Training the Senior Body & Brain
Science-based holistic exercise, extending the mind-body paradigm into the practical.
I’ve trained athletes of all ages, from 3 to 100 in virtually eery sport except curling. I’ve learned that the formulas don’t change, but the methodology does. In all sports, movement is key. Older athletes can’t lift as much weight as younger ones, but aside from that, training is training. The biggest problem for older athletes is the loss of balance and motor control, primarily from disuse. I’ve seen so many “seniors’ exercise programs” that are nearly a complete waste of time, both for the leader and the participants. The intentions are good, but the execution is flawed. Just sitting in a chair playing with small weights does so little for the seniors that the session is merely a social event and a reason to get out of the house. When one of those seniors comes to one of my sessions, they are shocked at the difference, but after training with me a few times they understand the benefits.
I don’t train muscles; I train bodies, and I train brains. Believe it or not, complex exercises can stimulate neuroplasticity, the generating of new brain cells and new cognitive patterns, far better than the purely mental tasks that you might expect to be better. I don’t use simple resistance exercises that help one or a handful of the 700+ muscles we have; I teach movement skills that use them all. If your movements are good, ALL of your muscles will be trained and taught how to work together, along with your brain, and that makes you smarter. A unified, coordinated, supple body is a strong body, and one that is unlikely to fall. That muscle between your ears is essential to the equation.
While I have a few folks who, by virtue of age, chronic conditions, or permanent injuries, have great difficulty doing much without sitting or at least holding onto something (which is one reason my sessions include chairs) I encourage everyone to get out of the chair as much as possible, and to only hold onto the chair to the extent that they need it for balance and stability. Many of my crew find themselves, months later, able to do things they didn’t think they’d ever do again.
Many of my exercises challenge balance, and so the chair is there if needed. I’ve trained athletes who required walkers or canes, and several have graduated to getting around without them. While most senior exercise programs seek to avoid anything that might result in a fall, I focus on what to do if you fall, how to fall, and how to get back up. We even do “practice” falls, either from our knees or onto an elevated platform.
Most of us have fallen, and sooner or later, nearly all of us will fall. Pretending otherwise is whistling past the graveyard. And often we don’t fall because our bodies are weak, we fall because our brains and central nervous systems (CNS) are weak from lack of use. If you haven’t done something, be it riding a bike, jumping rope, ballroom dancing, or playing the flute, your “muscle memory” erodes. You think you can hop over that little obstacle, right up until you face plant! We also lose our coordination — not just hand-eye, but foot-eye, hip-eye, and knee-eye, the ability to know where we are in space.
Also, as sight and hearing tend to decline with age, we lose our bearings because our eyes and ears, especially the inner ears, are crucial to balance and spatial awareness. I use eye exercises as one key metric for measuring, as well as a solution for the task of avoiding falls, and preserving vision. Yes, eye exercises can preserve good vision while simultaneously improving balance! The muscles in the eyes are integrally connected to the inner ear canals, which serve an important function in balance and stability. I have eye exercises that can vastly improve balance and reduce the likelihood of falls. I also put emphasis on ankle mobility and stability, because afferent CNS signals from our feet are secondary to visual cues for balance. If you can’t keep your balance with your eyes closed, the problem is likely poor “communication” between your feet and the balance mechanisms in your brain and inner ears.
Further, I’ve learned, after years of training high-level athletes, that ankle mobility is crucial to good health and good movement skills. Restricted range of motion in the ankles is a major cause of knee pain and deterioration of the knees, resulting in surgery or even knee replacement. Lack of ankle function can have effects throughout the body. Visualizing the subtle and elegant movements of the thirty bones of a healthy ankle and foot complex is a bit like watching the phenomenon known as murmuring, the way a flight of a thousand starlings can undulate through the sky within inches of one another like feathered Blue Angels. I have a few videos that I share with my athletes as I teach them proper mechanics for walking, skipping and running. Yes, my senior athletes are encouraged to relearn the arts of skipping and running, and learn them better than the way they did them in their early years, but first we learn the proper way to walk. People walk like they’re old are simply because they are walking wrong!
Chair exercises not only fail to enhance mental function, they fail to enhance bone density and can even help it to deteriorate. They also fail to teach good motor skills, because we were never meant to function optimally while seated. Swimming and water aerobics, while beneficial for the heart, lungs, and muscles, also fail to provide that much needed stress, shock, and compression that serves to make bones stronger. Exercising in water is good — heck, I’m a lifelong swimmer — but it can’t be your only outlet. Professional cyclists often end their careers by crashing and breaking a hip. As a triathlete, I’ve crashed my bicycle more times than I care to recall (sometimes aided by cars) but I’ve never experienced a broken hip and only one minor collarbone fracture. The reason? Running 50-100 miles a week for all those years gave me bones that could withstand significant impact. Hence, I give the same exercises to my 90-something clients as I do to high-school athletes. Riding a bicycle, especially a stationary one, as your only source of training does no more for your bones than watching television.
Having lived three quarters of a century, I find my priorities changing. Like a great many senior citizens, my biggest fear is no longer cancer, heart attack, nor accidental death. I’ve stopped doing dangerous things, my heart is super strong, and if I haven’t manifested cancer yet, the likelihood is diminishing. No, what scares the bejeezus out of me, and most of the folks in my senior exercise classes, is dementia, suddenly waking up in an unfamiliar world, not knowing the people around me, not remembering where I left my wallet, my keys, or my wife. I’ve heard so many experts telling me that I should do crossword puzzles, sudoku, or Mahjong, to keep my brain in tiptop shape. Sorry, that advice is crap, pure and simple, absolutely worthless.
Having spent years studying the mechanisms of the CNS and brain, let me explain my program, where every single person attending my classes will tell you that they are getting younger. And not just younger physically, they’re getting younger mentally. My exercise programs include activities, proven to generate significant neuroplasticity, new brain cells.
We all know that to make our muscles stronger we have to force them to work harder; we have to put them under significant stress. Making muscles work harder, subjecting them to the kind of demands that we gave them when we were young and athletic is how we get them back to being young and athletic. It should not be controversial to say that the brain works the same way. But crossword puzzles and sudoku create less strain on the brain than picking up a 2-pound dumbbell puts on your arm and shoulder muscles. If you are already experiencing dementia, crossword, and sudoku will be challenging but unhelpful. For the rest of us, they are not sufficiently challenging to provide a benefit.
What creates significant strain on the brain is to force it to focus on multiple simultaneous physical tasks. If I ask you, how many words can you give me beginning with the letter S, you should be able to come up with quite a few. But if I ask you to perform the same task while tossing a ball in the air and catching it, or while standing on one foot, or while performing any complex physical task, you will find it extremely daunting. You may even find it impossible.
In one of my classes, I asked that very question of the group. I told them to perform a complex series of lunges at the same time. Everyone in the room struggled to come up with words beginning with S while changing the direction of their lunges on command. Without even realizing it, they were straining their brains. And that’s a good thing!
Another such exercise is the Stroop Test, where you respond to a series of flashcards each containing the name of a color, but most of them are printed in a color not consistent with the name on the card. For example, the card with “blue” written on it may be written in red. The brain does not want to look at that and call it red; the brain wants to read and pronounce the word “blue.” Getting your brain to instead conjure the word “red” in this instance is a strain on multiple brain functions. First you must convince your brain to wait, to evaluate the challenge, and then to vocalize the name of the color while staring at a word that wants you to pronounce it, rather than call out its color.
One exercise that I usually start my new people with is juggling two balls. For the average teenager learning this move takes less than a minute to learn and five to master. But for folks in their 70s, 80s, or 90s, this task may require weeks to learn. First, we learn to toss one ball switch the other ball into the hand that just tossed a ball and then catch the ball that was tossed in the opposite hand. We do this a little bit faster, then a little bit faster, until eventually both balls are in the air at the same time. Once my people learn how to juggle 2 balls, I make the task more complicated by having them stand in an awkward, unbalanced position, starting with 1 foot forward, then making it more complex by putting the 2 feet in line, then gradually bringing the front foot back until the heel of the front foot touches the front of the trailing foot.
Having accomplished that we then move on to rotating the torso while juggling two balls in a difficult balancing stance or walking while juggling. Those who excel learn to do it standing on 1 foot. Once we have tried juggling two balls standing on 1 foot, we try to juggle them in the opposite direction, and suddenly the challenge is far more difficult.
The neural complexity of this strategy is based, not just on the challenge of multiple simultaneous tasks, but also by developing challenges based on understanding the function of multiple complexes within the brain. When we toss the ball with our right hand and catch it with our left, the ball crosses our centerline. When a body part or task crosses the centerline, which would include our vision moving from right to left, the two hemispheres of the brain must communicate. The left hand needs to know what the right hand just did. This does not happen with crossword puzzles.
Further, when we struggle to maintain our balance, we are now activating a separate complex within the brain called the Ponto Medulary Reticular Formation or PMRF. While the right hemisphere of the brain controls the motor cortex in lifting the left foot off the ground, it is the job of the right PMRF to control the stabilizing muscles that allow us to balance while supported only by our right foot and leg. So while the left motor cortex would normally control the muscles on the right side of the body, the function of stabilization, activating muscles on the right side of the body to prevent falling, is handled by the right side PMRF. Simultaneously, the left PMRF assists by stabilizing the left side of the body and the elevated left foot.
Thus the simple act of two ball juggling in a precarious stance requires both the frontal and motor cortices to function at a high level and share information. Adding the additional challenge of stabilization and balance makes this seemingly silly act a major, significant, and beneficial, strain on our brains. Try to visualize the frontal lobe, motor cortices and PMRFs frantically exchanging information to coordinate signals like a well rehearsed marching band and drill team. This simple task of exercising multiple hemispheres and PMRFs even helps with the simple task of walking, with which many seniors struggle.
As I have written previously, SAQ training (speed, agility, and quickness) is extremely important for the elderly. I claim it to be more important for a senior citizen than for a professional athlete. If the athlete under performs in this area, they lose a game. If a senior citizen fails in this area, the results could be catastrophic. They may fall and incur an injury, perhaps a broken bone or two or even a traumatic brain injury (TBI). If they misjudged the speed of an oncoming car while crossing the street, and are unable to perform the simple SAQ task of sprinting, or pivoting to jump back onto the curb, the result is potentially fatal. And isn’t it obvious that quick thinking and quick reactions are essential for operating a motor vehicle. Did you ever try to tell an elderly person that they should give up their driving privileges?
There is some bad news. We are all born with a ticking time bomb in our DNA. We’re all going to die at some point. My focus, both for my clients and for myself, is to both extend that timeline and to minimize the length of the downhill slide that comes at the end. This phenomenon is called healthspan. Ideally, our healthspan and lifespan should be very close to the same, but for the vast majority, it is not. Some folks begin noticeably deteriorating in their 40s and 50s, giving them a decades-long glidepath to their final destination. Then there’s Jack LaLanne, whom I consider both a role model and a mentor. Jack was working out in his home gym two months prior to his death at the age of 96. He was reported to be mentally sharp right up to the end. I could say the same about my mother who lived 100 years, eight months, and 14 days. We had a conversation at her bedside less than an hour before her death. She was extremely lucid, even though her vision and her hearing had noticeably deteriorated. Mom was very active and used her brain far more than most for her entire life.
In previous articles, I have also praised the work of Dr. Dale Bredeson, author of The End of Alzheimer’s. Obviously, I’m a fan of good nutrition (actual good nutrition, which can differ significantly from the published literature and official guidelines). I believe in doing “all of the above,” utilizing every conceivable approach and therapy. Dr. Bredesen talks about the importance of diet and exercise, and the avoidance of toxins and stress, but doesn’t address my brain training protocols. I suggest following his suggestions, as well as availing yourself of specialized nutrients and supplements demonstrated to have brain enhancing qualities. Couple this with my exercise programs, and you can enjoy life to the very end.