The Science of Fitness Podcast
Welcome to the Science Of Fitness podcast where we aim to inspire you to live a healthier and more fulfilling life as we share evidence and anecdotes on all things health, fitness, performance, wellness and business.
Hosted by Kieran Maguire, Co-Owner and Director of Science Of Fitness with an Undergraduate degree in Exercise Science and Masters degree in High Performance, the podcast includes guests and friends of SOF from all walks of life sharing their knowledge and stories within their field of expertise.
Join us as we provide listeners with digestible and relatable educational tools and entertaining stories to inspire a healthier and more fulfilling life.
The Science of Fitness Podcast
EP 8 The Solo Series - Your Fitness Longevity Checklist w/ Kieran Maguire
Our conversation continues with a deep dive into the world of cardiovascular fitness and strength, tailored for those over 50. Explore how simple pleasures like walking and golfing can be powerful tools for longevity when combined with thoughtful approaches such as zone two training and HIIT. Learn the transformative power of compound strength exercises like deadlifts and squats for building a stable, robust body that resists falls and injury. As we guide you through these insights, you'll find yourself inspired to shift focus from short-term aesthetic goals to long-term functional capabilities. Equip yourself with the knowledge to not only survive but thrive, ensuring a vibrant and active life no matter your age.
Welcome to the Science of Fitness podcast, where we aim to inspire you to live a healthier and more fulfilling life, as we share evidence and anecdotes on all things relating to health, fitness, performance, business and wellness. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Science of Fitness podcast and again, another solo series episode. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about the fitness longevity checklist. Longevity is all the rage at the moment and, for those that work in the space, longevity, as we understand it, is going to be the new frontier of health, using exercise as one of the key pillars of preventative mechanisms for all-cause mortality, mental health and wellness and actually physical enjoyment of your life. In today's episode, we're going to discuss the four things you need to be working on and you need to know about when it comes to longevity and its relationship to fitness. Again, there is plenty of information out in this space, but these are a couple of the key criteria that we look at for our population that we work with here in our over 50s program. So, for those of you that are over the age of 50 and looking to improve your physical capabilities, looking to maintain your physical capabilities, this one's for you. For those of you that work with people in the older population. This one is for you. For those of you that work with people in the older population, this one is for you.
Speaker 1:The four key areas we really like to consider when it comes to over 50s populations and those that are interested in the longevity scope include grip strength, and that is probably the most spoken about, I suppose, indicator of physical health and longevity. Second is ankle range of motion. Third is aerobic fitness and fourth I refer to as compound strength. So let's start at the beginning grip strength. As we all know, grip strength is a key indicator of overall muscle health and a predictor of healthy aging. It's linked to mobility, cognitive function and lower risk mortality. Research has shown that each five kilogram drop in grip strength increases the risk of death by 16% and cardiovascular mortality by 17%. Maintaining strong grip through regular exercise can help preserve independence and reduce the risk of cognitive decline and disability in older adults.
Speaker 1:So what do you do for your grip strength? A couple of the key things that we like to use include pulling exercises, and that can be everything from an inverted row using a pair of gymnastic rings, a TRX or a bar, right through to your dumbbells, single arm rows, your reverse, fly positions, anything that requires you to hang on to something and squeeze, if you don't have access to a gym or a trainer. If you're looking to improve your grip strength and you want some sort of means to do so, you need to be looking at things that you can pull on. Wrap a towel around a bar or a post and lean back against it and do some pulling exercises. Simply just hanging on to things. Going down and finding the monkey bars at the local park and hanging on to those or doing some sort of pulling towards it is one of the best things you can do. The second one, and one that we use all the time and quite regularly I've used this personally in my own training is simply just hanging and lengthening out the period with which you can hang.
Speaker 1:Now, don't underestimate the difficulty of hanging your dead body weight on your hands. If you are incapable of hanging for 30 seconds, that should be your number one priority when it comes to your strength and your training. How do you get yourself capable? Well, simply a modified position. By again using a pair of gymnastic rings, a bar that's maybe at chin or chest height, hanging on and sitting into a squat position so it's supported, not your entire body weight is on your hands is one of the easiest ways to start to build the actual strength, endurance and tolerance. Ultimately, for a hanging position, once you can hang for 10 seconds, do intervals of 10 seconds on 20 to 30 seconds rest hanging, building to 20 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds really should be the benchmark for everybody. And then, once you're able to hang for 60 to 90 seconds, you can then look at different modalities of hanging, be it straight arm now moving to a bent arm position, so floating your feet off the floor at the top of maybe a chin-up, and then maybe start to look at eccentric chin-ups and lowering and then being able to pull yourself up and down. If anyone over the age of 50 can achieve at least one chin-up, we can almost guarantee their grip strength is going to be in the 90th percentile, and that's a little anecdotal experiment that we've run. If you can complete one chin-up and you're over the age of 50, you're going to be in the 90th percentile, so understanding that the ability to squeeze and pull is directly related to your grip strength.
Speaker 1:Another thing that I like to sort of use and refer to when it comes to grip strength is when you're just hanging and pulling. It's one end of the spectrum. When it comes to the muscles in your forearms, which is ultimately what we're testing, not only taking into account your fingers, but the health of your wrists and your grip strength is a really important factor. So starting to look at mechanisms with which you're pushing your body weight into your wrists and your hands is another way to actually improve your grip strength and the overall health of the muscles in your forearms and your hands. Coincidentally, these wash up to a little bit more of your ability to handle a push-up type pattern get up and down off the floor and so forth but it all starts with your hands. Putting your hands on the ground, pressing up and down in your push-up type shapes is a really important way to start to build strength in your forearms and in your wrist, building a more robust system and then ultimately actually improving that grip strength and overall ability to move. And suddenly you can see how that scientific relationship of grip strength and all-cause mortality, general wellness is so heavily related and so important. If you don't use it, you will lose it. It's as simple as that, and so hanging, pulling and pressing are the easy ways for you to just continually improve your grip strength.
Speaker 1:Other modalities include farmer's carries, include taking the flight of stairs once you've done your shopping and just looking for incidental opportunities to start to pull and hold on to carry things. You know as much as you know a polite person might offer to carry the bag for the elderly lady. You should insist on carrying it yourself, at least for some portion of time, just to continually increase the stress or the work through those muscles so that you don't lose the capacity to do so, because at some point in your life you might find you need to be able to be strong enough to yank a bag off a shelf or whatever it might be. This is when it counts for Moving on to the second point, ankle range of motion, and this one's spoken a little less about, and this really falls into the balance category. What's spoken about quite often is falls and the risk associated with regular falls. We want to mitigate falls risk as much as possible, and so some of the means and mechanisms that are discussed when it comes to ankle range, discussed when it comes to resisting or preventing falls, is strength and range of motion in sort of the hips and the knees, and it's also about foot speed and jumping and sort of getting yourself used to it. And well, yes, they're all well and good.
Speaker 1:If you lack ankle range of motion, it's going to compromise your ability to organize your and prevent a fall, to absorb force and then generate force out standing in and out of a chair. An ankle range of motion is something that a lot of us don't really think about. We wrap our feet up in shoes and just sort of hope for the best. Improving and maintaining a healthy ankle range of motion is critical to maintaining good balance. Ankle mobility plays a critical role in balance and stability, directly influencing the risk of falls in older adults. Limited ankle flexibility reduces the ability to make quick adjustments during movement foot speed, increasing the likelihood of losing your balance. Studies show that poor ankle mobility is strongly associated with a higher risk of falls, particularly in individuals with weaker postural control, making it essential to maintain and improve your ankle flexibility to reduce falls risk and promote safer mobility in aging populations.
Speaker 1:And so what can you do to improve your ankle range of motion? One of the easiest hacks we have is simply sitting yourself down into a squat, be that assisted on a wall or with a sort of bar or couch next to you you can rest your arm. But just sitting down at the bottom of a squatting range of motion and staying there for 30, 60, 90 seconds it's going to create a metabolic wash up which promotes blood supply. And that is where all the magic really lives, because it drags down nutrients and minerals into the peripherals, be it your ankles and down towards your feet, and it also acts as a flushing mechanism so that we can promote blood supply the entire time. When there's a compromise in blood supply, a compromise in movement, that's again when we stop using the tissue and the muscles and the joints, and if we stop using them you start losing them, and so simply sitting in the bottom of a squat for longer periods of time is my best and easiest recommendation. Second to that, you can do deliberate stretches of the calves which do something, but not a whole lot, and passive stretching juries kind of out.
Speaker 1:It's necessary for some people that have neural tightness and structural tightness, and then some people have great flexibility but lack range of motion, and the difference in the flexibility versus range of motion is the ability to access and have control. We've got a lot of people that, through a passive stranger stretch test, we can get a lot of range, but then when you do an active one, when there's a bit of load applied, they lack the range that they once had. Passively, when we're moving life generally, there's a load associated with the range that we require, and so being able to move through those ranges of motion under load and with strength is critical and an important factor to consider when you're considering your mobility. The other thing you can do is work on what's called your dorsiflexion, so that's band around your feet and it's pulling your toes against that band towards your shins. Working on the muscles that dorsiflex at the ankle tibialis, anterior fibularis group, etc. They actually help your ability to improve your ankle range of motion and get movement through that joint. So those are isolated base movements that you can really target the specific muscle groups that are involved in those ranges of motion.
Speaker 1:And so taking a little bit of time at the end of your exercise session, maybe at the start, and really deliberately moving the joint, training the muscles that give us better range of motion, is something that I highly recommend. Obviously, calf raises, both on two legs and one leg, hanging heel off a step, is something I recommend. Getting blood flow. Getting stimulus into the muscles that help us move our calf and a big part in our ankle is another really easy access way. If you're standing in the line at a coffee shop doing a couple of calf races, breaking your knees forward over your toes and asking for a little bit of that stretch mechanism in the back of the leg, that's going to do wonders for your ankle range of motion, and the more you move it, the better it'll get. So look for ways and look for reasons to be moving and challenging that ankle range of motion all the time. From there we sort of lean into a bit more of the generalized areas of consideration, and aerobic fitness being the main one.
Speaker 1:Aerobic fitness is crucial for cardiovascular health, as most of us know, and it's crucial for reducing the risk in chronic diseases, playing a significant role in healthy aging. Again, a lot of this stuff we know. Higher aerobic capacity measured by VO2 max is associated with lower mortality risk. It's as simple as that. For instance, a study found that for each one milliliter millimole per kilogram increase in VO2 max corresponded to a 15% decrease in all-cause mortality. And so maintaining aerobic fitness also supports better heart and lung function. It improves energy levels and enhances mobility, helping adults remain independent and reduce risk of heart disease, diabetes and cognitive decline. Again, it's that same notion of if you use it you won't lose it. And so if you require your cardiovascular system to be functioning well through exercise and intentional cardiovascular exercise, it's going to function well when you're not intentionally exercising but might require your cardiovascular system.
Speaker 1:And that's where that incidental exercise element comes into play. Going for a walk, playing golf, recreational activities of any kind can be considered as incidental activity. Having good cardiovascular health through deliberate training is going to make those activities one more enjoyable and two more accessible. And I think that's the most important part For a lot of the people in our program. Here, both in our over-50s program and in our Elevate program, they're training not to look a certain way, not to achieve a certain goal when it comes to the weights they're lifting, but just to enjoy the activities they love skiing, surfing, golf, walking just to be able to engage with them, particularly as their career starts to wind down and they have more time on their hands that they can spend with friends, with family, with loved ones, with grandchildren, nieces, nephews. Being able to be physically involved is such an important part of our ability to maintain relationships, and so your physical health is critical. Cardiovascular forms a major part of that. You go on that holiday where you want to go for lots of walks and see a city. You need to be healthy enough to get out about and about to do that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1:And so how do you improve your aerobic fitness? We like to break it into two categories. You've got your general aerobic training, your zone two training, which again is another big buzzword, but it's just doing longer, intentional bouts of exercise, be it 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes, up to 60 minutes, sitting on a bike, a rowing machine, on a brisk walk, maybe even running if that doesn't cause too much physical pain, but actually just involving yourself, where your heart rate is about 50 to 60% of your max. One of the best ways to work out what heart rate zone about 50 to 60% of your max One of the best ways to work out what heart rate zone you want to be doing your aerobic training is you take 180 less your age plus or minus by 10 beats per minute. You want to stay in that zone for that 20 to 30 minutes. So it should be almost conversational as you do it On the other side of the spectrum, you've got your high-intensity interval work that also improves your aerobic energy system.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's considered anaerobic, meaning lacking oxygen. It's going to be a bit more metabolic in its nature. It's going to burn more glucose and burn more energy and recreate energy without the presence of oxygen. But ultimately in the interval, in the resting bouts, your respiration rate is going to be higher, musculoskeletal, you're going to be asking more questions of your lungs, your heart's going to get more work. So doing the anaerobic work is going to have an improvement on your aerobic fitness in general, and that's involving bouts of 80%, 90% max intensity. So really going quite hard on whatever it might be the bike, the walk, a run, some interval-based work for 10, 20, 30, 60 seconds and then having an equivalent rest of that. So be it. 10, 20, 30 seconds of work, 20 seconds rest, maybe 20 seconds, 30 seconds of work, maybe one minute of rest. Being able to re-engage and generate the same amount of force or as close to within those efforts as possible is a great way to improve your anaerobic and ultimately your aerobic energy so that you can then again continually engage in those bouts where you might be playing backyard cricket and you've got a bowl and over. There's going to be a couple of intense intervals and being healthy enough and fit enough to go and do those intervals multiple times. That's the whole intention. You can make the most of your summer.
Speaker 1:And then, finally, the point that I'd like to raise is your compound strength, and I say this because it gives me an opportunity to talk generally. One of the main things, the main concerns, particularly for the females over the age of 50s, is the change in bone density, and so the best way to improve your bone density, we now know, is actually improving your base level strength, improving your ability to generate and push and pull and absorb forces using your muscles, because those muscles pull on bones and they increase the density of that bone as a result. Now, on top of that, you've got, when it comes to bone density to stay on the topic for a second you've got impact, which you know, using jumping and hopping, and deliberate impact-based work is necessary, but it's not to say you must do that and you must start there. Particularly if you're in osteopenia, osteoporotic areas, you might need to start a little bit more gently and build up the tolerance to handle impact-based work and by simply pulling and pushing on strength, on weights and resisting loads, you're going to be putting stress through the bone which causes the relaying and the thickening of the bone. So it's not to say it must be impact or it's not going to work. There is going to be many a mechanism at play to increase your bone density when doing strength training without too much impact. Once you've got enough strength in your system to handle and absorb heavier forces ie doing impact work by all means go in that direction.
Speaker 1:Compound strength exercises like deadlifts and squats are crucial for maintaining functional strength, which support daily activities such as lifting objects overhead and standing up and in and out of a car. These movements engage multiple muscle groups, enhancing overall body strength and stability, which are the critical components when it comes to moving well. Studies show that older adults who regularly perform strength training exercises can improve their muscle mass and reduce the risk of falling by 30 to 40%. That's not even really talking about the ankle range, which I mentioned before, but just simply lifting weights reduces the risk of falling by 30 to 40 percent. Maintaining the ability to lift weights off the floor promotes independence and reduces the risk of disability, helping to preserve mobility and functional physical function as people age. Physical independence is such a strong point that I would like to stick on for a moment.
Speaker 1:We have people that come and train here in their mid to late 70s and they are physically capable of performing a lunge, getting up and down off the floor, and I often find myself pausing when I'm offering people a hand to get up off the ground after a set of work that we do on the floor. Let them get off the ground independently and regularly training. That again comes into that same mechanism of if you use it, you won't lose it, and it's the same idea when it comes to your compound strength in general. Every time we sit and stand out of a chair, we're performing some sort of squatting pattern. If you can squat with weights in front of you weights on your back, maybe your body weight even to a certain extent, depending on what age you are you're going to get up and down off that chair very easily. It's going to be something you don't even have to be conscious or think about.
Speaker 1:Versus, most of us know people that really struggle to get in and out of a chair at some point in their life because they've lost their physical strength. Turning around and doing your compound exercises, like your squats, your deadlifts, your lunges, your big pulling and big pushing exercises, is going to improve your ability to do compound based movements Getting in and out of a chair, getting low and playing with grandkids, lifting suitcases above your head when you're traveling and everything in between, helping move furniture, etc. And being able to contribute and being physically strong enough and capable enough to independently manage those little moments in life is one of the most important things that exercise gives people, particularly good strength training, and it's something that every single one of us should be considering, whether we're over the age of 50 and concerned about our longevity or not. Because I know a lot of young people that train for a little bit more of potentially an aesthetic reason and in doing so, are compromising their movement later in life and in doing so, are compromising their movement later in life. They might be agitating lower back issues, agitating knee issues, because they're not focusing through a broader lens.
Speaker 1:I look at exercise and go what do I want to be able to do in 10, 15, 20 years physically? And if I, you know, in 20, 30, 40 years can still do 5, 10 chin-ups, I'm going to be in an incredible shape at that point, maybe let's stop worrying about right now as much and let's worry about a 5, 10-year window and, more importantly, prioritize not getting worse. Physically, it's not always about getting better, getting better, getting better which has fed into us. It's actually about simply not getting worse, because at the age of 55, 60 years old, you can do a handful of push-ups, squat your body weight, hang off a bar. If you can maintain that physical capability for 10, 15 years, you're going to be in great shape in your mid to late 70s. And that's a nice way to consider all these four points your compound strength, your aerobic fitness, ankle range, motion, grip strength. When it comes to your training and your longevity, you don't need to run the next record on a marathon. You need to just stop yourself from getting worse and being able to run the marathon as an example and so sort of.
Speaker 1:To wrap up this episode, take a moment. When you're thinking about your training, if you're thinking about getting into training, if you're a little bit nervous and anxious as to where to start, grab the low hanging fruit. What drills can you do to improve your grip strength? What can you? Hang on, pull off, uh, pull on and pull and push off. What can you do for your ankle range of motion? Can you stretch and use your calves and your lower limbs a little bit more? Are you doing any aerobic activity? Can you get out and go for an extra walk? Or maybe you know, get, get yourself on a bike and check your heart rate and stay at a certain zone for 15, 20, 30 minutes.
Speaker 1:And then, what are you doing about your compound strength? Can you get up and down off the floor? Can you lift heavy things up and down off the ground? And are you deliberately practicing doing those activities? And if you are, and if you're in a planned, structured, structured program, if you're learning how to do physical activity safe, safely and not pushing the envelope too quickly, this one measured and controlled program, I can guarantee you'll be in a wonderful position from a physical health perspective for the next 10, 15, 20 years. Just keep adhering to that program and keep chipping away at your skills and at your movement and enjoy a really strong, healthy, long life. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening to today's episode. For more regular insights into SOF, be sure to check us out on Instagram or Facebook or visit our website at scienceoffitnesscomau. Once again, we thank you for tuning in to the Science of Fitness podcast.