What is the best approach for unresolved muscle and joint pain?
You’ve had unresolved muscle and joint pain that just won’t go away. You may have tried steroid injections, joint manipulations, rehab exercises from your physio but the pain just keeps coming back. You feel you’ve tried almost every method and treatment available and it just hasn’t worked.
Bespoke exercise, (exercise but not as you know it). This is exercise grounded in biomechanics. The thought process dives a little deeper than what you may have tried in the past.
In short, it’s the understanding of how force impacts your body when doing specific exercises.
Application is key - For this to work, it’s about attempting to load your muscles and joints with the appropriate exercise for your bone structure, muscle lengths and current muscular system tolerance.
This is specific exercise, that when performed, aims to contract the target muscle. The exercise is designed in a way that considers manipulating the resistance throughout the movement to match your strength. This can be done on a strength machine that uses a resistance-manipulating cam or designed on a cable machine. When designing the exercise we attempt to increase the resistance at the strongest part of the movement and reduce the resistance at the weakest part of the movement - without eliciting a pain response. With this setup, the target muscle is appropriately challenged from the start of the movement to the end of the movement. In other words for every degree of movement your joint moves, the muscles are being challenged just the right amount to get a positive adaption.
Not too little. not too much, just the right amount to keep your muscular system happy. Once this is established, we have a great foundation to work from. We’ve managed to load the joint, and muscles without getting a pain response.
This study showed the effectiveness of appropriate exercise. It evaluates the effectiveness of training the muscles that flex the elbow on a machine with a resistance-manipulating cam to try to match human strength, compared to a machine that only offers consistent resistance by using a disc plate. It concludes that training elbow flexor muscles on a machine with a resistance-manipulating cam is more efficient for increases in strength, than training on a machine with a disc plate.
We are able to help our clients because we consider the following throughout the range of movement at any given joint:
The moment arm - the perpendicular distance from the joint axis to the line of force the joint is resisting.
The length-tension relationships as muscles shorten and lengthen - how strong the muscle is at any given muscle length.
The muscle origin and insertion attachments and the angle of pull the muscle has across the joint.
The active range - the contractile ability of the muscle when the muscle is fully lengthened.
How quickly the muscle fatigues during a set.
And that’s before we’ve even started loading the exercise. If you’ve tried exercise before and it hasn’t worked, the above points may not have been considered. If not, there’s a high probability the exercise won’t work. And if none of these points are considered:
"it would be like aiming for a bullseye in darts wearing a blindfold. If you can’t see it, the chances are you’re not gonna hit it."
Once we understand how force impacts the body through exercise, we can start making better decisions with exercise choices and how we perform them. The difference is in the detail. There are multiple considerations to design an exercise that is right for you depending on your needs, an exercise that you will feel the benefits from rather than pain.
Greg Cornthwaite – Strength House Co-Founder
