The Fat Killing Your Joints by Jerry Brainum 4/26

 

 

 

Anyone with a long history of resistance training will eventually experience musculoskeletal pain or injury. The causes are rarely simple — poor exercise form, programming errors, inadequate recovery, and individual anatomy can all play a role. Among the most common culprits, though, are sloppy technique and excessive weight. Lifting with control at all times and avoiding unnecessary body movement reduces undue stress on muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Unless you are a competitive powerlifter chasing record lifts, there is little reason to load the bar beyond what you can handle with good form. This matters more than many lifters realize: while heavier weights have long been associated with greater muscle growth, recent research suggests that significantly lighter weights, taken to the point of muscular failure — the moment a rep simply cannot be completed — can produce nearly equivalent gains.

Is musculoskeletal injury an inevitable consequence of long-term resistance training? The question mirrors a longstanding debate about arthritis — specifically, whether joint deterioration and inflammation are simply an unavoidable product of aging. Many researchers have argued that everyone will develop some degree of arthritis given a long enough life. Yet studies of certain traditional, non-industrialized societies have found little to no arthritis even among older members, and a notable number of centenarians show no meaningful joint deterioration. This suggests that arthritis may not be biologically inevitable — that lifestyle, movement patterns, and environment play a larger role than aging alone. The same logic may apply to resistance training. If injury were truly unavoidable, we would expect all experienced lifters to accumulate damage at roughly equal rates. Instead, injury rates vary widely, suggesting that controllable factors — technique, programming, recovery, and individual biomechanics — are the more likely culprits.

One likely explanation for chronic injury among experienced lifters is that certain exercises place joints in biomechanically compromised positions, generating stress that accumulates over time. Some movements are almost guaranteed to cause problems eventually. Front raises — performed with dumbbells, a barbell, or a cable — are a prime example. The stated purpose of the exercise is to target the anterior, or front, head of the deltoid. The problem is that front raises impinge on the shoulder joint, and repeated performance virtually ensures chronic shoulder pain. What makes this particularly counterproductive is that the anterior deltoid is the easiest portion of the shoulder to develop — it is heavily recruited during nearly every chest exercise, including bench presses, incline presses, and dumbbell flies. Most regular lifters already have overdeveloped anterior deltoids relative to their lateral and posterior heads. Front raises don't address a weak point; they pile more volume onto a muscle that needs it least, while steadily degrading the shoulder joint in the process. This pattern — high-risk exercises producing redundant stimulus — is frequently modeled by elite bodybuilding champions, whose training advice is often poorly suited to the general lifting population. A multi-Mr. Olympia winner's published shoulder routine, for instance, featured four variations . . .