Exercise Headaches Can Turn a Good Workout Into Something You Start to Dread
You finish a workout and, instead of feeling better, a headache starts building. Or perhaps you are halfway through a gym session when pressure or pain develops around your head, behind your eyes or near the base of your skull.
Exercise headaches can be frustrating, particularly when exercise is supposed to support your health.
There are several possible reasons they can occur, and understanding the pattern is an important first step towards working out what needs to change. The original article focuses particularly on active people experiencing headaches during or after training.
Why I’m Talking About Exercise Headaches
My name is Kevin, and I’m a physiotherapist based in Brisbane. I work with many active people, including gym-goers and golfers, who want to continue training but find that exercise headaches keep interrupting them.
These headaches should not automatically be dismissed as something you simply have to tolerate. At the same time, it is important not to assume every headache during exercise comes from the neck, muscle tension or training technique alone.
What Are Exercise Headaches?
Exercise headaches are headaches that occur during or following physical exertion. They are often associated with strenuous activities such as running, swimming, tennis and weightlifting.
One recognised condition is primary exercise headache, where strenuous activity itself triggers the headache and no underlying disorder is identified. These headaches are often described as throbbing and affecting both sides of the head, although headache symptoms can vary considerably between people.
Exercise can also trigger migraine in some people, so not every headache that appears during a workout is necessarily the same type of headache.
What Can Trigger Exercise Headaches?
There is no single explanation for every case of exercise headaches. The important question is what happens consistently before or during your symptoms.
Some factors worth considering include:
- High-intensity exertion: Strenuous exercise itself can trigger primary exercise headaches in susceptible people.
- A sudden increase in training intensity: Going from lighter training to much harder sessions may expose a headache pattern that was not noticeable at lower intensities.
- Breath-holding and heavy bracing: People often hold their breath when completing difficult repetitions. If a headache repeatedly occurs with heavy straining, that pattern is useful information to discuss with a healthcare professional.
- Neck symptoms: If your headaches are consistently accompanied by neck pain or stiffness, the neck may warrant assessment rather than assuming the headache is purely exercise-related.
- Migraine triggers: For some people with migraine, strenuous exercise can act as a trigger, particularly when other individual triggers are also present.
Heat and other exercise conditions may also influence some headache presentations, which is another reason to look at the whole situation rather than one movement in isolation.
Why Exercise Headaches Shouldn’t Simply Be Pushed Through
When exercise headaches appear, people often respond in one of two ways. They either stop training completely because they are worried exercise is causing harm, or they keep pushing through significant symptoms and hope the headache disappears.
Neither response helps you understand why the headache is happening.
For some people, adjusting exercise intensity or identifying a repeatable trigger may be appropriate. For others, particularly when a headache is new or unusual, medical assessment is more important than experimenting with training changes.
Can You Keep Exercising With Exercise Headaches?
Having exercise headaches does not necessarily mean you need to abandon exercise altogether. What is appropriate depends on the type of headache, whether you have been medically assessed when required and what reliably provokes your symptoms.
For some people, a more gradual approach to strenuous exercise may be useful. That could involve lowering the load, controlling the pace of a session and building intensity progressively rather than jumping straight back into demanding training.
The aim is not simply to avoid every movement that has caused an exercise headache. It is to understand the pattern and make sensible decisions about what your body currently tolerates.
What Your Exercise Headaches May Be Telling You
The key message is that exercise headaches deserve more thought than either ignoring them or immediately giving up training.
A headache during or after exercise may represent a primary exercise headache, migraine triggered by exertion or another headache presentation. The symptoms alone cannot always tell you which explanation applies.
Pay attention to when the headache appears, what brings it on and how it responds when your training changes. If the problem continues, becomes more frequent or does not follow your usual headache pattern, an appropriate assessment can help clarify the next step.
Take the Next Step
If exercise headaches are regularly affecting your workouts, it may be worth having the symptoms properly assessed rather than repeatedly stopping training or trying to push through them.
Book a session with one of our clinician online or call 1800 432 322.
Written by:
References
Abolhasani, M. (2022) ‘Headache and exercise’, Headache and Migraine in Practice, pp. 335–346. doi:10.1016/b978-0-323-99729-4.34001-7.
McCrory, P. (2000) ‘Headaches and exercise’, Sports Medicine, 30(3), pp. 221–229. doi:10.2165/00007256-200030030-00006.
Turner, J. (2003) ‘Exercise-related headache’, Current Sports Medicine Reports, 2(1), pp. 15–17. doi:10.1249/00149619-200302000-00004.
