Hello and welcome to the Over 50 Health & Wellness podcast.  I’m your host Kevin English – I’m a certified personal trainer and nutrition coach and my mission to help you get into the best shape of your life – regardless of your age – so that you can show up in life as the healthiest, strongest, most vital version of yourself.  I want to let you know that if you enjoy this podcast, I have additional free resources over at www.silveredgefree.com.  There you’ll find my mini guides on nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle.  Today we have another edition of the Coaches Corner – so no guest today – it’s just me, and we’ll be back next week with our regular interview format.

 

Here’s what we’re covering in this episode.  I’ll start out with a brief discussion of how things are going with my new client Broc.  If you’re not familiar Broc is a podcaster himself – he’s the host of the Midlife Mastery podcast – and he’s hired me as a personal trainer and nutrition coach – and he suggested that we share our journey on our respective podcasts – me from the coach’s perspective and Broc from the client’s perspective.  He’s on a journey to get into the best shape of his life in his fifties, and he’d like to lose 40 pounds and regain some of the strength he had when he was younger.  I cover most of this in the first two editions of the coach’s corner, so today we’re going to pick up where we left off.  OK, I’m ready if you are – let’s do this!

 

After that we’ll discuss common reasons for workout injuries, then dive into ways to strengthen your core – spoiler alert – we won’t spend much time talking about crunches.  From there we’ll discuss the importance of healthy fats, then move into a brief review of the Book Thrive State by Dr. Kien Vuu.  Finally, we’ll wrap up with some of my takeaway thoughts from some of my recent podcast guests and I’ll give a preview of some of the guests I have coming up in the next few weeks.

 

Broc

And where we left off was about 3 or 4 weeks into Broc’s program, and he was doing great.  He’d lost some weight and was happy to be moving some weights again.  But then he had one of those weeks.  You know the kind – where everything goes off the rails.  First off, he took a week of vacation because his mom was coming to visit - who he hadn’t seen since Covid started – and although this is a good thing, vacations and family visits usually disrupt our routine.  But then a day or two later, his college-age daughter goes into hospital and ends up having emergency surgery (I’m happy to report she’s doing much better now and is on the road to recovery).  So now Broc is out of his new healthy routine and things get crazy stressful with his daughter going into the hospital.  And if this wasn’t bad enough, he tweaks his back trying to get a workout in.  When it rains it pours.

 

Now I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that you know exactly what this feels like.  Pretty much every human who has been alive for over 50 years has experienced some sort of back pain.  I certainly have – on multiple occasions.  But for Broc this came at a horrible time – not that there’s ever a good time to injure your back – but he had a lot on his plate at the moment.  Broc was very disappointed, he was making such good progress – both nutritionally and with his lifting – and now he just had a lousy week.  His daughter got sick, with his mom visiting he was out of his normal eating routine, and now a hurt back.  He was experiencing a setback.  And pretty early on in his renewed fitness journey.

 

Now if Broc had a competition or a model shoot coming up in the next month or two, we might have been scrambling madly to do some serious damage control.  But Broc is an athlete of aging, he’s training to tackle midlife, to reach and maintain his goal weight and to be strong, fit and capable for whatever the second half of life throws at him.  Let’s assume he lives to 100, that makes his timeline close to 50 years – so in the big picture a setback of two weeks isn’t a complete catastrophe.

 

Before we talk about how Broc handled this set back, let take a minute and explore how we get injured working out.  We get hurt for several reasons – but the primary culprits are improper loading, improper movement, muscle imbalances, muscle weakness, inadequate warmup, overuse, and overtraining.

 

Improper loading is pretty straight forward – this is when we attempt to lift more than our bodies are prepared for.  There are a number of reasons we do this – inexperience, or perhaps trying to keep up with the guy/gal next to you.

 

Improper movement is often related to improper loading, but this refers to lifting with poor form.  As soon as we load a hinge or a squat movement, say a deadlift or a barbell back squat, we need to be very conscious of our form.  And the heavier the load gets the more critical good for is – and the harder it is to maintain.  For example, I know that when I get to heavy deadlifts, I have a tendency to let my hips rise up too fast.  So if you can picture this, I’m set up perfectly for my heavy deadlift – the barbell is over midfoot, my core is braced – in fact my whole body is tensed, and I’ve taken all of the slack out of the bar.  I clear my mind, take a deep breath, and I will my hips and shoulder to rise at the same rate until the bar reaches my knees.  But we’ve got a problem, somehow my shoulders moved upwards maybe an inch, but my butt somehow shot up 12 inches, so that I’m basically in a Romanian deadlift position.  Now a Romanian dead lift is a perfectly fine exercise – I love them – but the problem here is that I’m not loaded for Romanian deadlifts – I’m loaded for heavy deadlifts.  And in that split second, I have a decision to make.  I can drip the weight, rest and try again… that’s the smart thing to do.  Or I can gut it out – I mean the barbell came off the floor – remember my shoulders moved up an inch – and try and muscle the barbell up to full lock out.  The heck with it – I’m throwing caution to the wind – I got this – I decide to continue.  As I continue up the strain moves from my hamstrings to those relatively small lower back muscles and I’m now at that critical juncture.  If I can manage to keep a neutral spine – that is not allow my spine to round or flex under this heavy load – I stand a good chance of coming out of this unscathed.  But alas, the load is too heavy, my form breaks down, my spine rounds as I stand up to full lock out.  I did it, I made the lift.  Maybe it’s even a new PR.  But I know almost immediately that I’m going to pay.  There’s a tightness in my lower back that wasn’t there before – but it’s not too bad… yet.  Maybe I think to myself that wasn’t too bad.  But then later that night, or maybe not until the next morning, I start getting sharp stabbing pains in my back when moving from sitting to standing or vice versa.  Crap, I just tweaked my back, and depending on how bad it is I’ll be sidelined for a couple of days to a couple of weeks.  And now I really really wished that I’d have dropped that barbell.

 

Next up is muscle imbalances, and I suspect this played a role in Broc’s injury.  The vast majority of us are office workers these days and we spend most of our days sitting, which is horrible for our bodies.  This causes our hip flexors – basically our quads, iliacus (ill-i-a-kis), and psoas muscles to become tight and our hip extensor muscles – primarily our glutes and hamstrings – as well as abs can become lose or weak from too much sitting.  And this results in a muscle imbalance and a common condition know as Lordosis.  What happens is your tight quads pull your hip girdle forward, and your losses weak glutes and hamstrings further exacerbate this.  Here’s a simple way to demonstrate this.  Stand with a neutral spine and put your hands on your hip bones.  This is your pelvic girdle.  Now keeping the rest of your body motionless, rock your hips forward, pause for a moment and then come back to neutral.  Now do the same in the other direction – tilt your pelvis backward and then come back to neutral.  Most of us fin it easier to rock forward – for many people that is their default position.  Here’s another way of looking at it.  Imagine that your hip girdle was a large bowl of steaming hot soup, and it’s filled to the brim.  Any forward – or backward – tilt at all would spill the soup on to you.  Now with your hands on your hips find that neutral position – again without moving any other part of your body – find that perfect level spot where you wouldn’t spill any of that scalding hot soup.  How does that feel?  Is that your default position?  If not, you’re in good company – you have a muscle imbalance.  Keep in mind that although the hips are the most common area for distinct muscle imbalances, they can occur anywhere in the body.

 

Next up on ways we commonly get injured is muscle weakness.  This is closely related to – if not the same as – improper loading.  I once read an article that said that the most common golf injury is a back injury.  And I remember thinking – well, that makes sense.  I mean golfers have a fairly explosive rotational movement, but the article went on to say that the back injuries didn’t come from swinging the club, but rather from bending over and picking up the ball!  Now I would submit that anyone who injures their back picking up a golf ball – or any light object for that matter – is probably experiencing something more akin to the straw that broke the camels back.  This person was an injury time bomb, just looking for the right trigger to full bore tweak their back.  This scenario is GREATLY reduced for someone who trains regularly and has a strong back.

 

Improper warmup is another common cause of injuries, especially as we age.  Those of us over 50 should take the time to warm up the major muscles we’re preparing to use before intense exercise, and we should certainly build up to heavier loads as opposed to jumping right into the workout.

 

We also see overuse as a common cause of injuries, and these often occur where people engage in activities with repetitive motions.  Think swimmers or pitchers and their shoulders, runners and their knees, ankles, or shin splints

 

The last common cause of injury is over training – and in my experience this can affect novices as well as workout veterans.  But the bottom line is this – when we don’t listen to our bodies and we push too hard, we’re much more likely to get hurt.

 

OK, back to Broc and over coming setbacks.   I love his attitude, in his version of this  - which you can listen to over on his podcast at midlifemasterypodcast.com, he stated, “Setbacks aren’t a warning to play smaller, they’re a message to play bigger.”  He understands that progress is rarely – maybe never – linear.  It’s almost always filled with ups and downs, peaks and valleys, but as long as the general direction is towards our goals, we’re making headway.  His perspective is that a weak back is more prone to injury and a strong back is more injury proof, so he wants to double down on strengthening his back.  I love his attitude.  But as a coach I’m upset when a client gets injured – my job is to first and foremost keep my clients safe.  So as a coach, here’s how I handled this situation.  I told Broc not to do anything that his back didn’t like – not even a little bit.  He was worried about missing workouts, and I asked him not to worry about that – I wanted him taking care of A -his back, and B- his daughter.  We talked about some breathing techniques and stress control, and then added some light mobility work in as his back started to improve.  Broc is highly motivated and was eager to get back to hitting the weights, but I wanted to back up and ensure that we really focused on building his core starting with some pretty basic movements.  So that’s where we are, Broc took about a week off from working out, and hopefully life is getting back to normal.  I’m programming a lot of core stability and mobility movements and am slowly reintroducing the barbell at reduced weight and volume.

 

Hear Broc’s side of the story and follow him at midlifemasterypodcast.com – I’ll put his info in the show notes including the link to his episode where discusses his injury and thoughts on overcoming adversity.

 

CORE

So let’s talk about the core.  When most people think about the “core” they think of the abs; they picture a person with a strong core as someone with six-pack abs.  And while a six-pack can be a sign of a strong core (it is mostly associated with a low body fat percentage), the core is more than just the abdominal muscles.  The core is the center of the body and is responsible for the muscles that move both our hips and our shoulders, and is made up of muscles in the front, sides, and rear of the body.  Core muscles stabilize the spine, pelvis, and shoulder girdle and create a solid base of support for the powerful movements of your extremities. Having a strong stable core is critical to athletic performance as well as injury prevention.

 

Your core is activated in almost every athletic movement, from running and jumping to kicking and throwing, in fact it is involved in almost all human movement.  You may have heard that your core referred to as your powerhouse; you originate power in your core and transfer that power from the center of your body to your extremities.  Core strength and stability should be the very foundation of any strength and conditioning program.

 

OK, before we go any further - a word on sick-pack abs.  Many of us equate a strong core with visible abs, you know… like the ripped models on the cover of fitness magazines or on that Instagram account you follow.  But the truth is that six pack abs are much more a function of diet than they are of strength.  Look at any strongman competition, most of those competitors have insanely strong and capable cores yet lack any six-pack definition at all.  For our purposes here we’ll focus on building a strong, capable, injury resistant core.  If you are interested in the aesthetics of six-pack abs, let me know and I’ll cover that in a future Coach’s corner episode.

 

Before we discuss the best way to strengthen our core, let’s take a brief look at the muscles that make up the core.  There are essentially four main muscles that make up your core:

 

Internal & External Obliques – found on the outside of your core, they help flex the spine, and aid in twisting as well as bending from the side.

Rectus Abdominus – these are the six-pack muscles and aid in flexing the spine (as in doing a sit-up or crunch).

Traverse Abdominus (TVA) – these are deep core muscles – located on the inside of your internal obliques - and are critical for bracing and stabilizing the spine.

Erector Spinae – these run along your spine and assist in keeping your back straight and aid in rotational movements.

 

If you’re interested in seeing a diagram of your core muscles, check out the show notes for this episode.  You can find those at www.silveredgefitness.com/episode67.

 

But what is the best way to get a strong core?  The typical prescription is often tons of sit-ups and crunches; and while these exercises can be helpful, they are not the most effective way to get a truly strong and capable core.  To do this you will want to engage in exercises that strengthen the entire core (remember the core muscles are front, side, and back of your body – everything from your hips to your chest).  Below are a few exercises of my favorite movements that are excellent for building a strong and stable core.

 

Bird Dog – let’s start here.  The bird dog is a simple exercise that most people can do.  You start a bird dog on all fours – on your hands and knees.  Then you brace your core and keeping a neutral spine you lift one hand and the opposite foot out until they are parallel with your trunk.  Hold for a moment and then slowly and with control return to all fours.  Repeat on the other side.  That’s one rep.  This can be scaled down for deconditioned folks by doing one limb at at time.

 

Weighted Carries – also known as suitcase carries, these are often overlooked but a fantastic set of exercises for building core musculature.  In fact these – along with offset marches and lunges - are my favorite exercises for the core.  They are most commonly done by holding a heavy weight in one hand by your side and simply walk.  You want to focus on standing tall and straight, keep your shoulders square, brace your core, and walk.  Another great variation is to carry the weight overhead in one hand.  Walk the prescribed number of steps in one direction, switch hands and walk back.

 

Planks – you are probably familiar with this exercise.  Planks are an outstanding exercise and don’t require any equipment and can be performed pretty much anywhere.  The basic idea is to maintain a straight line from your ankles to your head and hold until your core begins to burn!  Forward planks are the most common variation but be sure to incorporate side planks as well.

 

Offset Marches and Lunges – I love these, and I don’t know why they aren’t more common.  Begin with a heavy object in one hand (kettlebells are particularly well-suited for this – but a dumbbell or any heavy object will do) and clean it to the front rack position.  If you are unfamiliar with a front rack position, this simply means to get your kettlebell up so that it’s resting on the same shoulder as the hand with the weight.  Brace your core and stand tall.  For marches you’ll pick up one foot and pull your knee high, then lower with control and repeat with the other leg – you’re basically walking in place with an exaggerated step.  Work for the prescribed time or number of reps and then switch sides with the kettlebell and repeat.  Lunges are similar, clean the kettlebell to the front rack position, and then lunge (forward or backwards) with both legs.  Once you complete the prescribed reps, switch the kettlebell to the other shoulder and repeat.  A fantastic variation for these is to perform your marches and lunges with the weight in an overhead position.

 

Deadlifts – this exercise – along with the squat - often gets overlooked when it comes to building core strength, but simply put a heavy deadlift works almost every major muscle in the body.  The role of the core in the deadlift is primarily posterior core (back) stabilization, so the muscles doing most of the work are the erector spinae.

 

Squats – like the deadlift, barbell squats are often overlooked for their usefulness in building a strong core.  Heavy squats engage both the erector spinae and external oblique muscles and are responsible for keeping proper position as we come up from the bottom of a squat.

 

Your core muscles are built for endurance, not for maximum strength, so it is best to increase reps or time as your strength improves.  Having a strong core translates to greater athletic ability as well as greatly reducing your chance of injury.  If core exercises are not a part of your current routine, consider adding some of the exercises above.

 

FATS

In my first coach’s corner I talked about protein, and last time I covered carbohydrates, so I thought it only fitting to bring up fats in this episode.  Most of us over 50 remember a time when fat was out of vogue.  We were told to fear fat because it would raise our cholesterol levels and… well, it would make us fat.  Fast forward to present day and we now know that not only are fats not bad for us, but they are vital to healthy aging.  Fat has six major roles:

Fat provides us with energy (in fact it is the most energy-dense macronutrient)

Fat assists in making and balancing hormones

Fat forms our cell membranes

Fat forms our much of our brain and nervous system

Fat is responsible for transporting fat-soluble vitamins

Fat provides us with essential fats our bodies can’t produce on their own

 

How Much Fat Should You Eat?

 

So how much fat should you eat?  A healthy person should strive to get 20 to 30% of their daily calories from healthy fat sources.  In practical terms this means a minimum of one to two servings of healthy fat per meal.  As mentioned above, fat is the most energy-dense macronutrient – fat provides nine calories per gram – whereas carbohydrate and protein provide four calories per gram each.  So a little goes a long way.

 

Fish Oil Supplementation

 

Once upon a time in our ancestral past, we would have consumed about two parts Omega 6 fatty acids for every one part Omega 3 fatty acid.  Fast forward to today and that healthy ratio of 2:1 has sky-rocketed to 20:1 in most western diets.  Omega 3 fats are anti-inflammatory and Omega 6 fats are pro-inflammatory.  While we need both, we want to ensure our ratios are closer to the optimal 2:1 ratio.

 

Omega 6 fats are found in vegetable oils, grain-fed meat and eggs, farmed fish, and in most of our heavily processed food.  Greatly reducing processed foods and swapping out conventional grain-fed meats and eggs for 100% grass-fed alternatives is the first step towards reducing the inflammatory effects of Omega 6 fats.  Regularly including wild-caught oily fish (salmon, mackerel, sardines) will also greatly help.

 

A common step to restoring the 2:1 ratio is to supplement with fish oil.  There are a ton of options out there, and not all fish oil is created equal.  I really like Labdoor, they stack-rank supplement brands and have an entire section on fish oil – you can find their fish oil rankings HERE (https://labdoor.com/rankings/fish-oil?filter=quality).  The main thing you are looking for in a fish oil supplement is the EPA and DHA content.  You will often see things like flax seed or flax seed oil marketed as a good source of Omega 3 fats… but flax contains mainly ALA and has poor conversion to EPA/DHA, so your best bet is to stick with fish oil.  Or better yet, you can cut out the middleman, and supplement with algae, specifically spirulina or chlorella.  Just make sure you do your homework and get a premium quality product.  I had Catherine Arston on the podcast a month or so back, she’s the CEO and Chief Science Officer of Energy Bits which is a company that makes high quality algae, and I’ll add a link to that podcast episode in the show notes.

 

Which Fats Should You Eat?

Most of the fats you eat should be polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, which are primarily found in nuts, seeds, avocados, and fish. Choosing foods that are low in saturated fat can also help reduce your risk of heart disease.  You’ll want to strive for a variety of healthy fats in your diet, and if possible try to get fish and meat that are wild caught or 100% pasture raised.  Greatly reduce or eliminate refined and processed foods containing industrially produced fats and artificially hydrogenated fats.

Book Review

Thrive State: Your Blueprint for Optimal Health, Longevity, and Peak Performance by Dr. Kein Vuu.  It seemed only appropriate to review this book as I just had Dr Vuu on the podcast a few week ago.  This is a great book for anyone interested in holistic health and longevity.  Dr. Vuu opens with his own personal transformation story – long story short he found himself as a practicing doctor giving his patients advice that e himself wasn’t following – and as a result he ended up rather unhealthy – he was overweight, had high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.  So he took matters into his own hands and within 6 months completely reversed his chronic illnesses.  And this caused him to take a deep dive into chronic disease and how modern medicine “treats” these diseases – and what he found is that modern medicine does nothing to treat or cure these diseases, rather they recommend pills and sometime surgeries to alleviate the symptoms, while ignoring the root cause of the problem.  Eventually he realized that YOU are your own best medicine – the doctor of the future is you.

 

So having placed responsibility for our own health back where it belongs – on us – Dr. Vuu came up with what he calls his 7 BioEnergetic Elements, which are sleep, nutrition, exercise, stress & emotions, mindset, relationships, and purpose.  The book dedicates a chapter to each of these elements, and gives some great practical tips for improving in each of these areas.  And then finished by explaining how these are all tied together, and in order to truly thrive – that is reach your thrive state – you need to have mastery in each of these 7 bioenergetic elements.  This was a great read – very accessible and informative.  If you want the cliff notes version listen to my podcast, I’ll drop a link in the show notes (which you can find at silveredgefitness.com/episode67), and if you want to dive deeper, I strongly recommend you read the book.

 

Podcast Recap

OK, coming into the home stretch here.  In case you missed them here’s a recap on my last few podcast guests and my man takeaway for each of them.  Three weeks ago I spoke with Debbie Crall.  Debbie is a 64 year old author, speaker, personal trainer and nutrition coach who has worked with everyone from pro athletes to full-on couch potatoes.  An offhand remark by a relative at a family get together forever changed the arc of her life – at the time she was a two pack a day smoker and drank a 6 pack of Dr Pepper daily.  She went on to become a fitness professional and competitive body builder and today is in fantastic shape.  Debbie is very active on social media, and one of things that impressed me is not only how strong and fit she is, but how flexible she is.  One of my favorite quotes from our interview is when she says, “yoga is really important to me. That's made me stronger.  The weights haven't made me stronger. The joint endurance has made me stronger because you can only lift as strong as your joints are. And yoga has made me stronger a lot stronger.”

 

I think this is critical for those of us over 50 and often ignored, but Debbie goes on to make a strong case for the importance of working on flexibility and mobility as we age.

 

Two weeks ago I spoke with Dr. Kein Vuu, but we pretty well covered him in the book review section earlier.  My main takeaway from speaking with Dr. Vuu is the importance of relationships and purpose not only to our emotional and mental wellbeing, but how these are actually critical to our medical health.

 

My latest episode was with Former Miss USA Gretchen Jensen.  Going into this interview I had very little – as in none – knowledge about beauty pageants.  Gretchen gives us a unique behind-the-scenes look at this world.  And her journey was surprising to me – I just assumed she grew up doing beauty pageants as a child – but that wasn’t the case at all.  I won’t give away any spoiler alerts here in case you haven’t listened to her episode yet, but my key takeaway from speaking with Gretchen is how beauty emanates from the inside – beauty starts from being healthy and confident, it starts with self-acceptance and self-love.  I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that good place to start in developing inner beauty would be to level up in all of Dr. Vuu’s seven BioEnergetic elements.

 

As we wrap up I want to thank you so much for listening and let you know that I’m so excited about some of my future guests.  I have had some fantastic conversations with some amazing human beings and I’m excited to share them with you.  I spoke with Gene Dykes, aka the Ultra Geezer – Gene is a 73 year old world record ultra runner.  I had a beautiful conversation with Julia Olson – Julia is a 64 year old childhood diabetic, double organ transplant and triple cardiac transplant survivor with an amazing transformation story – and I promise you you’ll be uplifted and inspired by her story and outlook on life.

 

I spoke with Dr. Sefan Zavalin, he’s a movement enthusiast and work culture consultant and we spoke about the dangers of sitting and gives those of who are office workers some great advice on breaking the cycle of excessive sitting

 

Let see who else… I spoke with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon – she’s on the forefront of the muscle-centric medicine front and explains the importance of protein and resistance training as we age, and why muscle is the organ of longevity.  You definitely won’t want to miss this one!

 

And most recently I recorded an interview with Andy Baker.  Those of you who have been around for a while may remember wayyy back – I think it was episode 16 – I did an interview with Dr Jonathon Sullivan.  That episode to this day is one of the most popular.  Dr. Sullivan is the co-author of the book The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40.  Dr. Sullivan’s co-author was Andy Baker – and Andy is one of the most sought after strength and fitness experts in the industry, and we talk all about what exercises are best for those of us over 50 and exactly how we can program these exercises for optimal safety and effectiveness.

 

I’ll drop all of these folk’s social media info into the show notes at silveredgefitness.com/episode67 in case you want to get a sneak peak at these folks before their actual episodes air.

 

Well that’s our show for today folks – I’ll put links to everything we talked about in the show notes and you can find that over at 73, and don’t forget to check out www.silveredgefree.com for more great free resources on how to live you healthiest, strongest life after 50.  I’ll be back next week with an interview with Gene Dykes – and if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to run 200+ mile races in your seventies, you won’t want to miss this episode!

 

Thanks so much for spending your time with me today, until next time, stay strong!