But my overall sports skills lagged behind those of my mother and siblings no matter how hard I tried. During the summer of my thirteenth year, for example, I practiced my tennis strokes daily against the barn door for six solid weeks. My father’s only comment was “You’re swinging that racket as if it were a broom.” This left me with considerable baggage around sports. So at midlife I decided to release this baggage and pick up some barbells—and some insight—instead. When I was forty-five I took tennis lessons, more as therapy to recover from my past than from a desire to play regularly. By the end of the season I realized that I was perfectly capable of playing and enjoying a game of tennis. Later that summer I even played doubles with my mother and brother. What a healing! The truth, however, is that I have about zero interest in sports, except when well edited in movies, like Field of Dreams.
John Douillard, D.C., Ph.D., a fitness expert and the author of Body, Mind, and Sport (Three Rivers Press, 2001), points out that 50 percent of women experience their first personal failure around organized physical activity in school gym class, and that this sense of being a physical “loser” can stay with you the rest of your life. At perimenopause you have to ask yourself, “Do I really want to continue limiting my health and happiness because of something that happened to me in eighth-grade gym class or with my parents when I was six?”
Get out your journal and write down everything you remember about physical activity and sports from when you were eleven to thirteen years old. What did you love to do? What activities felt good? What are your memories from gym class? What is your family legacy around fitness? What do you honestly believe about the physical capabilities of a woman your age? Age seventy-five? Age ninety? What was the fitness level of your mother? Your grandmother? What happens to you when you walk into a gym or onto a dance floor?
Exercise for Vibrant Health on All Levels
At midlife I finally figured out what type of exercise was right for my body and temperament by realizing that my sports skills, strength, and fitness levels were all about me and my body, not a way to win family approval or measure up to a cultural standard. Regardless of your own fitness past or legacy, you need to know that vigorous regular exercise is an absolute necessity if you intend to live well beyond midlife. Vigorous exercise sends positive signals to your entire body that increase your levels of human growth hormone. Exercise tells your body to stay vigorous, vibrant, healthy, and growing. Sitting on the couch and eating junk food and drinking too much alcohol gives your body the opposite message: get old, deteriorate, and go into decline. It’s that simple.
The bottom-line truth is that our bodies respond to the demands of our activities. For example, my mother’s Everest trek has left her feeling stronger than ever—even though she’d previously taken two painful falls that resulted in considerable injury. Like all injuries, these too had an emotional component. They brought up persistent self-doubt and messages of “I’m not good enough” from childhood. The Everest trek opportunity was just the medicine she needed to quell the internal voices of doubt that said, “Maybe I really am too old.” She also had to look squarely at her past tendency to use movement and exercise as a way to avoid difficult emotions signaling unmet needs.
Ask yourself what activities you want to be able to participate in for as long as you live. I tried for years to enjoy running—it was very “in” in the 1970s and 1980s. But it never felt good. Though I ran regularly throughout medical school and residency, I never felt that elusive runner’s high, no matter how long or hard I ran. In fact, I hated it. I finally gave myself permission to stop. I now go only for those activities that feel right.
RUTH: Couch Potato No More
Ruth, fifty-five, came to see me complaining of aches and pains and not being able to sleep well at night. She told me she had raised five children and was now looking forward to retirement from her job as a government secretary. She had never done any regular exercise. Her initial bone density test showed a slight bone loss despite the fact that she had been on estrogen for seven years following a hysterectomy with ovary removal for heavy bleeding. In addition to recommending dietary improvement and a supplement program, I stressed to Ruth that she needed to begin an exercise program: her couch-potato status was putting her at risk for significantly tarnishing her dreams for her golden years.
Ruth decided to start a walking program every morning with some of her friends. Within three months she had lost ten pounds without changing her diet at all, her aches and pains were gone, and she was sleeping better than she had in years. Later that year she and her husband both took up skiing and hiking. Her bone density has stayed steady even without weight training. Fitness and outdoor exercise have become a regular part of her life.
Start Somewhere—Anywhere
If you simply can’t see yourself doing something like weight training just yet, commit to doing some kind of physical activity for just ten minutes daily for thirty days. It could consist simply of stretching every day. Here’s what I recommend: put on some music you love and dance around your house. Even if you’re in a wheelchair, you can sit and move your upper body. No kidding. No excuses. I guarantee that by the end of thirty days or much sooner, you’ll be looking forward to your daily dance. Just this simple exercise will wake up the inherent, irresistible desire to move that lies within each of us—albeit more deeply buried in some than others!
Movement is contagious. Today’s dancing around your living room will eventually wake up enough of your muscles that you’ll want to do more. You can always pick up your cat and dance around with him or her. (This is weight training, after all!) Start very slowly and breathe in and out through your nose—this will expand your lower lungs optimally. It can take a while to create flexibility in your rib cage, so don’t get discouraged if nose breathing makes you feel out of breath at first. Don’t ever push beyond what is comfortable for your breathing and heart rate. But every day ask your body to move a little faster or bend a little deeper. Simply moving your body begins the bone-building process.
Get Support
After you’ve done your one month of dancing, you’ll have created the movement habit in your life. Now’s the time to begin adding some resistance training, weight lifting, or Pilates. I suggest that you go to a Y, an adult education class at your local high school, or a gym and have one of the staff members guide you through a personal strength-training program. This way you’ll be learning proper technique, which you can later adapt for home use.
Whether you work out at home or in a gym will depend upon your lifestyle and temperament. I’ve done both and find advantages and disadvantages to each approach. The beauty of the gym is that the phone doesn’t ring and no one interrupts you. And the entire environment is dedicated to fitness, so you’re more apt to get into the spirit of it. But sometimes taking the extra time to go to the gym is too much. My current personal fitness regimen combines one-hour Pilates sessions in a studio with a teacher and thirty-minute Pilates mat sessions on my own at home, each done two to three times per week, as well as two to three hours of Argentine tango a week. I also take regular forty-five-minute walks. I haven’t always been able to get this amount of exercise in. One of the benefits of midlife is that my time is more my own than it was at any other stage of my life. And I find that I love moving in ways that my body has always longed for—and finally found.
Build Strength into Your Day
Here are a few tips for adding some strength training to your day-today activities. Try these exercises when you’re on the phone or have a few spare moments. They cover all the major muscle groups.
~ TOE STANDS. Face a wall and stand twelve inches away from it with your feet shoulder width apart. Rest your fingertips lightly against the wall for balance. (As you improve you can use the wall less and less.) Now raise yourself as high up as you can; remain on your toes for a count of three, breathing normally, then lower yourself slowly. Breathe. Repeat a total of eight times. Gradually hold each toe stand for t
hirty seconds as you become stronger.
~ HEEL STANDS. Stand facing a wall so that you can put your hands against it if necessary. Slowly raise the toes and balls of your feet until you are balanced on your heels. Remain on your heels for a count of three. Slowly lower. Breathe. Repeat. Try for a total of eight repetitions, and gradually increase the amount of time you balance on your heels so that eventually you’re holding each heel stand for a count of thirty.
Both heel and toe stands use your own body weight to strengthen your legs and to improve balance and flexibility.
~ PUSH-UPS. Although many women hate them, nothing beats a push-up for strengthening the upper body. You can ease into this exercise with wall push-ups. Stand with your feet about three feet from a wall. Lean forward with elbows bent and palms touching the wall. Now push off the wall, keeping your back perfectly aligned with your legs, making sure that your head is aligned with your back and not pitching forward. Repeat this wall push-up eight times. Build up to three sets of eight repetitions.
After this becomes easy, you’ll be ready for push-ups on the floor. Start on your hands and knees with arms straight. Now bend your elbows and dip your chest to the floor. Go slowly and keep breathing. Try for four knee push-ups. Gradually build up to two sets of eight.
When you get strong enough, you’ll be ready for full-blown regulation push-ups. Start on your hands and knees. Then straighten your legs out behind you so that you are supported by your toes and your arms. Your body should form a perfectly straight line with your head in alignment with your spine. Don’t allow your hips to jackknife up in the center. Now dip down so that your chest almost touches the floor. Push back up. Hold. Repeat. Do four, working up to eight. Eventually you’ll be aiming for two sets of eight push-ups.
~ WEIGHTS. Place a set of graduated dumbbells (5–20 pounds, depending upon your strength level) in front of your TV. During commercial breaks or even during your favorite shows you can easily do a few sets of biceps curls, overhead presses, bent rows, flat rows, or triceps kickbacks. The point is to keep the weights out where you’ll run into them regularly.
Take your time. Your body is very forgiving and very responsive if you approach it with respect and love. Each time you lift weights, ask your body if it is willing to breathe a little deeper and lift a bit more weight. Don’t push it. On the days when you feel wonderful, do more. When you feel lousy, cut back. Exercise is a discipline, it is true. But once you’ve made the commitment to do it regularly, get that abusive coach out of your head. The best motivator is the pleasure, joy, and awareness that come from being in your body.
SAFE PILATES AND YOGA FOR WOMEN WITH BONE LOSS
Pilates is an excellent option for women with osteoporosis because it helps develop a strong core and better balance, reducing the risk of falls. Yoga also improves strength and balance, and weight-bearing yoga has specifically been shown to build bone.
Yet traditional Pilates and yoga exercises should be modified for women with osteopenia or osteoporosis so that they concentrate on movements that involve extension and avoid those that involve spinal flexion, or forward bending of the spine—especially when it is combined with side bending and twisting. A Mayo Clinic study showed that in women who had osteoporosis, doing the flexion exercises actually caused an increase in compression fractures.63
For the same reason, women with bone loss should avoid the rolling exercises in Pilates (such as rolling like a ball) and lifting their heads while lying on their backs for exercises that use the same motions as sit-ups or abdominal crunches. Instead, these women should keep their heads on the floor when doing exercises on their backs.
An excellent resource for such women is Rebekah Rotstein’s Pilates for Buff Bones program, a Pilates-based workout that focuses on bone-strengthening techniques that are safe for women with osteoporosis and osteopenia. Rotstein is a former ballet dancer who turned to Pilates to relieve chronic pain after injuries ended her dance career. At twenty-eight she was diagnosed with osteoporosis, and she eventually developed a new career in rehabilitation, applying Pilates principles to sports medicine. For more information on Pilates for Buff Bones, visit Rotstein’s website at www.incorporatingmovement.com.
Preventing Hip, Shoulder, and Back Pain
Many women begin to experience joint problems during perimenopause, including decreased range of motion in one shoulder or in the hip joints. You must maintain your range of motion and also keep your spine well aligned and stretched in order to keep the spinal nerves free from impingement, which can lead to back, hip, and other pain. Pilates does this beautifully, and so does yoga. There’s also an ingenious at-home program that anyone can do called the Core Program, developed by physical therapist Peggy Brill. The Core Program is a series of exercises that can be done in a small space with only a mat and some ankle weights. Thousands of women have had their bodies transformed by doing the Core Program, including my mother, who does the program regularly. (For more information, read The Core Program: Fifteen Minutes a Day That Can Change Your Life [Bantam Books, 2001], by Peggy W. Brill, or visit her website at www.brillpt.com.)
Our Beliefs Are Stored in Muscles, Bones, and Fascia
Our emotions play a strong role in joint pain because emotions of all kinds can and do “live” in our muscles, tendons, and joints. If we feel beaten down by life, then our bodies may reflect this. You have only to look at the gait of a depressed person who is shuffling along, head down, in order to see the profound effects that emotions have on alignment and movement. Conversely, changing your alignment and posture instantly makes you feel better even when you are depressed, much the same way as voluntarily smiling elevates your mood.
I can also assure you from my years of Pilates that taking the time to open the chest or move the shoulders in new ways often brings up all kinds of emotions. Massage therapists and yoga teachers can attest to the fact that emotional releases of all kinds are very common when people have the courage to consciously open up new spaces in their bodies.
Skilled body workers can in fact often “read” the traumas and blockages that are “stuck” in the muscles and fascia. For example, I had a recent session with Melanie Ericksen, a gifted massage therapist and body worker who was able to help me move an energetic blockage that had resulted in intermittent right hip problems for more than twenty years. This hip problem was related to my masculine (right) side and the men in my life. For many years I have had to lead with my masculine “get ’er done” side in addition to not getting a lot of support from the men in my life. This pattern has needed to be balanced with my feminine (left) side, which is about receiving. Melanie and I were able to release my outmoded beliefs around needing to do it all by myself, which encouraged me to allow myself to be more supported. As we were working, I literally felt a huge amount of energy flow into my left hip and leg, and the hip issue pretty much went away from that moment on. (For more information about Melanie, who has practices in Portland, Maine; Palm Beach, Florida; and New York City, visit her website at www.wealthofhealthme.com.)
Interestingly, my session with Melanie was right after I danced a tango with my dance partner Jim at Men’s Night at Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts in New York City. Regena Thomashauer (aka Mama Gena) had previously suggested that I dance there as a way to fulfill my desire to learn tango better and also to demonstrate the dance of male/female energy to the group. There’s nothing like having a scheduled performance as an incentive to practice! So for the next eight months, I practiced “following” in tango—a skill that requires surrendering to a leader, usually a man. Talk about learning to receive! The follower part in tango is all about being present, being yourself, and standing in your feminine power and center while also responding to the masculine lead. Being willing to dance a tango in public after only about a year of dancing required courage and willingness on my part. I had absolutely no dancing skill when I started, but I knew that putting myself on the line like this was a very practical way to learn how to be in my
feminine energy consciously and on purpose.
Another example of how emotions get stuck in our bodies is a condition commonly known as “frozen shoulder.” About six years ago, like so many other midlife women, I developed the beginning of this condition when my right shoulder began hurting so badly that I once fell to the floor in pain after picking up a piece of wood to load into my woodstove. Believe me, the pain was very real. On the other hand, I realized that such severe pain seemingly coming out of nowhere had to have an emotional component. Shoulder issues tend to be about feeling burdened or as though you’re carrying the weight of the world. (Back when I first started doing Pilates and I was doing lots of work on my shoulders, I used to joke that the world as we know it would fall apart if I were to relax them!)
Studies have actually shown that frozen shoulder, like much back pain, begins with what is called “tension myositis syndrome,” a term coined by John Sarno, M.D., who has treated thousands of individuals with conditions ranging from sciatica to severe back pain and frozen shoulder. Dr. Sarno points out that these painful conditions are related to painful emotions that we can’t allow ourselves to feel. Hence the emotion goes into our soft tissues and creates tension, which shuts off the blood supply and pinches nerves. Pain is the result. The solution involves acknowledging the probable emotional basis for the problem. Once the emotion is acknowledged and expressed, the stuck energy can move out of the body.
The Wisdom of Menopause Page 59
