There are mornings now when I wake up and genuinely wonder what happened to me during the night.
Did I fall down the stairs?
Fight a bear?
Enter a triathlon in my sleep?
Because I distinctly remember going to bed.
That’s all.
I got into bed.
I lay down.
I went to sleep.
And yet when I get up the following morning, various parts of my body behave as though I’ve spent the night doing manual labour.
Shoulder.
Stiff.
Knee.
Complaining.
Back.
Has apparently submitted a formal grievance.
Feet.
Why do my feet hurt?
I haven’t even used them yet.
There is something deeply unreasonable about being injured by unconsciousness.
And for a while, I assumed this was simply what getting older felt like.
Another cheerful little gift from the ageing process.
Except the aches seemed to become much more noticeable around the same time as everything else was changing.
So eventually I did what I always seem to do these days.
I investigated.
And there it was.
Muscle aches and joint pains.
Menopause.
Of course.
At this point I felt menopause was becoming rather greedy.
Surely it couldn’t have everything.
Apparently my joints got the memo too
Joint pain is actually recognised as a symptom that can occur during perimenopause and menopause.
Some women describe stiffness.
Some aching.
Some notice particular joints.
Others seem to have days when their entire body has collectively decided not to cooperate.
And symptoms can continue after menopause too.
That was strangely reassuring.
Not because I was delighted to discover that aching joints could hang around.
Obviously.
But because once again there was that moment of:
Oh. So I’m not imagining this.
There’s something powerful about discovering that an experience you haven’t really heard anybody talking about is actually common enough to appear in mainstream medical guidance.
I’d heard endless jokes about hot flushes.
I’d heard far fewer women saying:
“Has anybody else suddenly become aware of every joint in her body?”
Perhaps we need better menopause merchandise.
Forget the fan.
Give me a heat pack and a comfortable chair.
But hormones aren’t responsible for everything
This is where I have to put the brakes on slightly.
Because there’s a danger once you discover that menopause can cause joint and muscle pain.
Suddenly every ache becomes:
Hormones.
Knee hurts?
Menopause.
Shoulder hurts?
Menopause.
Back hurts?
Menopause.
Accidentally drop a tin of beans on your foot?
Probably menopause.
No.
Joint pain has lots of possible causes.
Injury.
Overuse.
Arthritis.
Inflammatory conditions.
Hypermobility.
Other medical conditions.
And sometimes the cause isn’t immediately obvious.
So I’ve kept the rule I made right at the beginning of this book:
Menopause can explain a lot. It doesn’t explain everything.
If pain is severe, persistent, worsening, associated with swelling or affecting everyday life, that’s not something I want to diagnose myself from the sofa.
Particularly because my own body already had another factor in the mix.
My hypermobility.
Ah yes. My bendy joints.
Until my chiropractor pointed it out, I’d never particularly thought of myself as hypermobile.
It was simply my body.
Apparently some of my joints have a slightly more liberal interpretation of the phrase normal range of movement.
Which might sound useful.
Extra flexibility!
Lovely!
Except joints that move more aren’t necessarily joints that feel better.
And when I started having problems with my shoulders, the advice I received was to work on strengthening the muscles around them.
As I mentioned earlier, I couldn’t establish that menopause universally makes hypermobility worse.
That’s an important distinction.
But there is good reason for strengthening and conditioning to form part of managing troublesome hypermobile joints.
The muscles can help provide support and control around the joint.
Which brought me back—yet again—to the answer I was beginning to suspect had been following me around this entire book.
Get stronger.
Honestly.
I was hoping at some point the evidence might recommend lying on the sofa eating biscuits.
So far, disappointing.
Movement when moving is the last thing you fancy doing
There’s an irritating contradiction with aching joints.
When everything hurts, you don’t necessarily feel like moving.
You feel like protecting it.
Resting it.
Possibly sitting very still and waiting for somebody to bring you tea.
And sometimes rest is exactly what an injury needs.
But when it comes to general strength, stiffness and maintaining mobility, completely avoiding movement isn’t necessarily the answer.
Regular movement and strengthening can help maintain muscle strength, balance and everyday function.
For hypermobile joints particularly, the advice I’d found emphasised controlled strengthening rather than simply stretching joints as far as they’ll go.
That caught my attention.
Because when you’re flexible, stretching can feel like something you’re naturally good at.
But I don’t actually need to win a competition for putting my leg somewhere legs weren’t designed to go.
I need control.
Strength.
Stability.
Movement that supports my body rather than showing off what my joints are capable of.
My joints have had enough freedom.
They now require adult supervision.
I had to stop thinking of exercise as punishment
This connected with something I’d already started changing in the previous chapter.
For years, exercise had often been presented to women as something we did because of how our bodies looked.
Burn calories.
Lose weight.
Tone up.
Work off dinner.
Earn the dessert.
None of that particularly inspires me now.
What does inspire me is this:
I would like my body to work.
That’s it.
I want shoulders that let me reach into a cupboard.
Legs that get me upstairs.
Hands that open things.
Knees that bend.
Muscles that support my joints.
A back that doesn’t object every time I ask it to participate in normal human life.
Suddenly exercise isn’t punishment.
It’s maintenance.
And maintenance doesn’t have to be dramatic.
Walking.
Swimming.
Resistance work.
Moving regularly.
Strengthening the muscles I actually use.
Starting gently and building gradually.
I’m not training for the Olympics.
I’m training for being an independent older woman.
I’d quite like to be good at that.
The temptation to do everything on a good day
I also had to learn something else.
There are days when you feel good.
And when you’ve had several achy days, a good day can make you slightly overenthusiastic.
Suddenly you’re Hercules again.
You clean everything.
Move something heavy.
Go for a long walk.
Sort the garden.
Decide that cupboard really does need reorganising.
Carry twelve bags in from the car in one trip because taking two journeys would apparently violate some deeply held moral principle.
Then the following morning your body sends an invoice.
This is where pacing began to make sense to me.
Not doing nothing.
Not being frightened of movement.
Just resisting my tendency to alternate between:
I AM INVINCIBLE
and
I appear to have been run over by a small agricultural vehicle.
Consistency isn’t particularly exciting.
But my body seems to prefer it.
Rude.
Heat or cold?
This was another area where I wanted a simple answer.
Which is better?
Heat?
Cold?
Unfortunately, bodies continue refusing to behave like instruction manuals.
For some aches and stiffness, warmth can feel wonderful.
A warm bath.
A shower.
A heat pack.
That feeling when tight muscles finally begin to relax.
Cold is often used around acute injuries and swelling.
But the right approach depends on what is actually causing the pain.
I’ve become much less interested in declaring one thing best and much more interested in:
Does this help me, and is it sensible for what’s actually going on?
That question applies to an extraordinary amount of menopause.
And then there’s sleep
Pain and sleep have a particularly irritating relationship.
It’s difficult to sleep when you’re uncomfortable.
And after a terrible night’s sleep, everything can feel harder.
You’re tired.
Less patient.
Less inclined to exercise.
More sensitive to discomfort.
And if you’ve already got menopausal sleep disruption happening in the background, the whole thing can start feeling like one of those children’s roundabouts where nobody knows how to make it stop.
This was when I began noticing how connected everything was becoming.
Sleep affected how I felt.
How I felt affected whether I moved.
Movement affected strength.
Strength mattered to my joints.
Pain could affect my sleep.
Round and round we went.
I’d originally approached menopause as though I needed to fix a collection of separate symptoms.
The more I learnt, the less that made sense.
My body wasn’t a collection of independent departments.
It was one body.
Annoyingly interconnected.
What about painkillers?
There are obviously times when pain relief has a place.
I’m certainly not going to award myself a medal for suffering unnecessarily.
But I also don’t want to repeatedly cover up unexplained pain without knowing why it’s happening.
If something keeps hurting, particularly if it’s getting worse or interfering with normal life, I want to know what’s behind it.
Sometimes the answer may be relatively straightforward.
Sometimes professional advice or physiotherapy might help.
Sometimes further investigation is needed.
And sometimes the answer might simply be that I’ve asked a deconditioned body to do considerably more than it’s currently prepared for.
My old Hercules memories don’t automatically give present-day Hercules the same lifting capacity.
Apparently muscles don’t accept nostalgia as resistance training.
Learning the difference between discomfort and warning
This has probably been one of the harder things for me.
When you’re trying to become stronger again, some physical effort is expected.
Muscles working.
Getting tired.
Feeling that you’ve actually used them.
But pain isn’t something I want to prove I can ignore.
Especially with hypermobile joints.
I’ve become much more interested in paying attention to what my body is telling me rather than trying to conquer it.
There was a time when I’d probably have thought:
Push through.
Now I’m more likely to think:
Why does that hurt?
Can I change the movement?
Do I need to reduce the resistance?
Am I doing too much too soon?
Would professional advice help?
This doesn’t feel like weakness.
Actually, it feels rather sensible.
Hercules has matured.
My new definition of strong
I used to think being strong meant being able to lift something heavy.
And yes, I still rather enjoy being stronger than people expect me to be.
Hercules isn’t completely retired.
But my definition has widened.
Strong is being able to get yourself off the floor.
Strong is carrying your shopping.
Strong is climbing the stairs.
Strong is having enough stability around your joints to do ordinary things confidently.
Strong is maintaining balance.
Strong is continuing to move as you get older.
Strong is knowing when something needs medical attention rather than stubbornly pretending it’s fine.
And sometimes strong is admitting that perhaps you shouldn’t move the wardrobe by yourself.
I said sometimes.
Let’s not get carried away.
So what am I actually doing?
I’m trying to make movement part of normal life again.
Not a punishment.
Not a transformation.
Not a six-week challenge.
Something I do because this is the only body I’m getting.
I’m strengthening.
I’m walking.
I’m swimming.
I’m paying more attention to my joints.
I’m trying not to go from nothing to everything simply because I wake up feeling energetic one morning.
And I’m learning that looking after my body now isn’t about desperately trying to stop myself ageing.
I am ageing.
We all are.
The goal isn’t to prevent that.
The goal is to give Future Me the strongest, most capable body I reasonably can.
She’s going to need it.
Hopefully for a very long time.
And I’d rather she didn’t look back at me and say:
“You knew all this and still didn’t do your squats?”
Fair point, Future Me.
Fair point.
There was, however, another change I’d begun noticing.
It wasn’t painful.
It wasn’t particularly dangerous.
But it was surprisingly good at making me stand in front of the bathroom mirror and think:
Hang on. When did THAT happen?
My skin was changing.
My hair was changing.
Even the familiar face looking back at me seemed slightly different.
And that brings me to…
