Early in my career as Physical Therapist, I realized there was more to rehabbing the body than simply stretching and strengthening. The same can be said for fitness programs aimed at ‘preventing injury’.

The missing piece for many fitness and rehab programs is ‘neuromuscular and proprioreceptive control’.

What that means is essentially how well can you control your body position and movement? Can you isolate movement at a certain joint? This is dictated by how much the receptors that live deep inside your joint (called proprioreceptors) are communicating with your brain and central nervous system.

Clinically, I often find that the fittest and strongest individuals lack basic neuromuscular control. In efforts to excel at pattern-based activities such as running, weightlifting, and sports, the body becomes great at essentially compensating or recruiting from any body region necessary to achieve the desired task.

If training consistently only involves multi-joint and heavy load movements, the capability and health of individual joints becomes quickly neglected and overlooked.

Let’s use back squat as an example…. If an individual has knee pain with squatting, it may be easy to call it a knee injury, but what if the knee is actually taking a beating because the hip or ankle isn’t functioning properly? If you only train pattern-based movements that require contribution of many joints, you may never know.

When we incorporate training to individual joints, however, we receive assessment information as well as an opportunity to improve deficits that individual joints may have developed over time.

Joint specific training is a phenomenal supplement to a traditional pattern-based training program. With this targeted work we can easily identify weakness and imbalances and then execute precise and specific training to areas of deficit.

It can be used as rehab, prehab, warm-up, and to enhance performance with traditional fitness programming.

I developed my online platform, Upgrade Your Joints, as a training resource for athletes ready to dive into the nitty gritty of the health and performance of their joints. I teach you the science behind our training principles, offer you self-assessment guidance, and then give you access to a complete library of training classes.

If you are interested in learning more, I have some free resources to help you