Pain And Getting Older

One of the best things about my role as a personal trainer is to help people. Whether it be with their diet, lifestyle choices or exercise prescription or all of the above I can genuinely enrich my clients lives for the better. Pain is a topic that comes up often with my older clients. Many people associate body pain with getting older. Let me tell you now this is not the case and hopefully, this post will change your paradigm about getting older and being in pain.

I will start by giving an example of a male client in his mid 50’s I have been training for about 3 years now. He occasionally would have knee pain on his right side. At the beginning of our training he would often say to me that getting old is hell because he associated his knee pain with quite simply a fact of getting old. Once I addressed the main culprit of his issue I told him his knee pain isn’t necessarily from getting old. The issue is from an imbalance in your hip over the years that has led to a gradual degradation of your knee joint. There are many variables in this equation in terms of activity level, the severity of the imbalance and water intake play a part in the equation. I then began to try and change his paradigm about pain and getting old. I told him it’s not necessarily your age that correlates with pain it’s a mere fact that you let that imbalance occur over how many years and it gradually did a disservice to the integrity of your knee joint. I told him if he had addressed this issue earlier in his life with the proper stretching he would most likely not have any pain. Since I have been training him his knee pain has been minimal as we have addressed the root cause and it’s not his age.

I hope you get where I am going with this. People are unique in terms of the state of their body but I want to be clear on this. Muscle balances over time can break down the integrity of the musculoskeletal system which in turn can lead to pain. If you simply address these issues by identifying the imbalance and proper stretching you can get the body tracking the way it is supposed to. This, in turn, will eliminate or decrease the amount of pain. Stop telling yourself your old because you’re in pain. You would be surprised at how quickly I have got clients pain relief in one session from stretching or addressing the muscle imbalance no matter their age.

Again each case is different but my challenge is if you have joint or muscle pain some simple internet research will shed light on your specific condition. You should be able to find the proper stretches to do with your symptoms. Start doing them every day and then after a month or 2 see if your condition is improved. The key here is consistency for this to work. Stretch every day especially if you work at a desk. I am going to save a lot of you some time by offering this gem of a link. If you have neck or upper back pain and work at a computer here is a great set of neck and upper back stretches to do. These are called Mckenzie neck exercises after the physical therapist who came up with them in the ’60s. If you have neck pain do these exercises every day for at least a month and see how you feel.