Here we are again, gang. Welcome back. This is the Good Living Doc show. I’m Dr. Mark Smith. I am the Good Living Doc. GoodLivingDoc.com. Thank you for showing up. This is episode 12. Today, we’re going to talk about why you feel old and what you can do about it.
As we go along, please remember that I’m not your medical doctor, so please don’t take anything I say as personal medical advice. Never try to treat, diagnose, or cure any symptom or disease in yourself or anyone else based on anything I say here. And if you do decide to make changes to your lifestyle based on something I say here, please do so with the guidance of a trained and licensed health professional.
Let’s just jump right into it. Aging is a topic of conversation in my office almost every day because many of my patients who come to me for chiropractic come because they have aches and pains. And usually, by the time they come, their aches and pains are bad enough to where It’s become a real problem in their life.
Far too many people ignore the symptoms of a declining body and declining function until it’s such a problem that they have to seek help, but that’s just kind of what we’ve been taught…you know…throughout our lives with the disease care model of health care that we all live in… is that you wait till there’s something wrong to go and get help.
And that’s a problem because if you’re trying to maintain your health and maintain wellness as you age, it’s really something that you have to be proactive with. You have to get in front of it before it happens. It’s just like getting your teeth cleaned or changing the oil in your car. You’re trying to prevent major problems down the road and so maintenance is required.
So, by the time people come to me, they’re usually in their 40s or 50s and they’ve had worsening problems for a couple decades and it’s beginning to interfere with their lives. And so they’re looking for ways to stop this discomfort. And people from their 20s to their 80s tell me that they’re old.
What Are We Saying When We Say We’re Old?
There’s always a big laugh around here when someone in their 20s tells me that they’re getting old. They say, “Oh, I’m just getting old.” So, what are people saying when they say that they’re getting old? Because when someone in their 20s tells me that they’re getting old, what are they saying? Because someone like me in their 50s, when they hear a 20 year old saying that they’re old, I just think that’s ridiculous. And then there are probably people in their 70s and 80s who hear me say something about being old and they’ probably think I’m being ridiculous.
But what are we actually saying when we say this? What we’re saying is that we feel some kind of restriction in our life…some kind of decline…something less than we used to feel. We’re stiffer, we’re less able, we have more aches and pains, we have less ability to do the things we used to do or we feel more discomfort when we do the things that we used to do. We don’t feel freedom of movement like we did at one point in our lives.
And actually our age, our chronological age, has nothing to do with that. What it has to do with is a lifetime of accumulating stressors and injuries that have never been resolved…and they build on top of each other over our lives.
Because from a very early age, we’re all taught to respond to our problems…to play defense when we have an issue…not to get in front of our issues…not to do maintenance or prevention on ourselves. And we all have this lifetime of accumulating…what I call micro-traumas or “little hurts.”
These little things that happen to us that maybe caused us some pain or some discomfort at the time, maybe for a couple of days, but it didn’t last. It didn’t cause us to go and get any kind of treatment for it, but it happened and we dealt with it. We got through it and we went on with our lives and nothing was really done about it.
And we have hundreds, if not thousands, of these little hurts throughout our lives that accumulate as we age.
A Lifetime of Little Hurts
What’s the first physical trauma for a human being? It’s childbirth. Now, we know that childbirth is extremely physically traumatic on the mother. But it’s also extremely physically traumatic on the child. I won’t go into the details about what physically happens when a child is born. You already know what that is, but think about it.
And then aside from just naturally being born, the physical trauma of that, you possibly have a physician who’s pulling on a newborn’s head, or if they use the suction cup or the salad spoons (forceps), you know, to get the kids head out. And there’s also that kind of trauma that can just build on top of the trauma already of just naturally being born.
I’m not saying that childbirth is an injury…that it injures a child…but it definitely is a physical stressor. It’s a micro-trauma. It’s a little hurt.
Now, newborn babies are very pliable. They’re malleable…they’re mostly cartilage and nature has built a newborn body so that it’s able to be born in a safe way…most of the time it happens that way…it’s a safe childbirth with no lasting injuries. But it is still something that a newborn’s body has to deal with and heal from.
What’s next? What’s the next trauma? Our next one that I can think of is learning to walk. How many times does a toddler fall on his butt…fall into something…bang their head? Then they grow a little bit older, start tumbling, jumping, wrestling with siblings, learning to ride a bike, falling off a bike.
I remember when I was a kid learning how to ride a bike, my mother took me to the doctor for a completely unrelated issue, but I had all these bruises all over me from learning how to ride a bike. And the doctor was looking at my mother with this side eye, like she was abusing me because I had bruises everywhere.
And we get a little older. High school sports. Wrestling, football. Very traumatic on the body, but so are things like basketball and soccer. Rugby…oh my gosh, rugby. I lived with a couple of rugby players in college. They were always injured.
Then we start to exercise…start to go to the gym. Start to try and lift heavier weights, push our bodies, make our bodies stronger, prettier to look at. So we’re stressing ourselves that way on a regular basis. There are injuries from that…you’re not going to work out for years and years and years without injury. You’re going to have injuries. You’re not going to play high school sports and not be injured.
Then we might move into a physically stressful job. There are hundreds of physically stressful jobs. Being a mechanic. Being a dental hygienist. Being a hairstylist. Being in construction. Working in a factory. Being a chiropractor.
And then there are the kinds of stressors that we can’t prepare for like car accidents and falls. My point is that our lives are filled with injuries and little hurts. Now, most of these things don’t send us to the hospital. Most of them don’t require physical therapy or surgery. But they do require the body to adapt and to heal.
Scar Tissue Will Make You Feel Old
Putting these kinds of stressors on the body without maintaining the body, without maintaining our joints, without doing something about the scar tissue that builds when we injure tissues… if we injure joints, oftentimes injuries in the body are repaired by scar tissue…fibrous tissue. It’s not like the original tissue when your body has to heal itself.
Scar tissue is mostly collagen and it is very strong, but it’s very inelastic. And if we start to build scar tissue on our bodies from little injuries that occur over a lifetime, we will start to get stiffer. We’ll start to have less range of motion…unless we’re doing the things that keep these injuries and joints healthy…maintaining our bodies. Scar tissue will limit our range of motion.
I got guys that come and see me that I went to high school with who played football and they spent the entire four years of their high school life ramming their head into somebody else, and nobody ever did anything about this. Because a lot of times, the culture of that kind of team sport is all about being tough and not letting your pain get in your way and working through the pain…and so, there’s very little resting time. There’s very little healing time.
A lot of these high school kids, they’re not allowed to heal from their injuries. They’re not allowed to sit out. You sit out, you lose your spot, or you get kicked off the team. And so there’s very little done about these kinds of impacts that we take when we’re young. And let’s face it, when we’re young, our bodies deal with them pretty well.
The kind of hit you take when you’re in high school, you know, you might get over that hit within a few minutes. If you’re 60, it might take you a couple days. But that scar tissue that forms, it doesn’t go away. It builds. With every little hurt, it builds. So these guys that I went to high school with, they come in and you know, I’m trying to see how their range of motion is and I gtell them to look up and they barely can look up. They barely can even move their head around, because they’ve got so much scar tissue and arthritis in their spines and their necks that they can’t move them anymore.
That’s what happens. That has nothing to do with age. That has to do with injuries that were never cared for…that were never resolved.
Micro-Traumas Build on Top of One Another
So when you’re 25 and you’re working a construction job and you go to lift something heavy and your lower back quote-unquote “goes out,” and you’re bent to the side for a week, and you take a bunch of anti-inflammatories and you’re still going to work because you’ve got to go to work because you’ve got bills to pay. And every day it gets a little bit better and every day it gets a little bit better and then finally you’re better and you can stand up and you never stopped work and you never did anything about this injury you just had and you think you’re fine because the pain went away.
Guess what just happened. Your body just had a little micro-trauma that it had to adapt to…that it had to heal. And the healing that occurs is not with the same tissue that you were born with. And that tissue is inelastic. It’s very tough, but it’s inelastic, and so it’s prone to inflammation.
And so you’re fine for a couple of years, till the next time…you know…you’ve had a hard couple of weeks. Your back’s starting to hurt, starting to get stiff. And you think I’ll just stretch a little bit. Okay, now I feel better. And you just keep going to work and doing this physically stressful thing until…here it is again. Low back pain…boom!
Now you’re hurt again and maybe it’s another week-long thing. And you’ve had it before. It’s no big deal. I could still go to work. I can still do my job. Just take my anti-inflammatories. Now you’ve got another injury on top of the other injury. Eventually the pain goes away…think you’re fine. And it goes on like that.
And then what happens is, eventually the body can’t adapt to this anymore. Eventually it starts to break down, and then suddenly you’re 40 and when these things happen, they’re worse. Now you’re down for two weeks. The pain is worse. The healing time is longer. Then people say, Why? Why is this? It never was like this before. Why is it longer? Why is it taking longer for me to get better now? Well. I’m older now. I’m getting old.
So, two weeks you were out of work. You see where I’m going with this? Then you’re 50. Next time you’re down for three weeks, or four weeks. Or maybe the pain doesn’t ever go away anymore. Maybe it’s there constantly now. Maybe you can’t stand up straight. Maybe you get out of bed and you can’t stand up right away. Maybe it takes you 10 minutes before you can even stand up straight or get going. Well, I’m just getting old…you know.
And this is what happens throughout our lives. These little hurts. So, think about all the little hurts you’ve had..step off a curb wrong and you feel that jolt up through your spine and walk weird for a couple of hours. Man that really hurt. My lower back’s all stiffened up now.
Or maybe you had a hard day at the gym and you were lifting, you know, you were doing military presses. That’s a shoulder exercise…pushing weight straight up over your head…and you did too much and now your shoulder hurts. And every time you move it, the shoulder hurts. There’s inflammation there now.
But what do we do? We work through it. No pain, no gain. Keep lifting, keep lifting, keep hurting that shoulder. The pain never goes away but you keep lifting. Eventually you don’t have that range of motion anymore. Eventually you can’t reach your arm back behind you like you used to…used to be able to reach a spot. You know, you used to be able to clasp your hands behind your back or it’s harder to put your hands behind your back. It’s harder to start to do things for your job that you need to do…that you used to be able to do…you used to be able to do that. Now it’s harder. Can’t do it without pain anymore.
Well, I’m just getting old. Getting old man.
Now, on the other side of that, I’ve got 80 year olds that could run rings around me. They bust through my front door like they’re 30 years old. It’s crazy. So it can’t be old age. Otherwise, they’d be all crippled up with canes and complaining about their backs and how much they hurt all the time. But there are people who aren’t like that so it can’t be age.
We have to get away from saying this because what this really is the result of is these little hurts throughout life that have never been fixed. They’ve healed.
Offense is the Way to Wellness
So, if we want to feel younger, the first thing we have to do is stop waiting until we’re having this emergency to do something with ourselves…to do something about these aches and pains that we have.
I have to say this at least once or twice a day…I say to somebody who’s in their 40s or 50s and always seems like 40…everyone tells me my body is going to fall apart when I’m 40 and man, it sure did. When I turned 40, everything went south, and that just might be the time in life where these things just catch up with us. But if we’re waiting until we have an emergency to do anything about these things, we’re never going to get back to freedom of movement.
Defense is not the way to wellness. Offense is the way to wellness. We’ve got to be proactive. And I say at least once or twice a day to somebody in their 40s and 50s, I say this is the time, right now, you’ve got to get serious about this. At least a percentage of your day…of your life…has to be focused on maintaining your body. Not just stressing it.
Going to the gym and lifting heavy…that’s a stressor. It’s great exercise…everybody should include strength training in their exercise regimen, but it can’t just all be that. We have to work on movement. We have to work on maintaining our range of motion, our flexibility. Flexible bodies have far, far, far fewer pains than people who are stiff and are inflexible. Inflexible bodies are prone to injury.
So, if you’re listening to this, no matter how old you are…if you’re 20…I don’t care if you’re 20, if you’re 50 or 70, or you’re 80. Now’s the time. You have to get serious about this now, because if you wait until your body is full of injuries and scar tissue and shortened muscles and tearing ligaments, then what happens…most of the time…is people try and start some program to make their bodies better and it’s so hard and it hurts so much that they just quit.
Kind of like every time you get tooth pain because you’ve got a cavity, you just rub some pain relieving gel on it till the pain goes away. And then it hurts later…rub some more gel on it…pain goes away and you just keep doing that…just keep doing that or ignoring it or whatever…until the pain gets so bad that you need help. And then one day you go to the dentist and your mouth is just a wreck and you need a complete mouth transformation and it’s tens of thousands of dollars.
As a chiropractor, I think everybody on planet Earth should get adjusted regularly. I get adjusted regularly because I know what chiropractic does for me. I know what happens in my body when I get an adjustment. I know how it helps me. And so I think every person should do it whether they have pain or not.
By the time you have pain, something’s wrong. It’s too long. If you have pain…unless you just lifted something and…you tried to lift a car or something, or you fell from a tree or you got in a car accident…now you have an injury and that’s different. But if you’ve just got these aches and pains and you just start waking up one day and you’re sore and you’re stiff and you’re hurting a little bit and you wait 10 more years until you start doing something about it, that’s way too long.
That’s why the process of healing is so long and expensive because we wait too long to do anything for ourselves that’s healthy. Going to the gym and working out is wonderful and we should do it, but it’s not all we need to do. So I’m going to give you a list of things that we should do to maintain our movement and our youth over a lifetime. And you can start with these immediately, hopefully. Don’t wait.
Do You Feel Old? Here is What You Can Do About It
Number one…I already said it…chiropractic. People say my back doesn’t hurt that bad. I don’t need that. I don’t know how many people come in here with a friend or family member…I ask them if they want me to check their spine. They’re like I don’t need an adjustment. I’m like, how do you know? I didn’t check you. I don’t have any pain. Well, that’s not what I’m doing here.
I’m not treating pain. I’m trying to restore movement. I’m trying to restore movement to your joints…to your spinal joints and I guarantee you, if I check you, I’m going to find some that aren’t right. Because, if you get out of bed ever…It’s like saying I don’t have to go to the dentist, my teeth don’t hurt. You know, it’s like you chew every day, don’t you? You eat every day, so somebody needs to check your teeth once in a while, don’t they?
So I want to check spines, whether they hurt or not…if I find a problem…you need to be adjusted…whether you hurt or not. And people should come to me and let me check them on a regular basis throughout life. How’s that any different than…I don’t know…you know, people hear me say that…they go oh of course…you know…you want to pay for that car you got out back buddy. That’s why you want me to keep coming back. But they have no problem with thinking about the high blood pressure medication they’ve got to take twice a day for the rest of their lives. That’s not a scam somehow. But me telling people they should get adjusted when they’re not in pain, that’s a scam.
Because they don’t understand…they don’t understand what I’m doing. Maybe that’s my fault. Maybe I didn’t tell them right, you know, maybe I didn’t explain it right. But adjustments free up restricted joints. So if you’ve got scar tissue, chiropractic can deal with that. If you have restricted vertebrae that are stopping you from doing things…or you might not even know… look, you can have a restriction in your spine and not know. You’ve got 24 vertebrae. So if one vertebra doesn’t move properly, you’re not going to know it because the other ones are going to do the job for you.
That’s what the body does…it adapts. It starts figuring out ways to do things so that you can keep living and keep moving. Meanwhile, the body is breaking down and it has nothing to do with your age. It has to do with…it has to do with the fact that no one’s dealing with this. So chiropractic restores movement to vertebrae and that helps the nervous system and helping the nervous system helps every single thing that the body does. That’s what I’m trying to do. You think I got into this because I wanted to pop backs for back pain all day long?
This helps you live. It helps you live better, stronger, and longer. That’s my goal for you. I want you to be able to play volleyball when you’re 80 if you want to. But that requires you to come and see me more than when you just hurt or when you can’t stand the pain anymore.
Okay. I’m going to move on. Sorry, I get a little excited.
Number two…movement exercise. So, you know, lifting weights isn’t on this list, okay? Because that’s just something that many people just do when they go to the gym. You lift weights and I think that you should do that…you should lift heavy things once in a while.
But I’m talking about bodyweight movement, talking about functional bodyweight movement. Things like calisthenics, burpees, bear crawls…you know…bodyweight squats, push-ups, things that, you know, work your whole body at the same time. There’s hundreds of different ways to do push-ups that are great, you know.
Things that move your joints through a complete range of motion…that you’re not just pushing weight in one direction over and over and over and isolating muscles. You need to work your body as a unit, like you would if you were a hunter-gatherer and you were trying to build a shelter or clime a tree or something like that.
Now, bodyweight exercise can be stressful. So, you also need some kind of movement program that’s not stressful because sometimes you just need some movement without stress. So things like walking are great and they’re great aerobically. Swimming, taking a bike ride, all those kinds of things are gentle on the spine and on the joints and so they can help improve muscle function and…you know…joint function in a more gentle way.
Using resistance bands can help and then tai chi is a gentle movement practice that focuses on slow flowing movements. It’s going to help your balance, it’s going to help strengthen some muscles and get movement into your muscles and joints in a way that you probably don’t ever get.
Yoga’s like this too. I recommend yoga every day to tons of people because it’s such a wonderful thing. And you don’t have to sit in a room and do yoga an hour a day. 10 or 15 minutes a day will change your life. You can learn yoga on the internet very, very easily.
You can follow along on Youtube…just the beginner floor stuff, you know, just follow along, learn the moves and then you can do these moves…do five or six moves for your lower back, five or six moves for your neck and shoulders, five or six moves for your spine in general and just learn these basic, easy moves.
You’re not trying to stress yourself out. You’re not trying to push through anything. You’re just trying to get movement into your joints and in your spine in a healthy, safe way. That’s the beauty of yoga is that it’s safe and doing this every day, you’ll notice a tremendous difference within a couple of weeks. You’ll notice your range of motion has improved and that your ability to move…your freedom of movement is better. You’re going to have less stiffness and more ability to move your arms and legs just in life in general.
Balance exercises…everybody who’s aging needs some balance exercises, too, because not only does that help train those little stabilizer muscles that keep us upright…keep us from falling over…but it’s great for the nervous system too. It’s great for the brain and the nerves…to balance.
If you’re in a lot of pain, If you’re an older adult, start slow. Sometimes just sitting in a chair and standing up is enough. Sit in a chair, sit down, stand up, sit down, stand up. If you’re a little bit more functional, I’ll tell somebody to lay down on the floor and get up. Then lay down on the floor a different way, and then get up a different way, and then lay back down on the floor a different way and then get up a different way.
See, I mean, you’re working your entire body in a way that you don’t normally and that helps the body get better and stronger. The more you make your body try and do something, the better it gets at it because the body has this propensity to always look to be more efficient. It always tries to figure out a way to do what you’re trying to make it do. And so the more you do this, the more able you become.
And then my absolute favorite movement exercise…is dancing. Dancing is so good. No matter how you do it. I mean…well, I don’t know…I don’t know if you’re like a head banger from the 80s maybe you shouldn’t do that, but just put on some music, close the blinds…or open them depending on who you are and if you want the neighbors to see…and dance.
Move your hips, move your arms around, move your neck around, you know, get your body to where you’re having some fun and getting a little sweat going. That is a tremendously wonderful, healthy thing to do and it’s not going to injure you…unless you’re breakdancing or something…doing the worm or whatever it is…now don’t do that. Nobody should have ever done the worm. Okay. That’s just my opinion.
Continuing with the list of things that you can do so that, you know, all that is physical.
So try and figure out some of those physical things to do. You also need to what number are we on?
It’s just number three. I don’t know. We’ll say it’s number three…is, you need to eliminate Inflammatory foods…foods that cause inflammation in your body. Because part of the reason that people feel stiff and old is because they’re joints and their bodies are just inflamed. They’re tissues are inflamed. And when you have inflammation, you feel it.
You can feel when your joints are inflamed…they feel like they’re stiff and sore…like they’re not, they don’t want to move. And your diet has at least a little influence on that…probably more than you realize.
You can google inflammatory foods but just the big ones, the big ones…are grains and grain products and dairy. Those are the two biggest things that cause the most inflammation because they are the most, well, grain products are the most processed. I mean, they’re ultra processed. They’re the things with grains in it are the things you’re going to find in wrappers, bags, and boxes.
Things like pasta and bread and cereal and muffins and breakfast bars and all those things that are easy to eat…and they’re good. But those things are very inflammatory because we don’t have the digestive ability to digest a lot of them. Our digestive systems don’t handle them well.
When we can’t digest things, we get an immune response…we get inflammation, or if you’re sensitive to certain foods and things in certain foods you get inflammation. So, eliminating ultra processed foods like grains and…not just gluten, you can’t just go gluten free, gotta eliminate all grains and listen…I know that we’re taught that grains are really nutritious and we have to have them for nutrition, but there’s nothing in grains that you can’t get from other fruits and vegetables in higher amounts and in more bioavailable ways, which means that the body is better able to utilize them.
Fruits and vegetables is where it’s at gang. It’s not in processed carbohydrates. And dairy is very inflammatory for almost every individual, even if you don’t realize it. When people eat dairy, they get inflammation. So if this is a big part of your diet, you probably have some inflammation that you are dealing with and you might not even know it.
Alcohol is a big one too, but let’s just go with those two biggies because, you know, that’s going to be the most work for most people. But, you know, my advice is always to get away from the wrappers, bags, and boxes. Eat plants and animals. You know, eat the fresh stuff. Eat the stuff without ingredient lists. If it has an ingredient list on it, it’s processed.
Hydration has something to do with this too. If you’re dehydrated…a lot of times people have joint pain everywhere, you know they hurt all over…all their joints…and they say, well, I’m just getting old and I start going, how much water do you drink every day? Oh, maybe a 16 ounce bottle.
We have to drink water, water, water. Dehydration will cause inflammation. Bad inflammation will cause your joints to hurt and this inflammation that comes from grains and dairy will cause joint pain too. It’ll cause you to be sluggish…it’ll cause you to just feel old.
And supplement. Now, certain supplements are great to lower inflammation, so you know, if I was going to tell somebody to supplement, it wouldn’t be for joint health. It wouldn’t be to restore joint function, something like…it wouldn’t be collagen or glucosamine or chondroitin or something like that.
If you want to try that stuff, just find a good product and use it. I think collagen, you could probably try collagen at first…collagen is probably a better supplement to take for your joints. If you want to do something specifically for joint health, that would be my first choice.
But what I would suggest first for people is to take supplements that help control inflammation. So that would be Vitamin D and omega 3s, Those are the big ones. Also turmeric, I guess those would be the top three. So there’s a list for you to get started with to help you to not feel old.
Now, I know we did this pretty quickly, just because I’ve been talking…I’ve just been rambling for a while and this is getting long but we’re going to talk…I mean, we’re going to talk about these things in the future. We’re going to talk more specifically about these things, but these are the kinds of things that you can learn on the internet. You don’t need me to coach you through how to do bodyweight exercise and Tai Chi and all that kind of stuff. I mean you can find instructional programs out there and people who actually teach these things too.
I mean, go to a yoga class to learn from an actual individual. Some yoga instructors that are really knowledgeable can help you with specific problems that you have. If you have lower back pain or if you have a hip that bothers you…I mean, they can give you things that will work on that…that will help you with that kind of thing. It’s not something that I can do on this podcast so you’re going to have to look for other ways to learn about some of the stuff and to actually start to implement it, but I see I’m getting long here. So I want to cut this off.
I hope you got something out of this today. We’ll talk about these concepts in the future again, but just keep in mind that age is not your problem. You have to start working on movement. You have to start trying to help improve the movement of your spine and joints. And there are wonderful, amazing, great ways to do that in a gentle, safe, healthy way that will change your future. But you’ve got to start today.
You can start slowly if you want, but you gotta start today, okay? Don’t put it off… don’t put it off till you’re 60. And if you’re 60, don’t put it off till you’re 80. Because the more of these little hurts, these micro traumas build up and they accumulate, the more old we’re going to feel if we don’t deal with them. We’ve got to fix them, and that’s possible to do, no matter who you are or what your problems are.
You can be better. You can feel better. There are ways to do it. These things are not something that ignoring can do anything with.
Thanks for showing up, everybody. My name is Dr. Mark Smith. This is the Good Living Doc show, and I am the Good Living Doc. GoodLivingDoc.com. Thank you for listening to the end of yet another amazing podcast. I appreciate the positive feedback everybody’s been giving me. I’m going to keep on keeping on. Okay? So you do the same. And I’ll be back when I can. I do these when I have time and sometimes I don’t have time. So when I have time, I’ll Sit down and talk by myself to this microphone again.
Until that time, be nice to yourselves. Be forgiving, be patient with yourselves but make yourself better. You can be better no matter what age you are. If you’re still breathing, You can heal. Okay? Until next time, take care.
