Functional Exercise For Seniors – by James Atkinson
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A lot of exercises books are tailored to 20-year-old athletes training for their first Tough Mudder. Others, that the only thing standing between us and a perfect Retroflex Countersupine Divine Pretzel position is a professionally-lit Instagrammable photo.
This one’s not like that.
But! Nor does it think being over a certain age is a reason to not have genuinely robust health, of the kind that may make some younger people envious. So, it lays out, in progressive format, guidelines for exercises targeted at everything we need to build and maintain as we get older.
The writing style is clear, and the illustrations too (the cover art is the same style as the illustrations inside).
Bottom line: if you’re looking for a workout guide that understands you are nearer 80 than 18, and/but also doesn’t assume your age limits your exercise potential to “wrist exercises in chair”, then this book is a fine pick.
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Why 10,000 Steps Might Be Making Your Pain Worse (+ What To Do Instead)
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Walking can be pleasant, but (unless you’re walking on rough terrain) in biomechanical terms it’s very repetitive, and doesn’t challenge muscles enough to build strength or improve balance.
So, wear and tear can occur, but development won’t happen much after a certain very base level.
Dr. Alyssa Kuhn, arthritis expert, explains how to fix that:
Different Movements
If you sometimes find yourself struggling with stairs, low chairs, or daily movement, that usually means your muscles lack the correct strength. As with any kind of strength training, your muscles need to be challenged with increasing resistance, not just the same repetitive movement, or else they will have no reason to get stronger.
Dr. Kuhn recommends these exercises in particular:
- Chair stands: sit at the edge of a chair, stand up, and sit back down to work your thighs, glutes, hamstrings, feet, and ankles. To make it easier, raise the seat height or use the chair arms for support. Alternatively to make it harder, hold a weight to your chest. Goal: 8–12 reps, 2–3 sets; optional 30-second test for number of stands.
- Step-back with knee march: step one leg backwards, then bring your knee up to your chest before repeating to build your hips, glutes, core, and balance. To make it easier, shorten your step and knee lift, and hold a chair for support. To make it harder, take a bigger step, make a faster knee drive, and step up onto a stool. Goal: 10–12 reps per side, 2–3 sets.
- Balance with weight pass: stand on one leg (or use your back toes as a sort kickstand for balance purposes, without putting much weight there) and pass a weight or object hand-to-hand. To make it harder, use a heavier weight and hold it further from your body. Goal: 20–30 passes or 30–60 seconds per side, 2–3 sets.
For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like:
How To Make Downhill Walking Easier On The Knees
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Can’t Do The Middle Splits? Two Anatomy Tricks To Get You Deeper In Seconds
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Flexibility coach Aleks Brzezinska—who first got flexible as an adult herself—explains how:
To the floor
First, understand four factors that affect how easy or hard the middle splits will be:
- Muscles: flexibility partly depends on inherent muscle stretchability, which varies between individuals. Stretching regularly works for everyone, but heavy weightlifting can hinder flexibility progress.
- Ligaments: ligament length and mobility affect joint flexibility. Longer ligaments offer more mobility but less stability, increasing injury risk. Hypermobile people tend to progress faster in flexibility. Ligaments can be stretched over time, though excessive stretching without strengthening can reduce joint stability, so it’s important to do both.
- Hormones: estrogen makes connective tissue more flexible, improving flexibility in women.
- Bone Structure: the biggest limitation in achieving full middle splits can be bone structure, particularly hip socket depth and femur shape. Shallower sockets and longer femur necks generally allow more movement. Children have more cartilage in the hips, which does aid flexibility if trained early, but it’s not too late for the rest of us, either.
Now, the two tips:
- Arch your back while attempting the split. This can help you slide deeper into the position regardless of your current level.
- Conversely, round your back and sit your hips backward. This shifts the stretch from the inner thighs to the hamstrings and mimics a wide pancake position, helping those whose hip anatomy prevents full middle splits.
For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Test For Whether You Will Be Able To Achieve The Splits
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The Spectrum of Hope – by Dr. Gayatri Devi
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We’ve written before about Dr. Devi’s work (See: “Alzheimer’s: The Bad News And The Good“) but she has plenty more to say than we could fit in an article.
The book is written for patients, family/carers, and clinicians—without getting deep into the science, which it is assumed clinicians will know. the general style of the book is pop-science, and it’s more about addressing the misconceptions around Alzheimer’s, rather than focusing on neurological features such as beta amyloid plaques and tau proteins and the like.
Dr. Devi explains a lot about the experience of Alzheimer’s—what to expect, or rather, what to know about in advance. Because, as she explains, there are a lot of different manifestations of Alzheimer’s that are all lumped under the same umbrella.
This means that a person could have negligible memory but perfect language and reasoning skills, or the other way around, or some other combination of symptoms showing up or not.
Which means that any plan for managing one’s Alzheimer’s needs to be adaptable and personalized, which is something Dr. Devi talks us through, too.
Bottom line: if you are a loved one has Alzheimer’s, or you just like to be prepared, this is a great book to prepare anybody for just that.
Click here to check out The Spectrum of Hope, and hold onto that hope!
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How Mood Drugs & Sleep Problems Affect Women’s Hormones
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…and other items from this week’s health news:
Sleep, drugs, and mixed messages
Most people know that irregular sleep, shift work, jet lag, and artificial light at night can disturb one’s circadian rhythm, but menstrual cycles? Yes, that too!
How this happens: it’s because the timing systems are deeply connected; the brain’s “master clock” interacts with reproductive systems, linking daily and monthly cycles. Furthermore, shorter daylight lengthens reproductive cycles, while longer daylight shortens them, showing sensitivity to seasonal changes—or anything your body might reasonably mistake for a seasonal change (given the ubiquity of bright lights these days).
The same study also found that mood stabilizers have hormonal side effects: lithium, used for bipolar disorder, can lengthen circadian rhythms and disrupt hormonal cycles.
You may be wondering: is this of any relevance to me, postmenopause? And the answer is: it depends, because if you’re on HRT, chances are your body will still adapt to a monthly cycle—even without ova to ovulate (and so forth), the hypothalamus will still regulate the metabolism of your estrogen, no matter whether that estrogen came from your ovaries or a pharmacy. However, the symptoms should be much less severe, and you shouldn’t experience bleeding after the first 6 months or so.
Read in full: How disrupted sleep and mood drugs impact women’s hormonal and mental health
Related: The Other Circadian Rhythms
Long COVID extra bad for many women
Long COVID, short end of the stick? It certainly seems so:
Researchers (Dr. Jacqueline Maybin et al.) have found that women with long COVID face higher risk of abnormal uterine bleeding, with symptoms like fatigue, headaches, and muscle pain worsening during perimenstrual and proliferative phases.
How this happens: Dr. Maybin and her team found a cluster of immune cells in the endometrium of affected women, pointing to inflammation as a likely mechanism rather than ovarian hormone disruption. Which is not too shocking, all things considered (long COVID being an ongoing systemic response to an infection long after it should have been necessary), but it’s good to know.
And, in terms of “what we know”, the science for this one is about as sure as science ever is about anything, as it came from three approaches—data from 12,187 women, a three-month clinical follow-up of women with long COVID, and an analysis of blood and endometrial samples.
Since long COVID affects 3–7% of the global population and is twice as common in women, this is pretty important—not just as trivia, but for practical reasons too; it means that menstrual cycle phases should be factored into long COVID biomarkers (something the researchers also called for in their paper).
Read in full: Study reveals bidirectional relationship between long COVID and menstrual disorders
Related: What Can Be Done About Long COVID?
A reasonable, yet unexpected, extra cancer risk
Researchers (Dr. Mariah Bilalaga et al.) found that nonadherence to cervical screenings (i.e., simply not getting it done when invited/recommended to do so by healthcare providers) went up since the pandemic—most likely a side effect of people initially consciously avoiding unnecessarily going to places where one might get infected, and then developing a new habit around same, whether or not the habit is consciously upheld or just habit now for many.
However, while COVID does continue to be risk, so is cancer, and recommendations are to go get screenings when invited/recommended all the same.
Somehow, awareness of the HPV vaccine (that helps prevent cervical cancer, because most cervical cancer is caused by that virus) also dropped, which hasn’t helped cervical cancer numbers stay under control, either:
Read in full: Nonadherence to cervical cancer screening increased after COVID-19 pandemic
Related: Everything you need to know about cervical cancer
Take care!
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Is cancer more common in women after IVF?
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Since fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF) began, there has been concern they could cause cancer.
Concerns have included whether aspects of treatment – such as taking hormonal medications, or puncturing the ovaries to retrieve eggs – could stimulate the growth of cancer cells.
Now, our new study, published on Wednesday, has found women who underwent fertility treatments had a comparable overall rate of cancer to similarly aged women.
However, there were some differences: they had more uterine, ovarian, and melanoma cancers, and fewer lung and cervical cancers. Let’s take a look at what this means.
Shaw Photography Co./Getty What we did
Our study wanted to find out whether women who underwent fertility treatments had a different rate of cancer from the general population.
We used individual records from Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme to find women who had fertility treatments between 1991 and 2018. We linked this data to the Australian Cancer Database to find cancer diagnoses.
We found 417,984 women who received fertility treatments and followed them for about a decade on average:
- 274,676 women had treatments where the egg was removed from the women’s body (IVF and similar treatments)
- 120,739 women had treatments with a specialist where the egg was not removed (mainly intrauterine insemination)
- 175,510 women received a prescription for clomiphene citrate (also known as Clomid), a medication that induces ovulation.
One woman could have had multiple types of treatment.
Their median age (the midpoint of their ages) was 32–34 years. Compared to the general population, fewer lived in disadvantaged areas.
We compared these women’s rates of cancers to women in the general population, by statistically matching them on factors such as age and the state they lived in.
What we found
Women who received fertility treatments, either with or without egg removal, had close to the exact total number of cancers we would expect in the general population of women.
But women who used clomiphene citrate had 1.04 times the rate of cancer, or 8.6 extra cancers for every 100,000 women treated each year.
Rates of uterine cancer, ovarian cancer (except for those who used clomiphene citrate), and melanoma were 1.07–1.83 times higher, depending on treatment type. This means about three to seven more of these cancers for every 100,000 women treated each year.
This difference could be due to risk factors unrelated to the treatment. For example, endometriosis – a risk factor for infertility – is linked to ovarian cancer. Similarly, more Caucasian women receive fertility treatments, and fair skin is an established risk factor for melanoma.
Across all treatments rates of cervical cancer and lung cancer were 1.43–1.92 times lower. This translates to around two to six fewer cancers for every 100,000 treated women each year.
These decreases could be due to women receiving fertility treatment being less likely to smoke. Women who receive fertility treatment may also be more likely to be screened for cervical cancer, as clinicians often encourage them to get screened before treatment. But this is anecdotal – we don’t yet have data on this.
What this means
Overall, these findings are reassuring for women who have received or are planning fertility treatments.
The number of people undergoing fertility treatments is increasing worldwide. These findings deepen our understanding of the types of cancers diagnosed in women who receive fertility treatment.
Our study shows some cancers are more common in women who received fertility treatments than in the general population of women.
However, the absolute numbers of these cancers are small, similar to those observed for women using some other medical interventions (including the contraceptive pill).
It is normal to see differences in cancer risk in specific populations when compared to the general population.
So, does this mean IVF does not cause cancer?
This study design cannot determine if fertility treatments themselves cause or prevent cancer.
Though fertility treatments may contribute to cancer risk, women who receive fertility treatments have a different health and socio-demographic profile to the general population of women. These factors may affect cancer risk.
We did not have any data on why women were using fertility treatments to get pregnant and whether this is connected to their cancer risk. For example, we don’t know if they were receiving treatment for medical infertility, or for another reason (such as same-sex couples trying to conceive).
Our study also only followed women for around ten years, and the cancer risk profile may change as these women age.
The takeaway
As with every medical treatment, it is important for women and their health-care practitioners to make informed decisions before and after fertility treatment, including considering potential changes in cancer risk.
Women considering fertility treatment, and those who’ve used fertility treatment, should continue to participate in the routine cancer screening programs they’re eligible for.
If women are worried about their risk of cancer, they should consult their doctor to understand the steps they can take to reduce their risk.
Adrian Raymond Walker, Research Fellow, Centre for Big Data Research in Health, UNSW Sydney and Claire Vajdic, Professor, The Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Carrot vs Eggplant – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing carrots to eggplant, we picked the carrots.
Why?
In terms of macros, carrots have slightly more carbs, though the fiber content means it can’t be construed as a negative in terms of glycemic health, so we’ll call this round either a tie (which is fair) or a slight win to carrots if you want the extra carbs.
In the category of vitamins, carrots have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B6, B7, C, E, and K, while eggplant is not higher in any vitamins; an easy win for carrots here.
Looking at minerals, this ones’s closer: carrots have more calcium, iron, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc, while eggplant has more copper, magnesium, manganese, and selenium, yielding a modest-yet-clear 5:4 win to carrots in this round.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for carrots, but by all means do enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
The Real Magic Number For Daily Fruit/Veg
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