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Of course, while every one of those muscles serves a different purpose and each is susceptible to its own form of strain, tears, and other kinds of injuries, we want to focus on the most common and debilitating muscle problem in terms of aging: back pain. First, let’s tour your back. Your spine is the snakelike curved structure made up of small bones called the vertebrae, which are stacked one on top of another to form a column. Between each two vertebrae, there’s a disc that provides cushioning. Think of the spinal structure as a series of jelly doughnuts—with the vertebrae acting as the semi-hard casing and the discs as the squishy substances inside that casing. Tendons and ligaments hold the entire spine together, and openings in each vertebra line up to form a long hollow canal that houses the spinal cord from the base of the brain down the spine. Small nerves from the spinal cord jet out the spine through the space between the vertebrae. (A bulging or herniated disc happens when too much torque is put on the spine and the disc bulges out, like pinching the doughnut so the jelly oozes out. If that occurs close to a nerve, that leads to inflammation of your nerves leading down to your legs and arms, which is why a pinched nerve hurts down the legs or arms more so than directly in the neck or back.) Though we all have heard of the severity of injuries that can come from trauma to the spine, the more common forms of pain come from strained muscles in or surrounding the lower back.

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You might not know it by our country’s obesity epidemic, but we certainly do love our muscles. We see them on everything from magazine covers and CD cases to Brad Pitt movie posters and Times Square billboards. Despite our visual fascination with the lean mass of tissue that swiped the term “six-pack” from the beer industry, muscles are really important because of their physical function. The 650 muscles in our body give us the strength to do everything. While we all have varied levels of muscle mass, all of our muscles work the same way. Attached to ligaments, muscles are made up of tissues that contract and relax. To understand how they work, think of an extendable ladder that is extended—that’s your muscle at rest. When you put tension on one end, the ladder ratchets together and consolidates the rungs—
making the ladder shorter. When you release tension on your muscle, it relaxes and extends back to its rest length. A muscle works when you put it under a certain amount of tension, and the energy you consume (food) gives you the power to contract and relax. When a muscle is under full tension during a workout, it is actually damaged by that tension, but it grows when it recovers. When you put your muscles under just the right amount of tension (that at threshold), that’s when you feel soreness—a soreness is caused by toxins in that damaged muscle. (Postworkout massage and stretching have been shown to reduce muscle soreness because they both help work those toxins away from the muscle to be drained in the lymphatic system.) Too much tension, and a muscle rips—that’s not soreness; that’s pain

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KNEE Situated between the two longest bones in your body (the tibia and fibula), the classic door-hinge joint bends in one plane of motion—backward, not forward or side to side.

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SHOULDER

you can see that your two shoulder joints consist of three bones (the clavicle, scapula, and humerus), and they’re essentially what gives you the ability to rotate your arms in many different directions. The top of the humerus bone lies on a shallow shelf of bone within the shoulder, like a golf ball on a tee. Some shoulders dislocate easily because the top of the humerus falls off a damaged joint, just like a ball on a chipped tee. This anatomy allows a wide range of motion, and allows you to swing clubs, play tennis, and do the backstroke. But that wide range of motion also makes it the most prone to dislocation. Those people who play sports with throwing motions are at most risk of suffering an injury to their shoulder joints; a rotator cuff injury is usually a strain or tear of the muscles or tendons around those shoulder bones. Diagnosis comes from a physical examination—no, the doc isn’t just trying to see if you’re tough—confirmed by an MRI, and the treatment is similar to that undertaken for a meniscus tear. You can most likely avoid shoulder problems by paying attention to your arm position during movement. Avoid any exercises that require you to put your hands outside of your line of vision. In those positions, you’re more likely to pull the ball farther from the golf tee than it wants to go.

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HIP The hip joint gives you a lot of stability because it needs to carry your body weight, but the ball-and-socket anatomy also gives you the ability to rotate and to move forward but not back. One of the foundations of your body, the hip joint is a place where many different muscles and tendons attach; many of the injuries that happen to this ball-and-socket joint stem from overuse and the wear and tear of being in constant motion. But because it’s more stable than mobile, it’s more prone to fracture than dislocation (especially as you get older, when it’s more likely that you’ll lose balance on a rug or an uneven part of the pavement and land on your side).
No matter which one we’re talking about, joints are vulnerable parts of your body. They’re soft substances, so if there’s some kind of trauma, the joint is the first thing to take the hit. But as you age, your concern shouldn’t revolve around injury. It should revolve around degeneration, and how you can keep your joints young and strong.

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