5 Ways to avoid injury and bulletproof your joints
Injuries are the height of frustration for fitness enthusiasts. There’s nothing worse than training for a race and feeling a nagging pain escalate into an injury. And it only gets worse as we age.
Not only do our joints get weaker, but our injuries take longer to heal. Fortunately, there are evidence-based ways to avoid injury and bulletproof your joints.
In this article, I’ll show you five things that I'm doing right now as I train for my next Ironman 140.6 and Spartan Ultra. You’ll learn how to
Let’s dive in!
Take advantage of Daily Undulating Periodization
Your tendons and connective tissue can gain size and strength, just like your muscles. But they require heavier weights. If you can lift a weight more than about 11 times, you’re unlikely to see much tendon growth.
Meanwhile your muscles are far less picky. You can get bigger and stronger with any weight that you can lift between 5-30 times. If you can lift a weight more than 30 times your basically doing cardio. If you can only lift it 4 times or fewer, you’ll get stronger, but it’s unlikely you will get much bigger.
This affords us two important opportunities. First, we can intentionally target our tendons for strength and size. Second, we can intentionally avoid stressing our tendons to allow recovery and avoid overuse injuries.
Now we want to train our tendons, because otherwise they’ll grow weak and increase our risk of injury. But we don’t want to train them too aggressively too often, because we’re getting older and the risk of an overuse injury is getting higher. And of course, as we age it gets increasingly difficult to heal from injuries.
Fortunately, there’s a ready-made solution, Daily Undulating Periodization (DUP). DUP simply means that you change your training intensity from day to day. This allows you to specifically set how much volume your tendons receive.
Here’s how you might use DUP to train your shoulders. On Monday you might focus on lifting really heavy. An overhead dumbbell press is good for this, and to maximally stimulate both your muscles and your connective tissue, you decide to lift a weight you can only lift 8-10 times on your first set.
Then on Thursday you might focus on a higher rep range. You might do lateral cable raises for around 20-25 reps. This gives your connective tissue a chance to recover, while allowing you to continue building strength and muscle.
If you’ve been lifting for a while, you’ll probably know which joints give you the most trouble. You can set your “tendon volume” really low for those joints. For other joints you might try a higher volume.
I’ve been using this system for a couple years now, and it works great. About 50% of my volume is “tendon volume”. Because I’m currently training for an Ironman and Spartan Ultra, I’m only doing 2 full body strength sessions per week. I typically do 6-10 sets per muscle group per week depending on how close I am to a race. So I have one higher intensity day (heavy weight and lower rep range) and one lower intensity day (lighter weight and higher rep range.)
Finally, if you’re a relatively advanced lifter, DUP is probably a great idea in general. There is good evidence that DUP causes greater strength gains, and some evidence that it may cause greater muscle growth in more advanced athletes. So there’s really only upside.
Try a sprinkling of explosive training
I love to move explosively. Jumping, throwing, rough housing with my kids and obstacle course racing are all part of being fit for me. Unfortunately many injuries occur when you move explosively. And this is even more true as you age. For most guys my age, a random game of basketball is all you need to blow out a knee or Achilles tendon.
Of course you can train to move explosively, but that can quickly turn ugly too. Explosive training has been one of my most consistent sources of injury (that and running). If you do too much too often, it can easily lead to an overuse injury. Again this becomes much more relevant as you age, and it will affect different joints differently. If you’re reading this, you probably know which of your joints are weakest.
Because of this, I took a long break from explosive training. But that didn’t work either. Think about landing a big jump. Ideally you’ll land soft, quiet and in something like a quarter squat position. You’ll feel the muscles of your legs take and dissipate the forces of the landing.
But what if your movement is sloppy? Suppose you just drop all the way down into a deep squat and just let your knees take the full impact. Strong muscles and joints don’t mean a thing if you have terrible technique. It’s a recipe for an injury. You need to train the explosive movements you anticipate seeing in real life without overdoing it.
The solution is fully understanding the purpose of explosive training and then correctly implementing it. Here’s what explosive training won’t do. It won’t make you bigger. It isn’t a great way to build endurance (especially as you age). And it isn’t a particularly good way to strength train.
Its real purpose is to ingrain safe movement techniques, increase explosive strength (e.g. vertical jump height) and improve your ability to decelerate (e.g. land a big jump). All of these are neural adaptations.
Fortunately for us, neural adaptations for gross motor skills have a very low mini-effective dose. It doesn’t take much training to make progress. For instance, I’ve found that 3-5 sets of 1-2 reps is plenty to make progress and build proficiency. I put my explosive work at the very beginning of my strength sessions. I completely avoid fatigue and focus exclusively on making a maximum effort with perfect technique. And I stop training BEFORE I notice even a hint of lasting fatigue.
To put it another way, you can think of strength training as building a bigger engine and explosive training as becoming a skilled driver. Weight lifting builds your tendons and muscles. Explosive training teaches you how to skillfully use those tendons and muscles.
Embrace multisport endurance training
Are you a struggling broken runner? Or do you simply avoid running to avoid getting hurt? I’d love to be a terrific injury-proof runner, but through years of stubborn experience, I’ve learned the hard way that running tons of miles just isn’t in the cards. Something always starts to break.
I developed nagging knee pain training for and running the Authentic Marathon in Greece. I developed achilles tendon pain training for and running a Spartan Ultra in Scotland. And I beat my feet up barefoot running in preparation for the MovNat L3 cert.
And I’m not unique. Running is one of the most injurious forms of exercise. Statistically, you are WAY more likely to get injured running than lifting weights.
But it’s also one of the most important. If you want to live a long healthy life, cardio is the single most important thing you can do. For instance, studies have shown that people with elite V02 max scores (top 2.5%) are 4-5x less likely to die from any cause than people in the bottom 25%. Plus, if you want to play like a kid with your kids, you’ve got to be able to run. And if, like me, you love obstacle course races, running is simply unavoidable.
The problem is that every time I work up to higher weekly mileage, something starts to hurt. It happens even if I take it really slow. My joints just can’t handle the kind of miles needed to train for long distance events. And it seems to only be getting harder with age.
Then I trained for my first half and full Ironman. I could suddenly build mountains of Cardiorespiratory Fitness (CRF), and I was only running one third of the miles. Plus I noticed that my running performance actually improved. I was able to achieve greater overall levels of fitness, avoid downtime from injuries, and I could tackle tougher running workouts because my swims and long bike rides provided a ton of foundational Z2 work.
Here’s why.
First, cross training reduces your risk of injury by allowing you to go lower volume on any single discipline. For instance I would need to do 3x as much running to achieve the same level of CRF as I get from triathlon training. Currently I run 2x per week. That’s it.
But I also bike 2x per week and swim 1-2x per week. Moreover, my long bike rides can sometimes go 4 or more hours. That’s a TON of Zone 2 work. So despite only running 2x per week, I’m building cardio 5-6x per week.
Second, cross training gives you TONS of flexibility to preemptively avoid overuse injuries. If you feel a nagging pain in your knee during a run, you can simply swap your next couple of running workouts for cycling workouts. You already feel confident cycling so there’s no barrier to entry. In the past, taking a pause from running meant taking a pause from my cardio.
Finally, multisport endurance training is also way more fun and interesting. I never really liked running enough to want to do it 4-5x per week. Having 3 different disciplines keeps the training fresh and interesting.
Eat plenty of fat
If you want to build strong, injury-resistant joints, I highly recommend eating plenty of dietary fat. Forget supplements. Most of those are just marketing. Eating real food and in particular fats is where it’s at.
A 2008 study found that consuming at least 30% of your calories from fat made runners 2.5x less likely to be injured. Other studies have found similar results.
Fat increases your anabolic hormones while healthy fat decreases your systemic inflammation. It’s probably these two features of eating fat that leads to stronger bones and joints.
Eating fat optimizes a variety of sex and anabolic hormones including testosterone, estrogen, growth hormone and IGF-1. This can improve strength and muscle development, enhance body composition, increase libido and improve your mood and mind.
Does this mean you should eat low carb, carnivore or keto? Nope. Consuming 20% of your calories as fat is enough to optimize your hormone production. And there may be some incremental benefits to going all the way up to 40%, but there are significant diminishing returns.
Basically, you want to eat a balanced diet and definitely avoid going low fat. My fat intake fluctuates between 30-40% most of the time. Vegan dieters have the hardest time with this. They need to rely heavily on things like olives, olive oil, vegan Omega 3’s, nuts, seeds and avocado. But they’ll also notice the biggest difference if they’ve been eating a low-fat diet for a while.
Avoid excessive stretching
Stretching feels really good, and at one point in my fitness journey, I was all-in. I loved gymnastic strength training, and I wanted some of that insane gymnast flexibility. And although I still have nothing but deep admiration for the masters of calisthenics, I’ve abandoned static stretching. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still stretch occasionally just for the sheer pleasure, but I don’t put it in my program.
Here’s why.
If you don’t regularly use a range of motion, for instance touching your toes, your body shuts down that range of motion. Your nervous system inhibits your ability to get into that position.
Why would your nervous system do that? One reason is that any range of motion you don’t use is superfluous. Why maintain a range of motion you don’t need? Another reason, and the reason that matters most to us, is that unused ranges of motion are weak ranges of motion. You only build strength into the ranges of motion that you train or use regularly.
Thus your body inhibits your flexibility to prevent you from getting injured. So if you almost never touch your toes, then your hamstrings almost never get any use or training when fully extended. And if you suddenly ask them to bear a bunch of weight in a very flexible position there’s a reasonable chance they’re not ready for it.
In other words, your brain makes you inflexible to protect you from ranges of motion that you’re too weak to use safely.
Now passive stretching gives you back access. It reduces that inhibition. But it doesn’t solve the underlying problem. For instance, research has shown that stretching is extremely unlikely to change your muscle’s length, thickness or strength even after an intense 12 weeks of stretching.
Instead when you gain more flexibility from static stretching, it’s a neural adaptation not a structural one. Thus, what you gain from stretching is a change in your central nervous system that gives you greater flexibility. Basically you train your nervous system to allow you access to new ranges of motion.
Now contrast this with a strength training exercise. For instance, a simple Romanian Deadlift, properly executed, will put those same hamstrings into a deep weighted stretch every rep. And research has shown that this can increase your muscle length. Plus it builds strength into those end ranges of motion. It won’t get you a front split, but it will get you decent flexibility backed up by strength.
If you’re a gymnast, MMA fighter or ballerina, you need tons of flexibility. And you’re going to build insane strength into those ranges of motion and use them constantly. But if you’re a 43 year old fitness junkie, like me, then all that extra flexibility makes no sense. Even if you take the time to build strength into it. It’s just more for your central nervous system to track.
Remember when I said that your brain shuts down superfluous ranges of motion? Well that also may matter for joint strength and injury proofing. Joints with shorter ranges of motion may be easier to protect.
Think of a gymnast's joints as an exotic car. Cool as hell, but a ton of upkeep and a lot ot keep track of. A lot can go wrong. My joints are more like a beat up old Ford F150. They’re less likely to break down. They get the job done. And they don’t require any fancy or extravagant care.
Thus, all most people really want is a solid foundation of reasonable flexibility. Things like being able to touch your toes or deep squat. This gives me all the flexibility I need to tackle a Spartan Ultra, wrestle with my kids or what-have-you. And any reasonably good strength training program is going to deliver that.
Thanks for reading!
Did you enjoy this article? Last year I wrote an article offering up 7 ways you can bullet-proof your joints. It’s been one of my more popular posts. If you haven’t already check it out. Are bulletproof joints real?
