The Relationship between Exercise and Reducing Musculoskeletal Pain

Chronic pain is defined as pain beyond normal tissue lasting for 12 weeks or more. It contributes to disability, anxiety, depression, sleep disturbances, poor quality of life, and healthcare costs. Although, the treatment choice for chronic pain maybe included recommendations for rest and inactivity, exercise may have specific benefits in reducing the severity of chronic pain, as well as more general benefits associated with improved overall physical and mental health, and physical functioning. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the relationship between exercise doing and musculoskeletal pain.

 This descriptive study was conducted among academic people working in Tarbiat Modares University from Jan to Apr 2020. The volunteer subjects were entered into this study after being informed about the aim and procedure of the study and signing the consent form. In this study, the relationship between doing exercise and musculoskeletal pain was investigated.A researcher –made questionnaire based on the objectives of the study as well as a demographic characteristics questionnaire were used to collect data. In the objective based questionnaire, the participants were asked about their exercise doing and musculoskeletal pain. The response options to the questions were as Yes or No. Finally, the data were entered into SPSS version 26 software and statistically analyzed using descriptive analysis as frequency/percent and analytical analysis as chi-square test.

Totally 93 participants with mean age of 36.15±11.42 years old including students (41.9%), employees (54.7%) and professor (3.5%) were participated in the study. Furthermore, 41.4% of the participants were men and 58.6% were women. According the results, there was a significant relationship between exercise and reduction of musculoskeletal pain (p<0.0001) Mann Whitney’s test showed that there was a significant relationship between gender and exercise activity (P value= <.001), which was higher in men than women.

This study showed that the participants who did exercise they were less suffering from musculoskeletal pain.