It’s very common to experience some popping or clicking noises as you introduce your body to new exercises.

Here’s a simple refresher:

Muscles move body parts by contracting and then relaxing. Your muscles can pull bones, but they can’t push them back to their original position. So they work in pairs of flexors and extensors. The flexor contracts to bend a limb at a joint. Then, when you’ve completed the movement, the flexor relaxes and the extensor contracts to extend or straighten the limb at the same joint.

If your muscles haven’t been firing the way they’re supposed to, and that dysfunction gets compounded over time, it’s common for these newly stimulated muscles to make your bones and tissue run into each other at the joint as they’re relearning to function.

This is where the noise comes from.

First off, if this popping or clicking is unusually painful or gives you an overall uneasy feeling, then please stop and listen to your body.

If there seems to be a lot of noise but there isn’t much pain associated with the popping, the best way to go about this is to allow it to happen. The more you ask your body to function in this way, the more fluid this movement will become in time.

As with other symptoms that may show up, you can’t go wrong with slowing down the movement to see if that makes a difference for you.

So let’s try that for right now: I just want you to slow down and observe this popping and clicking. Pay attention to how this changes over time and that will be one great way for you to track progress. Be sure to measure this over the course of weeks.