How Swimming Might Improve Pain Tolerance

If you sometimes wonder why you put yourself through the pain of tough workout after tough workout, you’re not alone. But in what may seem like a paradoxical relationship, fighting through the pain of a challenging swim could be a smart, drug-free way to reduce or manage other kinds of pain. That’s been suggested by some recent studies that have added evidence to the idea that regular physical activity could help you live a longer, healthier, and less painful life.

What Is Pain?

Pain is one of those things—you know it when you feel it. But getting to the root of what exactly it is and why it happens has been a complex undertaking in scientific circles, made even more difficult because it’s such a singular, subjective experience; how one person experiences and tolerates pain may be quite different from another’s experience.

Everyone knows pain when they feel it—save for individuals who have congenital insensitivity to pain and anhidrosis, a very rare inherited condition in which the person cannot feel pain and cannot sweat. This dangerous condition can be deadly, as these individuals aren’t getting the feedback that pain provides to know when they’re ill or injured.

For the rest of us, pain is simply information your body provides to the brain to let you know how it’s handling certain movements and activities or as an alarm after an injury or other trauma.

Sherry McAllister, president of the Foundation for Chiropractic Progress, says “pain is a signal in your nervous system that something may be wrong, and may be experienced as an unpleasant feeling, such as a prick, tingle, sting, burn, or ache.” It can come on suddenly as a sharp, stabbing sensation, or it may develop over time and throb dully on an ongoing basis. It can affect one specific area or plague the whole body.

Pain can be divided into three main categories: Acute pain, subacute pain, and chronic pain. “Acute pain is pain that has been present for less than three months,” McAllister says. “Subacute pain is a subset of acute pain, which is pain that has been present for at least six weeks, but less than three months.”

And once you cross that time barrier, you’ve tipped into having chronic pain, which is defined as pain that has been present for more than three months, McAllister says.

Chronic pain has become a major problem for many people, and a big moneymaker for some pharmaceutical companies. It has also contributed to the development of the opioid crisis, a huge public health problem that has destroyed untold numbers of lives and families. That’s because it’s proven very difficult to cure chronic pain, but this long-term condition can be managed, and opioid-based medications have been used perhaps too liberally in some cases to treat it. 

Managing Pain

Although over-the-counter pain medications such as Tylenol, Advil, and aspirin are widely used to treat acute pain, they aren’t suitable for treating chronic pain, as they can cause potentially dangerous side effects, such as organ damage, with long-term use.

Opioids are used to treat chronic pain, but they can also cause significant side effects including constipation and addiction.

For those suffering with intense chronic pain, such as may occur after an accident or because of certain medical conditions, science doesn’t have a great answer for managing that pain long term, but there’s increasing evidence that regular exercise, and swimming in particular, could be part of the answer for some people.

For example, one 2023 study that included more than 6,800 participants published in PLOS One, an open source medical journal, found that over time, increased physical activity could improve pain tolerance and might be useful as a nonpharmacological treatment for chronic pain.

The study authors noted that “in this study, pain tolerance increased with level of physical activity. Being physically active at either of two time points measured at a 7- to 8-year interval was associated with higher pain tolerance compared to being sedentary at both time-points. Pain tolerance increased with higher total activity levels, and more for those who increased their activity level at follow-up.”

They also noted that “overall, higher leisure time physical activity was associated with a significantly higher pain tolerance when measured repeatedly in the same individuals.”

Those effects did wane over time, but the findings support the idea that exercising more could help forestall or slow the development or progression of chronic pain conditions.

How About Swimming Specifically?

Virtually any kind of physical activity seems to help with pain tolerance, but swimming may have a leg up on other forms of exercise because it’s non-weight bearing and less likely to cause lower extremity joint pain. For people who have conditions such as osteoarthritis in the knees or ankles, swimming can be used to control pain while keeping the joints limber.

What’s more, the kind of high-intensity interval training you’ll find with your local Masters Swimming group, “can release helpful chemicals into the body called endorphins,” McAllister explains. Endorphins are brain chemicals that have a similar chemical structure to opioids, and they can trigger feelings like the high you might feel after using an opiate.

“Endorphins have been shown to create a natural pain-relieving impact as well as maximizing the body’s ability to deal with the pain,” she says.

In addition to releasing these feel-good chemicals, over time, a swimming habit can help build up your muscles and improve strength, flexibility, and stability, all of which can improve any structural imbalances that may be contributing to the pain-causing problem.

As your confidence grows, you may find you can move more easily with less pain. “Recent research shows that exercise therapy normalizes the limbic brain functions, … allowing you to overcome fear-avoidance thinking, enabling goal-directed behavior and elevating exercise as a positive approach to combat chronic pain,” McAllister says.

As compelling as the evidence may be that swimming can help with pain management, McAllister notes it’s important to first get a proper diagnosis and to understand the reason for the pain before attempting to use swimming or another other form of pain control without input from your health care provider.

Although “swimming can be a very powerful way to deal with pain for a number of reasons, proper diagnosis and treatment is imperative before engaging in any exercise to avoid further injury,” she says.