I’m not a doctor but am a certified personal trainer and corrective exercise specialist. Prior to opening up my own training studio I trained at another local club for over five years and had the opportunity to work successfully with clients who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, metabolic disease, strokes, shoulder injuries, chronic neck and back pain, ankle issues and knee pain, including patellar tendinitis and IT band syndrome.

Your body is a well-designed machine, and often times it feels “wear and tear” with no real answer as to a specific event or injury that creates pain or discomfort. When muscles end up too tight, strong or overactive, there’s usually some muscles in the surrounding areas that are weak, underactive and not pulling their own weight. After time, overactive muscles win the “pulling on joints” struggle and joints get sore and irritated because they are tracking improperly, at angles they were never meant to. It’s difficult for doctors to do much in that waiting period, as there’s been no real injury event and no need to “cut” anything yet. So most often the advice is rest, ice and take it easy when you’re exercising.

Icing may or may not help depending on the individual and while rest will certainly help while you’re resting, the joint then gets practice at not moving and the original issue comes back as soon as you move the way you were beforehand. Many of the more drastic interventions can be prevented early on by fixing the joint tracking issues with not only stretching the overactive muscles, but with strengthening the under active ones and then reintegrating all muscles around a joint to reteach it how to move properly. The process includes foam rolling, stretching, isolated strengthening exercises and integrated exercises. It sounds like a big process, but if there’s obvious tracking issues, the original program can be taught fairly quickly and you can make great progress in as short as a month.

I’d like to invite you out for a complimentary consultation and movement assessment at the studio. If there is a joint alignment and/or muscle imbalance, it most often shows up in the assessments and I can give you advice from there as to how to move beyond stretching to strengthen up any underactive muscles to help with tracking.