Introduction
Last week’s post, though perhaps an amusing romp, wasn’t very responsible. I mean, why showcase my bad habits? Whose idea was that, anyway? I hope I didn’t come across as condoning any of those behaviors (though honestly, as odd as they are, you’d have to be some kind of kook to adopt them). This week I hope to provide a whole-grain, high-fiber, wholesome corrective. I’m offering up sincere and helpful advice here and I will try my best to make it amusing somehow.
Some background
My younger daughter is home for the summer and perhaps being around her vivacious youthfulness emphasizes how fricking old I’ve gotten. I guess I’ve reached the age where I worry more about my advancing decrepitude than reveling in whatever vigor I still have left. Sure, I can still make my bike go pretty fast when I dig deep, but I also dread the prospect of, say, my back going out for no good reason. (A buddy of mine, though he still athletic and does all kinds of yoga, threw out his back putting on a sock.) I contemplate how to preserve my physical faculties over the last few decades of my life.
Strength and heart health are all well and good, but I lately I’m putting more focus on balance. Seventeen years ago I read a fascinating New Yorker article about the role balance plays in graceful ageing, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. The article, by the doctor/professor/writer Atul Gawande, is called “The Way We Age Now.” (My friend P— and I have a running joke about Atul Gawande. P— is a doctor, and I fancy myself a writer, and we complain to each other how Gawande is a better doctor and writer than both of us, and is also better looking; we naturally assume he’s even seduced our wives at some point.) In the article Gawande describes how he tagged along with a Dr. Bludau, a geriatrician, during a routine physical exam of an 85-year-old woman:
It seemed to me that, with just a forty-minute visit, Bludau needed to triage by zeroing in on either the most potentially life-threatening problem (the possible metastasis) or the problem that bothered her the most (the back pain). But this was evidently not what he thought… The danger for her was losing what she had. The single most serious threat she faced was not the lung nodule or the back pain. It was falling. Each year, about three hundred and fifty thousand Americans fall and break a hip. Of those, forty per cent end up in a nursing home, and twenty per cent are never able to walk again. The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness. Elderly people without these risk factors have a twelve-per-cent chance of falling in a year. Those with all three risk factors have almost a hundred-per-cent chance.
What is to be done?
How do I address these three risk factors?
- Being an athlete is a non-negotiable part of my lifestyle, because cycling is a) fun, b) something I have enough experience in that it’d be a shame not to do it, and c) my number-one way to burn off stress. Cycling addresses the strength part of my ageing, to a point. (I know that ideally I should do core exercises, join a gym, do yoga, etc. and I’m trying to muster the resolve to take those things up.)
- In terms of prescription medications, I’m not sure how feasible it is for any of us to avoid needing them when we’re old. It’s not like we can just resolve to go without. I’m lucky enough to be blessed with low cholesterol, and my blood pressure is decent, and so far I have no risk factors for diabetes, but you just never know what I may need for this or that ailment in my codger years.
- Balance: this is the area where I think I can make the biggest difference.
How can we improve our balance?
I’d like to think that being a cyclist automatically gives me great balance, and of course it can’t hurt, but I don’t think it’s actually enough. I learned this when I was doing physical therapy after breaking my femur. As we began my regimen, my physical therapist asked me what my goal was for the therapy. As I’ve explained in these pages, I’m not actually that into goals, but this time I had one. “I want to come out of this better than I was before,” I declared. After all, I had a gym to work in and an expert to guide me … why not dream of shoring up some of the classic deficiencies of the pure cyclist?
To start with I had to learn to walk all over again, and realized in the process just how complicated walking is. With every step, the back leg has to swing forward, the knee bent so your foot doesn’t hit the floor, and then you have to plant that foot and swing the other leg forward, and that swinging is more rhythmic when we realize. But because I didn’t trust my bad leg to bend properly, I was kind of swinging it around sideways so I could keep it straight, and thought I was doing pretty well until my physical therapist, laughing, told me to walk toward a mirror and watch myself. I looked like a drunken zombie.
After relearning how to walk, one of the toughest things I did in that gym was a toe-tapping exercise on a fairly unstable platform. It was basically a square plank of wood with a half-cylinder under it (i.e., a hemispherical cross section), kind of like a teeter-totter that you stand on. I would start by standing on the plank, balancing so it wouldn’t tip forward or back. Then I’d tip the plank forward until its front edge tapped the floor, and then rock back until the plank was level again, the slower the better. I’d do this ten times, and then I’d switch to rocking back, to tap the back edge of the plank on the floor, return to level, and do that ten times. Once I mastered that with both feet, I learned how to do it standing on just one foot. Oddly, I was no better at this with my good leg than my recently healed one, but in time I went from incompetent to totally proficient, even after adding in a barbell in one hand to put me slightly off balance. I cannot tell you how stoked I was to have learned a new trick that I couldn’t have done before my accident. I actually was better than before.
So now, with Gawande’s article in mind, I want to continue that trajectory of actually improving my balance. The fun way is to ride indoors with my bike on rollers, when it’s too dark and/or wet to ride outdoors. The less fun, but logistically easier, way—and, more importantly, the way I can recommend to you, albertnet reader—is to do the PT balancing trick on a balance saucer. You can buy one of these (one manufacturer’s product name is “Wobble Balance Board”) for about $20. This is even harder that what I did in physical therapy.
The regimen
The great thing about the balance saucer is that you can do your whole routine in 5-10 minutes. (I suppose this duration will vary as you become more proficient, and based on how much you want to do.) My current regimen consists of the following exercises, in sets of 10 repetitions each:
- Standing on both feet, tap the front edge of the saucer on the floor
- Standing on both feet, tap the rear edge
- Standing on one foot, tap the front edge
- Standing on one foot, tap the rear edge
- Standing on both feet, tap the right edge
- Standing on both feet, tap the left edge
I hold a barbell in one hand, and after the first five reps I pass it to the other hand. If I feel like it, I pump the barbell in the air for extra exercise and instability. (I plan to figure out other cool things to do on this saucer, maybe even incorporating my upper body.)
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, and five movies totaling two minutes at 60 frames per second is therefore worth about 7.5 million words, here are videos showing the exercises:
(Video credit to my daughter, expertly wielding her superfly non-phone camera.)
Don’t be surprised if it takes a while to get good at this. When I started up again (over a decade after my physical therapy days), I was pretty wobbly and struggled for a while.
Make it a habit
Did you notice in that video that I wasn’t in a fancy studio with mirrors and mats, wearing PrAna yoga pants and fancy workout shoes and headphones and a fitness tracker? All you need for this is the saucer and a pair of shoes with good, grippy soles. With worn-out or loose-fitting shoes, I have a lot of trouble, and if I try to do this barefoot my feet slide off. But other than that, no special gear or preparation is required, not even a warm-up. That said, this activity is oddly strenuous given how low-impact (actually, zero-impact) it is. During winter, when I’m working from home and stuck at my desk with my blood congealing, almost like suspended animation, I like to take a break and do my balance regimen to get my blood flowing. It really warms me up.
Making this a habit is key. Initially you’ll need plenty of repetition to develop the balance needed for these exercises, and then you’ll want to maintain that consistency so that five, ten, and twenty years from now you won’t have lost the ability. It’s kind of interesting to ponder how well we could maintain this, if we do it daily … can you imagine having this kind of balance at 80? Assuming we don’t, at least we’d be declining from a pretty decent height of capability. I think that’s well worth pursuing.
—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For
a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment