What to Train for now that you’ve Decided NOT to Focus on Appearance? Longevity!

Tips for increasing longevity in Women

If you’re a bit stuck on why women should be in the gym, and training with you beyond losing weight and looking a certain way, then this month’s topic is for you! We’re talking about longevity, but not just in the “living longer” sense, but in a “living longer, healthier, and without disease” sense!

1. Reframe stress, thinking it’s bad for you is harmful

We know that stress is bad for us¹, and we know that even psychological stress has a physiological effect, which may trigger anything from butterflies in your tummy to mental health disorders to autoimmune disease². But for modern day women, there’s often not much we can do about it, we can’t stop caring for our kids, we can’t control our spouses, we can’t let our elderly parents down, and now, with a cost of living crisis, we can’t quit paid work either!

What we can do, however, is reframe how we think about stress.

Simply believing that we’re getting enough exercise³ , that we have a healthy lifestyle, and that stress is good for us⁴, is enough to reduce all-cause mortality in the studies that I have read recently! Having purpose in your life and work is another mitigation tool, which many of us find in caring for our families and loved ones⁵!

In other words – stop worrying about it. If there’s nothing you can do about the stress in your life, or your clients life, then the ONLY thing you can do is to reframe it. View it as a challenge, let it fuel your purpose and determination, see it as something that builds your resilience and makes you mentally and physically stronger, because that’s true too!

2) If the goal is longevity – then we need to talk about Grip Strength!

Hand grip strength is such an accurate measure of mortality risk that it has been proposed as a new “vital sign” of health⁶. Several diseases have a correlation with low hand-grip strength, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, kidney and liver disease, some cancers, sarcopenia, and fragility fractures. If someone has a low grip strength, then their risk of hospitalisation, poor nutrition, overall mortality, and low quality of life also increases⁷.

Grip strength is used as a one-size-fits-all measure of overall strength, upper limb function, bone mineral density, fractures, falls, malnutrition, cognitive impairment, depression, sleep problems, diabetes, multi-morbidity, and quality of life. There is a predictive association between grip strength and all-cause and disease-specific mortality, future function, bone mineral density, fractures, cognition and depression, and problems associated with hospitalization⁸.

What this means is not that we have to run around squeezing stuff to build our grip strength. We do, however, need to hold a variety of heavy stuff in a variety of ways. Lifting children, weights, sand bags, backpacks, and bars of different dimensions will contribute to increasing overall muscle mass, including the muscles around the wrists and hands. This increase then decreases the risk of the above diseases, improves our cognition, and can be measured by grip strength.

When we’re looking for reasons to train beyond how we look, then longevity is extremely motivating. Women develop osteoporosis, dementia, and a variety of other diseases at twice the rate of men, a number than can be significantly reduced with strength training. Dementia and heart disease are also the number one and two cause of death of women in Australia, and those numbers aren’t really changing. In fact, for heart disease in particular, outcomes for women are actually getting worse⁹.

Strength training can change this.

3) If Our Goal is Now Longevity, then we have to train getting off floor without using our hands…

Let me explain why…

Similar to grip strength, the ability to sit and rise from the floor predicts all-cause mortality¹⁰. In other words, the harder you find it to get up off the floor, the more likely you are to die from anything – another fall, heart disease, dementia, you name it!

You might wonder why that’s relevant when 80% of your clients are 20-40 years old? It’s relevant because that’s when we start to lose muscle and bone mass, it’s when our ability (or inability) to get off the floor without using our hands starts to decline.

Guess what reverses it?

STRENGTH TRAINING.

Sitting and rising from the floor is scale-able just like any other exercise. You might start with stationary lunges, progress to kneel-to-stand, progress to kneel-to-sit-to-stands. Or you might start with squats, progress to full squats, progress to rolling burpees, etc. Burpees themselves, Inchworms, or turkish get-ups are other floor-to-standing patterns that you can train!

4) Train Complexity in the Body.

If you’re training for longevity, then complexity of movement matters, games and personal connection matter, and keeping the body guessing matters… for neural and joint health, get out of the saggital plane.

Our brains and bodies are plastic and always adapting to new things on one hand, and pruning what we don’t need on the other. This means that if you don’t train bending and rotational movements, and the client doesn’t do them in their everyday life, then they will loose that ability.

If you’re building muscle mass, then some saggital heavy lifting is necessary. However, the more complex movements are also necessary, as they wire new neural connections throughout the body, thus playing a role in the prevention of cognitive aging¹¹. You read that right, programming complex movements and developing new skills can maintain cognitive skills more broadly.

Any physical movement is good for the aging brain, but learning a new skill at the same time takes it to another level¹². Women are generally less active than their male counterparts, and twice as likely to develop dementia, so this is important for us – more important than how we look!

Some ideas for increasing the complexity of your programming include:

• Adding a rotation to your static or saggital exercise – if you’ve programmed a side hover, add a thread needle. If you’ve programmed a back squat, and a turn and look over their shoulder…
• Adding a side bend to your static or saggital exercise – if you’ve programmed a lat pull down, change it to a single arm and add a stretch. If you’ve programmed a stationary lunge, add an arms overhead side bend as they descend.
• Join two moves together – a lunge and shoulder press for example, or a push up and a squat…
• Train reflexes – if they’re doing burpees, throw a tennis ball for them to catch at different stages. Or use a sound cue to break them out of whatever they’re doing and complete a task in a requisite time.
• Games – games involve spontaneous movement and connection with the other people in the gym (including you!). My favourites at the moment include “piggy in the middle” and wrestling.
• Tools such as the blaze pod and other games – where random patterns occur for your client to react to.
• Add a “driver” to any exercise and move it 3 ways – if you’ve programmed a squat and chosen the arms as “drivers”, send them forward and backward, left to right, and in circles while performing the squat. I find this sort of thing fantastic as a warm up, because you can’t lift as heavy, but it lights up the nervous system from their fingers to their toes.

An added bonus of adding complexity to an exercise is that you’ll notice you’re also challenging their balance as they change directions and move through gravity and positions.

Keep Muscle and Bones Healthy

Bones are not just bones – they also regulate calcium and create hormones. Likewise, muscles are not just muscles – they also play a role in disease prevention, heart health and brain health¹³. In both men and women, Oestrogen is a major player in the maintenance of bone health, structure, and function. Bone health and muscle health go hand in hand with longevity, which is obviously a bigger issue for women than for men after menopause¹⁴.

How do we keep muscles and bones healthy as we age? With big weights¹⁵ and plyometric exercise¹⁶ – with one important caveat.

Oestrogen also plays a role in soft tissue elasticity and health, so therefore is impacted by menopause, and the pelvic floor is particularly vulnerable. Big weights and plyometric exercise puts extra pressure on the pelvic floor muscles, ligaments, and tendons.

So in summary – big weights and plyometric exercise with pelvic floor conditioning, awareness, and monitoring. Big weights means your client cannot repeat the lift more than 6 times (preferably less), and plymetric exercise is anything that vibrates the body, eg. Landing patterns, jumping drills, whole body vibration, etc.

Performing these types of exercise with pelvic floor integration will change the lives of your female clients in a way that is unachievable when you’re focused only on their appearance.

 

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A post shared by Clare Hozack: IHP, IntoYou, AWPT, Burrell Ed (@clarehozack)

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