Because adding strength to inefficiency often causes more problems than it solves
Hi there,
It’s surprisingly easy to get stronger but feel worse.
I call this fit, not healthy. When you wake up feeling older than you should. Not because of productive muscle soreness. But rather stiff, sore joints. You can push more weight in the gym, but getting up from the floor feels uncomfortable and hard.
This happens because even if you try to stay active and exercise, ignoring movement quality often just leads to becoming more powerfully inefficient. The result is more load through your joints, ligaments, discs and tendons than is healthy.
In the short term, you feel achy, stiff and sore. In the long term it can show up as medical conditions like arthritis and tendon issues that can worsen your quality of life.
The key is to understand and train movement quality.
That sounds simple, but when you look into it, movement quality is a complex topic and it’s easy for the pendulum to swing in the other direction. I’ve seen plenty of people focus entirely on corrective exercises, but never use enough load or intensity to get the amazing health benefits of strength and conditioning.
Luckily there’s a simple framework that can help you understand how to move better and will help you figure out which areas are doing well and which areas need help.
So today we’ll cover the Joint by Joint approach, developed by Mike Boyle and Gray Cook, including…
- Why each joint in the body does one of two things
- The pattern in your body that arises
- What happens when one joint can’t do its job, and its neighbor pays for it
Let’s get to it!
Each joint wants one of two things
Each joint in your body can be classified as a “mobility” joint, or a “stability” joint.
Mobility and stability come down to what each joint tends to lose when something goes wrong.
A mobility joint has a tendency to become stiff and lose range of motion. Think of a stiff ankle.
A stability joint has a tendency to lose stability, becoming difficult to accurately control under stress. Think of someone who rounds their lower back excessively with bending or lifting.
Classify every joint this way and a pattern emerges. Joints tend to alternate: mobility, stability, mobility, stability, and so on.
Your joints alternate in a predictable pattern
Big toe: Mobility
Mid-foot: Stability
Ankle: Mobility
Knee: Stability
Hip: Mobility
Low Back: Stability
Mid Back: Mobility
Mid and Lower Neck: Stability
Upper neck: Mobility
Shoulder Blade: Stability
Shoulder: Mobility
Elbow: Stability
Wrist: Mobility
When one joint struggles, its neighbor pays the price
Here’s the most interesting part of this model.
If one joint loses its ability, it tends to “borrow” from the joints above or below it, and often compromises its ability to function efficiently.
A very common example is losing ankle mobility.
If you are lacking that ankle mobility, but still continue on with your workouts and daily life, your body’s best solution is to make up for that deficit by borrowing from a stability neighbor. Either the knee or the foot.
But borrowing from that neighbor comes at a cost. That neighbor will have to sacrifice some of it’s stability to make up for the missing mobility.
The work gets done, it’s just no longer efficiently distributed.
The compensation that saves you today costs you later
In the short term, this compensation makes sense. We can’t become incapacitated because of a stiff ankle. That would be an evolutionary liability. The compensation helps us do the things we need to survive in the short term.
In the long term however, there can be consequences. Often in the form of pain, or in the very long term, increased risk for early degenerative changes like arthritis or tendon issues.
In our example, if you borrow from the knee, you can end up with knee issues like patellofemoral pain, early meniscus wear, and eventually arthritis.
If you borrow from the foot, it’s common to end up with plantar fascitis.
Feel better now, move better for the long term
This model gives you two practical tools.
- If you’re feeling pain or stiffness somewhere, look at that area’s neighbors first. The painful joint is often the victim, not the cause.
- You can also screen each joint proactively, before pain shows up. You don’t need a corrective exercise for every joint in your body. Screen first, then spend your time only on the areas that actually need it.
I’ll share simple ways to screen each joint and address any issues you find in future newsletters.
There are always exceptions
The body is complex, and this framework simplifies it on purpose. That’s by design, and I think it’s still the most useful place to start.
Understand how your joints work together, and you can build a plan that spends time only where it actually matters. That way you can spend less time exercising and more time doing all the things that make life amazing.
Until next week!
Cody
P.S. – If you have a sore, stiff, or creaky body and want easy ways to test its neighbors, just reply with a few details and I’ll send back some ideas to try.