Built from Broken: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body

by Scott H Hogan

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—the

its impact is proportional to the load used. The more load, the greater the response.

Despite popular opinion, tendon breakdown and joint dysfunction can only be fixed by increasing the load tolerance of connective tissues.

Though there are dozens of good reasons to focus your fitness efforts primarily on resistance training, here are two of the most relevant.

First, physical fitness (specifically, muscle mass and strength levels) is one of the strongest predictors of future health.

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. Unsurprisingly, eight times is also in the range of recommended reps for building muscle.

Not only does load training build strength and muscle, it also thickens and strengthens connective tissue.5

For building and maintaining bone mass, studies show even heavier weights initiate the grea...

Resistance training has even been shown to reduce age-related cognitive decline, slowing down neurodegeneration in people at risk of developing Alzheimer’s.10

A study published in Frontiers in Physiology demonstrated that previously 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. Researchers concluded that strength training could slow or even halt muscle atrophy and that sarcopenia “should not be conceptualized as a linear process” that begins in middle age.12

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. As I hope you are starting to see, that’s the exact opposite of what you should do.

These methods do nothing more than treat superficial symptoms. The only viable solution is to fortify your musculoskeletal system with targeted load training.

So to answer the question: No, it’s not too late. It’s the perfect time.

Never too late, never too old.

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.

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.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Nowhere is this cliché more appropriate than in your kinetic chain.

It’s more fun. When you really double down on attacking limitations and weaknesses, you won’t see incremental improvements. You’ll see dramatic leaps in how you look, feel, and move. It’s the most satisfying way to approach fitness, despite the fact that most people assume the opposite.

At any given time, about one third of adults in the U.S. are experiencing joint pain or stiffness.16

Here are the five most common causes of joint pain and weakness. In virtually zero cases are these factors isolated. Almost always, there is a combination of multiple variables that cause each other and create positive feedback loops. Still, it’s helpful to isolate them so you can understand how they affect you.

the concepts of static posture and dynamic posture.

Static posture is how you hold yourself when unmoving, as in sitting, standing, or sleeping.

Dynamic posture is how you hold yourself when walking, running, bending, squattin...

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.

Your nervous system has been recording and perfecting your movement habits, for better or for worse, since you were born. Altering these lifelong habits is no easy task. But it can be done by (a) moving more and moving in different ways, and (b) establishing new, healthy motor patterns and building strong, stable musculature around problem joints. By adding more varied movement, you’ll train your nervous system to maintain better posture. And by improving the way you sit, stand, walk, and move through daily life, you’ll resolve many joint pain episodes without any other intervention.

Movement quality is comprised of neuromuscular coordination, joint proprioception, and fatigue management.

Figure 1.3 Pain compensation cycle.

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. A 2011 metastudy (study of studies) revealed that stretching has “no significant effect.”25

Each additional pound of body weight adds about 4 pounds of additional pressure on your knees.

be your own pain management specialist.

Or at least, your own advocate for getting the care you need.

the best ways to treat it naturally.

Unlike specialists who only look at a thin slice of what is happening in your body, you will be able to see the big picture once you understand how pain works.

Compared to low-fat diets, low-carb diets provide better pain relief and anti-inflammatory effects.

a marathon mindset to battle back from degenerative tendinopathy.

cartilage is porous, and synovial fluid constantly leaks out into the space surrounding the joint. Since loss of synovial fluid leads to increased friction and cartilage thinning, it’s partially responsible for joint degeneration and osteoarthritis.

Burris believes that hydrodynamic pressure created from moving joints reduces friction and drives synovial fluid back into cartilage, counteracting fluid lost.

But for stiff joints, high-repetition movements with a deliberate tempo pump your joint capsules full of cushioning synovial fluid.

Even if you don’t implement a specific stretching method, just moving more in between sedentary sessions will keep your joints in shape.

IMPORTANT.

Only movement squeezes SF back into the joint capsule. So don’t let yourself become the Tin Man. As exercise physiologists like to say, “motion is lotion.”

Isometric contractions can even reduce inflammatory cytokine levels within SF to help bring down inflammation, allowing the healing process to run naturally.

Your cartilage is made of 65%–90% water.

When you are dehydrated, your joints grind together, causing inflammation and erosion. Make a conscious effort to hydrate well before exercise and keep sipping water throughout your session.

collagen is, it’s quite a bizarre molecule.

three coiled subunits containing exactly 1,050 amino acids.