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    Dynamic Aging: Simple Exercises for Whole-Body Mobility
    Dynamic Aging: Simple Exercises for Whole-Body Mobility
    Dynamic Aging: Simple Exercises for Whole-Body Mobility
    Ebook220 pages2 hours

    Dynamic Aging: Simple Exercises for Whole-Body Mobility

    By Katy Bowman, Joan Virginia Allen, Shelah M. Wilgus and

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    About this ebook

    As seen on the Today Show, Dynamic Aging isn’t that same old senior fitness, senior stretching, senior strength book you’ve seen again and again. This book is about using simple exercises to feel better and get back to living vitally no matter your age.

    Don't blame your age if you're feeling creaky. It could just be the way you're using (or not using) your body. ―Washington Post on Dynamic Aging as a Book for the Ages


    Movement is a powerful tool and changing how you move can change how you feel, no matter your age. Dynamic Aging is an exercise guide geared to an over 50 audience that includes:

    • 30+ illustrated exercises
    • Moves for pain-free feet and strong hips
    • better balance and getting over the fear of falling
    • how to improve sitting, standing, and walking posture
    • go from stiff shoulders to arms that can reach, carry, and lift
    • how to stay fit to drive
    • tips for moving more in daily life

    Alongside Bowman's exercise and alignment instructions are stories and advice of four women over seventy-five who began this program over a decade ago. Along the way they found recommended surgeries unnecessary, regained strength and mobility, and ended up moving more than they did when they were 10 years younger.

    From hiking in the mountains to climbing ladders and walking on cobblestones with ease, each of these women embodies the book's message: No matter where you're starting, if you change how you move, you can change how you feel.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUphill Books
    Release dateFeb 24, 2017
    ISBN9781943370122
    Dynamic Aging: Simple Exercises for Whole-Body Mobility
    Author

    Katy Bowman

    Bestselling author, speaker, and a leader of the Movement movement, biomechanist Katy Bowman, M.S. is changing the way we move and think about our need for movement. Her ten books, including the groundbreaking Move Your DNA, have been translated into more than 16 languages worldwide. Bowman teaches movement globally and speaks about sedentarism and movement ecology to academic and scientific audiences such as the Ancestral Health Summit and the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Her work has been featured in diverse media such as the Today Show, CBC Radio One, the Seattle Times, NPR, the Joe Rogan Experience, and Good Housekeeping. One of Maria Shriver’s “Architects of Change” and an America Walks “Woman of the Walking Movement,” Bowman consults on educational and living space design to encourage movement-rich habitats. She has worked with Patagonia, Nike, and Google as well as a wide range of non-profits and other communities to create greater access to her “move more, move more body parts, move more for what you need” message. Her movement education company, Nutritious Movement, is based in Washington State, where she lives with her family.

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      Book preview

      Dynamic Aging - Katy Bowman

      INTRODUCTIONS

      When I was a kid, my mother observed that I always insisted on learning the hard way, meaning that I wouldn’t let myself benefit from the wisdom of others, and needed, instead, to experience lessons for myself. Fortunately, I’ve grown out of this trait in many respects. Now when I meet people who have had the experience of walking down a path I am currently on, I value their insight. And what I’ve learned from the people around me who’ve lived much longer than I have is that I need to take good care of my body, because if I don’t, I’ll miss being able to move how I want to.

      I have had my body for only forty-one years, but over the last twenty-two, I’ve had the pleasure of working one-on-one with over a thousand bodies, most of them older than mine. And if there is one message I’ve received loud and clear, it’s that those coming to me for corrective exercise and alignment work in their sixties and seventies wish they had had access to this material in their twenties. From these people, I’ve learned to value future physical function now. That’s why I’ve chosen to write this book.

      I teach people new ways to move their bodies. And I’ve had the good fortune of working with a large group of people over a long period of time. This means I have been exposed to a lot of data—about what people have done in the past, which hobbies and injuries they have, and where they are today.

      I’ve worked with groups of competitive athletes, young children, pregnant mamas, post-natal mamas, and breast cancer survivors. I’ve led courses for those with cardiovascular disease, bad backs, and pelvic floor disorders, and thousands of people suffering with foot pain. I’ve gathered the information on what thousands of people have done in their past, and as a result, I’ve become familiar with the average movement history of today’s seventy- and eighty-year-olds in my culture.

      This book includes the stories of four of my clients: an attorney, a dance-movement therapist and RN, a teacher and social worker, and a sassy, kick-ass graphic artist (she’s done most of the graphics in this book) who travels to far away countries. These women began working with me in their late sixties and early seventies and were part of a large group that started taking classes in my new-at-the-time exercise facility around a decade ago. They were the four who continued to show up, sometimes two hours a day Monday through Friday, for years, eventually studying to become movement teachers themselves.

      Now, in their mid- to late seventies at time of writing (with one turning eighty just as this book is being published), they are some of the few of their own peer group who haven’t made a transition into senior living centers. They look younger now than they did years ago. They move younger than they did years ago. I regularly tell people this is possible—that they can look, move, and feel younger through smart movement and regular training—but I’m forty-one years old. Who’s going to believe me when I say that starting at sixty or even seventy isn’t too late and that tremendous improvement is possible? And so I thought I would ask Joan, Lora, Joyce, and Shelah to share with you their own insights about how a goldener can turn back the clock. You’ll see their commentary throughout the book, the perspectives of four strong, dedicated, powerful women well into their seventies who are active and thriving.

      But what is a goldener? When these women came to me with the idea for this book, they were clear: We don’t want old in the title. Or senior. Or geriatric, for that matter. How about an all-new, beautiful term that describes how we feel about this stage of our lives, the golden age? How about goldener? I agree whole-heartedly with their thoughtful word choices, and science seems to as well.

      Exercise has powerful capabilities to improve health, but so do words. During a game of charades, have you ever mimed a senior, shuffling at a snail’s pace, stooped over, one hand on the low back and the other on an imaginary cane? As biological beings, our behavioral patterns are shaped by what we see—how our own parents move, how our peers move. Even how cultural norms are portrayed on TV can shape our reality. The question is, how do other people move, and how do preconceived notions of the way the over sixties move affect how we move once we, ourselves, are older?

      In a study created to measure the impact of positive or negative stereotype reinforcement, researchers found that walking speed and time spent in the balance phase of walking increased after only thirty minutes of intervention (Hausdorff, Levy, and Wei 1999). Did the researchers hand out a magical exercise or stretch? Nope. During a thirty-minute video game, subliminal terms were flashed on the screen: senile, dependent, diseased for one group and wise, astute, accomplished for the other. With absolutely no exercise intervention, the positively reinforced group was able to make gait and walking speed improvements more commonly found after weeks or even months of exercise training. So here’s the takeaway message for everyone: Words can be profound, so practice positive speak about yourself and those around you. And here’s the takeaway message for exercisers: The way you’re moving (or not) right now could be influenced by things other than your physiology.

      There are many headlines, some of them about research, announcing the norms of the human experience. However, using age as a variable in research can be problematic as it’s hard to separate age from length of habit. There is a difference between the statements Older adults are more prone to bunions and Older adults who’ve been wearing too-tight shoes for longer are more prone to bunions. Age is typically selected as a research variable because it is objective and easier to quantify than your behavior over time. You can tell me with great accuracy how old you are, but it’s less likely you could tell me with great accuracy just how many hours you’ve spent with your toes crammed together in your shoes. And so, it is often through language in general and language used in research that we perpetuate the idea that bodies start falling apart simply because they’ve reached a certain age. Of course, all cells will eventually cease to replace themselves, but what’s important here is not the inevitability of decline, but that we’re able to see the difference between natural decline and the loss of function we’re experiencing simply due to weaknesses created by poor movement habits.

      And here’s something else to consider: There seems to be a culture-wide decrease in strength that’s not related to age, but to a lifestyle that requires very little movement. A study comparing the grip strength of millennials (those born between approximately 1980 and 2000) in 2015 to the grip strength of this same age group in 1985, for example, shows people’s grips are significantly weaker today than they used to be (Fain and Weatherford 2016). Kids today (I never thought I’d type those words) move less than I did as a kid, and according to my grandparents, I moved less throughout my childhood than they did throughout theirs. Given the human timeline, i.e., the recent introduction of technology and the relatively recent Industrial Revolution, I’ll suggest that with each generation comes less movement. This is actually good news, as it means our perception of the general decline in body weakness over time could very well be coming from the fact that we’ve really just been extremely sedentary the bulk of our lives. We’re mostly under-moved, and not at all too old.

      Dynamic Aging is a guide to get you moving more and moving more of you. This isn’t a book that suggests, Hey, you should start walking! Instead, it helps you see which parts of your body you can start moving a tiny bit here and there so you feel like going out to take a walk. This guide contains exercises designed to improve your movement habits through simple postural adjustments and exercises designed to challenge your body, gently, in a way that you probably stopped doing a long time ago without realizing it. As you slowly introduce more movement into your life, it’s likely you’ll see an improvement in those movement declines that you had associated with age but that were actually a product of your long-term movement patterns.

      This is a guide facilitated by four of the most amazing, dynamic goldeners I know, who began just as you are about to now (with their feet). I hope you will gain as much from reading their experiences as I have from participating in them.

      MEET THE GOLDENERS:

      Joan

      At the age of seventy-one, after a long career as an attorney, I was referred to Katy Bowman for exercises to help with my pelvic prolapse, chronic constipation, and foot problems. I met with her for a whole-body evaluation and began the movement practice that day which would change my life. I am now seventy-eight years of age. My chronic constipation completely disappeared three years into my movement practice. I walk daily and am able to continue to pursue my passion for hiking (three to ten miles), now in FiveFinger and zero-drop shoes, on the mountainous terrain of the trails on our ranch, on the sandy beaches of our nearby coast, and in our quest to hike all of the national parks (thirty-two to date, with the latest six hiked last summer in my seventy-ninth year). I can walk barefoot without

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