Guest Column: Your body is keeping score. Are you listening?

There’s no better place to be active than eastern Suffolk County in summer and early fall. The trails through the Pine Barrens and along the bluffs fill with hikers. The golf courses are at their best. Tennis courts stay busy into the evening, and pickleball has taken over parks and club schedules across the East End. As an orthopedic surgeon, I could not be happier about any of it.

Movement is one of the most powerful medicines we have. Regular activity strengthens the muscles that stabilize and protect your joints, keeps cartilage nourished, maintains bone density, improves balance and protects your heart and your mood. The stiffness so many people attribute to “just getting older” is often the result of moving less. Motion is lotion, as we say in orthopedics. The people I see aging best are the ones who never stopped playing.

But the long, beautiful season out here has a way of encouraging people to forget that their bodies have limits. How you move matters as much as how much you move. The way your foot strikes the ground or how your hips rotate through a stride or a golf swing could spell disaster for your joints. A small imbalance that feels like nothing on a Monday morning can, over a full season, generate enough asymmetric load to cause a tendon tear or a joint problem that sidelines you entirely. By the time I see the injury, it is the end of the story and the mechanics are ignored. This is why I encourage active patients to get a movement assessment even when nothing hurts. A physical therapist or sports medicine provider can spot compensations you have been making for years. Fixing a hip drop early is a minor adjustment. Fixing the injury it causes is a major one.

The musculoskeletal system is a remarkable piece of engineering, designed to absorb stress, adapt and grow stronger. But it runs on a budget. And this is where I want to be direct, because knowing which signals matter can change the course of your health. Most post-activity soreness is normal and fades within a day or two. But certain symptoms are not ordinary aches, and they deserve a medical evaluation rather than another week of pushing through.

Those symptoms include persistent joint pain that lasts more than a few weeks despite rest, ice and over-the-counter measures. Also, discomfort that wakes you from sleep or aches while you are sitting still often points to inflammation or arthritis progressing inside the joint. This is not simple muscle soreness or a suggestion to try a new workout. Something structural is at play. The same goes for prolonged morning stiffness. Everyone is a little creaky when they wake up, but stiffness that takes more than 30 minutes to loosen is a classic early sign of osteoarthritis and could be a sign that a joint needs to be checked out by an orthopedist.

Aside from chronic pain, other warning signs of bad joint health are changes in appearance or feeling. A joint that swells repeatedly after activity, feels warm or looks different from its partner on the other side is telling you the tissue inside is irritated or damaged. Also, a knee that grinds with every step, catches mid-motion, or locks up may have cartilage wear or a mechanical problem that will not resolve on its own. If your knee buckles on the stairs or your hip no longer feels trustworthy on uneven ground, do not simply start avoiding stairs and trails. Instability is treatable and if left untreated, it could leads to falls and further injury.

None of these warning signs means surgery is inevitable. In fact, most patients I evaluate never need an operation. Early intervention opens the widest range of options like targeted physical therapy, bracing and strategies that can preserve your own joint for years. But when arthritis has advanced to the point that conservative measures no longer work, modern hip and knee replacement is one of the most successful procedures in all of medicine. Patients who spent years hobbling are back on the golf course and the pickleball court, moving better in their seventies than they did in their sixties. The biggest regret I hear in my office is rarely about having surgery. It is about waiting so long.

Eastern Suffolk County has a genuinely extraordinary culture of physical activity, and it is one of the things I love most about practicing medicine here. I want it to continue for everyone, for as long as possible. Just do not confuse toughness with ignoring your body. Listen to it, and when it starts telling you something more serious, come let us listen with you.

Dr. Blum is a board-certified orthopedic surgeon at Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead. He specializes in hip and knee replacement surgery.