I know what you’re thinking: “I come to work, it’s a 12-hour shift. We’re constantly moving, fast walking, repositioning patients every two hours. I never leave the unit without getting at least 10,000 steps.”

And I get it. When you’re that active for that long, it’s easy to assume you’re covering all your bases.

The problem is that nursing asks a lot from bodies that modern life does very little to prepare.

We live in an extremely sedentary society compared with what most of the Alberta population was doing just 100 years ago.

A couple of generations ago, growing up on a farm and then transitioning into nursing was a common path for many young Albertans. Those bodies had already spent their formative years practising how to move, carry, haul, push, pull and lift things while navigating uneven terrain.

And even if you didn’t live on a farm, you still walked more in daily life. You may have ridden a bike to get places, carried groceries home, scrubbed floors, hung laundry, opened heavy doors and used your hands and shoulders for countless tasks that machines now do for us. Even dancing was athletic!

The terrain wasn’t just the ground beneath your feet. It was your entire movement substrate.

Today, that environment includes smooth floors, sidewalks, thick-soled shoes, elevators, escalators, vehicles, chairs, screens, power steering, automatic doors, rolling carts and tools designed to make almost every task easier. Convenient? Absolutely. But every convenience removes another small movement demand that once helped prepare the feet, hands, shoulders, spine and hips for life.

From a movement perspective, the terrain we live in today is basically impoverished because so little variety is required.

Most of us grow up walking on perfectly flat, engineered surfaces, sitting at desks and watching screens. We don’t regularly climb, crawl, hang, squat, kneel, balance, reach overhead, carry awkward loads or get up and down from the ground. When your world is sidewalks, buildings, elevators and vehicles, movement is inevitably seen as “optional.”

Ten thousand steps a day on concrete wearing Hoka shoes is not the same as steps across an open field while dodging gopher holes and cow pies.

But the difference goes far beyond the feet.

Ten thousand steps also do not prepare your hands for CPR, your shoulders for moving an inert body, your spine for an awkward transfer or your whole system for reacting quickly when something goes wrong.

This is where nursing becomes a strange contradiction.

Your shift is physically demanding, but much of it is also repetitive: walking the same floors, charting at computers, standing, reaching and holding familiar positions for hours. Then, with little warning, you have to get to a patient quickly, stop a fall, reposition a body, push a bed, perform CPR or produce force from an awkward angle.

Your body goes from zero to sixty – sometimes ten times in a shift.

That workload can exhaust the body, but exhaustion is not the same as preparation. Repeating the demands of nursing does not automatically build the range, organization, strength and responsiveness needed to meet those demands safely – especially when the rest of life offers so little movement variety.

So the unfortunate truth is: nursing itself is not enough to automatically create a body that’s been built to care.

But it can become the reason you build one.

The same body that works through a 12-hour shift also has to recover from it, remain ready for the next unexpected demand and still have something left for life outside of work.

That requires more than steps. It requires feet that can sense and organize against the ground, hands and shoulders that connect into the core, joints that can access useful ranges, strength that transfers into real tasks and a nervous system that can move between effort and recovery.

In this sedentary, screen-based world, having a way to buffer against the daily stresses of nursing is required if you don’t want to feel like you’re seventy when you’re actually in your fifties. Especially when those are the types of people you often end up helping.

But the good news is that your nursing career doesn’t have to wear you down until your wrists give out and you can’t do CPR anymore.

Nursing can be the reason you stay strong, independent and capable into your eighties – if you do the right things along the way.

The demands of the job can show you what needs attention: what needs to become stronger, what needs more range, what needs better organization and what needs to unwind at the end of the day.

And at the end of the day, this isn’t just about surviving work. It’s about being able to actually enjoy your life outside of work too, while being sure you can trust your body to carry you through it all.

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If you want to learn more about the “right things” that can help your body carry you through your career and beyond, sign up for our September webinar: Built to Care: A Nurse’s Guide to Orthopedic Longevity.

Presented by Denise Rouleau and Mark Stefanishyn, co-founders of Rouleau and innovative pioneers in the field of Orthopedic Longevity.

Rouleau is on a mission to reverse functional health decline and ensure that Albertans of all generations can build durable, capable and adaptable bodies for the decades ahead.

Click here if you are interested in being a participant or researcher in a nursing-centric orthopedic longevity research project