Rethinking Fitness: The Overlooked Significance of Stability and Balance

Staying useful for as long as we can, brain training our central nervous system to improve our balance, demystifying PT, the difference between stability and balance, and more. In today’s show, I’m here to share my personal experiences surrounding stability and balance — two aspects that are often overlooked. This episode is all about the journey: from me hopping on one foot to enhance balance to exploring physical therapy and sports for more robust body stability to learning how this fosters longer, better, and healthier lives for all of us. It’s about harnessing the power of movement and control.

As we age, the risk of injuries from falls increases alarmingly, making stability and balance crucial for our overall health. This episode sheds light on these important elements of fitness and emphasizes how their role goes beyond the traditional gym routine.

Thank you to our sponsors:
Timeline Nutrition — our favorite supplement for cell support and mitochondrial function. Listeners receive 10% off your first order of Mitopure with code AGEIST at TimelineNutrition.com/ageist.
InsideTracker — the dashboard to your Inner Health. Listeners get 20% off on all products at InsideTracker.com/AGEIST.
SRW Labs – Science Research Wellness — improve your cellular health. Listeners receive 20% off all products with code AGEIST20 at SRW.co.
LMNT Electrolytes — our favorite electrolytes for optimal hydration. Listeners receive a free 8-serving sample pack with their purchase at DrinkLMNT.com/AGEIST.

Quotes
“If we feel confident in our bodies, if we feel certain that we are stable, doing whatever we’re doing, we’re going to be able to be more useful.”

“Doing things like playing tennis, playing pickleball, all of these things require an element of stability, and one of the things to keep in mind is that a lot of our physical faculties are going to decay pretty much no matter what we do. So we need to keep them at the peak level for as long as we can.”

“Then we have balance, and balance is a critical part of stability, but it’s not the same thing as stability.”

Listen to the SuperAge podcast wherever you get your pods.

Connect with David Stewart
Website
Instagram
Facebook
LinkedIn
Email

Full Transcript:
Welcome to SuperAge. My name is David Stewart. I am the founder of AGEIST and your host. On the SuperAge show, we talk about how to live healthier, how to live longer, and how to be happier. And who doesn’t want that? Today’s show is brought to you by InsideTracker, the dashboard to your inner health. Go to Insidetracker.com/ageist to save 20% on all their products. Today’s show is also brought to you by LMNT, my favorite electrolyte mix. It’s what I put in my water in the morning and it’s what I put in my water at the gym. Go to drinklmnt.com/ageist and receive a free 8-serving sample pack with any purchase. Today’s show is also brought to you by Timeline Nutrition with their breakthrough product, Mitopure, the first clinically-tested Urolithin A supplement which is showing tremendous results for mitochondrial health.

Welcome to episode 142 of the SuperAge show. This will be dropping on July the 12th 2023. We are back in Park City, Utah, this week. Last week, we spent a couple of days in Los Angeles, which was wonderful. We saw some of the team there and were able to do some profiles and some photos and, you know, I lived there for 15 years, so it was really nice to be back Los Angeles. For any of you who don’t live there, it is a very difficult city to get one’s mind around. I’ve lived in a lot of big cities and I think Los Angeles is probably the hardest one to orient. It’s the hardest one to make friends in and sort of understand. Like, where do you go to eat? Where do you do stuff? Because everything is hidden in Los Angeles and the Angelenos are not really as forthcoming as, say, a New Yorker is. I mean, you stop a New Yorker on a street corner and you just say, like, “Hey, where’s your favorite dry cleaner?” And you’re going to get a 10-minute conversation about that, the pluses and minuses of all the neighborhood dry cleaners. It’s sort of not like that in Los Angeles and it’s true that a lot of it is because of the car thing and I don’t know what to say. I mean, the traffic in Los Angeles, to put it mildly, is dysfunctional. So to get from the west side to the east side at around, you know, five o’clock, you’re looking at an hour, an hour and a half, which is just bananas. But it’s the way it is and it is a great city and the weather is really great and there’s a lot of great stuff there. So, you know, you go there and you just kind of figure it out. To anyone who’s visiting Los Angeles or thinking about moving there, the lifestyle tip is: set up your life so you don’t have to drive your car much. You want to sort of stay in your little bubble there and not be going back and forth because you’ll lose your mind. But otherwise it’s a great city. It was wonderful to visit there this week.

On the show, we’re going to talk about a couple of subjects that don’t get much attention, which I have been learning personally the last few months are very important, and they are stability, and part of stability is balance. And I’m going to tell you a little bit about my journey into these things in a few minutes after we have a quick word from a couple of our sponsors.

Today’s show is brought to you by SRW Laboratories out of New Zealand. Their vision is to extend human healthspan. SRW Labs curates the very latest in science and research to formulate premium nutraceuticals that support your cellular health, especially as you age. Working with their scientific advisory board, they seek to understand and address the causes of aging at a cellular level, providing support across 12 bodily systems with an approach that is unique to SRW. They know that doing one thing well, such as eating healthily, won’t have the desired effect on your health. This is why SRW seeks to educate people on the factors that influence aging and, more importantly, biological age. Use the code AGEIST20 at checkout and save 20% off any order. Go to SRW.co. Use the code AGEIST20 at checkout, save 20% on all their products. This show is also brought to you by LMNT, spelled LMNT, my favorite electrolyte mix. One of the great findings that I learned last year was the importance of electrolytes in my water, especially sodium. Of course, if you have hypertension or you’re prehypertensive, this is something you want to pay attention to. But for most of us, we’re probably lacking electrolytes. And my favorite one is element. And guess what? They just launched grapefruit. I’m actually drinking a element grapefruit right now And that’s awesome. Go to drinkelementcom slash AGEIST. Get a free eight serving sample pack. That’s D-R-I-N-K-L-M-N-T dot com slash AGEIST and get a free eight serving sample pack with your next purchase.

So we’re going to dive right into stability and balance and my journey and the sort of issues I’ve had with that, and the reasons why we should really bring these things to the top of our fitness protocol. And I just want to remind people after we have a little chat about that we’re going to do, just try this. So right now, let’s get into this idea of stability and balance. What is this and why is it important? So let’s start with the scary stuff. If you fall, depending on your age, the mortality rates go up like dramatically 70, 75, 80, 85. But if you’re over 75 and you fall and you break your hip I’m just reading stats from a finished study here you have a 10% mortality chance in 30 days, 21% in six months and another 27% in a year. So that’s a little over 50% mortality rate in a year. If you break your hip, I think that with an older population, you have a number of things going on there. You have perhaps osteoporosis, you may have balance and stability issues, you may have strength issues, you may have vision and hearing issues, but what seems to happen is that when and I’m not a doctor, i’m not a scientist, this is just what I’ve read is that when you break a large bone like that a hip, a femur, something like that your body says okay, survival first. We need to put all of our bodily energy into repairing this limb because you know, the person here isn’t going to be able to eat, you know, feed themselves, take care of themselves. We need to get this bone healed, and it’s at the expense of the energy that’s allocated to things like the immune system.

So, you know, when people die, it’s not so much from blood infection, something associated with injury itself, but it’s oftentimes influenza, pneumonia, things like that that the immune system just can’t manage. That, along with bone repair Now, assuming you’re not over 75, still doing something like breaking a wrist, breaking an arm, a femur, hitting your head from a fall none of this is good. We don’t want this. No, this is definitely something to be avoided because there will be a healing process Depending on what kind of break you have. This can be something that can really affect you the rest of your life. The other thing about balance and particularly stability these are two different things. I would like to say that balance is part of stability. If you’re not using your body correctly for instance, just getting out of a chair, and perhaps it’s your habit to always load one side of your body that’s what I’ve learned I do You load sort of like in my case, the right leg more than the left leg and then you’re going to build imbalances all through the chain up and down and that’s eventually going to cause problems. It’s going to cause overuse injuries, it’s going to cause joint problems, posture problems, all kinds of things. So those are the bad things that can happen if you fall.

But let’s talk about being useful, which is something we talk about all the time here. You need stability to be useful. If somebody says to you hey, can you come over and help me with whatever, if you’re tipping around, you’re not going to want to do that, you’re not going to be able to do that, you’re going to be a liability. I think that one of the big things here for all of us, as we get a little older you know, our 40, 50, 60, whatever this idea of being useful and being able to fulfill some kind of purpose in our lives. This involves, at a base level, our bodies, and stability is really key in this. That if we feel confident in our bodies, we feel certain that we are stable, doing whatever we’re doing, we’re going to be able to be more useful. Now, this also is going to impact the quality of our life. If we’re stable and we feel strong and we feel balanced, you know we’re going to be able to go hiking. We’re going to be able to go ride bikes. We’re going to run around. We’re going to be able to pick things up and not feel like we’re going to fall over. So you know, quality of life is a big thing. We’re going to be able to go hiking, for instance. You know a lot of people like to go hiking. Hiking is great, but hiking involves moving on an uneven surface. You need to have stability to do that. Doing things like playing tennis, playing pickleball, all of these things require an element of stability, and one of the things to keep in mind is that a lot of our physical faculties are going to decay pretty much no matter what we do. So we need to keep them at you know, the peak level that we can, for as long as we can. If we let them just atrophy early in life, it’s going to be really hard to get them back. Let’s just talk about stability.

So let’s just break down stability. What is stability? In my mind, it involves really four different elements. There’s what I would call small muscle controls. The other part to this is the big muscles, which is strength. So you need to have a certain amount of strength in order to be stable. So that’s core strength, leg strength, upper body strength, the big muscles. So you have the small muscles, which are sort of the control ones. Then you need the big muscles too to, you know, keep the big parts of the body in line. Then we have balance, and balance is a critical part of stability, but it’s not the same thing as stability. I see it as sort of a subpart of stability.

And balance, for instance, is being able to stand on one foot and close your eyes. What happens? That’s balance. Now I think we can further break down balance into different elements. So the first part of balance is sensing your feet on the floor. So those are the nerves in the bottoms of your feet. They’re feeling pressure through your feet and it’ll help you know, like, where you are. The other part of this is your inner ear. Your inner ear helps you know which way your head is, are you moving? It’s sort of like a built-in accelerometer there. And then we combine these things along with the other sort of sensing parts of your body. So your body is covered with nerves and you’ll be able to tell, like is your arm up, is your arm down?

You put all this together and you have really what’s sort of a large complex, a proprioception. It’s your whole body, knowing where your body is in space at any given time, which will is essentially balance. And if we think about how incredibly complicated this is, you know our brains are just such amazing things that they’re able to take all of this information and help us to move through space. And you can watch a toddler how, as they’re sort of learning, they’re getting the neural circuitry together to walk And we’ll take a step and they fall over and then another one. Maybe they get a little better, and then you know they figure out the whole walking complex And it just blows my mind how complicated that is and that we can do that. And then you know we can advance to things like tennis or other things. It’s really an incredible thing.

So my journey with stability began. I guess I really started to get into this about six months ago. So what I had done was this rather quioxic thing for someone my age. I decided to do master’s ski racing. As you can guess, that involves a lot of stability And at the time I didn’t really understand that. I didn’t really get the sort of muscular control needed to do this And I came to where I am today, basically through my feet. When I started doing ski racing, i thought that as a reasonably adept recreational skier, that your foot is just sort of locked into a ski boot. It is and it isn’t. All the bones in your foot need to move so that you can feel what’s going on through the snow, through the ski, through the boot, and I felt that I wasn’t really able to move my foot and control my toes within the boot the way that I wanted to. So I sort of looked around and I found somebody online who was very good with feet. She told me a few things and some exercises to do, but there’s probably a lot of goodness out there in the world of online PT. To me, you really need somebody in person.

So I said thank you for your help. That was really useful, and then I sought out some other PT in real life. Now I happen to live in Park City, utah, and if you’re going to deal with stuff like orthopedics or balance or athletics or any of that stuff, this is a really good place to be, because the US Olympic team is here. There’s a whole ecosystem around this kind of thing here that’s really advanced, and I’d had an experience maybe 15 or 20 years ago with physical therapy. I’d hurt my shoulder and the insurance people as they would go to this facility And I got some people that they weren’t really very good, they weren’t very helpful. But here you’re getting people with like a lot of letters after their names. They have advanced degrees in physical therapy and they really understand how to look at the body and how the whole chain moves up and down.

So it starts in your feet and then it goes all the way up to your head. So what I thought was a foot issue there is indeed a component of a foot issue. I tend to pronate rather radically. I have flat feet because of wearing kind of squishy shoes for a long time. A lot of the nerves in the bottom of my feet they just sort of gone to sleep. Everything had gotten lazy. As the PTs looked at what was going on with me, they were like oh, yeah, yeah, i’m not going to go to the feet, but now you got other stuff going on. You got stuff in your glute mede, you got stuff in your lower back, you’ve got all kinds of stability issues with your hip, with your knee, with your ankle. We got to work on all that, and this was way more than I was planning on, but it was super helpful.

And this is one of the differences between doing sport and then just training in the gym, and I’m all for the gym. I love the gym. I’m in the gym. Can’t tell you how many hours a week I’m in the gym. I love it In the gym. What I’m doing is I’m building bigger muscles, which is good. I’m working on my aerobic capacity, i’m working on my VO2 max, i’m working on flexibility. I’m working on all these things, but I’m not necessarily working on balance and stability. And where these things really come out is when you do a sport. If you’re running, for instance, and your gait is a little off, you’re going to hurt yourself or you’re going to be a very inefficient running. Your neck will run very fast. There can be all kinds of problems that are going to show up, but they’re only going to show up because you’re engaging in a sport of some kind And I’m, you know. The same thing is true of golf, of tennis, of pickleball, really anything. Where are you using your body purposely, and that’s where this sort of stuff shows up. And so that’s really great. It’s great to do these kind of things because it’s going to show up things that aren’t quite right through the whole chain of your body The way you’re trying to be purposeful with an action, the way you’re trying to hit a tennis ball or a golf ball or your my sport, skiing.

If I don’t have stability, if I don’t have confidence in my balance and how I’m holding my hips, i’m going to be really reticent to do some of the things that the coaches ask me to do. And that’s what I found last year. They would ask me to do things and I would just look at them like how does that even happen? Because I couldn’t really imagine my body being able to do these things, even though I was pretty strong, i was able to pick up heavy stuff, i was aerobically very fit and I thought why can’t I do this Big plug for doing sports? I love the gym. The gym plus sport is great.

So I’m going to just describe a little bit about what they’re doing to me and what I’ve learned, and maybe this would will be helpful to you. There was, like all kinds of balance issues that I didn’t even know that I had. So they would have me in these evaluations One of the things they would have me do is I would be on one foot and they want me to hop forward and land on that same foot. And it was initially very difficult for me to even imagine how this movement would happen. And it took a lot of practice and it took a lot of work on stabilizing the hip, the ankle and the knee and then getting everything sort of moving in one motion. And then, once these elements were a little better, some part of my mind could actually imagine how that movement would happen. Now I can do it. I can’t do it the way. I mean I see people who are on the US ski team the way they do it. I’m not even in the same universe as that, but I can do it better. And one of the wonderful things about this stuff is that one can make really At least in my case, pretty Admittedly I was coming in from a pretty low level advancements in this stability and balance stuff.

In a way that’s it’s much slower to get stronger, like when you’re to Actually build muscle is quite a process. I mean, it can take a few years To build up muscle. You’re initially when you’re training, lifting weight or working on machines or something, what really what’s happening here is you’re training your central nervous system to recruit the muscle more efficiently. So seemingly you can like suddenly, if you haven’t done before, you’re suddenly lifting Way more weight than you were, like a month ago. But it’s not so much like your muscles are getting bigger, it’s just your central nervous system is working more efficiently and then you start to build muscle. Anyway. These Advancements in balance and stability can happen pretty dramatically quicker because what you’re doing is You know you are building some of these control muscles, but it’s more central nervous system stuff. You’re training your body. You’re training all those proprio sensors you have in your body and the circuitry in your brain That makes sense of all this. Like, once your brain understands that something works better, it immediately adopts that pattern. So that can happen pretty quickly. You do something three, four or five times and your brain says, oh wow, that was great. Look how we moved our body. Wasn’t that wonderful. Let’s do that again. Versus, you want to build up your glute muscle. Now. That can take Six months a year for you, consistent work. So this is actually really satisfying. I really like it.

I’m just gonna go through some of the stuff that they’re doing with me. Initially, there’s a stuff with the feet which is, you know, being able to move the toes Independently, being to pick up like a marble and move it. So I’m I’m working the muscles in my feet Which I hadn’t done before. All of my PT stuff is done barefoot, because we want to increase the sensation in the bottom of the foot, all those nerves. We have as many nerves in the bottom of our feet as we do in our hands, but we spend most of our time essentially having mittens on the bottoms of our feet and it just goes to sleep. So that’s not good. and I want to say I know I say this all the time but these big squishy shoes, hocus, they look so cool, they’re awesome, but I think wearing these big squishy shoes for any period of time is not so great for For any of this stuff that we’re talking about here balance, stability, proprioception, sensation through the bottom of the foot And I think that some of what I see out there as people get older, they’re like, oh, i need a squishier shoe. No, it’s sort of the other way around. I, you want something that’s going to give you a lot of neural feedback which will help you with your balance. It seems as though the PT folks there’s a certain progression that they want to go through, and so we start out with things that are really static stabilization. So these involve bands going. You know, there’s sort of a clamshell position or a fire hydrant position And they want me to hold this position for 30 seconds or a minute And there’s a band involved that I have to push against with my leg And then we move into.

Once that’s sort of dialed in a little better. Then we move to more dynamic things With increasing complexity. These are now involving standing on one leg. The other leg is sort of up in sort of a fire hydrant position And then I have a cable machine and I’m pulling on something with the other hand and try to keep all of this going without tipping over. It’s a little challenging And I think it’s going to get increasingly challenging. What’s super interesting here is that none of this involves what I would say any kind of heavyweight. It’s just mostly my body weight or these really squishy bands that they don’t want me doing any of that until I get these, the movement patterns, dialed in. So, for instance, last week we were doing just regular old body weight squats, no bands, no, nothing, bare feet And my trainer Diamond. Don’t you love a trainer named Diamond? He’s really awesome. What he’s doing is he’s teaching me how to do a squat by going directly down and directly up, and I thought that’s what I did, but he’s like no, no, no, no. You’re. As soon as you’re starting to go down, what’s happening is all your weight. You’re transferring it over your right leg and then you’re sensing it’s on your right leg. So you try to correct by moving more weight to the left side and you’re doing this sort of corkscrew motion through your body And this is all really bad. You’re just going to hurt yourself. So we’ve been working on this. Sounds like you know such a simple basic movement, right, but you know doing it wrong for 64 years. He’s a little bit of reprogramming.

So what they do is they take a couple of foam rollers and they set them up vertically on either side of my hips And they’re like okay, dude, let’s see you do body weight squat straight back and don’t hit the bumpers. Especially, they put on either side of me and you know, it took me like four or five times to be able to do that And like a lot of concentration, i’m going very slowly. I’m not holding any weight, but that that’s how this works. So once I was able to do that, my brain sort of clicks in. It’s like, oh right, this is how we can do this. We can do this more efficiently like this. And Daniel sort of tapped me on the shoulder, you know, tapped me in the waist, to just let me know like, okay, you need to move this over a little bit And that’s how we’re slowly progressing with this stuff. Now, all of this might sound like a lot of work and it sort of is a lot of work And there is expense associated with this, but it’s not dramatic, because I see my T-people probably every two weeks or three weeks And I think each session is about $90.

So there is some expense associated with this. But my feeling is and this is sort of how I it’s a value thing with me, and other people have other value systems. They’ll spend their time and their finances doing other things. For myself, i feel that my body is something that I would like to have around in really good working condition for as long as I can. So this for me is worthwhile And I understand, you know, other people have other value situations. They have other things that they need to spend their time and money on or that they wish to spend their time and money. But this is this is what I do, and I find I just get a tremendous amount of satisfaction out of, like, just moving my body through space. Just being able to do this stuff, i find is just, i don’t know, it’s kind of amazing And I, you know, i come to all this stuff later in life. I was not a particularly gifted athlete in any way. I was average or sub average, you know, when I was younger And I think I’ve sort of come to this post 50 or something I learned to surf when I was about 50 and I’ve taken up this ski racing thing in the last year at 64. And I it’s just, it’s a thing that I like And I know that if I want to be able to do this it requires a bit of a program.

We have to be purposeful with these sort of things. So right now I’m I’m being very purposeful with my, with my physical therapy and my training. I’m also pretty purposeful with what I eat and how I go to sleep and things like this. And you know, some people will say, like, where’s the fun in that Well, it’s a value thing To me. This is worthwhile and, i would say, something that I get a lot of mental stimulation out of. And I see people who don’t do this, who are my age, who just sort of let it all slide, and that’s fine for them, but I also see what their capabilities are and that wouldn’t be satisfactory for me. So I choose to live my life this way. I just want to wrap this up with a couple of other thoughts on this that the main thing our brains do is control our bodies, and the best thing you can do to help your brain stay alert and alive and youthful and functioning the way you want it to is to move your body.

Any kind of movement, especially novel movement, is caused by something called neurogenesis, which is the growth of nerve cells. And I can tell you from what I’m doing some of these physical therapy things it’s not my body that hurts, it’s literally my brain hurts. There’s new wiring happening. I can feel it happening in my brain. So I would encourage people. Maybe doing this sort of thing is not your thing And I will say physical therapy is another world, away from having a trainer who’s helping with strength training and something, and I think that’s there’s a huge value in that. But this is something quite different. This is really analyzing movement patterns, being able to move your body more efficiently, and learning, like, how to do that, how to control your body. So this will, it’s going to cause you to learn new things. It’s not dissimilar from you know. It’s like, okay, i want to learn how to play the piano. That’s really hard. It’s going to require all this new neuromuscular training to happen. It’s also not, in my view, that different from I want to learn Mandarin”-Very similar.

And I just want to say, like I ski sometimes over at this place called Alta and they have a club over there called Over 100. This is for real And it’s not a club of one. There’s actually like a number of people that are over 100 years old that ski at Alta And if you go over to the lodge at Alta, like early in the morning, i’m 64. And I’m on the younger age of the people that are there. That has caught my attention. You know why is that? Why are these people in full command of their facilities, doing something that requires fairly high level of skill, and they’re in their 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and I think that this has a lot to do with it.

We’re going to get with. Just try this in just a moment. After a quick word from our sponsor. Today’s show is also brought to you by Inside Tracker, the dashboard to your inner health. On June 29th, inside Tracker officially added insulin as one of the biomarkers they test. Inside Tracker has made great strides this year in adding biomarkers like ApoB, which is critical for heart health, as well as re-hormone markers that are especially important for addressing symptoms related to aging. Now Inside Tracker has added insulin, which is the key biomarker for sustained energy and an early warning for several chronic diseases. insidetrackercom/ageist. Go to insidetracker.com, save 20% on all their products today.

So, keeping with the theme of the podcast this week, and just try this I’m going to encourage you especially you gentlemen out there who have some disadvantages as far as doing new things and meeting new people I would encourage you to try something new that involves some sort of athletic ability, some sort of sport, and it involves new people. So if you’re one of the last people on the planet who have played pickleball, try it. Pickleball is a very social thing to do. I would say warm up before you do it. You don’t want to pull a hamstring. Try golf, try hiking, try doing something that involves your body in a new, novel way, and maybe it’s going to be hard, but so what? that’s really great for you. You’re going to learn new things, you’re going to meet new people And one of the things that I found trying something new at this age. Gentlemen, this is the line for you. This is my first day. I’m new at this. Can you help me out? Just ask for help And it’s going to be much smoother for you And ladies out there. You know that already. So this week I’m just trying this try something new. Try and pick up some kind of new sport, new athletic ability, some new novel way to move your body, and bonus points if you’re doing it with a new people. Thank you all for joining us on the show this week. It’s really great to have you guys with us. I so appreciate your time and your attention. If you have any questions about any of this, david@superage.com, i answer all of my email promptly and personally, and you can also, if you like, leave us a review. We love reviews. You can leave us up to a five star review or leave us a comment hopefully a good comment And that would really help us. And if you want to be a superstar, share this with someone else and ask them to subscribe to our podcast.

Thank you so much, and everyone have a wonderful week. We’ll see you next week. Bye now.