I’ve written before about functional fitness, why we need muscle, and why longevity increasingly looks less like chasing skinny and more like maintaining strength. I still believe all of those things because they really do matter, especially as we age and start understanding health more broadly. It is about what our bodies can still do, how well we recover, how steady we feel, and how fully we can participate in our own lives.
For more than a decade now, I’ve exercised daily. Not occasionally. Daily. No exceptions, no excuses. Walking. Weight lifting. Hiking. Biking. Paddle boarding. Snowshoeing. Yoga. Elliptical workouts. HIIT. Pickleball. All the things that bring me joy-well maybe not HIIT but I know it’s good for me. Movement is my “me” time. It clears my head, supports my body, helps me process life, keeps me connected to myself, and honestly, makes me happy. Based on all that daily movement, I thought I had a pretty solid understanding of my muscles.
Recently, I’ve been working on my yard. I’ve done yard work before, but this was the first time I took on this level of physically demanding yard work by myself. This wasn’t planting petunias for twenty minutes and calling it a day. This was serious labor. Rocks. Bricks. Buckets. Pavers. Wheelbarrows. Rakes. Shovels. Bags of dirt. Landscape fabric. And did I mention rocks? I spent weeks lifting, bending, crouching, stabilizing, twisting, carrying, arranging, repositioning, and receiving very loud and clear communication from muscles I don’t always hear from during my regular workouts. And talk about sweat… damn. I swear, I sweated out every ounce of water I drank. If you’ve never got sweat in your eyes, trust me, it’s not a spa treatment.
At one point, I loaded the wheelbarrow with so many rocks that it was slightly off balance. Add a slope and a little momentum, and apparently the wheelbarrow had somewhere urgent to be. Before I could regain control, both the wheelbarrow and I went down. My pride took a hit, but remarkably, nothing else did. I wasn’t injured at all, and I think that says something about what years of strength, balance, and daily movement had quietly built in my body.
Somewhere between hauling bricks, losing a brief argument with a wheelbarrow, and trying to make piles of rocks look “natural,” I realized something: all those years of movement weren’t just exercise. They were preparation. Not preparation for a fitness competition or some dramatic before-and-after moment, but preparation for life.
That realization hit me harder than the soreness. And trust me, there was soreness. Even my hands hurt. In fact, I was sore enough that I made another batch of my muscle balm because I needed it myself, and I would much rather use herbs and oils I recognize than reach for some over-the-counter version with ingredients that sound like they were named during a lab evacuation.
The soreness was also information. My body was showing me where I was strong, where I was challenged, and where certain muscles had apparently been waiting very patiently to be included in the conversation, including my hands. That is the thing people forget about muscle: we don’t build muscle just to exercise better or look better. We build muscle to participate in life more fully.
Your version may never involve an overloaded wheelbarrow or several tons of rocks, but life has a way of asking more from the body without checking our schedules or reviewing our workout history first. The strength we maintain now affects how prepared we are when that moment comes, whatever it looks like for us.
Muscle is easy to misunderstand because we have made it too cosmetic. Too much of the conversation gets trapped in how bodies look instead of what bodies can do. Visible muscle gets attention, while useful muscle does the work quietly. It is the support system in the background, helping us move, stabilize, recover, carry, bend, balance, and keep going when life asks more from our bodies than sitting in a chair, watching YouTube videos, and scrolling through other people’s opinions.
Your body does not care whether your arms look impressive in a tank top, although it’s a nice perk. Your body cares whether your joints have support, your bones have protection, your metabolism has help, your posture has backup, and your energy has something solid underneath it. Muscle is active, protective, metabolically important tissue. It helps regulate blood sugar, supports movement, helps maintain bone strength, and gives the body more capacity to handle stress, effort, recovery, and daily life.
That capacity matters more as we age, not because aging automatically means becoming weak. I wholeheartedly reject that gloomy little bedtime story. But muscle does become easier to lose if we stop asking the body to maintain it. The body is efficient. If we rarely lift, carry, push, pull, bend, balance, or challenge it, it starts adapting to that lower demand. The body is always listening to what we repeatedly ask of it, even when what we are asking is very little.
Modern life makes this ridiculously easy. We sit more. We outsource more. We push buttons more. Some people may have entire days where the heaviest thing they lift is a water bottle, and even that may come with a handle and emotional support stickers. Convenience is lovely. I am not trying to churn my own butter or haul river water in high heels. But convenience also means we have to be more intentional about muscle than previous generations did. Our ancestors moved because life required it. Today, we have to move because life no longer demands it.
Think about your own day for a minute. How often does modern life genuinely require your muscles to work? Depending on how you spend your time, hours can pass without your body being asked to lift, push, pull, stabilize, or carry much of anything.
This yard work showed me another result of all those years of daily movement: they helped me maintain the physicality I needed when life demanded more from my body. Those workouts helped me keep going when the project took longer, the wheelbarrow was heavier, and the rocks needed to be moved again because apparently “aesthetically pleasing” is not a one-and-done situation. The work was still challenging, and my muscles had plenty to say, but there is a big difference between being challenged by physical work and being completely taken out by it.
Without the last decade of daily movement, I honestly do not know if I could have done half of what I’ve done in my yard. That is not ego. That is gratitude with dirt under my fingernails. Every day of movement mattered because those days compounded into strength, stamina, steadiness, and the ability to say yes to more of life.
That may be one of the most important reasons to maintain muscle as we age. Muscle gives us access to projects, adventure, independence, energy, confidence, and the kind of life that still asks something from us physically. It matters because we want to keep living fully, not because we are trying to look younger or prove anything, and definitely not because social media needs another video of someone doing lunges in matching workout sets while pretending the lighting was accidental.
My yard will eventually look peaceful and beautiful, which is hilarious considering how much hauling, sweating, bending, falling, and muttering went into it. But underneath the rocks, bricks, pavers, and landscape fabric, there is another kind of evidence: the evidence of a body I have been building for years, not just to work out, but to live.
The important question is not whether your yard contains several tons of rock. It is what you still want your body to be able to say yes to, and what you are asking it to maintain today so it can keep saying yes later. That answer will look different for each of us, but the body can only maintain what we continue to use.
That is where this comes back to the larger message of my book, The Awakened Body. Learning to work with the body instead of against it is not just about food, weight, symptoms, or health goals. It is also about listening when the body communicates, respecting what it needs, and understanding that the choices we make every day are quietly shaping the life we will be able to live later. Muscle, movement, and strength are all part of that conversation because we are building a body capable of carrying us into the life we still want to live.