December 15, 2025

Pain is Information: What Girls are Never Taught About Listening to their Bodies

By Lylah Ruparel

Pain is one of the first things girls in sports learn to ignore.

It starts small. A sore ankle after practice. A knee that aches when landing. A shoulder that feels tight but workable. Someone shrugs and says, “That’s normal,” or “You’ll be fine once you warm up.” And most girls nod, because they want to believe it. By the time many female athletes reach adolescence, they’ve developed a dangerous skill: the ability to disconnect from their bodies just enough to keep going.

But pain isn’t failure. Pain is information.

The Lie of “Pushing Through”

Sports culture has long treated pain as a moral test. The athlete who pushes through discomfort is praised. The one who pauses is questioned. Girls, especially, absorb this messaging early, often in environments where they already feel pressure to prove they belong.

Yet from a biomechanical perspective, pain is rarely random. Most overuse injuries don’t arrive suddenly; they build quietly through micro-tears which are small disruptions in soft tissue that accumulate when recovery is incomplete. Ligaments and tendons don’t have the same blood supply as muscle. They heal slowly, and only when given space to remodel.

Applied Biology and Biomedical Engineering professor Dr Livesay explained it this way during a HERcovery interview: “Big injuries usually start as small ones that weren’t given time to reorganize.” This is supported by decades of sports medicine research showing that repetitive load without adequate recovery increases injury risk far more than a single high-impact event. Pain is often the earliest warning system, not something to silence, but something to decode.

Why Girls Are Taught to Dismiss the Signal

Female athletes face a unique double bind. They are often told to be tough, but not too loud. Strong, but not difficult. Competitive, but grateful. As a result, many girls learn to normalize constant soreness. Studies show that adolescent female athletes are less likely than boys to report pain early, especially when they fear losing playing time or being seen as weak. Early reporting is associated with shorter recovery times and lower rates of reinjury.

Ms Scott, varsity girls soccer coach at a Brooklyn public high school, shared during a HERcovery interview about female athletes: “No one wants to be the girl who says something hurts. They think that means they’re weak.” But pain doesn’t indicate weakness. It indicates  physical, neurological, or emotional load.

The Brain Is Always Involved

Pain isn’t just about tissue damage. It’s processed through the nervous system and shaped by stress, fatigue, fear, and prior injury. Research in neuroscience and sports performance shows that when the brain senses threat , whether from exhaustion, anxiety, or pain, it changes how the body moves. Athletes may stiffen, brace, hesitate, or subtly alter mechanics in ways that increase injury risk. Neuroperformance coach Ms Sugiura explained it simply during a HERcovery interview,“If the brain feels unsafe, it will change how the body moves, even if nothing is technically ‘wrong.’”

This is why injuries often happen late in games, during intense training blocks, or in emotionally stressful periods. It’s not that the body suddenly fails. It’s that the system has been overloaded without enough opportunity to reset.

When Pain Stops Being Specific

When pain is ignored long enough, it stops being helpful. Instead of my knee hurts when I land this way, it becomes global pain in the form of fatigue, tightness, irritability, fear of movement. Confidence erodes. Trust in the body fades. Many girls don’t quit sports because they stop loving them. They quit because their bodies feel unpredictable and no one taught them how to listen before things escalated.

Sports medicine research consistently shows that athletes who learn to differentiate between normal training discomfort and warning-sign pain have longer careers and lower burnout rates. Yet this skill is rarely taught explicitly, especially to girls.

What Listening Actually Looks Like

Listening to pain doesn’t mean stopping at the first sign of discomfort. It means learning to interpret patterns.

Some clinicians recommend simple daily check-ins, noting sleep quality, mood, soreness, and energy levels, because self-reported awareness often predicts injury risk as effectively as advanced physiological monitoring. Others emphasize movement awareness: noticing changes in balance, coordination, or confidence, subtle signs that the nervous system is under strain. As Dr Fury, sports orthopedic, said during our interview:“Return to sport isn’t a finish line. It’s the start of rebuilding trust, physically and mentally. That trust begins long before injury occurs.

A Skill Girls Deserve to Learn Early

Pain is not something to fear. It’s something to translate. Girls deserve to be taught that listening to their bodies is not quitting but instead it’s strategy. That rest is not weakness, it’s preparation. That longevity, confidence, and performance are built through awareness, not denial. The strongest athletes aren’t the ones who ignore every signal. They’re the ones who know which ones matter and act before the body is forced to shout.

Sources & Further Reading

• Bahr, R., & Krosshaug, T. (2005). Understanding injury mechanisms: A key component of preventing injuries in sport. British Journal of Sports Medicine.

• Meeusen, R. et al. (2013). Prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of overtraining syndrome. European Journal of Sport Science.

• Van der Sluis, A. et al. (2014). Risk factors for injury in adolescent female athletes. American Journal of Sports Medicine.

• Moseley, G. L., & Butler, D. S. (2015). Pain neuroscience education. Journal of Physiotherapy.

• HERcovery Project — In Converstation... Series (2026)