“What’s the sport where the super athletic crazy guys jump on walls and scale them like a lizard?” Asked Ophelia at one of her morning training sessions. “You know, you see stunt men do it in Jason Bourne and John Wick movies. They hang off walls, drop from cliffs, and land like cats after a broad jump from a twenty-foot roof top.” She added. “Oh, that’s parkour.” Coach Slash, her assigned personal trainer for the session, replied. “That’s a type of athletic discipline in which the goal is to get from one point to another the fastest way possible. That sometimes means jumping from one roof top to another.” Ophelia paused momentarily with a sly smirk. “I want you to train me to be able to do that.” She snickered and added, “Either that or make it to where I can get up and down from the floor.”
Ophelia is one of our diligent and devoted personal training clients in her mid-sixties. She is in exceptional health and maintains a healthy ratio of lean muscle mass to fat mass, show’s up on time to her bi-weekly training sessions fifteen minutes early ready to warm up and exercise, and, as we can see by her comments at the beginning of the page, she has a witty and spry sense of humor. So, Ophelia is doing a lot of things correctly when it comes to practicing the art of lifetime fitness. A consistent exercise ritual, a healthy diet, smiling, and laughter are a significant portion of her life.
As humans advance in age, events occur that make seemingly normal activities like getting up and down from the floor become challenging. Past events throughout our lives can contribute to joint pain, mobility limitations, or muscular weakness. The first steps when getting out of bed first thing in the morning can remind us that somewhere along the line in our life, we’ve tweaked our back, strained a shoulder tendon, or our joints have developed arthritis.
The byproducts of enduring the stresses of life have the likelihood of producing pain-like symptoms, contributing to the reduction of our normal physical activities, and changing the way we interact with our everyday life environments. Contributing factors leading to increased pain and mobility impairment include sedentary lifestyles, poor dietary decisions, or lack of motivation to overcome and rehab significant injuries. These examples are often due to neglecting the importance of staying active and exercising, which produces suboptimal lifestyle adaptations that might include the inability to perform simple human functions, such as getting up and down from the floor.
Superflous amounts of sitting for hours, consuming high amount of starchy and fatty foods during low levels of physical activity, endulging in drinking copious amounts of alcohol more than half the week, or putting routine exercise on the back burner are self induced examples of why people struggle to perform something as simple as getting up and down from the ground. These examples don’t include living with an advanced form of arthritis and osteoporosis, a degenerative nerve disease, or recovering from joint replacement surgery. Those extreme cases require a more advanced form of therapy and medical intervention. However, human’s in our current day and age can significantly benefit from focusing on the low hanging fruits of success by ensuring to refine the issues that are right in front of them they have control over such as practicing healthy dietary choices, sitting less, moving more, and finding exercises and recreational physical activities they enjoy.
General advancement in age can be expected to occur every time we pass around the sun. We don’t need cutting-edge research to demonstrate that a body that is a year older than it was three hundred and sixty-five days ago has bone, joint, and connective tissue that isn’t as new as what it was in the past. While we know that the tissues in the body change over time, and sometimes the tissue becomes more brittle and our coordination isn’t where it was as teenagers at our athletic prime, one thing that we never want to disappear is our ability to get up and down off the floor. Similar to when a baseball player doesn’t practice playing catch and the ability to catch and throw can decrease, getting up and down from the ground is a diminishing skill set. Focusing on small goals such as managing weight, working on not overindulging too much in alcohol or treats, and practicing exercises that reinforce the ability to get up and down from the floor can help us to live happier, healthier, and stronger lives.
Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.
