'No pain, no gain': Why we equate suffering with success
A client was gathering her things when she smiled and rubbed her thighs. "I know it was a good workout," she said, "because it hurts." She wasn't complaining. If anything, she sounded pleased. The soreness reassured her that the hour had been well spent. Had she walked out of the studio feeling light and comfortable, she might have wondered whether she had worked hard enough.
It's a familiar exchange for anyone who teaches movement. Clients often ask whether they should expect to feel sore the next day, whether shaking means they are getting stronger, or whether an exercise "counts" if it never leaves them breathless. I usually explain that soreness is an unreliable measure of progress. Bodies adapt. Sometimes the most significant changes are almost imperceptible: climbing stairs with less effort, standing a little taller without thinking about it, waking up without the ache that had become part of everyday life.
Still, her remark stayed with me because it sounded familiar far beyond the studio. We tend to admire people who work themselves to exhaustion.
We admire the student who survives on coffee and sleepless nights, the employee who works through weekends, the parent who gives everything up for the children. We have a vocabulary that gives suffering a certain moral weight: pinaghirapan, tiis ganda, kung gusto, may paraan. Difficulty makes achievement feel deserved. Pain becomes proof that the effort was real.
Perhaps that is why "No pain, no gain" has become such a persuasive slogan. It's no longer confined to gyms. It has become a way of thinking about life itself. Pain does not simply accompany achievement; it certifies it. Difficulty gives our accomplishments a certain moral weight. We speak proudly of the things that demanded the most from us, and we sometimes become suspicious of those that came more easily.
Filipino historian and essayist Resil Mojares often reminded readers that culture has a history. What feels natural or self-evident usually has a past. Our values are inherited long before we begin defending them as common sense. In his essay, A History of the Body, he wrote about how the body is "so loaded with significance that what cultural changes were coerced or imposed on the body cut deep not merely on the flesh but the psyche." Culture can shape not just how we behave but also how we understand ourselves and what we believe we must endure. This is perhaps one way of understanding the peculiar authority that suffering enjoys in the Philippines. It is woven into many of the stories through which we have learned what goodness looks like.
The images are familiar. Christ on the cross. Mary grieving for her son. Rizal walking to Bagumbayan. Parents foregoing comforts for their children. Overseas Filipino workers enduring years away from home. They are stories about love, faith, duty, and courage. Yet suffering is often what gives them their moral force. Pain becomes a visible expression of commitment. We learn, over time, to recognize sacrifice as evidence that something—or someone—is worthy.
This way of thinking follows us into ordinary life. A promotion feels more deserved after years of exhaustion. We admire the person who stays late at the office. Relationships that survive years of difficulty are praised for their strength. Rest, meanwhile, often needs to be earned: after this deadline, after this semester, after this project, when things finally settle down.
Anthropologists have long been interested in how societies make sense of pain. The sensation is physical, but what we make of it is learned. Cultures teach us which forms of suffering should be hidden, which deserve sympathy, and which become badges of honor.
Seen from this perspective, my client's sore thighs were doing more than telling her that her muscles had worked. She had learned to read that soreness as achievement.
There is an irony here. Contemporary movement science has become increasingly interested in efficiency rather than punishment. A good workout is not necessarily the one that leaves the body in pieces. Recovery is part of adaptation. Strength develops because muscles are allowed to repair themselves. The healthiest training programs recognize that relentless strain eventually produces diminishing returns.
The same may be true beyond the studio.
It is worth asking why we have become so reluctant to recognize care, joy, and sustainability as signs of a life well lived. We readily celebrate sacrifice, but we hesitate before ease. We know how to admire the person who burns out for a cause. We are less certain what to make of the person who has learned to flourish without exhausting themselves.
I think again of my client after class. By now, the soreness she carried home that afternoon has long disappeared. What remains is the quiet certainty with which she said, "I know it was a good workout because it hurts."
It was such an ordinary sentence that it could easily have passed unnoticed. Yet ordinary sentences often reveal the deepest assumptions of a culture. They remind us that ideas do not live only in books or speeches. They manifest in our everyday habits, in passing remarks after exercise classes, in the phrases we repeat without thinking.
Perhaps that is why the old slogan has endured for so long. It speaks to something larger than fitness. It reflects a habit of measuring value through sacrifice, of treating suffering as evidence that our efforts, our relationships, even our lives have been worthwhile.
Maybe it is worth asking whether everything valuable needs to hurt quite so much.
