Strength is often forgotten and sarcopenia

This post is about strength. Strength is important. Strength is SO often forgotten in place of the need to stretch!

How many times have you been in the garden for a few hours or been doing DIY and the next day you are struggling to move? Often I ask people how they have prepared themselves for this amount of bending or DIY under load and they look at me as if I am mad! They then tell me that they sit at a desk all day and all week.

To enable our bodies to cope with bending for an extended period of time, lift things that we are not used to or even to bend and reach in a new way…. we NEED to have the capacity in our body to cope this. Claire Minshull had a lovely way of describing ‘capacity’ and she compared it to a fuel tank. She said that if your fuel tank is full, you should have good power, but if it is almost empty, you may well struggle to do pretty basic things.

Capacity is strength!

Capacity gives you more endurance.

Capacity helps you to do more.

Stretching will help you to move better to new places, BUT it will not give you more capacity to lift and bend in a sustained way. It not give you more endurance. STRENGTH or increased capacity will.

As we beautifully age…. and become less active, many of us get Sarcopenia.

The definition of Sarcopenia is the loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength as a result of ageing. The main reason for this outside illness is living a sedentary lifestyle which many of us have. We do more sitting and generally do less. Getting little or no physical activity on a regular basis puts people at an increased risk of developing sarcopenia as they age.

Can we do something about us having or getting sarcopenia? Yes!!

There is an important correlation between inactivity and loss of muscle mass and strength. This suggests that physical activity should be a protective factor for the prevention but also the management of sarcopenia. It gives you greater control and will be protective against things like falling.

As you get stronger, the stairs become easier, getting up from a chair is so much easier, as is getting off the loo or up off the floor.

So, if you are tending to be very sedentary or struggling to get the motivation to do more to help your self, get some advice of how to get moving more and maybe even to start to add load to your system to keep your muscles and bones strong. It is great for the health of our bodies and helps with longevity.

See below. The picture at the top is a fit 40 year old. The picture at the bottom is a fit and strong 70 year old. Then picture in the middle is a normal 74 year old. One that does very little. Probably watches a lot of TV and reads a lot. You can see the massive muscle wasting and this has been replaced by fat. The middle man is not fat. He just has much less muscle mass. So he will struggle to do much. Stairs will be hard and so will getting up from a chair.

You don’t have to go to the gym for hours to achieve this. But you do need to challenge your bodies a bit. Starting gradually and build. Start with longer walks and then walks up and down hills. If you are unsure about this, get advice from a medical professional.

It is all about choices. But this is one choice that most of us can make with a positive end result.

If you want some help with this, call the team at Back to Back on 020 8605 2323.

Keep fit and well and STRONG.

Blog post by James Dodd

Functional Exercise and Training – The Why and the What!

Tri-Plane Movement and Functional Training, these are both current words used to describe movement and training by the personal training and allied health professions (osteopath, physiotherapist, exercise physiologist and chiropractor). The health and fitness industry is going through yet another change, just like the swiss ball was the man of the moment in the 90′s, pilates and the core were the trend of the early 2000′s, many trainers and health professionals are now focusing on training movement rather than muscle, training functional exercises rather than non functional exercises, training groups of muscles rather than muscles in isolation.

What this means in simplistic terms is that trainers and health professionals etc are now moving away from the body building approach to training and conditioning (that is isolated weight training) and moving towards training that integrates movement with resistance that mimics upright function such as gait and other movement patterns that we perform on a daily basis i.e. squat, sit to stand, step up and down, push, pull & rotate. Trying to use gravity as the driver by doing exercise on your feet or upright, rather than on your back or in a machine stimulates your proprioception much more effectively than fixing an area, therefore creating the correct chain reaction needed for full and appropriate muscle function.

This does not suggest that one training approach or philosophy is better than the other, it fundamentally comes down to what the specific individuals goal is. For a body builder looking to compete, then traditional weight lifting techniques that have been proven to produce muscle gain is required. For the olympic power lifter, olympic lifts are practiced. For the sporting indivdiual, there will be likely a combination of functional movement exercises as well as some strength, olympic and powerlifting techniques. For the individual wanting to improve their overall wellbeing, strength and mobility, there is also likely to be a combination of the above.

So what does Tri-plane movement, functional training etc etc mean. Tri-Plane movement simply refers to movement in the three planes (sagittal, frontal and transverse planes). If we look at the individual who is standing upright, the best way to describe movement in the sagittal plane is forwards and backwards movement. Movement in the the frontal plane refers to side to side movement (that is laterally stepping or performing a lateral lunge). Movement in the the transverse plane is when movement occurs with rotation. That is, whilst standing you twist and turn to move or lunge backwards and laterally. Everyday movement occurs in all three planes at a bone and joint level and this is why there is this growing change in the way that training is being carried out. Previously most gyms and training programs were focused on training muscles in machines and/or functional training was restricted to movement purely up and down i.e squat movement or forwards (anterior lunge). As our understanding of functional biomechanics and movement improves, so does our training approaches and philosophy. Now days we are seeing more and more clients perform movements that involve all three planes of movement, involving less equipment and with movements that mimic real life activity.

Functional Training is probably one of the biggest buzz words in the health and fitness industry at this particular moment. There are many indivdiuals out there claiming to provide functional training. Functional training is certaintly not something that is new, rather it has been around for many many years and simply relates to training that mimics how we function. How this training relates to how we function will depend totally upon what and why we are training. For an individual who sits for their job for their entire life and wants to improve this, then training should focus on improving their ability to sit whilst working. For those individuals who are wanting to improve their everyday movement, that is sit, stand, walk, step up and down, squat, lunge etc etc, then training should reflect this. For the sporting individual, the training should mimic the sporting requirements, movements or athletic components that are that sport. So functional training has many meanings and therefore can be interpreted in many different ways.

For the general public, when we look at the body and how it functions, the most common movements or positions we are in involve walking (gait), sitting, standing, squatting, lunging, stepping up and down, single leg balancing, pushing, pulling and twisting. All of these movements are impacted by gravity and ground reaction force and these are two other factors that should be taken into consideration when prescribing a program. Gravity is something that we are always working against to remain upright. Therefore gravity is something that can easily be used to increase or decrease the degree of difficulty of an exercise. Ground reaction force relates to Newton’s laws and how force in one direction results in an equal and opposite amount of force in the opposite direction. This can be related to jumping and landing on the ground whereby an amount of force is exerted downwards and then the force will be transferred back into the legs and must be either shifted or absorbed by the body. So when it comes to functional training and tri-plane movement training, hopefully now you will have a little bit more of an understanding of what, why and how this might be prescribed in relation to yours or anyone else’s training program.

In our opinion, functional exercise should be used more and more when rehabilitating injuries or with patients post surgery. The more you get patient’s bodies working proprioceptively and in 3 planes, their bodies can start to ‘switch on’ to allow them to recover better and stronger.

To find out more about changing your training program, making it a little bit more functional in relation to your specific goals, incorporating exercises that involve training in all three planes, then contact Back to Back – The Earlsfield Osteopath on 020 8605 2323 or click here