managing aches and pains that come with aging (40)

December 25, 2024 7:41 PM

I'm starting to notice that my body (mostly back, neck, shoulders) feels more soreness, tension, and stiffness than it used to, as I near 40 years old. I'm a healthy and active person and yet I can no longer sit through a 2 hour movie, flight, or dinner without feeling uncomfortable!

I'm a healthy weight and I do various forms of physical activity regularly (mostly weight lifting, walking, and pilates on a weekly basis). I don't have any serious injuries and get plenty of sleep and hydration.

I do experience a lot of mental and emotional stress (I have PTSD so it feels like my muscles are always "on alert" and tense, if that makes sense) and I also perform lots of desk/computer work. I think both things are making this worse.

Stuff I've already tried:
*a deep tissue or sports massage about once every 4-6 weeks which is what my budget allows
*a few sessions of guided stretching with a PT
*warm epsom salt baths
*heating pads
*using an acupressure mat
*taking frequent breaks from the computer to move around
*ibuprofen or Tylenol for especially bad days

These all provide temporary relief but I'm looking for something to actually prevent the discomfort long term. Curious about specific types of yoga for this (as opposed to the generic "take a yoga class" advice), as well as acupuncture, specific ergonomic chairs/pillows, and anything else I'm not aware of! Open to most things besides a chiropractor. What has worked for you? I don't want to just accept my body feeling this way from now on.

posted by cboggs to Health & Fitness (29 answers total)

More sleep. Eight full hours if you’re not getting that. That’s when all the junk gets cleared out of your cells and things heal.
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:31 PM on December 25 [2 favorites]

It could be something as simple as your bed/pillow aren’t working well for you. Or age can also catch up. I’m 44 and very physically active but sometimes I pay dearly when I push hard. A couple sets of tennis and I can barely walk the next day. A few hours of yard work and my back is killing me. Physical therapy can potentially help. And hey popping a few advil can also give you at least a quick fix. Overall for me I’m mindful of what causes my body more discomfort. I find things like stand up paddle boarding, cardio martial arts, hiking, and light weight lifting to be good. Racket sports unfortunately do not mesh well with my back even though I love them. Love playing tennis but I play very little because it’s brutal on our body. We can’t stop aging. But we can learn to adapt.
posted by ljs30 at 8:43 PM on December 25 [1 favorite]

You mention using heating pads, but can I suggest preemptively using alternating heating and icing before pain starts. I am a little further along on the journey of pain management than you, but I find that alternating icing and heating after any exercise, or even at the end of the day, works to get ahead of the pain. Also, preemptively doing PT - so even when my hip isn't bothering me, continuing the exercises, particularly if I know I'll be on my feet a lot.

Also, take another look at what you consider healthy eating. I felt like I was eating healthy before, and then it got even more refined, and when I didn't follow a more stringent diet, I felt terrible. Now I feel best when I eat tofu and brown rice...which isn't exciting, but...
posted by Toddles at 8:45 PM on December 25 [2 favorites]

So a yoga pra tice of at least 3 days a week keeps my joints and muscles feeling good. My teach does mixture of hatha and ashtanga yoga and the other one does a mor cardio thing. Restorative or gentle isn't going to so as much for you but is a good way to start or move through recovery in an injury.
posted by edbles at 8:48 PM on December 25 [1 favorite]

I find dry needling helpful if I have a particularly knotted up muscle. Acupuncture is helpful for calming the nervous system in general, which I find helps with pain. I would avoid yoga if your joints are hypermobile, but it can be great for people who aren’t.
posted by wheatlets at 9:08 PM on December 25

For desk and stress soreness, I go back to Pilates or core work like it. It isn’t just getting the strength to be upright, it’s the strength and proprioception to be upright through balance and relaxation as much as strength.
posted by clew at 9:09 PM on December 25 [1 favorite]

IANAD.

I am sorry you are dealing with this. Ouch.

Maybe have some basic labs checked, but especially Vitamin D? A family member had a stupidly low level of Vit D, went on the endocrinologist-suggested brand and dose of D-3 supplements, and about 95% of his aches and pains and general body discomfort resolved after he completed the loading dose. Obviously anecdotal, but it couldn’t hurt.

I personally endured years of lower back pain, inability to sit in certain positions or chairs or cars without pain, as well as weird stabby stabby abdominal pain. It turned out I have pelvic floor dysfunction, but also my lower back was seriously out of alignment. My pelvic floor physical therapist sent me to her colleague, a magical spinal physical therapist, and they fixed me. It was life changing. I also get massages as often as the budget allows, do my PT exercises, am careful about lumbar support when I sit, move around more often, make sure I don’t arch my spine in the way that jacks it, et cetera, but the PT changed my life.

Hope you are able to find relief.
posted by kyraU2 at 9:47 PM on December 25 [1 favorite]

It's less the kind of yoga than kind of teacher. You need to find a studio with people who focus on deep stretching and fascia work. I do a mix of vinyasa and spinal yoga with occasional yin and detox sessions (the latter are supposed to be gentle, not with these teachers!), haven't been able to hit a kundalini class in a while but those were nicely hardcore. Over here this kind of deep approach tends to go together with body positivity and people who teach teaching courses, because they're constantly refreshing their anatomy knowledge and they've had time to really refine their approach to structuring focussed classes. You want the kind of session that leaves you boggling because you didn't even know you had these muscles that are hurting just now. Yoga's also great at getting you to consciously relax, which should help a lot.

Otherwise, take a good look at your ergonomics. Your own posture, but also any chairs and beds and pillows you use regularly, with a focus on whether they let you maintain neutral spine while relaxed. Computer setup too: if the top of your frequently used screen isn't level with your eye line it's messing up your neck. If you spend a lot of time with your phone, take a look at your posture then as well.

Massage wise, I've had a lot of luck with Thai massage - it's really good at unknotting things. My place advertises it as yoga for lazy people and there's definitely a similarity of effect.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 11:09 PM on December 25 [2 favorites]

I have some suggestions and an admonition.

Suggestions:
1. Sleep. Really, my aches and pains are so much worse when I am even a little underslept.
2. Deliberate stretching practice for the affected joints and muscles. Exactly which stretches depend on which bits hurt. I would recommend Kit McLaughlin's book for a vast selection of stretches you could apply. But you might look at learning to bridge, movements that stretch the pecs, the upper back, the shoulder capsule, and the neck.
3. Ergonomic review of your work station: monitor height, desk height, chair height, keyboard position
4. Diet and hydration can make a difference. Dial back the alcohol if you drink. More water. Less salt. Some people have issues with nightshades or other foods. Experiment.

Admonition:
I'm mid 50s now, and the bad news is: to some extent this is part of aging. A level of acceptance helps. And taking care to get warm and ease into movement - don't stop moving, ever, but things are just more and more likely to go PING inconveniently if you don't accommodate this need.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:37 AM on December 26 [2 favorites]

Glasses? Are you beginning to get presbyopia, if you have glasses is your prescription changing faster than it used to? That’ll make you hold your head funny and then everything’s under strain.
posted by clew at 12:56 AM on December 26 [2 favorites]

When this started happening to me, the first thing that suffered was sleep. I'd wake up 4-6 hours in with an ache that demanded attention, and couldn't get back to sleep again. So for all the folks recommending more sleep, just know that that was easier said than done for some of us.

The thing I found that helped me most was to get a dense foam roller, which I guess is just a cylinder of EVA foam about the size and shape of a short poster tube. I keep it on my chair, and move it constantly throughout my day. The goal is just to constantly massage different parts of my back and ribs during the course of the day, so that no one bit gets more tense than all the rest.

I coupled that with neck, shoulder stretches on the regular, and it really worked well. I also found that drinking less alcohol and more water helped, but only in conjunction with everything else: it's a complete set or nothing works at all, for me.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:47 AM on December 26 [1 favorite]

You sound pretty active, and I wonder if part of the problem could be solved with some shifts in nutrition. Maybe you need to recover better? Do you take creatine? It’s one of the few supplements that actually has medical evidence behind it. I’d also suggest tracking your food intake for a few weeks to get a better sense of your nutritional needs. Are you getting lots of protein and veggies?

I think you’re right not just to accept this. I think too many folks accept as aging things that could be improved. Given your current exercise volume, I’d say it’s worth going to the doctor for a physical with blood tests. You could have some sort of vitamin or other deficiency.
posted by bluedaisy at 3:09 AM on December 26 [1 favorite]

Do you like swimming? I love lifting but I have found that swimming and all the twisting and diffferent motions (I swim all four strokes, with a masters team) makes a big difference in terms of mobility as I age. More than yoga did for me, even, because the water means you wind up in very fun shapes. Maybe water arobics if you are not comfortable with swimming distances. Also this is the kind of thing that a good sports-focused PT could make a real difference with. The kinds focused on injury recovery are important, but I find they often have a lower definition of "good enough" than those focused on athletics. They should be able to help you understand what is causing your discomfort and then make a plan to attack it.

Finally, I do really like taking a hot bath and then foam rolling. It gets me into a place where I can hit much deeper from the start.
posted by dame at 5:18 AM on December 26 [1 favorite]

Tai Chi or slow motion kata

Warming up more, including when you get out of bed to start your day.

Anti-inflammatory medicine - try a week of Tylenol maintenance for arthritis and see if it helps

Get checked for arthritis or stress injuries by your doctor - your weight lifting may be playing old Harry with your knees and your rotator cuffs. Don't just take the Tylenol and self diagnose. The results of a week of of Tylenol for arthritis is something to take to your doctor as a data point.

Swimming

Make sure your ambient temperature is good. If you are cold at night you may be clenching up to keep warm and that body tension soreness and stiffness lasting through the day.

Check your working ergonomics. You may be past the age where you bounce back unscathed after an afternoon spent craning your neck or sitting on a seat that is the wrong height.

Hypnosis for relaxation - progressive relaxation.

Self massage - Do you actually handle yourself lovingly and sensitively so that you can recognize the feel of a tense muscle? If not, you could stand to learn.

Check your mineral levels. Sometimes just taking magnesium or discontinuing calcium or something like that can make all the difference.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:45 AM on December 26 [1 favorite]

Posture exercises. Do you use a phone? If so you may have horrible posture without knowing it. 95 percent of the people I see walking down the street have horrible posture. It's amazing. You can compare a video of people walking down the street in 1970 with one of people walking down the street in 2024 and see a frightening difference.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:47 AM on December 26 [2 favorites]

I'm going to recommend Vital Proteins collagen (bovine, in the blue container). It contains glycine (I think) which calms down inflammation. Said inflammation is especially common with people with stress and tension in their bodies.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 5:56 AM on December 26

I ended up doing like 4 months of PT to address chronic neck and back pain. For me, a lack of strength/mobility in my mid-back was putting strain on the rest of my body. Working with a PT twice a week resulted in an enormous improvement. Maybe a longer course of physical therapy would be helpful to you as well?
posted by toastedcheese at 6:12 AM on December 26 [1 favorite]

My partner has been taking turmeric to help manage aches and pain from arthritic inflammation, might be worth a try. She activates it with black pepper and mixes it into yogurt and pieces of apple, though one can stir into water and chug it. Organic turmeric if, like my partner, this becomes a daily regimen.

Seconding the recommendation to explore aquatics.
posted by ginger.beef at 6:45 AM on December 26 [1 favorite]

Take it from an older athlete, rest days and recovery are essential. A protein drink with lots of BCAAs (Branched-Chain Amino Acids) are part of my recovery along with hydration and electrolytes. And be sure to share the issues you're having with your massage therapist. I've found their knowledge of our body's musculature and how muscles interact to helpful in dealing with specific areas of soreness.
posted by tommasz at 7:38 AM on December 26

Yoga, but with the caveat that there's no one specific type/trick/pose that works for everyone, or for one specific body part. What will help most is to gather bits that address your own needs and specifics, and the way to do that is to try as many classes and teachers and videos etc as you can. The beauty of yoga is that it gives you ears and a vocabulary for what your body is doing and what it needs, over the long term. But it's really self-work that no one can do for you -- you really have to put in the work to figure it out for yourself.

I've also gathered a ton of info/tricks from PTs over years that are part of my yoga practice, so I'd second the advice to go for a course of that. Finding a good PT is very important -- ask around for recommendations. For instance my shoulder surgeon has a PT that he sent people too; that's the one I wanted, and was much better than the pre-surgery shoulder PT I got at the generic place in town.
posted by Dashy at 7:53 AM on December 26 [2 favorites]

On the topic of sleep, how old is your mattress? Depending on the type and how frequently you've turned it, the support it provides will degrade. And this happens slowly so it may have crept up on you.
posted by SPrintF at 8:18 AM on December 26 [2 favorites]

I experienced this same thing this past year but with lower body pain. It sucks. Massage helped but was expensive. PT was worthless, unfortunately I think you have to find a good PT and that feels like a crap shoot, plus it's very time consuming. I eventually helped it with the following:
Majorly reducing stress (easier said than done!)
I tried a bunch of YouTube yoga videos (I like some from. Alo yoga) targeted at the problems I thought I was having until I found a set of yoga exercises that were hard enough to show progress but also felt like they were attacking the problem areas, and I started doing that most nights before bed.
Being careful about what I was doing at the gym, paying attention to what made it worse, cutting back on the things that made it worse and slowly re-adding things as it seemed to be better. You may need to go through a period of stopping a bunch of the harder activities in favor of just walking and stretching, which sucks.
My various doctors recommended acupuncture, I didn't try it but there's a data point if you're interested.
If you can figure out the precise problem (for me lower spine) salonpas lidocaine patches can be very helpful

Good luck.
posted by ch1x0r at 8:23 AM on December 26

Best answer: If your back/neck/shoulders are hurting and you sit in front of a computer all day—especially if you’re using a laptop that sits directly on the desk— I’d strongly recommend looking at your ergonomic setup. It was life-changing for me to get a cheap laptop stand and Bluetooth keyboard/mouse — it got my laptop screen up to eye level and got me out of a hunched position all day, which dramatically reduced my upper back/neck/shoulder pain.
posted by ourobouros at 9:09 AM on December 26 [2 favorites]

Resistance band training, complex muscle group exercises, focusing on core muscles have been most effective for me. Swimming for cardio. There are groups of muscles that wrap the body diagonally and support the interior muscles, and they are essential to stability and strength. Here are two You Tube channels I like for choosing exercises I will do over those I won't do:

HT Physio

Institute of Human Anatomy NOTE!!!This channel has explanations using dissected bodies, but it has some very good recommendations on exercises and how the body works.
posted by effluvia at 9:54 AM on December 26 [3 favorites]

I was in the same boat 10 years ago. Approaching 40, everything started hurting. I remember getting back x-rays and everything.

Then I lost ten pounds and that seemed to fix everything. I always considered myself active and healthy but it turns out I did have ten pounds to lose. I'm 5'9" and was about 165. I went down to about 150 and all the aches and pains went away. I've been able to keep my weight below 155 for the past decade and now I'm approaching 50 and everything still feels great.

I try to run and eat vegetables every day, but I really think it's losing those ten pounds and keeping them off that made the difference.
posted by Sophocles at 1:11 PM on December 26

Wait for a sale, but the Herman Miller Embody chair is worth every penny if you spend a lot of time in front of a computer. I can sit in it all day without developing the sort of pains your regular Office Depot type chairs always left me with.
posted by axiom at 9:32 PM on December 26

Mid-50's here, and here is some contradictory exercise advice for you that I have found very helpful:

- don't stop moving/exercising
- Also: stop moving/exercising

By which I mean, as you age, be very, very mindful of rest and recovery days. You won't be able to go at it as hard as often at 40 as you did at 30, at 45 as you did at 40, etc., but you don't have to cut back that much. You'll just have to be mindful of what you're doing in ways that you haven't needed to be, until now.

Basically, just listen to your body a lot more. If you have an exercise routine you follow, and maybe one day you need a day off, take it. Maybe, do yoga/stretching once in a while instead of resistance weights, or walk a bit less, or just take the day off entirely. Then, get right back to your normal routine the next day. Your body will tell you what it's capable of on any given day. Rest and recovery are just as important as exercise.

Your days of effortless exercise on demand may be numbered, but that doesn't mean you have to stop entirely, or even change it up all THAT dramatically - just evolve your exercise routine as your body evolves.
posted by pdb at 9:42 PM on December 26 [1 favorite]

As you get older (52 here), I find the difference between 6-7 hours of so-so sleep and 8-9 hours of quality sleep every night really can't be overemphasized in terms of how I feel the next day. (If your schedule permits, of course.) Anything that can possibly help--quality mattress and pillows, blackout curtains, white noise, getting checked for sleep apnea--is worth looking into.
posted by gottabefunky at 1:13 PM on December 27 [1 favorite]

Lots of good advice here. I’m not super-sporty, but I have been practicing yoga on and off for over twenty years, and I relate to this question on many levels (getting older myself, early forties, never sporty, haven’t had many changes in weight and am generally happy with my body but unhappy with /scared of pain).

I am an insufferable pedant, and I feel compelled to say that there is not a “specific type” of yoga that can address a specific pain in the body, or even pain in the body broadly, in the same way that there is no exercise that will whittle your waist specifically or that will specifically help you lose weight when other exercises have “failed”. (I grew up around so much fatphobia, and these false idols of ideas, that we can “spot-reduce”, or that there are Superior Forms Of Exercise, make me mad as hell.)

The type of yoga that will help relieve pain for you is the one that you can begin doing now without pain, that makes you feel challenged but also engaged with (and ideally positive about/grateful for) your body.

This is the type of yoga that you might be willing to continue to do; and the benefit of any practice, from piano to physics, is only derived by continuing to do it in ways that stretch and strengthen and teach you more about yourself. (To me, the question feels similar to asking, What type of rest and fluids will best help me get over a cold?)

A PT or other healthcare professional could help you articulate what muscles/joints are in play and what combination of strengthening and stretching would help you (it is almost always some of both!).

Once you have that, find a good, anatomy-focused yoga teacher who has explicitly and without prompting expressed interest in you being very careful with your body (for example, not pushing headstands or super-advanced poses just because you have the strength to do them, but who focuses on form and building a rewarding continuity of practice).

Red flags for me include people who talk about yoga or martial arts as exercise, or who discuss weight loss; who date or socialize with students; who push students to try advanced poses and/or who don’t build modifications into their practices; who do not in a live class have some patter at the beginning allowing students to quasi-anonymously identify themselves if they want help with modifications (a common way to do this is to have everyone take child’s pose at the beginning of class, and then let people raise their hands unseen to the room to let the teacher know about any injuries or questions).

Some people think of hatha yoga as more gentle than vinyasa yoga, but vinyasa practices can be super-easy and gentle on the body, moving through sun salutes slowly to warm up the body. Similarly, hatha can involve long holds in very challenging poses.

For me, vinyasa practices help me let go of my analytic brain more quickly, which is better for both my physical and my emotional pain. In hatha classes, my brain tends to take the opportunity of long holds to think about things that are bothering me outside class, or to focus on difficult sensations in my body. Even so, if I use flow-y vinyasa yoga to distract and numb myself out, it will still come back and bite me in the ass, just as much for neck pain as for unresolved relationship issues!

I am a big yoga nerd-amateur (not certified to teach, but have studied a fair bit), and I believe there are lots more practitioners here on MetaFilter, so please ask more questions about yoga if you have them! My tiny little 5-min-a-day practice is one of the best things in my whole life, and yoga has saved my mental health in more ways than I can express.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 10:49 PM on December 28 [1 favorite]