4 Things Worth Keeping Strong as You Age
Four Things Worth Keeping Strong as You Age
When we talk about longevity, the conversation usually goes straight to nutrition, sleep, cardiovascular health, or the latest blood test that promises to tell us how we're aging.
Absolutely all of those things matter, and as a Pilates teacher, I spend a lot of time thinking about it differently:
“What does your body need to be able to do for you for a very long time?”
I want you to be able to get up from the floor. Carry your groceries. Walk down the stairs without thinking twice about it. Reach for something on a high shelf. Recover when you trip. Get out of a chair easily. Keep playing the sports you enjoy. And, ideally, feel confident enough in your body that you don't spend your days worrying about what it might not be able to do anymore.
There are four areas I pay particular attention to because they play such an important role in strength, balance, mobility and independence: 1. grip strength, 2. the muscles around the hips, 3. the calves and 4. the diaphragm.
These aren't the only things that matter for healthy aging, and I wouldn't call them the “four biomarkers of longevity.” But they are four very useful places to look when we're thinking about maintaining physical capacity as we get older.
And the nice thing is that you don't need four separate workouts to address them. They're all being used in a well-taught Pilates class.
1.Grip strength
Grip strength is surprisingly useful as a general indicator of physical health. Research has consistently found an association between weaker grip strength and poorer health outcomes, including greater risk of disability and mortality. It also makes intuitive sense when you think about what your hands actually do all day.
You need your hands to carry things, open containers, hold onto a railing, use tools, pick things up and support yourself when you're getting up or down from the floor. For someone who wants to remain independent as they age, those are pretty important skills.
We use our hands constantly in Pilates. We're holding straps and handles, gripping the footbar, pushing into the carriage and sometimes supporting our body weight through our hands. We are also asking the hands and arms to work in coordination with the shoulder, trunk and spine rather than treating the grip as something separate from the rest of the body.
That's one of the things I like about Pilates. We can build strength without spending a class thinking, “Now we're going to work on grip strength.” We're simply giving the body a reason to keep using it.
2. The hips and balance
The muscles around your hips have a tremendous amount to do with how you move through space and how well you maintain your balance. The hip abductors, in particular -the muscles on the outside of the hip- help stabilize the pelvis and control the leg when you're standing on one foot, stepping sideways or responding to a change in your balance.
This becomes increasingly important as we age!
According to the CDC, more than **one in four adults over the age of 65 reports falling each year**, and a substantial portion of those falls result in an injury or restriction of normal activity.
Balance is not simply standing on one leg and seeing how long you can stay there. Real-life balance is much more complicated; You're walking on an uneven surface, turning your head, carrying something, stepping over an obstacle or reacting to something you didn't expect. The little adjustments your body makes with the strength you are building in Pilates are what makes balancing easier.
Pilates gives us a lot of opportunities to practice those adjustments. We strengthen the hips in side-lying work, standing exercises, feet in straps, lunges and single-leg movements. We work on pelvic stability, weight shifting and controlling the legs independently of one another in many of our exercises!
Importantly, we practice doing all of that while paying attention to where our body is in space. That combination of strength, control and awareness is a big part of what makes movement feel more secure.
3. Don't overlook your calves
The calf muscles are easy to forget because they're not usually the muscles we think about when we talk about strength training. But every time you walk, your calves are helping you control your ankle and push your body forward, and your calf muscles (gastrocnemius and soleus) act as a peripheral heart, pumping blood back to the heart. So all this good calf work promotes circulation.
Your feet and ankles also play a major role in balance. They are constantly making small adjustments in response to the surface underneath you and to changes in where your body is positioned.
As we get older, losing strength in the lower leg can affect walking speed, mobility and balance. Research has found a relationship between plantar-flexor strength—the group that includes the calf muscles—and balance in older adults.
Footwork might look like very simple work, but we're asking the foot, ankle, calf and the rest of the leg to communicate with one another. That connection to the ground becomes increasingly valuable as we age.
4. And then there's the diaphragm
If you come to Kelp Pilates, you hear all of our teachers emphasize the importance of breathing deeply and exhaling on the exertion.
Most of us think of the diaphragm simply as the muscle that allows us to breathe. And of course, that's its primary job. But breathing and postural control are closely connected, and the diaphragm works together with the deep core muscles to help stabilize the body.
Yes! The way you breathe directly influences how you organize yourself when you move!
In Pilates, we use the breath to move into places we might have locked up.
Mindful and purposeful breathing helps us become aware of
- the movement of the ribs,
- the relationship between the breath and the low and deep abdominal muscles, and
- our ability to connect the abs without movement without gripping or holding tension elsewhere in the body.
This is particularly useful when we're doing something challenging, like: maintaining your breathing while you're balancing, coordinating your breath with a difficult movement, and stabilizing your spine or pelvis without holding your breath. These are skills worth practicing and exactly how we move through our classes at Kelp Pilates!
>>>This is what I love about Pilates<<<
The reason I like these four areas so much is that they bring us back to what I think exercise/movement is really for: Maintaining the physical abilities that allow us to participate in our lives.
A Pilates class can ask you to hold onto something firmly, stabilize your pelvis while one leg moves, control your ankle and foot against resistance, and coordinate your breathing with movement - all within the same hour.
These exercises and movements aren't accidental. Pilates - or Contrology- is built around the idea that the body works as a whole to control the movement of the body when forces like gravity, pulleys, weights or springs are pushing or pulling; not just outsourcing and building muscular strength of legs or arms or abs.
There is so much evidence that Pilates improves balance, strength, flexibility and functional ability in older adults, and research suggests it also helps reduce fall risk. The quality of that evidence varies, so I don't think Pilates should be presented as some magical solution to aging. It is, however, a very practical way to keep challenging the body to move, stabilize, strengthen and coordinate.
That is really what I want for you. Not to exercise because you are afraid of getting old. I want you to keep exercising because you have places to go, people to see, things you want to do and bodies you want to keep using. For me, that's a much more meaningful way to think about longevity.
It's not just about adding years to your life. It's about keeping your body capable enough to participate in those years. And that's a pretty good reason to keep moving.
Let your wellspan match your lifespan
