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broken down
beat up
bottlenecked
How can we manage our exercise, lifestyle, and nutrition habits to overcome the obstacle of joint dysfunction?
nutrition,
When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.
“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. Everything else—stretching, foam rolling, manual therapy, massage, flossing, smashing, taping, cracking, and popping—is secondary. You can spend hours each week on extraneous soft tissue and recovery work, but if you don’t effectively utilize load training, you won’t get the relief you’re looking for.
mechanotransduction
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. But it must be well planned and well executed.
If it breaks your body down, it’s because either your tissues are not prepared for the load volume or specific movements are creating unnatural stress on your musculoskeletal system.
weightlifting morphs from a vanity-based hobby to a learned skill of absolute human necessity.
First, physical fitness (specifically, muscle mass and strength levels) is one of the strongest predictors of future health.
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.
Strength, Muscle, and Mortality Say it . . . what one man can do, another can do. —from The Edge (movie, 1997)
“low muscle strength was independently associated with elevated risk of all-cause mortality” among participants 50 years or older.
Researchers found that those who lifted weights had a 46% lower death rate.9 Even after adjusting for other health variables such as body mass index and chronic disease, and lifestyle habits such as smoking and drinking, the weight-lifting group still had a 19% lower mortality rate. Resistance training has even been shown to reduce age-related cognitive decline, slowing down neurodegeneration in people at risk of developing Alzheimer’s.10 Weight training effectively boosts production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a naturally occurring protein responsible for nerve cell
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untrained seniors can build muscle and strength comparable to masters athletes who have been training for decades.11 Another study from the Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology found that the primary driver of age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia) was not age itself but reduced neuromuscular activity.
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 path of least resistance (and the one typically recommended by conventional medicine) is to stop doing the things that hurt—avoid uncomfortable movements and find easier forms of exercise.
One problem with this approach is that your muscles don’t work in isolation. Each primary muscle has an entire cast of stabilizing muscles that surround it. If these smaller stabilizing muscles are neglected, muscle imbalances occur that quickly create movement faults, mobility restrictions, and joint irritation.
muscle-only approach often exacerbates common muscle imbalances. For example, an exercise routine that leans on heavy pressing, rows, and lat pulldowns builds the shoulder’s internal rotation muscles while neglecting the posterior (rear) muscles. This front-biased training combined with slouching over a desk all day causes shoulder impingement and pain.
Mobility work, core stabilization training, endurance exercise, and joint-building movements all get left by the wayside.
more loads are added to compromised joints, pain and injuries are inevitable.
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.
First and foremost, many people lack the mobility and movement control to execute heavy loaded barbell movements safely. They would be better served focusing on exercises that establish proper movement patterns, build core stability, and stress the joints and muscles in ways that build them up instead of tear them down.
A smarter approach involves shoring up weak points first and balancing traditional strength training with joint stabilizing work, mobility training, and corrective exercise.
Most programs are designed exclusively to build muscle and strength, neglecting other important aspects of fitness and longevity. For instance, connective tissue goes through a degradation and regeneration cycle after training, just as muscles do. As cells are damaged and repaired, connective tissue strength increases. But when this process is interrupted before full regeneration is complete, a net accumulation of damage adds up, leading to collagen base degradation.
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.
“corrective exercise,”
prehab
But the problem with leaning on your strengths is twofold. First, the more you develop your strengths, the bigger the gap between your strongest links and weakest links. The bigger this gap is, the greater your risk of injury.
Second, any progress in your strong attributes is incremental only. On the flip side, improving your weak points raises the whole system. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Nowhere is this cliché more appropriate than in your kinetic chain.
Underlying this growth trend is bad posture, lack of varied movement, and repetitive use strains. Here are the five most common causes of joint pain and weakness.
Poor posture is the number one nondisease cause of joint pain.
Static posture is how you hold yourself when unmoving, as in sitting, standing, or sleeping.
To improve posture—static or dynamic—you need both conscious effort and mechanical changes to the musculature that supports proper alignment. That includes targeted strength training and mobility exercise.
Improving dynamic posture requires retraining the neuromuscular systems that control postural muscles.
Movement quality is comprised of neuromuscular coordination, joint proprioception, and fatigue management. Let’s briefly look at each of these crucial pieces.
Neuromuscular coordination is the ability of your central nervous system to control muscles while executing complex movements.
By establishing joint stability with targeted corrective exercises and frequently practicing the primary movement patterns, you can improve neuromuscular coordination.
Improving Neuromuscular Coordination
Joint proprioception describes your ability to sense the position and movement of your body through space.
your muscles flex or elongate when they should be guarding ...
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This includes fatigue-proofing important postural muscles that you can’t afford to have quit on you.
Fatigue Manavement
upper back muscles should be trained using high repetitions from multiple angles, so they are never your weak link
muscular endurance in your low back (the most common pain point) is more important than muscular strength or mobility.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, multisport athletes enjoy better performance success and reduced injury rates than single sport athletes.
A study commissioned by the National Federation of State High School Associations showed that single-sport athletes are 70% more likely to suffer an injury than are multisport athletes.24
muscle imbalance
