It’s a well-worn cliche of getting older: Your back complains when you get out of the car, your knees have opinions about stairs, and you wake up so stiff that you can barely move. Somewhere along the way you started saying “well, I’m not thirty anymore,” like that settles it.
Most of the everyday aches people blame on getting older are actually the cost of not moving, and they respond to movement at a smaller dose than you’d expect it would take to make a difference.
To be clear: aging is real - especially if you’ve put a lot of “city miles” on your body in the first 3 - 4 decades of your life. Joints wear, recovery slows, and nobody outruns their own mortality. All of this can be true and we can still benefit from not taking a fatalistic approach to our own physical capabilities.
Think about what a normal week looks like for most of us. Sit in the car, then at a desk, then in the car again, then on the couch. Your hips spend ten or twelve hours a day folded to roughly ninety degrees. Your spine holds one shape. Your shoulders round forward toward a screen. Then one day you bend over to pull a weed or reach into the trunk, there’s a twinge or a spasm, and the story writes itself from there: I’m getting old.
A thirty-year-old who sat like that for a decade would ache too, and that’s becoming more common with people going straight into sedentary jobs in their 20s. The ache isn’t related to your birth year, it’s related to all the hours your body spent doing nothing. Our bodies tend to keep what you use and let go of what you don’t. You’ll hear this referred to as “use it or lose it”, or in exercise physiology terms, “S.A.I.D.” (specific adaptations to imposed demands). Muscles that never get asked to work get weaker, and joints that never move through their full range of motion get stiff. This is an adaptation, not damage. Your body is adapting to what you train it to do.
This is really good news because adaptation runs both ways. The same system that got stiff and brittle from disuse gets limber and strong when you start training it, even in very modest doses. I routinely watch this play out with clients. The knee that is always in pain quiets down after a few weeks of the legs getting stronger. The back that flared every time the yard needed work feels fine once picking things up becomes something the body practices instead of something it survives. (But you still have my full endorsement to pretend it’s hurting to get out of yard work - I hate yard work.)
To be clear: pain can absolutely indicate a real injury or medical problem, especially pain that gets worse instead of better when you exercise. Pain that’s sharp, that showed up after a specific incident, that comes with numbness or swelling, or that’s getting worse instead of better should be treated by a physical therapist or a doctor. But the everyday stiffness and low-grade aching that crept in gradually over years of sitting is mostly not a medical mystery. That’s under-use, which has a cheap, boring, reliable fix.
So here’s what I’d ask you to do this week: catch yourself the next time you say “I’m getting old.” Note what you were doing. Then give that exact thing a little practice every day for two weeks. Take the stairs slower but more often. Get down to the floor and back up once a day, using whatever help you need. Walk ten minutes after dinner.
Then check the ache again and you might find it wasn’t a verdict on your age, but a request from your body.
If you try the two-week experiment, I’d love to hear how it goes. And if you want help building the next step after that, that’s what I do: blackcreekcoaching.com.