Staying Strong, Functional and Independent as We Age, Part 1
“Now that I’m thirty it seems like my body has just started falling apart.”
“Now that I’m in my mid thirties, I guess it’s normal to throw your back out when you sneeze.”
“Just wait until you hit forty… things just aren’t the same.”
“Oh no, I’m much too old to do that.”
These are phrases all too common in our day and age. And while there may be some degree of truth to the fact that as we age we don’t recover as fast or we get hurt easier or we don’t have the same physical capacity that we did when we were in our twenties, the extent to which people embrace these age-related, physical “handicaps” is astonishing and also honestly quite frightening.
Why should we succumb to being gradually more and more weak, frail and immobile?
The not-so-secret, secret is that we don’t have to.
We don’t stop moving like we used to because we get old; we get old because we stop moving like we used to.
Yes, we will chronologically age and yes, there will be some compromise in our tissues as we age but if we pay attention to our physical health and train strategically to ensure the health and capacity of our joints, we will likely end up A LOT better off than we could ever imagine, even as we age.
A question I often get as a chiropractor is which pillow is the best? Which type of mattress is best? Which type of office chair is best?
To which my answer is, if your body is working well, then, within reasonable limits, these things should not be particularly crucial. Sure, you don’t want to be sleeping on a super old, worn out mattress. You probably don’t want a mattress that is excessively soft or lumpy. And you probably don’t want a pillow that is excessively fluffy. Beyond those parameters, for the most part, the perfect mattress or pillow or chair should not excessively matter. If your body works well and it has “capacity”, then it is able to adapt to a diverse range of surfaces, products, environments and shapes.
And that is a crucial element of physical fitness and health that we need to continue to train, for our entire life: capacity.
The earlier you start, the easier and better off you are. But, it is never, ever too late to start.
The more capacity we have, the better able we are to handle and deal with demands we face in our every day lives, hobbies and sports. The more capacity we have, the less likely we are to compensate through both simple and complex movement pathways. The more capacity we have, the less likely we are to get injured and when we do get injured, not only is it often less severe but our recovery is often expedited, as well. The more capacity we have, the more able and better we feel, no matter what our age is.
How do we identify our current capacity and decipher where we need to spend our time training? Which areas of our body have sufficient capacity and which areas need work to build in more capacity?
The easiest most straight forward way to identify these things is to get evaluated by a practitioner or coach who does Functional Range Analysis (FRA). I do FRA, along with “mini FRA” in my office, routinely (here is a link to our web of practitioners who do FRA, in case you want to find one in your area).
An FRA looks at each joint of the body individually to determine if you have not only adequate passive flexibility in that joint but also if you have adequate control over that flexibility, aka mobility.
Once you identify where your deficits are, you get to work!
Time under tension is the name of the game. Meaning, you have to dedicate time to exposing your tissues to specific tensions in order for the tissue to remodel so that it accommodates for the ranges you are trying to build in.
If we do not actively work on building and maintaining adequate ranges of motion to last a lifetime, our body will gradually cut these “excessive” ranges of motion out because they are “unnecessary” and metabolically “too expensive” to maintain. And thus, we gradually get stiff and immobile with age.
We have to use our full ranges of motion on a daily basis, if we want to maintain them (enter the Morning CARs routine). Otherwise, we can guarantee that the body will gradually diminish those ranges over time.
If you don’t have an FRA practitioner in your area, then for general health I recommend starting by focusing on your spine, shoulders, hips and feet. You may need to focus on other areas depending on your specific symptoms, needs or goals but spine, shoulders, hips and feet are always a solid place to start.
Controlled Articular Rotations (CARs) are a great way to make sure you are exposing your joints to their current full range of motion on a daily basis. CARs is a big topic in and of themselves so, blog post on CARs coming soon.
I like to work from the deepest layers out. This is because if you have a hip joint that is restricted by the capsule, the thick, fibrous, ligamentous tissue that surrounds the hip joint from the deepest layer, no matter how much you stretch your glute in a figure four stretch, it might feel good, but it’s not going to stick. You have to open up the ability for the hip joint itself and thus the capsule to access full rotation before you can expect a figure four stretch to make much long standing difference.
Not only do we care about maintaining adequate ranges of motion for physical performance, but also for longevity of the human body itself. If we want our joints to last us well into our seventies, eighties, nineties and beyond, we have to take care of them. We don’t expect our teeth to stay healthy if we don’t brush them twice daily yet we somehow expect our joints to stay in good condition even though we tend not to even think about them until we get injured or hit with arthritic type symptoms. And even then I think a lot of people think, “well, it was inevitable; I’m getting older after all…” I’m here to tell you, this does not have to be the case.
Train strategically and maintain good joint capacity (meaning adequate range of motion at each joint PLUS adequate control over that range of motion) and not only does your physical performance skyrocket but the health and longevity of your joints will exceed your expectations, as well.
How do you train capacity?
Oh man, there is no one way. A great system to get you started is Functional Range Conditioning (I am an FRC provider and there are thousands and thousands of us all across the world - same network as FRA). FRC is utilized by many professional sports teams because it works. It’s very user friendly and the philosophy is simple. It’s basically what I’ve written in this article up to this point: use it or lose it and train strategically.
Another generalized approach to training capacity is to make sure to spend time training your joints (and thus your tissues - you can’t really train your joints without tissue involvement), at end ranges of motion. Not only in your mid range where you’re already strong.
Training your joints (and thus tissues) at end ranges of motion is important not only because it will increase your joint capacity, make you stronger, less prone to compensatory movement pathways and mitigate injuries (if trained properly), but also because end ranges of motion is WHERE we tend to get injured when we do get injured. So, if we’re training our end ranges of motion, then when injury does occur, we’ve trained that tissue to recognize and be strong at that end-range and often the result is that our injuries are not as severe as they would be were we not to train those end-ranges.
Lastly, training your joints (and thus tissues) to have adequate capacity is important not only for the individual joints themselves but also for the joints throughout the entire body. You’ve probably heard, “when it comes to the body, it’s all connected”. How can we expect tight, restricted joints to play nice with others? For instance, clinically I find that often “knee issues” are actually tight hip issues and/or disconnected feet issues.
If we have joints that have their own adequate capacity, then we can, with much more certainty, expect they will play nice with others. And not stress their “neighbors” out so much.
If we do not pay attention to our individual joint capacity, then whenever we move or “train”, we will likely be reinforcing and strengthening our dysfunctions. We must train capacity so that our joints and tissues can function properly and optimally and stay physically healthy for a long, happy, fulfilling lifetime to come.
The best time to start was probably ten years ago. The next best time to start is now.
