Elbow Grease Part 4: The Modern Environment is Failing You

Restoring Readiness with Movement Hygiene

Nothing is more routine, or more destructive, than how we live today. The modern environment is full of stressors. Many are occupation based (think mechanical breakdown from repetitive tasks) and others are passive inputs correlated with modern lifestyles.

Our elbow evolved to adapt to variable and multi-directional loading. That evolutionary process was once for throwing spears, climbing trees, managing tools, crawling, lifting, catching, and bracing for falls.

Now we sit for hours, perched with wrists cocked and shoulders rounded…

Feeding the Body a “Balanced” Diet

Our elbow doesn’t get fed the right kind of “food”. It hangs from a steering wheel as we drive to and from the home. That same home has an armchair, a tablet, and a TV remote control. This linear, sedentary, and repetitive modern use has caused it to lose its variability and resilience. So when our modern human bodies go back to throwing, swinging, and lifting, we take these imbalances and deconditioned joints to the cleaners. “Tennis Elbow” “Golfers Elbow” are just terms used to describe a symptom of “overuse” in reality it’s an imbalance that has reached it’s breaking point.