Author: Bob McMillan

Good health habits pay off. The surgeon who will be cracking and digging into my chest on Monday said he wished his arteries were as good as mine.  Here’s why that’s important.

My blog post this week will be short by design, and next week’s post will be late by necessity. The bad news is that I am having open heart surgery to have a valve replaced with pig or cow parts. The good news is that my arteries are in such good condition (as shown by a heart catheterization last week) that the surgeon won’t need to do any of the other work he usually does (by-pass) while he is in there digging around. He is one of the best, and best known, heart surgeons in the business so I guess I got the luck of the draw.

When I was young, I was diagnosed with a minor heart murmur. This is where the heart has a minor leak. It didn’t keep me from being an athlete in high school or college. It didn’t keep me from being a Marine Corps Pilot and it hasn’t kept me from moving and exercising in later life. But somewhere around age seventy, my doctor told me that the heart murmur was getting more pronounced and that I should see a cardiologist. So I did. He diagnosed it as Arterial Stenosis which means that the aortic valve was not closing properly, and it seems to be a progressive problem. The last echo cardiogram showed the problem to be “severe” and needed to have something done about it. Not only was the heart leaking, but it was enlarging and it was “regurgitating”, all of which was deemed serious enough to do something about. If you look it up online, the prognosis is that you may last a year or two after a “severe” diagnosis. Hmmm. The interesting part is that I haven’t experienced any of the symptoms that usually go with the diagnosis.

So I’ll be a little late next week in getting out a blog post, but I will be including a short weekly chronicle of the five to eight week recovery process, for those of you who may be old enough to be looking forward to possible heart problems.

Wish me luck.

I learned something valuable this past Saturday. It’s about simplifying exercise, and more importantly, about simplifying the way I talk about it. This past Saturday, I was a speaker, and had a display booth at a Health Fair in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. There were 40 exhibitors. It was a productive event and well attended.

I was given forty-five minutes to speak. I did the talk and it was well received, but I didn’t get the message out that I really wanted to get out. I didn’t have enough time to say everything I wanted to say. It was as if I wanted to give an entire full day workshop in forty five minutes because I had a perfect audience of people who really wanted to hear what I had to say. I got it all in but it was too much information packed into too short a period for people to absorb. I gave out a lot of quick information but didn’t say much. I’ve been a public speaker much of my adult life and I should have known better.

Later in the day, I attended a presentation given by a personal trainer named Nathalie, who, in my opinion, is one of the most competent trainers in the business, not just for her technical ability, but it the way she communicates with clients and classes. Her message was about How to Simplify Exercise. And that’s precisely what she did. She wanted to demonstrate that exercise can be enjoyable, something that a person might just look forward to doingrather than a “chore”. She had everyone in the room, mostly older adults,moving their bodies in a way that energized them on the spot, and filled them with a burst of endorphins (those natural “feel good” chemicals produced by your body instead of a lab) and made those in the audience, at least for the moment, actually feel good about exercise as well as just plain feeling good. Even those in the room with “built-in aches and pains” were able to do the simple group of movements she taught. They enjoyed it, and some went home feeling good enough about the way they felt after the short session, that they might just start fitting some of those movements into their daily routine. Everyone enjoyed her message and everyone benefited. The point was that she was able to take what most trainers make complicated and made it simple and easy to understand so that her audience actually wanted to act on her message.

Nathalie’s talk made me realize how easy it is for me to complicate something that doesn’t need to be complicated to be effective. Nathalie and I both preach the same message, but she did it in a way that made me realize just how complicated and unnecessary many of the things I say are. After all, the goal of what I am doing is to make older people Come Alive with Vitality and Personal Energy. Older adults want to feel alive, look alive and keep living that way for a lot longer than they thought they could . . . right up until they die. They want to avoid long, lingering illness, be strong enough to prevent falling, or at least to catch themselves if they do. They want to be able to get down on the floor and play up close with their young grandkids. . . and be able to get back up again. Or get in and out of a car without a lot of agony and effort. It doesn’t have to be difficult. Moving your body should be simple and easy. Older adults understand that moving their bodies can make them feel good both in the moment and over time. But they feel it takes up too much time and effort to get any real benefit. Natalie’s talk may have convinced those who heard her to think otherwise.

Thank you Nathalie for getting some of my thinking back on track and making me realize how much I have complicated the teaching process.

By the way, Nathalie has written a great book of Daily Wisdom. Her book, Daily Enlightenments, 365 Days of Spiritual Reflection, by Nathalie W. Herrman and can be viewed and purchased at http://tinyurl.com/kbkjdtz .  Her website filled with daily motivational messages is http://enlightenmentdaily.blogspot.com. My wife and I both highly recommend the book. And to comply with the new disclosure rules, I get no compensation if you buy the book. I just like it.

Thank you for reading.

This article is an overview, not a detailed treatise on rest and recovery. The principles are simple but apply in different ways to different people. Some people need more rest and others need less. While there are overall principles and rules of thumb, it is still an individual matter.

Here are some basic principles of rest and recovery:

• Muscles grow and rebuild at rest rather than during exercise.
• As seniors, you need more rest between exercise sessions if you are doing strenuous resistance exercises. The rule of thumb, or starting point, is 48 to 72 hours ( two to three days) between strenuous exercise periods.
• If you choose to be a performance or master’s athlete, then you will need more rest between exercise sessions. If master’s competition is your goal, work with a trainer who works with master’s athletes. You are dealing with an entirely different exercise and fitness scenario.
• The more vigorous the exercise, the longer the rest and recovery period until you become “acclimated” to the exercises. Different people need different recovery periods based on their own individual needs.
• Let your body rest. When you first start exercising, it will take longer for your body to recover. As you continue your exercises over time, the periods in between exercise sessions can shorten.
• Your body will speak to you and tell you if you need more time to recover. But if you become over-zealous, chances are you won’t notice what your body says – or you won’t listen.
• If you don’t get enough rest or don’t recover long enough, your physical resistance will be affected. Your immune system can temporarily weaken; your resistance to chronic illnesses can decline until your body catches up.

How about Sleep? Sleep is a slightly different story. Your body needs sound sleep to maintain energy. The people who study sleep give us some guidelines, but we tend to disregard them. For example these experts tell us that seniors need between seven and nine or ten hours of uninterrupted sleep each night. But that’s difficult to do as you get older. I don’t know about the ladies, but most of the men I surveyed said that they get up once or twice a night to pee.

These experts also recommend a room in complete darkness and no sound: no night light, no lighted clocks, and no phone chargers. Sure. And complete silence? My wife and I listen to the artificial sound of ocean surf rather than traffic noise and sirens.

The natural human rhythm is to sleep when the sun goes down and wake up at first light. Some of us come close in the Summer during Daylight Savings Time, but for most of the year, the lure of Reality TV and action shows is too much of an attraction for early bedtimes.

Does all this sound deliberately vague? It is. Studies A, C and E say that as seniors, you need less sleep as you age. Studies B,E and F say that you need as much as, if not more sleep than your younger counterparts. What’s the correct answer? It’s whatever works best for you. Test and listen to what your body tells you. Then keep doing it.

In fact, if this entire nine part series has sounded a bit vague it has been deliberately written that way. There are simply too many contradictory studies and too many differing opinions on each of the topics in this series, to be able to provide specific “one size fits all” rules. We are all responsible for listening to, understanding, and then acting on the feedback we get from our bodies. Each person is different and while I would like to be able to be more specific, the solution to your health, fitness and personal energy situation is within you: your judgment, your ability to be reasonable and honest with yourself.

You know what you shouldn’t eat. You know you should exercise and move your body. And you know how much sleep works for you. So maybe now is the time to do the right thing, take positive action, self-actualize, and Come Alive fully – Now!

And as for rest, recovery and sleep? You’re a senior . . . You’re allowed to nap. Thanks for reading.