Professional, or sometimes even recreational, sports come at a certain cost. The cost you pay when you decide to maximize your performance in a sport such as football is almost always in pain, injuries, and added daily stress.

However, there are certain types of pain you should ignore. On the contrary, this means that there are other types of pain you must evaluate deeply and thoroughly so you avoid getting injured in the future.

The purpose of this football pain relief guide would be to teach you how to differentiate between good pain and bad pain. Following that, I will offer certain pain relief techniques you can use to manage pain effectively.

Let’s start with the basics first.

How to differentiate good pain from bad pain?

Ideally, there are two types of pain, the good and the bad. However, these two types of pain serve different purposes. 

For example, you might feel sore after a lower-body gym session where you performed trap bar deadlifts and Bulgarian split squats. Or you felt sore after agility drills and sprinting sessions that aimed to develop your speed and anaerobic endurance.

You may even go without soreness for a day or two, and then the delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) starts kicking in.

All the examples I just mentioned belong to the good type of pain group. 

Usually, you are feeling sore because you:

  • Just finished a session of high-intensity running/jumping and your tendons and muscles feel “weaker/more vulnerable” than usual.
  • You completed an anaerobic endurance workout and now you have bunch of lactic acid (more precisely H+ ions running around your body and making you more acidic)
All these things are good as long as your prescribed training volume is adequate and doesn’t put you in the overtrained state, also known as the overtraining syndrome in the literature.

Now, let’s cover the so-called “bad pain.”

The way bad pain differentiates itself from good pain is it primarily induces damage to the structural elements of the body. Think in terms of your tendons, ligaments, bones, and even sometimes the muscles when we ideally talk about overtraining and exceeding weekly training volume thresholds.

Here are a couple of bad pain symptoms to be aware of:
  • Sharp or stabbing sensations
  • Persistent, unrelenting discomfort
  • Severe pain causing weakness, fainting, vomiting, or nausea
  • Pain accompanied by fever or chills
  • Redness, swelling, or bruising
  • Limited mobility or inability to move the affected area
  • Increasing or worsening pain
  • Difficulty sleeping due to pain
  • Limping when moving
  • A "hot" sensation in the painful areas
  • Open wounds or discharge
  • Pain that doesn’t improve with rest, pain relievers, or ice/heat therapy
Now that you know the difference between good and bad pain, let’s cover some basic football pain relief techniques you can use.

7 best football pain relief techniques

Here are the 7 best football pain relief techniques.

The RICE method

The RICE method (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) is a solid pain relief technique for managing injuries caused during a football match or practice. It is especially good for handling sprains, bruises, and strains. 

You should rest the injured leg area to prevent further damage. 

Start by icing the injured spot to reduce overall swelling. Then compress the injured area to support it and elevate it to help with the blood flow. You can slightly speed up the recovery if you twist an ankle during a game by applying ice and keeping the injured leg elevated.

Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs)

Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen and aspirin are most widely and commonly used to reduce overall inflammation and pain after strenuous practice or game. These NSAIDs are good for helping block chemicals in the body that cause discomfort and swelling.

Non-narcotic injections

Non-narcotic injections like corticosteroids are widely used to reduce pain and inflammation in the injured area. 

If you are someone constantly experiencing knee pain from wear and tear, a doctor may suggest you take a non-narcotic injection to ease the discomfort. Most of the time, this comes without the risks associated with stronger medications such as opioids.

Physical therapy

Physical therapy can yield extremely positive results in terms of your ability to recover from injury. Physical therapists can help with severe injuries such as muscle strains or torn ligaments. A good physical therapist will guide you through specific exercises that will help you strengthen the injured area and restore the original range of motion.

Recreational activity such as rucking

Rucking is a super fun activity that involves walking with weight on your back. Rucking can be a great recreational activity you can use to better recover from your football practice and games. However, there is a catch. 

You can't just add another rucking session on top of everything you do. 

The trick lies in reducing your current training volume by around 15-30% and then adding low to medium intensity activity such as rucking to your schedule. One of the articles I recently read can help you determine whether you can ruck with a normal backpack in case you aren't sure whether you are ready to spend another couple hundred bucks on this gear.

Chiropractic therapy

Chiropractic therapy is common among both professional and recreational football players. It is mostly used as a tool for addressing back and joint pain. This pain is often caused by high-impact collisions. 

A chiropractor can actually help you adjust your spine positioning, which realigns your joints and relieves pressure on your nerves. However, if you have never visited a chiropractor before, you need to know what to wear when you visit one.

Fascia massage

Fascia massage helps target your connective tissue. 

This connective tissue surrounds your organs and muscles, and from time to time, it gets knotted after an intense physical activity like football. Fascia massage together with fascia blasting is useful because it helps you to release the tension in your tissues. 

This often results in better flexibility, mobility, and reduced pain. However, there are certain fascia blasting side effects you should be aware of before starting the fascia massage session.

Last Words..

Sometimes, there isn’t much you can do about alleviating pain from football than to rest, reduce your weekly training workload, and eat clean. Anyways, those should be all in place before you opt for any of the techniques described above.

The three pillars I just shared above represent somewhere about 90% of your capacity to fully recover before the next training session comes.

So, besides doing the fancy recovery techniques discussed above, make sure to have your weekly volume, diet, and rest periods intact. 

Nothing beats a well-programmed training session coupled with an adequate diet and rest periods. Make sure to remember that before you decide to spend another couple hundred dollars on that new flashy recovery supplement every fitness influencer talks about on Instagram.