Muscle Medicine: The Revolutionary Approach to Maintaining, Strengthening, and Repairing Your Muscles and Joints Read Online Free PDF Page A

when a sedentary person with the same degree of the disease would have spent the past five years hobbling in pain. Of course, our marathoner is an extreme case and a cautionary tale as well. (A hip replacement and the end of his running career were in his near future.) Your goal is to have healthy muscles that support healthy (or healthy enough) joints.
    We know from the research literature that joint damage by itself is often not the whole story behind pain and restriction. In a famous 1994 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 64 percent of the subjects, none of whom suffered from back pain, had significant disk abnormalities that turned up on their MRI exams. Similar studies have looked at meniscus tears in the knee, which, according to one Harvard paper, are found in one out of three people over the age of forty-five, only a fraction of which cause symptoms.
    Now let’s look at muscle fiber. Like connective tissue, muscle ages over time, losing water and suppleness and becoming more vulnerable to injury. Unlike bone, which usually heals better than new, muscle tears heal themselves with a second-rate patch material: scar tissue made from collagen that is stiffer and weaker than the original fibers. But in contrast to connective tissue, muscle has a great blood supply. It’s packed with capillaries that bring in oxygen and nutrients, allowing the tissue to heal quickly (if imperfectly), and the healthy muscles can grow bigger and stronger in response to healthy stress.
    If no effort is made, muscle mass and muscle endurance will decline about 1 percent a year after the age of forty. All of the body’s systems decline with age, but nothing bounces back like muscle responding to exercise. In one famous study by a University of Arkansas researcher, some hundred-year-old study subjects doubled their strength with a program of light weight training. (Certainly, American swimmer Dara Torres has opened a few eyes, defeating competitors less than half her age with her three silver medals at the Beijing Olympics.) Muscle is the human equivalent of a renewable power resource like wind or solar energy. Connective tissue, especially articular cartilage, is more like oil, nonrenewable. When it starts to run out, you scramble to adapt, and when it’s gone, it’s gone.
    To power the body and protect the joints, muscles have to respond to a command from the nervous system with a simultaneous contraction and relaxation of the agonist and the antagonist. When they can’t, its often the result of muscle dysfunction or injury, the two major categories being traumatic and chronic injury. In the case of trauma, the damage is the work of a moment: a trip, a fall, a car accident. The most common example of muscle trauma is a strain—or a “pulled” muscle—when the muscles fibers overstretch and tear. How many tear determines the severity of the strain. (As a matter of terminology, muscles suffer strains, and ligaments, when they are stretched and ripped, suffer sprains .) In the simplest cases, a muscle is asked to contract too hard or for too long, and something “gives,” for instance when an outof-shape recreational athlete decides to start the season with wind sprints and pulls a hamstring muscle.
    TRAUMATIC VS. CHRONIC MUSCLE INJURY
    But what if the muscle pull isn’t a one-shot deal? Let’s say you keep suffering muscle pulls in the same place. Or the joint and the surrounding muscle get achier and weaker from the stress of everyday life. Now we’ve entered the realm of chronic injury. Something has gone awry in the way the muscles and the joints work together that produces constant irritation. The most common forms of chronic trouble are labeled repetitive stress injuries. Think about performing the same small, rapid movement over and over without giving the muscles a chance to rest and recover, for example, clicking a computer mouse all day. Little tears develop in the muscles and the connective tissue;