“It doesn’t get much easier.” This statement came from one of my peers who was ten years older than me. He who expressed this to me after sharing with him the knee pain I was experiencing. This knee pain was brought about by spending a significant amount of time preparing my garden for the spring season over the weekend. Moving wheelbarrows of mulch, laying weed barriers, setting up anti-squirrel defense systems, and turning my compost pile were just a few tactics that took a fair amount of physical exertion. I knew my garden was getting prepared to become a lush and fertile climate for veggies to thrive. However, my knee felt tired, swollen, and cranky after the rigorous effort I put into gardening.
I understood my friend’s dry, yet, honest exclamation. His statement expressed his experience with aches and pains he has endured throughout his life. He was a sage I respected who had seen ten more years of stress than me that life could throw at a person. However, my entrepreneurial spirit was motivated to find the positive in this comment.
The next day, I thought about the phrase “it doesn’t get any easier” and connected that statement to the currency of the situation regarding my knee pain. My immediate counter to this statement was, “but, it gets better.” I’m sure many people can relate to challenging times in life. Being a parent, attending college, and starting a business were not easy parts of my life.
I learned fast that progressing from a regular undergraduate student to graduate classes didn’t offer any breaks. After my son turned fourteen, I was posed with an intelligent, courageous, and strong-willed human under my roof that I hadn’t dealt with throughout my life. Branching off from working for large companies to opening my business left me feeling like I was on an inflatable raft out in the Pacific Ocean with only an oar to paddle myself to shore. Those times weren’t “easy” at all. However, by enduring the trials and tribulations these circumstances put in my way, I’ve progressed through these challenging experiences. I now possess pertinent tools to make my everyday life enjoyable and fulling.
Enduring the nagging pain and the inconvenience of a swollen knee wasn’t the most desirable state of affairs I would prefer. However, I believed I would feel better in more ways than one by developing well-thought-out approaches to progress past this knee pain. As an advocate of lifetime fitness, my nature was to implement tactics to improve my knee status and find a way to “get better.”
We promote a phrase to our personal training clients at the beginning of their training session: “you’ll feel better walking out than when you walked in.” Even though a person might feel physically deconditioned, enduring pain in the body, or stressed out from the logistics of life, nine times out of ten, they feel better after a bout of routine exercise.
So, how could the currency of my situation become better? I had a strong sense that focusing on the healing abilities of my body as I aged wasn’t a productive way to improve my situation. A billion research articles state that the body doesn’t heal as fast following each trip around the sun. Mulling my mind on those thoughts wasn’t going to do much good for my knee pain. However, designing a workout focusing on healing loads, injury prevention, balance, and strength training, the other parts of my body will improve how I feel. If I can improve how I feel, things will “get better.”
Focusing on joint injury prevention, balance, coordination, and functional strength are simple yet effective exercise themes. Techniques such as planks, push-ups, and single-leg balancing exercises promote strength, endurance, and durability in many critically essential joints throughout the body.
Enduring pain at any episode of life can obstruct the overall experiences we get out of our everyday lives. Indeed, we can be posed with new challenges that we haven’t yet seen, making them a challenge to overcome. However, if we can establish a starting point in how we can “make things better,” perhaps we can take steps forward to alleviating and potentially surpassing what malady is imposing its will upon us.
Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.
