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muscle imbalance alters movement patterns and joint mechanics, which leads to postural faults, excessive compensatory loading on specific joints and muscles, inflammation, pain, and injury.
pain compensation cycle
tendons
attaches muscle to bone.
often the first to break down from overuse, causing inflammation, pain, ...
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overuse,
combination of traumatic injury and stressful, repetitive motion.
Treatments aimed solely at blocking inflammation are not the solution to resolving your joint pain.
rheumatoid
osteoarthritis.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks its joint tissue. RA patients often depend on medication and tar...
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Osteoarthritis (OA) is the breakdown of cartilage and other collagen structures within joints. Although injuries can expedite the onset of OA, and it worsens with age, it is not considered a normal part of aging. Weight-bearing joints and the hands are mo...
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Experts from Arthritis.org and the Centers for Disease Control agree that staying active is the most important thing you can do to manage symptoms.
Only 10 pounds of excess weight puts an additional 40 pounds of pressure on your knees.
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.
it pays to be your own pain management specialist. Or at least, your own advocate for getting the care you need.
Pain is a protective response to tissue injury.
(nociceptive pain),
Pain is not without value, but it’s hard to recognize this when you’re in pain. Its value lies in guiding you back to health.
Types of Pain 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. Differentiating between the two helps you determine what course of action is best.
Nociceptive inflammatory
throbbing
pulsating
Neuropathic pain
Neuropathic pain is described as shooting, tingling, stabbing, or burning—often affecting the lower legs and feet. It can be a chronic feeling or come and go.
A third type, centralized pain, occurs when your nervous system amplifies the volume of pain signals.
Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to form new connections, especially in response to learning or an injury.
Like a road detour during construction, a damaged brain finds a new path to the destination.
This same process of rewiring neural circuitry takes place in the rest of the body as well.
But like many basic functions of the human body, neuroplasticity can turn against you.
“Adaptations in your brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves can outlast the original injury and lead to structure changes, which include the sprouting of new nerve endings and the formation of new synapses between neurons.”
sensitization.34 It’s your body’s way of protecting an injury from further aggravation, but it can also overreact. As pain receptors continue to upregulate and more inflammatory mediators are released, your acute pain from an injury can transition into chronic pain.
cortical inhibition. This is your nervous system’s response to injury, where neurons that control muscular force production around the injured area are selectively inhibited. This is another reason why training through joint pain is a fool’s errand.
Upregulated pain receptors, increased nerve endings, and other structural changes to the nervous system can make you sensitized to pain in the future—long after the original injury has healed.
Not only that, sensitization doesn’t stay isolated to one injured body part. It can affect the way you perceive pain in other areas. This means an injury that produces prolonged inflammation could lead to increased pain sensitivity throughout your body.
catastrophizing—when fear of additional pain and injury becomes
catastrophizing
Jessica Kisiel, exercise physiologist and author of Winning the Injury Game, pushes her clients to connect with pain instead of ignoring it:
Pain has a dual role in your body: communication and protection. It is the body’s last resort mechanism to get your attention.
You have ignored the subtle signals that your body has sent you: the strange feelings, muscle tightness, reduced range of motion, and so on. To make you take notice and stop your destructive behavior, your body is forced to take harsh action and makes you hurt—terribly....
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One of the simplest ways to eliminate exercise-related joint pain is to take the momentum out of the movement.
especially effective for working through tendon pain and learning new exercises.
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...
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Slow repetition speeds allow you to safely perform previously uncomfortable movements without pain while also ...
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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.
inflammation is a fundamental part of your body’s immune system.
It’s in charge of clearing dead cells away from injury sites, protecting wounds from foreign invaders, and supplying regenerative nutrients for repair.
The Three Phases of Inflammation
