JOINT HEAVEN: Circle your joints and they will love you.

Aging is a joint game. Many of the chronic conditions that we encounter as we get older are conditions that affect the joints. Arthritis is an excellant example, where deterioration in the cartilage within the joint causes pain and inflammation. This article describes an excellent exercise approach with often dramatic results* that improves joint health and nerve function while reducing pain and inflammation.
​I'm sharing my secrets with you.

Life experience and inactivity tend to promote joint deterioration.
It therefore makes sense to make joint health recuperation and rejuvenation a priority as we get older.

When we are inactive for long periods, our joints stiffen and our muscles tighten. This causes poor circulation. Inflammation and pain increase and nervous system function diminishes. (For every hour of extended sitting, blood flow to the legs and feet is reduced by as much as 50%. This condition is reversed if you move for just 5 minutes out of every hour.)

If you have problems with your joints, inactivity is your enemy.

Here are the basic ways that a joint can move:
  1. Circling the joint. The smaller the circle the better.
  2. Hinge motion: Bending and straightening.
  3. Lateral movement is side to side. 
  4. Twists (aka rotations): Turning around a central axis.

This feature article discusses the benefits of using gentle circling motion to enhance healing while reducing pain and inflammation. It is the most effective and safest way to move a hurting joint. Circling exercises, customized for those older, are demonstrated throughout the 4 Building Better Balance DVD classes.

We are all familiar with circling our ankles or our wrists. The circling technique I advocate is a bit more involved. These seated exercises require extra concentration to perform the movement in a small and relaxed manner while at the same time keeping the rest of the body still. Consciousness and sensitivity are required but the effort is worth the often dramatic* results.

Benefits of Circling:
  • Circling is by far the safest and most effective movement for a joint, whether it is injured, otherwise compromised or not. Circling the joint gently is less stressful and at the same time a more thorough, safe and healthy use of it. Gentle circling results in deep joint release which in turn quickly enhances the healing process, reducing pain and inflammation.
  • Circling is also an excellent way to warm up your body. For instance, if you have been sitting for a while, circle your knees before standing up. 
  • In general, whenever you feel tension building up in the joints, use gentle circling to realign the body and release tension.​ Inproved nervous system function is one of the results.
How to Circle Your Joints Properly:
  • When circling using my technique it is important to isolate the movement by holding one part of the body still while gently circling the other part, all done from a seated position.
  • With circling, smaller is better. In this situation a small motion is more effective than a larger one. Small, slow, gentle with little resistance. This may be a difficult lesson to learn. We are often told that bigger is better in all things. Not so with joint circling. Injury produces tension which can make it even harder to move the joint in a relaxed manner. Persevere. Make the circles smaller. 
  • Using seated knee circles as an example: Sit toward the front of your chair, place your hands under your knee, lean back to lift the leg, keep your back and thigh motionless as you let the lower leg completely relax. Think of the lower leg as a rag doll leg. Let it swing out and in gently and then let it circle. Keep the circles small and relaxed. Go both directions. 
An amazing attribute: The potential for successive release of adjacent joints is one of the dramatic features of circling (also known as circumduction). Years ago I discovered something astounding. If you gently circle one joint, the joint next door to it also releases. This in turn triggers adjacent joint release up and down the body in a similar way to dominos falling. It is especially notable when it involves the spine where release of the top joint in the spine (where the head meets the neck) can cause a rippling effect of release all down the entire spine! This benefit will only happen if you truly relax the joint as you move it in this small circling fashion. The reaction happens because the simple movement is of significant importance to the nervous system. Once the system is triggered to release, it communicates the message to the next joint and the next joint and so on and so on...
Great Circling Exercises: 
  • Knee circles, seated or standing: Essential exercise for improving knee health. Fabulous preventative movement that keeps your knee joints healthy. See Knees That Hurt for more information.
  • Relaxed shoulder joint circles while tilting over: This is a wonderful way to move your arm if you have any shoulder pain. It is especially good for rotator cuff injuries.
  • Seated hip circles: This exercise releases lower back tension in a gentle and profound manner. Very safe and easy to do. See Exercises to Release Lower Back Pain.
  • Atlas joint head/neck circles: Isolated tiny circles in the joint that connects the head to the neck are amazingly effective at reducing neck tension. See Exercises for a Stiff Neck.
  • Thumb circles: Believe it or not, "twiddling" your thumbs is a wonderful way to ease the arthritis that affects the base of the thumb. 
  • All 4s: Get on your hands and knees with your palms under your shoulders and your knees under your hips. Pretend you have a tray of glasses on your back and circle the entire back keeping it parallel to the floor without spilling any water. Keep the circles small and smooth. Go both directions. This is an amazing exercise that ends up circling 8 joints at the same time: both shoulders, wrists, hips and knees.

In my daily dance practice I use 2 circlings extensively:
  • Any time I feel tenderness or tension in my knees, I stop what I am doing and circle my knees (using the standing circling exercise described in Knees That Hurt).
  • I frequently do a standing version of the atlas joint circling. Bending over with the crown of my head toward the floor, I very gently make tiny circles in the joint that connects the head to the neck. I keep my knees released and slightly bent. As I make these small movements at the top of my neck I will sense a progressive release of each joint of the spine from the neck down. This is the exercise that helped me recover from a difficult shoulder injury last year. (Be careful if you try this. Bending over can cause dizziness. Make sure to hold onto something first.)

Circling Exercises to Avoid:
  • Head circles. Many exercise teachers will have you circle your head. I avoid this. It is a risky exercise for fragile neck joints.

In my opinion, the best approach to healing is to utilize all types of movement. Use hinge motion to strengthen and stretch. Use isometrics and resistance training to strengthen. BUT base your therapy on simple and gentle joint circling for a quicker, more effective recovery.

Here is an excellent treatment plan for a hurting joint: Begin with passive gentle circling. Then move on to active gentle circling before embarking on the more aggressive hinge exercises. Return to gentle joint circling periodically during therapeutic process to release any build up of tension.

* Examples of Success Using Joint Circling:
  • At a presentation I gave several years ago, I led a short exercise session on lower back health composed of exercises I have developed which are included in all my classes and DVDs. The 10 minutes of gentle movement affected one attendee so much that he came up to me afterwards exclaiming that the lower back pain he had arrived with that morning was now gone! He also said that the same thing had happened to all 8 gentlemen seated at his table! Central to the 10 minutes of exercise is a wonderfully effective seated hip joint circling that releases tension in the lower back.
  • ​​A student in one of my classes had bone-on-bone arthritis in one of her knees to such an extent that it took her 40 seconds of excruciating pain in the morning to straighten her knee. I taught her how to circle the knee joint for her to practice before straightening her knee in the morning. After doing so she was able to straighten it pain-free! 
  • I spent much of last year with a neck and shoulder injury that took over 6 months to heal. One of the reasons for the successful recuperation was my daily practice of atlas joint circling. It is now a basic part of my own regimen.
  • While writing this article I rediscovered the effectiveness of "twiddling" the thumbs. During a yoga class that I took recently, I found that if I circled my thumbs while resting in Child's Pose that the entire spine released! Please see my note above about this amazing attribute.

Why is circling so effective?

When circling is done with sensitivity and release it is extremely effective. This is true whether the joint is healthy or inflamed. Why is this so effective? The nervous system plays an immense role in all things physical. When your body is in an inflamed state, with tension and pain, the nervous system is compromised, causing blockage and constraining circulation. Gentle joint movement removes that blockage. Nervous system function is streamlined, resulting in better circulation and reduced inflammation and pain.
​This is a true example of how smaller and more sensitive
​can be more powerful than big and brawny.

Hinge Motion: A different kind of essential joint motion.

​Straightening and bending is called hinge motion. This is the type of joint movement we are most familiar with. Straightening and bending the knee for example. Squats, leg extensions, bicep curls are all hinge based exercises. Hinge exercises are invaluable and should be included in every exercise regimen, especially for building strength. However, they can be abrasive on tender joints and in my opinion should not be the primary resource for injury rehabilitation.
Great Hinge Exercises: 2 essential hinge exercises you should do daily. See Exercises to Stop Leg Cramps for more information.
  • Point and flex the feet to stretch the back of the ankle and the Achilles tendon every morning, preferably prior to standing.
  • Stretch the back of the legs every evening before bed, especially if you get leg cramps. These are known as hamstring or calf stretches.
Background notes: I am not a trained physical therapist, nor do I have the rhetoric of a professional trainer. You would be hearing terms like flexion, extension, hyperextension, abduction, adduction and circumduction if were. I am writing this article in words we can all understand to be as helpful as possible. I speak out of 20 years of experience teaching exercise for those older and 45 years of fitness and dance training.

For those of you who are fitness professionals I would like to make a distinction between circumduction and circling. Technically the only joints that have a circling capability are the shoulder and hip joints because they are ball and socket joints. This is called circumduction. Circling in other joints is a hybrid action which is a combination of joint and muscle movement. For my purposes, I make no distinction. The image I use involves controlled (yet released) movement that originates from a single point in the center of the joint. To me it is doesn't matter whether the joint is a ball and socket joint or not.
Published March 31, 2019