Pain

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."