5 Tips for Muscle & Joint Longevity
We only get one body to last us a lifetime and most folks practice some sort of daily maintenance for our physical health, in one way or another. We brush our teeth to clean out bacteria and avoid cavities. We eat nutritious diets to maintain a healthy weight and avoid diabetes. We exercise to maintain cardiovascular health and avoid heart disease. We do most of these things by way of habit because we reap the benefits over time as we incorporate good practices into our daily routines.
The human body is an incredibly resilient machine, but it does require some ongoing maintenance for good health and longevity, especially when we consider muscles and joints. Ultimately, we all want to wake up in the morning without pain and do the things that we love for as long as possible.
So what can we do to maintain our muscles and joints?
Tip #1: Build an awareness for posture/positions
Are you staring down at a phone for several hours a day? Are you slumped in a chair with your spine rounded like a prawn? This is an ongoing challenge for us all – it’s a big one. Not many of us can get through a day without some amount of sitting, computer work, phone use etc and it’s these activities that tend to take us from an ideal posture, into a lazy posture that places huge load on our muscles and joints.
Consider staring at your phone, with your head looking down. The human head weighs about 5kg in most people. When we look down and flex our neck to 60 degrees, that 5kg weight on the spine turns into 27kg! That’s an extra 22kg that your joints, discs, ligaments and muscles have to hold in place. No wonder neck pain is such a big problem.
Some folks like using post-it notes on the computer screens, some use regular calendar reminders. Setting up a system that draws your awareness to these positions can help to build new habits and remove a HUGE amount of load from your muscles and joints.
Tip #2: Regular strength & stability training
The number one way to protect a joint is to make it strong and stable with help of the muscles around it. That doesn’t mean maxing out your deadlift and squat several times a week to get bigger muscles, but rather it’s about maintaining the smaller, intrinsic strength and control that is required at a micro-level. We’ve seen plenty of very strong athletes that can move incredible weights, but still lack control in some of the micro aspects which can contribute to joint degeneration.
Muscles need to be stimulated regularly to stay strong and to maintain the connection with your brain. Building a daily routine that involves some simple strength and stability exercises is a great way to target any weaknesses and maintain good control, which will also be protective for your joints over the long-term.
Tip #3: Vary your activities and intensity
Our physical body will only allow us to continually do what we can effectively recover from. One of the big reasons that people find themselves needing help with pain is due to chronic overuse and under-recovery. This is especially true for the athletic population that enjoy sports and working out.
We can explain most muscle and joint injuries with the concept of Load vs Capacity. Every musculoskeletal tissue in the body (muscle, joint, tendon, ligament etc) has a certain capacity that it can tolerate and effectively recover from. If your load continually pushes the threshold and breaches the capacity without adequate time to recover, you will get injured.
Oftentimes, less is more. If you start to get some warning signs that your load is exceeding your capacity, it’s time to reassess and show some love to your future-self. Exercise doesn’t have to be 100% all-out effort every time. It’s important to have complete rest days and days where the intensity is at a low level, so that your muscles, joints and connective tissues can adapt to the load and recover for future workouts.
Tip #4: Be PROACTIVE and not REACTIVE
Pain, stiffness, tightness that lingers… these are not normal sensations when we think of healthy muscles and joints. Generally when something starts to hurt, or feels tight and stiff, we tend to wait and see if it goes away on it’s own and only seek help when it becomes a much bigger problem.
Most people are generally REACTIVE when it comes to muscle and joint healthcare. We tend to only want to part with money when it is going to get us out of pain and back to doing the thing that we love. Most folks are not thinking too far ahead and the body is not often seen as something that requires investment for the sake of our future-self.
But what if some time and money invested now could mean avoiding hip replacements before the age of 70? What if the effort you put in now could mean walking without pain and being an active grandparent, instead of being stuck in a chair. It might seem extreme, but these are real consequences that can result from years of poor muscle and joint function.
Clinically, we have the means to assess and report on function. We have the skills to treat the problems and restore range of motion when the problem is not too far gone. But this only helps our future-self if we are PROACTIVE by jumping on these problems early and staying on top of it.
Tip #5: Optimise your metabolic health
It’s common knowledge that we should be at a healthy weight, eat a balanced diet, drink plenty of water and get good quality sleep. It’s not too hard to take action on these basics and make some solid progress. But if you’re already diligent with the foundations of good health, you might think what else can I do?
Every one of us is unique and we all respond differently to various inputs. For instance, fermented foods and drinks are considered ‘healthy’ options, but not every individual will do well with kimchi, sauerkraut and kombucha. Without us realising it, our body can create a constant low-grade inflammatory response if we are consuming foods and supplements that are not suited to our individual immune type. This can have many wide-ranging effects throughout the body, including muscles and joints, ranging from a decreased recovery capacity all the way through to throwing fuel on the fire of painful inflammatory joint conditions.
We all have a dominant immune type that dictates how we respond to our environment. Without understanding how you react, you might be constantly driving your own immune response in the wrong direction, resulting in any number of symptoms from joint pain and inflammation, through to asthma and allergies.
Are you Th1, Th2, or Th17?
Understanding your own immune type and therefore what your body responds to positively and negatively, can be a gamechanger in reducing systemtic inflammation that would otherwise rage away in the background unchecked. Connecting with an experienced Functional Medicine Practitioner is a great starting point to understanding more about your systemic health, which will have positive long-term impacts for muscle and joint longevity.
A few thoughts on stretching and self-treatment
When we talk about muscle and joint health, the first thing that most folks want to know about is STRETCHING!
What stretch can I do for _________?
How often do I need to stretch _________?
My _______ has flared up because I didn’t stretch enough.
Stretching is fine, if you already have healthy muscles and joints with full ranges of motion. Stretching may actually have benefits, particularly to the nervous system, if that’s something you like to do as a routine. If you have full range of motion and daily stretching helps you keep it there, cool!
However stretching isn’t helpful as a treatment intervention and can actually cause more problems that it helps without an accurate diagnosis. The same goes for many of the popular self-treatment approaches such as massage guns, lacrosse balls, foam rollers etc. These are all capable of stimulating the nervous system and creating some temporary change in the muscles, but the keyword is TEMPORARY. It’s important to recognise that while these approaches may feel nice and do have some associated benefits with muscle health and longevity, they are not TREATMENT.
Final Thoughts
Small changes now add up to bigger changes over time. Muscle and joint health is a long-game. Review these five tips and identify which one is the most relevant to YOU. What change will make the biggest impact to your longevity?
Dr. Christopher Aysom, Principal Clinician
BChiroSc, MChiro (Chiropractor)
Apex Soft Tissue & Spine
Pymble, NSW, Australia
https://apexsofttissue.com.au
