Discomfort Is Feedback, Not a Warning
Why the movement you're avoiding is probably the one you need most.
Discomfort Is Feedback, Not a Warning
A few months ago, one of my clients told me she hadn’t done a squat in three years.
Not a modification. Not a partial squat. Three years of not squatting at all, because her knees hurt when she did, and the most logical thing in the world felt like: if it hurts, stop. She wasn’t wrong to listen. She was wrong about what her body was telling her.
This is one of the most common things I see in my practice, and it’s one I want to talk about directly, because the cost of getting it wrong is real. Pain is not a stop sign. Sometimes it is, but most of the time, especially the low-grade, grumbly, this-doesn’t-feel-great pain that shows up in a squat or a lunge or getting down to the floor, it’s a message. It’s your body telling you something needs attention. Not that you should stop moving, but rather, that you should move better.
Why Pain Is More Complicated Than We Think
Pain feels like the most physical thing in the world. A knee that locks up mid-squat, a back that seizes when you bend to tie your shoe. It seems obvious that the body is just reporting a fact: something’s wrong, fix it. But pain doesn’t get built from tissue alone. It gets built from biology, psychology, and circumstance, all three, all at once. Researchers call this the biopsychosocial model, which sounds clinical but really just means that the same twinge in your knee will register differently depending on what you believe is happening to it, what kind of week you’ve had, and who once told you to be careful with that knee years ago. The nerve sends a signal. The brain decides how loud to play it. Pain is real either way. It’s just never only physical.
This is part of why avoidance backfires so reliably. When we stop doing a movement because it hurts, we don’t just lose the movement. We teach our nervous system that the movement is dangerous. Every time we skip the squat, we confirm the threat. The alarm gets louder. The threshold gets lower. Over time, the thing we were protecting ourselves from becomes more likely, not less, because we’ve stopped giving our body any evidence to the contrary.
The Difference Between Feedback and a Warning
I’m not asking you to push through real pain. That’s not the point. There is a difference between discomfort and damage, and learning to tell them apart is one of the most useful things you can do for your long-term health.
Here’s a rough guide:
Feedback looks like this:
A dull ache that shows up during a movement, especially one you haven’t done in a while
Muscle soreness the day after a session (the kind that feels earned)
Tightness at the beginning of a movement that loosens as you warm up
Discomfort that is similar or better the next morning
A warning looks like this:
Sharp, shooting, or stabbing pain during a movement
Pain that is significantly worse the next day
Pain that’s localized to a joint and doesn’t change with warmup
New pain that came on suddenly rather than gradually
If what you’re experiencing is in the first category, there’s a very good chance the thing you’re avoiding is the thing that would help.
What Avoidance Actually Costs
Working with the demographic I do, I frequently hear the phrase “I can’t do squats.” Or, even more alarming, “my doctor, or my physiotherapist, or my well-meaning neighbour, told me I should stop squatting.” And yet, I have never had a client tell me that they want to live out their elderly years unable to get up off a low couch, lower themselves into a car, kneel in the garden, or get down to the floor to play with their grandkids: all things that require the ability to squat.
My client who stopped squatting didn’t just lose a gym exercise. She lost something quieter and more consequential. The chair in her living room got harder to get out of. She started looking for higher seats. The floor became a place she didn’t go down to anymore, because getting back up felt like a project. None of this happened dramatically. It happened the way most losses happen, gradually, and then all at once.
Squatting is not a gym movement. It’s a fundamental human pattern. We do it to sit down, to stand up, to get on and off the toilet, to pick things up off the floor. Remove it from your training for long enough and it doesn’t just stay hard in the gym, it gets harder everywhere else. That’s the part people don’t see coming.
How I Think About This With Clients
When a client tells me something hurts, my job isn’t to remove the exercise. It’s to figure out what the discomfort is telling us, and then respond to that information.
Knee pain in a squat is one of the most common examples. Here’s how I approach it:
Limit the range of motion. We don’t need to squat to depth. A quarter squat, or a box squat where you’re sitting back onto something and standing up, gives us the pattern without the load at end-range. We start there.
Address the weakness underneath. Knee pain in a squat is often a quad strength issue, or a hip stability issue, or both. We add accessory work: terminal knee extensions, step-ups, glute bridges. We build the scaffolding so the movement has something to support it.
Progress gradually and track response. The rule I use with my clients: you might feel it during the session, and you might be sore the next day. But you should not be crippled 24 hours later. That’s the line. We stay on the right side of it and build from there.
Build the trust. This part takes time. It’s not just physical adaptation, it’s teaching your nervous system that this movement is safe, that it’s something to move toward rather than away from. That’s the actual work.
What Changed
My client who hadn’t squatted in three years squats now. Not to depth, but she squats. We spent several weeks rebuilding the pattern from the ground up, and then one session she got off the floor without using her hands, and she stopped mid-movement and looked at me like she’d surprised herself.
She had.
That’s what discomfort as feedback looks like in practice. Not pushing through pain. Not ignoring the signal. Listening to it carefully, responding to what it’s actually saying, and earning back what avoidance had quietly taken away.
If there’s a movement you’ve been avoiding, I want you to think about whether it’s a warning or feedback. Because the answer changes everything about what you do next.
If you want help figuring out the difference, shoot me an email at bree.steinke@gmail.com and we’ll get you sorted.
Chat soon,
Bree