Train your brain to beat pain

There isn’t one source of ‘pain’ – although in this case we mean ‘suffering’, not injury – and the sources are interlinked. There’s muscular fatigue; the build-up of lactate; oxygen debt and the signals it sends out, such as high heart rate and breathlessness; and there’s mental fatigue.

These act in concert with the central nervous system (CNS) to tell the body we should stop by making us feel pain. It’s not that we’re