Stretching has fallen out of favor to a certain extent with the general public and it’s easy to see why: it’s been shown not to prevent injury when performed before a workout, needs to be done in earnest to reap the benefits, and it seems that the average person is unaware of where they’re tight so as to stretch the muscles that need it the most…basically be efficient with their stretching.

This article is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to stretching but rather a glimpse into why flexibility and mobility are important and where to spend most of your time focusing your efforts.

Terms Defined

So when talking about stretching it’s important to understand why we stretch: to either improve flexibility or improve mobility. They’re not the same thing:

• Flexibility: How easily a muscle lengthens between its attachment points. Can you put your leg over your head with a locked knee? Your hamstrings are considered very flexible.
• Mobility: How easily the body moves around each joint. Can you grab the ends of a broom handle and, without unlocking your elbows, take it from the front of your body, over your head, and around to the back of your body by just rotating your shoulders? Your shoulders would be considered very mobile.

These are important points to be made distinct, as flexibility doesn’t necessarily mean good mobility as our joints are surrounded by multiple muscles that have to work with one another to allow proper mobility. So if you have flexible hamstrings from tight hip flexors, your hip mobility will not be as great as it could be. And when it comes to posture and a properly functioning body, both are necessary.

Phasic And Tonic Muscles

Many years ago, Doctor Vladimir Janda, a Czechoslovakian neurologist and exercise physiologist, examined the muscles necessary for good posture. To simplify, Janda separated muscles into two groups: Tonic, which tend to shorten when we get tired (or old!) and Phasic, which tend to weaken under stress (or age, I dare say). A simple chart:

That’s the theory, but the terms tonic and phasic have been abandoned by progressive exercise scientists because these terms are too simplistic in describing the behavior of muscles across the body. Not everyone is the same. However, take a look again at the muscles in the tonic group. If you’re sitting at a computer reading this, every single one is contracted. If you stand up and contract all of those muscles, you look like a 90 year old person with terrible posture. If you think of how many people have desk jobs that require large amounts of sitting, the fact that people don’t look old sooner in their life should come as a surprise!

Target: Strengthen the Phasic, Stretch the Tonic

So if you’re going to have rhyme and reason for stretching, the above should be your starting point. If you are not keen on stretching every muscle in your body, focusing on the muscles that make us look old and stretching them regularly would be a vast improvement over no stretching at all. Plan it into your exercise routine and start reaping the benefits today.

The Study

File this away in the “Medicine In Motion is not just a clever title” part of your brain because the research bears out that moderate exercise reduce the occurrence of the common cold. Researchers at Appalachian State University in North Carolina have found that regular exercise, and surprisingly the perception of being fit, are associated with a substantial reduction in upper respiratory tract infection. The study followed 1,002 adults (male & female, 18 to 85) over two 12-week periods; half participated in the fall and half in the winter. Those who said they exercised (details below) at least five days a week had 43% fewer days with upper respiratory tract infection than those who exercised no more than one day a week (4.41 days versus 8.18). Similarly, those who rated themselves as highly fit had 46% fewer days with a respiratory infection than those who reported low fitness (4.89 days versus 8.60). Even when they did get sick, frequent exercisers and the most fit suffered less severe symptoms, by 32% to 41% between high versus low exercisers and perceived fitness.

To determine high exercisers from low, participants were surveyed regarding how many days per week they exercised for at least 20 minutes, leaving them winded and sweaty. They were also asked to rate their physical fitness on a 10-point scale. They were divided into three groups (8-10 high, 6-7 middle, and 1-5 low) based on their response.

While earlier research has been performed, what set this study apart was that validated methods were used to track respiratory infections and related symptoms. The researchers chronicled the effects of the common cold using the Wisconsin Upper Respiratory Symptoms Survey, a reliable and valid daily logging system.

A Double-Edged Sword

While moderate exercise shows benefits to reducing the occurrence of the common cold, too much exercise seems to increase the occurrence. It is well-known that marathon runners often come down with colds or worst in the weeks and sometimes months after the race. This is especially true of ultra-marathoners. In a five year study of 350 athletes in the 160 kilometer Western States Endurance Run, Dr. Nieman found that one out of four runners reported sickness during the 2-week period after the race.

The effect is most certainly paradoxical. Athletes, when compared with their couch potato colleagues, experience higher rate of upper respiratory infections, especially in the few weeks following  intense training and races. In non-athletes, increasing physical activity is associated with a decreased risk of upper respiratory infections.

So stay active, but not too active, if you want to keep a cold a bay. If you’re a marathoner…we wish you good luck and would love to talk with you about ways to stay healthy too!

I’m getting old; I shouldn’t workout.

Now, never mind that this train of logic is right up there with “I’m getting hungry; I shouldn’t eat,” the day and age of the slow decent into assisted living has passed us by. Now, people are maintaining an exceedingly high level of function deep into their 9th century.

The Long Tail Of Aging

Think about older individuals you’ve known in your life. It seems almost inevitable that you or someone you know had a grandfather or uncle (or grandmother or aunt or parent) who maintained an incredibly high level of physical functioning deep into their 80′s and 90′s. Often we think that this person is special, that they’ve been dealt a genetic “full house” that allows incredibly high function into their later years. This isn’t entirely true; in fact something called the Danish Twin Study established that only about 25% percent of how long a person lives is determined by our genes. The rest is determined by our lifestyle and the increased incidence of “ageless athletes” should cause one to take notice. In other words, the long tail model of aging is no longer de rigur.

What is the long tail? Normally, the long tail refers to the sales of a niche item; the less popular but more targeted (think a book about an obscure mountaineer) an item is, the longer it is going to sell but in smaller amounts. Compare this to a really popular item selling explosively at first but fizzling in short order. Aging, as we’ve come to expect it, follows this trend: a person reaches what is considered an “advanced age,” gets sick, fights back but never returns to the previous level of health, continues to survives, gets sick again, and the process repeats. The final years of this person’s life is spent in a state of stunted function, possibly medicated, definitely not living to the fullest.

Compare this to Jack Lalanne, whose recent death was a shock to most everybody but it is exactly how one would have expected such a man to go. Lalanne’s death resembles that of a wild animal (or possibly a house cat, who barely recognizes its own domestication). The animal spends its life functioning at a very high level. It gets sick just a few short days before it dies. It doesn’t spend years in a state of semi-function; it’s still chasing and killing (or grazing and running) right up until it kicks. To wit this is how Lalanne kicked: he maintained an enormously high function right up until pneumonia got him. Take a look at an interview he gave last year, at the age of 95:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkdYrAQJu6g

There’s More Than Jack

It is easy to isolate Jack, to dismiss him as an obsessive but there are others, for instance Clarence Bass, who has maintained less than 10 percent bodyfat for 30+ years:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNwgmFsFsOk

Or Art De Vany, who still trains hard and runs fast at the age of 73:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1eyOjgcPSA

What about ladies? They’re even more impressive. Ernestine Shepard is 73 and in phenomenal shape:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqev-P-ZPQE

Perhaps the most impressive of all is Olga Kotelko. At 91 years old, she has athletic records that have not been touched by athletes 10 years younger. You can read about her here and take a look at her speech for accepting athlete of the year:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwr9LDY6o0Q

She didn’t start until she was 77. It’s never too late.

The Hippocampus

NPR recently featured a story about how new research indicates that walking increases the size of the hippocampus. The hippocampus, while being a very small part of our brain, is responsible for the daunting task of encoding information we take in so that we can recall it later. The normal course of aging is for the hippocampus to shrink, foreshadowing memory loss and dementia. These individuals took to the walking program 3 times per week for 40 minutes at a time. The distance over time increased as the exercisers speed increased. At the end of a year, the exercisers hippocampus increased in size by 2%, as measured by before and after MRI. In the control group the hippocampus shrunk by 1.5%.

More On Walking And Health

A similar study covering a larger period of time found a similar result. This time, researchers focused on gray matter volume, also found to reduce as we age. Following 299 cognitively normal Pittsburgh area adults (average age 78), those who walked 72 blocks weekly, which amounts to about 6 miles or less than 1 mile per day, had significantly higher amounts of gray matter 9 years later. The final follow up after year 13 found that 183 of the subjects had normal cognitive functioning, with a final indication that this amount of physical activity decreased the risk for cognitive impairment two-fold.

Evidence From The Longest Lived Cultures

Not a study in the strictest sense, similar conclusions were found and published a book called “Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest.” What Dan Buettner, the author, and his team of researches found were 4 (later upgraded to 5) longevity hot spots around the globe: Sardinia, the Greek island of Ikaria, Okinawa, the Costa Rican peninsula of Nicoya, and the California city of Loma Linda. Buettner and his researchers tease out what he calls a “de facto longevity formula” by finding out what these people are all doing similarly in spite of their incredibly varied cultures and locations. While he does narrow it down to 9 traits, the one that is perhaps not surprising (in the context of this blog) is the fact that everyone included lots of low intensity activity, namely walking, in their daily lives. This also sometimes included some manual weed-whacking as evidenced below:

A Final Thought

The take home point from all of this is that it’s not a magic bullet: walking keeps the brain healthy only if it’s part of your daily life. The suggestion here is that you avoid being an efficiency expert and try to find ways to walk more. To follow the car example above, park at the back of the lot and walk up. Chances are you’ll get into the store before those circling the lot and be healthier for it!