Great advice on the right way to handle fall risk for seniors. Includes an excellent video.
Elliott Royce takes practice falls at least five times every morning. He doesn’t just practice; he preaches, too. He goes to assisted living centers, senior centers and community centers to talk about how to prevent serious injuries if you take a tumble.
For my fall-semester OLLI class I took “Ballet for Adult Beginners,” taught by Lei Shanbhag.
I took the class as enrichment of my movement practice. I felt like adding something very different to my existing range of taiji, running, natural movement, a tiny bit of parkour, and so on, and I thought that ballet would be very different, and yet still fall within the broad spectrum of “movement practice.”
I also took it as cultural enrichment. I wanted to learn a bit of the vocabulary of ballet—both the literal vocabulary (Allongé, Battement, Ronds de jambes), and the movement vocabulary (learning to see a dance as a conversation between the dancers and one another, and with the audience).
As far as enhancing my movement practice, I’d have to say it wasn’t a complete success—I did the moves in class, but I didn’t really learn them.
That’s entirely a matter of my own abilities: I’m just very slow to learn movement stuff. I have crappy mirror neurons, and I can only learn movement stuff verbally—I have to watch the movement, describe it to myself in words, and memorize the verbal description. Only then can I attempt to do the movement, by playing back my memorized description and attempting to execute it.
As perhaps you can imagine, this is not the quick and easy way to learn to dance. The upshot is that I need to go more slowly than most people (so I have time to create the verbal description), do it more times than most people (so I have time to memorize my verbal description), and then do it yet more times (so I can learn to execute the moves that I’ve described).
I could probably have learned, let’s say, half or a third of what was taught, if we’d done just that much, and spent two or three times as long on each thing.
As it was, I enjoyed the moving very well, but didn’t leave each class with one or two specific things I might practice between then and the next class.
I don’t mean this in any way as a criticism of the class, which was enjoyable and informative. I had the sense that other people in the class (all with some sort of dance background) were picking up much more of the movements than I was. And Lei was constantly asking if the amount done was the right amount. I could have said, “Wait! Before we go on, let’s do this one thing 5 more times.” I chose not to, so that’s all on me.
Despite not learning the movements, I nevertheless did the movements (as best I could), so the classes were a nice workout—well structured, with a warmup, stretching, practice of the moves we were learning, and more stretching.
I was more successful at learning the cultural stuff. I didn’t learn every ballet term, but I learned enough to provide some useful context. Now I can look things up and understand them. I also began to learn to see ballet, which is something that I didn’t really appreciate before.
One tidbit that we learned the first day stuck with me: The posture of ballet dance—feet turned out, hips forward, weight forward—dates back to Louis XIV. Basically, turning your feet out lets you activate your glutes, while shifting your weight forward lets you activate your quads. If you’ve got good musculature in your legs, this posture lets you show that off. (Especially if, as Louis often was, you’re wearing tights.)
Basically, ballet dancers stand that way because Louis XIV thought standing that way made his butt look good.
Important to me during the dark days:
feeding your brain properly has the potential to prevent and reverse symptoms of mental health disorders, and in some cases, help people reduce or even eliminate the need for psychiatric medications.
Source: https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/mental-health-guides
Perhaps because I’ve reached an age where I might be considered a senior my own self, I’m becoming increasingly annoyed by the way public health advisors infantilize seniors.
It’s most obvious with fall risk, where “don’t fall” not only is repeated constantly, it almost always comes with a particular sort of blame-the-victim advice—remove tripping hazards, wear supportive shoes, be careful on wet or icy surfaces, always use your assistive devices (canes, walkers, etc.)—the implication being that if you fall it’s your fault for not having made your environment sufficiently fall-proof.
This advice is not merely useless or insulting; it is actively harmful.
It’s harmful first of all because it conflates “senior” with “frail” in a way that will inevitably lead the public to harass seniors just like the public feels free to harass fat people, smokers, pregnant women (especially those with the temerity to drink alcohol), or anyone who isn’t conforming with whatever the current public health fashion is.
Inevitably too, it will have that effect in the minds of seniors who will start to think of themselves as frail simply because everybody says so.
More to the point, it’s is precisely backwards for what you want if your goal is (as I think it should be) to prevent frailty.
This is perhaps not as harmful as the infantalization of children and youth, which works extra harm because adults have more power to impose their conditions on children, whereas seniors mostly have enough autonomy to ignore inappropriate advice. But it hurts seniors in exactly the same way it hurts children, reducing their ability to become or remain robust actors in the wide world.
Now, I don’t want to fall into reverse-blaming the victim. If you are frail, then taking steps to reduce the risk of injury just makes good sense. My go-to activities to prevent frailty might well put an already frail person at serious risk.
I try to resist the urge to suggest to seniors that they should do hazardous activities in the name of preventing frailty. But the advice I see from professionals (and random strangers) goes too far in the other direction. Following it is going to doom already frail people to becoming steadily more frail.
Great run! My sore foot didn’t hurt until I was just a few steps from home. My knee didn’t hurt at all. My heart rate held exactly where I wanted it.
Latest in the long-running series, “Studies that reinforce my preconceptions just from reading the headline”:
Vegans have twice as many sick days as their meat-eating colleagues in the UK, according to a new report.
Source: Report finds vegans have twice as many sick days as meat-eaters
After the Rattlesnake Master 10k I came down with either a very nasty cold or else a moderately nasty case of the flu. Whatever virus it was, it had me pretty much down for the count for a solid week. Today was the first day in almost two weeks I felt up to a run.
On Sunday I ran in the Rattlesnake Master Run for the Prairie 10k.
Usually I expect that I’ll write a post when I participate in an event like that, but it turns out that I don’t have a lot to say about it. It went fine. I ran very slowly, which I expected because I’d done all of my training very slowly, but I did not come in last, which was nice.
I’d suffered with a nagging sore foot for several weeks leading up to the race. The pain was in the heel of my right foot, which made me figure it was probably plantar fasciitis. I think I’ve figured out though that it’s actually peroneal tendonitis. Understanding that gives me a clue toward recovery. The peroneal tendon, which reaches down the outside of your ankle, through the heel, and then forward across to the inside edge of the front of your foot, is heavily involved in balancing, especially standing on one foot. I do a lot of single-leg standing as part of my taiji practice and teaching, and since figuring this out I’ve been especially careful about being gentle with myself in this part of the practice, and in just a few days I’ve finally seen dramatic improvement.
The realization didn’t help in time for the race though, and my foot was a little sore right along. It wasn’t so sore that I thought I was doing real damage though, so I just ran the race anyway. It did impact my gate a bit, which meant that my opposite-leg knee started hurting about halfway through the race.
Part of the reason for this post is to test the GPX exporting at Polar (which had been broken for a while) and the GPX tracking plug-in that I’ve got here (which has been updated a couple of times since I last successfully got a GPX track exported from Polar). So, here’s the track of my run. The heart rate data doesn’t seem to be working.
[sgpx gpx=”/wp-content/uploads/gpx/Philip_Brewer_2019-11-03_08-55-36.gpx”]
(I didn’t want to fiddle with my phone at the start or finish of the race, so I started tracking my run about 5 minutes before the start of the race, and then I forgot to turn it off until about 5 minutes after I crossed the finish line, so both the time and the distance are a little off.)
My official time was 1:17:13.4 meaning a 12:26/mile pace. That’s as fast as I’ve run in years. (Overall results. Age-group results.)
It was pretty cold at the start—cold enough that I didn’t manage to get my race number in my pre-race selfie:
It had warmed up a lot by the end of the race, when I captured the selfie up at the top with Jackie (who along with a lot of the Master Naturalists had volunteered in the race).
Another post to file under “all the rays are actinic”:
[Near infrared light] can trigger cellular activities that restore cellular metabolism, promote blood flow, neuroprotection, and reduce levels of inflammation and oxidative stress. All of these cellular mechanisms can be summed up as “helping the brain to repair itself.”
Source: Will the Photobiomodulation Trial Be the One to Turn the Tide Against Alzheimer Disease?
I have always been an optimizer. I spend way, way too much time, energy, and attention optimizing things. Which is, you know, fine, even though my net benefit is small or zero, largely because I don’t focus my optimization efforts in places where I get the biggest payoff. (I’d say that I don’t optimize my optimization efforts, but I don’t want to tempt my brain into trying to do that. It would not end well.)
One place where my optimization efforts did end well has been in optimizing things for life under late-stage capitalism.
I was helped by a couple of lucky coincidences and a bit of lucky timing.
Purely because I enjoyed doing software, I became a software engineer at the dawn of the personal computer era, which gave me a chance to earn a good salary straight out of college, a salary that grew faster than my expenses for most of the next 25 years.
Whether because of my upbringing or my genes (my grandfather was a banker), I liked thinking about and playing with money, which meant that I was doing my best to save and invest during a period when ordinary people could easily earn outsized investment returns.
It worked out very well for me. I’m as well positioned as anyone who isn’t in the 1% to do okay in late-stage capitalism. (Frankly, better positioned than a lot of the 1%, who find it easy to imagine that they deserve the lifestyles of the 0.1%, and if they live like they imagine they should will quickly ruin their lives.)
This whole post was prompted by a great article that looks mainly at the efforts women make to optimize themselves under the overlapping constraints of health, fitness, appearance, and financial success in the modern economy. Highly recommended—insightful and daunting, but also funny:
It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible…. But today, in an economy defined by precarity, more of what was merely stupid and adaptive has turned stupid and compulsory.
Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman by Jia Tolentino
One focus of that article is on “fitness.” I put fitness in quotes because of the way, especially for women, so much of fitness is actually about appearance. Perhaps because I’m not a woman—also perhaps because I’m already married, and because I’m older—my own perspective on fitness has gotten very literal: I want my body to be fit for purpose—fit for a set of purposes which I have chosen. I want to be able to do certain things because I have found the capability to be useful. (I also want to be able to do certain things that I can’t do, because I imagine that the capability would be useful, and much of the exercise I do now is intended to achieve those capabilities.)
In a sense, optimizing for fitness is really neither here nor there as far as optimizing for late-stage capitalism, which is mostly about money. And yet, really it is. My fitness suffered during the period I was working a regular job. Getting fit and staying fit takes time. To a modest extent, you can substitute money for time—you can pay up for the fancy gym where the equipment you want to use is more available, or take a job that doesn’t pay as much but allows you to squeeze in a midday run. But now we’re right where we started: optimizing for life in late-stage capitalism.
I should say that I’m delighted with how well my life has turned out. If I’d had any idea how little I could spend and still have everything I really want, or how early I’d have saved up enough money to support that modest lifestyle, perhaps I could have avoided a lot of anxiety and unhappiness along the way. But who among us has such luck? And more to the point, maybe some of that anxiety and unhappiness were crucial to my making the choices I did that got me to where I am.
I worry just a bit about my irresistible impulse to optimize, but like everything else about me, it got me to where I am. And, as I say, I’m delighted to be here.
