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Joints: The Ultimate Flex for 2025, Experts Say

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By Cameron Aldridge

Joints: The Ultimate Flex for 2025, Experts Say

Photo of author

By Cameron Aldridge

Understanding Middle Age and Joint Health

Reaching middle age often means becoming intimately familiar with your body in ways you might not expect. I’ve spent recent years realizing that my youthful antics, like popping my shoulders out of sockets for fun or bending my elbows backward, were not without their future consequences. Two decades of engaging in vigorous sports with a less-than-perfect skeletal structure have left their mark as well.

Now, I find myself painstakingly performing minor exercises from physical therapy, hoping to salvage my ability to bend, twist, and move freely. It’s not only the major joints—hips, knees, and shoulders—that start protesting with increased years, but also the smaller ones that seize up and demand attention, often painfully so. Consider the vertebrae and the compressible discs between them, or the joints connecting our teeth and jaw, and even the front joint of the pelvis, which typically goes unnoticed unless childbirth or a sports injury brings it to the forefront. These junctions become arthritic and stiff over time, turning what were once simple movements into sources of discomfort and pain.

It’s tempting to curse these joints for their fragility and apparent betrayal, especially the tiny ones we never even acknowledged until they started hurting. Yet, these joints are actually marvels of our anatomy, bending and flexing to prevent breaks and more severe injuries.


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Joints are so crucial for movement that nature has invented them more than once. Arthropods, such as crabs and cockroaches, evolved joints within their exoskeletons, enabling them to bend and scurry efficiently. Our own skeleton, likely beginning as external bony scales on ancient creatures, eventually internalized to encase our spinal cord around 420 million years ago. Modern vertebrae consist of numerous joints—usually around 25—stacked and cushioned by cartilaginous discs. This evolutionary design was essential even before our ancestors left the ocean, facilitating the basic movements necessary for crawling onto land. Joints have evolved to allow insects and animals to maneuver in various ways, including running, climbing, and even flying, all activities that rely on strong bones connected by flexible joints to defy gravity.

Our joints do more than just connect bone to bone. They are buffered by connective tissues, cartilage, and bursae—slim sacs filled with fluid that lubricate and cushion the joints, enabling smooth, swift movements without the creaks of a rusted hinge. Even immobile joints benefit from this cushioning, allowing the skeleton to absorb and distribute pressure effectively.

Many of our joints go unnoticed until they start to present problems. Consider our teeth, which are held within the jaw by a small, ligamentous joint that allows for slight movement. This joint is constantly active, processing the tiny vibrations that help us discern the texture of our food. A sudden shift in a tooth is often the last alert to avoid biting into something too hard. The ability to balance our body weight on the small surface area of our feet is another marvel, courtesy of 26 bones and numerous joints that allow for extensive flexibility.

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The pelvic region, though it appears to be a solid bone ring, is actually a complex structure where three bones on each side—the ilium, ischium, and pubis—join together. The front of this ring features the pubic symphysis, a joint that plays a crucial role in weight distribution and shock absorption. It becomes particularly flexible during childbirth, expanding to allow a baby to pass through, and typically returns to its normal rigidity afterward.

As vital as they are, joints are often taken for granted until they begin to deteriorate. Conditions like arthritis introduce chronic pain and swelling, while years of physical activity wear down the joints in our jaw, spine, and pelvis. Our vertebral discs compress under the dual pressures of aging and physical weight, sometimes bulging or herniating, impacting nearby nerve roots. Our evolutionary upright stance puts additional demands on our spine, which naturally curves (lumbar lordosis) to distribute the pressure of our upper body when we sit or stand.

While we often associate bodily strength with the robustness of long bones or muscles, vulnerable as they are only under extreme stress, joints are fundamentally different. They might seem weaker because they yield before our bones do, but this flexibility is actually a protective mechanism. Every subtle movement of our teeth or hips is a crisis averted—an injury that didn’t happen. With each step and every lifted weight, our joints absorb and adapt to pressures, exemplifying strength through flexibility.

Opinions and analyses in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Scientific American.

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