The first trick to exercising with bad joints is to have better joints.

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean you can take a supplement and magically your joint problems will be cured, but there are adjustable lifestyle factors that can and will make things relatively better or worse.

We say “and will”, because you don’t get a choice in that part. Everything we do, every little choice in our day, makes our health a little better or a little worse in some aspect(s). But we do get a choice between “relatively better” and “relatively worse”.

With that in mind, do check out:

• Avoiding/Managing Osteoarthritis
• Avoiding/Managing Rheumatoid Arthritis
• How To Really Look After Your Joints

Ok, you have bad joints though; what next?

Let’s assume you’re doing your best with the above, and/or have simply decided not to, which is your call. You know your circumstances best. Either way, your joints are still not in sufficiently good condition to be able to exercise the way you’d like.

First, the obvious: enjoy low-impact exercises

For example:

• Swimming
• Yoga (much more appropriate here than the commonly-paired “and tai chi”)*
• Isometric exercises (i.e. exercise without movement, e.g. squeezing things, or stationary stability exercises)

*This is not to say that tai chi is bad. But if your problem is specifically your knees, there are many movements in most forms of tai chi that require putting the majority of one’s weight on one bent leg, which means the knee of that leg is going to suffer. If your knees are fine, then this won’t be an issue and it will simply continue strengthening your knees without discomfort. But they have to be fine first.

See also: Exercising With Osteoporosis

Second: support your joints through a full range of motion

If you have bad joints, you probably know that there’s an unfortunate paradox whereby you get to choose between:

1. Exercise, and inflame your joints
2. Rest, and your joints seize up

This is the way to get around that damaging dilemma.

Moving your joints through a full range of motion regularly is critical for their maintenance, so do that in a way that isn’t straining them:

If it’s your shoulders, for example, you can do (slow, gentle!) backstroke or front-crawl or butterfly motions while standing in the comfort of your living room.

If it’s your knees, then supported squats can do you a world of good. That means, squat in front of a table or other stable object, with your fingertips (or as much of your hands as you need) on it, to take a portion of your weight (it can be a large portion; that’s fine too!) while you go through the full range of motion of the squat. Repeat.

And so forth for other joints.

See also: The Most Underrated Hip Mobility Exercise (Not Stretching)

Third: work up slowly, and stop early

You can do exercises that involve impact, and if you live a fairly normal life, you’ll probably have to (walking is an impact exercise). You can also enjoy cycling (low-impact, but not so low-impact as we discussed in the last section) and work up to running if you want to.

However…

While building up your joints’ mobility and strength, it is generally a good idea to stop before you think you need to.

This means that it’s important to do those exercises in a way that you can stop early. For example, an exercise bike or a treadmill can be a lot of use here, so that you don’t find you need to stop for the day while miles from your house.

If you get such a device, it doesn’t even have to be fancy and/or expensive. This writer got herself an inexpensive exercise bike like this one, and it’s perfectly adequate.

Fourth: prioritize recovery, even if it doesn’t feel like you need it

Everyone should do this anyway, but if your joints are bad, it goes double:

Overdone It? How To Speed Up Recovery After Exercise (According To Actual Science)

Fifth: get professional help

Physiotherapists are great for this. Find one, and take their advice for your specific body and your specific circumstances and goals.

Take care!

First, let’s quickly address the word “overweight”. Over what weight, exactly?

And the answer is: over the weight that, when measured in kilograms and divided by your height in square meters*, is sufficient to put your body-mass index (BMI) into the “overweight” category of 25+.

^{*No, your height doesn’t come in square meters, because it’s a height not an area, but that’s the formula anyway.}

BMI is not very useful (see When BMI Doesn’t Measure Up if you’re unfamiliar) but unfortunately, it’s been used for a sufficiently large amount of research that new research becomes difficult without referencing the old research that depended on BMI, so we’re stuck with it for a while yet.

Fun two-part fact about BMI before we move on:

• If, by some accident or incident, you unfortunately lose a leg, your BMI will go down considerably (because your mass will be quite a bit lower)
• If, by some accident or incident, you unfortunately lose both legs, your BMI will go up considerably (because your height will be quite a bit lower)

BMI is a fabulous, highly functional system.

Enough about BMI. What about yoga?

Two things generally held to be true:

1. Body fat above a certain level is not good for your health
2. Yoga is good for your health

So, how well do these things go together?

Let’s start with the obvious question: is yoga good for weight loss?

And the answer is: no, not really

Or, at least, we were not able to find any particularly strong evidence to support it. While there were countless tiny studies with shoddy methodologies published in fringe publications making claims such as “self-reported weight loss after a year met the threshold for significance”, when we narrowed our search to only systematic reviews, suddenly there were only a few pages of results, and most of them weren’t actually relevant (i.e. they merely contained the keywords but in other contexts).

Two were relevant, of which, one didn’t have the full text available (only an abstract that was lacking certain little details such as… the results), and the other one, well…

❝Out of 445 records identified during literature search, 30 trials with a total of 2173 participants were included. No effects on weight, body mass index, body fat percentage or waist circumference were found❞

In other words, they also got the countless tiny studies that we found, carefully went through them to remove the worthless ones, and found 30 out of 445 that met appropriate standards, and those 30 studies that were robustly-conducted found no clear benefits, and the strongest positive conclusion they could draw was the benefits couldn’t be ruled out preliminarily, and that it was safe.

Read in full: A systematic review and meta-analysis on the effects of yoga on weight-related outcomes

So, what can it do?

Researchers (Dr. Widya Wasityastuti et al.) did a meta-analysis of 30 randomized controlled trials (2,689 participants) examined yoga’s effects on cardiometabolic health in adults in the overweight or obese categories of BMI, using outcomes like blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, inflammation, and antioxidant markers.

The results, in few words:

• Blood pressure effects: yoga was associated with a reduction in systolic blood pressure of 4.35 mmHg and diastolic blood pressure of 2.06 mmHg
• Cholesterol effects: yoga produced modest improvements in lipid profiles, lowering LDL cholesterol by 0.08 mmol/L and increasing HDL cholesterol by 0.06 mmol/L
• Other metabolic markers: yoga “may” improve glucose regulation, oxidative stress (redox balance), and inflammation, but the evidence for these outcomes remains uncertain

Note that “may” is scientist-speak for “we haven’t proven it doesn’t”

This means, of course, that the biggest deal here is the blood pressure reductions.

This is quite in line with what we wrote about here: What Most People Don’t Know About Blood Pressure

As for Dr. Wasityastuti’s paper, you can read it in full here: Impact of yoga on cardiometabolic health in adults with overweight or obesity: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

Want to learn more?

You might want to swing by:

Which Style Of Yoga Is Best For You?

Enjoy!