Prime Time (18 page)

Figure 3. Single-Arm Rows: Place one knee and one hand on a chair or bench. Bend the standing leg. Hold the weight in your other arm and let it hang straight down. Then bring your elbow up close to your side, and control it down. Keep your back flat. Think of sawing a big log as you bring your elbow up and down. Keep your elbow close to your body. Exhale as you lift. Inhale as you lower.
KAREN WYLIE

Balance and Core Training

“Without regular muscle-building exercise,” says Scott McCredie in his book
Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense,
“strength levels decrease by about 12 to 14 percent per decade, starting at about age sixty in men and about age fifty in women.”
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This loss of muscle mass and tone, especially in the legs, hips, and trunk, has a direct effect on balance.

Every year, one in three people over sixty-five fall. As I have already said, this can lead to potentially crippling fractures, even fatalities. The reason we fall more as we age is that we are more likely to lose our sense of equilibrium. Actually, like muscle loss, balance loss is natural and begins very gradually, as early as in our twenties. As we age, various physiological changes in the inner ear, the bottoms of our feet, and our eyesight challenge our sense of balance. More important, we process these signals more slowly and less accurately than when we were younger. I’m not sure which of these (or maybe it’s all of them) is the culprit in my case, but balance is definitely my Achilles’ heel. One reason I try to keep my muscles strong is to compensate for this.

I also do exercises specifically designed to improve my balance. Whenever I can, like when I am brushing my teeth or hair or waiting in a line, I practice standing on one foot. At home, to challenge myself even more, I do the one-legged stand with my eyes closed. Once a day, I walk for a dozen or so steps, placing one foot directly in front of the other, as though I’m walking a plank. Balance can be developed just as muscles and aerobic capacity can.

Certain medicines and combinations of medicines can make you dizzy. If you find yourself having trouble with balance, have your doctor or pharmacist take a look at all your medicines (including any over-the-counter ones) to see if that could be a contributing factor.

Physical therapist Karen Perz offers a useful tip: “When someone is off balance, it’s better for them to hold on to you, rather than for you to hold on to them … and you should offer your elbow, not your hand.”
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Yoga and tai chi, a Chinese martial art where you do a series of slow, flowing, standing movements, are excellent for developing balance. So are core training and Pilates, which more and more gyms are offering. In core training you do exercises while standing on various surfaces that wobble. In addition to stimulating adaptations in the balance centers of the central nervous system, these exercises deliberately create instability, which recruits the smaller, stabilizing muscles, such as the gluteus medius, in the hip; the vastus medialis oblique, in the knee; and some of the small muscles in the back and the shoulders that aren’t normally challenged. My Prime Time Workout also includes exercises to improve your balance.

Physical Therapy

I woke up one morning unable to lift my right arm above breast height. A physical therapist explained that sleeping on my side had aggravated an already-existing rotator cuff problem, and the injury required six months of manual therapy. After that, my back went into spasm, which reminded me of what my friend Bette Davis said: “Aging isn’t for sissies.”

Chiropractic therapy, if done by a qualified practitioner, can provide quick relief through joint manipulation; it’s a lifesaver for many people. But with a trained and talented therapist, physical therapy can get to the underlying causes of your problems by deeply working the muscular, skeletal, and nervous systems. The therapist uses her or his hands and arms to apply sustained pressure where the muscles have become hard and claylike, as opposed to springy. This makes the knot relax and increases circulation to the area. Very often, the knot is caused by a lack of mobility in the joints and/or the related muscles, tendons, and ligaments, which is why the therapist works on all the systems.

In searching for your own manual therapist, what you want to look for are the letters OCS (orthopedic clinical specialist) or SCS (sports clinical specialist) following the person’s name. Or you can visit the American Physical Therapy Association website at
www.apta.org
. They provide lists by region of therapists and their certifications. Once at the APTA website, choose “Find a PT,” then select “Musculoskeletal” and fill in your zip code.

Get the therapist to help you understand the underlying causes of your problem: what muscle weaknesses and joint immobility brought you into therapy, and what exercises you can do to address them. Treating the cause of the problem is usually much more effective than treating the symptoms. Many such therapists can be reimbursed through health insurance.

For example, I learned from my manual therapist that my posture had contributed to my back, neck, and shoulder pain. The slight rounding of my shoulders (begun, as with so many women, in adolescence) had gradually gotten worse. The smaller back muscles that pull our shoulders back had weakened, causing pressure on my neck and shoulders. Doing something about it after years of neglect is hard, and correct posture feels awkward at first—at least it did for me. But with practice, it has become (almost) second nature. (My therapist says it takes six weeks on average to reeducate the muscles.) I now check regularly to make sure that while I sit at my computer or at the movies, in a restaurant, or in the car, I always use good posture.

Flexibility

How important it is to keep our muscles, tendons, and ligaments flexible is the final point I want to make about physical fitness in the Third Act. Flexibility can protect us from injury no matter our age, but it is especially critical when all these body parts are beginning to lose their mobility and to stiffen. It is best to stretch
after
working out, and to hold each stretch for at least twenty seconds. It takes that long for the muscle to fully relax and release. Yoga can be an excellent way to maintain flexibility, although you should start with a gentle form. So can Pilates and tai chi.

PILATES

The Pilates method seeks to develop controlled movement from a strong core; it does this using a range of apparatuses to guide and train the body. Each piece of equipment has its own repertoire of exercises, and most of the exercises involve resistance training, since they make use of springs to provide additional resistance.

TAI CHI

The ancient art of tai chi uses gentle, flowing movements to reduce stress, improve balance, and help with a variety of other health conditions. Each posture flows rhythmically into the next without pause, ensuring that your body is in constant motion. The movements are coordinated with your breathing to help you achieve a sense of inner calm. The concentration required for tai chi forces you to live in the present moment, putting aside distressing thoughts.

Tips on Walking

Walking can be as good for weight loss as running. Here’s one comparison: Say you are a 145-pound, sixty-year-old woman. If you run for 30 minutes at 5 miles per hour, you will burn about 285 calories. If you walk for 30 minutes at 4 miles per hour, you will burn 165 calories on a level surface, 225 calories on a slight incline, and 360 calories on a 10 percent incline. Don’t underestimate the power of a brisk walk!

Posture is key: Your shoulders should be back and down, your head high and directly over your neck. Look straight ahead (to anticipate obstacles) and take long, smooth strides, with your arms swinging freely. Be sure to breathe.

Wear lightweight, breathable, supportive, comfortable shoes with a flexible, cushioned sole to absorb impact. Different shoes work better for different feet.

Warm up for a few minutes before you begin your walk.

Try using walking poles. They help with balance, take a little weight off your joints, and encourage you to use more muscle groups, so you will burn more calories. Good ones have rubber tips and wrist straps. (Go to
leki.com
,
bdel.com
, or
anwa.us
for more information about walking with poles, which is sometimes called “Nordic walking.”)

Here-and-There Exercise

It’s not simply doing thirty or forty minutes of moderate exercise every day that will keep you healthy. What you do, here and there, during the remaining fifteen or so waking hours of your day matters just as much!

Physiologists have grown perplexed about the rapid increase in obesity in the developed world. How, they ask, can this be so, when the percentage of people who perform the minimum half hour of daily moderate activity has remained relatively stable? This phenomenon has led scientists to define a new health risk called
inactivity physiology.

It is now believed that even if you devote thirty to forty minutes daily to exercise, if the rest of your day is spent in a sedentary position, you are at risk of poor health. Well, it’s no secret that too many of us spend too much of our time sitting. We sit in our cars or on buses to get to work; we sit at desks once we’re there; and we sit in front of the television when we get home. The average adult spends 9.3 (61 percent) of their waking hours sitting. Scientists are starting to believe that simply getting up and walking a few steps every hour can mitigate the negative effects of this inactivity.

In airports, I always walk rather than take the “moving sidewalk” and use the stairs rather than the escalator. And if I do have to take an escalator, I walk up it instead of just riding passively. These little decisions can really add up to your becoming more physically active.

Interoception: The Deeper Meaning of Body Awareness

I feel strongly that this is the time in our lives when getting “into” our bodies is less about being into our bodies in the “How do I look?” sense, though that is a part of it. But there can also be a psychic effect of physical activity.

So many of us have, to greater or lesser extents, become numb and cut off from our bodies. This lack of connection often increases as we age. We may be saying to ourselves, “Why deal with our bodies now? We’re through having children. We’re beyond trying to appeal to someone else. We don’t even appeal to ourselves!” Numbness especially occurs with people who have been abused or are burdened with obesity, but it is more widespread than that. We can be alienated from feeling our muscles, our heartbeat, our breath within the body. Obviously we are aware of these things, but it can be only on a superficial, disembodied level.

My friend Joan Halifax, a Zen master, has challenged me to consider a deeper significance of body awareness. “We think the mind is between the two ears and is the expression of the brain,” she told me. “But neuroscience shows us that the mind isn’t just in the head; it is throughout the entire body, informing the entire organism.” When we are cut off from our bodies, our thinking becomes
disembodied.

I know what that feels like. For years, I suffered from anorexia and bulimia. Food addicts, like all addicts, are inevitably disembodied. By the time I started my Workout business I was not engaging in my food addiction, but I was not healed, either. I guess I was the equivalent of a dry drunk (but for food, not alcohol): one who is sober but has not worked through a twelve-step program. The result was that I spent a lot of time taking up residence next door to myself—disembodied. As I look back over those years of building the Workout business, I think I was instinctively searching for a way to heal myself, to get back into my body. Discovering that I could be in control of my body through exercise, and thereby learning to accept and even love my body, was a first step in making that happen.

I ask you, right now, to put your index and middle fingers on the artery at the side of your throat and feel your pulse. In a moment, I’m going to ask you to stop reading, close your eyes, and sink into your body. When you do, be aware of your breathing, the rise and fall of your chest, your pulse, the sensations inside your body, the feeling of the flesh of your buttocks against the seat, the bottoms of your feet. Don’t rush and don’t forget to breathe. And, with your breath, bring forgiveness into your body for perhaps not being everything you wish it was. Smile into your body. It’s gotten you this far. It deserves your love, respect, and attention. Now close your eyes for a minute and experience your body.

Assuming you did the above, you were, for a moment, present in your body. When we get into the habit of body awareness through meditation, attentive, deliberate exercise, or yoga, we can nurture what Joan Halifax says is our ability to be
interoceptive—
we have the capacity to sense or experience the body, including our ability to sense our body temperature, feel our hunger or sexual urgency, be in touch with the gut, the lungs, the heart, and so forth. Another way of saying this is that we develop an image of our body’s internal state. What I find most interesting is that interoception allows
self-
empathy. Empathy means we feel the suffering (or other emotions) of others, which can lead to kindness. We can’t feel empathy and kindness for others if we lack it for ourselves. Self-empathy starts with our embodiment—being in our bodies, our muscles, our cells, our breath. You have to love and be kind to your body.

Taking it a step further, Joan Halifax says that while empathy is about feeling for others, “compassion means feeling the suffering of others but with an attendant aspiration to transform the suffering. Compassion is the most important mental quality we can cultivate.”
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