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January 6 - January 20, 2023
“Maybe being at rock bottom is the perfect place to start. I was free to explore life’s infinite possibilities.”
You don’t have to—and should NOT—accept pain and movement dysfunction as part of aging. Those things need to be addressed and eradicated. But if you can let go of your preconceived notions about what you are supposed to look like and what exercises you should be able to do, you’ll be wiser, capable of addressing the obstacles in front of you and moving past them. The real challenge is accepting your current limitations without letting that knowledge discourage you. Instead of asking yourself, “Why me?” ask, “What is the next logical step forward?”
Load training (a.k.a. resistance training) is the most effective lever for resolving joint pain and building a resilient body.
Despite popular opinion, tendon breakdown and joint dysfunction can only be fixed by increasing the load tolerance of connective tissues. And how is that accomplished? Rest? Stretching? Anti-inflammatories and injections? Nope. Only through load training.
First, physical fitness (specifically, muscle mass and strength levels) is one of the strongest predictors of future health. And resistance training is the most practical and proven way to build muscle mass and strength. Having more muscle improves metabolic health markers such as insulin sensitivity, reduces all-cause mortality risk, and may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, and strokes.3 Second, heavy loads are required to create adaptive responses (healing responses) from connective tissue like tendons. Easy exercise and light training won’t cut it.
Studies show you must challenge your joints with weights around 80% of your one-repetition maximum to elicit the greatest adaptive response. This equates to a weight you can lift about eight times before reaching failure.
Despite the dumb weight lifter stereotypes, resistance training is one of the best things you can do for your cognitive function.
American Journal of Medicine shows that aging adults can gain nearly 2.5 pounds of lean muscle and increase their overall strength by 25% to 30% with just four to five months of consistent training.
The basic movement patterns that train your lower half—squatting, hinging, lunging—produce the greatest metabolic response. Most importantly, having a strong lower half is the best way to protect your body from the most common pain points: low back pain and knee pain.
you can build significant muscle, strength, and joint integrity in as little as two days per week. The key is using the right exercises, repetition tempos, and recovery periods to create consistent, positive adaptations.
Movement quality is comprised of neuromuscular coordination, joint proprioception, and fatigue management.
Neuromuscular coordination is the ability of your central nervous system to control muscles while executing complex movements.
Joint proprioception describes your ability to sense the position and movement of your body through space.
And because all of these mechanisms break down when you’re tired, fatigue management should be programmed as well. This includes fatigue-proofing important postural muscles that you can’t afford to have quit on you.
A muscle imbalance occurs when one or more muscles in your body are stronger or larger than others.
These types of imbalances alter movement patterns, compromise joint stability, reduce mobility, cause chronic pain, and lead to repetitive use injuries when soft tissues grind against bony tissues.
One of the most pervasive myths about muscle imbalances is that you can fix them by stretching. But the research on stretching is not flattering.
The myth that tendinopathy is primarily an inflammation problem is the most destructive belief in all of sports medicine.
In the case of injury, inflammation delivers much-needed oxygen and nutrients to damaged tissue while also clearing out bacteria and dead cells.28 Treatments aimed solely at blocking inflammation are not the solution to resolving your joint pain.
Load training is the only therapeutic intervention that addresses all five primary causes of joint pain—posture, movement quality, muscle imbalances, tendinopathy, and collagen degradation.
Most pain experts consider nociceptive pain and neuropathic pain to be the two primary types. The key difference is that nociceptive pain is caused by direct tissue damage, and neuropathic pain is caused by a disease state or nervous system dysfunction.
Nociceptive pain (nō-si-'sep-tiv) is what you experience when you break a bone, twist an ankle, or smash your thumb with a hammer. The causes range from thermal (heat) to chemical to mechanical.
Nociceptive inflammatory pain, a subtype of nociceptive pain, is what comes next. The flood of inflammatory cells and increased swelling compresses nerves, causing painful feelings of pressure.36 This is often described as throbbing or pulsating pain.
Neuropathic pain is described as shooting, tingling, stabbing, or burning—often affecting the lower legs and feet.
A third type, centralized pain, occurs when your nervous system amplifies the volume of pain signals. Interestingly, centralized pain often lingers long after the original tissue damage has healed. In many cases of a nociceptive pain response to tissue damage, the lingering pain has nothing to do with the injury. Pain receptors have been sensitized, and sometimes new pain receptors have been formed. This can persist for months or years after the tissue damage occurred. To resolve it, you have to do more than just treat the symptoms. It takes understanding and addressing the root causes of the
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Chronic pain isn’t just a nuisance. It blunts your strength and performance through a process called cortical inhibition.
By allowing pain to hang around, you’re suppressing strength gains. Besides, you’ll end up losing any progress you make once your joints start degenerating.
This means an injury that produces prolonged inflammation could lead to increased pain sensitivity throughout your body. Not good news. To make matters worse, there are psychological effects of pain and injury that linger. And don’t think this is just a problem for the hysterical or overly sensitive. No one is spared from these biochemical processes.
When you focus too much on pain, you risk making it worse. This is called catastrophizing—when fear of additional pain and injury becomes exaggerated.
First, be attuned to feelings of pressure or tension in your joints when exercising.
This means the older you are, the more attuned you can be to pressure sensations issuing warning signals. Pressure indicates an early inflammatory response, an increase in synovial fluid from joint damage, swelling, or a mechanical problem—like a ligament being in a precarious position.40 Tension in a muscle or joint usually indicates a lack of flexibility, but it can also mean your tissues are under stress and in danger of tearing. Let pressure and tension be your guides. The more often you recognize these sensations, the better you will be at managing pain and preventing injury.
Second, beware of favoring one body part over another.
Third, establish a diagnostic ritual that allows you to search for and locate pain.
Pain has a dual role in your body: communication and protection. It is the body’s last resort mechanism to get your attention.
More often than not, you can work through discomfort safely just by reducing the weight and slowing down the repetition speed to at least three seconds during the lifting (concentric) phase and three seconds during the lowering (eccentric) phase. Your body responds in a completely different manner to this type of training.
You must view your pain with a more scientific, unemotional perspective. This strategy has three main benefits: (1) it allows you to address underlying problems before serious injuries occur; (2) it shows you what to look for that precedes pain—feelings of pressure, tension, and other strange sensations; and (3) it teaches you to differentiate between counterproductive pain and productive discomfort, a necessary skill for improving fitness.
Pain relief is treating symptoms, not causes.
Instead of aiming to block pain, focus instead on these four goals: modulate inflammation, resolve and prevent tendinopathy, improve synovial fluid health, and protect collagen health.
The inflammation theory of disease states that chronic inflammation is the underlying cause of or main expediting factor in most common diseases, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and Alzheimer’s.
If you have low-grade systemic inflammation, it is damaging your quality of life in virtually every way—the way you look, how you feel, and even how effectively you think.
Lose weight. Regardless of how you make it happen, losing weight reduces total body inflammation levels.
Avoid NSAIDs and other anti-inflammatory drugs. Paradoxically, long-term use of NSAIDs such as naproxen and ibuprofen increases levels of low-grade chronic inflammation.
Reduce carbohydrate intake. Compared to low-fat diets, low-carb diets provide better pain relief and anti-inflammatory effects.
Follow a low-inflammation diet. Some foods cause dramatic spikes in blood sugar that raise inflammation levels.
20 minutes of exercise resulted in a 5% decrease in circulating inflammatory cells.
Sleep more. Only one night of sleep loss raises circulating inflammatory cytokine levels.
Use cold therapy when you feel all banged up. Cold therapy, such as sitting in an ice bath, will help relieve pain and inflammation in flared-up joints.
Take proven anti-inflammatory supplements. There are a handful of natural supplements with proven anti-inflammatory benefits.
The second item on the list is resolve and prevent tendinopathy—in that order. It’s likely that you already have some level of tendinopathy in your body right now that could lead to injury and chronic pain—even if you don’t have any symptoms.
The only way to get past tendinopathy is to exercise for load capacity and tissue remodeling, using pain as your guide.
