Uncover the Hidden Truth About Gym & Joints
- Brainz Magazine
- Jun 10
- 6 min read
Written by Bradley Abbott, Personal Coach
Bradley Abbott is known for his wholistic approach to personal coaching merging fitness training with nutritional therapeutics. Author of the e-books A How-to Guide in Developing Functional Strength, Power and Adaptability, and The Cussing Coach, both published in 2024.
Whether you're an athlete or someone who likes going to the gym, bone and joint problems are always an increasing concern, especially for 30-70 year-olds. It doesn't happen straight away. It's almost deceptive in that sense. It happens slowly over the course of many years, unless, of course, you're a competitive elite athlete, where the risk of sports-related injuries increases exponentially!
However, you do not have to be an elite athlete to have bone and joint problems. The minerals that keep your bones and joints healthy and strong, you lose through sweat from exercising. The breakdown happens gradually over many years and over many gym sessions, but don't worry, I am going to show you how to overcome this problem.
Younger & stronger: Actively resilient
When you're younger, so energetic and full of life, you're so strong that sometimes during local football, basketball, and indoor hockey games, these encounters are sometimes described as 'like hitting a brick wall.' Then you continue this pattern through to your twenties and then in your thirties. Suddenly, you start to hear the cracking of your wrists and ankles, the clicking of your neck. These are early signs of bone and joint issues like osteoporosis.
Forty & older: The results of exercise
When you enter your forties, fifties and sixties, things begin to slow down (most of the time), and the results of exercise without proper rest and supplementation begin to take effect. Arthritis, osteoporosis, ankylosing spondylitis, bone and heel spurs, and rheumatism begin to set in.
Bad eating habits, and worse, harmful eating habits, progress the bone and joint degeneration at a rate hitherto undreamt of for your body. Crippled, costing, and difficult to perform your activities of daily living, it starts to effect your mood and mindset. You feel burdened and burdening. However, it's not entirely your fault. We have been surrounded with false ads, propaganda, and false information around mineral and vitamin requirements (RDA's), and water consumption (the commonly stated '2 litres/day').
Fitness performance & nutrition: Energy through health
Fitness and health are used interchangeably quite a lot, but it may surprise you, they are not the same! In many circumstances, they are so far apart from each other that it may worry you. Let me give you an example. Anywhere up to 80% of the oxygenated blood from your nervous, musculoskeletal, and endocrine systems in your body travels to your muscles in response to exercise. Remember, when you are exercising, your sympathetic nervous system is turned on, which means you are in a 'fight or flight' response. This is why Frequent gym-goers, CrossFit athletes, and long-distance runners have to supplement, hydrate, and truly take care of their rest and recovery on a regular basis.
To be fit, you must train frequently; rest, eat the right calories for your body weight and physical demands. You must hydrate, sleep and supplement. To be healthy requires the same aspects, apart from frequent recreational exercise. Your exercise to contribute to your health could be walking, gardening, or housework. There's a difference in physical demands.
You need some form of exercise to contribute to health, but without the correct protocols for replacing the nutrients, calories, proteins, fats, and water you have lost, repetitive, intense exercise will break your body down faster than you could've imagined.
Gym & joints: What to do about it
Pain, cracking, and clicking, is it really necessary? No! This information is highly controversial for the reasons I have just mentioned, surrounding information sources.
Supplement appropriately for your bodyweight and joint issues, clean up your diet, rest, and hydrate. It's as simple as it sounds. However, breaking your old eating habits is the difficult part.
Unfortunately, there's only a handful of supplement companies globally that can be trusted for their high-quality supplements and well-informed supplement recipes.
Cleaning up your diet is mandatory for you to absorb the minerals needed to fix your joints and reverse those bone and joint conditions.
Sleep & satisfactory recovery
Why is sleep excellent for our joints?
It allows our bodies to replenish our bone cells through osteoblast and osteoclast activity. Also known as 'bone remodelling. The osteoclasts get rid of old bone and the osteoblasts help us rebuild new bone. This ability is paramount and essential when we're children, but as we get older into our thirties, forties and beyond, this ability greatly diminishes.
Sleep helps turn on our parasympathetic nervous system, otherwise known as 'rest & digest.' This allows the nutrients we get from food and (mainly) supplements to be absorbed into our bloodstream and be distributed where needed. In this case, our bones and joints.
Now, I know this is about bones and joints, but stay with me here, there's a point to this.
When we get older, especially when we get to our forties and beyond, we start to lose the ability to digest food. A glycoprotein known as Castle's intrinsic factor is produced by the parietal cells of our stomach and allows us to absorb vitamin B12, and it's this ability that we begin to lose in our late thirties onwards. Another digestive issue that we face as we get older is our ability to produce stomach acid, which limits our ability to break down foods and extract nutrients from them. Thus, minerals and vitamins are needed to help our bodies maintain and repair our joints.
Sleep is vital for these processes. Regular, good, high-quality sleep allows these processes to work more efficiently, but you still need to supplement when you get older, and when you're in the gym.
Spectacular sports nutrition & why it exists
It exists to fulfil a nutritional need for athletes and gymgoers, so you guys can perform at your best, Whey protein, creatine and essential fatty acids (EFA's) are still, after three to four decades of research, considered the 'gold standard' of sports supplementation for performance, but they aren't the only ones to consider. Caffeine in capsule and powdered form is a much stronger form of caffeine than coffee. Sorry, Starbucks lovers. Caffeine in capsule and powdered forms is an excellent energy booster and is what most serious gym-goers and athletes consider a good pre-workout.
Round up
In summary, this is how you should "tackle" your bone and joint issues head-on and proceed with utmost urgency!
Realise quickly that they aren't going to go away and your bones and joints will degenerate if you don't approach your health and fitness recovery pro-actively.
Prioritise sleep!
Hydrate & log how much water you drink daily. Drink 2.5-4 litres of water daily. Tap water isn't going to help you here. You need filtered or reverse osmosis water (more on this in a later article). They are the cleanest and most effective types of water for hydration and health.
Clean up your diet through continuous experimentation with different types of foods, and journaling them in a food diary to record what you eat and how those foods make you feel.
Supplement woth the 90 essential nutrients per 100lb's of your body weight per month, or as much as you can afford.
Log your supplementation in your food diary. Remember, your body responds best to supplements once you have gotten into a routine. Don't worry, though, if you have ever-changing shift patterns, it's not the 'be-all-end-all.' You will be fine.
Additional rest and recovery protocols like ice baths, or cold baths to reduce swelling after a long-distance run on the treadmill or outdoors, go a long way.
Swap out one to two weeks of intense training for de-load weeks and make them a regular occurrence in your fitness regimen.
Listen to your body! If you need time to recover before a match, a sporting event, or even your next gym session, take it. Be kind to your body.
Read more from Bradley Abbott
Bradley Abbott, Personal Coach
Bradley Abbott is a personal coach and author. Known for his wholistic approach to training merging naturopathic principles with fitness training, he has managed to reverse the symptoms of his clients almost completely, and raise their energy to heights they never thought possible. He is the founder of Phoenix Phorm Online and uses these platforms to educate and inspire a larger audience.
