For a skinny guy who never did any resistance training, this transformed my body to a lean, muscular type in what it seems to me like overnight. I cannot emphasize enough how good that was (and is) for the body. The body at first doesn't like it, but giving it a bit of consistency it learns and yearns for it.
The back pains I had are gone and even if they come back here and there they are much less intense and more manageable. Doing some impromptu exercises for couple of minutes fixes that too.
One of the biggest wtfs I had was when I decided to drill some holes in the wall because I was unable to for months after last surgery. I've grabbed my battery powered drill from the shed and was open mouthed how suddenly light that tool was. I literally checked if I've put the battery on. You don't notice the strength gain that much during normal work in the house, but do something which you know was heavy before and be amazed.
I definitely credit good people on this site for sharing their experiences. At first I thought that only weirdos and meatheads do resistance training and always had a mental image of steroid laden walking muscles. Then I've read that article where was the graph of expected life expectancy for a person taking on training in their forties vs not training and it really did concern me. As a guy in early forties I didn't want to spend the rest of my life with very poor quality of life/mobility. I didn't want to be glued to my computer all day long as it would virtually be the death of me.
I wanted to write a blog post about this journey (which is still short, but memory is fresh;) maybe to help geeks like us to see that being in front of the computer all day long is terrible. It works when you're young, but it absolutely doesn't as you get older. And everyone will get older whatever the younger people think. If I knew stuff I know now about fitness 20 years ago, I'm sure I would be 5 times more healthier, and I wouldn't need any spinal surgeries. But nobody told me anything and I thought "doing stuff" on the computer all day long is fine. "I'll be mobile and skinny even when much older, what else would I need?". Oh boy how wrong was I.