Joints: How Do We Keep Them Healthy?
Estimated Read Time: 2 minutes
Original Post: Here.
We’re often told to save our joints. Not to use them for they will succumb to “wear and tear”. The human body isn’t a machine, it is an ecosystem that grows from getting enough stress and having enough rest. If you threw the device/machine you're reading this on right now on the ground, you know that it's state would deteriorate. At best, it remains the same. Living things though, like us, have the opportunity to grow from such a situation.
Stress your body out with just enough exercise, and you get stronger after getting enough rest. The key here is to never let the stress surpass the rest so much that your body cannot recover and grow. To bring nutrients to your joints, you need to move them in their full range of motion both actively and passively, load them and rest them. This means, you need to move them in all the ways they can move and challenge them, by lifting things, or putting weight through them, and you also need to allow them to rest, as you would during sleep. Your joints do not receive nutrients if you don't do this. In fact, they start to lose function. When you don’t move, you tell your joint that it doesn’t need to move, and it learns to get better at not moving. When you do move you tell your joint, ”I need you to adapt to this movement.”, and it starts to move better.
