For most of my adult life, my body felt like something that was happening to me rather than something I understood.
Things would go wrong and I wouldn’t know why.
Sometimes things would seemingly improve and I wouldn’t know why either.
It almost felt random.
I could have been exercising a lot, eating very healthy, and i’d still get sick or get injured.
Now, five years into this process, it doesn’t feel random at all. It feels like something I can actually understand.
Before I understood biomechanics, my body was a mystery
In my 20’s and 30’s many things would happen to my body that seemed a bit unpredictable.
One day i’d wake up tight. Another day I might wake up with a fever. etc.
It felt kind of random sometimes. LIke my body had a mind of it’s own.
The same was true of feeling focused and energized.
Some days I’d have really good focus and stamina. Other days, seemingly at random, I’d feel drained and depleted for no reason I could easily identify.
So back then i’d often make up my own hypotheses since there wasn’t a very tight logic. I’d say to myself things like “oh this must be because I have more stress at work” or “maybe this is related to what I ate last night?”
This is exactly what I see tons of people these days doing. Putting together correlations in their own head that are almost laughable once you understand biomechanics.
And then there was my mouth.
Throughout my early to mid twenties i was often clenching and grinding on my teeth. I put it off to stress and things like that. Because the reality was I had no real clue what was actually going on.
Another dental issue I had was I had a root canal and a couple of upper teeth seemed to be evolving into a worse position.
I would scratch my head and think to myself… “weird. The body is so random.”
Looking back, none of this was actually random. I just didn’t have the biomechanical framework to see the pattern. I was reacting to a body that felt like it was governed by chance, when it was actually governed by structural rules I hadn’t identified yet.
Why the body felt unpredictable in the first place
Once you start to understand these biomechanics — how the skull sits, whether the skeleton is compensating, whether the brain is being crushed by the collapse of the skull — the “randomness” starts making a lot more sense.
A body that is collapsing is fighting an uphill battle constantly, and is figuring out how to compensate in order to keep you alive and functioning as best it can.
It may need to turn down your energy to do that.
Or perhaps it needs to reduce function in a certain organ.
Or perhaps it needs to reduce activity in certain parts of the brain to keep other, more important, parts functioning well.
We really don’t know all the tradeoffs it is making.
But from what I have seen I think it is safe to assume that the body is making very intelligent decisions in the name of our survival.
The body is actually deeply logical when it’s improving
Here’s what I’ve come to appreciate over these five years that i’ve been on my biomechanical recovery.
The body was never actually irrational.
It was never truly random, even back when it felt that way to me.
What I was experiencing as chaos was really just the output of a system responding logically to a structural situation I didn’t understand yet.
Once you understand the inputs, the outputs stop feeling mysterious and start feeling almost mechanical in how consistently they follow from cause to effect.
These past five years very little has surprised me:
When I feel tired, I can often feel how it’s using more reserves to make harder (positive) structural changes.
When I cough, I can feel afterwards how much lungs feel clearer.
When I have a headache, I can feel how it’s putting pressure on my skull to expand and make more room for my brain. And i’ve experienced tons of cognitive and neurological benefits as a result.
I literally never get sick because it always sends signals to me beforehand of what I need to do to prevent it.
My body just seems to work very predictably as long as I respect it’s boundaries.
Command versus chaos
The best way I can describe the difference is that I used to feel like a passenger in my own body.
I was reacting to whatever it decided to throw at me, with no ability to anticipate or influence it.
Now I feel like I have command of it. I understand what it’s telling me, I can predict how it’s going to respond to different inputs, and it holds a baseline of function that I can actually rely on day to day.
That shift — from unpredictable to predictable — has given me a ton of confidence.
For example, I know that I can push myself harder and work consistent ~70 hour weeks at age 49 with no retribution.
When I’ve said this to some friends/acquaintances they often tell me that i’m probably building up some kind “health debt” that I’m going to have to pay one day.
And they typically rant on about how exercise & eating healthy is absolutely key to health. Because after all…. that is ‘proven’ in their view.
This one guy who is about ~7 years younger than me and holds a senior corporate position recently said something like that to me.
He's an avid padel player that ensures he makes it to the gym a few times a week while working 50-60 hour weeks. A year back he had to have a major knee surgery and then a little while back i heard he got pretty sick and had to take almost a week off from work to recover.
Meanwhile I’m older than him, i’m clocking 10-20 hours more of work time per week than he does, I don’t go to the gym ever, i’ve never needed to get any surgeries, I haven’t been sick in over 5 years, i’m in a good mood pretty much 24-7, and I’m able to work at this level for the last two years without having taken a single day off.
So I ask myself… who is actually the one that is running up this ‘health debt’?
Is it me who just seems to perform better and better in a sustainable way, or it is him whose body is giving clear signals that is breaking down?
My money’s on me baby ;)
Plus to be honest… his face is aging and showing more lines whereas mine seems to be doing the exact opposite. I have gotten rid of my wrinkles and my hair is getting thicker.
You see when you take a step back and think logically about the actual evidence… you would probably see that over the last few years literally every signal points to the fact that he is aging a LOT faster than I am.
But try and tell him that… and he’d think you lost your marbles.
I mean… how could someone that is sitting on his ass and eating whatever he wants be aging a lot slower than someone who regularly goes to the gym and goes out of his way to eat a healthy diet?
Point being that most people out there have stopped looking at the signs the body is giving them. Rather they prefer to just maintain their ‘belief system', even if they’re falling apart in the process.
Closing thoughts
I think a lot of people live the way I used to — treating their body as this semi-mysterious black box that occasionally malfunctions for reasons nobody can quite pin down.
Get sick, shrug, blame bad luck or a weak immune system.
Feel drained, shrug, blame stress or age.
Have a dental issue crop up, shrug, blame genetics.
Their great grandfather also had bad teeth… Voila! That must be the source of their problems! :)
Except, I don’t think any of it is actually random.
I think it’s downstream of a biomechanical baseline that’s unstable, producing exactly the kind of erratic output you’d expect from any system under chronic variable stress.
Fix the structure, and the erratic output goes away.
What’s left is a body that behaves consistently, communicates clearly, and follows its own internal logic so reliably that, for the first time in my adult life, it actually makes sense to me.