Welcome to Karen Roberts Wellness; a journey to an alternative, comprehensive, but more body relevant understanding of your physical health and fitness, and possibly, a better, simpler way to get and stay fit-for life! But you might be wondering about the title of my blog. It refers to a specific muscle in the body, the Psoas (pronounced: soas); a hip flexor, and in my opinion, the most important muscle in the body. This opinion will be explained in a future post.
Let’s face it. What we really want out of life is to be happy and healthy. Isn’t that what Covid-19 has taught us? The jury may still be out on that one. To be happy? Well, that’s a thing you’ll have to sort for yourselves, but to be physically healthy and fit, now that’s a thing I definitely know something about, especially with 33 years of experience solving fitness issues for my clients. That experience makes me an expert, and expert advice is really what’s needed in this day and age of, what seems like, endless advice and opportunities to get ‘fit’. And then you start to ask yourself, what do I do and where do I go for the right program for me? Well, let me help you with that.
I’d like to introduce you to a different concept of fitness that will challenge the very traditional notions of what is fitness. This different concept of fitness will most likely divide opinion across the globe, but we need healthy discourse on all subjects, and in my opinion, robust debate is not done often enough, especially when it comes to challenging the current methods of developing fitness for everyone, not just the young. I’ll start the debate by asking a simple question, and one many do not quite understand. You want to be fit, but for what purpose? And a second question. Why are we now all expected to be, and train like professional or semi-professional athletes? The first question is more elusive so I’ll first tackle the second question. We are, the majority of us, neither professional nor semi-professional athletes, and I’m kind of not impressed that you’ve been training with your sports team since you were 4 and now that you’re 24 and ‘retired’, you think you can open a training gym, or you’re a professional dancer, or serial extreme exerciser, and think we can be fit if we train just like you did and do.
The last time I cleaned something, lifted something, or climbed a set of stairs, it did not involve running down a pitch or eejit jumping into a burpee, or holding an impossible stance, or pushing my heart rate to the great beyond. Raise your hand if you’ve raised your eyeballs to the heavens by seeing fitness as represented by rippling abs (okay, nice to see, but will not pick up my laundry off the floor), or 20 somethings, most likely never having been ‘unfit’, demonstrating impossible movements and postures, or air brushed images that ‘sell’ us the idea of fitness as physical beauty and perfection only for the rest of us to say, “really?”, “what’s the point”, or “I’ll never look like that!”
And there you have it! You are right! We will most likely never look like that; I certainly don’t, so stop chasing it! And besides, and here’s the start of the controversy. You don’t need to look like a magazine cover, a trained athlete, a dancer, or uber exerciser to be ‘fit’. You can be fit just looking like yourself but you need to develop a knowing and understanding of how you move and how you use your body, and, most importantly, how this connects to your function that determines your fitness. I call it: Functional Fitness, and it is, in my expert opinion, more important and long lasting than traditional work-out fitness.
Now I’ll address the first question about your expectations for becoming ‘fit’, and here’s more controversy coming now, but before you condemn me for dissing heavy exercise, let me say I have the greatest admiration for anyone who commits to doing work-out type exercise in any form, but exercise done in this mode may not necessarily give you the ‘fitness’ you think you’re getting, especially if you think it will somehow set you up, invest in, or prepare you for old age. Do a work out because you love the feel of it, or you just want to look buff, but true fitness, in my opinion, is not about having big muscles in your arms and legs, or running really fast, or long-distance swimming or cycling, but is, in fact, about using your body in the most efficient way, over the longest period of time; from young adulthood to death.
This does not depend on large muscles, and in fact, if you have developed really big muscles (overtraining comes to mind), and then use them inefficiently/in the wrong way, you are just wasting energy dragging around this massive extra weight, and most likely creating tension somewhere that may be difficult to get rid of in the future. This use of your body could make you less efficient for your required functional tasks, and possibly lead to functional muscle imbalances which then could possibly lead to injury which will, in time, bring you to people like me. Ah, wouldn’t it be nice if you never had to access a Physio, or an Orthopaedic surgeon ever again, because most insidious onset ( happening for no apparent reason) musculoskeletal problems, in my opinion, are wholly preventable. I said this to a client once, about fixing people so they would never have to come back to me for the same problem, and he said wouldn’t I be putting myself out of business? So I says to him, “you do know there are about 8 or 9 billion people on the planet, so I think I’m okay, and besides, no need for Physio?, what a great thing that would be.”
And seriously people, how ripped do you need to be when you’re 100 years old? I suspect most of us would be delighted if we had enough functional strength and control to get off the toilet by ourselves at age 100. And you know what? We should have that positive expectation for our functional fitness from middle aged to elderly, so stop thinking right now that frailty in older age will be inevitable. And I hate to tell you this, but age 30 is when the aging process starts. Stop buying into the idea that you will automatically break down as you age and become less functional.
It’s not entirely true. You will do, if you do nothing at all to help your body stay functionally ‘fit’ so it can age well. We think our problems occur because we get old and don’t exercise enough, but that is wrong thinking. We lose physical function and functional fitness because we don’t control our movements properly as we manoeuvre through our environment. When movements and postures become difficult as we age-mostly because we didn’t do or understand the things we needed to do to prevent this outcome-, we start to avoid key, essential functional movements and postures making our functional world smaller and smaller.
We avoid soft or low chairs, or we install an electric chair that lifts us out of said chair sacrificing our perfectly good leg muscles, or a stair lift for the same purpose, or we avoid walking because we feel unsteady. This is the beginning of a very slippery slope you don’t want to be on. We start to use other muscle groups that were not intended to be used for these movements. Just picture the last older person (careful now-65 is not old) you witnessed getting out of the chair sideways using mostly the arms which are about a quarter of the size of the legs; tiny arms trying to haul the entire weight of the body out of a chair. The long-term, overall end result may be that you end up in a bed in a nursing home because you no longer have control of your normal functional movement.
I teach my clients to think of the arms as two 6-year-old girls, and to view the thighs and the ‘True Core’ as three 20-year-old Rugby players. Transfer the load to the Rugby players. Why lift weights when you can lift your body as a weight. We can’t stop the aging process, which does have gradual and negative impacts on all our bodily systems, but we can do simple things to slow down the ‘effects’ of physical aging. And here’s another thing I’d like to share about traditional workout-type methods of physical fitness. You can’t store the strength you gain from work-out, boot camp, or uber exercise type fitness routines. Let me say that again with slightly more emphasis.
YOU CAN’T STORE THE STRENGTH YOU GAIN FROM WORK-OUT FITNESS!
What exactly does this mean to you and your current workout routine? Well, say you decide you’re going to follow one of the bazillion latest random fitness plans like: Get fit in 30 days, or, an amazing 6-week work-out to a new you, or my favourite, just do this one exercise every day! After 30 days or 6 weeks, when you have completed your course, basking in the satisfaction of getting yourself ‘sorted’, you stop, and in stopping, the benefits go with them; not immediately but they will go, so you need to either sustain this regime for the rest of your life if you want to continue to look and feel like you did from your exercise excursion, or keep investing in new plans. The fitness plans don’t tell you this important little fact about working out, or they convince you this is what you need to do to ‘stay fit’. No one sustains programs like these over their lifetime. For a time, you feel you’ve done your body a good turn, but then, as it wears off and you’re a bit disillusioned that it didn’t last longer, you move onto the next latest fitness plan or you just keep re-investing in the old one, sinking more and more money into something unsustainable, or worse, ineffective. Choose your exercise elixir wisely, I say.
And as for the one exercise! Don’t get me started. There is no one exercise that will fix your fitness, and definitely not your functional fitness. A joint Canadian-UK study from 2018 looking at muscle function and mobility at 3-and 6-months post ICU stay, found, at 6 months, that recovery of muscle size may not translate into improved functional outcomes. This would beg the question: why should we spend so much time trying to improve limb muscle strength and size post illness, or in those who are traditionally inactive agers, if we’re not guaranteed better functional outcomes? There is a better way. You need to use your functional tasks as the exercise. It’s a win-win, and guarantees Perpetual Fitness. You could also argue a case about the sustainability of traditional work-out type fitness regimes as being nearly impossible to maintain as our lives change over time; children arrive, jobs change, or we just develop different interests. Perhaps we need to think of a marriage of the two, or a transition from one to the other as we reach a certain age.
Our commitment to exercise/strengthening/fitness, needs to be more integrated in our daily functional tasks if we want to have a successful fitness regime; a functional fitness regime that will sustain us through the ages, at little cost, once you learn the secrets. This is why I think we need to change the way we think about physical fitness and stop seeing exercise as something we do outside our normal lives/activities, but see every movement and posture, if done correctly and driven properly, as the exercise. Imagine if every smallest to largest movement we do, or every activity we engage in, and every position we assume would become our exercise. We then would have perpetual conditioning. Conditioning that increases in strength and value as we go along, creating a seamless vein of fitness that would carry us to death with very little interruption or decrease in our physical function, barring a catastrophic event or illness. And having this investment in Perpetual Fitness, you’d be more prepared to deal with medical illnesses, and catastrophic injury.
So, what am I really saying to you?
1) You need to understand, invest in, and train in, body-controlled posture and movement and turn it into sustainable, seamless perpetual fitness exercise that becomes part of your everyday life, and, more importantly, becomes your functional fitness regime.
2) You need to see your body as a ‘house’ you live in and learn to mind, manage, and nurture the ‘house’ so it doesn’t break down, much like any derelict or neglected house
3) Appreciate that it takes very little effort, and a small investment in functional fitness that will allow you to enjoy the quality of your life to the very end.
And more specifically:
4) You need to understand and use what I’ve discovered as, the ‘True Core’-the driver of Perpetual Fitness.
Intrigued? Interested? Baffled? Stay tuned for my next blog entry for more valuable information about Functional/ Perpetual Fitness and the ‘True Core’.
