I’ve worked with hundreds of athletes who spend their entire careers wearing some form of footwear, from running shoes to skates to ski boots. Most of these athletes suffer unnecessarily from shin splints, plantar fasciitis, and groin injuries often brought on through years of ankle immobility caused by their footwear. The good news is that after a few weeks of ankle and foot exercises these injuries can be healed; if the exercises are continued, those injuries never return.
A very cost-effective means of preventing this? Go barefoot! Barefoot training will help compensate for the extended periods of time feet spend locked in tight athletic or orthopedic shoes.
When the ankle ligaments are tight, they will restrict movement in the calf muscles. Tightened calf muscles will, in turn, lead to a stiff gait, causing aches and pains in the knees, hips, and lower back. Amazing as it may seem, something as small and seemingly unimportant as a tight ankle ligament can have a major impact on our energy levels, strength, and vitality.
The solution is always the same: Gently increase the movement of the toe and ankle ligaments, and a positive chain reaction will ripple through the adjoining muscles, loosening them and relieving the stiffness and pain.
JOINTS CAN BE PAINFUL AND EXPENSIVE
Nothing says “old age” like creaky joints. When we hear this telltale creak, it’s often accompanied by deterioration in the joints and the beginning of chronic pain, which can become debilitating. Thank goodness for the high quality of modern medicine, and the option to have hip or knee replacement surgery. The demand for these procedures has led to impressive advances in the surgery itself, but there are always associated risks, making it preferable to avoid surgery if at all possible. Our main objective should be to prevent joint damage in the first place, not just because joint pain can be crippling but also because joint problems can be enormously costly.
Most people become aware of their joints when they suffer from chronic pain. When joints are functioning well, all our movements are fluid and efficient and we don’t even notice which joints are involved in which movements. But when joints are diseased or damaged, every movement becomes torturous. The quality of our daily lives is much diminished when stiff damaged joints cause us chronic pain. Paraphrasing Joni Mitchell, we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone—we never really appreciate our joints and all that they do for us until they are no longer functioning properly.
Decades ago, experts accepted tooth decay as an inevitable part of aging. In the province of Quebec, Canada, as late as the 1970s, dentists assumed there was nothing they could do to prevent teeth from rotting, so it wasn’t uncommon to extract the teeth of patients as young as teenagers and outfit them with dentures! The prevailing attitude toward joint pain is similarly outdated and the treatment is just as drastic. We have been programmed to accept joint damage as an inevitability of aging, something to be tolerated like wrinkles and gray hair. Most people are unaware that joint damage is preventable. In fact, we can do plenty to protect our joints.
When people suffer from joint problems, they naturally look for the fastest, easiest ways to relieve their pain. However, if the root cause is not resolved, the damage will get progressively worse. And the root cause is not age, but a lifetime of bad habits.
Joint Damage Cause #1: Being Sedentary
The number one cause of joint damage, trumping all others, is a sedentary lifestyle. Couch potatoes are actually at a greater risk of suffering from joint problems than are weekend warriors or hard-driving athletes. Sedentary people vastly outnumber active people in the Western world, so the sedentary group represents a larger number of potential joint pain and arthritis sufferers. The main reason sedentary people experience more joint pain and arthritis is atrophy, wasting of muscle tissue caused by disuse.
With atrophy, muscles lose their elasticity, becoming smaller, drier, and stiffer; their shrinkage causes the joints to compress, creating greater tension on the joint during movement while eliminating the space necessary for synovial fluid to lubricate the joints. The result is a grating of bone on bone that is both painful and debilitating—this condition is also known as arthritis. Arthritis makes any activity, even something as benign as walking across a room, excruciatingly painful.
For sedentary folks who are experiencing any joint pain, the value of exercise cannot be overstated. Movement is an amazingly simple and elegant solution to an otherwise complicated problem. If you’ve been sedentary for a while, do not be discouraged by your limitations—begin today, at home. Just get up and walk around, making sure you gently bend and straighten all your joints. You should notice considerable improvement quite rapidly.
Many middle-aged people don’t think of themselves as sedentary, but when they take the trouble to document their movement, they’re stunned to discover that they are in fact technically sedentary. (See “Are You Sedentary?” in Chapter 3.)
Joint Damage Cause #2: Overweight
Another leading cause of joint damage is excess body weight. Often, excess body weight goes hand in hand with a sedentary lifestyle, with one causing or exacerbating the other. While excess weight may seem like just an easy scapegoat for joint problems, people who have lost weight will tell you how much better their joints feel when they are lighter. We shouldn’t expect our joints to be able to happily support more weight than they were created to support. The compression caused by excess weight eventually flattens the joints’ natural cushions, and this flattening squeezes out the lubricating synovial fluid sacs and leads to a grinding of bone on bone that we so desperately want to avoid. Losing weight alleviates the compression of the joints, restoring a space for the fluid sacs to spread lubrication.
Often obese or overweight people ask me what exercises they can do to relieve their hip and knee pain. I suggest that if they lose the weight the pain will go away. Going under the knife is an option, of course, but we should try to avoid it at all costs as there are potential unforeseen side effects of surgery. Losing weight has no negative side effects!
Joint Damage Cause #3: Poor Walking or Running Habits
A sedentary lifestyle is much more dangerous to joints than any sport or activity could ever be. But that said, poor running and walking habits are another cause of joint damage. Active people take about 10,000 steps a day, and sedentary people take about 3,000 steps a day, but no matter how many steps one takes, if the feet are slamming into the ground, joint damage will result.
If a runner runs heavily on a hard surface such as concrete, he will eventually have joint trauma. Runners and walkers tend to respond to joint pain by purchasing state-of-the-art running shoes in the vain hope that new shoes will provide the amount of cushioning required to soften the impact, thus sparing their joints. But even the best running shoe will be incapable of cushioning against that slamming effect.
In addition to impact trauma with a heavy walking or running stride, you also have the problem of muscles constantly contracting and never lengthening. No shoe, no matter how ingenious the design, can protect against the repetitive shortening of the muscles that occurs with a runner’s stride. The initial cause of the pain, before the actual joint head gets damaged, is the shortened muscles. Shortened muscles cause the bones to squeeze the joints tightly together. The combination of damage from repetitive impact to the head of the joint and the shortened muscles squeezing the joints together leaves no space for the synovial fluid to lubricate the joint, as well as no room for the cartilage to slide smoothly—and this condition is the precursor to arthritis.
With conditions like joint damage that becomes arthritis, we generally resort to treating our symptoms rather than addressing the underlying causes. Perhaps this is due to our defeatist mentality about aging: We assume pain is part of the process. We opt for a fast and simple “solution,” reaching for an anti-inflammatory or painkiller to mask the problem, and like magic the pain is gone. The trouble is that the cause of the pain and of the continued damage isn’t gone. Unless we treat the cause, the pain will be with
us for the rest of our lives. And that means we will be popping medication for the rest of our lives. Not a great way to live.
Our joints are truly designed to last a lifetime. But even though the repercussions from poor habits and wear and tear are not apparent until we are older, the damage starts accumulating when we are young. Years of poor walking and running habits will eventually wear down a joint to the point where replacement surgery is required.
Prevention is the best solution, but once you have joint pain, trying to reverse the damage is second best. Learning to be light on your feet is the first step toward preventing joint damage, and it takes only 10 minutes to learn how to walk lightly. Parents should teach their children as well, just as we teach them the daily habit of brushing and flossing their teeth. Runners should also learn good running technique. Pulling out of the joint with strengthened full-body muscles is the only permanent way to protect joints from impact damage. If you get rid of the impact, you get rid of the root cause of the damage.
Joint Damage Cause #4: Sports Injuries
I have seen a great deal of joint damage in professional sports—most of it reversible, and nearly all of it preventable. Athletes tend to develop very tight muscles, which cause undue compression of the joints (particularly in the hip, knee, shoulder, and spine). Over time, the compression takes a serious toll on the cartilage, causing damage. This happens in many sports, including soccer, hockey, tennis, football, and basketball, to name a few.
The training of young athletes too often focuses solely on the development of strength and neglects the need for range of motion. After decades of working with high-performance athletes, I can tell you that many athletes receive almost no dynamic flexibility or muscle decompression training. As a result, their joints grind together with every movement, and their muscles and tendons are prone to tears and strains.
Range of motion of any joint is vital to athletic performance and to preventing injuries. Some coaches try to prevent injuries with yoga or static stretches, but that type of stretching isn’t effective for this purpose. Yoga holds static poses, and static stretching actually creates unbalanced muscle development and shortened instead of lengthened muscles. Eccentric exercise strengthens the muscles while simultaneously stretching them, and so it lengthens the muscles. Dynamic range of motion stretching not only can prevent injury and enhance performance; it can save careers and create champions.
Athletes usually come to me when their coaches have tried all the conventional paths and failed. My method is looked upon as a last resort! After a few weeks of dynamic flexibility or eccentric stretching, I have seen many of these young athletes go on to win world championships and Olympic medals.
The sad truth for many retired athletes is that the joint damage that forced them to prematurely end their careers was probably preventable had a few small changes been made to their training. Just 30 minutes of eccentric stretching done two to three times a week is enough to protect both athletes and the rest of us from damaged joints and relieve painful symptoms associated with muscle tightness.
BALLERINAS VS. FOOTBALL PLAYERS
I am a former professional ballerina. Ballet dancers have been tested many times against football players and boxers—and every time, they come out ahead, pound for pound, in all the categories of strength, endurance, and speed. Ballet dancers have fewer injuries and longer careers than most other high-performance athletes. Correctly taught eccentric stretching increases the speed and stamina of a weekend warrior and a high-performance athlete alike.
Interestingly, the reason athletes damage their joints is identical to the reason normal people do. The only difference is that the damage in athletes presents itself much earlier. Most amateur athletes and weekend warriors jump straight into physical activity, with little to no preparation. With cold and tight muscles, they lace up their skates or put on their shoes and within minutes transition from a near-static state to one of intense activity. This is a recipe for disaster, and as they age, they find themselves saddled with debilitating joint pain.
I have found it challenging to persuade them to delay starting right away, especially if they are young athletes, but the small amount of time spent doing a dynamic warm-up routine could spare them weeks, months, or even years of pain and inactivity resulting from damaged joints. Prevention needs to be encouraged, embraced, and emphasized.
HOW ECCENTRIC EXERCISE PROTECTS JOINTS
Dynamic eccentric stretching pulls the joints apart while strengthening them, and thus prevents joint damage in the first place. Pulling the joints apart creates a space for the lubricating and healing synovial fluid to enter. This fluid prevents grinding on the joint while also healing any damage. Eccentric stretching also prevents the squeezing effect that is the actual cause of the pain and damage.
You may need to take some time to relieve compressed joints and rebuild atrophied cells, but the reward is worth the effort. Have faith in your body’s proven ability to heal itself. Be realistic in your expectations—slowing down the aging process is, in many ways, as good as reversing it! Imagine that every time you do a workout your cells are regenerating themselves and nothing is dying. “One cell at a time” is my personal mantra.
Now let’s turn our attention to flexibility—what it is, why it’s important, and how the ESSENTRICS program can help us relax into new levels of strength and flexibility.
PART II
HOW WE STAY YOUNG AND HEALTHY
CHAPTER 5
STRETCH IT OUT
FLEXIBILITY IS THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH
In the standard approach to stiffness and joint pain, we tend to treat the symptoms and not the underlying causes. This shortsighted approach always makes me think of an old dancer’s saying: “You are only as loose as your tightest muscle.” We need to make sure that every muscle is equally stretched and strengthened in relationship to the surrounding muscles, not only to manage pain and stiffness but also to perform at our peak abilities.
A few years ago I worked with prima ballerina Anik Bissonnette. Anik had been in Moscow performing Giselle as a guest artist of the Bolshoi Ballet, one of the world’s premiere ballet companies. She had suffered for years from chronic hip pain and to control the pain, she was under the permanent care of a company physiotherapist and osteopath.
During a break in the middle of her ballet tour, Anik joined my team in Mexico for a two-week film shoot for the latest Classical Stretch DVD. During that time, she didn’t do any ballet classes and did only Classical Stretch. She was worried that Classical Stretch wasn’t challenging enough to keep her at the high level of physical fitness she required as a ballerina. While she felt much better, she thought that she would surely be out of shape when she returned to the company after her two weeks with us.
Much to her surprise, two things happened by the end of the two-week filming: Her chronic hip pain disappeared (never to return!) and when she got back to the company, she was stronger than when she had left.
During those two weeks, we were not doing any special exercises for Anik’s hips; she was simply doing regular Classical Stretch workouts that are designed to rebalance the full body, the same DVD workouts that are marketed and sold to everyday exercisers. We didn’t work on the symptoms, but rather, in following the ESSENTRICS program so diligently for two weeks, we were able to completely resolve the underlying cause of the problem. This turnaround is a perfect example of how rebalancing exercises can work their magic through all the muscle chains of the body.
HOW MUSCLE CHAINS GET SEVERED
I often share this image with my trainees: When a door is loose on its hinge, it hangs off center, swinging awkwardly and closing imperfectly. The hinge could be loose because of something as simple as a screw not being tight enough, and that small problem can lead to a major problem. If the screw doesn’t get tightened, the door eventually becomes so unbalanced that it will be difficult to close and could end up ruining its frame or structure. What grew into a serious structural problem coul
d have been easily prevented and corrected by tightening the loose screw in the first place.
As with the broken door and the loose screw, if any of the muscles of a joint are too tight or too weak to hold the joint comfortably in correct alignment, the tightest muscle will pull the joint out of alignment, unbalancing it and ultimately causing pain and injury. I’ve found that balancing the entire muscular structure simultaneously is one of the most miraculous-feeling and rewarding elements of these workouts—and one that has the biggest impact on people’s quality of life.
TRACING THE PATH OF MUSCLE CHAINS
Each muscle and each bone has a role to play in shaping your body and facilitating movement. Just to be able to hold your head on top of your shoulders without letting it fall over requires the support of dozens of muscles, soft tissue, and the bones of the cervical spine. Think about it: How amazing is it that you can hold up the heavy weight of your head, all day, without compressing your spine? Even with this constant pressure on our spines, only a few people suffer from back pain. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the strength of our muscles.
The brilliant design of your body becomes even more impressive when you stop to think about how many moving parts make up a human being and how complex a pulley and lever system is needed to make any movement smooth and easy. We’ve talked about how muscle chains work, and how each muscle in the chain affects others. But technically, muscle chains are only indirectly attached, because muscles attach to bones. Each bone in our body has a muscle pulling at the front and back end. In fact, with 620 muscles and only 200 bones, often several muscles are attached to the same bone, each pulling in a slightly different direction.
Aging Backwards_10 Years Lighter and 10 Years Younger in 30 Minutes a Day Page 7