Hidden Healing
Hidden Healing
The fountain of youth was a mystical destination when I was growing up (the adventures of Ponce Deleon). Supposedly if you drank from the waters, you would reverse aging. This mythical goal is in the limelight again with Peter Attia’s book Outlive in addition to a growing faction of doctors diving into longevity medicine.
Personally I have a muscle-centric slant on medical advice and I test and implement novel ideas/data to my lifestyle before presenting it to my patient population. I turned 60 last year and was blessed with a grandson so unfortunately the idea of mortality popped into my thought process. Average American male death occurs around 73 (and for women 79!) So if I choose to live an “average life” I have about 12 years left of independence (assuming I don’t develop cognitive decline or life altering heart failure). I want to be blessed with a great grandchild and be able to hold him/her with an intact memory of the birth of my own children. I believe having an optimized musculoskeletal system provides independence, allows for glucose and cholesterol disposal, provides an infinite source of hormone production and prevents age related injuries (hip fracture/osteoporosis/obesity/arthritis).
A challenge for my population is adapting this mindset when entering late life. No question > half my patients over 40yrs old have no time to exercise, take care of their kids and also become caregivers for their aging parents ( the sandwich generation) and then are trying to retire only to find out starting impactful exercise late in life is difficult to impossible due to lack of hormones and energy…not that mention the delayed onset muscle soreness associated with starting a routine hurts and takes forever to recover (adding to the frustration of feeling old). Taken from “bro-science”, there are ways to hack your introduction to exercise. One would be optimizing your healing time before you begin the journey.
Fix sleep to the point of maximal REM and Slow Wave Sleep. Get rid of inflammatory nutrition habits (no sugar is not a necessity and there is no such thing as sugar deficient) have a go-to static stretching routine to deploy when muscle talk back to you. Adding healing herbals like turmeric/Cbd/ essential oils. Using cold immersion/IF sauna/fasting to retrain the metabolism. Eliminating high stress relationships and developing a practice of calm/peace/nature exposure. Optimizing hormones and peptides to your advantage “temporarily” to shorten your break in period.
The problem comes in knowing which data to trust and applying it to self. Since the tobacco industry developed the concept of causing confusion and doubt with too much information…Dr Google has been a confusing landscape of 3 million hits to any inquiry you can come up with. With all that confusion, the default is usually falling back to what you implemented in the past assuming it will work “this time” because you are wiser! NOPE. What failed before as unsustainable will fail again and faster since your older. This editorial isn’t to evaporate your hopes but more to help you embrace the use of coaches, trainers, therapist, nutritionists and doctors to get your summit faster with less effort.
If you are in your 40’s to 50’s, you are probably at the heaviest weight ever with the weakest endurance/strength. I will sometimes hear the phrase “I don’t want to kill myself” when patients give excuses of why they cannot maintain an older athlete lifestyle. The truth is by stopping or downplaying the value of maximal effort during exercise creation…you are actually killing your selves. If you think I’m absolutes…your lifestyle is either supportive of longevity or accelerating disease. I see older guys in the gym trying their best but sometimes I want to go over and give my 2 cents regarding how to change the exercise movements to get the most out of it. But most guys don’t want to hear that. Gals are usually not in the resistance areas of the gym as there are sometimes meatheads that act inappropriately dropping Fbombs with every sentence. (Dicks!)
I don’t blame some newbies shying away from the mirrors for fear is criticism.
Combine that members-only-phenomenon with the devaluation of hiring coaches and paying for health…most people 2 weeks after new years will tap out and put their membership on hold cause they flared up their arthritis or got hurt. Medical insurance doesn’t pay for health/it pays for disease management. Going to the best gyms can cost as much as a 2nd mortgage. Hiring a life coach is frowned upon if not covered by medical insurance and worse the doctors that are supposed to guide you when disease approaches, typically have no training in nutrition exercise or mindfulness.
So are you on your own? Yes and no. If you are one of my patients…I always am chasing youth and even if it didn’t resonate with my own health, I would still want to design a personal program to apply change/initiate feeling good/and using data to show progress. (Just relying on a scale or dress size is so archaic …with DEXA scans, fat impedance devices, wearable watches that calculate sleep to heart rate to some with zone training there are a plethora of different things available to motivate and guide. Luckily there are a few social influencers that actually know what they’re talking about! This age of information and AI can speed up your journey to optimize but all journeys begin with the first step.
Find your motivation, hold it close to your heart, find a community of healthy (check out my DrRic Hiking Excursion group as we are growing with all age groups and big Bucketlist rewards). Commit to ritualistic sleep, food prepping, weekly exercise volume goals and reversal of disease. You may not notice change on your own till 12-18 months but don’t do this alone! Find your community and get younger together.
-DrRic
Muscle Centric Design
I break down lifestyle design to 3 components:
A-Spiritual Base
B-Building Bulk
C-Sustainable Nutrition
(Note the design of my logo. With interlaced Yin/Yang and 7 Chakras)
Spiritual practice looks different with everyone, every patient, every trauma (spiritual trauma)
Nutrition practice essentially boils down to macros/volume/timing/ upbringing and current medical challenges. With all those variables
It’s still easy (initially) to direct change.
Movement / Exercise / METs / Free Time / Age / Hormone Levels / Latitude / Knowledge
Base / Prior Injury / Cardiovascular Fitness / Lung Disease….to me
more complicated to engage in an average patient …
BUT
…even with all the variables, just deploy short trials without commitment for a lifetime. I feel when a coach allows entry level investment im a new routine, in case “it hurts”, it’s too complicated, “they’re too expensive”, distance is time consuming, “it flares up my knees”…you can see an endpoint and the investment doesn’t take a large commitment of resources!
Don’t think it will always be entry level. Short term goals of tasting more and more intensity is a necessary evil. Human musculoskeletal systems are the best at adapting. Digestion can ramp up insulin based on how you indulge. Hormonal glands can turn on secreted messengers in milliseconds in times of fight flight flee events. All the systems can adapt and ramp up production of peptides however the muscies are a different beast.
Muscles are structural, propulsive, storage depots, and externally located compared to all other body systems. The more signals of energy expenditure you challenge the system with, the more youthful and disease/age reversing the entire body behaves! No other system short of the nervous system and improve as you age and grow. (Muscle can grow no matter what age AND brain grows as you study and calm! “Mind Muscle” blog coming up in the near future!)
I was blessed to have the genes that love movement and challenge - structurally I’m shorter but faster. I figured I was quick in grade school and due to some inborn talent I capitalized on speed during spring months (track & field + running) I can still run at 60yrs of age and definitely love sprinting (short intense run swim bike climb). Consequently I love the delayed onset muscle soreness that emulates from regions after exercise.
In planning initial routines (taking into consideration the challenges listed above) is fairly easy. Decreasing all cause mortality requires about:
1-150minures weekly of mild to moderate exercise
2-75minites weekly of intense exercise.
Full Stop!!!
Now introducing a step up approach starting from physical limitations and building up from there at a pre-set duration of time really is all you need.
Choosing cardio vs resistance …well it should be both. The data is showing 2 sessions per week of resistance and 3 sessions a week of cardio are the suggested endpoint. A well versed personal trainer, exercise coach, athlete can mix many different elements into your templates assignments.
Second biggest consideration is how the current body will react, flare up, recover from said template. That too can make or break the morale of the investor to change and we need to avoid associating a relationship of SUFFERING DISABILITY with start up. Developing dread will uncouple motivation and NO ONE can sustain the journey. (Then back to couch surfing)
Soooooo…. Easy but Hard. Be forgiving on yourself. Understand it may hurt but just disperse the severity over an appropriate time frame. Conjure up images of youth and happiness to keep you engaged. Target feeling young!
Bottom line is the longer you postpone the more shit you will accumulate to make it even harder to start in the near future.
DrRic
Healthy Movement
Over the millennia, the fitness industry has driven popularities and fads regarding exercise equipment, gyms, and cults. With any new novel approach in fighting diease, at first its exciting but often falls from practice due to boredom. Let’s face it, humans will always want to be with “the popular group” but beware as a specific template may not fit you! There are so many different presentations of human form that it’s impossible to say ONE type of exercise is good for ALL.
I remember when TaeBo was advertised with Bill Banks and it swept across the nation as the new thing to try. That year I saw a new hip injury in my sports medicine clinic daily. I love the fact that social media played an important role in getting people off the couch into a gym or on a mat HOWEVER for your average couch-potato American, you should get medical clearance from your primary care doc. Not to avoid a heart attack or stroke but more to get the approval that “yes, this new endeavor is worth the investment trial!”
Your doc should be acting as your go to “fund of knowledge” for lifestyle change. Andy Weil taught me that patients should act their age to avoid injury. I say you should work to express youth in all you do and guidance is mandatory as there is SO MUCH CONFLICTING DATA that sifting through will require experience. How to read studies, how to anticipate injury, how to interpret guidelines with medical diseases to successfully reverse the suffering in the shortest amount of time using the most appropriate deployment of activities.
One visit to a new doc or life coach will NOT be enough to get you the brass ring needed to postpone disease and sometimes trial and error can be compressed so you have less frustration, less injury, less spending and less remorse about reversing your medical problem. In the old days your neighborhood doc knew you, your family, your history and would be able to help “hack” (short cut for you boomers) your efforts in getting to goal FAST. Now, especially since covid, no one trusts the healthcare industry, big pharma or the CDC! We must as a community come together, share resources, support those that are lost and prosper together. The small communities of “Blue Zones” is shrinking fast and obesity, metabolic disease, heart disease and cancer are just as prevalent now as 10-20 years ago! The only thing changing is the amount of prescriptions being given to the average patient coming in for coaching and lifestyle advice.
Defend your selves from mis-information, seek youthfulness every day, move and rest. If this is all foreign to your eyes and ears, find me on herbal411.squarespace.com