Joint Supports

Do you really need them?

You may have seen athletes wearing them and wonder whether you need to use support tools for your joints or not. Or maybe you are experiencing pain in your elbows or knees and are thinking of using them to continue training at the same intensity. The truth is you most likely shouldn’t use them.

The first thing you need to consider is your goal. Are you training for a strength competition or are you training to be stronger and healthier?

Professional athletes and competitors do not have a choice but to deliver maximum performance using any method allowed by the rules of their sport, even if this is not always the healthiest thing to do.

If you want to progress, you need to stick to our golden rule which is to never skip steps.

It is very important to understand that if you need any kind of external support for you to perform an exercise or lift a certain amount of weight, then you are simply not strong enough to do it. And if you are not strong enough to do it, you should not try. You can’t rush progress and you can definitely not get strong faster by increasing resistance too soon.

The reason why you can’t do it without support is because although your primary muscles are strong enough, your stabilizers and core aren’t. Using support tools like wraps and belts will help you do harder exercises and lift heavier, but will also widen the strength gap between your bigger muscles and secondary muscles and core. If you want to be really strong, you must understand that you need to master the basics. A house is only as strong as its foundations.

Therefore, you should keep training without external support tools until you are fully ready to progress. This is why we always recommend to stick with an exercise until it becomes easy to perform all reps of all sets with perfect form. This is how you know you are strong enough to increase the difficulty and move onto the next step.

As for those of you who experience pain in your joints and tendons or ligaments, it is even more important to train light and make sure you train within a range of resistance which doesn’t bring pain. You might want to use wraps, elbow sleeves or knee sleeves to be safe, but make sure the exercises you do are not painful even without them. In fact, full rest may be more advisable in most cases of joint and connective tissue pain until full recovery.

The key point here is that if you cannot perform an exercise without a wrap, a belt, or any support tool, then you lack strength somewhere. And the only way for you to fix this is by continuing to train at your level without added support until you are ready.

And if you are injured or feel pain, you should decrease the intensity or fully rest until the pain disappears, but you should certainly not keep increasing the intensity.

If you want real strength, train safe and think on the long term!