Your Younger Self Missed This Memo
Happy Memorial Day. We hope you're doing something worth remembering today — or at the very least something that involves a grill and zero deadlines.
We want to talk about something that might feel personally targeted, and we apologize in advance.
Your body kept its receipts from high school 🥲
You know the knee. Not anyone's knee — your knee. The one that pops when you stand up making you wonder if you should start referring to yourself as "middle-aged.". Most of us have a version of this — a joint or a muscle that technically works but has been unnecessarily cruel to us for years — and we chalk it up to getting older, as though our bodies just decided to start falling apart at 35 out of spite.
But a study in the American Journal of Sports Medicine found that 50% of people who tear an ACL or meniscus develop osteoarthritis within 10 to 20 years, and the researchers had a phrase for this that's so perfectly brutal it deserves to be framed: "the young patient with an old knee." Tear your ACL at 15, and by 30 you could be negotiating with your own joint like it owes you money.
And it doesn't stop at one — research presented at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons found that 20% of adolescent athletes who had ACL reconstruction went on to tear their ACL again, and for every year older an athlete was at the time of the first injury, the risk of the second dropped by 29%. Your body apparently treats the first one as a precedent rather than a lesson.
We wrote a few weeks ago about how more than half of youth sports injuries are overuse injuries, and that neuromuscular training can cut ACL injury risk by up to 50%. Those stats are worth repeating because the new data above is the reason they matter so much — it's not just about one missed season, it's about what that injury becomes ten or fifteen years later when your kid is an adult wondering why their body keeps score on things they barely remember.
Why we're bringing this up on a holiday
If you're a person with a knee — or shoulder, or back that announced itself one day and never left — you already know the value of what you didn't get. You already know what it costs to work around something that could have been prevented, and there's a decent chance your kid is doing the exact same thing you did: playing hard, growing fast, and trusting that their body will just figure it out.
Youth Pre-Habilitation Workshop — Today at 5pm
Trainer Paydyn is leading a 60-minute workshop in the yoga room for parents of competitive young athletes, and the flyer at the front desk puts it well: there's a difference between "working out" and "bulletproofing," and most kids have only ever done the first one. Paydyn will cover what the most common season-ending movement flaws actually look like, how to build athletic durability in the offseason, and why the preparation that happens before the season is what determines whether your kid finishes it.
After the workshop, Paydyn will open enrollment for a 6-Week Offseason Durability Program — a structured, twice-a-week camp starting this summer, built on the same injury-prevention protocols used in elite collegiate programs and adapted for growing athletes, designed to make sure your athlete stays on the field rather than watching from the sidelines.
It's happening today at 5pm in the yoga room upstairs, and you can visit the front desk or call to grab a slot while they're still available.
You can't go back and give your 15-year-old self a prehab program, but you can give one to the kid currently sitting in your living room, probably on their phone, blissfully unaware that their knees have an expiration date 😅
Enjoy the holiday 🫡
Keeping tabs on your body so it doesn't keep tabs on you,
Your West Coast Fitness Family
PS: We're open regular hours today, but the cardio dance class is canceled.
