Get it? Joint custody? Ha? See what happens when I try to be funny before I have my coffee?
In any case, it seems an unfair choice to have to make—between your heart, mood and overall health and your knee cartilage—but there you have it: a new study has found that middle-aged people who do a lot of high-impact exercising (running and jumping) are at a higher risk for arthritis and are in other ways not doing their knees any good. That makes sense, when you consider all the pounding running entails. Medical News Today
But you'd be hard pressed to find a doctor who thinks it's cool to kick back and stop working out in order to spare your knees. What's more, new research in Germany shows that athletes had healthier white blood cells than their sedentary counterparts—and white blood cells, of course, are responsible for fighting off infections and seeking out and ridding the body of abnormal cell growths, such as cancer. This piece from Health.comexplains it in plain English.
So if if you're worried about your knees, choose lower impact exercises like swimming and cycling that may be protective of your joints, and can give you all the health yeas of exercising without the nays. Swimming is especially good for building muscle in a way that's gentle on everything except your hair. Sure, it can be a pain to get changed and blow dry and all that, but swimming has the highest calorie burn of all the solitary sports. Plug your vital stats into this caculator to figure out how much you'd torch displacing water a few days a week.
