MONDAY, Sept. 28, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Exercise is not first on the list for folks with throbbing knee pain from arthritis or a blinding migraine headache — but a new evidence review argues it should be.

Shorter-duration and lower-intensity exercise can reduce pain in ways that rival — or exceed — common pain medications, researchers write in the journal Pain Reports.

Overall, the reduction in pain that occurs with exercise is about 60% larger than the average relief reported for painkilling drugs, researchers said.

“At a time when we’re looking for safe and effective ways to manage pain beyond medication, these findings provide strong evidence for making exercise a more routine part of pain care,” lead researcher Ben Singh, a research fellow at Adelaide University in Australia, said in a news release.

For the new review, researchers pooled the data from 157 prior reviews and more than 2,700 previous clinical trials involving more than 221,000 people.

Results showed that exercise significantly reduces both short-term and chronic pain across a wide range of conditions.

“Our study found that exercise was associated with substantial reductions in acute and chronic pain across all forms of exercise — whether that be via aerobic or resistance exercise, or through gentler movement such as yoga, Pilates or tai chi,” Singh said.

Overall, exercise reduced pain by about 1.1 points on a zero-to-10 scale, which amounts to 60% greater pain relief than that found for common pain meds, researchers said.

Exercise was shown to help with pain from cancer, arthritis, migraine, menstrual cramps, fibromyalgia, and a host of other conditions. 

Less-intense exercise programs involving less than two hours of exercise per week delivered the best benefits for easing pain, researchers observed.

“Importantly, we found that more exercise wasn’t necessarily better,” Singh said. “In fact, shorter-duration and lower-intensity programs showed greater reductions in pain, suggesting people may not need to exercise harder or for longer to experience meaningful benefits.”

There are several reasons why exercise can help ease a person’s pain, researchers said.

“When we exercise, our body releases chemicals including endorphins and serotonin that can help reduce how strongly we feel pain and increase our pain tolerance,” Singh said. “Additionally, it helps calm inflammation and change the way our brain responds to pain, while also improving mood."

Doctors should consider specific prescriptions of exercise for people dealing with pain, the team concluded.

“Despite the evidence, it isn’t used as routinely as it could be and is rarely prescribed with the same precision as medication,” Singh said. “Instead, people experiencing pain may be told to ‘stay active,’ rather than being given a specific, evidence-based exercise program that considers what type of exercise to do, how hard to work and for how long.”

This might be in part because there are no clear guidelines that precisely recommend ways to incorporate exercise into pain management, researchers said.

“Health care providers need definitive guidance, not just whether exercise helps, but which exercises work for which patients, and how to prescribe them effectively,” Singh said.

More information

Harvard Medical School has more on exercise for pain management.

SOURCES: Adelaide University, news release, Sept. 23, 2026; Pain Reports, August 2026