Living Longer and Better: Building Muscles Without Joint Wear and Tear

By: Bradley Binversie

I grew up playing sports like basketball, hockey, soccer, football, and basically every sport I could. As I’ve gotten older my fitness priorities have shifted from maximum performance to longevity fitness based solutions. I desperately want to stay in shape as long as I can, so that I can enjoy my life. It is incredibly important to maintain our fitness levels for muscular and cardiovascular health in order to live a long productive life. Obesity and life style factors all increase the risk for heart disease, cancers, and dementia.

Aging is the ultimate catch 22. Don’t work out enough, you lose fitness and gain weight. If you work out too hard, you wear out your joints ligaments, which will leave you unable to move or exercise, leading to weight gain anyway. Then it will be increasingly more difficult to get back into shape because our joints will hurt even more from the extra strain of the weight gain. Most of the times, it’s knee pain and hip pain that lead stop us from getting around.

A couple things I’m doing…
1. Longer Distance at Lower Intensity: I’ve tried to incorporate exercise into my routine that will continue to help strengthen my muscles and workout my cardiovascular system without wearing out the cartilage in my knees and hips. I’ve incorporated more long distance walking and light cardiovascular training, basing that off some of the research by Dr. Stephen Seiler. His research indicates that top performing athletes, have an understanding that it’s actually better to do light to moderate intensity work at longer intervals with the occasional high intensity training sprinkled in. This is because overtraining at high intensity really does not increase physical performance enough in relation to the increased risk for injury.

2. Non-Load Bearing Exercise: Another item I’m incorporating is trying more non-load bearing exercises as part of my routine such as bicycling or swimming. It doesn’t completely remove the risk of injury, but it does help give the joints a break from the pounding, while still improving my muscular and cardiovascular health. This isn’t 100% of my exercise routine, but it’s significantly more than when I was younger.

3. Kaatsu: Also I use KAATSU to help increase my muscular response without straining my joints. Kaatsu is a blood flow modification tool and technique that improves the cardiovascular system and builds muscle without submitting the body to high levels of exercise. I listed this technique among the tools on my profile.

4. Sauna: After my exercise, doing Sauna helps keep the heart rate elevated. Our heart pumps faster to send the blood to our organs, particiularly our skin, in order to cool the body. This can’t replace exercise but I really enjoy it, and think it may help a bit with cardiovascular health.