They found that exercise will not wear your joints prematurely. Exercise does not damage joints.

Even if you already have arthritis, your joints benefit from regular physical activity. Joint movement keep cartilage healthy by stimulating it to take up nutrients and dispose of waste products.

In addition, exercise strengthens muscles so that they can better support your joints.

No matter how badly you have used your body, however improperly paired your muscle groups have become, you can reverse the trend. And you can do it at home.

Yoga is the answer. Yoga is the most simple and effective way of keeping the joints young and healthy. The superiority of yoga is that it undoes our complex and often used patterns of movement.

You can start at your own level and progress at any rate. Yoga is about journey not the destination. Start slowly and stick with it. The little improvements along the way, feeling looser in your own skin, feeling lighter and feeling younger, that’s the goal.

Start with the most modest, disarmingly gentle stuff, where you really find hard to believe anything is happening at all and eventually progress to more difficult poses-asanas.

But yoga does take time and effort. Sometimes it’s hard just to hold a stretch for a matter of seconds, but this is what it is all about. The harder you find the stretch, the more you need it.

In time, all soft tissue will loosen, even blood vessels and nerves as the body is reintroduced to it’s extremes. Elasticity is restored and so is streamlined, smooth-gliding function. The stretches pull the tissue and create a much more vigorous blood supply and the skeleton is cleansed and rejuvenated.

The root cause of cumulative joint problems is the lack of variety in the way we use our bodies. When we remain locked in by our stereotyped pattern, our joints become trapped by our physical habits.  Joint action loses opportunity, loses variety, loses lubrication, loses elastic stretch and clothing of muscle tissue.

There is another set of factors: repetition and overuse.

We either do too little or too much: the occasional bout of activity in desert of non-activity -  suddenly leaping up from the sofa to do a intense shoveling in the garden. The skeleton struggles to accommodate the quantum leap from non-activity to repetitive aggressive over-activity.

Balanced, properly coordinated muscular control is the very essence of healthy movement and healthy joints. Every muscle performing a set movement has a partner to perform the reverse movement. For easy action, both need to be well-matched in length and strength.