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The thing that stimulates the muscles with weights is the same thing that undermines the joints. It’s baked into the cake, so to speak.

“Would you rather have arthritis and be strong, capable, and functional—or have arthritis and be weak and less functional?” — Jim Keen, Director of Training at FastFit®

Living means getting older, and getting older means your body starts wearing down. Joints start to hurt, old injuries flare up, or things like arthritis show up unannounced. In this episode, Jim Keen and I discuss how to keep training through all of it.

Because the members who quit due to joint pain end up far worse off than those who work through it with one of our certified personal trainers.

Jim starts with a hard truth: your joints have a shelf life. Muscle tissue is highly adaptable, tendons and ligaments less so, and bone responds very slowly. The joints and connective tissues are permissive elements—the hinges that let the doors swing—while the muscles are the active element. The problem with most exercise is that you undermine the joints in the very process of trying to access the muscles. Running and sprinting pound the ankles, knees, and hips.

And weight training has its own version of the problem: when a muscle stretches into passive insufficiency and can no longer contract, the load transfers straight to your connective tissue. Think of locking out a 500-pound leg press to catch your breath. Suddenly, it’s your meniscus, ligaments, and bone bearing the load, not your muscles. This is why new lifters (and people on steroids) so often suffer joint injuries: the muscles get strong faster than the tendons and ligaments can keep up.

Isokinetic exercise solves this in several ways. You can instantly get less resistance—push less, get less. The range of motion is preset by a trainer, so you never drift into the dangerous positions where connective tissue takes over. And the resistance is heavy where you’re strong and automatically lighter where you’re weak, so you don’t get a big load applied to vulnerable joint angles—and without the repetitive over-stressing of the connective tissues. Even better, absorbing force safely over time actually thickens the tendons and ligaments, increasing your capacity to absorb force in the future. That makes you more resistant to injury rather than risking injury to get stronger.

Kyle adds an important warning about newer machines that let you set your own range of motion, just like a barbell. That freedom can be dangerous, because self-awareness is hard—especially as we age. This is exactly why FastFit® trainers set specific ranges of motion, and why they shorten that range if something changes for a member over time.

The second half of the episode is about the everyday pain points that make people want to quit—sore hands, weak grip, achy wrists, arthritis. Jim is honest: FastFit® won’t cure your rheumatoid arthritis, but would you rather have it and be strong and functional, or have it and be weak? And often the symptoms do improve. More importantly, there are countless adjustments a trainer can make—through form adjustments or tiny tweaks to equipment setup. You have far more options than you’d ever have with a weight, which just pushes and pulls on you without responding.

The key is identifying what’s actually going on. If your hands hurt because your forearms are weak from never being trained, that’s a middleman getting stronger—good. If they hurt because of a wrist injury, that’s something to work around—also doable. Same with the low back: sharp sciatic pain needs to be addressed, but the “I just helped a friend move a couch” feeling after a static stiff-legged deadlift is simply a strong posterior chain being built safely. The point is that almost nothing has to end your training—but your trainer can only help if you tell them what’s going on.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why your joints have a “shelf life” and how muscle, tendon, ligament, and bone each adapt at different rates

• How most exercise—running, sprinting, weightlifting—undermines the joints in the process of stimulating muscle

• Why new lifters and steroid users so often suffer joint injuries

• How isokinetic resistance protects joints: instant lighter resistance, preset range of motion, and load that matches your strength

• Why absorbing force safely actually thickens tendons and ligaments and makes you more injury-resistant

• Why letting the user set their own range of motion can be dangerous—and why trainers set it instead

• Practical adjustments for hand, wrist, grip, and joint pain: thumb positions, hooks, straps, pads, pullovers, and single-limb work

• How to tell the difference between real injury pain and a weak “middleman” muscle that simply needs strengthening

🎧 Listen to the episode now:

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