walking Archives - GrandmaBetsyBell

Therapeutic Yoga

This past November I dashed late into a networking event at a new-ish yoga studio in my neighborhood-walking distance from my house. BendnMove owner Tamara Gillest introduced me around. The health care providers offering their services were familiar to me, members of a Business Networking International chapter here in West Seattle. It felt like coming home to a room full of caring practitioners; a chiropractor, a vendor of the Smovey and Nordic walking poles, a life coach and personal trainer, a massage therapist among others. I knew I’d been led to this event and was open to what was offered.

Therapeutic Yoga. I asked Tamara what that might be. I have studied yoga for years and have a morning practice. Over the last few months, walking any distance at all has been challenging because I never know when the sciatic pain will begin. It is a pain that makes me cry out and wonder if I can make it home. I remember once walking to the hardware store about a mile away and setting out for the return trip with a cloth bag full of six bedding plants. That much weight proved too hard to carry. I set the bag behind a picket fence and limped home to get the car, worried that someone would steal my bag. Of course, this is West Seattle’s Genesee hill and the bag was untouched.

Every time I left home, I experienced breath-shortening anxiety in anticipation of pain. I realized I wasn’t walking every day out of fear of pain. Perhaps Therapeutic Yoga could help with that anxiety.

I signed up for 4 sessions. Tamara sized me up and gave me a series of gentle stretches, hip opening, core strengthening moves to practice. Most importantly, she refocused my yoga breathing to help with the anxiety. It has made such a difference to practice deep breathing, to remind myself to initiate every move with the breath, and to build confidence in my legs and back and core again. I always take my sticks with me to give support when the pain hits. I’m back to 30 minutes of walking every day.

A google search for yoga poses to help with sciatica resulted in poses that are far too advanced for the level of challenge I have. Perhaps it is my age. At 78, it is not a good idea to twist into a pretzel even though I am strong enough to do this. Tamara’s approach is gentle, breath-centered, calming-the very approach I need to help me slow down, relax into movement. If you have suffered chronic pain, you know how difficult it is to manage your thinking about an activity you are about to try. If you know it causes pain, you tense up or you may decide not to bother trying at all.

The last thing I want is to stop moving. I would lose all the benefits of moving that I have mentioned in post after post. Muscle tone weakens; blood flow to the joints slows down; lungs long for fresh air and deep breathing; stiffness sets in. We must keep moving to stay vibrant. Anticipating pain can keep us from setting out. My pain is diminishing ever so slightly and I am able to step out of the house with my sticks and walk for 30 minutes, breathing into the pain, keeping my breaths long and deep and calming.

Here’s what Tamara has to say her Therapeutic Yoga teaching

Yoga therapy provides high quality and skilled therapeutic application of yoga. The education and skills required to work as a yoga therapist surpass those of the average yoga teacher, necessitating a comprehensive understanding of anatomy, physiology and psycho-spirituality from both the eastern and western traditions. Yoga therapy is a highly personalized experience that focuses on your specific condition and needs. It offers a means for safe, personal healing to people living with chronic pain or illness. You can expect a tailored program unique to you that incorporates breath, movement and meditation. Individual yoga therapy is ideal for those with special needs or conditions, who prefer a slower-paced program and a one-on-one setting.

Does yoga therapy replace other treatment modalities?

Yoga therapy is leading edge and uses yoga as a complementary treatment to traditional medical healing practices. Based on on-going treatment studies, these weekly sessions are ideal for those with chronic lower back pain, neck pain and auto-immune disorders such as Multiple Sclerosis, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis, among many chronic conditions.

Thank you, Tamara and Therapeutic Yoga.

Comments? Thoughts?

Be well, Do well and Keep Moving.

Betsy

www.HiHoHealth.com Shaklee product shopping site

www.EmpoweredGrandma.com tails of travel, most recently Mexico

Gentle Reader,

To my delight, my signature byline, Be Well, Do Well and Keep moving, points as much to brain health as managing arthritis. Recent studies show that walking improves brain health.

In August 2010, Live Science reported on a study involving a group of “Professional Couch-Potatoes.” This is what one researcher called the 69 adults, aged 59 – 80, who were sedentary before entering the study. I mean sedentary: they reported exercising no more than twice in the previous six months. The study compared this group of inactive people with thirty-two 18 – 35 year olds.

The result? Walking at one’s own pace for 40 minutes three times a week can enhance the connectivity of important brain circuits and combat declines in brain function associated with aging and increase performance on cognitive tasks.

The goal was not to study specific brain function, but to study connectivity. “Almost nothing in the brain gets done by one area; it’s more of a circuit,” study researcher Art Kramer, psychology professor at the University of Illinois, said in a statement. “These networks can become more or less connected. In general, as we get older, they become less connected, so we were interested in the effects of fitness on connectivity of brain networks that show the most dysfunction with age.”

Previous studies showed a loss of coordination in the DMN (Default Mode Network) when a person is least engaged with the outside world either passively observing something or simply daydreaming. This networking failure is a common symptom of aging and in extreme cases can be a marker of disease, study researcher Michelle Voss said.

People with Alzheimer’s disease tend to have less activity in this network and they tend to have less connectivity, Voss said. Low connectivity means that the different parts of the circuit are not operating in sync. Like poorly trained athletes on a rowing team, the brain regions that make up the circuit lack coordination and so do not function at optimal efficiency or speed.

In a healthy, young brain, activity in the DMN quickly diminishes when a person engages in an activity that requires focus on the external environment. Older people, people with Alzheimer’s disease and those who are schizophrenic have more difficulty “down-regulating” the DMN so that other brain networks can come to the fore, Kramer said.

In this study by Kramer, Voss and their colleagues, they found that older adults who are more fit tend to have better connectivity in specific regions of the DMN than their sedentary peers. Those with more connectivity in the DMN also tend to be better at planning, prioritizing, strategizing and multi-tasking.

Just by walking three times a week for 40 minutes, DMN connectivity was significantly improved in the brains of the older walkers, but not in the stretching and toning group, the researchers report.

If you have friends or relatives who sit around with the remote, tell them about this study and see if they would be willing to get out and walk. It could make a big difference.

One Way to Ward Off Alzheimer’s: Take a Hike

The study began with 299 dementia-free participants, ages 70 to 90, in 1989. Researchers measured how many blocks they walked per week and, at 9 and 13 years after the initial examination, scientists assessed them with high-resolution magnetic resonance imagining (MRI).

In a final evaluation,116 of these people were diagnosed with dementia or mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which can lead to Alzheimer’s disease, while 169 (excluding those deceased prior to the follow-up) remained free of these conditions.

No one has taken a snap shot of an elderly group and followed them over time prior to this study. The participants agreed to walk at least one mile per day. Erickson’s study found that walking at least one mile per day significantly enhanced the volume of several regions of the brain, including the frontal lobe, which is involved in reasoning and problem-solving.

The researchers also found people who walked that distance reduced their risk of cognitive impairment by about half. However, walking more than one mile every day did not further improve brain volume.

We don’t need to do much, but we do need to do something, every day. In my recent visit with the Sports Medicine doctor, she dissuaded me from getting a cortisone shot for my sciatic pain. She gave me some new stretches and said, “Walk 30 minutes every day without fail. It’s the best medicine.”

If my pain is acute, I leave home with walking sticks.

Before long, the pain eases up. BTW, I also take several of Shaklee’s Pain Relieve Complex herbal tablets during the day, depending on how bad the pain is.

It looks as though this advice is helping my brain as well as my joints.

Join me!

Be Well, Do Well and Keep Moving,

Betsy

206 933 1889

www.hihohealth.com shopping for Shaklee

www.EmpoweredGrandma.com for travel suggestions and reflections