June 2024

“I’m a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn’t have the heart to let him down.” 

- Abraham Lincoln

Coach’s Commentary

I may need to rename this section to “something I saw on social media this month that made me mad.” This month it was  a post floating around that said “When you’re young and you drop something, you pick it up.  When you’re old and you drop something, you stare at it for a while, wondering if you actually need it anymore.” On the surface, this is funny and relatable for many people.  But after my initial “haha” reaction, and after I read people’s comments, I stopped thinking it was funny.  Because too many people seemed to have accepted this as reality, and that is sad.  Why would anyone want to accept that it’s impossible to pick things up off the ground after a certain age? Picking things up should only be impossible after you start believing it’s impossible.  As long as you DON’T accept this as your reality, it won’t be.  It is never too late to start strength training and practicing basic movement skills that will enable you to continue doing ordinary things like picking things up off the floor or walking up/down stairs unassisted as you age.  Sure, you might need to be more intentional about the way you bend over to pick something up, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to bend over at all.  

This boils down to a problem we have where just because something is common, makes us think it is normal.  There are numerous health issues that we consider to be normal, just because they are common.  But they aren’t normal.  It’s not normal to be incapable of picking things up off the ground.  I won’t go into some of the other common-but-not-normal health issues that bug me, (at least, I won’t go into into them here and now), but let’s work on making this particular issue no longer common!

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