Mindset
“Sometimes, They Just Need to Get Stronger!”
-Unknown
I recently had a great interaction with the Reconditioning Plus+ community we created about six months ago. It’s a great group of critical thinkers and, more importantly, really good human beings.
We were sharing case challenges and insights loosely around the subject of shoulder pathologies. We’ve been going deep on different areas of the body that often become problematic, or injuries that have a tendency to recur. Our belief in Reconditioning is that pain problems or injuries that aren’t directly traumatic in nature usually have background stories. The current complaint is often just the output expression of something deeper.
We tackle areas of the body and recurrent injuries because they give us a starting point. That is, after all, the typical nature of our practices. Someone comes in to see us because something is bothering them enough to seek our counsel. It’s bad enough that they are willing to dedicate some of their precious time to having us help them.
But part of our job is to clarify what their problem actually is, while never losing sight of the fact that the problem they came to us with matters to them.
Pain is usually their problem. Some form or variation of it, anyway. Something is gnarly enough to have their attention. It’s preventing them from living comfortably, doing something that matters to them, or performing at a level that matters to them.
So our first responsibility is to understand them. What is their problem? What do they believe contributed to it? What has changed in their life?
They need to be heard.
Being heard is something every human seeks, and not every human receives. But while we’re hearing them, we also need to recognize that their interpretation is only one part of the story. We need to see some of the things they don’t see. We need to uncover things they don’t even know might matter.
Unfortunately, many of the issues our clients suffer from aren’t precipitated by the one thing they believe is the problem. They’re often a confluence of elements, each potentially contributing something to the painful output that has now become their greatest concern.
They may not recognize that the stress they’ve been dealing with at work over the last six weeks coincides almost perfectly with the emergence of their symptoms. They may not consider that working six hours a day on a laptop, staring down at a screen, has dramatically changed the positions and movement variability their body experiences every day.
They may not recognize that doing the same things over and over again, even doing them really well, can make the body incredibly good at solving one particular movement problem while leaving it less prepared for novel ones.
Their decision to play pickleball after work on Fridays seemed completely sensible. It was an outlet for stress, an opportunity for community and, finally, a chance to move. But five days spent predominantly sitting at a desk may not have prepared them particularly well for accelerating, stopping, reaching, rotating, reacting and changing direction while simultaneously tracking and hitting a ball.
Or maybe they are active. Running has been their jam. They can run forever, and the movement is beautifully grooved. But running forward repeatedly is a very different physical problem from moving forward, backward and sideways, changing direction and reacting to something outside their control.
None of those things necessarily caused their pain. That’s an important distinction. But they’re all pieces of information worth considering as we try to understand the person standing in front of us.
There can be many interesting contributors to the caustic output this person is now complaining about. Some acute. Some cumulative. Some physical. Some contextual. Our responsibility is to explore them rather than simply matching the painful body part to our favourite intervention.
Which brings me back to the conversation we were having in Reconditioning Plus+.
One of the things we ended up discussing was something incredibly basic, and something I think treatment practitioners sometimes overlook.
Is this person actually strong enough?
Yep. That’s it.
Can they produce the forces they need to produce to do the things they want to do every day?
Beyond that, do they have enough muscular capacity to support themselves, repeatedly? Enough physical reserve that normal life doesn’t constantly push them toward the edge of what they’re capable of tolerating?
Those of us who have spent our lives in exercise, sport and performance environments can develop a pretty distorted perception of what “normal” physical activity looks like. We tend to surround ourselves with people who train. We work with people who exercise. Our social media feeds are filled with people lifting, running, cycling, skiing and competing.
We can start believing everyone is like us.
They’re not.
The latest Statistics Canada data make that abundantly clear. From 2022 to 2024, only about 46% of Canadian adults aged 18 to 79 accumulated the recommended 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each week.
Think about that.
One hundred and fifty minutes.
Two and a half hours out of 168 hours in a week.
More than half of Canadian adults don’t reach it.
Canadian adults also averaged 9.3 hours of sedentary time every day, with only 42% meeting the recommended sedentary-time threshold.
Perhaps even more troubling is what we’re seeing in young people. Only about 21% of Canadian youth aged 12 to 17 met the recommendation of 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity per day. Among adolescent girls, that number was just 8%.
Eight percent.
That begins to tell a much bigger story than simply whether people “exercise enough.” It raises questions about physical literacy, exposure to load, physical capacity, resilience and, ultimately, our relationship with movement across the lifespan.
Which brings us back to the people walking into our practices.
The matter-of-fact reality is that some of our clients need basic capacity building more than they need fancy exercise strategies.
We need to understand complexity. We need to be capable of recognizing neurological, mechanical, physiological, psychological, and contextual contributors to the problems people bring us.
But we also need to recognize simplicity when it’s standing directly in front of us.
Sometimes people simply need to become stronger.
Sometimes they need to discover that ten or fifteen minutes of appropriately selected strength work each day is achievable. Maybe that becomes the doorway to reducing some of the everyday aches and limitations that have prevented them from even contemplating a larger fitness objective.
In Reconditioning, we like to think about movement through two interacting ideas: capability and capacity.
Capability is how someone moves.
Capacity is how much of it they can do: under load, at speed, repeatedly, or under whatever demands their life or sport requires.
There isn’t an absolute rule about which one comes first because they are symbiotic moving targets. Some basic capabilities require a minimum level of capacity simply to execute them. As the demands of the task increase, greater capacity may be necessary to preserve that capability.
Think about stepping onto a 12-inch step.
For many of us, it barely registers as a physical task. Put your foot on the step, organize your body over it, produce enough force through one leg, and lift yourself.
It looks like a simple capability.
But what if you don’t possess enough force to lift your own body weight onto the step?
Suddenly, a movement problem is a strength problem.
For someone else, doing it once is easy. The question becomes whether they can do it twenty times. Can they do it carrying groceries? Can they do it with a backpack? Can they do it quickly if they suddenly have to run up a flight of stairs?
Same movement.
Different capacity.
This is why taking care of the issues our clients report requires us to understand what the real problem is rather than simply applying our therapeutic intervention of choice.
The intervention is the last thing we choose. Observation is where we begin.
Sometimes what we discover will be complicated.
Sometimes it will be surprisingly simple.
And sometimes the most sophisticated thing we can do is recognize that someone just needs to get stronger.
Then our job is to make that solution tangible, achievable, and meaningful enough that they’ll actually do it.
Think about it…..
Reference
Statistics Canada. (2025). Canadian Health Measures Survey: Activity monitor data, 2022 to 2024. The Daily, October 17, 2025.
