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Last week, I wrote about an often overlooked portion of a person’s basic physical infrastructure than can cause problems specifically for older adults at the beginning of an exercise program.  Your ankles are another often overlooked weak point in the physical infrastructure for seniors. Yet your ankles allow your foot to be flexible  when you walk, run, or even when you are simply getting up out of a chair.  They help you stand upright and help you to  maintain your balance.  They help support the weight of your body when you stand.

Some of the ankle problems you may have encountered include:

• Numbness, and a “pins and needles” feeling in the area of your ankles are common problems among older adults.  This can result from poor circulation or possibly a nerve problem.  If this is the case, you probably should check with your doctor to see what the underlying cause may be.  Often the circulation problem can be cured with exercise.
• Ankles are weak or in poor condition. This can cause soreness, or more importantly can result in twisted ankles and falling.  Falling is the leading cause of emergency room visits among older adults over sixty.  You can shore up the muscles, ligaments and tendons that make up your ankle infrastructure with some of the exercises I describe below.
• There are ligaments and tendons and connecting tissue -surrounding your ankles.  Often there is inflammation.  Sometimes exercise and inflammation fighting alkaline foods can help.  Read that “more veggies”.  In other cases, your doctor may want you on arthritis medication.  Check with your doctor.

Here are a few simple and useful exercises to start you on your way to stronger ankles.  Start slowly.  Over time your ankles will become stronger and more flexible.

• Heel-Toe stretches/Windshield Wipers/Rotations. Sit in a chair or on the floor with your legs straight out in front of you, toes straight up.  With your heels on the floor, bend your ankles, pushing you toes away from you as far as you can.  Then pull your toes back toward you as far as you can.  Push and pull your toes back and forth just a little past your comfort zone.  Do this ten to fifteen times in a row.”
  After you have done ten or fifteen repetitions, keep your legs straight and your toes pointed up.  Move your feet back and forth like the windshield wipers in a car.  Do ten to fifteen each.Finally, rotate your feet in circles, ten times in each direction.  All of that will give your ankles a good workout.  They may be a little bit sore at first.  Just don’t overdo it.
• Calf Raises. Stand erect on the floor while you hold onto a chair or something stable for support.  Raise up on your toes with both feet.  When you come back down, pull your toes up off the floor.  Repeat this ten times.  This is actually an exercise for your calf muscles, but will strengthen your ankles as well – two for one.  When you get used to this, try the same movement on one leg at a time.

• Brisk Walking. If you haven’t walked for a long time, your ankles are in for a surprise.  They’ll probably be quite sore after a brisk twenty minute walk.  If you are walking moderately fast, you will walk one mile in twenty minutes.  Walk a little faster and you can do a mile in fifteen minutes.  That’s not dawdling down the path, that’s brisk walking at 3 and 4 miles per hour.  There are those who believe that fast walking is the best exercise an older adult can do.  It’s certainly one of them,

Do these exercises and your ankles will get stronger and more flexible.  You’ll add another layer of prevention when it comes to avoiding falling.  Believe it or not, you’ll find it easier to get up out of a chair, particularly a deep or low chair when your ankles are stronger and more flexible.

Next week, I’ll write about another often overlooked but important part of your physical infrastructure — Your neck.  I’ll show some simple ways to strengthen your neck and make it more flexible.  It might just help you tighten your sagging chin and jawline too.

Thank you for reading.

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Bob McMillan is a blogger, writer and speaker on the subject of Health, Fitness and Personal Energy for Active Seniors.  He also holds a Personal Trainer Certification, and designation as a Senior Fitness Specialist from the National Academy of Sports Medicine.  Bob is 75 years old.

In the next few articles, I’ll be writing about some of the physical infrastructure issues older adults might encounter in starting a new exercise program from scratch or after a long layoff.

Whether you begin exercising with weights, machines, stretch bands, or just your own bodyweight, you will discover that one of the major points of weakness will be your wrists.  If you haven’t exercised for a long time, or are just starting out, you will find that your wrists are likely to be sore no matter what exercises you do.  Whether you are pulling or pushing, lifting or carrying, you will find that there will be stress and strain on the muscles, tendons and ligaments in your wrist.  When you are pulling, lifting or carrying things, you are stretching and lengthening the muscles, ligaments and tendons.  When you are pushing (pushing up to get out of a chair for example), you are putting pressure on your wrist at various points in its movement cycle.  And when you are twisting your wrist such as when you open a tight jar lid, you are putting major stress on your entire wrist, forearm and even your upper arm and shoulder.

Unless you have advanced bone brittleness (osteoporosis), your wrists should be able to bear a reasonable amount of weight.  If you have major bone density problems, you will need to work on your wrist strength before putting a lot of weight on your wrists.

Flexibility is another challenge with your wrists.  You may have difficulty moving your wrists throughout their entire range of motion.  If that is the case, there are exercises you can do to improve their flexibility.

Here are a few simple starter exercises you can do to help with wrist strength and range of motion:

1. Place your hands about  six inches in front of your face with your fingers and palms together as in the traditional prayer position.  Pushing your fingers, palms and heel of your hands together, rotate your hands side to side, and forward and back. Then rotate them in circles as much as you can.  Do this for around ten to fifteen seconds at a time, and do it one or two times.  Doing this will move your wrists through their entire range of motion with tension on both wrists the entire time.
2. Put your arms straight out in front of you with your palms facing forward, and with your fingers toward the ceiling.  Bend your wrists forward and back through their entire range of motion.  Do that for ten or fifteen cycles.  Then, with your hands in the same position, rotate your hands and wrists as if they were the windshield wipers of your car, as far as you can in each direction.  Do this ten or fifteen times.
3. Sit in a straight back chair with your hands at your side on the side of the seat.  Push with your hands and arms as if you were trying to lift your body off the chair. Make sure your weight is on your wrists. Don’t lift your body from the chair at first but put as much weight on your wrists as you are comfortable with.  Your ultimate goal will be to lift your body a few inches straight up off the chair, but start slowly and take a week or so before you try to lift your entire body weight.
4. Table Top.  Sit on the floor with your legs straight out in front of you, your knees slightly bent, and your arms by your side, fingers facing forward.  Tilt your head back and lift your butt off the floor until your body forms a table.  Your arms and your lower legs and feet act as the legs of the table and your flat torso as the table top.  You will be spreading your bodyweight throughout your arms and lower legs and your torso will get a great exercise at the same time.  Return to the starting point and do it for five repetitions, increasing to ten as you continue to do the movement over time.  This movement works the back of your arms and your shoulders too, but it’s a great exercise to strengthen and test your wrists.

Those are simple wrist strengthening exercises with the last one being the best.  Give them a try and see how they work for you.  After a while, you can open that jar as well as have stronger, more flexible wrists.  Start slowly and take your time.  If you have sharp pain, stop.

Next week, I’ll talk about your ankles:  How to strengthen them and how to increase their flexibility.

Thanks for reading.

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Bob McMillan is a blogger, writer and speaker on the subject of Health, Fitness and Personal Energy for Active Seniors.  He also holds a Personal Trainer Certification and designation as a Senior Fitness Specialist from the National Academy of Sports Medicine.  Bob is 75 years old.

Want more Personal Energy and Vitality?  Want to feel better fast?  Want to make fighting disease easier and develop a stronger immune system?  Here’s a quick way to do it:  Eat a more Alkaline diet.  Many of you have heard of the importance of an alkaline diet but don’t know what it is or why you should do it.  So to discover what it is and why it works to make you feel better . . . read on.

You know how your body temperature can vary up and down with an average healthy body temperature of 98.6 degrees?  Well there’s a similar scale that refers to the acid-alkaline balance in your body.  This is called pH balance or acid-alkaline balance.  Although pH ranges are different in various parts of your body, the most important for health and personal energy is the pH value of your blood.

By the way, the term pH means “Potential Hydrogen”.  If you are interested in the chemistry, you can find a less than elementary explanation online at Wikipedia.

The pH scale ranges from 0 to 14 with 7.0 being neutral, 0 being the most acidic and 14 being fully alkaline.  The pH for stomach acid is around 3.5 (highly acidic), but that’s not relevant to our energy level as discussed here.  The ideal blood pH is 7.36 which is slightly alkaline.

How can you tell what your blood pH is?  A regular blood test from your doctor or medical lab is the most accurate.  You can also purchase pH strips at most pharmacies for both urine and saliva measurements. Follow the instructions and the results you get will be close enough.

What are the primary benefits of an alkaline blood pH?  They include:

• Increase in personal energy and vitality
• Feel better overall
• Empower your immune system to help ward off disease
• Often you will lose weight as your blood pH becomes more alkaline
• And many more.

The way to get to a more alkaline blood pH is through the food you eat.  Most Western diets are highly acidic.  Other factors include alcohol, caffeine, stress and many medications.  The most important way to develop a slightly alkaline blood pH level is by being aware of the pH makeup of various foods and making simple adjustments.

Meats, dairy (including cheeses) and sugars are considered to be the biggest acid producers.  Green, leafy vegetables are the most alkaline with most other vegetables still high on the alkaline scale.  Most fruits are somewhere in the middle with some being slightly acidic and others more alkaline.  As for grains, there still seems to be inconsistency among nutritionists as to the pH range.

Here’s a surprise.  Lemons, limes and Apple Cider Vinegar provide an alkaline response in the blood.  that’s why you often read or hear about drinking water with lemon or Apple Cider Vinegar to help promote weight loss and nutritional detox.

Nutritional scientists have produced strong evidence that a diet of alkaline foods will help prevent chronic disease.  They seem to agree a diet that is 70 to 80 percent alkaline and 20 to 30 percent acidic will provide an ideal alkaline blood pH.

And here’s a real kicker.  Although all the evidence is not in, there is evidence to indicate that most cancers cannot survive in an alkaline environment.  This bears out evidence that many people claim to have cured their own cancer by changing to a heavily plant based diet, and have significantly cut back on, or eliminated, the acidic meat and dairy from their diets.  (Disclaimer:  That’s not a recommendation.  It’s simply evidentiary, based on claims of others).

You can find numerous charts and graphics online which provide the blood pH values of various foods.  I suggest you take a look at them.

There is strong and increasing evidence of the nutritional and medical benefits of adjusting to a more alkaline diet.  It simply means increasing your veggies and cutting back on meats and dairy.  I strongly suggest that you look closely at your own diet and see where a change might be beneficial.  We all can use more energy and vitality.  We all would like to feel good as we age.  We all would like to eliminate chronic disease.  This could be one of the ways for you to do them all.

Thank you for reading.