Can your MRI be trusted?

And then of the chronic joint pain you treat in midlife adults, what percentage is actually due to natural aging versus poor health or neglect?

Yeah, so it's really hard to give you precise numbers there, but there's a lot of functional loss, loss of capabilities that's due to lack of training, lack of use.

no longer squatting to sit, um, no longer kneeling, no longer trying to get up off the floor.

Uh, a lot of people blame aging, you know, Oh, I can't go down there.

I can't go up those stairs.

I can't do this.

I can't lift that.

I'm too old.

I'm too this.

I have a rotator cuff tear.

I have a disc herniation.

Uh, you know, I've heard a lot of excuses.

Um, And they don't think of it as an excuse.

They actually think they're too old to do it.

But in actuality, they simply lost the abilities because by not practicing them, by not training them, their brain lost the connections to the muscles responsible for coordinating that movement or motion, right? Part of our training and part of what we do in a gym or when we work with a smart strength coach deals with strength.

We lift up a weight, we're going to build the strength in that muscle.

But when we do a complex movement, let's say an animal walk on the ground, or we just get down on the ground to get on our knees and get back up, not only are we training the strength, we're training the coordination and the pathways in the brain to create that movement and execute it smoothly.

That's called neuromuscular training.

The brain is responsible for coordinating all of that.

And the brain will actively... cut the nerve signals to the muscles that it's no longer using, that it no longer needs to use because it's working on a preservation principle passed down through millennia of evolutionary pressure, right? The body is not going to spend any energy, time, or resources in maintaining structures that we don't use.

Period.

End of it.

So a lot of the times when we start working out at a gym, that signal is not only important to grow the muscles and to grow strength.

and to build resiliency within the tendons and attachments to bones, it's really important to train the pathways between the brain and those muscles so those movements are smooth and coordinated.

If you think about falling, A lot of people die because of falls.