Longevity: Why Power, Quickness, and Balance Are Crucial
Longevity! We all want to live a longer, healthier, more active life, don’t we? Whether to continue playing sports, enjoy time with our children and grandchildren, or simply relish a typical day without niggling aches and pains, our physical health is crucial.
Maintaining muscle mass – and by extension, power, quickness, and balance – is crucial to reduce injuries, improving mobility, and ensuring a high quality of life as we age.
We were lucky enough to speak with Dr. Howard Luks, a board-certified orthopedic surgeon and the author of ‘Longevity… Simplified: Living a Longer, Healthier Life Shouldn’t Be Complicated’, in an episode of our podcast ‘Move Without Limits’.
In this article, Dr. Luks helps us to understand why power, quickness, and balance are so crucial in our quest for longevity and quality of life as we get older.
Longevity: Key Takeaways
Maintaining muscle mass is vital: Muscle mass directly influences power, quickness, and balance, which are essential for preventing injuries, improving mobility, and ensuring a high quality of life as we age.
A sedentary lifestyle has significant negative impacts on physical wellbeing, increasing the risk of pain, injury, and decreased longevity. Dr. Luks emphasizes the importance of being active to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Power, quickness, and balance enhance longevity: These three components are critical in preventing falls, a leading cause of death and disability among the elderly. Developing and maintaining them can significantly improve our functionality and reduce the risk of life-threatening incidents.
Exercise for health and pain management: Regular physical activity has a profound effect on managing and reducing pain. Dr. Luks highlights the transformative power of exercise in improving overall health, including joint pain relief, better metabolic health, and weight loss.
Empowerment through education: Reload advocates for an informed approach to physical health, moving away from fear and misinformation towards a science-based understanding of the benefits of targeted exercise and activity for a pain-free, longer life.
Does Being Inactive Really Make a Difference?
What Dr. Luks has to say about the connection between inactivity and longevity is enlightening, to say the least. If you think you don’t need a reminder of how a sedentary lifestyle can affect your physical wellbeing and ability to cope with pain and injury, then you need to listen to the experience of Dr. Luks:
“Lack of activity has horrendous downsides. Not only do I push this to my patients in terms of its importance, but I feel like I have to walk the walk as well. You know, I’m doing it to maintain my lifestyle, but I don’t want to be the sedentary orthopedist trying to tell people how to live their life.
“Along the way, I realized that the osteoarthritic patients who did better were the ones who were more active. Not only did they move more, but they were stronger. If you look at a typical knee replacement patient, you know, it’s typically not a fit, active person.”
Severe arthritis does not necessarily mean severe pain. “You can have bone-on-bone people who are pounding their way out there in the gym with very little discomfort,” Dr Luks says. “Yet you can have others with poor metabolic health who have mild disease, yet terrific pain.”
The difference? Level of activity.
“Far too many people are afraid of injury, but the rate of injuries is really low. What we should fear are the risks of being sedentary, because the risks of being sedentary far outweigh the risk to us of being active.”
So, What is the Role of Power, Quickness, and Balance in Longevity?
Falls are a leading cause of death and disability in over-60s in the United States. Or are they? Isn’t that like saying that falling out of the sky is a leading cause of plane crashes?
Falling is the symptom. Death or disability is the result. To improve longevity, we need to go beyond focusing on the symptom and pay more attention to the cause. That’s the real culprit.
“People think that we can’t jump, squat, or sprint when we’re 60,” Dr. Luks says. “That’s nonsense! We have lots of different muscle fibers, and those muscle fibers do different things. Sure, falls are known to be a leading cause of death. You didn’t die from the fall itself – but you fell, you spent a week in bed, and now you have less muscle, less fitness.
“Now, you go back out there, and your baseline is low. You fall again. Less fitness, pneumonia, hospitalization, dead.”
What’s going to stop people from falling, and instead improve longevity?
Power. Quickness. Balance.
When you develop and maintain these three components of overall fitness, you improve functionality in several ways. You’ll be more able to move forward rapidly. When you feel yourself falling, you’ll be able to move faster – putting a foot forward to stop yourself and rebalance. To do this, you must have power and strength.
Did you know that the inability to stand on one leg for 10 seconds is linked to a doubling in the risk of death?
Developing power, quickness, and balance doesn’t have an overnight solution. It requires a constant and consistent approach, but it doesn’t have to be complicated or confusing.
“The easiest way to start is to focus on single leg varieties and rotation in order to focus on balance,” Dr. Luks says.
Connecting Health and Pain Management
Dr. Luks is convinced that there is a connection between exercise and healing injuries. This isn’t just some notion plucked from the air. Not only is there plenty of scientific evidence to support the positive effects of exercise on pain sensitization in individuals with musculoskeletal pain, but he can demonstrate a wealth of personal anecdotal evidence, too.
“I can take a 60-year-old with a belly, thin legs, a little out of shape, who is short of breath going upstairs, and who comes to me with knee pain – and in six months, they don’t have knee pain anymore,” he says.
“I haven’t operated on them. I haven’t injected anything into them. The difference is that they bought into the understanding of how their overall health and fitness level is affecting their joint pain.
“And now their cholesterol levels are normal. Their insulin resistance has improved. They’re off their blood pressure medications. They’re down 20 pounds. And their joints don’t hurt.”
Beyond the X-Ray: A Message of Hope for Healthy Longevity
At Reload, the focus is on educating and empowering individuals to take control of their health. We look at what’s important to them, their lifestyle, their physical needs, and what they want to be able to do.
Forget what you watch on Instagram videos and read on social media posts. We’re led by science. Instead of making you scared and enforcing rest that will only lead to muscle loss and greater weakness – you’ve been there with your physician and traditional physical therapy, right? How did that work out? – we help you to look beyond your fears and embrace the benefits of targeted exercise and activity.
The Bottom Line
Power, quickness, and balance are not just desirable attributes. They are essential components for longevity and quality of life. By embracing physical activity and focusing on these key aspects of fitness, we can all enjoy greater health, reduced risk of injury, and enhanced quality of life as we age.
The first question you need to answer is, where to start?
We have the answer. A full 360-appraisal of your current physical fitness, and how it helps or hinders your everyday life and what you desire to do. Want to know more?
Book a comprehensive, 90-minute body evaluation with Reload today.
