A couple of months ago, I started having pain in my right hip and far-right lower back when I would do heavy back squats.  Then, a few weeks later, it started to happen during deadlifts, too.  Soon, even running was causing hip pain, light cleans or box jumps would send stabs of pain through my back.

I tried stretches, foam rolling, dynamic mobility warm-ups.  I did pre-hab and re-hab progressions.  I focused even harder on my exercise form.  All of which helped a bit.  But not much, and not in a lasting way.

Throughout, I was mystified.  I couldn’t find anything that had changed in my workout, couldn’t point to a traumatic injury, couldn’t spot a movement dysfunction that could have chipped away at me over time.  I started to think perhaps I’d just never figure it out.

But, after another month of puzzling, I realized something had changed.  Due to a shift in schedule, I was suddenly walking much, much less than I had been before.  And I was wearing shoes – less flexible, heeled, toe-smushing work shoes – vastly more often.

So, with nothing else to lose, I started increasing my steps.  Thanks to my schedule, they were almost all indoor steps, often multi-tasking while walking a figure-eight around a room.  (Lesson learned the hard way: if I just walk around a room in a circle, I end up dizzy and nauseous enough after ten or twenty loops that I need to sit down; a figure-eight turns in opposite directions at either end, so I can loop indefinitely without falling over / throwing up.)  But indoor stepping did allow me to take off my shoes, so I walked the majority of those steps barefoot (or, rather, in sock feet).

I determined that I’d fallen to only walking 3,000-4,000 daily steps, so I inched that up by 500 a day, first to 10,000, then (as I was enjoying it) all the way to a daily 15,000.  And, lo and behold, even before I hit that 15k step count, my back and hip pain had completely and permanently disappeared.

Previously, I could have told you about the importance of daily movement, and of walking in particular.  Looking at our ancestors and current hunter-gatherer tribes, I would have said, it’s pretty clear that we evolved to walk 3-5 miles (or, funny enough, 10-15k steps) every single day.  And I would have theorized that not getting that amount of daily walking was one of the underlying drivers of pain and dysfunction in modern life.

But this was the first time in my adult life that I’d fallen to such a low level of daily movement myself, and had directly paid the price.  Which highlighted the big difference between knowing something intellectually, and really understanding it at a visceral level.  I now know, first-hand, what happens if you don’t stay active.  And I can definitively say: the truth hurts.