A young woman recently joined the club where I work as a fitness instructor. She was new to exercise, and after a few weeks, she confessed to me that she had put off joining for a long time because she expected the workouts to require a lot of jumping, something she wants to avoid due to ankle and knee problems, and she hasn’t” lost the COVID pounds yet.”
Once he started training, he quickly learned something: jumping in the exercise is completely optional. Each exercise can be adapted to be easier on the joints. It’s a myth that you have to punish your body in a workout to gain anything from it.
“Fitness is the longest of the long games. This is an investment plan,” says Kieran Maguire, an advocate for low-impact strength training. Credit:istock
The technical term for exercise that significantly increases the load on the joints is high impact – and you may not realize how high that impact is. According to exercise scientist Kieran Maguire, director of fitness science, running can put up to seven times your body weight on your knee joints. “That’s a lot of mass to absorb,” she says. No wonder your knees always ache after that first run.
There are many good reasons to avoid high-impact exercise: preexisting injury, fear of re-injury, being overweight, uncertainty about unfamiliar movements, lack of coordination or fitness, disability, muscle pain, age, or low bone density. Or maybe you work out in an apartment where you can’t jump in and disturb your neighbors. And maybe you don’t feel like jumping today.
Women may have other reasons, such as period pain, endometriosis, pregnancy, and postpartum pelvic floor problems.
The good news is that even if the highimpact exercise is not for you, that doesn’t mean you can’t win the many high health benefitsintensity exercise. “Impact and intensity are two separate things,” says Amelia Phillips, a fitness expert and host of the podcast. healthy her. “You can have a very high intensity workout that is low impact.”
“Rowing is such a great example of equipment that you can put a beginner and an Olympian together for two minutes and they will both have the same training intensity.”
High-intensity, low-impact exercise that puts less stress on your joints includes riding a stationary bike, swimming, or using an elliptical trainer or rowing machine.
“Rowing is a great example of equipment where you can put a beginner and an Olympian together for two minutes and they will both have the same training intensity,” says Phillips. This is because the intensity of the exercise is entirely relative to each person’s individual fitness and experience.
