Unlocking the Secrets to Aging with Grace: Strength, Balance, and Mobility for a Vibrant Future

Embrace the secret to a vibrant future with me, Rob Maxwell, as we unlock the keys to aging with grace and vitality. Get ready to fortify your life's journey with a blend of strength, balance, flexibility, mobility, and cardiorespiratory endurance. This episode is more than just a conversation; it's a guide to enhancing your daily activities and ensuring you can keep doing the things you love. I'll walk you through why balance isn't just about your inner ear but a skill that, with the right exercises, can significantly reduce the risk of falls and keep you independent for years to come. It's a deep dive into how vital muscles work together to stabilize your every move and why strength training is about more than just bulking up—it's the foundation of a steady, active lifestyle.

As someone who's faced the challenge of maintaining balance personally, I know the stakes. That's why this episode is dedicated to demonstrating how incorporating balance exercises into your fitness regimen can safeguard your mobility. Whether you're a fitness novice or seasoned athlete, you'll discover why it's essential to start prioritizing balance now. Let's navigate the path to long-term health with actionable insights and practical steps that you can start today. Aging may be inevitable, but how we age is something we can control. Join the movement towards a more balanced life, and step confidently into a future where your passions and pursuits know no age limit.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to there is a Method to the Madness. My name is Rob Maxwell, I'm an exercise physiologist and personal trainer, I'm the owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs and I've been in business since 1994. The purpose of this podcast is to give you the science, to talk to you about what really works and what doesn't work and, most importantly, why. Because there really is a method to the madness of how we get in better shape. And today I'm going to talk to you about one of the components of graceful aging. Before I get into that, I want to thank our very first committed sponsor, jonathan and Lynn Gilden of the Gilden Group at Realty Pros. They are committed to providing the highest level of customer service in home selling and they have the sales and the reviews to back it up. So if you need any help in the real estate, give them a shout at 386-451-2412. All right, so let's talk a little bit about graceful aging.

Speaker 1: 1:13

I don't know about you, but I listen to a lot of different podcasts. I think it's a good way to learn and multitask although I know I should multitask on some things. But when I'm exercising, doing some form of, say, cardiorespiratory exercise, where it's not overly intense and it's just basically time invasive a little bit. Then I'm going to listen to a podcast quite often and more and more I'm hearing people talk about the quality time and use of quality time and I really like that. And I was listening to a guy the other day and he's more of a financial guy but he was talking about like he went to some legendary place that was on his bucket list and I can't remember really what it is because essentially it really doesn't matter. I got the gist of his story but he went there and he wanted to experience it and it was one of these places to where you can climb to the top. It wasn't like an Everest or anything really that challenging that you would have to train for. It's just, you know, the steps go up and you can climb up and be part of it. But what he noticed was when he went up to the top and I think he said either his wife or his girlfriend was with him, he was the only one up there and then he looked down and he saw all these people in their cars kind of looking at it or they're down below taking pictures, and you know he was insinuating that they really just were not in the condition to go up to the top and see this great monument, but you know they wanted to be there and take pictures, so that says a lot right there. I mean that speaks volumes about many things.

Speaker 1: 3:10

But what I took out of that, and he took out of that, is that we want to be able to do the things that we want to be able to do as we get older and fortunately I have a lot of clients that absolutely get that and that is their primary reason for working out. They tell me all the time they say I want to be able to do what I want to be able to do in 10 years from now or 20 years from now or 30 years from now, and that is a great mindset. I don't know how many times I've said it on this podcast. That like that is something we can absolutely do something about right now, whereas a common goal of I want to lose weight is very challenging both for the trainer and the individual trying to lose weight, because oftentimes they're just not really ready to put in all the work required on the diet. But improving our ADLs is something that we can tackle, it's something we can do, it's something we can program for, and it's something that I absolutely see a lot of success with.

Speaker 1: 4:22

So I'm going to go over what I believe are the five different mainstays of what I like to call graceful aging, and that is strength and balance and flexibility and mobility and cardiorespiratory endurance. Those are the five mainstays and I'm going to talk about them this week individually, and today I'm going to go ahead and start with balance. All right, so balance is technically defined as being able to maintain your posture in space. That's a pretty cool definition, but essentially I think we know what it means. It means being able to maintain a particular posture that you're in to the best of your abilities. So if you're standing on one foot, you're able to maintain that posture on one foot. That is an example.

Speaker 1: 5:27

Now, one of the reasons why people have a greater likelihood of falling as they get a little bit older is balance. Another one is strength, another one is mobility. So all of those three things we can work on and, as you notice, they're part of our components of graceful aging, but oftentimes balance is somewhat misunderstood that affect our balance, like inner ear and internally. Yes, those things absolutely are out there, they're factual. I mean, I think we've all had them at some point or another and whether we can do something about that. That's more of a medical intervention type of thing. But then there's another component to balance that people I don't completely know or maybe I'm just in a world where I think it's normal but maybe people don't understand that balance is very trainable. Improving your balance is very trainable.

Speaker 1: 6:37

Now, when we are lifting weights, for example, we have different types of muscle actions going on. You're going to have your isotonic portion of strength training, which is your concentric and your eccentric motions going on with what we call the agonist muscle group. So what that means is there's a primary muscle group doing the work. So if you're doing bicep curls, for example, the primary muscle group is going to be the biceps. But we also have synergistic muscle groups and we have stabilizers. So synergistic muscle groups are helping muscle groups, they help the motion. So, for example, on a bicep curl, the forearms are a synergistic muscle group. It's not. They're not contracting concentrically, so they're not actually shortening the elbow joint which is bringing the, the um tib and not the tib. And fib, the radius and the ulnar boy that was uh, shouldn't have come. So fib, the radius and the ulnar boy, that shouldn't have come so hard. The radius and the ulnar, bringing them closer to the body, all right. So in order to be able to do that, you have to have a strong enough grip. So if your grip's really weak, that's going to be limited and you're not going to be able to curl as much weight. So that is a synergistic helping muscle group.

Speaker 1: 8:02

But the ones that are really really involved in balance are called the stabilizers. So the stabilizers often get very weak. You've heard of use it or lose it. Hopefully you have, and it's absolutely true. If we don't use those little tiny stabilizer muscles, they weaken. So it's funny you can take somebody who is really strong in a squat, like they can squat over three digits, so they can squat over 100 pounds and they're solid and they get down to 90 degrees and all that's great because they've really strengthened the concentric and the eccentric motion in the agonist muscle groups. So they've done that. But then if they've never worked on balance or they haven't done anything on uneven surfaces in a long time like surfers, naturally have a bit of an advantage because they're working on uneven surfaces all the time, where the board underneath them is rolling back and forth, making those little stabilizer muscles strong. So if they haven't done anything like that and you put them on a Bosu ball, when they start to squat, you watch the ball just shake and shake and shake and people are like, whoa, what is going on? I can't keep it still. I can't keep it steady, and that's because all those little stabilizer muscles in the ankle are weak. They're simply not used to doing that. So you could be strong in one area and if you go to the gym and you lift a lot of weights, that's great. I mean, you are now making your body strong, which is one of the components of graceful aging. But if you're not working on the balance, working on the stabilizing muscle groups, then you simply have no reason to believe it's going to improve because, like everything, it's going to atrophy unless you use them.

Speaker 1: 10:03

When we were little kids I can speak for myself skateboarding was huge and we would skateboard most places that we didn't ride our bike. So skateboarding uses all those balance muscles. You have to use the stabilizing muscles because if you know as you lean one way, if you lean, let's say, let's see, I was called goofy foot, so my right leg went first. So if you're right foot, dominant, heading that way and you bend inward, you're going to turn to the right and if you go to the left or backwards, or if you go backwards, you're going to go to the left. So you know that. So you're constantly leaning either front back or staying still so you can go straight and those little muscles are getting stronger, so your overall body has better balance. If you haven't skateboarded in decades, like I haven't, I would hate to even see what happens if I jumped on one. You know we're not going to have that same kind of balance, so we are going to lose it.

Speaker 1: 11:09

So to train something, we have to train it specifically, and that is the principle of specificity. To train it specifically, and that is the principle of specificity. So, in order to train balance, we simply mimic those types of situations in life. One of the best exercises we can do is to stand on one foot and lift the other foot. Sounds easy. It's not. It really challenges your balance and you notice in time that those ankle muscles start to get a lot stronger. Those stabilizing tiny little muscles in your ankle start to get a lot stronger and you can simply hold that in place longer. It's not going to happen unless we do it. That's one way we can do it and I advise people when they're home to practice that when they brush their teeth, you're brushing your teeth, which hopefully you do. Stand on one leg as you do it for, say, 30 seconds and then switch to the other leg and do another 30 seconds, and I guess you're supposed to brush your teeth for two and a half minutes, right, isn't that what they recommend? So go back and forth on your ankle on your feet and as you get a little bit better, start to lift the opposite leg higher and higher. That's one way we train balance.

Speaker 1: 12:27

Another way is to work on unstable surfaces, so things like the BOSU ball. Once we progress, we do our squats, normally for strength, and then we can squat or do other exercises on a BOSU for stability. We don't really want to combine two things at once. Sometimes someone will want to do the main part of their strength exercise on an uneven surface. We call it like a BOSu. I don't advocate that, because then we're taking away the actual strength motion. So we really need to do both. We need to work on balance, we need to work on strength, and when we work on balance, we really need to work on balance. So the way we get better at that is to stand on that Bosu and, as we go down, try to get the shakes out of the ball. So we're not working on using more weight, we're not working on doing more reps, we're working on doing better reps. Like can we go down with hardly any movement in the BOSU? That would be an improvement in balance. That means the stabilizing muscles are getting stronger.

Speaker 1: 13:36

Another exercise we could do is we can work on actual step-ups, because we do want to learn how to pick up that foot appropriately, because a lot of times people fall because they're not lifting up their feet and again use it or lose it. If we're not used to pulling the toes up, which we call dorsiflex and dorsiflexing and lifting the foot up high enough, then that has also atrophied and we're basically going to have kind of lazy feet when we step. So we can work on step ups, all right. These are all things we can do in the gym. These are all things we can do for homework. These are all things that we have absolute control over.

Speaker 1: 14:21

We do have control over our balance and we want to start exercising that control now. Don't wait. Don't wait till you have balance issues. Start to work on it now. I can tell you I'm a very fit individual. Balance is not one of my strengths. I continue to work on it now. We should all work on it now. All right Now. Let me thank our second most loyal sponsor, overhead Door of Daytona Beach. I've known Jeff for over 30 years and his son, zach, for over six Great individuals. I personally vouch for them. They can do all the servicing for your garage doors and obviously they can sell you the best product around. Give them a shout at overheaddoordaytonacom.