Sample Content Preview

Introduction

If you’ve ever sat in awe watching children play, marvelling at the immense amount of energy and flexibility they have, you know that it’s thanks to their healthy joints. But as you age, even bending down to pick something up from the floor can become an impossible feat.

So how do you deal with this?

While you can’t really fight the process of aging, you can surely slow down the rate of damage inflicted on joints due to wear and tear. Learning how to nourish and take care of your joints will let you stay flexible for longer and yield relief for painful joints.

Read on to see what it takes to keep yourself and your joints moving well even in old age.

Chapter 1

The Importance of Joint Health

Every time you sprint to catch the bus, score a point against your opposing team, or shoot pool with friends, you’re using your extremely functional musculoskeletal system. This means a combination of bones, joints and muscles get you going where you want to go.

But muscles and bones don’t work alone. Instead there are joints that link these together. While bones support your body’s entire weight, your muscles pull your bones as you move. Joints are the connecting links that put both bones and muscles in motion.

Given the important functions of mobility and movement, it becomes crucial that you take good care of your joints. After all, you put them through so much wear and tear throughout your life.

Joints that aren’t well taken care of become susceptible to injury, inflammation and general dislocation. As age catches up with you, you can feel the effects of overuse weathering away your joints. So keep your joints healthy at every stage of your life so they can keep you moving even in old age.

But before we look at ways to do so, here’s a quick look at the anatomy of a joint so you can better understand what goes into keeping your joints healthy. Page | 10

What Are Joints?

Imagine if the skeleton had only one solid bone. That would make it very difficult to move. So instead nature solved this problem by dividing the skeleton into many bones, and creating joints where the bones intersect.

Joints are also known as articulations forming strong connections that join bones, teeth, and cartilage to one another. Now you have the freedom of movement in different ways and directions.

Some joints open and close like a hinge such as your knees and elbows, allowing you to straighten or bend your legs and arms. You sit down, stand up, pick up, and put down stuff using these joints without giving it a second thought.

Others joints are meant for more complicated movements such as your shoulder or hip joint. These allow for forward, backward, sideways, and rotating movements. Just think of everything you can do with these joints and you’ll get an idea of how limited your movement can become if any of these joints suffer damage.

But not all joints are created equal. For instance, while joints like the knees provide stability, others like the wrist, ankles, and hips let you move, glide, skip, or run.

And just as their functions vary, so does their anatomy. Which means that you also need to take care of them in specific ways.

Some joints are purely made of tough collagen fiber while others have cartilage binding bones together. Yet others have something known as synovial fluid in between cartilage pads at the end of articulating bones.

So while you may think that all joints can be maintained using the same methods, you may need to rethink your joint-health strategy. Let’s first take a look at the different types of joints found in the body before discussing how to take care of them.

Types of Joints And Their Functions

Each joint is specialized in its shape and structure to control the range of motion between the parts it connects.

For easier understanding, you may classify joints based on the function they perform or how much movement they allow. You can also do the same based on the structure of the joint, or the material that is present in the joint. This means looking at how the bones are attached to one another.

Both categories will let you divide joints into three broad classes:

Immovable or fixed joints. These are typically fibrous joints that are held together by dense fibrous connective tissue. Think about the bony plates of the skull to get an idea. There are links or joints between the edges of these plates made of fibrous tissue. The point is to make them immovable to protect the brain.

Sample Content Preview

What if I told you that you are capable of working on something in such a way that you are unstoppable? That's right. When you are enter a certain mental and emotional state, it seems like all you can do is to produce lots of your best stuff. It doesn’t matter what's going on around you. It doesn't matter whether you woke up on the wrong side of the bed. It doesn't matter whether people around you are freaking out. You are still able to produce a lot of stuff, take care of your best work and feel good about it. Sounds crazy?

Well, this is called your state of flow. The good news is everybody has one. It can take different forms. It definitely takes place at different times. It can to be triggered by many things. After all, we’re different people from different walks of life with our own distinct experiences. These differences do add up. Still, one of the things that we have in common is a state of flow.

This is where things are ridiculously easy. You produce a lot more and you are able to hit really highquality standards. This is a time where you achieve peak performance. Everybody is capable of this.

The problem is, for most of us, we stumble upon our state of flow. It's kind of like walking by the road and then you hear some rumbling up ahead. It starts to rain and, all of a sudden, you get hit by lightning. Well, how often does that happen. Unfortunately, in the case of states of flow, it’s not often enough.

The key to triggering this state is motivation. A lot of people think that as long as they focus on their state of flow or they think about it or they kick around the idea in their head that it will overcome them somehow some way. It doesn't work that way. You're missing a key ingredient. You're missing motivation.

A lot of people would say, “Okay, I get it. I just need to be motivated so I’ll push myself to be motivated”. There's a big problem with this. Life’s pressures and stresses can overcome you. You know this. I know this. Everybody knows this.

We surround ourselves with too much clutter, and I’m not just talking about clutter that you can see. I’m also talking about emotional and mental clutter. These are uncomfortable memories. These are regrets, problems that we dwell on. These can also involve our worries about the future.

It is no surprise that given this background, our priorities get scrambled. Whatever motivation we may have gets drowned out by the background noise of the rest of our lives. Sadly, the more people focus on their need for motivation or, worse yet, the results motivation brings, they lose sight of their capacity for motivation.

This is why a lot of people continue to struggle. In fact, so many of us have resigned ourselves to the inner and outer struggles that we have that we have lost sight of the reasons why.

This book teaches you practical tips to get motivated on command so you can achieve your state of flaw. Your state of flow is the goal. Motivation is the path to that goal. Motivation is also the fuel for your emotional and mental engine. Be clear about these distinctions. Don't get them confused.

Focus on Practical Goals

This book is not a feel-good book, okay? If you're looking to get pumped up, excited in broad generalized ways, this is not the book for you. Instead, this book is all about practical results. This book is intended to help you become a more effective human being.

We define effectiveness in a very limited way here. Again, this can be controversial because a lot of people would have very expansive and broad definitions of effectiveness that operate on different levels. There's nothing wrong with that and, in many cases, that is highly commendable.

However, as far as this book is concerned, we're going to focus on practicalities. Are you still with me? Good.

It's easy to confuse our ultimate goals with our practical goal. Our ultimate goals, of course, are specific big outcomes and objectives that we would like for ourselves. We would like to live a welllived life.

Let me put it this way. If you knew that you were going to be put in a box tomorrow, what kind of life would you have desired for yourself? In that instance, knowing that you're going to die, you are forced to look back at your life and judge what you have accomplished and be clear about what you wish you had accomplished. That's how we know what our ultimate goals are.

There is also the other set of goals. These are practical goals.

Too many people confuse the two. This is a mistake that leads confusion, wasted energy and wasted focus.

If you want to be more effective, and if you want to tap the power of motivation to push you to live a more effective and purposeful life, focus on the big things. Focus on the grand outcomes and objectives of your life.

Practical goals are involving putting food on the table, paying off debt, saving up enough money for your kid’s college, taking care of insurance costs, so on and so forth. These are important goals, mind you, but in the big scheme of things, they're just steps that you take to go a certain direction. They are means to an end, and the ends are worth the most. These are your ultimate outcomes and objectives. Don’t confuse the two.

Be Clear about the Big Outcomes and Objectives of Your Life

I have to confess I can't help you with this. Everybody’s life outcomes and life objectives are different. Maybe your grand life objective is to become the largest landowner in your state or province. Another person might have the grand objective of simply seeing his or her grandchildren graduate from college. Another person's grand objective have something to do with traveling to at least a hundred different countries.

Everybody's different that’s why I can't help you with this, but one thing is clear. You must have a crystal-clear idea of the outcomes and objectives you want for your life. Nobody can do this for you. You have to decide. You have to put in the work to clarify these things. As you can tell, there is no right or wrong answer.

Choose to be Clear about Your Need for a Process

Now that you have an end goal in mind, understand that this goal is not going to happen by magic. It's just not. Once you have a solid objective in mind, please remember that is point B. You are at point A. Your job is to figure out how to get from point A to point B.

Now, this is not a simple matter of a few hops, skips and jumps. This is a life’s journey. This involves a process that doesn't just involve going through time. It also involves a change in your mind and consciousness. You become a different person as you go through this process. It's the journey that changes you.

Every single day, there will be practical goals popping up all over the place. These goals need to be achieved to be achieved so you can continue your journey to your ultimate objectives and outcomes. I am, of course, talking about practical realities like keeping a roof over your head, making sure there’s food on the table and making sure that a lot of the everyday practical considerations of your life and your family are taken care of.

All these require process, and this process is your state of flow. Now, this is where a lot of people slip up. They think their process is them showing up to a job or doing whatever it takes to pay the rent. However, they're looking at it in the wrong way because if you look at your need for the process and you allow yourself to enter that state of flow, everything else becomes easier. Everything else falls into place.