Tag: age

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During the pandemic I followed something of a training plan—a mostly bodyweight exercise plan with minimal equipment beyond a pair of gymnastic rings, based largely on Anthony Arvanitakis’s Bodyweight Muscle books and YouTube channel.

Post-pandemic (once my local fitness room reopened, and exercise equipment became available again), more activities became possible. As they did, I added some in. With extra stuff to fit in, I let the program go. Instead I began exercising more intuitively—simply trying to fit in my strength training and my running as best I could. Each day I’d decide what to do influenced by how I felt, and what I’d done (or hadn’t done) the previous day or two, trying to cover all the bases, while allowing adequate time for recovery.

It has worked pretty well, but not as well as I was doing with an actual program. However, I don’t want to go back to the bodyweight rings program, because I feel like I’m getting real benefits out of the kettlebell and heavy club activities. So, I’m working on roughing up a training program that includes all the stuff I want to do.

Goals

It probably doesn’t make any sense to talk about the activities I do without thinking about the goals I’m trying to achieve.

Of course, I want to feel fit and healthy.

In the spirit of Peter Attia’s Centenarian Decathlon, I want to not only be capable of all the activities of daily living, but have enough reserve capacity now that I’ll still be able to do those things when I’m eighty, ninety, or (as I like to joke, except I’m totally serious) eleventy-one.

Among those things are the obvious—be able to hike a few miles on a rugged trail, climb a steep hill or several flights of stairs, carry a heavy bag of groceries home, put a suitcase in the overhead compartment, get down on the floor and back up again, etc. Besides those, I also want to be able to do well at longsword, which requires the ability to stand and walk in a low lunge, hold the sword with my arms at full extension (both forward and over my head), etc.

Fitness Activities

I figure the first step is just to document the activities that I think will support these goals, so that I know what I want to fit into the week. Here’s my first pass at a list. (Note that I already do an extensive warm-up every day, because it makes me move and feel better all day, whether I do a workout or not. I also walk my dog, and she rather insists on at least 6 miles a day.)

HEMA practice

My group has 2-hour meetings three times a week. They’re mostly skills training, so not too intense, although now that I’m approved for sparring the intensity has gone up.

Running

I want to go for two runs per week. One is a “long” run, in the 6–10 mile range (although I may want to work up to half-marathon length). The other is a “fast” run, which might include sprints, hill sprints, or just a hard run in the 3–4 mile range.

Kettlebell swings

This is primarily to work the muscles of my posterior chain, which needs a regular workout to keep me functioning well. In particular, I learned the hard way what happens if I don’t work my glutes. Currently I’m doing a heavy/light cycle, where I alternate between swinging an 18 kg (40 lb) kettlebell and a 24 kg (53 lb) kettlebell.

For the light kettlebell I’ve worked up to 10×19 swings emom. For the heavy kettlebell I’ve worked up to 10×12 swings emom. I try to add one swing per set every week.

Somewhere around sets of 25, I’d no longer get any break at the end of a minute. I don’t yet know if that’ll mean I’ll be able to do 250 straight swings.

Heavy club swinging

This is one of my newer additions, and I have already seen it do great things for rotational strength, plus grip, arm, shoulder, and core strength. As the weight has gone up, it has started hitting the legs as well.

I do three exercises (outside circle, shield cast, inside circle) in sets of 5 left and 5 right, and I work up from 5 sets on each side, adding one set every workout or two, until I get to 10 or 12 sets on each side, and then go up in weight. I’m up 8 sets with a 13.75 pound club. Soon I’ll go up to 15 lbs.

Kettlebell clean and press

This one seems especially useful for longsword, where you often need to hold the sword over your head, with your arms near full extension.

I do these as a reverse ladder, starting with 4 reps on the left and 4 reps on the right, then 3, then 2, then 1 rep on each side. Then I take a short break and repeat for some number of sets. Each workout (or every other workout) I add one set.

I just did 7 sets. I’ll work up to 10 or 12, then either increase the weight or else start the reverse ladder at 5 reps left and right, and go back to workouts of 4 or 5 sets.

Gymnastic rings circuit

Versions of this were my main workout all through the pandemic, when fitness rooms were closed and kettlebells impossible to come by. These were push/pull/legs workouts preceded by a starter and then ended with a core exercise. I had at least a couple variations of each exercise, so the starter was often jumping rope, but sometimes some sort of quadruped movement, push generally alternated between dips and some version of a push up, pull alternated between pull ups and inverted rows, legs was often air squats, but sometimes hindu squats or lunges or wall sits, and core was often hollowbody hold, but sometimes planks or reverse planks or V-ups.

I’d set the number of reps of each exercise at what I thought I could carry through for 3 rounds, and the 3rd round I’d aim to push to technical failure.

Toward a schedule

Putting all these things into a weekly schedule has proven to be difficult.

Me standing in zornhut

One issue is that my HEMA practice sessions occur at specific times, so there’s a certain lack of flexibility in the schedule there.

Besides that, there’s simply more stuff I want to do than fits easily into a week.

One solution to that would be to abandon the idea that “weekly” is the right structure. I could fit things into, let’s say, a 9-day cycle—but there are enough inconveniences with that, that every time I’ve considered it before, I’ve ended up sticking with weekly.

I’m pretty close to having a first cut at a weekly schedule ready to post. Look for it here in a day or two.

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I have long made it a general practice not to blame my age for any declines or limitations in my capabilities. It’s not that I don’t think my age matters. It’s just that I can’t do anything about my age, so blaming it doesn’t seem useful.

I now realize that I’ve been enabled in this by the fact that I spent my 20s, 30s, and 40s as a sedentary office worker. I did “exercise” some, but not a lot, and not very effectively.

The result of that was that when I finally started making exercise a priority in 2008, I was improving my fitness from a pretty low level. That meant that all through my 50s I was able to report, pretty much every year, that I was in the best shape of my life. (It was in 2014, when I was about 55, that I initially reported that I was getting enough exercise. A year and a half later I wrote this somewhat smug post on the myth of age-related illnesses of middle age. (I tried pretty hard not to be too smug about becoming fitter all through my 50s. Smugness is never very attractive, and it definitely doesn’t age well. I think that post holds up okay as being not so excessively smug.)

Looking back on it, I think my conclusions were the result of having a pretty skewed picture of what sorts of improvements in physical capability can be expected in an “older” person, based on have started from such a low base. Based on my experience these last two years, I’m beginning to think that I’ve made about as much progress as I can expect to make.

A photo me in in the Winfield Village fitness room doing shoulder-taps.
Me doing shoulder-taps.

That’s not definitely true. I continue to exercise. I continue to seek out new modalities of exercise. Maybe one of those will yet do great things for my physical capabilities. And it’s still true that I’m in the best shape of my life. But for the first time in a decade, I’m not in better shape than I was a year ago.

Still, I think I’ll hold off on blaming my age, at least for a while yet.

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When I was a kid or a teenager, my skin would heal from minor scratches almost immediately. A scratch (like from walking through brambles, which I did all the time) would heal up in maybe a day and a half or two days. Then, sort of all at once, when I was about 24 or 25, suddenly it took twice as long. I noticed it when I was living in Utah and hiked a lot in the mountains and deserts, and would get similar scratches, which would now take three or four days to heal.

I figured I was just getting old, and it would just keep getting worse. But it did not. Instead, it stayed like that for thirty-five years. However, just in the past year or two—since I reached my 60s—I’ve observed a fresh doubling in wound-healing times. Now a minor scratch takes a week to heal.

The surprise here is not that the speed of healing declines as one gets older, but the weird stepwise nature of the change—stability for decades, and then an abrupt doubling in time to heal.

I don’t know if that will continue. Maybe I’ll continue to heal at this rate until I’m 105 or so?

I’ve documented this largely for my brother, who once expressed appreciation for the fact that having an older brother gave him a four-year heads-up for this sort of age-related change. (I’m not sure he appreciates it as much now as he did in his 30s and 40s.)

I looked for some research studies as to whether my observation points to a more general phenomenon, but wasn’t able to find much. My brother found a study, which says in part:

The rate of epithelialisation appears to be different in older persons, but the magnitude of the delay may not be clinically important.

THOMAS, D. R. Age-Related Changes in Wound Healing. Drugs & Aging, [s. l.], v. 18, n. 8, p. 607–620, 2001. DOI 10.2165/00002512-200118080-00005.

I guess, as long as you do eventually heal up, the length of time it takes is “not clinically important,” but it’s still kind of a drag to be wounded for week(s).

The sort of scrapes that are now taking longer to heal than they used to.

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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.

Source: 95-year-old shares tricks of safe falling

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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.

  • Wrong: Remove tripping hazards. Right: Use pillows, empty boxes, rocks, sticks, 2x4s, and whatever else you have handy to make a little obstacle course on which you can practice navigating tripping hazards.
  • Wrong: Wear supportive shoes. Right: Wear the least supportive shoes you can handle and do foot exercises to gradually strengthen your feet.
  • Wrong: Be careful on slippery surfaces. Right: Pay attention to the surfaces you’re walking on and exercise due care on all of them.
  • Wrong: Always use your assistive devices. Right: Work with a physical therapist if necessary, and then do exercises to make yourself strong enough to obviate the need for an assistive device.

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 use the weir across the little creek behind Winfield Village for balance practice, when it’s dry and clear of debris.

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.

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I used to make fun of our culture’s weird fixation on dangers from ordinary things, but now that I’ve seen it have its effect on Jackie’s mom (labeled a “fall risk” at the hospital and now confined to a wheelchair), it’s not so funny any more.

My theory is that this phenomenon has its roots in how safe daily life has gotten: Eliminate any particular danger and there’s always the next most dangerous thing.

I have been predicting for years—only partially tongue-in-cheek—that we’re dangerously close to feeling like it’s a “reasonable” precaution that everyone wear a helmet while taking a shower, because bathroom slip-and-fall injuries are probably the greatest non-motor-vehicle risk that ordinary people face.

Hospitals’ fear of elderly people falling is so great that they are preventing them from walking, reports The Washington Post. This is ostensibly for the patients’ own good — yet not getting up for even just a few days is crippling them…

Source: How We Are Treating Kids as Mirrored By How We Treat the Very Old: Crippling Them with Caution

Just as an aside: One thing about this that drives me crazy is that safety advocates have pushed for all sorts of changes to cars to make things safer for drivers and passengers, but I’ve seen almost no push to make cars safer for bicyclists and pedestrians. If you want to make things safer, there’s a place to start.