Top Causes of Joint Pain in Irish People and How to Treat Them

Approximately 23% of adults worldwide experience some form of joint or musculoskeletal pain with the number on this rise. The most common areas of the body that seem to cause people the most problems are the knees, hips, back, shoulders and neck. In this blog, we will dig into some of the main reasons people suffer with joint pain and things to bear in mind while trying to build and strengthen muscles functionally in order to alleviate the symptoms.

Causes

There are many reasons why someone might be suffering from joint pain. Some for acute reasons like to accident or injury, and some for more chronic reasons like wear and tear or arthritis. One thing that is generally always present is an underlying biomechanical issue.

Acute (Short Term)

• Some acute joint pain can come directly from one specific incident like a contact injury from sport or an accident at work. Sometimes these issues cannot be helped and are simply down to bad luck.
• Other acute injuries can present without any actual event and can seem to appear out of nowhere. These are usually biomechanical in nature and come as a result of poor movement causing stress on a joint.

Chronic (Long Term)

• Arthritis or “wear and tear” is one thing that effects people as they get older, and while this may seem unavoidable, “wear and tear” has a biomechanical component.
• Joint pain that has come slowly over time but has not resolved even with intervention could be considered chronic joint pain. This happens when someone’s biomechanical issue has not been properly resolved and acute joint pain has become chronic.
• Neurological conditions can also cause long term joint pain. Although this not caused by biomechanical issues, improving how someone moves can definitely help alleviate and manage the symptoms associated and improve day to day life.

Building Strength

While strengthening the muscles around painful joints seems like a rational solution, it’s important to understand how the body works in order to make sure that we are doing this in a way that is actually compounding existing biomechanical issues. Let’s think about two ways of looking at training the body.

Muscle First

This is the approach that most people follow when it comes to strengthening muscles in the body. Most exercises focus on the muscles themselves, either trying to specifically isolate them in order to load them, or by using techniques to try and stretch and “loosen” them.

Function First

The issue here is that all of the muscles in the body are allocated to certain functions. For example, the glutes and the posterior chain are involved in hip extension when we walk. As well as that, this function has to integrate to others like the opposite hip going through a flexion, or the ribcage rotating.

While it’s possible to try and purely isolate muscles involved in these functions, it doesn’t integrate them into the larger picture and teach our body how to do them simultaneously in a way that supports our joints when we move.

Functional Patterns

At Functional Patterns we teach fundamental aspects of movement like the functions described above. We focus on the functions found in the “FP First 4”, standing, walking, running, and throwing. These are the functions that have shaped the human body, and in order to strengthen and offload our joints we must work to improve these patterns. We focus on getting people to understand these functions with basic corrective exercises for their core, t-spine, and legs, and then progress to dynamic movements in order to build better biomechanics.

Conclusion

In order to get any meaningful change with joint pain we need to truly improve biomechanics. In other words,  we need to improve the functionality of the body in a way that allows muscles to naturally contribute in order to create strength and support our joints.

This is the only way that we can make long term gains to our movement and have muscles know how to integrate into the whole system. If we only focus on a muscle first approach, it’s actually very possible that we can add friction and compression to the same joints we are trying to offload. That’s why at Functional Patterns we focus our efforts on improving the first 4.