I’m lying flat on my belly on a gym floor covered in Astroturf, and peering down at me is a biceps-endowed trainer who is becoming famous in the wellness world for exposing the hidden old person in you. His name is Bruce Mack, and for this part of his assessment, he’s positioned me at the bottom of a push-up—legs straight behind me, palms by my chest with elbows bent—and asked me to quickly lift my body off the floor and into a plank. If I can do this simple move smoothly—and feel no pain in my shoulders or back—then I get a score of 3. Too low a score on this move, or on the other six tests of “movement imbalances” he’s putting me through, and Mack will declare me unfit for duty as the active over-50 adventurer I’ve always assumed I’d be. I try to push up, but nothing happens. I might as well be paralyzed, for all the luck I’m having. “Are you feeling any pain?” he asks again. In fact, I wish I was. I’m no stranger to discomfort. Three years ago, my relationship with lower-back pain went from casual to intense, and 7 years before that I suffered a tear in my right rotator cuff. But I followed my doctor’s orders and got myself back to working condition. Or so I thought. No, what I’m experiencing in that moment is inertia in its purest form. It’s as if someone futzed with the signal between my brain and my body, rendering me useless. I have to confess: I’m a little shocked. I lift weights 3 times a week and walk at least an hour most days. And until my back woes, I practiced yoga regularly. So how can it be that I’m unable to do a simple push-up? “You have no core strength,” says Mack. “Literally none.” A few minutes later, I struggle through a deep squat, through the Hurdle Step test—in which you try to balance on one foot as you lift the other up and over a string suspended a few feet up—and through a few other moves that leave me feeling entirely humbled. My final score: 11/21. I stare at the sheet in disbelief. Though I’ve heard Mack’s spiel about the middle-age pain epidemic and the need to rethink the way we approach exercise to combat aging, it takes a moment for the significance of my results to hit me. While I appear to be a healthy 51, my joints, muscles, and ligaments are secretly closer to 60-plus—and headed toward a world of hurt. MORE: Your 30-Second Knee Pain Solution Let’s say you’ve had a little back pain, struggle with bad knees, or are nursing a shoulder that pinches every time you lift your arm overhead. Good for you—that makes you an average middle-aged American. A staggering number of us—100 million—are slogging through our days with chronic pain: 15% are saddled with neck pain, 19% complain of knee pain, and, at some point, 80% of us will be sidelined with back pain. But if, say, you wanted to clean out the garage or hike to a gorgeous view, you could do it, right? You’d end up with some aches—maybe a throbbing knee or a stiff back—and you’d probably pop an ibuprofen or two, but that’s just aging, right? It doesn’t mean you’d flunk Mack’s assessment. Wrong. In fact, Mack says, you are almost certainly as “dysfunctionally fit” as I am. In his worldview, we are all part of the middle-aged masses who, for the most part, try to exercise like we’re supposed to—we walk or run a few times a week and (if we’re really good) strength-train regularly—but still often find ourselves prone to pain and as stiff as toy soldiers. Since launching MBSC Thrive—a workout program designed to hunt down and kill the physical imbalances that Mack says are secretly aging us—he and his team of trainers have run more than 150,000 Americans through the standard Thrive assessment. Seventy percent have been shocked to discover that they scored below the average of 12/21, making their physical age—or movement age, as Mack likes to call it—about 20 years older than their chronological age. (See how you measure up with this simple at-home verion of the test.) “We see a lot of people in their 40s who move like they’re in their 70s,” says Mack, who is helping to lead the campaign to prehab us all before it’s too late. He formed Thrive in tandem with Mike Boyle, a strength-and-conditioning specialist with professional athletes in his fold and an unusual approach to pain and injury prevention. Boyle had discovered that when he applied the rehab techniques of physical therapists to his late-career clients, they not only performed at their peak again but did it with fewer aches. Five years ago, Mack, following Boyle’s program, got Thrive going in a single gym, and now this anti-pain, anti-aging training is, literally, thriving. Currently, their program, which for most of us replaces our usual strength training, is in 45 gyms across the country (including the fitness center at Rodale, Prevention’s parent company). In May 2014, Men’s Health named Thrive the best new workout of the year. “So, like, the back pain that keeps me from jogging or even sitting at my desk comfortably? And the neck pain that I wake up with? There’s an easy way to fix all that?” I ask Mack. “Yep,” he says with a smile, “we can fix all of it.” Ten minutes later, I’m back on the floor, moving my upper back along a foam roller like I’m a piecrust. Based on my assessment, Mack has custom-designed a 45-minute routine for me. It’s unlike any I’ve ever done, but, fresh from being humbled by his test, I’m ready to try it. I imagine working myself backward in age like Benjamin Button in workout wear. First up: corrective stretches and full-body foam rolling to increase my range of motion. This is the PT-inspired prehab that kicks off every Thrive workout. Foam rolling has earned quite a health halo over the past few years. Studies have shown that it can reduce muscle stiffness and discomfort, making workouts feel easier, and cut the risk of overuse injuries. Still, I ask Mack, is 10 minutes of rolling around really worth more than spending that time on, say, a treadmill? MORE: Feel 10 Years Younger With This Foam Rolling Workout It is, he explains, because my “‘needs improvement’ areas” took years to sneak up on me and need time to dissipate. Mastering the science of imbalance, I soon learn, is as easy as humming a line or two from “Dem Bones,” the sing-along guide that introduced most of us to our skeletal makeup. Everything in your body is connected, and, just like a strand of old Christmas lights, when one part malfunctions, the rest suffer, too, explains Mack. For the majority of us, it starts with our deepening relationship with the chair (something the average American spends upward of 8 hours in each day). The more you sit, the tighter your parts that are supposed to be agile and mobile—ankles, hips, and shoulders—become. Muscles that used to be strong get weaker. Eventually, you start to move differently, and activities you never even thought twice about, like walking up the stairs, feel laborious. MORE: 10 Moves For Pain-Free Hips Yeah, OK. But I exercise, I remind Mack. Doesn’t that count at all? It does, Mack assures me. My hard work has undoubtedly slashed my risks of heart disease and diabetes and kept me at a healthy weight. Unfortunately, as surely as sitting around creates imbalances, exercise is what compounds them. “Doing the same motion incorrectly for days, months, or even years is what leads to chronic pain and injury,” Mack says. Knees, forced to make up for malfunctioning hips and ankles, take more of the brunt of impact and grow overworked and grouchy. Tight hip flexors and hamstrings pull on your lower back, turning it into an achy land mine. Your pelvis tips forward and your shoulders get stuck in office-body hunch, gridlocking your upper back and slashing your shoulders’ range of motion, even during exercise. Without your realizing it, your form—whether it’s your running gait or your ability to squat correctly—suffers. “Suddenly,” Mack says, “people throw out their back or tear a rotator cuff, and they’re back on the couch.” Images of my poor form in yoga float back to me. I never mastered moving from Plank to Chaturanga into Upward-Facing Dog, and the proof eventually showed in the form of my torn rotator cuff. I mention it to Mack and he shrugs, as if he’s heard it all before. Chances are, he says, yoga wasn’t entirely to blame. It was just, so to speak, the straw that broke my shoulder. “The problem with a lot of workouts is the one-size-fits-all prescription,” he says, noting that many baby boomers arrive at Thrive nursing an injury they earned in a high-intensity program like CrossFit, P90X, or a tough boot-camp class. “About 99% of the 40-plus population is dealing with some sort of movement imbalance, but most programs put everyone through the same workout without first stopping to assess how an individual’s body works in space.” Basically, he tells me, it could have been worse. All that dangerous, incorrect-form stuff ends now, as Mack runs me through the rest of my new workout. The routine strikes me as uncomplicated, with a big bang for your buck in a short amount of time. The strength-and-power portion mimics movement patterns I do in real life, like lifting my suitcase into the overhead compartments on flights and carrying heavy bags from the car to the house. Woven in are jumping exercises, like hopping to the side and landing on one foot. “After age 30, we lose power—the ability to move quickly—at almost twice the rate we lose strength,” Mack explains. While my power definitely needs work, the moves he’s teaching me have none of the go-hard mentality most workouts stress today. Instead, Mack has me dialing back. “You need to learn to move well before you move often,” he says, quoting one of his PT gurus, Gray Cook. “Once you’ve retrained your body to move correctly, you can build intensity safely from there.” By the time I towel off, I’m sweaty and spent, but rather than feeling ruined, I’m energized. I leave Mack hopeful—and with instructions to do the workout 2 or 3 times a week in place of my previous strength routine. With each session, I see improvements, but it isn’t until I’ve done the work about a dozen times that I really begin to notice a change in how I feel. It’s in the middle of a yoga class—my first in 3 years. When the teacher calls for us to move from Plank to Chaturanga to Upward-Facing Dog, I’m able to do it without pausing once or making a single groan. My core is getting stronger. My shoulder is stable. I’m feeling…no pain. MORE: 6 Moves To Shrug Off Shoulder Pain
