What I meant by bending in one direction, though, was this – whereas hips, shoulders, wrists and ankles are able to rotate, and even elbows to a limited extent but knees emphatically do not rotate, they only bend. Some types of exercises overstretch the ligaments on either side of the knee, which work better to protect the knee if they are somewhat stiff. I probably did not explain very well, and anyway, I’ve realised this is not the place for heedless advising without a prior invitation, so I’ll stop here.

This leads to much mental frustration as well as physical pain. In Pilates, for example, whenever we have a substitute instructor, I have to go through the whole, “My aren’t YOU Miss Flexible?” And I feel the need to explain AGAIN about how we’re all made differently and that no one way is better than another and that my flexibility means that I’ve had arthritis since I was 13 and that I get tendonitis at the drop of a hat…blahblahblah. I do get sick of being a freakshow. Sometimes, I even get a hint of, “But you’re so LARGE…how can you be this limber?” But I let that slide off me for the ignorance that it is.

I’m staring at the disks now, thinking…just one more round…just one more round. But one more round means over an hour for me and the old knees just can’t do it. I need Sylvester’s “Birds Anonymous” for DDR. Yes, I did just compare a video game to Tweety.

Of course, my current knee problems only really took hold once I found out that I had a talent for Dance Dance Revolution. Not a form of movement good for anyone over 30, but damn fun.

There’s more, but this is supposed to be a comment not a post.

So then there is movement – a different word altogether.
Movement – a group of people who loosely work towards a common goal.

Movement – a musical term. And Movement and Music go together like …..well, babies and doughnuts, or anything else you can think of that goes really, really well together.
Movement is organic, natural, and stillness can be a part of it. If we are alive we are in motion, and this is true EVEN if we are practically immobile (I had cause to find this one out when coming face to face last March with dead body of elderly relative who had died – peacefully, as they say – in his bed. He was 95, and practically immobile before he died – but seeing him dead made me realize how much he had been moving even when sitting in his chair all day!)
People have always worked, rested and played – and even though that was an ad, it is still a description of a full life with no room for Exercise. If we breathe we are in motion – our actual life that we are living is one long fluid motion – why should we have to step OUTSIDE of our life now and again and EXERCISE.

Sorry – maybe this is a rant – if so, I apologise. But with A Sarah’s journey, which started this thread, exercise is no more an “answer” than diet. And the following self-teaching has become part of my journey – “Don’t diet. Just eat stuff. Don’t exercise. Just do stuff. Start when you feel like it, stop when you want.”