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Pain is inevitable, especially in Taekwondo training. However, suffering is optional. Everyone will experience pain, but one does not have to suffer, one can just deal with the pain and get on with one's life. Taekwondo students need to understand pain so they may effectively deal with it when it occurs.

Pain is a paradox. It may protect or destroy. It may warn of something wrong and thus protect life or it may devastate the will to live and thus destroy life. In a self-defense situation, pain may drive you to survive at all costs or it may cause you to surrender and die.

Pain is relative. What is unpleasant to some is pleasurable to others. It is common to all people yet unique to each person. This makes it difficult to define pain precisely. Students of Taekwondo know pain. The pain of a wide stretch, the pain of an errant kick, the pain of an unbroken board, and the pain of a failed promotion test. As the saying states "That which doesn't kill you, makes you stronger," although it still hurts.

in 2007, doctors in Toronto found that baby boys circumcised without local anesthesia were far more sensitive to pain six months later than their uncircumcised peers. A new study has found that painful trauma during infancy seems to rewire the nervous system permanently. 

Neuroscientist M. A. Ruda and her colleagues at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research in Bethesda, Maryland, investigated this effect in newborn rats. The researchers injected the animals' hind paws with an irritant that causes several days of pain and swelling. When they reached adulthood, the rats experienced distinctly above-average responsiveness to pain. Autopsies revealed that their spinal cords had 25 percent more pain fibers linked to the hind paws than those in rats that were left alone. It is possible, says Ruda, that similar processes occur in humans exposed to painful medical procedures soon after birth. "There are a number of chronic pain states for which the physical causes are hard to identify," she says. "This is total speculation, but if your responses to pain are altered, you may be at a higher risk for some kinds of persistent pain." 

How Pain is Perceived

Pain results when nocireceptors (nerve endings) are stimulated by mechanical, thermal, or chemical stimuli that have the potential to cause tissue damage. A pain impulse is transmitted from the nociceptors to the spinal cord along either A-delta or C-delta fibers. Because they are covered with a sheath of insulating myelin, A-delta fibers transmit impulses quicker than the smaller C-delta fibers. A-delta fiber impulses are perceived as sharp, localized pain, such as a nose hit by a punch. C-delta fiber impulses are perceived as a diffused, dull, aching pain, such as the residual pain of a bruised nose. 

Nociceptive fibers enter the spinal cord through the dorsal horn, synapses in the spinal cord, and then descend as the spinothalamis tract, which has two divisions. One the neospinothalamic tract ascends to the thalamus and projects to the somatosensory cortex where it transmits information about the quality, intensity, and location of the pain stimulus. The other, the paleospinothalamic tract occurs at many synapses and transmits impulses through the reticular system to terminate in the thalamus, with projections to the limbic and subcortical areas. The brain then processes the impulses for a physical response.

Transmission of pain impulses depends on the intensity of the stimulus causing the pain. The greater the intensity of the stimulus, the more pain is tranimitted. However, some chemicals produced by the body inhibit transmission of painful impulses.

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