WS#51 - Slow creeping changes

Week of 4/1/24

Almost all fitness changes come very slowly. If you look for them daily, you will be disappointed. This goes for both positive and negative changes. You could exist in a certain form when you are 25 and then suddenly you wake up 40 and things have gone in the wrong direction. You rarely make these multi-decade changes unknowingly when things are going in the right direction. I had a thought the other day about the stages of life that many of us go through, in particular those with children. The framework I envisioned is as follows:

1.     Ages 25-40: Many have children in this age range and find themselves playing on the floor, getting up and down often. People follow around young children all day, pick them up, put them down, get down on one knee, sit on the ground, roll on the ground, and find themselves in positions they would not otherwise be in.

2.     Ages 40-65: As the young children have now grown and don’t need an adult playmate as much, many adults do not find themselves in any of the positions mentioned above. Mostly, they are sitting, standing, or walking. There is no jumping, rolling, sitting on the floor, or really any activities that require deep ranges of motion of the hip, knee, or ankle joints. This is the danger zone.

3.     Ages 65+: The cycle repeats when grandchildren enter the picture. Almost all grandparents want to be able to play like they could when they were 25-40. It is fun to be on the ground with young kids, they reward you with love. However, at this stage, many people find they cannot tolerate the tension that comes from these positions and opt out of this type of playtime, at least not playing as much as they would like. This happens over decades and is mostly ignored… until it can’t be.

It takes conscious effort to maintain your physical fitness and the ability to move your body well. Our world is set up to create slow moving people with poor health. We have to actively fight this or the cycle will repeat itself forever, and likely get worse. For the sake of keeping this shorter, I will keep my thoughts on childhood and adolescence brief. For many, the deterioration of our health may start earlier in life, as early as elementary and middle school. Kids who do not participate in activities that require the use of their bodies can start to lose joint range of motion very quickly. Couple that with the fact that kids are sitting most of the day at school and home, there often is no need to access certain ranges of motion to meet the demands of life. This lack of movement leads to many issues and plenty of smarter people than me have identified this as part of the childhood obesity epidemic. Lack of awareness on the parents’ side is an important component of this negative cycle, and childhood health is critically linked to the awareness of parents and supervising adults. I will cut my rant short here.

Go towards the uncomfortable positions and face them head on. If it is terribly uncomfortable to sit on the floor, do it anyway for a short amount of time. If you struggle to get up off the ground, do it anyway. Discomfort is different from pain. If you have real pain, seek professional help. Seek help on the things you struggle with because suddenly (decades later) those problems will go from barely impacting your quality of life, to completely changing the way you thought you would be living as you get older. Don’t be a victim to your lifestyle, you will look back and regret it knowing that you are the only one to blame.

-Matt