Some fall-themed advice…

It is now, nominally at least, fall. We’re going to talk about the other kind of “fall” though, the kind that results in broken hips and more.

If you’re thinking “not me; that happens to older more infirm people”, rest assured, it can and statistically probably will happen to you at some point. So, how to play the odds?

First, be robust!

We may not be able to make ourselves like children who bounce easily, but we also don’t have to crumble into dust at the slightest knock, either. There are two important ways we can start to make ourselves robust from the inside out, and they are simple: diet and exercise.

• Diet: The Bare-Bones Truth About Osteoporosis
• Exercise: Osteoporosis Exercises

“But I don’t have osteoporosis”—great! But osteoporosis is preceded by osteopenia, which is generally asymptomatic at first, and also if we’re not very careful about it, we will lose about 1% bone density per year from the age of about 35 onwards, with that rate of loss climbing sharply from the age of 50 onwards, and even more steeply in cases of untreated menopause.

So in other words, don’t take your bone strength for granted; there’s a first time for everything, and you don’t want to find out the hard (and yet, dare we say it, brittle) way.

Second, be dynamic!

Be able to fall and get up safely. If your later life is going to be a triathlon of things you need to train for now, then being able to fall and get up safely should be at the top of the list.

Being able to “deep squat” will help you a lot here, in being able to get up with minimal (or no) use of your hands. We shared a great instructional video about this last week.

It also means that the more your lower body can still take your weight while your torso is closer to the ground (without your legs buckling and collapsing, for instance), the softer and gentler you’ll hit the floor if you do fall, because the final “drop” will be from a lower height.

If at all possible, consider taking some classes of a martial art that involves safely falling—aikido is typically the softest and gentlest and is famously great for people of all ages, but judo or jujitsu will suffice if aikido isn’t available where you are. You don’t have to get a black belt (unless you want to), and any decent instructor will be happy to guide you through the basics of safely falling and then send you on your merry way, if that’s all you wanted.

The benefits of this are twofold:

• Obviously, if you fall, you will have better technique and thus be less likely to incur injury
• As you are falling, you will be less afraid, and thus less likely to tense up mid-fall (tensing up will exacerbate any falling injury)

Click here to find an aikido teacher near you (you can search by country, state, and city)

Third, be balanced!

Spending even just a few minutes each day working on your balance can go a long way.

Standing on one leg (and then the other) is a very good obvious starting point. Please, do so safely. The shower is not the best place to take up this practice, for instance. A nice safe grassy area is great. Your carpeted living room or bedroom is next-best.

Another great approach is the practice of bāguàzhǎng circle-walking.

Bāguà is tai chi’s lesser-known cousin, and those arts are two of the three main schools of wǔdāngquán. But, fear not, you don’t have to don orange robes and live atop the Wudang mountains to get what you need in this case.

To give a text-based summary: bāguàzhǎng circle-walking involves walking in a small circle, with a low center of gravity, moving one’s weight very purposefully from one leg to the other, keeping complete stability the whole time that one is (often!) on one leg.

Once you get good at this, you’ll see that this is essentially a super-enhanced version of the “standing on one leg” exercise, because it’s about keeping balance while on one leg, and/but while moving also.

Naturally, if you do get good at this, you’ll be very unlikely to fall in the first place.

Here’s a visual primer. This video will show the basic footwork, and the video that follows it (it’ll prompt you if you want to watch it) shows how to bring it up to a standard walking speed, without losing fluidity of movement:

We’ve talked before about Good (Or Bad) Health Starts With Your Blood, and how a lot of human disease begins with, or is exacerbated by, diabetes or even pre-diabetes, and that in the US, this is even more strongly true than in the rest of the world, what with the US being #1 for diabetes.

However! That does not mean if you’re not prediabetic, there is no threat. This is because it is usually insulin resistance, and not the high blood sugar content itself, that is the main driver of disease. It just so happens that blood sugars are a lot quicker and easier to test, and the correlation between them is high. On the other hand, insulin resistance will often go unnoticed for many years, because the pancreas just cranks out more and more extra insulin to compensate and keep the blood sugars balanced—until one day it can’t because the body is so resistant to insulin that the pancreas just can’t produce enough to get it to care adequately, and that’s when the blood sugars will finally rise (and get noticed).

We reviewed an excellent book about precisely this (very, very common) phenomenon: Why We Get Sick – by Dr. Benjamin Bikman

The good news is, there are things can be done to Improve Your Insulin Sensitivity.

And with regard to blood sugars themselves, an excellent list is: 10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars

Number 8 in that list was:

After you eat, move

The glucose you eat will be used to replace lost muscle glycogen, before any left over is stored as fat… and, while it’s waiting to be stored as fat, just sitting in your bloodstream being high blood sugars. So, this whole thing will go a lot better if you are actively using muscle glycogen (by moving your body).

Inchauspé gives a metaphor: imagine a steam train worker, shoveling coal into the furnace. Meanwhile, other workers are bringing more coal. If the train is moving quickly, the coal can be shoveled into the furnace and burned and won’t build up so quickly. But if the train is moving slowly or not at all, that coal is just going to build up and build up, until the worker can shovel no more because of being neck-deep in coal.

Same with your blood sugars!

But that—sound advice as it is—remains a little vague, leaving us with questions such as:

• How much movement?
• For how long?
• And what’s the window of opportunity to enjoy this effect?

With those questions in mind…

Japan’s “Plus 10” Initiative

The government of Japan has a “plus 10” initiative, whose goal is to encourage everyone to add just 10 minutes of extra activity to each day. You might think that won’t make a big difference, but in fact it all adds up, for example: Cumulative Exercise vs Neurodegeneration ← which shows how it is cumulative exercise over time that matters the most in this regard, which means that “little and often” really does count for a lot.

We’ve also written before about How Useful Is “Exercise Snacking”, Really?, with some very specific protocols there for those who like to truly optimize everything.

Most recently, a Japanese research team investigated the effects of two different approaches to post-dinner exercise, on blood sugars:

1. Walk for 10 minutes, immediately after eating
2. Walk for 30 minutes, 30 minutes after eating

There was also a control condition (rest only, no walking).

They measured the effect of these conditions on blood glucose in three ways:

• 2‑hour blood glucose area under the curve (AUC)*
• mean average glucose
• peak glucose

*that’s a way of looking at the total impact of it over the course of the recording period

They additionally measured heart rate, perceived exertion, and gastrointestinal discomfort.

They found that both walking conditions significantly reduced 2‑hour blood glucose AUC and mean glucose versus control:

• 10-min walk: the AUC was 15,607 mg·min/dL (control was 16,605), and mean glucose = 127.9 mg/dL (control was 135.8mg/dL)
• 30-min walk: also effective, but no significant difference compared to the 10‑min walk immediately after eating.

However! Only the immediate 10‑min walk significantly lowered peak glucose (164.3 mg/dL, compared to the control condition’s 181.9 mg/dL).

Which means that the immediate 10-minute walk not only equals the delayed 30-minute walk in most ways, but also outright beats that in a third way. And that third way, the peak glucose? That’s where the insulin resistance starts, so this is critical.

As for the other things they measured: both walking conditions were rated as low perceived effort, with the 10‑min walk feeling the relatively easier of the two. No increase in gastrointestinal discomfort was reported for either walking condition.

You may be wondering about the pace of this walking:

❝The walking speed was self-selected by the participants to be comfortable. The participants were instructed to walk at their usual relaxed pace as in their daily life. The walking speed was set on a treadmill and was implemented at the same speed for the two walking conditions.❞

You can read the paper in full, here: Positive impact of a 10-min walk immediately after glucose intake on postprandial glucose levels

If walking isn’t your thing, or you don’t have a treadmill and the weather outside is frightful, then you might like:

No-Exercise Exercise! ← for a veritable buffet of exercise snacking ideas

Want to learn more?

Consider:

15 Easy Japanese Habits That Will Transform Your Health

Enjoy!