06/03/2026
Most people blame age.
And sometimes age is absolutely part of the conversation.
Tissues change. Recovery changes. Hormones change. Strength, balance, vision, reaction time, sleep, stress, inflammation, medication, illness, workload, and life experience can all influence how the body feels and functions over time.
But I also think pain often gets simplified too quickly.
A sore knee becomes, “I’m getting older.”
A stiff back becomes, “That’s just my arthritis.”
An unstable ankle becomes, “That’s that old injury.”
A tight shoulder becomes, “That’s the surgery I had years ago.”
And sometimes those things matter.
But sometimes they are only one chapter of a much longer story.
Over the years, I have worked with people who have had hip replacements, broken toes, fractured ankles, torn ligaments, broken clavicles, shoulder injuries, elbow injuries, femur fractures, surgeries, scars, pregnancies, strokes, long COVID, concussions, chronic illness, neurological changes, and injuries they barely think about anymore because life moved on.
What interests me is how often the body continues carrying parts of that story long after someone stops thinking about it.
An injury heals.
A surgery becomes a memory.
Life moves forward.
Yet the body may still be using some of the same strategies it developed along the way.
Sometimes that becomes obvious.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes people are genuinely surprised when a conversation about an old ankle injury turns into a conversation about balance, walking, confidence, or a completely different area of the body.
I see that more often than people might expect.
The body is constantly working with what is available to it. Strength. Stability. Mobility. Recovery. Sleep. Stress. History. Support. Capacity.
That is one of the reasons I try not to get too attached to a single explanation.
People are rarely as simple as a diagnosis, an image, a body part, or a painful area.
There is usually more to the story.
So no, I do not always blame age first.
I get curious about history.
Because pain is not always where the story started.
