There is a three-letter word I do not allow in my gym.
No sign. No warning label. No penalty attached. But I enforce it consistently, and people learn quickly that I mean it.
The word is old.
You may not say, “I feel this way because I’m getting old.“ I will stop you. Not because I think time doesn’t pass, I do, and I’ve been in this work long enough to know better. I stop people because I’ve watched that word become something else entirely.
It has become a shrug. A quiet surrender dressed up as honesty. The word ‘old’ is how people hand over their agency while still sounding reasonable about it.
I am not reasonable about it.
What we call aging is usually something more specific.
After four decades of working with real bodies, not curated ones, bodies that arrive stiff and guarded and unsure, I’ve come to a different conclusion. Most of what we call aging isn’t time doing damage. It is an accumulation.
Muscle loss doesn’t happen because another birthday has passed. It happens because we stopped asking our muscles to do hard things. Posture collapse isn’t the clock striking fifty. It’s modern life asking us to sit for hours in positions that slowly unmake what the body worked decades to build. Joint failure isn’t the inevitable erosion of time. It’s the accumulated cost of moving the wrong way, ten thousand times, a hundred thousand times, long past the point where the body could quietly absorb it.
The body is extraordinarily patient. It adapts, compensates, and continues. And then, eventually, it can’t. What looks sudden almost never is.
Only about two percent of pain and injury comes from genuine trauma, accidents, disease, or pathology outside a person’s control. The other ninety-eight percent comes from the tension we hold, the positions we practice daily without noticing, the movement we’re missing.
That’s not a hopeful statistic. It’s a clarifying one. It means almost none of what people attribute to age was actually caused by age. It means the story is still unfinished.
What I find when we start the work.
I’ve worked with women in their sixties and seventies who arrived certain that what they were experiencing was simply age, the tax on living long, the bill finally come due.
In most cases, what we found instead was a history.
A shoulder that was never quite right after a fall fifteen years ago, with a whole compensatory architecture built on top of it. Hips shortchanged by decades of sitting, stabilizing muscles dormant so long they’d forgotten their job. Backs carrying loads they were never designed to carry because the system upstream had gone quiet.
None of it was age. All of it was a story. And story, unlike age, can be revised.
Not always fully. Not always quickly. But the body, given honest attention, responds.
The word old externalizes the story. It locates the cause outside the person, beyond their reach, prior to anything they might do about it. I’m getting old is not a description. It is a verdict. And it is almost always premature.
The question worth asking instead: what has this body been tolerating, quietly, and for how long?
That question has answers. The answers are almost always workable.
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