Isn’t exercise supposed to make your joints feel better? Yes it is, but exercise is a very broad term and encompasses many forms. It’s essential that you do the right types of exercise to keep your joints healthy, and many people miss out on one crucial element that can make all the difference.

After the age of 30 you start to lose muscle mass at a rate of 1-2 percent per year, or put another way 10-20% per decade. As you lose muscle, your joints are losing their support structures. As the joints become less supported, they become more prone to pain and injury.

Walking, cycling, running, yoga and other various exercise classes will do little to nothing to preserve the muscle that’s lost as part of the aging process because you lose a specific type of muscle fibre which is not used or trained with these types of low intensity activities.

The muscle fibres lost as part of the aging process are called type 2 or fast twitch muscle fibers. These muscle fibers are the biggest, strongest fibres and are only called upon during high intensity, low duration activities.

Because walking, running, cycling, and yoga are all either endurance based or low intensity activities, the type 2 muscle fibers are not called upon, so you’ll only preserve the type 1 muscle fibers which are smaller and weaker, and used during light, or long duration activities.

Strength training changes everything:

The good news is, that all of this can be offset and reversed to some degree by strength training, in fact, I was able to help one of my clients avoid a double knee replacement, by helping them regain muscle and strength around their knee joints. After spending a good deal of time in pain with arthritis and becoming less and less mobile, they became completely pain free after 10 weeks of strength training and was able to return to activities which were previously painful without going under the knife.

As you progress through a set of a strength training exercise, the exercise starts to feel more intense, and the body has to call upon the type 2 muscle fibers to complete the effort, and with time, the type 2 fibers can be rebuilt, giving your joints the natural support that they have lost over time.

Muscles also need to be balanced with each other, exercising some muscles more than others which oppose them will also cause joint pain, so a good training programme can help re-balance muscles and therefore reduce the stress experienced by the joints.

Strength training is one of the best tools we have to offset the effects of the aging process. The sooner you start the better, but it’s never too late to begin, as research has shown that people in every decade of life can re-build lost muscle.

Steve Shreeve