How to Protect Your Joints and Build Strength After 40
By midlife, most men carry battle scars, sore knees, cranky shoulders, and stiff backs. The problem isn’t that you’re old or broken, it’s that you’re still trying to train like you did at 25. The solution isn’t to stop lifting heavy, but to lift smarter.
Science shows that strength training is one of the best tools for protecting joints, reducing injury risk, and maintaining movement quality into later life.
Here’s what the evidence says about training sustainably, without breaking down.
Gymnastics strength training and wrist pain
A lot of gymnastics skill seekers experience wrist pain as they train to build strength, increase flexibility and unlock new gymnastics skills.
Gymnastics training requires a lot of wrist strength and flexibility.
Think about the wrist extension in push-ups, handstands and planche training.
Think about the wrist flexion in the false grip.
Balancing on your hands also requires a lot of wrist strength.
Gymnastics strength training and elbow pain.
I hate elbow pain.
It hurts to train.
You can't hang from the pull-up bar.
It hurts to do handstands, dips, muscle-ups planche and more..
And it makes me sad.
So what causes it?
How do we fix it?
Most importantly, how do we prevent it?
That's what today’s post is all about.
Building strong & stable shoulders
Place a cannon in a canoe and put both into the water. Then fire, and... what happens? KABOOM! Id’ bet money on the cannon ball not going far. Why? Because the canoe has a poor base of stability for maximal force production to be generated. Chances are, the canoe will capsize or be blown to pieces.
Would you really try to fire a cannon from a canoe?
Hardly. So why keep pushing your body in training to go to places (KBOOM!) that your shoulders just aren’t strong enough to survive unscathed? Many athletes focus on building the primary moves (for the purposes of my analogy, let’s think of those as big cannons), yet fail to understand the importance of building a bigger canoe (ie. strengthening the stabilisation muscles in the shoulder). It’s typically here that the shoulder gets injured, or you start experiencing pain in the elbows or wrists joints because it’s all linked together in the chain.
Structual balance for posture and performance
The most absurd example is when we look at the typical commercial gym, where we often see many guys focusing on their “beach muscles.” Their exercise selection is often limited to the muscle they can see in the mirror - bench press and bicep curls. The overtraining of the anterior chain often leads to an imbalance that can cause frustration, pain, and injury.
This can also be seen in gymnastics when athlete focuses on pushing exercises like planche, dips, and handstand push-ups while neglecting pulling exercises like pull-ups. This is a recipe for creating a structural imbalance in strength and flexibility that will induce shoulder pain.