The last couple of nights I’ve woken up with a nagging pain in one of the mystery muscles of my inner upper back on the left side. It’s only a little ache when I turn my head a certain way. Nothing to make a big deal out of.
It reminds me of that meme going around that says everything hurts after 30 if you sleep at the wrong angle.
My thirties weren’t nearly that bad for body-pains. But the mystery pains are a constant reminder of two things.
As you get older, the aches and nagging pains are always going to be there. They don’t always have an obvious cause. There isn’t much to do about them, either. You just have to shrug and go on about your business.
That’s the first thing. The second thing:
These constant companions are not inevitable symptoms of an even more inevitable decline.
Keeping muscles active and joints mobile and flexible goes a long way to minimizing the nags of aging.
What youth gives you free, age takes a fee.
Experience has taught me that the most effective remedy is to stop giving these aches the time of day. They’re going to happen no matter what. Dwelling on them means that I’m aching AND I’m giving my attention to the aches.
Double the suffering for the price of one.
What you don’t want to do is get into that habit of thinking of yourself as old, beat-up, past your due-by date, and identifying as an old person who is meant to hurt.
Ignore it. Move it how you can to loosen it up. Oh, and here’s the one nobody wants to do, which is prevention. A lot of the mystery nags (not all, but a lot) are avoidable by not doing the things that cause them to flare up, and by strengthening the muscles with resistance training.
That’s counter-intuitive advice in some circles. But, as I discovered and wrote about in Squat Every Day, keeping tender areas — shoulders, upper back, hips —active, mobile, and flushed with blood may as well be a wunderdrug for soft-tissue pains and injuries.
You aren’t hurting because you’re getting older. You’re getting older because you’re allowing your joints to hurt by not moving them often.
The “everybody knows” advice to rest, go easier, and stop moving? That’s contributing to the problem and making it worse.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Are you going to think yourself old?
Most do.
The majority are old in mind and spirit long before their body catches up.
But you don’t have to. It’s as much a choice as a biological reality.
Which way are you going?
Matt Perryman