Get strong without injury when older….Today’s Post….Thursday, 4-5-2018

Many men & women over 50 stop doing strength training due to getting persistent joint injuries.

1.  This has very undesirable consequences!

It can cause lack of mobility and frailty and the loss of years, even decades, of worthwhile and mobile life. 

2.  But if strength training causes joint pain that lasts all week long and fails to heal, it’s understandable if people stop doing it.

The much better news is that this is avoidable AND reversible!

3.  The scary and unfortunate news is that many drugs independently cause this to happen. 

Worse, that INCLUDES over the counter drugs people take for the pain!

This post has how to avoid all that and what does allow you to strength train with heavier weights without joint pain.

And, it has how to speed recovery if you do get a mild injury with methods that DO work without making things worse instead!

The cure has several parts:

1.  Avoid a lifestyle that causes joint pain even without exercise and follow the lifestyle that prevents joint pain and breakdown instead.

2.  Do not take or keep taking the drugs that cause joint pain or breakdown.  Notably that statin drugs do this is a known effect. 

Worse, the over the counter drugs for pain and inflammation are harmful and include some effects that cause or worsen joint pain. 

Mercifully some parts of the lifestyle that prevents joint pain and breakdown build your joints and reduce excess inflammation.

3.  Use the exercise forms and styles for strength training that increase your control and minimize injury to your joints.  Do not use or discontinue forms and styles of strength training that are uncontrolled or stress your joints excessively.

I found out today that besides making effective strength training harmful to do and causing insomnia and migraines that make strength training harder to recover from between times, statins drugs have another known side effect.  They cause joint breakdown and inflammation!

Since while statins are poor at heart attack and stroke protection for those who do not yet know the effective methods that do NOT have these side effects, it IS essential to take action to avoid heart attacks and strokes.

For new readers who don’t yet use the methods that do prevent heart attacks and strokes—and use the methods that lower inflammation very well these two posts and their comments have those methods:

These two posts have the strategies that show what things work and how to upgrade to them:

Fast Heart Protection without drugs....Tuesday, 1-9-2018

http://iehealth.blogspot.com/2018/01/fast-heart-protectionwithout-drugs.html

This post and the two comments I added that contain many things that do this AND they improve blood flow to the brain as well as the heart and tend to prevent Alzheimer's and vascular dementia.

How to eat a low inflammation diet….Today's post:  Tuesday, 12-19-2017  

http://iehealth.blogspot.com/2017/12/how-to-eat-low-inflammation-diet.html 

By following the lifestyle that keeps inflammation very low and adding the things that prevent heart disease you get two benefits that allow for safely doing effective strength training:

You turn off most of the main causes of joint inflammation and breakdown AND you include things that strengthen and build healthy joints! 

(The vitamin D3 and vitamin K2 and magnesium we list, besides building bone, also help build joints!  And, the vitamin C and daily organic fruit and vegetable servings also have natural vitamin C AND cofactors that build strong and resilient bones and tendons and joints.  Nature’s Way sells grape seed extract with some of those cofactors, for example.

Adding bone broth from cows fed only grass or taking the amino acids in it or taking a supplement with some of the collagen in it can increase bone and joint building too:

Now sells the amino acid proline as a supplement.  Source Naturals sells TMG, trimethyl glycine.  And Drs Best sells a supplement with Hyaluronic acid.  That supplement contains hyaluronic acid that helps joints contain enough fluid to lubricate well AND the form of collagen that has been shown to help rebuild joints.

(Joints and their cushioning surfaces are made of these ingredients.)

Those nutrients are also in bone broth from bones with marrow that are heated before the broth is made. By having larger amounts of the key building blocks and all the cofactors, that kind of bone broth can be a great way to go. (Our local Whole Foods sells such bones from cows that are 100% grass fed only.)

But if you aren’t well set up to make that kind of bone broth or dislike it, those supplements do help.

3.  Use the exercise forms and styles for strength training that increase your control and minimize injury to your joints.  Do not use or discontinue forms and styles of strength training that are uncontrolled or stress your joints excessively.

The key exercises for building overall strength and strong legs and back and keeping you mobile are the ones that exercise your chest and upper back and your lower back, gluteus or butt muscles and your thighs.

Other exercises that strain your joints can simply be skipped entirely by most people.

a) Pushups and bench presses are important to do because the pectorals and latissimus dorsi – called pecs and lats by body builders, are large muscles and provide the base for anything you need to do with your upper body that requires strength.

The unfortunate news is that the way untutored people do them, they tend to injure your shoulders.  This common style tends to put more strain on your frontal deltoid muscle than it is well designed to take and in a position that strains this muscle.

The key change is to a form where the pectoral muscle does 90% of the work instead and uses the frontal deltoid far less and in a high leverage position.

When doing pushups when you come down, if you touch your chin or chest and then go back up, you’ll tend to injure your shoulders. Using that same style doing bench presses is even worse for producing shoulder injuries because you rapidly become able to use more weight.

The cure is surprisingly simple! 

When you do pushups, lift your head so you are looking at the wall in front of you and, NOT, repeat NOT, at the floor.

Then increase the arch in your back this causes as much as you can so your shoulders are already well up from the floor.

Then using your pectoral muscles almost by themselves to a strong “push down” motion with them.  Then you only need to push a bit with the triceps in your arms at the top.

(Note that you do NOT use the front of your shoulders much at all to do either part!)

Lastly, only go down until your KNEES touch before you go back up.

To do the bench press safely with weights heavy enough to be effective, you will get strong enough to need one or two skilled spotters in case you try to lift too much or cannot do the last rep you had hoped to do.

But if you are only using lighter weights where you almost certainly can lift more and more times than you are doing, that may not be necessary.  Just do pushups as a second set and do as many as you can.

But in BOTH cases, you use the same method as in the pushups, which is why to learn the method doing pushups first.

Leaving your buttocks firmly touching the bench, get as much arch in your back as you can and look as far back as you can rather than at the bar.

Then, in that position, let the bar down under control until it just touches your chest.  Then use your pectoral muscles in a push DOWN method for the first two thirds of the lift; and then at that point finish the lift pushing with the triceps on your arms.  With the weight already moving and lifted that far your arms can then finish with a weight you could not lift with your arms and shoulders!

Best of all, because you use your pectorals so much and your shoulders so little you can become able to lift a good bit of weight without the nagging shoulder injuries the more common style causes!

The other exercise that you can do that exercises your grip and the part of your trapezius muscle that shrugs your shoulders and your glutes and entire leg is the deadlift.

You simply grab a bar with at least one large plate on each side and bend down in a way that keeps the SAME back arch as the pushups and bench press all the way down and back up and then stand up with it and set it back down again keeping that arch as you get to the floor.

You also hold the bar with one hand over the bar and one under it.  That way if it tries to roll out of your grip with one hand it rolls into a better grip with the opposite hand.

You do NOT need or want to roll your shoulders back at the top by the way.

Just stand up with weight and set it back down.

By using all these methods, you can get strong bones and muscles AND joints that don’t hurt or get worse at the SAME TIME!