Tag: age

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Do your workouts make you feel this good?

Dr. Stacy Irvine, DC

Why We Care So Much About What We Do……

An important part of working in the Health and Fitness industry, includes staying on top of the latest research along with developing an awareness of what is being presented to your clients and patients through a wide variety of media sources.  The normal scenario is when a completely bonkers fad diet is being promoted by a well-known celebrity, or a risky new type of workout is all over Instagram. We need to be prepared to explain what is happening and why is it probably not the best answer or solution any of us are looking for.

Rarely an article comes along that reflects a GREAT story of why we do what we do, and how our hard work and efforts can pay off. That happened with the article below from 56-year-old Nicole Haggerty.  In this well written, First-Person account, she eloquently explains what weightlifting has done for her, and how it has changed her life….

My favourite quote from this article is as follows:

“The past five months have unfolded as the most empowering journey I have every been on – and that includes getting a PhD. Every other accomplishment has been centered in my head……..But on reflection, I wasn’t paying much attention to my body.”

Please take a moment to read the full article. If you are an avid weightlifter, or just starting out on your weightlifting journey, we are sure you will find some extra motivation in these words.  

In the event the link above does not work, here is the article in full.

Nicole Haggerty

Published in The Globe and Mail, February 27, 2022

Red-faced, sweating and gasping, my brain tries to focus on what my trainer just said. I’ve just set down a 130 lbs hex frame and stepped off the platform to gulp water.

“Describe that to me,” asked Rob. He is looking for an answer that requires me to do something I’m just learning to do – connect my brain to my body.

Yes, I know. My brain is connected to my body – that slowly and inexorably expanding thing, below my neck that has been carrying my head around for the last 56 years. Since completing my undergraduate degree, work life has increasingly immobilized me. Sitting stationary at a desk, staring at a screen – it’s mostly through my fingers that I connect to my brain. I am an academic working at a business school – so they work feverishly to keep up as I pour out my thinking onto the screen, into the memo, e-mail, journal article … whatever the work is.

“It felt great,” I reply. “I could feel the work down my whole posterior chain.” (Who says that? – oh ya, I do!) “But my breathing and bracing weren’t great and I think I let my knees fall inward a couple of times.” Rob is quick to correct, encourage and set up more weight. Then cheerfully he’ll say, “Okay, next set.”

The last five months have unfolded as the most empowering journey I have ever been on – and that includes getting a PhD. Every other accomplishment in my life has been centred in my head – grades, degrees, promotions, published papers, even teaching. I’ve had a few close calls with fitness before – short triathlons, spin class, jogging. But on reflection, I wasn’t paying much attention to my body. These were instead, great opportunities to think my deep thoughts or focus on the world around me while I drowned out my panting breaths with the throbbing 80s music of my youth.

Weightlifting is different. Rob, my guide, has patiently walked me through a whole new world of specific functional movements, made possible by specific muscles moving in particular ways with increasing weights. He is a trainer and manager at my local gym and I was seeking someone who would help me with a single goal – get strong. I was tired of obsessing about steps and macros, and infinitely weary of the “eat less, move more” advice.

Getting strong (“not toned, not thin, not ready for a 5k”) seemed simple if a little embarrassing at my age. But Rob immediately took me seriously. It started with a humbling assessment of my strength and mobility.

Despite my age, size and beginner status, Rob has made me feel safe. Through his knowledge, patient demonstrations and encouragement, he has induced this body to squat, hinge, press and squeeze its way to all kinds of personal bests (which frankly is a low bar when you start from nothing but still – they keep coming). He’s taught me a new language – hypertrophy, eccentric, isometric … and more. He’s there when I falter, ready to ensure I don’t hurt myself even as he grins and asks for three more torturous reps.

The first weeks, I did everything he asked (glad for the mask mandate since it hid my ‘ugly lifting face’ though not my groaning). And always, he was there, clipboard in hand, a watchful gaze and posing questions like “Where did you feel that?” or the more general request, “Describe that for me.”

Early on I took these as rote pleasantries. Over time I realized he wanted more than rote answers. They were part of what needed to be trained. Having shown me how to do an exercise, Rob would explain where I should feel it and he encouraged me to think about the muscle or chain of muscles as they moved, stretched and strained. The questions were a test of that connection. Gradually, I started thinking my way back into my body. Not my body as an undifferentiated whole but as individual, electric connections to newly identified places – my traps, my quads, my delts, my glutes, my triceps and much more. Intentionally. Specifically. Magically. It’s surprisingly difficult and often funny. Like my recent five-second pause, struggling to repeat a lunge move that Rob had demonstrated because my disconnected brain couldn’t fathom what my legs were supposed to be doing. It’s hard work and relentless – every rep, every set, every time. Unnatural and unfamiliar. Yet infinitely natural and amazingly powerful. Rob has led me on a journey of discovery that I didn’t know could be so sacred and so glorious.

I am five months into a new way of living with this 56-year-old body. It talks to me in a totally different way now. A year ago, the simple act of standing up would provoke a cascade of little pains in my knees and hips, and a unique sort of unbending, wobbling walk as I unfolded myself. Today, my body still aches when I stand up – but the pains I feel now don’t scare me with their portending impairments. They are my quads, glutes, pecs and more – I’m still getting to know them all. Now they remind me of their capabilities, they call to me for movement, they demand to be challenged. And I long to continue this dialogue with them and represent their needs and experiences so I’m ready the next time Rob says:

“Describe that to me.”

Nicole Haggerty lives in London, Ont.

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Why Inflammation Makes You Old

Dr. Tamara Kung, ND

The definition of aging is a progressive change that leads to increased debility, disease, and death. Wow! That sounds depressing. Don’t despair, there are things you can do to make it a much more pleasant picture.

As we age, there is a reduction in our cells capability to read the right genes at the right time. Genes are locked in our DNA and are highly specific instruction sets that govern everything that happens in our body. The loss of specific steps, or the inability to read instructions properly, leads to cells messing up their functional roles and tissues and organs falling apart. 

The question is what causes the loss in information? 

This is where chronic inflammation comes into play. I often describe this process as the Marvel character the Hulk racing around in our body, smashing up cells, and tripping over DNA. This causes damage and a loss of stored information. 

But the Hulk is, for the most part, his harmless alter ego, Bruce Banner, a nerdy scientist who doesn’t cause harm. He stays calm until he gets triggered, and this is analogous to oxygen in our body. We need oxygen to live, it’s a functional part of our metabolism. But it can get amplified and become a superoxide, free radical. Another way to think of it is wildfires burning within us. The more inflammation, the bigger the fire.

What are the major triggers of our internal Hulk?

  1. Refined sugar / processed foods. Essentially the Standard American Diet (SAD)
  2. Alcohol/ Drugs
  3. Sleep deprivation
  4. Stress

Strategies to reduce inflammation:

  1. Reducing inflammatory triggers (refined sugars, processed foods, alcohol, toxic substances).
  2. Protect your body with high levels of antioxidants found in colourful fruits and vegetables.
  3. Intermittent fasting – recent studies are confirming that it’s not just what we eat that’s important, but when we eat as well. Fasting (different from starvation), has been shown to activate genes for longevity and is a whole other lever we can pull to increase our lifespan and health span. A future article will delve more deeply into this topic. 
  4. Increasing the number of healthy bacteria – aka the Microbiome we discussed in our previous article here. 

These strategies help protect your cells from damage. Less Hulk, less damage. Avoiding processed foods and added sugars, getting on top of our sleep are powerful ways to reduce the triggers. Loading up on antioxidant rich foods give you an added buffer of protection as these calm down any signs that could trigger the Hulk, or they will get him to change back into Bruce sooner rather than later. 

How would you react if someone told you that you could live into your 100’s remaining healthy and mentally sharp? This may sound like science fiction, but scientists like leading aging expert David Sinclair, a professor in genetics at Harvard Medical School, says this is more fact than fiction. In his book, Lifespan: Why We Age, and Why We Don’t Have To, he spells out why we should reframe the way we think of ourselves across time, sharing evidence to the theme that aging as we know it doesn’t have to be so. His quote “A painful descent into old age isn’t something you have to accept” resonates so well.

In short, inflammation is an accelerator of aging. The more we inflame ourselves, the quicker we break down. If we incorporate small practices that protect us from inflammation, we can keep ourselves running better…and for longer. 

References

Sinclair, D. (2019). Lifespan: The revolutionary science of why we age – and why we don’t have to. Atria Books.

Chung, H. Y., Kim, D. H., Lee, E. K., Chung, K. W., Chung, S., Lee, B., Seo, A. Y., Chung, J. H., Jung, Y. S., Im, E., Lee, J., Kim, N. D., Choi, Y. J., Im, D. S., & Yu, B. P. (2019). Redefining Chronic Inflammation in Aging and Age-Related Diseases: Proposal of the Senoinflammation Concept. Aging and disease, 10(2), 367–382. https://doi.org/10.14336/AD.2018.0324

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6457053/
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Think You Are In Pretty Good Shape? So Did This Guy.

By, Tim Irvine

I was recently talking with a friend of mine about a hiking trip he was planning and it reminded me of this article I read several years ago. If you want to read about an objective, physical transformation, give yourself five minutes to do just that and be amazed at what a consistent, sustained approach to physical activity can do for you.

The author, and subject, is Kyle Boelte, and he is a self-described active person, who also, at the time the article was written, happened to have a job where he sat at a computer for eight hours daily.

In the eyes of society, Kyle was in good shape and lead an active life. This allowed him the physical capability of planning and completing a 29-day hike of the Colorado Trail. This is no small feet (486 miles), but the compelling part was how he measured himself before and after. He took several different physical measurements and was completely blown away by the changes. So was I.

From my perspective, the most remarkable changes were his cortisol and testosterone levels. He was at the high end of normal cortisol before he started (17.8 ug/dL) and this dropped 40% by the time the hike was over. What surprised me much more was his testosterone which more than doubled. Incredible!

So what does this have to do with us ‘normal people’? The main messages are twofold.

One, even though we do some daily physical activity, if we sit all day for our work, our body will respond appropriately. We just won’t be in as good of shape as we think we should be. This can be helped by mini-breaks during the day where you literally move through a five to ten-minute movement routine to make sure you counteract the sitting. This needs to be done multiple times daily.

Secondly, consistent, sustained movement will make a big difference over the long term. For some, this might be three times weekly. For others, it might be 30-60 min every day. It’s the consistency piece that is the most important that your body will get the most positive impact from. The point is, make this your own so you start where you are at. That’s the only thing that really matters. Progress will come with consistency.

Of course, if you want to do a 30-day hike, by all means, go for it. Just make sure you prepare yourself properly beforehand. It is clear that it can be a game-changer.

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Sleep: Some Essential Facts You Likely Don’t Know

Dr. Tamara Kung, ND

Humans try all kinds of rational to shortchange sleep. Deep societal and cultural shifts have brought in an era where sleep is seen as second rate, an afterthought, a passive thing we do when there’s nothing else to do. We think sleeping means laziness and we’ve been actively fighting against it, with the false notion that we can be more productive and have something to show for our efforts. But what does sleeplessness really do?

As a result, two-thirds of adults around the world aren’t hitting the recommended 8 hours of sleep specified by the WHO and National Sleep Foundation. Countries where sleep time has declined the most, the US, UK, Japan, and South Korea, are seeing noticeable increases in physical disease and psychological disorders.

If that’s not enough, new research and scientific literature provide clear evidence that indicates the shorter your sleep, the shorter your lifespan.

Humans are the only species on Earth who deliberately deprive themselves of sleep. Sleep deprivation can be so devastating to our health that the WHO has classified shift work (jobs that are known to mess up our sleep), a probable carcinogen (being linked with prostate, breast, and colon cancer). The reality is, we are all Shift workers, which is defined as someone who stays awake for more than 3 hours between 10 pm-5 am more than once a week (official European definition).

Believe it or not, most of us fall under this definition because of how we live our lives. Do any of the following situations apply to you?

  • Traditional: Emergency responder, health care worker, flight attendants, pilots, ground transportation, food services, custodial staff, call centers, construction, manufacturing
  • Lifestyle: high school, college students, musicians, performing artists, new parents, in home caregivers, spouses of shift workers
  • Gig economy jobs: ride share services, food delivery services, freelancers
  • Jet Lag: traveling between across 2+ time zones in a day
  • Social Jet Lag: Sleeps and wakes 2+ hours later on weekends (more than 50% of population)
  • Digital Jet Lag: chatting with friends / colleagues, family several time zones away, over social media

Those that get paid massive sums for their physical jobs, professional athletes, have taken notice. The impact of sleep deprivation, or an erratic sleep schedule, has become a major priority for pros and elite athletes everywhere. World sports organizations like the International Olympic Committee have established guidelines for better quantity and quality sleep.

Why for athletes?

Because data shows that motor skills, reaction time, endurance levels all get boosted with 8 hours of quality sleep. Take NBA player, Andre Iguodala of the Golden State Warriors. Here are his stats on when he got 8 hours or more of sleep on a consistent basis compared to less than 8 hours.

  • 12% increase in minutes played
  • 29% increase in points/ minute
  • 2% increase in 3-point percentage 
  • 9% increase in free-throw percentage
  • 37% reduction in turnovers
  • 45% reduction in fouls committed 

This isn’t just for athletes though. We mere mortals also benefit as we try to gain more strength and endurance. When we’re sleep-deprived, we’re often burning more lean muscle mass and less fat which makes it really tough to build muscle. 

Getting enough sleep also drastically reduces the risk of injury. There’s nothing worse than being motivated to finally get active and then get injured and forced out against our best intentions! To put this into perspective, a study assessing sleep and injury risk in young athletes found the following:

  • 9 hours 15% chance of injury
  • 8 hours 34% chance of injury
  • 7 hours 62% chance of injury
  • 6 hours 74% chance of injury

Did you notice that the risk is not a linear one, it’s exponential with each hour of sleep loss!

What does sleep deprivation do for our brains? These are some of the major areas on how sleep affects our mental function and health. 

  • Impairs our ability to think on our feet 
  • Ability to take on new information becomes severely impaired
  • Reactions are blunted (less witty comebacks, or articulate responses) 
  • Increased chance we do something we’ll regret
    • Going for the junk food/ chips vs. healthier fruits/ veggie snacks
  • Long & short-term memory gets dulled – learning new skills, language, topic, becomes overwhelmingly more difficult vs. those who get sufficient sleep are more likely to master skills
  • Increases susceptibility to more extreme mood swings, and on top of that, it’s biased towards a more negative state (anger, anxiety, irritability) 
  • Significantly raises your risk for Alzheimer’s

How does sleep impact so many cognitive processes? 

When you’re asleep, a big neurological bath washes over your brain, clearing it of waste products (garbage) and toxins (tau proteins associated with Alzheimer’s) accumulated throughout the day. Additionally:

  • Sleep enriches our ability to learn, organize memories for storage and easy retrieval, make logical choices.
  • Recalibrates our emotional brain circuits to navigate day to day challenges with a cool-headed composure. 
  • A good night’s sleep promotes those “aha!” moments, where you figure out a novel solution to a problem you were previously stuck on. The saying “Sleep on it.” has its merits, as being uncovered through studies of sleep and dreaming. 

Tips for Unlocking Your Sleep Super Power

Just like everything else we value, sleep comes with our actions and the work we put into it. That being said, working on your sleep doesn’t have to be a drag. It should be something that feels good, is calming, relaxing, and something you look forward to enjoying.

Tip 1: A good night’s sleep comes begins with your daylight exposure. Aim for 30 minutes of outdoor daylight (overcast counts!) without sunglasses. This helps set your circadian rhythm up so that it guides you to sleepiness at the end of the day. Most effective for those who have trouble falling asleep before midnight.

Tip 2: Smaller dinners and finishing your meals before 7 pm is ideal. Late-night snacking tricks your body back into daytime mode and becomes stimulating. These mismatched signals of the environment and what we’re trying to achieve at night leave us tossing and turning. Instead of snacking, make a cozy tea and or go for a walk, stretch or a good read. 

Tip 3: Put on blue light blocking glasses after dinner and leave them on until you turn the last light off (never during the daylight hours because blue light is helpful in the daytime). Clear lenses block 15-30%, while orange lenses block 98%. opt for orange if you can. Here is a link for some sleek Bono glasses. 

Tip 4: Create a sleep sanctuary. Imagine the sensation you have walking into your favourite yoga session. The room is inviting, cozy and if someone brought in their phone, you’d zero in on them and internally yell “get that outta here!”. That’s how your bedroom should feel. Bring in plants, cozy pillows, dim the lighting and leave your devices (phone, computers, tablets) outside. 

Building a new routine takes practice, but each time you practice, you are voting for the path you want to live in.

I’ll leave you with this:

“Just in, scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It also enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you look more attractive, keeps you slim, and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia, and wards off colds and flu. It lowers your risk for heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes. You’ll feel happier, less depressed, less anxious. You’ll also be a much better athlete. Interested?”

If this were a drug, it’d be unbelievable! Many of us would pay big money for just a small dose of this!

This ad describes not a tincture, a new superfood, or drug, but the proven benefits of a full night’s sleep. Yours to pick up on repeat prescriptions every day!

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Do you move young… or old?

At Totum, we often talk about ‘moving young’ for as long as possible. This obviously has an impact on those 60 and above, but it actually starts in your 20’s. Tennis, running, swimming, biking, golf, you name it. Your ability to perform any of these activities is lessened if your muscular power decreases, and that starts a lot younger than most people think.

Muscular power is pretty straightforward. It’s how quickly you can apply the greatest force. Any kind of jump is a classic example of human power in action.

In a recent article by Alex Hutchinson for Outside magazine, he examines research that focuses on why older athletes, and people in general, lose muscular power as they age. Here are the key findings:

  1. Loss of power as we age is almost entirely related to a reduction in strength.
  2. Muscular power has very little impact on activities of daily living, unless it drops below a critical threshold, after which getting out of a chair, or off the toilet, becomes difficult quickly.
  3. Plyometric exercise helps to improve the messaging from brain to muscle, thereby allowing us to ‘move younger’.

Based on this information, we have the following tips:

  1. Never stop challenging your muscles to be stronger. Lift weights, jump, climb stairs or hills, carry heavy stuff, etc.
  2. If you, or someone you know, are in their 60’s or beyond, quality of life will largely be dependent on staying strong. No matter what your age is, strength can be built.
  3. ‘Bouncy’, jumping activities help to keep your brain-muscle connection strong. Note: If you haven’t done this type of activity for a while, take it slow to avoid injury.

Our experience over the last 25 years has shown us that no matter your age when you maintain or increase your muscular strength, you perform all physical activities at a higher level. Whether that’s winning the club championship or just being able to travel is up to you. Strength is critical in allowing you to do it all.