I was talking to one of the regulars at the gym this evening, who is in his late fifties. We chat occasionally and he is a small business owner with a relatively physical job, though he has a handful of employees that do most of the work these days. He is active at the gym and if anything, is a bit on the thin side, however he has some leg issues that have been creeping up on him with age.
Tonight we were talking about how even though we are getting older (he has a decade on me), compared to many in our age group and even much younger, we are both in relatively good shape. He commented that if he had known what kind of pain he would experience now a decade or two ago, he would have done different exercises, stretched more, ensured his joints were healthier. Things that I have started doing more of this year, and I am feeling the benefits.
We are terrible at predicting how we are going to feel in the future, especially when it comes to our health, because we haven't experienced it before. When we are young, we can't imagine what it feels like to wake up with an aching back every morning, or struggling to put on shoes, or having laboured breathing when exerting ourselves. We feel okay and make the largely incorrect assumption that, we will always feel okay.
But as the guy noted tonight, another thing that people who aren't in decent shape aren't very good at, is reading negative changes in their body. It is something I hadn't thought much about earlier, but it must be pretty true that when someone exercises regularly and pays attention to how their body functions, when it isn't functioning, they notice it. This means that they can either course correct their activity, or they can rest or see a specialist. Their body can tell them when they are out of sync, because there is less noise, they are better at reading, and being active means that it gets uncovered earlier.
We are all, always training.
The problem is that much of the training we do is teaching negatively conditioning our body. It is easy to see with office workers for example, where they often have sore necks from staring at a screen, shoulders slumped. Or with kids with bad posture from again, staring at a screen. But it is harder to observe the changes in our eyesight from continually focusing on a screen a few inches from our face, or the muscles in our lower back from sitting down all the time, or the atrophy in our joints from disuse, or the pressure on our knees with each overweight step. All these negatives (and many more) compound and add up over time, so that while each day we don't notice, at some point the discomfort grows to the point we can't not notice.
At that point, we feel we have a problem, but the fact is that very few of these issues are acute and instead build over time and generally require a lot of time and effort to correct, if they can be reversed completely at all. For many of them, all that can be done is to improve the condition, but it will never be as good as it could have been.
If we think about our physical potential when we were twenty years of age, we pretty much all had a lot of room to grow, strengthen, improve, and insulate our future from daily aches and pains, as well as reduce the chances of chronic lifestyle disorders. At thirty, a lot of that potential has gone, but we still have a lot of improvement possibility. The problem is, most of us don't do the work until there is a problem. We don't "precondition" our body for a future pain we can't imagine having, so we keep on repeating whatever we feel is right for us now.
Right now, might be wrong later.
I know that if I could go back thirty years to when I started at a gym knowing what I know now about and how my body feels, I would have changed my routine and put more repetitive emphasis on conditioning, rather than building muscle. Muscle is important to build, but the body also should work as a flowing unit, and all the pieces need development and alignment for balance. It isn't too late to improve.
There is still potential to be better, even if there isn't the potential to be as good as I could have been had I started earlier. There is still the chance to reduce pain and inflammation in my body, and to increase my daily capabilities and how I feel in general.
I am a people watcher and when I walk down the street or through the shops, I see all kinds of people who are obviously not in good condition. It isn't just that there are many who are overweight, but there are also many who have troubles with the way they walk and stand, who are stopping or unable to bend, who look like their body isn't really cooperating with them and isn't assisting them through their daily lives. And it always makes me wonder if they recognise the discomfort and if they are doing something about it.
Are they working the problem, or avoiding it?
No one can eat healthy or exercise for me, so it is up to me to do the work required. Yes, there are various drugs out there that can assist with something like weight loss, but everything has side effects and what happens in twenty years from now, is still an unknown. Our body is an incredible tool, but like all tools, it needs to be maintained and we need to know how to use it properly to get the most out of it.
We often worry about whether we will have enough money when we retire and prepare for it. Shouldn't we also do the prep work required to ensure we also have enough health?
Our repetitive actions amplify their impacta over time.
How will you feel a year, ten years, twenty years from now?
Taraz
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