If you’ve been to physical therapy for a chronic injury, you’re well aware that healing is pain. There’s typically much more to ridding a nagging injury than receiving a pleasurable massage.

Damaged tendons and ligaments are especially stubborn. Healing them is a game of months, not weeks.

I had a hamstring tendinopathy that lingered for months, and no amount of light exercise or massage would have any noticeable effect. It wasn’t until I focused on a spot-specific isometric hold, and performed multiple sets of 30 seconds, twice a day, that the hamstring started to get better. It’s difficult to get blood flowing through tendons, which is why it’s difficult to stimulate new cell growth.

I now know that isometric holds are the key to healing tendons. An isometric hold is a muscle contraction held in a fixed position and in one place, often against some sort of resistance. For example, if you were to use a leg extension machine in a weightroom and push to full leg extension, then hold that extended position, you would be engaged in an isometric hold. A wall sit could also be an isometric hold.

The isometric hold that helped my hamstring was challenging as hell, but I figured a few minutes of hell each day is better than a lifetime of possessing a bad hamstring.

After the hamstring recovered, I found myself wondering how many chronic injuries in the world would have healed, had hustle culture allotted more time for those afflicted. Who has the time to perform physical therapy exercises each day, in addition to routine exercise, work, and the daily obligations of adulting? Better yet, who really wants to when there are so many other lingering stressors dancing around in the mind? I suspect injured tendons often don’t heal for this reason. Instead, damaged tendons often steadily degrade until they eventually die.

Healing hurts, and similarly, I’ve noticed that once you’ve passed a life apex, maintaining the status quo hurts. Use it or lose it, the saying goes. This applies to both the body and mind.

If you don’t give your mind new stimulus and strain in the form of challanges, it eventually gives way, like a damaged tendon. Maybe we should treat our minds like a tendon in physical therapy,

So a good life requires pain, ironically, and to some extent, pain should be embraced.