68. 3 Reasons You Feel Tight, Stiff, And Drained All The Time

You can be doing “all the right things” and still feel like your body is stuck in quicksand. I see it constantly: people lift, they do cardio, they clean up their nutrition, and yet they wake up tight, stiff, achy, and low on energy. That pattern is typical in modern life, but it is not normal, and it is not something you have to accept as your new baseline.

I walk you through three core reasons this happens, starting with the one that surprises most gym-goers: you may not be moving enough throughout the day. Long hours of sitting shape your joints, hips, and upper back in ways a single workout cannot undo. From there we get into the deeper driver many people ignore: chronic stress. When your nervous system lives in fight or flight, your muscles stay guarded, tension piles up, and it becomes harder to sleep, digest well, and truly recover.

Then we bring it home with the third piece: you are not actually recovering. Real recovery means sleep, downtime, and consistent practices that shift you into the parasympathetic state. I also add a bonus that fixes more “mystery stiffness” than you would think: under-hydration and under-fueling, especially not getting enough water and protein. Finally, I explain why I brought therapeutic massage and movement care back into my work at Transformed Health Initiative, because bridging training and recovery is often the missing link to feeling better right now.

If you’re tired of feeling tight all the time, hit play, share this with a friend who needs recovery, and subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next. After you listen, what do you think is your biggest issue: movement, stress, sleep, or hydration?

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Transcript

Welcome And What Live Transformed Means

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Live Transformed, the podcast from Transformed Health Initiative, where evidence-based truth meets real life transformation. Lead yourself, integrate health, value what matters, engage in the process. This is how you live transformed. And now here's your host, Adam Kelly.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

What is up, all of you amazing people? I hope you're having a fantastic day today because it's a great day to have a great day. I am Coach Adam Kelly with Transformed Health Initiative here in Moore, Oklahoma, bringing you another episode to the podcast. And I'm excited, guys. I said last time I'm going to try to do better as far as getting back to being consistent, putting out episodes. It's been a crazy couple months as far as just everything happening at once, life doing what life does, all that good stuff. But uh so I end up not putting out an episode last week. So my goal now is to get back

Why Recovery Is The Missing Pillar

SPEAKER_01 1:10

to doing weekly episodes. So I launched my massage therapy, therapy uh, excuse me, therapeutic massage and movement care service here recently. First week of taking clients, that's going great, able to really help people. It's been amazing, and I'm super excited because just seeing how both worlds really impact one another. So, health and fitness, you know, working out, lifting, cardio, all those things, that's one huge part of it. And nutrition, you know, how we eat, how much we eat, what we're putting in our bodies, how it makes us feel, our body composition, all those things are super important, but those tend to be the two things that people focus on the most. And they tend to forget there's a third aspect here that's just as important as these other two, and that is recovery. Okay, so not just recovery in the sense of, oh, I took a minute between sets and now I'm going into my third set. I'm talking true recovery from the inside out, and that can look a lot different depending on what we're speaking of. You know, that could be sleep where we're actually healing and repairing tissue and basically just renewing ourselves. That could be uh therapy, so things like massage therapy, stretch therapy, um mobility work, yoga, Pilates, things like that. Uh, it could be um doing things like sauna, you know, spending time in the sauna, ice baths, these different things that people use as modalities for recovery. And if they're effective or not, that's debatable. But I am going to stick with the things that I know and the things that I've seen in the evidence to actually be helpful. And so that brings me to this episode. Like I said, last episode, I really dove into how I got back into massage therapy, how I originally got into it, how I got out of it, then getting into personal training and coaching, and how it's brought me full circle to getting my massage license and offering massage therapy and stretch therapy. That's the next one that's about to be released very soon. Totally pluck, you know, kind of plays into each other. And how this is looking at more of a holistic view of health and recovery and repair and movement and how we feel, how we sleep, all these different things. Because, you know, it's great helping people in the gym, it's great helping them get fit, lose weight, build muscle, improve mobility, all these things. But if we're constantly feeling more and more aches and pains, and more stiff, and just more like we can't really move around that much, even though we're moving around all the time at the gym and doing our cardio. But it feels like, you know, those actual things that we do in our normal life that don't involve lifting weights or cardio, it's more of a struggle than it needs to be. And so that's where recovery and body work and things like this can really be the missing link that a lot of people need and can use. Let me not say need, but could really use and benefit from if they were to add into their lifestyle.

Typical Is Not Normal

SPEAKER_01 4:29

So today's episode actually has a title, and that is Three Reasons You Feel Tight, Stiff, and Drained All the Time. Okay. Maybe we'll have some answers for you of what's going on compared to what you've been trying so far, right? So, you know, just after that last episode and since adding back in massage and things like that, I've I've really been thinking about how so many people are walking around with these conditions, you know, feeling tight, feeling stiff, feeling worn down, and they just think that it's normal. Like, oh, I'm supposed to feel this way because I'm in my 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, whatever, because you know, I this reason, that reason. This is just how it's supposed to be. Okay, a lot of people feel that way. But I'm going to point out a few big reasons why this may be happening to you. If you've been experiencing this and you're looking for some relief or what to do, or if something's wrong or not, let me help you here because let me say this feeling that way all the time is not normal. Okay, it is typical, but it's not normal. I had this conversation with a massage client earlier and was expressing the same thing that the situation that she's in, the way that she feels, the discomfort that she has, the tension she has, the knots and trigger points, the limited mobility, these different things, it feels normal because we're so used to hearing it and seeing it and experiencing it ourselves that we just think that this is how we're supposed to be. Like, oh, yeah, well, my neck just hurts all the time. Oh, well, my upper back is super stiff, it's just what it is. Oh, my low back just hurts, can't do nothing about it. And we kind of like trap ourselves in this way of thinking that because this is normal, because this is just my daily life, I'm just gonna have to live like this and get over it. But let me tell you, that is not always the case. Okay, but it's not normal. We need to uh understand that accept that it's not normal, it's typical. Just because something is typical, meaning you see it all the time, it happens very often, does not mean that it's normal, does not mean it's that's that's the way it's supposed to be. Okay, the body is meant to be in homeostasis, it's meant to feel good and move good. Matter of fact, it's meant to work so good that we don't even think about it. And, you know, as time has progressed, technology has progressed, we become more sedentary, we become more inside, we become more disconnected with nature and our bodies and more connected to everything else that takes our time and attention and energy. I feel like we just kind of don't realize the fact that we're not really supposed to think so much about how we move and what we eat and all these things. Like it's not really supposed to take up all of our time and our thought. Okay. What I mean by that is back in the day, people used to not have to worry about those things because one, they didn't have really time, and two, they didn't have a lot of the situations that we're dealing with today. Okay, they didn't have a lot of these conditions that we see today because it just wasn't possible. They were moving all the time, they were eating whole foods, real food when they could. They were fasting, they were doing so many different things that weren't intentional, that was just survival, and we've gotten away from so many of those things. And look how our health and our life has deteriorated as a whole and as a society. I don't feel like that's a coincidence. And the worse our situation gets, the more we tend to study things and research things and and test things and get super overobsessed with these different ideas when if you were to go back even a hundred years ago, but let's say 500, 1000, 5,000 years ago, people would have looked at you like you're crazy if you're if we spent as much time then focusing on health and eating and movement as we do now. They'd be like, What are we even doing here, guys? Why are we even thinking about this? Because really, normal should be we don't think about how our knees feel when we get up. We just get up. We don't think about how our back may go out if we're picking up this heavy object. We pick up the heavy object or we just can't pick it up. Like we're we shouldn't have to think about am I eating healthy or not? Because if all we had was real food, that really wouldn't be a question anymore. But I digress because that's going down a whole different rant that I had no intention to go down. And as you guys can tell so far, when I don't script episodes and I'm not reading from my notes specifically, like I have kind of an outline here, but if I'm not, you know, reading from a script, I'm probably gonna go in some rabbit holes and some rant. So y'all just bear with me. Um, so let's break down these three reasons so you understand and you can see what you can do today to start improving your situation.

Reason One You Do Not Move Enough

SPEAKER_01 9:31

So, reason number one, you're likely not moving enough, even if you work out, okay? Because I know he was about to say, I know somebody was gonna say, Well, wait a minute, hold on. He's not talking to me, check out because I move plenty. Okay, you may not be moving enough even if you work out, all right. So the honest truth is most people sit a good eight to 12 hours a day. Okay, rather if they're working a desk job, they're working whatever job has them sitting, they're driving a bunch, they're at ball games for their kids, they're at shows, they're at the movies, they're at the ball game, they're at um the circus, they're at uh so many different things that require us just to sit on top of the actual sitting we do throughout the day. And a lot of times we think that a workout per day, an hour in the day in the gym, or even two hours a day in the gym is enough to fix all of that sedentary time. And that is just not the case, okay? The body adapts to daily patterns, all right? It adapts to what you're doing. So if you've been working out for an hour for the last three years, your body's a pretty well adapted to that. Now, not that you're not going to progress, not that you're not gonna build muscle and have adaptation, but your body kind of adapts to where that's not really enough activity to spark a lot of the systems in the body that are required to keep homeostasis. So if you are completely sedentary, you've never worked out, and you go to the gym and you work out for 30 minutes, even if it's super light stuff, even if it's just on the treadmill, like you're gonna have some adaptations, you're gonna feel some things, you're gonna get sore, you're gonna be tired, you're gonna be wiped out, uh, and then you're gonna recover and get a little bit better. But if you kept doing that same 30 minutes of walking on the treadmill every day for the next three years, eventually that's not gonna be challenging for your body anymore. Eventually, it's gonna stop yielding some of those same health benefits it did in the beginning because now your body's adapted to this activity. So we have to push the body beyond what it's adapted to, okay. And it's just simple and plain. You cannot out train a sedentary lifestyle. Okay, so sedentary is still considered, even you let me rephrase that. You can still consider yourself as sedentary if you go to the gym and work out for an hour a day, but then you sit for the rest of the day, or you sit the majority of the day after that. Okay. This is why daily steps can be so crucial, you know, especially when it's a higher number, like 8,000, 10,000, 12,000, because in order for you to get that, unless you're going on runs, you're going to be spending quite a bit of time on your feet walking. And all of that movement throughout the day has a much better health benefit than if you were to go to the gym and do it all at one time and then go sit for the rest of the day. Your joints will thank you more, your digestion will thank you more, your blood circulation. So many things will be more appreciative if you break up your movement versus trying to do it all at once or only doing one little bit and then thinking that's enough to last you. Okay. That's just frankly not being very active if you only go to the gym once per day. So even if you're working out, point number two, or reason number two, why you may be feeling this way, your body is stuck in stress

Reason Two Chronic Stress Keeps You Tight

SPEAKER_01 12:53

mode. Okay. So constant stress equals muscles stay tight. All right. So everything is staying tense all the time. The more stress we're under. And we're not meant and built to deal with a lot of stress. Like we're we're meant to deal with or we're designed to deal with bursts of stress and then long periods of rest. Okay, so think of this in nature. Again, take it to before our modern

Bridging Training And Recovery At THI

SPEAKER_01 13:18

times. If your body feels tight, worn down, or just off more often than it should, that's not something you just have to live with. A lot of people are doing the workouts, trying to eat better, staying active, but they're still dealing with constant tension, nagging aches, low energy, and their body's just not responding the way it should. That's the gap. At THI, we bridge the gap between training and recovery, combining strength training, nutrition, and targeted body work to improve how your body actually functions. You don't just look better, but you actually feel better, move better, and perform better in your everyday life. If that's the piece you've been missing, we're here when you're ready. All right, back to the episode. You didn't have a lot of stress. You had probably three stressors per day. Actually, let's say four stressors per day. And some of these probably weren't stressors every day. Some of these may have been stressors just occasionally. So needing food, that may be a stressor. But if you, you know, if you're growing crops, if you have animals, if you're a really good hunter, if you're at a at a pond or lake or ocean where fish bite very well, then maybe that's not a stressor very often. But that's one. Clean fresh water to drink, or at least clean water to drink, drinkable water. That may be a big threat and stressor on a day-to-day basis. But if you have a clean stream in your area, then maybe it's not again. And then shelter, okay. Obviously, we need shelter to survive the elements, but if you have shelter, you built shelter, you live in a cave, whatever it may be, again, that's not a stressor you deal with very often. And then not dying by a predator or some other thing that's out there to kill you, okay, or another tribe or something like that. So, you know, that's probably not a day-to-day thing you would deal with living in nature. That would be an occasional thing. So outside of that, the majority of your time is chilling, foraging, huntering, gathering, playing, hanging out, sleeping, napping, like all these parasympathetic, you know, promoting things, these relaxation type events. Whereas in modern times, we constantly have things to stress about all the time. Okay. And the body doesn't recognize the difference between types of stress, where it's coming from, any of that. So, to your body, when you're in traffic and you've been cut off for the 18th time, driving the 20 minutes that it takes you to get to work, all of those spikes in cortisol, all of those spikes in adrenaline and anger and frustration and all the words you say and all that, your body can't tell the difference between that and you're running away from a wild animal or you're in a fight trying to protect your children. It doesn't understand how to differentiate between the types of stress, okay, or where stress is coming from. It's just stress, all right. And when we live our lives the way we do, again, dealing with traffic daily, work stress, family stress, home stress, all the blessings that we have, all the good things that break down, have to be repaired, all so many things that are constantly stressors. We're constantly connected to everybody and everything. So we never get time to just decompress and just go outside and be in nature and experience all the relaxation that comes from that. You know, that's not how we were meant to live. So that leads to being in a place of constant stress, okay? Chronic stress. That's a no-no, big negative. And the nervous system never shuts off. Okay, so again, we have sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic nervous system is that fight or flight response. That's that adrenaline rush, you know, you're ready to run away or you're ready to fight for your life. Parasympathetic is the opposite. That's that rest relaxation state. That's when we digest our food, that's when blood circulates better, that's when our nervous system calms down. But if we're always in a state of fighting, if we're always in a state of stress, then we're usually in that sympathetic nervous system state much more than the parasympathetic. And maybe we're never in the parasympathetic state. And that is a terrible thing for our bodies. And you can feel these things show up from the inside out in places like neck tension and headaches and tightness through the shoulders and traps and rhomboids and rotator cuff and in the hips and in the low back. Like that's the way that it works. Stress that's on the inside in your mind affects your body. Okay. Uh, Lane Norton, if you don't know who he is, look him up. But he says something that he's quoting somebody else that I really love, and that whatever happens in the mind affects the body, and what happens in the body affects the mind. Okay. These two things are eternally connected. Well, they're connected for now while we're alive in this state of being. Um, those two are connected. You can't separate them. What happens on the mind is gonna affect the body. If the mind is constantly stressed and under tension, the body's gonna constantly be stressed and under tension. Same thing, vice versa. Okay, so it's gonna show up in your body. Because, like I said, your body doesn't know the difference between the types of stress, right? It also doesn't know the difference between mental stress and physical stress. So if you're under a lot of physical stress, it's mentally stressing, right? Well, same thing vice versa. If you're mentally under a lot of stress, your body also starts to reflect that same stress. So this is why recovery is so important. It's not optional if you want to feel good. Okay, if you want to feel your best, you're gonna have to take care of your body, you're gonna have to get out of these extremely high stress states and do something good for your health so you're not stuck in these patterns anymore. Okay, big, big game changer.

Reason Three You Are Not Recovering

SPEAKER_01 19:10

And finally, for point number three, reason number three is you are not actually recovering. Okay, you're not actually recovering. Now that may mean your sleep is dog crap, okay. That may mean you don't have any downtime again. You don't have time to get into that parasympathetic, sympathetic nervous system. You don't have time to go outside and smell the flowers, literally and figuratively. You don't have time to just pause and rest. This is why my family, we keep the biblical Sabbath. It's the seventh-day Sabbath every Saturday. And this has been a huge blessing for us because I am forcing myself to stop and rest and spend time with my creator. So every single week, I'm guaranteed to spend a good amount of time if my kids allow me to, in that parasympathetic nervous system. And this does wonders for me, my health, my family, our week, and just everything. Everything benefits from it. And we're always pushing, right? Type A people, getter dunners, uh hard workers, you know, training hard, getting after it, crushing life, being the best parents we can be, being the best spouses, being the best employees or employers, doing all the things, always constantly pushing. And it's like you're doing all the work, but none of the repair. You're doing all the big tasks in life, but you're not doing the ones that are going to keep you doing what you're doing for the long haul. Okay. Because we all know high performers, we love to push, right? I'll sleep when I'm dead. Uh, no sleep for the weary or wicked or whatever that phrase is. Um, you know, I don't have time to rest right now. I don't have time to take off. I don't have time to take a vacation. I don't have time to take to keep Sabbath. I don't have time to, you know, spend time with my family and take my mind off of work or take my mind off my goals. I don't have time to, you know, do this or do that. We constantly are pushing and we kind of fall in love with that idea of, oh, look at me. I'm a grinder. I go hard. You know, I don't stop. As soon as my feet hit the ground until I hit the pillow, I'll be going. You know what I mean? That's how we tend to operate. And we hate that having to slow down. We hate having to take an off day. We hate having to call in. We even hate having to take vacation. Not that we don't enjoy the vacation, but we hate the fact that we're having to take off work. We're hating the fact that we're having to stop momentum, even if it means doing something that's good for us, right? That's where the problem is. And I'm gonna give you guys a bonus here, okay? I'm

Bonus Hydration And Protein Basics

SPEAKER_01 21:53

gonna give you a reason number four bonus reason of why you're feeling like this all the time. And this is one. That nobody tends to think about when it comes to being stiff and being tired all the time and you know tight and drained and all that, and that is you may be under hydrated or underfueled, okay? Underhydrated and underfueled. So muscles need water and nutrients, okay. So does every other thing and process and organ in your body. They need water, they need nutrients, okay. Digestion has to have water to absorb food and nutrients, we have to have water to excrete an excess of nutrients so we don't, you know, have some sort of toxic toxicity situation from too much of any given nutrients or chemical or whatever in our body, we have to have water for. And for uh water-soluble vitamins like vitamin C and your B vitamins, you have to have water for these vitamins to even be used. They they're broken down in water, they're shuttled through the body through our blood, which is 90% water. So all of these processes, even the absorption of these critical nutrients, are only possible if we are staying hydrated enough, okay, to keep these systems working the way they should. Now they can our body's very adaptable, okay. It's always trying to get to homeostasis, so it can fake homeostasis for as long as it possibly can if it can feel like it's there. All right. This is where we have compensation, this is where we have imbalances, things like that. And the body can keep trucking for quite some time. You can stay dehydrated for quite some time and maybe not even notice something, but eventually you may notice something. And I'm telling you, a lot of times with that tightness and stiffness and lack of energy, it's due to it not being hydrated enough. And you know, nutrients like protein, okay. Y'all know how important protein is. You guys have heard me talk about protein over and over and over. Protein matters for tissue health, not just for muscle, but for all tissue health, okay? And frankly, no offense, Frank, most people don't drink enough water and don't eat enough protein. Okay. That's just I I've been doing this for quite some time, guys. I see this over and over and over again. Water and protein are usually the two biggest struggles people have, not carbs and fats, not fiber, surprisingly. Uh, you know, a lot of these things people don't typically have problems with, but with protein and water, that tends to be the biggest struggle for the majority of the time. So if you find yourself waking up stiff and achy all the time, if your neck and your shoulders are staying tight all the time, it constantly feels like you have knots, constantly feels like your you know movements limited. And if you feel drained even when you didn't do much, even on your rest days, and you're like, God, I had a rest day yesterday. Well, I still feel exhausted today, the next day, there's a reason for it, okay? And more importantly, it's actually fixable. All right. You just got to be willing to do the work. So let's bring this thing full circle, okay?

Bodywork Results And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 25:12

This is exactly why I expanded my services. This is why I brought back massage therapy into what I do for this exact reason. Because again, well, I'm bridging the gap between the two areas that people struggle with the most with their health. And that way, whenever we improve both of those areas, just imagine how amazing things are. When you're not only looking better, feeling better, but you have more energy and you move better and you have less tension and you have less pain, and you're just, man, it's a beautiful place to be, right? Everybody deserves that. This is what I've been able to help people do now. Like I said, I've introduced massage therapy this week, and I'm already seeing the benefits seeing people just light up like, wow, I haven't felt this way in so long. Doing some stretches on clients, and they're like, My goodness, my low back hasn't felt this relief in forever. Oh, this is my favorite. I heard this one this week by a couple clients who saw each other in passing. One of them, we were doing finishing with a couple assisted stretching because she had some low back issues. The other client was coming in, and we're a private facility, so it's just me and my client or my group of clients at the time, and then the next people come in and just swap out. So then the next client comes in and she says, Oh, yeah, the part that everybody that this is the whole reason why we push hard is for this last bit, that last little stretch. And um, you know, just just seeing the impact that it has immediately when I'm just starting to really introduce this and push it full force, it's really a beautiful thing. So, you know, it's it's going beyond just training people, but actually helping them feel better every day. Okay, not just feel better in six months from now when you look better and when you're lighter and when your energy has improved and when your mobility and flexibility has improved through training, but you feel better now and you feel better next week as you're progressing in your goals and improving those long-term situations, you're also addressing the short term, the right now, the recovery, the repair. So that's what it's all about for me, guys. That's all I have for you for this episode. I hope this is helpful for you. I hope this gives you something to think about. Kind of think outside the box, guys. We're used to thinking, you know, uh health and fitness, so just eating better and moving more and trying to get some sleep, and you know, that should fix everything. And then we're doing those things, and it's like, well, okay, I'm losing weight. Yeah, my energy is a little bit more sustained. Yeah, I can do some things I used to not be able to do or haven't done in a long time, but why do I still feel like poo? Why do I still wake up exhausted? Why do I still wake up and I can barely turn my neck? Why do I still wake up and as my great-great-grandmother used to say, and as my mom now says, let me get my knees in gear before I start walking when I stand up because my knees don't feel right. All these little things, it's not just your training, it's not just your eating, it's not just your sleep, it's also these other points that we don't tend to think about that often. All right, guys, boom, look at me go. Kept this episode under 30 minutes. That was the goal. Well, once I do some editing, hopefully it'll still be under 30 minutes. But to make sure, I'm gonna leave you here, guys. Be looking forward to the next episode.

How To Reach Out And Wrap Up

SPEAKER_01 28:27

If my therapeutic massage and movement care is something that you feel would benefit you, and you find yourself in the more Oklahoma City metro area, then feel free to reach out, shoot me a message, call me, text me, email, DM, whatever it is. Let's get connected. Let me help you feel better right now. Um, same thing with coaching, and of course, it's playoff time because it is April, and we are Oklahoma City, so I just have to leave you guys with this. Make sure whenever this next round finally starts, because our boys are sitting here resting, waiting, that you thunder up. All right, guys, love you all. Do something good for yourself, something good for your health, something good for those you care about, and whatever you do, make sure you win on purpose. We'll talk at you next time. This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. We share general health and fitness information and professional experience, not individualized medical advice. This content does not replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making any changes to your health routine.