About Joint Mobility Daily

My knees started waking me at 3 AM in the spring of 2023. I had spent thirty years coaching basketball and track at a Phoenix high school -- thirty years in a gymnasium where the concrete under the hardwood doesn't care about your age, summer practices in 108-degree heat, and I was the coach who made his players stretch, cool down, and listen to what their bodies were telling them. I ignored all of it myself. By 56, my body started returning those instructions at 3 AM.

I went to my doctor expecting something structural, maybe a meniscus. What I got was "osteoarthritis" and a recommendation to try supplements before considering more invasive options. I'm Coach Dan. I'm 58, I'm retired, and I have been running a supplement testing notebook since June 2023. Same method I used for athletic performance tracking: log daily, give it enough time to separate a real trend from your body just having a good week, and don't read the data to match what you hoped to see.

Every morning: a stiffness rating before I get out of bed, a stairs test on the same three steps, and the Belle test -- my Lab has a tennis ball that needs picking up off the floor, and whether I can do that cleanly is a genuine daily metric. Phoenix summers complicate the baseline -- heat affects joint inflammation for me, so I note the temperature in the daily entry. Every supplement gets at least 45 days. Three of them produced nothing useful at 45 days, and those reviews say so. The ones that showed a trend, I explain when it started, how consistent it was, and whether it held past the initial window.