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Jamie:
I have known Janna for quite a while and she is the perfect person to have on this part two of our episode about you’re just getting old. And so we did a pretty long episode on that term, that phrase and all the questions around it. And I wanted to have Janna on here because she does have a special expertise on this that I thought could bring a very interesting angle and a lot of background to all these questions that we’re going to ask today. So most of these questions were asked in our Facebook group, and we’re going to cover them in depth and then as things come up, we’ll talk about that as well. So Janna, why don’t you introduce yourself, tell us about yourself, your business and why you’re an expert we want to have on this topic if you’re just getting older, or you’re just getting old.
Janna:
Hello! We’re all getting older, and older. My name is Janna Freedland Zellinger, officially that’s my full name. I have a business doing in-home exercise, which is now virtual exercise for older adults. Advice and experience in the physical therapy clinic a degree in integrative physiology and specialty certification in personal training senior citizens.
Jamie:
And you are one of the few personal trainers that I have met who wants to treat senior citizens like that as your population of choice. It’s not the people who are stuck with and you’re cringing and you’re bitching and moaning behind their back. Like that is who you love to work with every single day. You probably wouldn’t even work with a young person if you could do both.
Janna:
Older adults because their goals are so genuine, they’re so genuine. They’re such interesting people having lived longer and had more experiences. The work is fulfilling with them because they want basic functionality and other bodies. They’re not trying to lose 20 pounds in a week for a school reunion. They just want to play with their grandkids and continue to use the stairs.
Unknown Speaker 2:23
So Janna is gonna be perfect for this because our clients are pretty much 30s 40s 50s And then you know less as we’re getting as they’re getting older. And Janna is starting to start in their 50s and kind of go up. So we have really kind of covered all of that age range when you start to hear somebody say you’re just getting old, older, right? And so we know it’s BS. We know there’s no science behind that. It’s a term but the thing about old lifestyles is when you hear it enough, you start to believe it. And so until somebody comes and just smacks you and says What are you thinking? You fall in that trap of just letting that be your excuse? And we don’t want that to be people’s excuse. So today we’re gonna talk about a lot of different questions around athleticism and fitness and health and aging. And what you need to understand in order to age your best and not let you’re just getting old, be your excuse. So let’s start. So the first question that was in the Facebook group was the differences between muscular and biomechanical imbalances and structural issues as you age so Janna, you want to take this one first?
Janna:
Well, I’ve always deferred to you Jamie as a physical therapist, and you can’t really get to where you want to be physically without fixing all your structural issues. Some of them are just kind of there you know, like having one light longer than the other. So that kind of structural stuff leads to the imbalances in your muscle tone to the way that you use your body. So you always want to try to do the best you can to curb what you were born with and some of those things you can help with, like putting a lift in your shoe. And then when you sort of iron out those details you can work on your body with exercises to get that imbalance back to where it should be.
Jamie:
And I explain this as you know structural issues do happen as you get older. So you will get arthritis if you’re older than 20. You know, a third of college basketball players have severe arthritis, but you have no pain. And so the structural issues that we find don’t necessarily lead to a lot of problems. So, but one thing that can happen is like let’s say take the hip joint which is a ball and socket joint. With arthritis, the bones tend to kind of grow which does minimize the space in the hip joint. However, that being said, if you stay active with keeping your muscles and joints, everything moving well and keep those imbalances at bay. Those structural issues really play a minimal role in your movement and health. But basically, you can get on top of this and minimize those effects through taking care of yourself and maintaining your muscle in biomechanical imbalances. The next question is, how do we maintain functional strength as we age?
Janna:
So a lot of people, it might sound old-fashioned, but I have room to be old fashioned. You want to improve a craft to do that craft repeatedly and you work on it. So if you want a better gait than you go walking, if you want a better running stride, you work on running, you know, given certain tools, the right footwear and things that we can help along the way. But not the brand practice makes perfect.
Jamie:
Yeah. Yeah, I think it does depend on the term functional stuff thrown around a lot. It’s to the point where I don’t necessarily know what that question really means. And so I think it really does. Are you talking to the audience
Janna:
We’ve been working on it all.
Jamie:
Alright, so the next question is how do we maintain our range of motion and stretching? What are your favorite ways to maintain your range of motion as your clients age?
Janna:
Well, I send them to PT a lot. Alright. I really think intelligence is important to do. We include stretching into ways we do the static stretches to try to improve muscle lengths. We do the dynamic stretches to send blood they’re basically the more you move, the more range of motion you have. If you’re sitting, your muscles get stiff. So trying to do the dynamic or movement based stretches helps keep the blood flowing to those areas and they move more readily. And the question too is how much flexibility do you want? Most people desire an amount of flexibility more than they truly need? And so we’re just trying to maintain, you know, a normal walking gait versus being lifted at four. And as we continue doing lunges and hamstring searches, that kind of falls in line.
Jamie:
Yeah, absolutely. And one little piece about dynamic stretching, because I mentioned this all the time, and everybody’s kind of like what dynamic stretching is. So how I define dynamic stretching is it’s a movement based motor movement that takes your body through a full range of motion. So let’s say you are playing soccer, you want to do movements that are similar to soccer that take your muscles and your joints to the full range of motion. So that kind of stretches but it’s kind of that gentle stretch with the movement and the whole idea there is not only that it’s movement based but that is priming you for those movements. So that there is some injury reduction risk with that specifically. So absolutely. I agree with that. I think that’s the way more people are going even professionals rarely will see them do static stretching. anymore. It’s not that there isn’t a benefit to that but it’s a different time and a different place for that and that’s a detailed topic and probably a topic about a whole nother podcast but Alright, so the next one is systems of injury recovery process. So one thing I’ve talked about a lot in the other episodes is that you don’t just have pain because you get alert. However, injuries are more common as you get older and I talked about why in the previous episode, but gentle for your clients that are injured and having some pain. What are your steps and moving them from pain and stiffness into that movement based athletic life that they want to?
Janna:
So, yeah, I think I will try my best to identify the reason for it. And that involves asking a lot of questions because if I could crawl inside of my client’s body and feel for them what it is and tell myself what’s going on. That would be ideal. Obviously I can’t. So I pose a lot of questions to find out. What they feel it during is it’s all the time if it’s sharpshooting if it’s dull aching. These questions answer a lot for me as to whether or not I think we can manage it with exercise or if they need something a little deeper, like a structural change with physical therapy, sometimes even surgery is the answer if it’s bone on bone arthritis or something that’s just not fixable.
UnkJamie:
Yeah, and I would shorten that down to work with somebody who has been there before and knows how to help you out. So if you’re having that injury and you just don’t know what to do, find somebody who has helped people before that is not your friends or family. Somebody that’s just passing by. Because while they are trying to help, I guarantee you that will not work. So
Janna:
and everybody’s different. So just because somebody went through it doesn’t mean it’s the same situation.
Jamie:
Absolutely. What works for somebody’s back pain is not necessarily going to work for you and for yours. There’s literally hundreds of causes of back pain and the likelihood that like if that works, there’ll be one YouTube exercise on how to fix back pain, right. We launched 100 million times as
Janna:
well. You know, we always want to start with easy being like, oh, even just this summer a stretch made my back pain go completely away and I didn’t think that was possible. But I started doing a stretch and my body told me it’s what I needed. And I completely heard it that way. So sure. You definitely want to try and do things that are kind of those quick, easy fixes before you turn to something like surgery or something more expensive. And that’s always worthwhile to try.
Jamie:
Yep. All right. So this next question is, what are the effects of age in the body? And how do we maintain function with increased age?
Janna:
I want to go back to like, what do you want? You know, some people just don’t care to be as mobile as they once were. For the resting and enjoying so I just what is it that you wish to maintain to study and then we work on those things. You know, if somebody’s doing CrossFit competition, obviously you need to be building a lot of strength. If you just did earlier, want to lose your hair, and we’re just going to do basic strengthening exercises to maintain the shoulder girdle and keep a healthy rotator costs
Jamie:
Depends on the person based on their goals. Yeah, yeah, I remember probably the one and only time I engaged in a little bit of ageism and I had a patient that was 92 years old, and I didn’t get to talk to her. And in the script, he just said, hamstring strain from walking and I was like, okay, she’s already in bad condition. The hamstring strains are more aggressive injuries. And so this lady came in and I tended to sit and I looked up because there’s multiple people in the clinic. And I thought it was somebody else’s client because this lady was very spry. And eventually a guy went up and the doctor said, Hey, I don’t remember her name, but hey, are you Suzy and she was like, Yes, I am. Getting turned up was a 92 year old Pilates instructor who not only taught Pilates like I was thinking like, you know, Pilates. She also did Catholic calisthenics classes, step by step aerobics, that’s what it was, step aerobics classes and 92 years old, was more fit than 40 or 50 year olds, and we didn’t do an exercise of having to exercise with her. She was so athletic, maybe at a high level like 20-30 years old and she taught me a lesson on, you know, don’t read a book by its cover. This case I didn’t get here, but by our script. Yeah, but we wouldn’t have been doing those things if her goal was to just walk once a day for a mile, you know? Yeah. We’ll see. I think you bring up a good point. It’s, what do you want, but the effects on the body over aging are not that big actually. So strength. If you maintain you can maintain your strength within 3% per decade. So what that means is, let’s say you can squat 200 pounds. If you maintain your strength and you don’t try to gain it when you’re 30. If you can do it for you to actually start after defeat. So if you’re 50 you can squat 200 pounds and 60s, I tried to maintain that you can still squat 194 The same thing goes for cardiovascular benefits. The same thing goes for most stretching, you could probably get more flexible if just continue doing it. So basically it’s just an active thing.
Janna:
in your mind. Your mindset. I told my husband the other day that I tend to do a workout that I haven’t picked up since I was probably 25 . I’m 35 now, it was just a really intense video that I would do. And I did it again. And I actually surprised myself with how well I was able to do it. And I did it for a while during quarantine. Not having the option to go to the gym. And I told them I said I can’t tell if I’m just not quite as good as I was 10 years ago or I just don’t want to be and it was that I didn’t want to be. I just didn’t feel like pushing myself quite as hard as I did them. But that’s my choice. And that’s the level that I’ll be at.
Jamie:
Yeah, absolutely. That brings up the next question, which is the importance of form and mechanics to avoid injury as we age.
Janna:
I think that’s important no matter what age you are.
Jamie:
I agree 100%; I don’t know that it’s necessarily more important as you age. If anything, I think when you’re younger, you’re more likely to ignore form and you’re more likely to get injured because of that because you are not worrying about injuries as much as you are when you’re older. So if anything I think you know I see less technique and form injuries as people age because it’s more on that than just throwing up a weight for instance.
Jillian:
Yeah and I think there’s kind of like that tough mentality of like, push through the pain and ignore like you said, ignore that this hurts, whereas as an older person they might have the experience to say last time I felt that shoulder twinge it wasn’t so good. I should probably stop right now. Take a break, readjust.
Jamie:
Right? I think a lot of it comes down to ego, right? Like you’re not trying to impress anybody in your 50s 60s you’re doing it for yourself or for anybody else. No can be stronger than the next guy you don’t even know next to you. We Oh all right. So what are some common injuries of aging? So that is kind of the next question is What are common injuries and aging and how do we avoid them?
Janna:
Again, I think common in all ages, you would probably know better than I would Jamie or what you’ve seen come into your doors but I know shoulders. The shoulders are being one and then they move in 360 degrees basically so we can kind of pop those out of place at times there’s all those muscles and ligaments in there. So maintaining the integrity of all this soft tissue and muscle tone in there is key. Obviously I see a lot of nice stuff over time with my clientele is that you’ve got gravity working against you. So sometimes that cartilage wears away and we’ve got some arthritis issues down the line as well. Anything that takes a lot of your weight bearing, I think can over time become an issue if it’s not well maintained.
Jamie:
Yeah, I would say that’s where I see the biggest issues with aging is if you kind of let things go you haven’t been as active and then you try to do something. So you’re getting in your 60s and you’re not active and then you try to help your son move across the country or something and you’re lifting a heavy dresser drawer or something like that. It’s more of those activities of inactive activity that tend to injure people. If and we’re a lot better than almost any state because people generally stay more active here than they do in other states.
Jamie:
I would say you know you are in their 70s and 80s passing you want to fourteener which is humbling to say the least. Right? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. If you want to pass us young, young kids like jacking up the mountain. take dance classes and zoom classes. Yeah, but I think it is when you don’t say active and strong and movable and flexible that that’s where you get injured. So if, if that’s what you get into, the way to avoid it is to stay active, to stay moving.
Obviously, we can’t always be doing the things we want to do all the time. Sometimes you take breaks from skiing because it’s summer and then we want to get back or whatever the highest score. I always find it’s really key to avoid injury by warming up, giving your body the due diligence and building things very gradually. Instead of trying to pick up where you left off to scale back a little bit, you build it back up again to get it and then chances are you’ll likely get the hell out of where you left off because you didn’t waste time there. See an injury
Jamie:
So the next question is more about treatment for injuries. As you age it doesn’t. The only thing is it takes a little bit longer just because of the healing process just takes a little bit longer as you age. You know, when you’re 20 if you add yourself probably find within a week to do that when you’re 50. He has got to take a couple of weeks with that same injury primer taking just a little bit longer and that’s normal. It’s not to be worried about generally the nice thing is people who are older, take care of the body a little more, they value their bodies a little bit more because after the time you started turning about 35 year, you have an injury, you kind of realize, because that injury can’t do what you want to do. And so you start valuing your body a little bit differently. And you know, once it’s taken away from you, it’s eye opening, right? I had my first season last year, and it was scary at first, I went through a series of injuries. And you know, I was snowboarding and I took off the mask. It wasn’t really tiny, but it was tiny. Well, you know, I was like, I will tell you that I will ever be able to do that again. Of course I was fine. Eventually. But it’s scary. And so you know those things and so, we evaluate, you get it taken care of faster. So even though the injury process sometimes takes longer the overall process because many times it’s actually faster. So those people who value their body tend to come in faster for physical therapy. They’ll seek people out like yeah for help in getting back to things they want to do. And overall that process is just that much smoother. So
Janna:
yeah, and when they do their homework and beauty
Jamie:
and vice versa like we don’t deal with personal trainers like yourself because you were another set of eyes for us. And you can help them because we can help them with technique. And we always like to communicate with people like you because there’s several different reasons but one I’ve had a couple clients that tried to play with the personal trainer off me was like Oh, Jamie said that I don’t have to do this exercise today. And then the personal trainer who I’ve already texted you showed him the text and he said all right. So the last thing I want to share with you. I’m always in contact with you because you’re probably more than likely seeing them more than I have. So there’s usually a lot of things that you could share with us that really help us as our background information far as to tell you this, but when he does this, he shifts his weight, whatever because they
Janna:
noticed that they’re doing it themselves. are important, but it’s your obligation, working at the PT office or just giving even too much information that is better than not that we know about your body and what kind of makes you tick the way you do the better.
Jamie:
Yeah. All right. So we’ve got one final comment, and we’ll talk around it more so the question so he said, I hate it when people tell me this when you’re just getting older, so you’re just tired all the time. So what is your
What are your thoughts on this because this is the reverse situation to my ideal clients who keep telling me otherwise. I just feel kind of tired
Janna:
had a major change in his routine here from getting out walking every day and taking care of whites that kept his body moving to sitting at his desk all afternoon, never getting out. And I’ve told them to break up sitting since we all know sitting solvers for you. And when we talk about all those factors, there’s never just one answer playing into it. At once. We couldn’t identify the reasons for his lack of energy and had nothing to do with his age.
Jamie:
Yeah, right. So there’s reasons you mentioned like hydration. There’s exercise, there’s differences as you age, there is strength as you age. So if you let go, the same exercise years ago is now more strenuous on the body and it’s going to cause you more tired I think you know as we age. And so as we change we need different hydration, nutrition, sleep, stress, we need to adapt things and if we don’t change we may have less energy. However, it’s not because you’re aging because you’re failing to adapt to the age to put in the work but you’re not taking advantage of everything you could to get that energy back.
Janna:
Well, and I think it’s like we have this finite supply. And I mean, we can’t just be Energizer bunnies all time, unfortunately. So we allocate your energy towards certain things. In my eyes, what you want to do for the peak of his day, he’s sitting at a desk with a lot of energy. But then when he wants to work together, then you don’t feel quite as risky as he is. And that’s the part he wants to do. He’s very good about a self self motivated exercise program. On the days we don’t meet each other. We said maybe scale back a little bit around the routine to allocate that energy for the things you really want to do. Work out every day and have energy for the workout to give you energy for life. So apply that energy toward your life.
Jamie:
Yeah, it’s the difference between early risers and night owls, because everybody doesn’t have their peak energy times. At the same time, people’s peak athleticism, I have to look this up, but I believe it’s between them. But it does change as you age. So I need to tend to shift. That’s why kids sleep early in the morning in schools because they’re actually more tilted towards that night at night out every morning so they tend to have some sort of priority. We work your schedule around what you want, instead of forcing it to happen sometimes.
Yeah, listening to your money is key for everything.
Jamie:
Well, that’s that’s most of the question. We have time to do some other things that you haven’t mentioned. I know you’re not doing it currently, but you also talked in classes to talk about that.
Janna:
We are doing and currently we are here. Everybody learns to zoom so quickly. So the Vaseline classes are meant for patients with Parkinson’s disease. They’re super fun. It’s filled with great communities. They just log in and we work on skills that are good for the generational stuff that I’ve set up. Everybody, so if you’re working with clients outside of that, if you have Parkinson’s or know someone who would benefit from those classes, you can find us online to associate.
Jamie:
So, Jan, if anybody that has listened to this will work with you before. It has parents that they should work with, or grandparents that they think should work with you. Where
Can they find you? Yeah, so my website is www dot fitness partners. My business’s fitness partners Colorado and you can find my contact page you can email me at Jana. Free plan AMD and I love to talk to anybody thread, podcasts, whatever you call
them. What would you do today helping us around those because it is such a commonly held belief that just because you age you have to be deconditioned and have to be in pain. You know you’re destined to walk or something. TV station that people watch is
Jamie:
Thank you for coming. And you know, maybe we’ll have you on. Thank you everybody for listening and check Jana out and what she can do for you your parents or your parents
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