Did your competent? doctor get you recovered enough to do this fast walking?
NO? So, PURE INCOMPETENCE THEN!
My doctor knew nothing about recovery and did nothing. Which is why my gait is still screwed up; 15 degree leftward angle of left foot, no push-off, no free swinging lower leg, hyperextension of left knee. Can't do fast walking until these are fixed or I'll destroy my left knee.
This will never occur in your hospital, too worried about you falling.
Researchers spent 16 weeks studying adults with an average age of 79. Here’s the surprisingly hopeful takeaway
If you rest, you rust.
When we stop using muscles—metaphorical muscles or physical ones—we tend to lose the ability to use them. A few examples:
Since I’m talking about personal habits and skills, I’ll add one of mine. I used to run marathons, a full 20 years ago. But I had one kind of stupid injury during a light run the week after I ran one of them.
And, to be honest, I never really 100 percent recovered.
I had all of this in mind when I came across a recent study showing what happened when older adults with signs of frailty were encouraged to walk a little bit more briskly during supervised exercise sessions.
Short version: Those who walked faster were more likely to become less frail.
Writing in the journal PLOS One, researchers described an experiment involving residents of retirement communities around Chicago. They enrolled 165 people, with 105 ultimately included in the analysis. Their average age was about 79.
I spoke with the study’s lead author, Margaret Danilovich. She’s a physical therapist who conducted the research while an assistant professor at Northwestern University. (She is now director of clinical programs at Agilon Health.)
For years, she told me, there had been a tendency to treat frailty as something that only gets worse. And, to avoid asking too much of people who already have limited strength and endurance.
But her experience working with patients made her suspect that “maybe this hands-off approach was not actually helpful for older adults.”
So, the researchers randomly assigned retirement communities to one of two walking programs. Participants in both groups participated in individual, 45-minute sessions with trained research assistants, three times a week for 16 weeks.
One group walked at a casual pace. The other was encouraged to walk as fast as they safely could, aiming for roughly 70 percent of their maximum heart rate.
At the end of the experiment, about 70 percent of participants with follow-up frailty measurements in the faster-walking group improved by at least one frailty category.
That compared with about 46 percent in the casual-walking group.
Frailty here is something researchers actually measured, using grip strength and questions about fatigue, appetite, mobility, and physical activity. Improvement meant moving from frail to pre-frail or non-frail, or from pre-frail to non-frail.
Look, I find this research hopeful, but I also hope I’m a long way off from having to worry about something like frailty.
But it has me thinking about the things I want to stay proficient at, and whether I’m actually doing them often enough.
Or if maybe I could even turn back time, through sheer effort.
As Danilovich put it, we should be asking “What’s the appropriate challenge for people? And for people with frailty, it’s often a lot more than we think they’re capable of doing.”
I wouldn’t pretend that I’m going to start running marathons again just because I read a study.
Although …
Anyway, if there are things you want to remain able to do, you probably have to make room to keep doing them—and sometimes ask a little more of yourself while you’re at it.
As a wise man once said: “If you rest, you rust.”
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
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