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1pushing Back Aging-Part2
1pushing Back Aging-Part2
This second of a t w o - ~ a t t infection, he made a project of improving and stereotypes our movement; this is
them. During his exercise sessions he what Shlomo taught himself to overcome.
column on aging explores
would interlace his fingers with his toes Anxiety, fear and anger create muscular
the impoflance of movement and stretch them into extension, then flex tension, which builds up in the tissues
and other lifestvle choices, them against resistance, then stretch them when it is not released, until some areas of
further into flexion. After three months the body are virtually frozen. For exam-
and offers massage and
and many repetitions, his toenails became ple, some people respond to stress by
movement sessions for white again. angrily clenching the jaw, causing chronic
elderly clients. Schneider was impressed that Shlomo headaches or TMJ syndrome.
didn't back away from the changes that As patterns of rigidity lock in, tensed-up
come with aging. Instead he explored the muscles shorten; their antagonists can no
enormous realm of his body as i r was, then longer balance them, so they weaken and
grow
- slack. Blood vessels and nerves
become compressed, local circulation is
cut down and sensation dims to the point
R o l e m o d e l s give u s o u r e x p e c t a t i o n s a b o u t z+. of numbness. Many cells are left under-
nourished and burdened with waste prod-
ucts. Connective tissue in the area hard-
and there, through movement. Schneider ens, causing joint spaces to shrink. Pain
As a teenager, Meir Schneider found a role was learning that movement itself is a and stiffness ensue. Shallow breathing and
model in Shlomo, a 77-year-old retired deep, primal place you can return to again breath-holding are also associated with
laborer. They met on a beach in Tel Aviv. and again in spite of all kinds of stiffness, stress - and impair lung and heart func-
Meir went there every chance he got; it pain and disabilities. You can use move- tion. With these stiff patterns engrained
was a great place to do the vision and ment systems like tai chi or yoga as a way in the body from chronic stress, we are
movemenr exercises that were now bring- in - or better yet, invent your own. perpetually bracing ourselves for our next
ing him functional eyesight. Shlomo also The body in movement is a shifiing experience. Neutral or unimportant'exter-
went to the beach to move. He could no landscape like the beach - never the same nal events appear to us as hassles or annoy-
longer run and he swam slowly but had from day to day. You may feel muscles ing problems - and we respond with the
built up great endurance. Unlike other clamoring to be stretched in certain exact kind of behaviors that create more such
swimmers, whose warm-ups were hurried directions, or find yourself wanting to try events. Stress becomes a reverberating loop
and perfunctory, Shlomo took a lot of out strange new ways of walking, running in our lives, self-amplifying, self-prolong-
time with gentle exercises before his daily or dancing. You may have moments of ing and self-restarting. We stay tuned to it.
swim. H e was exploring movemenr, intense pleasure in some part of your back,
incorporating yoga and other systems, or you may suddenly feel that your neck is The lifestyle part of the picture
inventing, having a good time. When as long as a swan's, coming up from the Stress is not the only thing that ages us.
other seniors joined him, he led an exer- strength of your midback, and that it Bad food and too much of it are a prob-
cise class. At retirement 10 years earlier, needs to swoop. Years later, what lem. Time Magazine reported that nearly
degenerated disks had made movemenr Schneider learned from Shlomo and oth- one-third of Americans are obese. Animal
stiff and for Shlomo; now he ers helped him transmit this kinesthetic and human studies link dierary restriction
moved with ease and amazing flexibility. aliveness to clients whose only pain-free and lower weight with longer life. The
"It's important to move and loosen every movements might - be the motion of breath medical profession advises us to watch our
part of the body - at least 20 repetitions in a small area of the ribcage - yet move- weight and cut down on dietary fat. Of
for each movement, or your muscles and ment became their path to recovery. course, the kind of severe dietary restric-
joints won't respond," Shlomo told tion that results from body-image prob-
Schneider. Noticing that his toenails had Factors in aging lems like bulimia and anorexia nervosa is
turned yellow, an early warning sign of In our last column we wrote about how not conducive to a longer life; it's simply
poor circulation that could lead to serious stress accelerates aging.--Stressalso limits dangerous.
Self-Healing
then modify it as he feels his body's
. -particular needs from moment Whether the problem begins with the aging nerve or muscle is
to moment. For all of us, and as we train young people, a primary the subject of debate among researchers. Spinal motor neurons
goal of movement should be to serve the needs of our bodies. are the longest nerves in the body - sometimes more than three
There's an ideal flux, according- to Evans, for each system of the feet long in humans (and 60 feet long in whales). Some
body. Both mineral in bone and protein in muscle are continual- researchers think that therein lies their fragility. Substances are
ly being built up and lost. Both overuse and underuse are damag- shuttled continuously up and down along the microtubules,
ing; we get a net loss in these fluxes. "You need to find the exact which are a nerve's long-distance transport system. Because these
exercise prescription for each person at a given time," he said. slender, delicate filaments are so incredibly long, foul-ups can eas-
Schneider says that people with sedentary habits, even those ily arise: the microtubules can break down, leading to an accumu-
who engage in occasional furious athletic activity, have taught lation of cellular garbage in the nerve. So it may be the spinal
their brains to resist movement, so they have that resistance to motor neuron that causes the death of the motor unit in elderly
overcome before they can develop the kinesthetic awareness that people. It is certain that spinal motor neurons are dying as we
leads to balanced, healthful use. age, and the Type I1 motor neurons are dying in disproportion-
When you're young and active, nature gives you good circula- ately greater numbers - but there is also evidence of degenerative
tion, flexible joints, strong muscles and bones, great reflexes and change in aging muscle fibers.
coordination. You can start then, or in middle age, to build the The original challenge that kills these spinal nerves may be
health that will help you age successfully. Nature definitely underuse - but if they are few enough, it doesn't take much
doesn't give these gifts to the elderly; it's going to cost them an activity to constitute overuse. This is exactly the pattern that has
effort to stay in good shape. Schneider emerged with postpolio: years earlier, polio
recommends that people in their sixties attacked and &!led some of these nerves,
work on themselves at least an hour a leaving the surviving spinal motor neurons
day; in their seventies, an hour and a vulnerable to overuse, which eventually
half, and in their eighties and beyond, destroys them. The difference between
two hours a day - but no matter what people with postpolio and the rest of us is
they do, they won't be as fast as when about 20 years, Schneider believes. As
getting real with the situa
they were young, although they can massage therapists, we need to facilitate
improve reaction time to some degree. balanced use in elderly clients who have
Statistically, increasing muscle weak- lost motor units. It's a challenge.
ness is a part of aging. This serious Elderly people who were once top-level
health problem for the elderly leads to athletes and continue to work out will see
falls, fractures, loss of independence and their athletic skills deteriorate with age,
institutionalization. How much is loss especially at high-speed, highly skilled
of strength an inevitable part of aging activities like basketball - but they'll still
and how much is it just the atrophy . be at the top of the fitness curve for their
that comes with an inactive lifestyle? Leg muscles suffer the age. Fairly physically active people who remain so in old age will
greatest losses with aging, back muscles less, and arm muscles sustain moderate losses. The place you don't want to be is at the
the least. This points to lifestyle. T o stay strong, muscles need bottom of the curve; the sedentary elderly are at risk for losing
to be loaded, and a sedentary lifestyle disproportionately independent living.
unloads the weight-bearing muscles. Joint pain and stiffness can While endurance exercise, like walking or swimming, improves
be a factor; stiff ankles, for example, can limit movement at the muscle metabolism, it can't reverse muscle atrophy in the elderly.
knees and hips, and make full loading unlikely. What does reverse senile muscle atrophy dramatically is high-
The picture of senile muscle atrophy is not fully understood. intensity resistance training - weight lifiing at 80 percent of one-
What is clearest is that with old age
- we suffer a dramatic loss of repetition maximum. Using Nautilusmequipment or a similar
motor units. A motor unit is one spinal motor neuron and the system, the trainer finds a weight for each muscle group that is
muscle fibers it innervates. Motor units remodel themselves just beyond the person's capacity to lift, say, 100 pounds, then
throughout life. A muscle fiber can easily lose its connection to takes 80 percent of that, or 80 pounds. The weight-lifting session
the motor nerve. T o attract a replacement for the lost motor neu- for this person would consist of lifting 80 pounds in three sets of
ron, the orphaned muscle fiber puts out extra receptors for the eight repetitions each. Each repetition takes six to nine seconds;
nerve's chemical messenger, acetyl choline, all over its surface, like the rest period between sets is one minute. Periodically, the train-
a wall of hungry mouths. er assesses the person's progress and raises the one-repetition max-
Muscle fibers belong to either of two main types: Type I, or imum weight lifted accordingly.
slow-nvitch, are the small, slow, postural muscles; Type 11, or fast- This is a recent and important discovery. In one high-intensity
twitch, are the bulky, powerful, fast muscles that we use less often. resistance program, the participants in their 90s increased an aver-
In motor unit remodeling, the muscle fiber takes on the character age of 174 percent in strength of the quadricep in just 12 weeks.
of the nerve that adopts it. As it happens, Type I nerves tend to Improvement carries over into function - a similar program
arrive at these orphaned muscle fibers sooner than Type 11. In old increased walking speed by 48 percent for its elderly participants.
age we have fewer, bigger and more homogenous motor units, Elderly muscles are more easily injured and take longer to recover
and many more of them are Type I. than younger ones; antioxidants like vitamin E may help in recov-
ery. Senior citizens need their workouts too much to give them
T h e first session
This session will loosen your client's stiff neck and shoulders.
Let's assume your client is a woman. Have her sit in a chair and
rotate her neck in both directions while tapping on her trapezius
muscles. This will be the first exercise of the home program.
Standing behind her, massage her back upper back and the parts
of her shoulders she can't reach.
As your client lies on her side on the massage table, have her
rotate the arm that is uppermost in both directions while you
massage the ribcage area. Next, have her rotate the tip of her
shoulder in both directions while you alternately stretch her
shoulder away from her head and compress it toward her head
and then massage both shoulders, squeezing and gently pinching
the muscles. Next, have her sit up agair. and repeat :he firs: cxci-
cise to check whether the second exercise made this movement
easier. Follow this with a full-body massage.
T h e second session
This session loosens the joints of the hip and back. As your
client lies supine on the massage table, passively rotate each of her
legs in both directions, malung the hllest possible pain-free circle
of the hip joint (if there is discomfort, massage the area before
continuing). Then have her bend and straighten her legs continu-
ously, bending one while straightening the other. Meanwhile,
massage her abdomen. You are breaking up a very common habit
of tensing up the abdomen every time the legs are moved.
Now have her stand and perform on an imaginary Hula-
Hoopm,rotating her hips as fully as she can, first in one direction
and then the other. Then have her kneel, if she can, or sit cross-
legged on the floor if she can't kneel. Have her do a slow forward
bend, feeling the movement of each vertebra, while you massage
around the vertebrae to cue her. This will break up adhesions and From the first session: Have the client sit in a chair and rotate his or
allow fuller movement in the spine. continucd on page 36 ber neck i n both directions while tapping on the trapezius muscles.
From the second session: Have the client kneel, i f h e or she can, or sit cross-leyged on thefloor
i f h e or she can't kneel. Have the client do a slowforward bend,feeling the movement of
each vertebra, whileyou massage around the vertebrae to cue the client. This will break up
adhesions and allow filler movement i n the spine.
Have her assume the long sitting position on the floor (seated, with both legs together
stretched out in front). Have her rotate her feet in one direction and then the other, then
stop to visualize the motion, then repeat it. Now instruct her to alternate dorsiflexion
and plantar flexion of her feet, moving as far in each direction as possible; again have her
visualize and repeat. Then have her move her feet to one side, then the other, as far as
possible, and visualize and repeat.
As you perform your massage, include a deep effleurage of the legs, followed by a fric-
tion massage to increase warmth and circulation.
man's belief systems had done for him was had all their lives or find entirely new julie Doyle contributed to this article
to make him inflexible. He'd stay healthi- ones. It doesn't work when they try to live
er and probably live longer if he could in the past, offering unwanted advice to Meir Schneider, Ph.D. L.M. T , an inter-
learn to accept his problems, work within the successors in the businesses they lefi, nationally known therapist and educator, is
his limits and be the best 53-year-old he ignoring the changes and new needs of the creator of the Meir Schneider Self-
could be. their bodies. Maybe they can't run the Healing Method, the author of two books,
We've often seen people who have businesses they started anymore, but they Self-Healing: My Life and Vision and
heard these quasi-spiritual, mind-over- can sit on the boards of nonprofits instead The Handbook of Self-Healing, and the
matter messages, and then blamed them- - or travel around the country in RVs, founder/director of the Center and School
selves for their serious illnesses -as enroll in college courses, volunteer some- for Self-Healing in Saz Francisco. AJa
though the relationship between body and where, or take up fishing or chess. O r teenager, he overcame blindness caused by
mind were a simple mechanical one. They maybe they just want to have fun - Some congenital cataracts and other serious vision
believed that over the years they had too people who have worked hard all their problems and today has an unrestricted drz-
many gudging or mean-spirited thoughts lives have built up an enormous need for verj license. Forfirther information, call
and would get well immediately if only play, and they shouldn't feel apologetic (415) 665-9574.
they had switched to a majority of noble, about it.
lofty thoughts. It's hard to talk accurately T o stay healthy they'll have to devote a Carol Gallup is an advanced student of
about things in this realm. A feeling of lot more time to self-care than they did Self-Healing, Registrar of the School for
guilt about a degenerative corrdition is when they were young. They may find it Self-Healing, staff writer of the Self-Healing
incredibly harmful; a feeling of empower- an unexpectedly grounding and deepening Research Foundation, and the author of
ment about the ability to improve a physi- experience. numerous magazine articles. She studied
cal condition is essential. Anger is in fact physical therapy at the Mayo Clinic and is
toxic and forgiveness does help. But what Note: Information about the diet and now a master j degree candidate in research
is needed is an enormous, sustained effort cleansingprogram of Hazel Parcells is avail- psycholog at San Francisco State
that eventually leads to transformation. ablefiom the Parcells Center in Santa Fe. Universiv. For her thesis, she is document-
Aging and death are mysteries that exceed For information call (800)811-6784. ing the progress of a Self-Healing client with
our ability to predict and control them - muscular dystrophy using kinematic analysis.
and that's wonderful. They're a worthy
challenge for our spirits. That's why they
need to be approached with respect. There
is enormous human meaning in them.
As we discussed in our last column,
Americans are living longer, in better
health and with fewer disabilities. Senior
citizens are taking- to heart their doctors'
instructions to learn stress reduction and
relaxation techniques, stop smoking, avoid
too much alcohol, swim or take long walks,
lose weight, and cut way down on dietary
fat and choiesteroi - and it's working.
Things will probably get even better.
Now that scientists know what high-inten-
sity resistance training can do for the
elderly, it will probably become much
more widespread among them and they'll
maintain muscle strength - better. We can
expect to learn a lot more about successful
aging from the scientific community; a lot
of research dollars are going into gerontol-
ogy (the study of aging), and holistic
health practitioners from many disciplines
are likely to come up with their own dis-
coveries about aging.
We predict that, more and more, the
elderly will be able to enjoy their lives and
enjoy their bodies. We'd love to see them
explore movement and develop their own
self-healing powers, as Shlomo did. They
may continue to follow interests they have
From the third session: Sitting on thejoor, legs apart andfeet touching each other (the tai-
lorjposition), have the client leanforward andpush down on his or her knees. This opening
ofthegroin area helps abdominal breathing.
of pinching a layer of skin and superficial muscle and then rolling it along between fingers
and thumbs. As this layer of muscle is lifted and stretched, the underlying muscle
becomes accessible; it is this underlying layer that should be tapped on.
Pay special attention to the serratus anterior and posterior and the intercostal muscles.
Now have your client turn over, and begin work on the chest with effleurage and tap-
ping, paying special attention to the intercostals and the pectoralis major and minor. If
she is complaining of pain in any area, have her visualize the pain away, picturing the area
expanding as she inhales, letting go of all pain, tightness and trouble there as she exhales.
In the following exercise sequence, ask your client to notice a sense of increasing space
to breathe into in the areas she is working on. First, as she lies on her side, have her
stretch her upper arm over her head while she taps on the upper ribs with the other hand.
Next, have the client stand facing the wall, elbows locked, hands at shoulder height on
the wall, and move the midback forward, to a midway position, and back, that is, lifting,
bringing to neutral and then collapsing the chest. Then, standing, have her do a forward
bend, massaging her own lower back if she can, while you help her, and visualize that
increasingly she is breathing into the lower back, feeling it expand and shrink with her
breath.
Then, sitting on the floor, legs apart and feet touching each other (the tailor's posi-
tion), have her lean forward and push down on her knees. This opening of the groin area
helps abdominal breathing -
Now have her lie on the table in the supine position. Massage her anterior and poste-
rior neck. If you are sure it is sat;: with this particular client, you may include some gen-
tle cervical traction at this time. Then massage her chest and abdomen until they are
very relaxed. Now have her exhale slowly. When she is finished exhaling, have her
refrain from inhaling as long as possible while you count, and then ask her to inhale. As
you repeat this exercise over time, your goal and hers will be to lengthen the count each
time by at least five; you are aiming for a count of at least 30. Now have your client
kneel on the massage table and lean forward, with a pillow between buttocks and calves if
necessary -you may even need a second pillow under the abdomen. Massage the lower
back with tapotement while asking her to breathe deeply and visualize greater space to
breathe into in her back. You may want to repeat this session once.
continued on page 40
conmnuedfrom page 38