Cellular processes mean that we will all have some wear and tear as we age.
Once we hit a certain age, do the wheels suddenly fall off, or are there other factors causing our aches and pains?
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Welcome back to Get-Fit Guy. Kevin Don here with a significant diatribe in response to some listener comments and emails I received last week.
Regular listeners of the show will know that I don’t see fitness as what we do in the gym a couple of times a week for the goal of checking off a box marked “physical activity.” Instead, I see fitness as everything that we can do to move the needle from sickness to wellness and developing an understanding of ourselves as humans. I think it is our responsibility to ourselves as we navigate our world to have at least a basic understanding of self-maintenance, both in terms of our physicality but also our mindset and the emotional factors which influence our decisions. After all, a week is 168 hours long and of that, you may spend 5-10 hours in the gym. So, what we do in the other 94% of the week is always going to be more impactful on our fitness than that gym time is.
In episode 590 of the show, I discussed how to resist the aging process with strength training. In case you missed that episode, I really suggest you go have a listen; it’s packed with useful and irrefutable facts. But in the meantime, I will recap it as a background to this week's rant.
As we age, we are all undergoing a process that affects all matter in the known universe—as time progresses, we move from a situation of order to disorder and disarray. This is a fundamental and perhaps the most robust law in nature. In a closed system, entropy can never decrease, it only increases. In the human organism, that disarray comes in many forms but is mainly expressed as metabolic syndromes, most notably sarcopenia, which is a loss of muscle mass, and osteopenia, which is a loss of bone mineral density. Both of these can be mitigated by intentional and deliberate intervention.
In terms of sarcopenia, we know that muscles, ligaments, and tendons are all considered “soft tissues” in the body. We also know that soft tissues resist a force called “tension.” Tension is when our bodies are being pulled longer and stretched out. We contract our muscles to resist this and the act of resisting tension enables soft tissues to become stronger. Think about this example of tension acting on the body: carrying a grocery bag in one hand. The arm holding the groceries is being pulled down by the load and you resist this by pulling in the opposite direction. If you didn't resist, then you wouldn’t be holding the bag, it would still be on the ground. If there is no tension, muscles can’t create an adaptation. This is why lifting some load is crucial to gaining strength. You can't resist against nothing.
Next up is osteopenia. This relates to bone mineral density. We have evidence that bone remodels itself according to the stress it is placed under. If we decrease the stress, bone mineral density decreases; this is one of the major reasons that astronauts weigh much less on returning to earth and have to work hard on training in space! This adaptation to stress is called Wolff’s Law. It's called a law because it’s a rule that always happens when these conditions exist. It's not a debatable situation—it’s not “Wolff’s Possibility.” Bones get stronger by the force of “compression.” This is where hard tissue (bones) resist being crushed top down by a load/gravity. Think about Indiana Jones propping a descending tomb door open by wedging a femur bone under it. That’s compression. We can create this with things like barbell squats, which compress the whole torso and legs.
There are, of course, other metabolic syndromes that affect us as we age, such as insulin resistance and increases in visceral fat. Training interventions are also useful in these situations and will be discussed in future episodes.
So, why am I recapping all of this? A listener noted in response to my recent episode (617) on squat variants that “as a 50-something, my knees make the squat almost impossible.” Now, I understand and respect each person's reality and how important it is to feel heard and validated. But by the same token, I have a significant community of listeners here on Get-Fit Guy, and I have a duty of care to ensure that I get them training safely and enjoying lifelong fitness and health. I therefore have to pour water on this notion that the squat is almost impossible because the structures of one's knees have hit the half-century. That is simply untrue.
Of course, as noted above, we are all aboard a ride on the entropic express from which we cannot disembark. Cellular processes mean that we will all have some wear and tear. But being in our 50s or any other arbitrary age isn't a definite factor and as far as advice goes on both a subjective and objective level, I would call that catastrophising. Across a whole population of half-centenarians, if we were all to say “I’m 50 and therefore my knees are now going to reject a natural range of human motion,” then the healthcare system would be overloaded and unable to cope.
This is not to say that we aren’t affected by aging or that there are not other factors such as genetic ones, things like arthritis, or chronic or acute injury. But what I can say is that because we adapt to our external stresses, we also adapt to a lack of external stress. A good maxim here is “use it or lose it.” It's very often the case that as soon as we stop using our bodies, we have a worse outcome. I would encourage everyone, irrespective of age, to learn how to express themselves physically through the movement patterns and degrees of freedom discussed in earlier episodes. Hitting a chronological landmark isn't a meaningful metric of your ability to perform a gross motor skill. I’ll leave this with a quote from my own favorite coach, Mark Rippetoe, who says:
“Humans are built to move. We evolved under conditions that required daily intense physical activity, and even among individuals with lower physical potential, that hard-earned genotype is still ours today. The modern sedentary lifestyle leads to the inactivation of the genes related to physical performance, attributes that were once critical for survival and which are still critical for the correct, healthy expression of the genotype. The genes are still there, they just aren't doing anything because the body is not stressed enough to cause a physiological adaptation requiring their activation. The sedentary person's heart, lungs, muscles, bones, nerves, and brain all operate far below the level at which they evolved to function, and at which they still function best.”
Now let's go on to a listener email that I received this week!
“Hello!
Just finished listening to your ‘no pain, no gain?’ episode.
I find myself having the opposite problem: no exercise, more pain.
Now that I’m on the ‘wrong’ side of 50, if I don’t move regularly, I experience stiffness and soreness. But there are many mornings when it’s extremely hard to get out of that warm bed to get to swim, especially when the knees creak and the back is screaming from being so immobile.
Do you have any exercise suggestions to keep my body from complaining every morning? My doctor says I’m healthy, just getting up there and some amount of discomfort is expected. Should I back off swimming and switch to more yoga for flexibility? What’s a good workout routine to keep the body (mostly knees and back) from complaining when the morning alarm goes off?
Thank you,
Rachel”
Hi Rachel, thank you for the email! I think that everyone listening could benefit from a comprehensive reply to this.
As I just discussed, age itself isn't a metric on the state of our bodies or our ability to perform a task—just ask my 60-year-old karate coach who STILL outperforms me at martial arts, cycles hundreds of miles a week, and not long ago raised money for charity by swimming from England to France, or Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who, at 65-years-old, climbed Mount Everest and at 71 years of age, ran a 156-mile foot race through the Sahara desert, including completing two marathons in one day in temperatures reaching 122 degrees.
That being said, as part of a closed system, we are all subject to an entropic process. As we age, our joints produce less synovial fluid (the natural joint lubricant), cartilage, which cushions the joints from impact and friction, gets thinner, and the ligaments in the joints themselves lose collagen and become stiffer and shorten, making you feel stiffer and less flexible.
So it makes sense that you feel stiff and sore in the morning. Because we are lacking in joint lubrication and our ligaments are a bit stiffer, it takes us some time to get the engine running and warm. As you will have noticed, these symptoms go away when you have been up and about, and I think the best noticing you had there is that if you don't move regularly, you experience stiffness and soreness. This alone tells us that the best outcome is to move! Humans are designed to move—the body, although a bit of an oversimplification, is a system of pulleys and levers, all designed to move us through our environment in 360 degrees.
Sadly, because things like morning stiffness are an unavoidable side effect of aging, I can't say that I have any specific training protocols that will help here. I think you hit the nail on the head by recognizing the importance of exposure to movement. I would say that the best way to get that stiffness and soreness to go away is to get moving as early as possible on waking. That may indeed look something like yoga, or what we call CARS (controlled articular rotations), which take the joints through a full range of movement in a deliberate and controlled manner (look out for an episode on CARS soon).
Regarding swimming versus yoga for strength and flexibility, I’m not sure about that. I would encourage everyone to take the data I’ve given and make some objective choices—we know that we want a full range of motion around joints in different degrees of freedom (forwards, backward, sideways, rotation, etc.) and to build muscle strength we want some tension and for bone density we want compression. Because the water supports us, there isn't any meaningful tension or compression and without a way to incrementally increase the external load to create a strength adaptation, I would say swimming is limited. Similarly, we tend to either swim forwards or backward, so we are lacking multiple degrees of freedom. Yoga is great for exposing the joint to a varied degree of flexion and extension through multiple joints, it's great for isometric strength because you have to hold positions, and it's amazing for core strength, which is vital to anchoring all our movement patterns. But again, we don't see a large degree of freedom, because, whilst it utilizes many different patterns, it’s predominantly taking place on the spot. We also don't have a way to build non-isometric strength because we don't have an incrementally loadable external object.
So my advice would be to have a look this way:
Try and find something that you ENJOY and that hits as many of those metrics as possible and you’ll be good to go.
I hope this week has managed to clarify the importance of strength training. I’ll leave you with another good quote: “Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general.”
If you have a question for me that you would like answered, please check out the Get-Fit Guy Facebook page, where you can leave me a comment, or send me an email to getfitguy@quickandirtytips.com