HRT Can’t Fix Your Ligaments: The Diabolical Role of Estrogen on Connective Tissue

Okay.

I wanna start by telling you about a patient.

We're gonna call her Claire, okay? Now, Claire came into my clinic.

She was 43.

She had been training consistently since her late 20s, three, four, sometimes five days a week.

You know, she knows her way around the gym, right? She was not someone who ever skipped leg day.

She didn't avoid weights.

She didn't treat exercise as punishment, you know.

So she was somebody who genuinely loved working out, and I remember she came into the clinic.

It was...

I can't remember if it was, like, a Monday morn- It was, it, it was in the morning, my morning shift, and her right arm was slightly pulled in towards her body.

You know the way that you hold an arm when you're sort of nursing it or your shoulder's a little angry and you're trying to give it a reason not to be angrier? When she came into my clinic, she had been up since 4:00, 4:00 in the morning, because of her shoulder.

Now, obviously, I asked her what happened, and she said to me, "Nothing." Like, "I can't figure out what's wrong.

Like, I wasn't doing anything new.

I wasn't doing anything extreme.

I went to the gym the day before," and she was pressing, like, the weight that she's pressed, like, you know, 1,000 times before that, and then all of a sudden it just wasn't right, right? And then she showed me.

Like, "And now I can't lift my arm, you know, without it screaming at me." And for Claire, you know, at, in that moment, she really looked at me like she was waiting for me to, like, find the thing that she did wrong.

You know? Like, she was looking for me to do all the ortho exams, for me to show her the error, uh, you know, the mistake that would explain why such a strong and well-trained, committed woman suddenly had this, like, shoulder that had decided not to work in the middle of a completely, you know, ordinary workout the day before.

And, you know, as a doctor, that's what you do.

You run through all your orthopedic testing.

You run all her range of motion, active range of motion, passive range of motion.

You're trying to test for muscle insufficiencies, et cetera.

I- End of the story is I never found an error.

I never found a problem because there isn't really a test to test for ligaments, right? And I'm giving you a little spoiler there, right? What Claire had is what I would see, like, s- some version of that every week, uh, in clinical practice.

It's not, like, bad form or reckless training.

Okay.

I wanna start by telling you about a patient.

We're gonna call her Claire, okay? Now, Claire came into my clinic.

She was 43.

She had been training consistently since her late 20s, three, four, sometimes five days a week.

You know, she knows her way around the gym, right? She was not someone who ever skipped leg day.

She didn't avoid weights.

She didn't treat exercise as punishment, you know.

So she was somebody who genuinely loved working out, and I remember she came into the clinic.

It was...

I can't remember if it was, like, a Monday morn- It was, it, it was in the morning, my morning shift, and her right arm was slightly pulled in towards her body.

You know the way that you hold an arm when you're sort of nursing it or your shoulder's a little angry and you're trying to give it a reason not to be angrier? When she came into my clinic, she had been up since 4:00, 4:00 in the morning, because of her shoulder.

Now, obviously, I asked her what happened, and she said to me, "Nothing." Like, "I can't figure out what's wrong.

Like, I wasn't doing anything new.

I wasn't doing anything extreme.

I went to the gym the day before," and she was pressing, like, the weight that she's pressed, like, you know, 1,000 times before that, and then all of a sudden it just wasn't right, right? And then she showed me.

Like, "And now I can't lift my arm, you know, without it screaming at me." And for Claire, you know, at, in that moment, she really looked at me like she was waiting for me to, like, find the thing that she did wrong.

You know? Like, she was looking for me to do all the ortho exams, for me to show her the error, uh, you know, the mistake that would explain why such a strong and well-trained, committed woman suddenly had this, like, shoulder that had decided not to work in the middle of a completely, you know, ordinary workout the day before.

And, you know, as a doctor, that's what you do.

You run through all your orthopedic testing.

You run all her range of motion, active range of motion, passive range of motion.

You're trying to test for muscle insufficiencies, et cetera.

I- End of the story is I never found an error.

I never found a problem because there isn't really a test to test for ligaments, right? And I'm giving you a little spoiler there, right? What Claire had is what I would see, like, s- some version of that every week, uh, in clinical practice.

It's not, like, bad form or reckless training.