How to tell if joint pain might be caused by muscular weakness
There are 3 main causes of joint pain: lack of mobility, lack of stability and lack of strength. I am not going to talk too much about the first two since they are much more involved. However, the lack of strength is fairly easy to explain and test. Every activity you do requires a sufficient level of strength in the muscles around the joint and the muscles above and below the joint. For instance when doing a traditional step up, the muscles around the knee must be strong, as well as the muscles at the hip and ankle. If there is a weak link in that chain the stress and extra work is shifted to other muscles. If you experience pain immediately upon doing the exercise that can be an indication of a lack of strength, mobility or stability…you just don’t know sometimes until you do more tests.
However, if you can do step ups at 2 sets of 10 with no pain, and in the middle of your 3rd set of 1o you experience knee pain then it’s probably a muscular weakness somewhere along the chain. Here is the rationale behind that assumption: .ifferent muscles have different thresholds at which they fire. Some muscles fire at high thresholds (the glutes when doing a dead lift). Some muscles fire at lower thresholds (the deep stabilizers of the hips when walking). The lower threshold muscles have a higher fatigue level, i.e. they can work longer, they have to. Anything and everything activates them so they had better have a lot of endurance. The higher threshold muscles have a lower fatigue level, i.e. they only fire when they are needed and thus are not used to working that long. The pain caused by weakness is due to the smaller muscles “bailing out” and forcing the larger muscles to take up more and more of the work that the smaller muscles should be doing. Eventually, the bigger muscles get so ”overloaded” with work that they then start to “bail out”…the result is joint pain. (this is a HUGE OVER simplification, but you get the idea)
Take it another way. In the military you are as strong as the weakest link in your team. If one guy is weak, everyone else has to pick up the slack for that guy and work harder. The result is excessive stress, higher injury rates, internal team strife, etc. etc. Get the weak guy strong and the team’s overall mental, emotional and physical health increases.
Got it?
