Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Avoid Joint Pain in Strength Training to Lift Weights Forever | Ep 198

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Avoid Joint Pain in Strength Training to Lift Weights Forever | Ep 198 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: If you're like me, you love to get new PRs, you love to crush those lifts, continue making progress session after session.
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: But lately there's been a nagging pain in your elbow, maybe your shoulder, maybe your knee.
• 0:13
  Philip Pape: You brush it off, thinking that's just part of the process, but what if I told you that ignoring these signs could lead to a catastrophic injury?
• 0:20
  Philip Pape: There's an engineering principle called fatigue failure that explains why materials break under repeated stress and guess what?
• 0:28
  Philip Pape: Your tendons follow the same rules.
• 0:30
  Philip Pape: Today, we're diving into how understanding fatigue failure could be the key to preventing nagging injuries and ensuring longevity in your strength training journey.
• 0:39
  Philip Pape: If you're someone who loves to lift, and especially loves to lift heavy, this episode could save your tendons and your progress.
• 0:46
  Philip Pape: Let's engineer a better approach to tendon health.
• 1:00
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the podcast that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique.
• 1:09
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we're exploring the engineering concept of fatigue failure.
• 1:16
  Philip Pape: This episode is about keeping your tendons healthy and your lifts progressing.
• 1:21
  Philip Pape: We're gonna break down the components of fatigue failure and see how they directly apply to your tendons during strength training so that you can keep showing up session after session for years and enjoy the process.
• 1:34
  Philip Pape: And, as always, if you're enjoying the show, if you want more content like this that applies these concepts to your fitness, your health, your nutrition, hit the follow button right now.
• 1:45
  Philip Pape: If you're not already following the show, if you just downloaded this one episode for the first time, take a look at the back catalog, subscribe, follow if you like the episode, so that you get notified of future episodes.
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: And right now, when it comes to Apple and Spotify, that's one of the best ways that others can find the show.
• 2:03
  Philip Pape: So go ahead and hit follow and let's jump right into today's episode.
• 2:07
  Philip Pape: I wanna start by breaking down what fatigue failure actually means in engineering, and then we're gonna quickly apply that to your training.
• 2:15
  Philip Pape: In simple terms, it is the weakening of a material due to repeatedly applied loads.
• 2:21
  Philip Pape: Now, this doesn't happen all at once.
• 2:24
  Philip Pape: It's a gradual process that occurs in stages, and that's where things get interesting for us as lifters, because our body is physical system that includes these special tissue called tendons, and this is really where this process applies.
• 2:40
  Philip Pape: So the four components of fatigue failure in engineering are cyclic stress, crack initiation, crack propagation and final failure.
• 2:50
  Philip Pape: So let's break it down.
• 2:53
  Philip Pape: The first one is cyclic stress.
• 2:54
  Philip Pape: Now, in engineering this refers to repeated loading and unloading cycles In strength training.
• 3:01
  Philip Pape: Every rep of a heavy lift so every rep of a bench press, let's say, or a squat, is a cycle of stress on our tendons.
• 3:10
  Philip Pape: I want you to think about those heavy singles in that lift, right?
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: That heavy deadlift, that heavy overhead press.
• 3:16
  Philip Pape: Each one is putting significant stress on your tendons, your tendons.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: The second component is crack initiation In materials.
• 3:28
  Philip Pape: This is where tiny cracks form at stress points.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: Now, for our tendons, this is the microtrauma that occurs with each heavy lift.
• 3:35
  Philip Pape: It's totally normal, right?
• 3:37
  Philip Pape: This is when you hear about muscles breaking down and experiencing micro tears.
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: This is normal, it's part of the adaptation process.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: But you have to understand that this is one of the steps along the way.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: The third one is crack propagation.
• 3:49
  Philip Pape: This is where those initial tiny cracks grow larger under continued stress.
• 3:55
  Philip Pape: Now in our tendons, this is what happens when we don't allow for proper recovery.
• 3:59
  Philip Pape: Those micro tears start to accumulate and grow.
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: Recovery those micro tears start to accumulate and grow and that leads us to final failure In engineering.
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: This is where the material can no longer support the load and then it breaks.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: For our tendons, this is when a major injury can occur, like tendonitis or, unfortunately, what I had, which was a rotator cuff tear, a tendon rupture.
• 4:26
  Philip Pape: Now here's where it gets really interesting, because in engineering there's a concept called fatigue limit or endurance limit, and this is the stress level below which the failure will not occur, no matter how many times the load is applied.
• 4:37
  Philip Pape: So, for our tendons, think of this as the sweet spot of training intensity and volume right, your stimulus that allows for progress but without risking injury.
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: And you might have heard of concepts like stimulus to fatigue.
• 4:52
  Philip Pape: You might have heard of the fitness curve, stress, recovery, adaptation.
• 4:56
  Philip Pape: They all kind of play on this principle of finding balance between the intensity side, where you're actually doing something physical and putting the load on your body, and the recovery side, which, let's be honest, many of us do not pay as much attention to or give enough credence to pay as much attention to or give enough credence to.
• 5:14
  Philip Pape: So if we want to apply this knowledge practically to our training, I'm going to give you a few strategies here that I think are helpful.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: The first one is we want to prevent overloading.
• 5:23
  Philip Pape: Now you might say, well, don't you talk about progressive overload all the time?
• 5:27
  Philip Pape: Well, progressive overload is a misnomer.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: We're not actually overloading.
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: We're simply loading up to an appropriate stress to cause an adaptation.
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: So just as engineers design structures like bridges and buildings to avoid excessive cyclic loading, we need to be careful with our training loads.
• 5:46
  Philip Pape: But it does mean being smart about progressive overload and thinking about things like okay, I'm not gonna necessarily go for a one RM every session or I'm gonna cycle through different lifts as I test my one RMs, like in, for example, the Westside method.
• 6:06
  Philip Pape: Or instead of hitting one RMs, I'm gonna do doubles, triples, triples or even fives.
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: Still hit it hard, still get close to failure, but it's not that high end.
• 6:17
  Philip Pape: You know 90%, 95% of my maximum load.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: So there's there's ways to kind of balance this out and I've experienced myself with my shoulder rehab that when I really push for singles or doubles, there's a lot of stress on the tendon.
• 6:33
  Philip Pape: I know it's there.
• 6:34
  Philip Pape: Or doubles, there's a lot of stress on the tendon, I know it's there.
• 6:36
  Philip Pape: I can hear some of the grinding.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: I get some of the pain if I overdo it and that's my body telling me that those are probably not appropriate for me.
• 6:44
  Philip Pape: If you're still in a healthy state, you haven't gone through that yet.
• 6:46
  Philip Pape: It's good to be proactive and get ahead of that.
• 6:48
  Philip Pape: So preventing overloading just by balancing the intensity is a good strategy.
• 6:55
  Philip Pape: The second strategy is, of course, allow for recovery.
• 6:58
  Philip Pape: In engineering, materials need rest periods between these stress cycles.
• 7:02
  Philip Pape: For us this means adequate rest between your heavy lifting sessions.
• 7:07
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: That's really what it means.
• 7:09
  Philip Pape: It also means strategic deloads right Using deload weeks where necessary.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: Now, a deload isn't let me just take the week off A deload is okay.
• 7:19
  Philip Pape: If I normally train four days a week, maybe I'm still going to go in four days, but I'm going to drop a little bit of the intensity and cut out some sets or exercises to reduce the volume.
• 7:29
  Philip Pape: Or maybe it means I'm going to go from four days normally down to just two days this week and sort of compress into some smaller full body sessions, something like that, where you're basically giving yourself a chance to, you know, fully heal up and recover before you get back to the next cycle of, say, six weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks, whatever.
• 7:48
  Philip Pape: The third principle here, or strategy, is to monitor for signs of fatigue, is to monitor for signs of fatigue.
• 7:55
  Philip Pape: So if you listen to my episode about experimentation and prototyping, you know engineers use non-destructive testing to detect early signs of fatigue.
• 8:03
  Philip Pape: So they do things that don't push the material to their limit but still push them enough to kind of get data.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: So, for us lifters, this means paying attention to our bodies.
• 8:13
  Philip Pape: Okay, I don't know if you hear my my dog's barking, but they're paying attention to something.
• 8:18
  Philip Pape: Anyway, paying attention to our bodies, right, that slight twinge in your elbow, that little bit of a spring when you do your bench press and it gets to that one part of the bench press, you know what I'm talking about.
• 8:28
  Philip Pape: That little bit of a click in your shoulder, that little bit of a crack in your knee, right, don't ignore those.
• 8:34
  Philip Pape: Sometimes they're okay, sometimes they're early warning signs of, you know, impending tendon issues.
• 8:40
  Philip Pape: I've gotten very in tune with that with my shoulder, and you may be familiar with that as well, but we don't want to push through that and push to the full fatigue point, right.
• 8:52
  Philip Pape: And then number four is maintenance and repair.
• 8:54
  Philip Pape: So, just like structures undergo regular maintenance, we need to take care of our tendons.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: What does that mean?
• 9:01
  Philip Pape: This means proper nutrition, so not always being in a fat loss phase and not always cutting, especially if you're having some pain, if you're having some fatigue, if you're pushing it really hard.
• 9:11
  Philip Pape: If you're trying to build muscle, you need to be fully fueled up, have enough calories, enough energy, enough carbs to support your tendons.
• 9:19
  Philip Pape: You know, when I get into a period where I need to do some extra rehab, I decide to go into a maintenance phase so that nutrition is out of the equation.
• 9:27
  Philip Pape: This means staying hydrated.
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: This means, if you need to loosen up a bit, if you need to do some stretching before jumping into a movement, do it right.
• 9:36
  Philip Pape: Some of us, you know we got the really tight shoulders or elbows.
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: We're trying to do a back squat, like a low bar back squat, and you're just not able to get in there fully in one shot.
• 9:45
  Philip Pape: So you can stretch into it right, get under the bar and just kind of stretch to that point where it becomes uncomfortable back off.
• 9:52
  Philip Pape: Do it again back off and sort of ease into it just like any other stretching work.
• 9:56
  Philip Pape: And you may decide to incorporate regular periods of, say, five or 10 minutes of stretching a certain body part to keep it limber and loose, and it's perfectly fine, there's nothing wrong with that.
• 10:07
  Philip Pape: Things like massage, right Physical therapy all those may be in the cards for you, depending on what state you're in.
• 10:12
  Philip Pape: So prevent overload, allow for recovery, monitor for signs of fatigue by paying attention to your body and give yourself some love in the nutrition and the stress and the other parts of your life.
• 10:26
  Philip Pape: So here's a thought that might shift your perspective right.
• 10:30
  Philip Pape: In engineering, fatigue failure is not a flaw.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: It's actually a natural process that has to be accounted for when you design the part or design the product.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: What if we approach our training the same way?
• 10:42
  Philip Pape: Instead of seeing tendon pain or injuries as failures or setbacks, we view them as valuable data points.
• 10:51
  Philip Pape: They are telling us something about our design, right?
• 10:55
  Philip Pape: When I hear people say, well, I got a cortisone shot for this, or I got some, you know, I took some meds or some rest and they're not addressing the actual root cause, that's a red flag, right, because you haven't fixed the design.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: You're actually putting a band-aid on the situation.
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: Sometimes a cortisone shot can relieve a symptom that allows you to improve the design.
• 11:16
  Philip Pape: Or if the design was correct and you're applying it in a context that has pain or inflammation, even a good design can fail right.
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: So there's context and nuance here.
• 11:30
  Philip Pape: But when you look at your training and your recovery strategies, and then especially your form and technique.
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: Those are the things that are part of your design right and listening to your body signals and adjusting those things so that, when you're healthy, you're not exacerbating and furthering the injury You're, you're getting back to the root cause and fixing it.
• 11:51
  Philip Pape: That's a very nice place to be and this is a mindset shift from you know, pushing through pain to I'm designing my body for longevity.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: I'm designing it for longevity.
• 12:01
  Philip Pape: And when you're 20, when you're 25, your body's so resilient you don't notice these things.
• 12:05
  Philip Pape: They will start to accumulate.
• 12:07
  Philip Pape: So get ahead of it as early as you can.
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: It really isn't about lifting the heaviest possible weight all the time, right, but finding the optimal balance of that intensity and that stress and recovery that allows for continuously improving without you breaking down.
• 12:25
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 12:26
  Philip Pape: So as we wrap up, remember this your tendons, your tendons are like the materials engineers work with.
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: Right, they have limits.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: They have limits.
• 12:33
  Philip Pape: They're physical materials, they're mechanical materials.
• 12:37
  Philip Pape: But when you understand the limits, it doesn't mean you restrict your progress.
• 12:41
  Philip Pape: It means you can optimize your approach for those.
• 12:44
  Philip Pape: So, when you're looking at your training session right now, when you're thinking about how you're training, how are you going to go to the gym tomorrow and next week, whether it's a three-day full body, a four-day split, a six-day bodybuilding program.
• 12:55
  Philip Pape: Ask yourself, am I designing for just pushing it all out, to get short-term PRs, or am I designing to continue making progress, get strong, get jacked, get swole, but also have long-term durability right?
• 13:09
  Philip Pape: It's not mutually exclusive.
• 13:11
  Philip Pape: I mean pushing all out all the time is, but I'm saying getting the result is not exclusive with getting durability right.
• 13:17
  Philip Pape: Am I listening to the early warning signs or am I pushing until something breaks?
• 13:22
  Philip Pape: And that's where applying the concept of fatigue failure to your training is a very smart way to go.
• 13:29
  Philip Pape: All right, if you found value in today's episode, as always, do me a favor and share it with a lifting buddy who's been pushing a little too hard, or who loves to hit PRs all the time, or that guy or that woman who talks about their shoulder, their knee, their elbow right, and let them know about this episode and just to think about it a little bit differently.
• 13:48
  Philip Pape: And of course, they could always reach out to talk specifics.
• 13:51
  Philip Pape: I'm happy to talk about modifications for their training, food, other approaches, other types of programming and so on.
• 13:57
  Philip Pape: And then again, don't forget to hit follow if you haven't already, because your support helps us reach more people.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, keep lifting those weights and remember, in training as in engineering, sustainability.
• 14:11
  Philip Pape: And remember, in training as in engineering sustainability, longevity is about smart design and listening to the feedback and the data.
• 14:16
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.