How much pain is ok during exercise or rehabilitation is a tricky topic, and is more on the "art" side of physiotherapy than the "science". There are a lot of different factors that impact this. In particular, different tissues will tolerate different amounts of pain during exercise, e.g. with bones we want minimal pain when loading, while muscle and tendon will typically tolerate and sometimes even require some pain to allow for adequate adaptation. However, for most conditi

Most of what we do in rehab revolves around the fundamental concept of load. Our bodies have an inbuilt buffer between the amount of tissue damage and the amount of pain we experience. When pain or injury is present, much of the time it is because: 1) We have done too much too quickly. The load has exceed the protection system in the body 2) Our tissue capacity (and with it the pain protection line) has decreased 3) The buffer has increased, meaning we are experiencing more p