Mahjong, yoga, and the first thing to go in November
I sat down at a mahjong table for the first time this year with no idea what I was doing, and the women at that table had been playing for years, so the tiles moved faster than I could follow and all of them were talking the entire time. I had to work for every tile. What stayed with me on the drive home was not the game, it was that three and a half hours went by and I never once reached for my phone, my hands were busy, my brain was working at something brand new, and I was sitting shoulder to shoulder with people instead of beside them in a waiting room.
I take a yoga class every week too, same class, same room, same people. Some weeks my body wants it and some weeks I go because it is on the calendar and someone there notices when I am not.
The plan you keep is usually the one with other people in it
The biggest mistake people make with their body is not moving it, and I say that to patients all the time, but the harder truth underneath it is that almost nobody fails at movement because they do not know what to do. They fail because the plan lived only in their own head, where it can be quietly moved to tomorrow without anyone noticing.
I watch this happen on my table every week. A patient leaves with home exercises, a reasonable ten minutes a day, and three weeks later the tissue tells me what happened, because the tissue does not lie about whether it was loaded. The same patient who cannot find ten minutes alone will not miss a Tuesday pickleball game at seven, a walking group, a Saturday class with a friend who is waiting in the parking lot. The movement is not better. The structure around it is.
What the brain is doing while the body works
The reason a class or a game does more for you than the same movement done alone comes down to how much of you it asks for. Balance, timing, a sequence you have to hold in your head, a person across from you doing something you did not expect, all of that is the nervous system working, and the nervous system is not a separate department from the joint or the muscle. It is never just one thing, it is all interconnected.
This is also why I like naming mahjong and yoga in the same breath, because one of them barely moves the body and the other barely challenges the mind, and the thing they share is a room with other people in it and a standing time on the calendar. Sitting at that table, I was tracking tiles, reading three other people, learning a pattern my brain had never seen. Coordination, recall, paying attention to something outside your own head, those are all trainable, the same way strength is, and the way you train them is by using them with other people.
I am not going to tell you a card game protects your brain or that a yoga class prevents an injury. What I will tell you is what I see in the patients who have something like this on their calendar. They come in moving more, they recover faster between visits, they hold their corrections longer, and when something does go wrong they catch it early because they noticed it on a Tuesday instead of six weeks later.
November is the month this gets dropped
We get the best weather of the year in Scottsdale in November, and it is also the month I watch the most people quietly fall out of their routine, because the calendar fills with travel and family and the thing that gets cut first is always the hour that was only for them. Then January arrives and the body has been still for eight weeks, and people come back to movement hard and fast after being still, which is where a lot of the injuries I see in January are born.
If you are going to protect one thing through the holidays, protect the standing one. Keep the class, keep the game, keep the walk with the neighbor, even in a smaller version, because a body that keeps moving through November does not need to be rebuilt in January. Tissue remodels slowly, up to six months for a real injury to finish rebuilding its integrity, and nerves that have been through trauma can take up to two years, so the time you lose is not a week of motivation, it is months of tissue.
Pick the room, not the workout
When patients ask me what they should be doing, they usually want me to name the exercise, and what I tell them now is to find the room first. A class, a league, a club, a table, something with a time attached to it and people who will notice you, and then we can talk about whether your hips and your shoulders are ready for it, because that part is my job and it is a much better conversation to have before you start than after.
I am going back to that table, and that is most of the point. If your body has been telling you it is not ready for the thing you want to join, that is worth an hour with me before November gets away from us. I am here when you are ready.