At 25, I Couldn't Touch My Toes. I Thought That Was Who I Was.

A student of mine couldn’t bend down to tie his shoelaces.

His upper back was rounded. His neck hurt. His breathing was shallow—the kind that never quite reaches the bottom of the lung. He’d lived inside that body for so long that he thought this was just who he was.

“My body is too far gone.”
Followed by a bunch of expletives and self-criticism.

He had the right observation. He was using the wrong word.

The word “plastic” carries a curse in everyday English. Melted pipe. Cheap toys. Ocean garbage. Deformed, ruined, dead.

So when I tell you the body is plastic, you hear the curse, not the science.
And that mistake is doing more damage than the years of sitting ever did.
Because if you believe you’re plastic in the bad way, you stop trying.
You don’t even start.

The body remodels under whatever you repeatedly load it with.

Years of sitting shaped that student of mine. It has shaped you and me. Years of new loading—squats, deadlifts, presses, hangs—reshaped my student. Same mechanism. Opposite direction. The plasticity that bent him is the same plasticity that straightened him. Bones remodel. Fascia reorganises. Posture is just yesterday’s repetition wearing today’s clothes.

Six months in, Karthik tied his own shoelaces standing up.

This isn’t theory.

I thought that was who I was. The weak one. The stiff one.

The one who wasn’t built for it.

But I wasn’t born stiff. I had repeated stiff for two decades. The moment I started repeating something else—a stretch a day, a slow mile, the next slow mile—the body started replying. It always does.

Yours is replying right now to whatever you’re feeding it.

Plasticity isn’t only in your spine. It’s in your nervous system. Your metabolism. Your habits. Your identity. The thing that scared you—you can be shaped into this—is the thing that saves you. You can be shaped out of it.

Plasticity is possible.

In your posture.
In your body.
In your brain.
In your mind.
In your life.

You are not too far gone.

You are shaped by what you repeat.

Repeat something else.

This is part of a series around Plastic and Elastic. Inspired by Alan Watts’ thoughts around gooey prickles and prickly goo. You can read a couple of posts on this series over here and here.