Dear LPG,

Well, we have arrived at a new year and yet another lockdown, and I have no doubt that even more people than ever will have taken a serious look in the mirror and decided that their clothes are snugger than is usual, even if they can’t see the increase in waist and hip size without the use of that arch enemy of any new year; the tape measure.  This is when they reluctantly decide that they should not only promise or threaten themselves that they are not going to let this new year, or this new period of house arrest, allow them to get as lazy as the last.

So, there is a double reason to do some exercise so that we can be fitter for a summer when we all hope that the words ‘Free at last’ will take on more than one meaning.

I spent some time with thoughts of my increased body mass hauntingly apparent at the back of my mind at a time when I was reading your website recently, and I noted one of the exercise videos that was recommended with resolve, but while I was working through the exercises, and even though it was a chair exercise,  I became quite worried because the parts of the routine that demanded that I sit up extra strait, while feeling really good left me hearing a few pops and creaks somewhere inside as I did them.

I think that quite a few people are used to the odd click as their older knees take them up the stairs but clicks that sounded like they came from my spine really worried me and I have to say that, the naturally lazy person that I can be all but decided this to be a perfect excuse to justify giving up on the idea of exercise altogether and resigning myself to a future of relative fatness.

A look at the internet tells a different story though.  I have learned that unless you have a known injury or accident that pulled a specific part of your body and that has become ‘louder’ than normal, it is worth mentioning to your Doctor the next time you have the opportunity, but body popping is not likely to do you any harm. 

I suspect that most of the information I found relates to bodies that are much younger than those belonging to many of the readers of LPG, but our bodies work just like theirs, even if they are a little bit older…

So there is no excuse even if it does cause your body to pop a bit… don’t overdo it but keep going.

MA, Catford

MA offers some answers she found about the body popping question…

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