The Aging Process – Aches and Pains?

“Oh, I’m gettin’ old…”  As we age we expect to have aches and pains, but is that how it should be? Are our bodies just wearing down like our car?

I’m not a biologist or a doctor so don’t take any of what follows as a blanket statement for all cases, BUT, I think we should consider some of our views about aging. In particular, those nagging pains that we associate with being older. Are the achy low backs, shoulders, and knees that are so common in our society just a result of advancing years or is it not merely the years themselves, but the accumulating time spent with bad habits?

Take for instance the low back. This is a very common ailment (we’ve all heard the statistic that 80% of people will suffer low back pain at some point in their lives). Do we believe that low back pain is a part of aging, or is it that we all do roughly the same things? We spend and exorbitant amount of time sitting, putting our spines in a bad situation. Sitting causes you to tuck your tail bone causing rounding your spine. If you also use a computer your shoulders hunch forward as well, adding to the rounding of the spine. This all puts chronic, excess pressure on your intervertebral discs which over time can lead to back pain.

The important thing to now think about is how many hours of this accumulate over the years. Let’s think only about your working life starting at around age 22.  If you sit eight hours a day at work plus two hours in front of the TV at night, that makes ten hours a day on workdays. This equals fifty hours a week and 2,600 per year. That means that a 30 year old who began working at 22 would have 20,800 hours of accumulated time in a chair. Compare that to a 45 year old whose number is 59,800. It seems logical to me that it’s not just the fact that the 45 year old is older, but that they have 39,000 more hours of accumulated sitting.

It’s the same idea as with other health concerns like diabetes and heart disease.  People don’t have heart attacks or become diabetic from their first hamburger. It takes years of eating the same unhealthy foods for the damage to accumulate enough to begin causing issues. We as a society understand that relationship and have embraced the idea that ceasing to engage in poor eating habits can help to reverse the damage. We should also think about our aches and pains in the same way. Much of the damage that is already done can be at least alleviated (if not reversed) by removing the bad habits that have, over time, lead to our discomfort. Aging is the accumulation of bad habits.

If you’d like to know what things might be leading to any annoying aches and pains that you have, try getting a fitness professional to take you through a Functional Movement Screen.