IFYL2GO: Pain and Mobility Part 1

In this episode we discuss:

Acupuncture for back pain.

Exercises to reduce knee pain.

The impact of pain on your brain.

And many more topics that will affect your mobility.

For more information, and to sign up for our private coaching, visit tesh.com

Our Hosts:
John Tesh: Instagram: @johntesh_ifyl facebook.com/JohnTesh
Gib Gerard: Instagram: @GibGerard facebook.com/GibGerard X: @GibGerard

Transcript

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Gib. Hello and welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm Gib Gerard here with another if y'all to go episode of the show, but this week, we're doing something a little bit different. This is part of something that we're gonna be doing in the future. This is our first episode in a pain and mobility special. That's right. We're gonna take information from the radio show, from intelligence for your life, about pain and mobility, how to manage it in your life, taking giving you all of the best information on how to take that, that research and apply it to help you manage your pain and keep your mobility as we age. So we take that for you. We scoop it up, edit it up, put it into a podcast that you can take with you wherever you go. So I hope you enjoy our Ify out to go special pain and mobility episode. This is the beginning of a series, so we'll have more of this in the future, but for now, ladies and gentlemen, here is me and John Tesh. John Tesh, would Gib Gerard, to give one in three older adults now living with chronic low back pain. Ah, I am too. Most of us have been told the same thing, take the pills, live with it. It's just aging. But a major study just published in the Journal of American Medical Association followed hundreds of older adults with back pain and found that acupuncture actually produced meaningful relief without a side effect. Researchers are now saying it should be a first option, not a last resort. I mean, look, I've never done it. Have you ever done acupuncture? Yeah, I have Yeah, I have it. But the people I know who have swear by it. It's the best thing ever. It's pretty creepy when you first get started. Yeah, but, but look, I know that feeling I don't have, I don't have chronic back pain, but I do have, I do have a mat that has a bunch of needles on it, no. And whenever my back is sore, I say, I've never done acupuncture, but I actually have a mat that almost stimulates it, and I lay on that and it really I feel all of the muscles in my back release, and that is, that's all I want. That's all I need. And that's what muscle relaxants are doing, right? They're getting that, that tension to release and actually help you get to the bottom of the issue. And of course, acupuncture would work, yeah. So research saying, try it acupuncture. So Gib, for 50 years, doctors have told people with bad knees, the same thing. Rest, Ice Elevate, and now it turns out, and you know, this, a brand new analysis of nearly 700 patients found that the single most effective thing you can do for chronic knee pain is the opposite of rest. It's called isometric loading, holding a muscle under tension without moving the joint. We talked about this 69% reduction in pain isometrics. This is where so isometric just means you don't move it right without movement. Isometric, it's a, it's a, you're you're just getting the muscle tense. But this is something that we also know, that a lot of joint pain is because of a weakness in the muscles that surround it, and if you want to stabilize a joint, you need to get the muscles around it stronger. Yet another reason, another way that leg strength correlates with better health outcomes as we age. You have to work on it. You've got to stay strong. And one of our favorite exercises, if you're healthy enough to do it, in order to create that, that strength in your legs we talk about in the coaching calls all the time, and that is a wall sit. That's an isometric exercise that strengthens the muscles around your knee so that your knee does not take the brunt of every step that you take. Well done. You know, I've got that point, Gib, where people at the hospital, I say, when's the last time you had a fall? And I say, two weeks ago, falls are now the leading cause of injury death for Americans over 65 Yeah. Not car accidents, not heart attacks, falls. Researchers figured out why so many prevention programs aren't working. A study and frontiers in aging discovered that chronic pain literally rewires our brain's balance system, the part of your mind that keeps you upright is being drained every single day by pain that you have learned to ignore. But here's the deal. Pain is stress, right? If you're in pain chronically, you're in stress chronically, and stress is terrible for your nervous system. It's bad for your health overall, but it's particularly bad for your your neurological health, and that means that your brain is going to start to deteriorate right inside of your skull, because you are under that sort of chronic stress all the time. It's why you need to manage your pain if you if you want to live a longer, healthier life, we just, we know that it's true. I would also add into that that people are probably driving less because there's less stigma and taking Ubers, and there used to be in cabs everywhere. And on top of that, we're staring at our phones, so we're falling down more, and we don't have the leg strength to catch ourselves if we start to fall. Yeah, but I mean, I've heard people say before, doctors say before that that pain shrinks our brain. It does, it ruins. It just absolutely starts killing neurons. John Tisch would Gib Gerard and most people think a stiff back in the morning is just part of getting older. Well, it's not a new study from the University of Hong Kong used brain scans, and they found that poor sleep shuts down something called the glymphatic. Static system, which is our brain's overnight cleaning crew. When the system goes offline, memory suffers, and our body wakes up more inflamed than when we went to bed, which means that a bad night's sleep isn't just leaving us tired, it's leaving us in pain. Fascinating. How much have we learned over the last few years? I mean, just in doing intelligence for your life, the amount that we've learned about the importance of sleep and what it correlates to, it correlates to your waistline, it correlates to your muscle growth. We know those because you're going to eat, you're going to eat worse foods. You're going to crave high sugar, high energy foods when you haven't slept. But we also know that it can affect your cardiovascular system, your cardiorespiratory system, and obviously your body's ability to clean out the to clean out all of the byproducts of metabolism during that it's supposed to do during your sleep. If you have bad sleep, you're not cleaning that stuff out, which means you are going to be inflamed, in pain, and you're more likely to make bad decisions throughout the day. We just need to get more sleep. That's one of the reasons why we say, you know, don't eat too late, and be careful with the alcohol, because it will have a bad night's sleep. Yeah, and then you can't remember anything. You can't do anything. It's awful. Gib, I was just doing this earlier today because I had read this before. I brought it to you, walking backwards, and I almost killed myself, but I walked next to a wall. I was able to hold the wall. It's interesting. A study published in the Journal of orthopedic surgery found that one of the most effective ways to reduce knee pain is to walk backwards. People with knee osteoarthritis who added just five to 10 minutes of backward walking three times a week had significantly less pain and better knee function. It changes how the muscles fire and takes pressure off the exact part of the knee that wears down with age. How about that? Yeah. So when you walk forward, a lot of us, we land on our heel, and we're going to put a shock of energy all the way through the bones in our leg. And osteoarthritis is that wear and tear of the cartilage end caps of the long bones in your leg. When that starts to go away, every step is painful, but when you walk backwards, you're actually using your muscles to handle your weight, because your knee is already bent when you come backwards. So that means that every step you're taking is actually engaging the muscles, which we know is the key for less leg pain, less knee pain overall. So the more you walk backwards, the more you're going to engage those muscles, which means even when you walk forward, you're going to be in less pain. John, touch with Gib. Gerard, that's intelligence for your health. Gib, I wanted to bring this to you, researchers at Mass General Brigham Hospital just published something that's going to surprise a lot of people. They tracked older adults for 19 years. It was a big study, and The finding was that each additional hour of daytime napping was linked to a 13% higher mortality risk. Morning naps in particular were the biggest red flag, long, long, frequent naps aren't restorative. They're often a warning sign that something deeper is going on with sleep at night or with overall health. A lot of folks that have sleep apnea end up falling asleep in the middle of the day for hours, yes, and and prefrontal cortex dementia like these things red flags. These are red flags that your brain is deteriorating because you're not getting the sleep that you need. So we need those extended periods of sleep at night. We need those full REM cycles if we're not getting them because and that, and the signal for that is we're tired during the day, right? We want more coffee. We want more energy drinks. We want we're going to mask it with caffeine, or we take a lot of naps. That lets us know that we're not getting the restorative sleep that we need, and then boom, before we know it, we're in the doctor's office getting an MRI and and, yeah. So do it now. Do it before, before you start to notice the cognitive decline, yeah. And we also know that lack of sleep creates pain as well. Same thing all throughout our body, inflammation. Want to tell you about a new study in the Journal of American Medical Association. It looked at nearly 20,000 older adults, I found something striking. Gib people at high risk for sleep apnea had a 44% higher chance of poor mental health, oh, depression and anxiety. Most of them had no idea they had it. Snoring could be draining the brain of oxygen night after night and showing up as damage to the brain. The worst thing is, when you're alone and you don't know if you have a partner sleeping next to you, is like, Hey, you just held your breath for two minutes, right? They're gonna know that you also that you're waking them up with your snoring, that you're you're, you're, you're falling yourself awake. You know that feeling of falling and waking up suddenly? Yeah, so all of those are huge telltale signs that you're actually not getting the proper sleep, that you're not actually getting the oxygen to your brain while you're sleeping, and that, of course, is going to have consequences for your mental health. We know that depression and anxiety, these are linked to lower, lower certain neurotransmitters, dopamine, serotonin, and so when we are missing those neurotransmitters, when our brain is not cleaning itself out properly, boom, our whole day is shot, we're we're going to be more emotional, less less receptive to new information, all kinds of issues. Again, it's all inflammation. It's all going to be, it's going to be chronic in our system, and we have to get it checked out immediately. Yeah, that's really good, Gib. And just so just remember that if you wake up, I mean, if you're, if you're napping for like, an hour of twice a day, things like that, or if you're exhausted during. A day you need to go to your doctor get a sleep test. Yes. So we've all heard 10,000 steps a day, Gib, but researchers at Harvard just looked at older adults and found that the magic number is much lower than that. Good news, people who hit just 4000 steps a day cut their risk of dying from any cause by nearly 40% those who got 7000 their risk of cognitive decline dropped sharply too, which means the bar for enough movement is way lower than the fitness industry has been telling us for years. So it doesn't have to be 10,000 it does. And look, here's the thing, here's the good news about this. So many of you hear 10,000 it sounds like too much, so you do zero. What this is telling me is that anything is better than nothing, that 3000 is better than zero. You get benefits with every step that you take. So if you're going to do 100 steps, if you're doing zero steps today, you do 100 steps tomorrow, that's better. If you're doing 1000 steps today and you do 3000 tomorrow, that's better. And there are direct positive consequences for your health when you just add a few more steps to your routine. So what we're saying is between 4007 1000. Again, from this big study, people who hit just 4000 steps a day, they cut their risk of dying from any cause by nearly 40% we want to tell you there's a simple test physical therapists use to predict whether you're at risk of a fall, and you can do it in your living room. It's called the five times sit to stand you sit in a chair, cross your arms over your chest and then stand up and sit down five times as quickly as you can. Research published recently found that if it takes you longer than 15 seconds to do this, your fall risk goes up significantly. So no machines, no doctor's visit, just a kitchen, kitchen chair and a stopwatch telling you something most people don't find out until they've fallen amazing. Well, look, we know we've talked about this for a very long time. We know that when it comes to cognitive decline, when it comes to cancer, metabolic disease, all of these things, these slow killers that are that are taking us out one by one, that the earlier we know about it, the better the outcome we just we know that for so many different diseases. So here is a great test that you can do before you start to see a symptom, just to know, just know how, how my brain is functioning, how my fall risk, how my fall risk is presenting. And you can maintain your mobility. And you can start to do exercise that help maintain your ability, your mobility. If you know this, I will say that if I think about getting up and down five times in quick succession. I'm not worried about my leg strength or my falling. I'm worried about the fact that I'm gonna pass out, because when I stand up too quickly, just one time, I start to see little stars on the side of my vision. That's why it's a chair. All right, time for more mobility. Here the CDC is saying one in four older adults falls every year. Most of them never saw it coming. I've fallen a couple of times in the last two years. Researchers have identified the single biggest predictor of a future fall, and it's not age, it's walking speed that makes sense. A recent study found that adults over 65 who are slow walkers had dramatically higher fall risk and shorter life expectancy. Gait speed reflects the health of your muscles, your heart and your nerves, your balance system and your brain, all working together. When any of them weakens, you slow down. So you got to go see your doctor if all of a sudden you're walking behind everybody. That's look. The thing is not that you can that walking fast, it makes you healthier. It's that when you walk slower, it's an indicator that something else is going on. It could be pain, it could be a weak muscle in your legs, it could be a cognitive issue. All of those things are just indicators. So if you, like you said, if you're starting to fall behind, you got to find a way to get to a doctor. You got to find a way to get tested to make sure that you know all of these things are hunky dory. And again, this, this underscores, and we always say walking a lot is good for you, so it will help maintain your health if you're walking a lot, but if you're noticing that you're slowing down, boom, you know you need to get to a doctor. Amen. That's it for the show today. Thank you guys so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate, comment and subscribe on Apple podcast. Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. It helps us out a lot when you do that, we also try to respond to every mention the show, every DM about the show. You can tell us what you think about it, because ultimately, we do the show for you guys. So thank you so much for listening. You.