SaveYourself.ca • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
What were the bodies like on the beach? Ugly and white and ruined by offices.
Leonard Cohen, The Favourite Game
published 6/4/02, updated 6/26/04
We are sedentary. Everything our great grandparents did was more work. The population of agricultural workers is less than a third what it was fifty years ago, let alone a hundred years ago.1 The most trivial tasks required more physical effort then than now, and most things that are hard work have been automated: transportation, agriculture, manufacturing. The age of information has created legions of workers who literally only lift their fingers for eight hours every day.
Canadians and Americans — and the citizens of some other rich countries as well — have become a physically soft people and fitness crazes aren’t enough to stem the tide. An old friend of my family’s has been an outdoorsman for his whole life. He’s one of those people who doesn’t just go camping, he “goes into the bush” for a while. He tells me that he’s seen a trend in his Outward Bound students, even the ones who are superbly gym-fit:
“They’re wimps,” he says. “Pure and simple. Put them on a mountainside, they’re whipped in a few hours, if not a few minutes. I can go for days, forever practically. They ask me, ‘Aren’t you tired yet?’ I never am.”
They’re wimps,” he says. “Pure and simple.”In the science fiction classic, Ringworld, Larry Niven paints a future full of frail, sensitive people. Pain and effort are virtually eliminated, and fitness and pain tolerance along with them. But so what? It’s no great loss, as long as no one has to do any physical work or suffer. Right?
But we may underestimate the severity of the problem.
Several NASA research projects have shown that chronic inactivity causes marked degeneration of virtually every measurement of physical fitness. An ominous example is the impairment of the reflexes that help us maintain good posture. Damage like this isn’t irreversible in theory, but it is in practice: the longer we slouch, the harder it gets to sit upright — literally. A downward spiral.2
I suspect that people are suffering from a lot more musculoskeletal aches and pains than they used to. Modern statistics are not hard to come by: for instance, “back pain is the second leading cause of absenteeism from work, after the common cold”.3 But has it always been that way?
This is a true story, as far as I know: an aging farmer fell off a ladder and hurt his back. He refused to be taken to the doctor. “Not necessary,” he insisted. “Haven’t been to a doctor in thirty years, and I ain’t starting now!” But he was too crippled to resist, and his children took him to get help. The doctors soon discovered that he had broken his back — but not for the first time. He had, in fact, fractured his back twice previously, and healed, without ever getting help.
An anecdote like that is no basis for drawing a conclusion, but it does strongly suggest a question: are hard-working people really tougher? A lot tougher? Are we sedentary folk a lot more prone to injuries and complications? When you ask the question like that, it’s hard to believe that we aren’t. But the researchers will have to settle it.
Meanwhile, I can tell you that I certainly see a lot of pathology in my massage therapy practice that can’t be explained any other way. So I’m going to keep encouraging people to be as active as possible: use it or lose it is a very basic biological principle. We ignore it at our peril.
Chop wood, carry water!
