5 things nobody tells you about your legs after 60 (and the one that should stop you buying)

Heavy legs by the evening. Ankles that have quietly gone up a size by teatime. Socks leaving a mark that takes longer to fade than it used to. A vein that was not there last year.

Almost everyone puts these down to getting older, and in a sense that is right. What almost nobody is told is that they are the early, named stages of something that has a middle and an end, and that the end is genuinely unpleasant.

None of it happens quickly. That is the whole difficulty. Nothing changes enough in any given month to make you do anything about it.

Blood reaches your feet easily, because gravity does that for free. Getting it back up is the hard part, and your calf muscle does most of that work: every step squeezes the deep veins and pushes blood back towards your heart. One way valves inside those veins stop it falling back down between steps.

Those valves wear. When they stop closing cleanly, blood sits in the lower leg for longer than it should and pressure in the vein rises. That condition has a name, chronic venous insufficiency, and it affects somewhere between 10 and 35 per cent of adults, with the figure climbing steadily with age.

It does not announce itself. It starts as mild swelling, the kind you would not mention to anyone.

Here is the sequence, and it is well documented. Mild swelling first. Then discolouration, skin turning brown, red or purple as iron from broken down red blood cells is deposited in the tissue. Then the skin itself changes: thickened, dry, leathery. Then inflammation. At the far end, the skin breaks down and does not heal, which is a venous leg ulcer.

Between 3 and 5 per cent of people over 65 will have one. They are painful, they can take months to heal, and they have a habit of coming back.

Nobody moves through that sequence and notices. You notice the first stage, decide it is your age, and adjust. That is the mechanism by which a manageable problem becomes a serious one, and it is not a failure of character. It is just that the steps are too small to see.

A graduated compression sock is firmest at the ankle and eases as it climbs. The pressure narrows the vein, which helps those worn valves meet and close again, and the gradient from ankle to knee gives the blood a direction to travel. It does some of the work your calf pump is no longer managing on its own.

This is not a wellness theory. NHS guidance on venous leg ulcers states that if you have had one before, or you are at risk of developing one, compression stockings may be recommended by your GP, and that to be most effective they should be put on when you get up and taken off at night.

I want to be careful here, because this is where pages like this one usually overreach. A 20-25 mmHg sock bought online is not a treatment for an ulcer and it is not a substitute for a GP. If your skin has already changed colour or texture, that is a conversation with a doctor, today, not a purchase. What compression does well is act early, on the stage most people ignore.

Walk into a pharmacy and the compression aisle tells you exactly what it thinks of you. Black or nude. One size. Packaging that belongs in a hospital.

There is a practical cost to that, and it is not vanity. A sock you are faintly embarrassed by is a sock you leave in the drawer, and compression only does anything on the days you actually wear it. One customer put it better than I can.

There is a second problem with one size. Calves vary enormously, and a sock that is too tight at the top does the opposite of what compression is for. Two leg sizes is not a luxury feature, it is the difference between a graduated sock and a tourniquet.

Everything above argues for compression. This section argues against it, for a specific group of people, and it is the most important thing on the page.

Compression works by squeezing. If the arteries bringing blood down into your leg are already narrowed, squeezing makes that worse, not better. Cleveland Clinic advises against compression socks if you have severe peripheral artery disease for exactly that reason, and against them if you have severe swelling caused by a condition such as heart failure or kidney disease.

The neuropathy point is the one people underestimate. If you cannot properly feel your feet, you cannot feel a sock that is too tight, and you will not notice it doing damage until there is damage to see. Rates of all of these rise with age, which is precisely why an article aimed at people over 60 has an obligation to say so.

If none of that applies to you, compression is generally well tolerated. If any of it might, the £12.99 is not the question. Ask your GP or practice nurse first.

The most common complaint about compression socks is not that they do not work. It is getting them on. That comes up more than anything else in reviews, and it is worse if your hands or back are not what they were.

That last point matters more than the rest put together. Measure the widest part of your calf and buy to that, not to your shoe size.