Have you ever caught yourself thinking your knees have only so many kilometres left in them? Or felt a twinge in your shoulder and quietly wondered whether it's time to stop using it altogether?
I've thought both of those things. And when I sat down with exercise physiologist Mitch Hooper — a man who deadlifts over 350 kilograms and runs marathons — he pulled both beliefs apart in about thirty seconds. These are two of the most common injury myths going around, and believing them will cost you far more than the niggle you're worried about.
Myth one: your body wears out like a machine
"The body is not a car," Mitch told me, and he says it to clients constantly. Your knees don't come with an odometer. Your hips and your back don't have a fixed mileage after which they need replacing.
It's a very natural way to think. Everything else we own does degrade with use, so why wouldn't we? But living tissue works the other way around. Use isn't bad for you — use is the thing that keeps the tissue strong, nourished and resilient. It's the old principle: use it or lose it.
This matters most for people in their forties, fifties and sixties, because that's exactly when the wearing-out story starts to feel plausible. And it's the age at which believing it does the most damage, because the belief itself causes people to stop moving.
Myth two: pain always means injury
The second myth is subtler and, I think, more important. Pain and damage aren't the same thing.
Arthritis is the clearest example. Move an arthritic joint and it will often feel bad — and I don't want to dismiss that, because the discomfort is real. But the discomfort doesn't mean the movement is causing harm. In fact, if you followed "avoid pain at all costs" with arthritis, the joint would get considerably worse, not better.
The same applies through injury rehabilitation. A good clinician won't tell you to avoid all discomfort forever; they'll help you understand which sensations are information and which are a genuine stop sign. That distinction is hard to make alone, which is a large part of why professional guidance is worth it.
The real culprit: too much, too soon
So if use isn't the problem, what actually injures people? Almost always, Mitch says, it's doing something too much too soon.
The most common trouble spots are predictable — ankle, knee, lower back and shoulder. But the pattern behind them is nearly always the same. Someone who has done very little decides they're now going to do three intense hours a week. Someone who has never run signs up for an ultramarathon. I recognised myself immediately in this, because I'm a zero-to-hero person by nature: no warm-up period, straight in, trying to compete at a professional level from day one.
And here's the part that surprised me most. The risk runs in both directions. If you were training regularly and then suddenly stop — a gym closes, life gets busy — that sharp drop leaves you just as predisposed to injury as ramping up too fast would. Most people have no idea that detraining carries its own risk.
Build low, start slow — and keep your strength
When I asked Mitch for his top injury prevention tips, he gave me two, and I've been repeating them to myself ever since.
The first is to maintain your strength. He calls it the number one risk factor across multiple injuries. This is where people often go wrong when they take up something new: they decide they're a runner now, so they drop strength work entirely. Mitch calls that a huge mistake. Your body is built to push overhead, to flex and extend your spine, to do all of it — and as soon as you stop doing something, you lose your capacity for it.
The second is "build low and start slow." Begin relative to yourself and what you've actually been doing, then build the slope gradually. Focus less on how many kilometres you can cover and more on how precisely you can run the first one.
What I love about this is that it mirrors how I work with food. Nobody improves their nutrition by throwing out everything they eat and starting from scratch. You tweak, and tweak, and tweak. It's compounding interest for the body: 2% more each month feels like nothing at all, and then you look back after two years and you're a different person.
Exercise as medicine
When I asked Mitch what an exercise physiologist actually does, his answer was "treating chronic pain and conditions using exercise as medicine" — and that landed with me, because in nutrition we say food is medicine.
The synergy is obvious once you see it. Exercise provides the stimulus; food provides the fuel to facilitate the change. Neither is a replacement for medication, and neither pretends to be. But as Mitch put it, if you can modify someone's lifestyle so their body becomes more efficient at healing itself, that will always be more effective than something produced in a factory.
Who should see one? Broadly, anyone living with discomfort, and anyone managing a chronic condition like diabetes or recovering from heart surgery who hasn't had the time with their GP to really understand how to exercise safely. And ideally, anyone about to take on a big new goal — because prevention is better, cheaper and more effective than the cure.
Key takeaways
- Your joints don't have a mileage limit. Use maintains tissue health rather than consuming it.
- Pain doesn't automatically mean damage — with arthritis in particular, avoiding all movement makes things worse.
- Most injuries come from doing too much too soon, not from using your body too much over a lifetime.
- Suddenly stopping training carries a similar injury risk to suddenly ramping up. Consistency beats both.
- Maintain strength even when you're training for something else — it's the single biggest protective factor.
- Build low, start slow, and judge progress by quality of movement before quantity.
- If you're taking on a big new goal or managing a chronic condition, get professional guidance before the niggle becomes an injury.
This conversation sits right at the heart of how I approach wellbeing at me&my wellness. Your body isn't a machine to be rationed — it's a living system that responds to what you give it. Movement, nutrition, sleep and mindset all feed the same process, which is your body's genuinely remarkable ability to repair itself when the inputs are right. The work isn't dramatic. It's small, smart, consistent tweaks, sustained long enough to compound.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au