Does Your Training Program Address Everything it Should?

5 min read

Our patients often come to us with a training program that is one sided and neglects certain qualities.

Do you have adequate mobility, strength, power, and capacity? Can you squat, hinge, push, pull, carry, lunge, spring, throw, jump, and move laterally? Even if you’re no longer in competition, these are basic movements and activities that humans should maintain throughout their lifetime.

Why this is important?

All tissues (muscles, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, spine discs) may be susceptible to injury. We find that many of our patients could have reduced their risk of injury while maximizing their performance if they had incorporated more variety in their training. For example, if all you do is run, your joints are exposed to the same positions and same stressors with each stride. This narrows your “envelope of function” as your body becomes so accustomed to only those same stressors but struggle to manage any stressors outside of them. By incorporating some variety to your training you will essentially build a buffer to injury as you can tolerate a variety of stressors.

Keep reading to see a bunch of examples of different forms of training to ensure you are following a comprehensive routine.

Mobility work

Mobility represents a joint's ability to move through a full range of motion and demonstrate all the positions humans should be able to settle into. Restoring mobility throughout the body is a simple, yet overlooked, process. Too often, people seek to strengthen the muscles around a joint that can’t even demonstrate full mobility and range of motion, which is analogous to driving with the parking brake on. 

Easy lower body mobility routine we implement in our patients routines:

Strength training

Strength training is pivotal in maintaining muscle, ligament, and spine disc health. 

Impact on muscle: strength training reduces the rate at which muscles degenerate with age. Maintaining adequate muscle strength around all joints serves as a means of joint protection and joint function overtime. More muscles means less pressure and stress that your joints are forced to deal with.

Impact on ligaments: ligaments connect muscle tendons to bone and are crucial for maintaining joint stability. Dreaded injuries including torn ACLs, torn menisci, and torn labrums (hip & shoulder) are only a few examples of the ligamentous injuries we help our patients bounce back from. How do you maintain the stabilizing function of ligaments? Appropriate weight training is the answer. In fact, weight lifters have been found to have ACLs that are over 2 times thicker than average, thereby reducing injury risk. 

Impact on spine discs: spinal discs are the culprit in cases of disc herniations. Similar to muscles, both endurance and resistance training when implemented together has been found to be most effective in promoting intervertebral disc health. Intervertebral discs display a dose-response relationship between loading and disc healing + regenerative processes. This means that when your discs are loaded appropriately, the right combination of intensity and dosage can maintain your discs regenerative capacity and even stimulate healing in cases of progressive degeneration.

Great lower body strength compounds we program for most of our patients:

Rate of Force Development

Once you develop the ability to be strong and produce force, you must learn how to produce that force fast - think about the importance of speed in sports and in simply catching yourself from a fall. Training fast is crucial in tendon health

Impact on tendons: If your muscles outgrow, or adapt, faster than your tendons through one dimensional forms of training, your tendons will not be able to keep up. This is a common mechanism of tendinitis as undertrained tendons cannot bear the forces produced by their proportionally overtrained muscles. Tendons essentially cannot keep up with the surrounding muscles when exposed to little variety in training. 

Here is a great progression we use to train all the tendons of our patients foot and ankle:

Capacity (endurance)

Lastly, once you have good mobility, can produce a lot of force, and can produce a lot of force fast, it is time to focus on sustaining that output. This is also known as endurance which is crucial for both cartilage and cardiovascular health.

Impact on cartilage: Maintaining the health of your cartilage is vital in protecting yourself from the dreaded onset and progression of arthritis. Appropriate aerobic training, such as running, has been found to improve cartilaginous health. In fact, some research suggests runners have thicker cartilage in their knees and hips when compared to non runners. Running has also been proven to promote nutrition penetrating into the cartilage as well as removing metabolic waste products, both of which maintain cartilage health!

Finally, impact on cardiovascular health: Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality across the world. Lucky for us, frequent exercise is robustly associated with a decrease in cardiovascular mortality as well as the risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Regardless of your preferred form activity, do more of it. The benefits of activity on cardiovascular health are extensive. 

Conclusion

As you can see, the benefits of training are multifactorial and highly specific when you train with enough variety. This is why comprehensive training programs with the proper load, variability, and dosage is key to universal tissue health. If you only run, only strength train, only do yoga, or only do some other activity, you are only scratching the surface of being robust across all tissues in your body. Work with a professional to ensure your training casts a wide net and covers all your bases.

References

• Ambrosio, F., Kadi, F., Lexell, J., Fitzgerald, G. K., Boninger, M. L., & Huard, J. (2009). The effect of muscle loading on skeletal muscle regenerative potential: an update of current research findings relating to aging and neuromuscular pathology. American journal of physical medicine & rehabilitation, 88(2), 145–155. https://doi.org/10.1097/PHM.0b013e3181951fc5

• Dong, X., Li, C., Liu, J., Huang, P., Jiang, G., Zhang, M., Zhang, W., & Zhang, X. (2021). The effect of running on knee joint cartilage: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Physical therapy in sport : official journal of the Association of Chartered Physiotherapists in Sports Medicine, 47, 147–155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ptsp.2020.11.030 

• Grzelak, P., Podgorski, M., Stefanczyk, L., Krochmalski, M., & Domzalski, M. (2012). Hypertrophied cruciate ligament in high performance weightlifters observed in magnetic resonance imaging. International orthopaedics, 36(8), 1715–1719. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00264-012-1528-3 

• Mersmann, F., Bohm, S., & Arampatzis, A. (2017). Imbalances in the Development of Muscle and Tendon as Risk Factor for Tendinopathies in Youth Athletes: A Review of Current Evidence and Concepts of Prevention. Frontiers in physiology, 8, 987. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2017.00987

• Nystoriak, M. A., & Bhatnagar, A. (2018). Cardiovascular Effects and Benefits of Exercise. Frontiers in cardiovascular medicine, 5, 135. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcvm.2018.00135 

• Steele, J., Bruce-Low, S., Smith, D., Osborne, N., & Thorkeldsen, A. (2015). Can specific loading through exercise impart healing or regeneration of the intervertebral disc?. The spine journal : official journal of the North American Spine Society, 15(10), 2117–2121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spinee.2014.08.446 

• Willick, S. E., & Hansen, P. A. (2010). Running and osteoarthritis. Clinics in sports medicine, 29(3), 417–428. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csm.2010.03.006 

• https://www.opexfit.com/blog/what-exercises-should-my-clients-do