10 Ways to Help Keep Your Joints Healthy as You Age
If you’re like most people, you don’t think much about your joints until they start complaining. But your joints deserve attention long before they cause continuous discomfort. Keeping joints healthy is about taking smart, preventative steps throughout your life. By taking precautions early on, you can help avoid disabling pain, inconvenience, and loss of enjoyment and adventure in life.
At ABLE Chiropractic and Laser center our goal is to help you quickly get out of pain and enjoy life again and promote natural remedies for prevention when it comes to joint pain.
Here are ten tips for safeguarding your joints — and the cartilage that supports them — as you age:
1. Control Your Weight
If you’re overweight or underweight, it could have damaging effects on joint health. Your joints are meant to sustain a certain amount of force, and too much weight means you’re likely putting more stress on your joints than you realize. The The *ABLE Lifestyle Book is all about getting out of pain and strategies biohack your body to a health weight and exceptional health.
2. Move better and Build Muscle
Exercise helps build muscle and gives the joints much-needed support. Your muscles can take some of the strain off joints, but only if they’re strong enough. In particular, strong core muscles help build good balance and limit the risk of falls or injuries that might cause joint damage. 2 Strategies we have found to be very useful are mini trampolines and Vibration platforms. Repetition is the language of the body. Schedule 10 to 30 min daily to move and strengthen your body.
3. Stay Active
While focused exercise is great for muscles and joints, you should also aim for an active lifestyle in general. Get involved with activities you enjoy, such as swimming, biking, pickleball, walking or golf. Doing a variety of sports and leisure activities helps to ensure every joint and muscle is engaged.
Remember to warm up and cool down for at least 5 minutes when exercising, as this helps protect joints from damage. This practice is especially important as you get older, and joints become less resilient to sudden strain.
4. Maintain Flexibility
Regular stretching is another effective way to maintain healthy joints. As the common saying goes, use it or lose it! – just a few simple stretches in the morning, after exercise, and before bed will do wonders for the flexibility of your joints over time.
5. Decrease Inflammation
Like every tissue and organ, joints respond to the levels of inflammation in your body. You may have experienced short-term joint inflammation due to an injury, which is helpful for healing. However, inflammation is an issue that can lead to various diseases when it becomes chronic. The ABLE Lifestyle healing diet creates an environment to eliminate inflammation, get better sleep and control inflammation levels in the body to protect the joints.
6. Stay Hydrated
Water makes up about 80 percent of your body’s cartilage, which provides cushioning for your joints. If you don’t stay well hydrated, your body will pull water from cartilage and other areas, wreaking havoc on your joints. A good starting point is to replace soda and energy drinks with water to maintain healthy hydration levels.
*Alkaline water is believed to provide a powerful, natural approach to fighting inflammation. Keeping the pH of the body at alkaline levels may reduce inflammation, relieve pain, and improve overall physical health and well-being.
7. Use Smart Supplements
Certain vitamins and supplements can help reduce inflammation in joints and keep bones and cartilage healthy. Boswellia is an herbal extract that may reduce inflammation in people with conditions such as arthritis, but it also shows help with autoimmune conditions like asthma and also may inhibit cancer growth.
* Inflammation an ABLE Lifestyle product with boswellia and 7 other proprietary herbs taken each day, has helped many patients reduce symptoms of joint pain as effectively as NSAIDs.
Another anti-inflammatory supplement that could help maintain healthy joints is fish oil. Taking 1 to 3 grams of omega-3-rich fish oil each day can help reduce the intensity of joint symptoms like morning stiffness, tenderness, swelling, and discomfort.
Vitamin D works hand-in-hand with calcium to keep our bones strong. As adults, we typically need at least 600 to 800 IU of vitamin D in addition to adequate calcium intake. Spending more time outdoors has multiple benefits and can help top up vitamin D levels and will encourage you to stay active and moving.
8. Practice Good Posture
Poor posture changes your body’s center of gravity, placing added stress on your knees and hips. Make a point of standing tall, with your head in line with your shoulders, your shoulders directly over your hips, your hips aligned with your knees, and your knees aligned with your feet. Doing Pilates, yoga, tai chi, core-strengthening exercises and gentle chiropractic care can help improve your posture, strengthen joints, and prevent injuries and falls.
9. Biohack Your Body
Regenerate damaged tissue and reduce inflammation with all natural, high-tech therapies. It’s popular to incorporate certain bio hacks that optimize how your body functions. Biohacking is the practice of using science, technology, and lifestyle modifications to optimize and enhance one’s physical and mental well-being with minimal or no side effects.
Laser
High-intensity laser therapy (HILT)- a medical treatment using high-energy lasers to target specific painful areas of the body. This non-invasive procedure looks to promote healing and improve the functions of the body in many ways. A few examples would be, tissue repair and regeneration, improve circulation, and reduce inflammation. A major component of how the laser works is by stimulating cells to produce more ATP, giving cells energy to repair and grow tissues. HILT can be used to treat many conditions and problems, it can help prepare for surgery or help with recovery, with strains, arthritis, etc.
PEMF
Pulsed Electromagnetic Field therapy (PEMF), is a treatment that uses electromagnetic fields to promote healing and wellness for the body. The electromagnetic fields can influence the electrical and biochemical processes in the cells which affects their metabolism and pathways. This impact on cells can respond in many responses physically, including tissue repair and improved cellular function. PEMF can also improve blood circulation, by dilating blood vessels allowing for better blood flow overall in the body. The improvement in circulation helps to deliver more oxygen to the cells, aiding in the healing process.
Red Light Therapy
Red light therapy is a form of treatment using low-level red light wavelengths to increase wellness in the body. Along with HILT and PEMF, red lights also promote healing and tissue repair. The red light therapy penetrates the skin and is absorbed by the cells and tissues in the body. Red light therapy can also improve blood circulation as well as reduce inflammation, benefit the skin by stimulating the production of collagen, and can target fat cells which can contribute to weight-loss.
Vagal Nerve Stimulation
Vagal nerve stimulation (VNS) is a techniques that activate the vagus nerve, through natural means. These methods aim to promote relaxation, reduce stress, and improve overall well-being and is the optimum state for healing your body.
VNS has anti-inflammatory effects as well as pain-reducing properties. Chronic pain, such as joint pain can be regulated by the nervous system.
- The Vagus Nerve is the longest nerve in the body and named for the Latin word “wanderer”. The Vagus nerve wanders , sending out nerve fibers from the brain, down the neck, around the organs and joints of the body- Wandering to find areas that need help healing.
10. Wear Good Shoes
Choose walking shoes with padded soles and appropriate arch support to support comfortable movement and provide a base for good posture. High quality, properly fitted shoes will reduce undue stress and impact on the feet and joints as you enjoy an active lifestyle. Our office has partnered with Footlevelers to provide an in office foot scanner to customize your shoes to your needs.
Ultimately, remember to take it easy. Keeping active to take care of your joints should challenge you, but it shouldn’t cause pain. If you have some mild muscle soreness after you start a new exercise, that’s normal. But if it lasts more than a couple of days, or you feel joint pain after exercise, ease up on your activities to give your body more time to heal. Regular, gentle ‘stress’ on your muscles and joints – with enough rest in between – will provide the right level of challenge to keep improving, rather than degrading, your health and fitness.
If you have questions about how to start integrating any of these practices for keeping your joints healthy into your lifestyle, schedule a time to talk with us or come in for a zero-risk consultation. ABLE Chiropractic is here to aid you on your journey to A Better Life Experience – embracing a pain free life.