her fitness is actually decent—she can easily ride 60 km on flat roads on weekends. But she has a problem: the moment she hits a steep climb, her heart rate goes over 160 bpm, her thighs start burning, and she immediately gets off and walks. She told me, “Coach, the moment I feel pain, I feel like something bad is going to happen.”

The first thing I did wasn’t to increase intensity, but to re-educate her brain. We used an indoor trainer, precisely controlling intensity at 90% of FTP, letting her experience “5 minutes of sustained burning pain, then stopping, and realizing nothing happened.” I kept asking her: “What’s the score now? 7. Can you still chat with me at a 7? Yes. So this is safe.”

After four weeks of this, she rode up Fengguizui for the first time without getting off. Her fitness was actually sufficient from the start; what she lacked was a correct interpretation of exercise-induced pain. Her problem was tolerance suppressed by fear, and the fear came from “not recognizing this pain.”

Case B: Too Pain-Tolerant, Zhe—Tolerance Too High, Overtrained

Zhe was the exact opposite. 34 years old, astonishing willpower, the type of student who “if the coach says ride until you puke, I’ll ride until I puke.” The problem was he treated “being able to endure hardship” as the only virtue, cramming every session into the red zone, and often training with a cold or on insufficient sleep.

Three months later, he came to me saying his performance was dropping instead of improving, his morning heart rate was elevated, he was irritable for no reason, and he’d lost his passion for cycling. These are classic overtraining symptoms. His pain tolerance was so high that he’d lost the sensitivity to know when to stop—his body had been sending warning signals, but his willpower had turned the volume all the way down.

What I did for him was “reverse training”: forcing him to schedule recovery days, teaching him to read HRV and morning heart rate, and telling him a phrase I love: “A fast car is one whose throttle can be released.” After three weeks of adjustment, his numbers stabilized and his performance returned.

These two cases together illustrate that pain tolerance isn’t about “the higher, the better”—it needs to sit in a healthy range: high enough to unlock your potential, low enough to hear your body’s distress signals.

	May (tolerance too low)	Zhe (tolerance too high)
Core Problem	Fear amplifies pain, gives up too early	Ignores warnings, overtrains
Risk	Limited performance, stalled progress	Chronic fatigue, injury, burnout
Training Focus	Reinterpretation + repeated safe exposure	Learning to brake + recovery management
One-Liner	This pain is safe	A fast car is one whose throttle can be released

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9. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

These are the questions students ask me most often. Let me answer them all at once.

Q1: Can I take painkillers (like over-the-counter anti-inflammatories) to improve training or race performance?

Not recommended. Routine use of anti-inflammatory painkillers before events can mask important injury warnings, increase gastrointestinal and kidney strain, and the risk is even higher in dehydrated endurance scenarios. Pain tolerance should be built through training and psychological strategies, not masked by medication. If you have pain that requires medication to control, consult a doctor first—this is beyond the scope of “training.”

Q2: Can caffeine really make me feel less pain and hold on longer?

Caffeine is indeed widely studied and considered to reduce perceived effort and delay fatigue, which can help endurance performance—this is a relatively well-supported general principle. But dosages vary by individual, there are side effects like heart palpitations and sleep disruption, and individual sensitivity varies greatly. Treat it as a “supplement,” not the “main character.” Test your reaction during training first; don’t try it for the first time on race day.

Q3: Am I just naturally less pain-tolerant, so I can’t train it up?

Pain perception does have individual differences (genetics, past experiences, emotional state all play a role), but the plasticity of tolerance holds for almost everyone. Research shows a positive correlation between training hours and tolerance—meaning it’s built through training, not purely innate. You don’t need to compare yourself to others; just compare yourself to yesterday’s you.

Q4: Does cramping count as “pain to be tolerated”?

No. Exercise-associated muscle cramps are a protective response from the muscle; toughing through them can cause strains. When cramps hit, you should slow down, stretch, and replenish fluids and electrolytes. It’s a different thing from “burning exercise-induced pain”—don’t confuse the two.

Q5: Do methods like meditation or cold-water immersion help with pain tolerance?

Mindfulness meditation has some research support for regulating emotional responses to pain, and it’s worth trying, especially for people easily held hostage by pain sensations. Evidence for cold water/cold exposure is more mixed, and it stimulates the cardiovascular system—those with relevant medical histories should be cautious and consult a doctor first. Treat these as “supplementary tools”; the core remains regular training and psychological skills.

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Conclusion: Pain Is Not an Enemy, but a Signal You Can Talk To

Going back to Xiao Lin’s words: “The pain is still the same, but I knew what it was, so I wasn’t as scared.”

Over all these years, I’ve come to believe more and more that the ultimate goal of training pain tolerance isn’t to turn yourself into an iron person who feels no pain, but to build a mature, honest, and discerning relationship with pain. You know which kind of pain can be traded for growth, and you’re willing to stay in it a little longer; you also know which kind of pain is your body crying for help, and you’ll stop without hesitation.

Exercise itself gives you natural painkillers (EIH), your body becomes more pain-tolerant with training, and your brain—that organ that ultimately decides whether you stop—can be made stronger through deliberate practice.

Next time your legs are burning and your lungs are screaming, I hope you remember to ask: What’s this pain on a scale of 1 to 10? What kind is it? Which strategy am I going to use to walk it through this stretch?

Asking yourself that question already makes you a little stronger than yesterday’s you. And this kind of strength isn’t just on the racecourse—it slowly seeps into how you face all kinds of “pain” in life. And that, perhaps, is the most precious gift endurance sports have to offer.

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This article is educational content and cannot replace individual diagnosis and treatment advice from a physician, physical therapist, or nutritionist. If you have cardiovascular disease, chronic conditions, or existing sports injuries, please consult a professional and undergo appropriate assessment before starting or adjusting your training.

References

• Understanding Exercise-Induced Hypoalgesia: An Umbrella Review — https://www.mdpi.com/1648-9144/61/3/401
• Exercise-Induced Hypoalgesia: Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms (Narrative Review) — https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4409/15/10/858
• Brain Mechanisms of Exercise-Induced Hypoalgesia — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8911154/
• Exercise-induced hypoalgesia after acute and regular exercise (PMC) — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7523781/
• Pain Processing in Elite and High-Level Athletes Compared to Non-athletes (Frontiers) — https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01908/full
• Endurance Performance is Influenced by Perceptions of Pain and Temperature — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29270865/
• Neural mechanisms of pain processing differ between endurance athletes and nonathletes — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8596969/

Related Reading

• Pain in Endurance Sports: How to Distinguish Discomfort to Push Through from Injury Warnings to Stop Immediately
• Pain Tolerance Training: Pain Management Strategies for Running
• Pain Tolerance Training: Cognitive Reframing of Late-Run Discomfort
• The Science of Suffering: The Psychophysiology of Endurance Sports, Teaching You to Train Your “Brain’s Brake”