I'm 40 and I am legitimately trying to figure out why it is other millennials have back pain and other physical problems when I don't. That's not a flex, that's a genuine question I have whenever I see one of us say "my back hurts" or "my knee hurts".
One of two things: Hard physical labour especially with bad form, or desk jockeys not taking "use it or lose it" seriously, developing postural issues.
Generally speaking you want to be fit by 30 because after that it becomes a steep uphill battle, while maintaining or even regaining fitness you had then is way easier.
Yes, older zoomers, that means your fate might already have been sealed it's going to be an uphill battle with occasional lumbago while you regain flexibility or your bad movement habits and postural deficiencies are going to hit around 40. Now get off my lawn you can jog on the sidewalk.
I don't know if it'd be a good idea to say because I don't want to doxx myself. But I don't live in either of those areas.
I just do this stuff naturally. I walk to the store because it's a waste of gas to drive and I don't want to contribute to climate collapse unless I have to go a long distance, in which case I drive.
I make this green iced tea where I boil some water and steep the tea with lemon slices because it's delicious and better tasting than shitty tap water.
No actually, in my very unresearched and unknowledgable opinion the majority of people don't really set out to walk much more than to and from their cars, the washroom, or the kitchen
I don't walk to my grocery store, despite it being half a mile from my house, because there are no sidewalks along the 6 lane roads between my house and the store.
The street in front of my neighborhood has been under constant construction for 7 years, and I'm afraid to ask them to add sidewalks because I'm pretty sure this would make the entire area entirely unwalkable even in an emergency due to the construction barriers they'd install for at least the next decade for that project.
I don’t walk more than an hour a day and that’s just to the shops and back.
That's plenty for upkeep, your body knows that walking is a thing that it's supposed to do, and continue to do, and not just an interim state between sitting at a desk and sitting in a car which can be safely deprioritised just as it deprioritises balancing on one leg while holding on to a cabinet leaning over a mine-field of legos to get hold of the winter bedsheets stowed away in a far-away corner.
If you want to up the ante a bit add hanging to the walking: No need to get into pull-ups, at least not intensively so, just hanging provides enough data to the feedback loops in your shoulders/upper back to prevent getting confused as to how they're supposed to control the muscles there.
And if you're in a bad state (or just enjoy it), say you're fat and walking is actually a joint issue: Swimming. No need to train lap times, just enjoy yourself, of course, if you enjoy training lap times then do that.
While I'm at it last but not least: With every exercise, don't choose the hard stuff. If you can't do 10 pushups then you shouldn't be doing pushups, you should be training to get to 100 wall-pushups: Less resistance means you can focus on form and actually develop good form, and many repetitions of a low-resistance exercise tire the muscles just as fewer repetitions of a high-resistance one. Muscles will become stronger in the recuperation period after the lactose starts burning, as such don't set a number goal but train to exhaustion.
See, I have the same problem (I wake up 43 years old and not sore) and I ran into the planet plenty of times as a kid. And plenty more as an alleged adult.
Am skinny, grew up tall and skinny quickly, and spent most of age 18 - 26 doing low wage manual labour. Now 30 and I'm with the "my back hurts" crew. Also have scoliosis so that may or may not relate to it
Lifting weights can help a lot with various use related aches and pains. I've got a collection of small injuries that act up from time to time, mostly in tendons, and I find that almost all of them clear up when I lift regularly. The rest just requires some stretching.
I wnna get back into the gym, but just have a hard time making time when I spend 2 hrs a day driving to and from work and I gotta make my own dinner and clean up. 😩
I have a home gym setup in my apartment. It takes up one corner of my living room, but I've got a squat rack/pull up bar, an adjustable bench, barbell, easy curl bar, dumbbell barbells (like two really short barbells), a weight belt for weighted pull ups, and a cable system I can hang from the pull up bar to do cable stuff, like cable tricep extensions. The rack I got can also fit a dip station so I plan is to get one of those eventually. It's surprisingly compact. I live in a small one bedroom apartment so it's not like I have tons of space. To me the convenience is worth having exercise equipment take up a good portion of my living space. I built it up over a few years, since the start of covid basically, so it seems like a lot of stuff, but only the squat rack takes up much space. To start you can get a cheap adjustable rack, barbell plate/bar set, and a bench, and with that you can work your whole body.
Nope, got hit by a drunk driver when I was 20 and I've had back/neck problems ever since. There are about a million reasons someone might have pain that may or may not be their fault.