I went to one of those ninja warrior gyms. Called Ninja Nation, and you do all the stuff from the Ninja Warrior game shows.

I couldn’t do anything there.

Only reason I’m saying this is about the painful joints thing. One of the simplest things I tried to do there is just hang, from my hands, from a bar. I found I could hang for about five seconds.

The other thing I found is that there a sharp pain in my shoulders when I hung from my hands. I thought this was evidence of my shoulders being fucked up. In fact, my self image for years had been “I’ve got bad shoulders”.

But my friend who’s a massage therapist just said “You know you can get rid of that stuff. It’s just because you haven’t hung from your arms since you were a little kid”.

And he was right. I kept just putting my arms into whatever position would cause that sharp pain (a duller pain would have worried me more) and eventually that pain just went away. It was like cobwebs that had built up from the narrowed range of motion I was using my shoulders for.

The whole reason I’m saying this is for your physically painful exercise. Some of that may just be your body sort of shrinking its range out of non-use.

Pain isn’t always evidence that a body part is “bad”. Like if you were on a plane in a tiny spot for twelve hours, your legs would hurt as you finally stretched them out again. But that pain doesn’t indicate your legs are “bad” and it definitely doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stretch those legs.

Just food for thought