What Are Some Easy Ways To Protect Your Joints?

You should know how to protect your joints regardless of whether you work out or not. Your wrists and your ankles are extremely important in everyday movements. Those who have had problems with their knees also know how incredibly uncomfortable it can be to perform easy tasks like bending to pick something up, or even trying to take out the garbage.

1. Correct form

If you are into the habit of working out, making sure that you are performing your exercises with the proper form is one of the simplest ways to protect your joints. Make sure you hold your dumbbells with a tight grip, and that you follow the right form when doing bench presses or even bicep curls. The same goes for your squats- make sure you don’t go with your knees over your toes as you lower your body, so as to make sure that you’re not putting too much pressure on your ankles.

2. Strengthening smaller muscles

You know the saying, that a group is as strong as its weakest member. Why would it be any different for your body? After all it is a group of muscles and bones and… joints! The best way to protect your joints in advance is to make sure they’re strong enough to handle the extra pressure when you start lifting heavier weights. So make sure you progress slowly enough for your joints to adapt, and don’t be afraid to do exercises that you wouldn't normally do which help them (like exercises for the forearm, or the calves)

3. Supplements to protect your joints

If you want to effectively protect your joints and prevent injury, you could try a few supplements. There are plenty of natural alternatives, like fish oil (either eating fish or taking fish oil pills). And believe it or now vitamin C also helps to protect your joints. Some other substances that help are silicone and gelatin (type II collagen).

4. Rest

If you want to protect your joints, you must treat rest with as much importance as you treat your workouts. This can mean two things.

First, you have to make sure that you don’t work out too much, and rest too little. It’s important to get at least one day of rest per week. If you can’t stand it to not move a little, you can have an active rest day, where you go for a walk or an easy bike ride.

But the rest can also refer to giving yourself a break if something feels wrong. If you want to protect your joints it’s not smart to push through with a workout if you feel pain during or after your workout. If you don’t give yourself a break and let your joints get healthy again after an injury, the situation will only get worse.

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