One of the great pleasures of attending physique or trade shows is the chance to spend time with old friends and share memories and new training ideas. The other day I got to spend some time with Bill Pearl in Chicago. Quite a few years ago, when Bill had his health club in Pasadena, California, he ushered me into the world of forearm training. Before that I relied entirely on biceps work to build my forearms. Bill made me realize how much I was limiting my arm size by ignoring forearm work. No question, it was a breakthrough for my arm training. It was with great pleasure that I reminisced with Bill about the good old days.

We were both laughing over some shared event, and gradually the conversation drifted around to the following:

'Larry, you've been training now for a long time. How are your joints holding up?'

Casually, I replied, 'You know, Bill, I don't have trouble with any of my joints at all.'

'Really, that's amazing. My shoulders just kill me. I can hardly sleep, they hurt so bad. I guess it's all those years of heavy bench pressing.' 'Bill, I used to have so much trouble with my knees, I would have to carry a small tripod with me on the airplane to prop up my legs. It was the only way I could avoid the pain. They'd ache so bad, I could hardly stand it on long flights.'

Bill and I are not the only ones who suffer. At a recent seminar in Hawaii that introduced Bio Phase training, I asked the following question: 'How many here are suffering from some type of injury? Maybe it's a sore elbow or aching knees, or could it be those horrible painful shoulders?'

About 30 percent of the fellows raised their hands, some with a wry, knowing smile, as if to say, 'Yes, that's the name of the game.' Most of those who raised their hands had trained for many years and were carrying good size.

I asked them, 'How would you like to get rid of those aches and pains and make better gains at the same time?'

The wry smiles were immediately replaced by very interested, though somewhat doubtful, expressions.

A wise Greek philosopher, while watching the ancient Olympics, made this oft-quoted comment: 'The human body is the only machine that works better the more it is used.'

Where did we go wrong? Why is it that most of the fellows who have been using their machine for 10 years or more are all suffering some kind of connective-tissue irritation? Could it be we have not been using but abusing our machines? I think that's the case. Granted, we could all drop our poundage by 50 percent to avoid the joint failure, but then our size would also drop. Is there another answer?

How do you infuse some fountain of youth into your sore joints? The answer is the same one I gave Bill Pearl, which he's using right now: Change, change, change.

A tennis racket weighs less than a pound, but it isn't long before the serious player performing the same serve day after day develops tennis elbow. Is it any wonder that using a heavy-weight workout with little variation begins to cripple us? ALL The human machine does work better the more you use it, but the key is to use it with wide variation. Once you begin to limit the amount of variation in your program, you begin to develop residual fatigue. It takes longer and longer to warm up the joints and poorly oxygenated connective tissue. Before long the pain leaves the gym with you and crawls into bed with you at night.

How do we make these changes in our programs? You might be thinking there just aren't that many really good exercises.

I agree that some exercises are better than others, but if we sprinkle in some of the less effective ones in order to keep ourselves from suffering from joint inflammation, won't that in itself help us make better gains? How many weeks do we lose nursing a bad elbow'or worse yet, a bad shoulder? (If you can get a bad shoulder to heal in less than six months, you're lucky.) Bad knees? They don't ever get any better.

The best thing to do is find exercises that do not cause pain of any sort. That will help get circulation into the injured area. Don't rely on warmup-induced endorphin release to mask the pain. The injury is still there. Find exercises that don't cause pain when you can't warm up. Those will accelerate healing. Ice the injured area until it goes numb each night. Take aspirin, as it's a mild anti-inflammatory.

Once you've rehabilitated your aching joints, treat them with constant change; they'll last a lifetime without pain. It was necessary to warm up for five or 10 minutes on each bodypart when I was in my 20s and training the old way. Now that I'm in my 50s and training with Bio Phase, I no longer need to warm up at all, but I change my workout program every night. The vectors of stress are constantly changing. I do occasionally get hurt, but the next workout on the same bodypart will have me doing entirely different exercises. So the pain disappears within the week. And on most exercises I'm using heavier weights than ever.

You can enjoy the same freedom from joint pain if you learn to use rather than abuse your machine. IM

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