TIFU by not stretching for 30 years and not listening to my body

I am not a very flexible guy, I was never even close to touching my toes and I have been this way for most of my life. So I have just learned to live with it. I am also a pretty strong guy and do a lot of heavy lifting/ pretty physical jobs as well.

So I usually get a sore back or sore muscles that I take muscle relaxers to help was the pain until it goes away. Never really stretching to help ease the pain.

This never really caused any issues until about 2 years ago when it started getting painful around my waist when ai wore a belt. I didn’t really do anything about it just learned to deal with it by not putting my belt on as tight around my waist.

everything was ok for a while until the muscles in my stomach started to really hurt for no real reason. My 2 year old daughter had jumped on my stomach recently and I just thought it was because of that. Still I did nothing about addressing the issue.

Then my lack of maintenance on my body finally caught up to me last September, right before I moved into a new house. It felt like every muscle on the right side of my body constricted and made it extremely difficult to walk, put on socks or even turn in bed.

Even feeling this way I still just worked through the pain, not addressing the issue for a month thinking the pain will just go away. I had to use the muscles in my legs in order to lift my leg up and down to walk, making the muscles super tense. And when ai went to bed, those muscles twitched a lot as they relaxed. There was also a muscle behind my leg right below the glutes that made it feel like someone was taking a hot iron two the back of my leg, making it almost impossible to sleep.

So after a month of this I finally go to see a chiropractor auto see if they can fix the issue. And after some very painful tests she said my glutes were so tensed up that they were useless. And the muscles in my leg were trying to compensate for them. So she released all three glute muscles which gave me instant but not complete relief.

I next went to a physiotherapist to help further with my recovery. There she helped release more tensed up muscles until it wasn’t too bad to walk anymore.

Here’s the thing, for the last 9 months of my life since It first became incredibly painful for me, there are still muscles giving me pain. However I have figured out a solution. I have to twist my leg/ body in a certain way to get that specific muscle to stretch. And once I get that painful feeling I just stretch out that muscle aggressively, working through an immense amount of pain until that muscle is no longer painful.

I have had to do that with every single muscle on the right side of my body, because I still get pain. I am getting to the point now that it isn’t as painful anymore and I see a light at the end of the tunnel. But it has taken a lot of pain, effort and stretching to get me to this point.

Take my word of advise. Stretch, it is important to your health, also don’t ignore warning signs.

TL;DR I didn’t stretch for 30+ years and am now paying the price with an immense amount of pain