Are you tired of having unresolved muscle and joint pain?
You’ve had unresolved muscle and joint pain that just won’t go away. You may have tried steroid injections, joint manipulations, rehab exercises from your physio but the pain just keeps coming back. You feel you’ve tried almost every method and treatment available and it just hasn’t worked.
Bespoke exercise, (exercise but not as you know it). This is exercise grounded in biomechanics. The thought process dives a little deeper than what you may have tried in the past.
In short, it’s the understanding of how resistance impacts your body when doing specific exercises.
Application is key. For this to work, it’s about attempting to load your muscles and joints with the appropriate exercise for your bone structure, muscle lengths and current muscular system tolerance.
This type of exercise targets specific muscles by adjusting resistance throughout the movement to match your strength. It can be performed on machines designed to change resistance based on your muscle's capabilities, making the movement feel smoother and more effective. By increasing resistance when you're stronger and decreasing it when you're weaker, the muscles are challenged appropriately without causing pain. This approach has been shown to improve strength more efficiently compared to machines with constant resistance.
This study showed the effectiveness of appropriate exercise. It evaluates the effectiveness of training the muscles that flex the elbow on a machine with a resistance-manipulating cam to try to match human strength, compared to a machine that only offers consistent resistance by using a disc plate. It concludes that training elbow flexor muscles on a machine with a resistance-manipulating cam is more efficient for increases in strength, than training on a machine with a disc plate.
We are able to help our clients because we consider the following throughout the range of movement at any given joint:
1. The moment arm - the perpendicular distance from the joint axis to the line of force the joint is resisting.
2. The length-tension relationships as muscles shorten and lengthen - how strong the muscle is at any given muscle length.
3. The muscle origin and insertion attachments and the angle of pull the muscle has across the joint.
4. The active range - the contractile ability of the muscle when the muscle is fully lengthened.
5. How quickly the muscle fatigues during a set.
And that’s before we’ve even started loading the exercise.
If exercise hasn’t worked for you in the past, it’s likely because key factors weren’t considered, such as proper resistance adjustment or targeting the right muscles. If these details are ignored, the exercise is far less effective.
"it would be like aiming for a bullseye in darts wearing a blindfold. If you can’t see it, the chances are you’re not gonna hit it."
Once we understand how resistance affects the body, we can make better exercise choices and perform them more effectively. The key is in the details. Designing the right exercise for you depends on your unique needs. This approach helps you feel the benefits of the workout without causing pain.
Greg Cornthwaite – Strength House Co-Founder
