Comment by newnewpdro

I have some anecdata in support of your comment.

Both of my wrists were broken in my youth on separate occasions. Since then my wrists would ache when the weather changed, or when I spent too much time typing at the computer, or did certain physical activities like pushups.

The computing pain I mostly ignored, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't interfere with my life as I became increasingly immersed in programming and computers in general. It worried me that as I aged this career path would be a dead end, or one requiring chronic pain medication, because of my wrists.

But in my late 20s-early 30s I became interested in nutrition as my weight had been slowly climbing over the years and it was starting to noticably affect my overall quality of life. After my weight corrected itself with just an improved diet, I had a renewed interest in physical activities because being physical was so fun again becoming the same weight I was at ~17 years old, having lost ~26% of my weight in just a few months. Simple things like standing up had become entertainingly easy, running, jumping, everything was so easy and pleasant that I wanted to go for a run just to experience the ease of it.

The interest in physical activities escalated into a daily exercise routine, becoming curious about improving my performance beyond that of my ~17 year old self. Not wanting to acquire a bunch of heavy and expensive gear I'd have to store and move, I ended up doing just calisthenics and pushups became a major component of my morning ritual. For a year my wrists were the limiting factor in how many pushups I could do. I'd have sharp pains and aches well before any muscles were fatigued in that exercise. But I just kept doing them every day, with the reps slowly increasing as the months went by, adding multiple sets to morning and evening.

At some point, the wrist pain was no longer the limiting factor in my daily pushups and I was limited entirely by muscle fatigue and cardio instead. A nice side effect of this was that my wrists stopped hurting at the computer too.

I'm over 40 now, still doing hundreds of pushups daily, and my wrists have never resumed hurting. It's been really nice! Still ~165lbs too. Pushups have become the core of my daily routine, it's like brushing my teeth at this point. This experience has led me to suspect most sedentary people could achieve a relatively fit existence by just controlling their diet and spending as little as a few minutes every day doing pushups before they shower.