When we repeatedly perform the same movement over and over again—such as sitting at a desk, walking with improper posture, or executing a repetitive sport-specific motion—our body is exposed to the same repetitive stress, which can lead to overuse injuries, stress in the wrong areas, and even limit our range of motion and balance. As we know this limits our movement variability and can cause muscles, tendons, and joints to wear down or become overstressed, leading to pain and dysfunction.
By altering your basic routine, and adding pieces from the AlloVitae functional trinity of coordination, strength, and mobility, you can expand and maintain your movement variability and better manage your joint pain.
Improve your Balance
Do you feel like you have terrible balance? Good news, balance is a skill and can be trained! It’s not complicated - try standing on one foot for 10-30 seconds once a day for a week, and see what happens. Stand near something for hand support to start if you need it, and If you begin to lose your balance, just tap the other foot on the ground for support and return to the task. Balance training is a great way to warm-up, too, before you do any of your favorite activities!
Challenge your Coordination
When we talk about challenging our coordination, let’s keep it simple. This isn’t a matter of becoming the next Ninja Warrior or performing a circus act, but improving how you move and your control over your movements.
Remember that the body narrows its movement strategies as we get used to an activity, so the goal is being creative in finding ways to challenge tasks we are already good at in different ways. In fact, all that it takes to challenge our coordination is providing ourselves with some simple interference to make our body respond and add variability to simple tasks.
Have you ever stood on one foot when you brushed your hair? How about stirred a pot of pasta with the opposite hand? Or in a different direction? Or put your left/right shoe on before the other? Or put on a jacket or backpack with a different arm first?
These are all examples of adding interference and challenging our coordination of otherwise very, very automated movement tasks. If we did all of these in the evening our brain would be bombarded with new signals, activating new muscles and neurons, hitting new positions. Amazing!
And these are just general - think about everything we do in a day, and how many opportunities there are to challenge our coordination! Here are some more examples:
Do tasks in different positions -
Example: Try standing in a “split stance” - with one foot in front of the other - and switch every ten seconds while doing something at the counter.
Example: Sit up and on the front edge of a chair instead of slumping back into it when working at your desk.
Example: Stand side-on when you brush your teeth, spend one minute looking over the left shoulder and one minute looking over the right shoulder (minimum brushing time two minutes, please!).
Example: Watch your favorite streaming series on the couch. Then standing for two minutes. Then kneeling for 30 seconds on each leg. Then on your stomach (if you can) for a minute.
Add Cognitive interference into routine skills -
Example: Count backwards by two as you vacuum (switching hands every 20 strokes of the vacuum) to interrupt the pattern.
Example: Close your eyes when you stand up from or sit down on the couch to take away your visual feedback and force your body to be more self-aware.
Example: Tie your shoes with the opposite hand, or try to tie the knots in the opposite direction.
Example: Walk to the fridge sideways, backwards or any way other than forwards to elicit new patterns of self-organization and fire different muscles.
By varying your movements and how you do tasks, you can reduce the risk of your bandwidths narrowing, improve your coordination, developing repetitive strain injuries and encourage the proper functioning of all the muscles that support your joints.
Improve and Maintain your Mobility “Bandwidth”
Your “bandwidth” is a catch-all term describing how much freedom of movement we have. A simple way to think about it is how many different ways our body can rotate, bend, flex, extend, and generally locomote in different planes and excursions of movement. As discussed previously, as our bandwidth narrows through a decrease in variability, dysfunction can start to pop-up, along with joint pain and irritation.
Mobility is a key factor in having access to a large movement bandwidth and variability. But if the thought of stretching (the “S” word for some people) is unappealing, fear not! You don’t need to gymnastic aspirations to improve your bandwidths. Through the simple hack of shifting how we think about our daily tasks and incorporating a variety of movement excursions (end range explorations) throughout our day, we can improve our variability and mobility, reconnect with our bandwidths, and distribute all that stress more evenly across our joints and muscles, reducing the strain on any one area.
Here are some simple examples:
Build movement ‘End-ranges’ into the Day -
Example: Store your favorite coffee mugs as high as you can reach, like, really high, tippy-toes people! This will ensure you are getting some stretching in the morning. Add another level by reaching with the opposite hand, or changing the foot position). Talk about “wake up juice”!
Example: Try going over that floor mat on the ground with a big step every time you cross it, or take the stairs two at a time to open the hips and build some strength in larger ranges.
Example: Raking the leaves? Alternate short strokes with long strokes to challenge your core and shoulder muscles as well as your balance (bonus points if you change your foot position, dominant hand, and the direction of your raking).
Example: Breathe in as deeply as you can every fifth breath while you shower or watch T.V. to move your diaphragm and reoxygenate your system in the morning (or before bed)!
Simply by remembering to incorporate some excursions and end range movements into your daily tasks, it will challenge your degrees of movement. This way, you can maintain an expanded palette of variability on a daily basis!
Teach your body different Strength Skills
Variability doesn’t just mean moving in different ways, it can also mean teaching your body how to use its strength in different ways. Strength is obviously important for providing better support and reducing the load placed directly on the joint itself. Muscles that are weak or underused can contribute to poor posture, misalignment, and ultimately pain in the joints. But the type of strength you need in life will vary greatly, and so you should vary how you teach your muscles to be strong!
And yes, you teach yourself how to be strong. Strength is a skill that will develop in the specific way you teach it. And doing the same type of strengthening over and over again without changing it up can lead to problems from, you guessed it, a lack of variability. If you teach your body different strength skills, however, you can improve your robustness by not only strengthening the supporting tissues of your joints, but also giving them an increased ability to be resilient to many different stresses of daily life. Below are different strength skills to think about incorporating into your daily routine, this is not a comprehensive list, but most methods will fit into these categories:
Isometric Work - not all movement means moving! Isometric strength is built, in fact, by NOT moving. Holding positions for different lengths of time is a great way to teach your body strength, endurance and stability. It’s also a great way to avoid moving through painful ranges of motion. Hold a half squat, a half push-up, or a glute bridge for 10, 20, or 30 seconds and you can start building basic strength daily with no stress on the joints. This can be done with or without weight.
Tempo Work - tempo simply means holding your movement phases to a fixed time period. Try lowering yourself into your chair over a five second period before standing up fast. Tempo work can be a great way to develop strength through dynamic ranges of motion while controlling for joint pain.
Rhythmic Work - similar to tempo, rhythmic strength can be done to a set cadence, but is more dynamic. Marching in place, skipping, jumping jacks, and drop squats could all be considered types of rhythmic strength. While they place more force on the body, the upside of exposing yourself to rhythmic strength is that the load will be distributed across the muscles and elastic tissues, which are all important at managing your movement. It’s also a great way to get your heart rate up. To help manage joint pain, start with small ranges of motion and build into larger excursions.
Loaded Work - the traditional method of strength development, using additional loads while moving will not only improve your strength, it will improve your coordination and tissue quality. In general, start lighter and progress to heavier loads.
Conclusion
Joints need movement to stay healthy. But as we start to limit our ranges of motion or perform the same motions over and over again, the decreasing movement variability can lead to joint dysfunction, where the joint no longer moves freely or efficiently. This bandwidth tightening of your joint(s), will lower their tolerance and capability to manage the tasks being performed or how they respond to new types of activity.
To offset this and improve variability, challenging your movement vocabulary is a great way to improve function - improving your coordination and balance, maintaining control over end ranges of mobility, and enhancing your strength will all ultimately reduce joint stress and give you a better chance of decreasing pain and managing it. This doesn’t have to be extreme! Simple inclusions from the lists above can work wonders for expanding your movement palette, and helping you move better to change your life!