Hello, this is Ronnie Hall. Welcome to the June edition of Senior Connect, the monthly podcast of Seniors Ministry at First Press Columbia. Today we will hear from three members of First Press who interact with senior adults on a regular basis. They will provide valuable and practical insight into the necessity of continuing to move around and stay active while confined to our homes. Before we hear from today's guests, I have two announcements. First, the lifelong learning webinar, Covenant Grandparenting with Dr. Mark Ross, was well received and enjoyed by many. If you were not able to participate, or if you want to listen again, a recording will be available soon. Secondly, plans are underway to have a patriotic celebration via Zoom sometime in July. In 2019, the 50-plus age group enjoyed brisket, barbecue, and the fixings in Jackson Hall, and Glenn Ward gave a hilarious monologue that also reminded us of God's blessings on our nation and pointed us to Jesus. Glenn has agreed to go virtual for 2020 and speak again, so keep an eye out for more information in the weeks ahead. And now our interviews with Dr. Foster, Margaret Cease, and Jimmy Easterby. All right, joining me now is Dr. Michael Foster. He's a cardiologist here at First Presbyterian Church, and he's agreed to come on and share with us some practical advice for why we need to stay fit. So, Dr. Foster, thank you for joining me. My pleasure, Ronnie. First of all, I just want to say to all our seniors, we certainly recognize this is probably a more difficult time for senior population than than many other folks for several reasons. Seniors seem to be the most vulnerable group in general. That's certainly the way it looks to me in reviewing the statistics and reading lots of articles about the situation. And also, our seniors are in a variety of So some are still married and living in their own homes and have yards to keep up and are extremely active in that regard. While others have health issues to contend with or loss of spouses and are living in more isolated situations. And some are in assisted living facilities. And many seniors go to assisted living for the fellowship of being around others and now suddenly can't go to the community dining facilities or have the group games and activities that they're normally used to. So we're certainly acutely aware of the difficulties our seniors are facing. Although I see a wide range of patients, our practices lean more towards the senior population. And so, I've seen the impact of the coronavirus situation in our seniors. And I've had several patients who have contracted the virus, unfortunately have survived, although one spent almost three weeks in intensive care and a couple of weeks on a ventilator and remarkably survived and has recovered very, very nicely. I think it's really important, Ronnie, as you said, despite the situation, despite the isolation, despite the anxiety and in some case depression that goes along with our current events, it's really important to stay active. This virus especially preys upon people who are not physically fit, chronic lung conditions, diabetes, failing heart. things like that, and the more fit we are, the better our nutritional status, certainly the better our chances of beating this virus if we are exposed and in fact the condition. So I think we wanted to talk a little bit about the importance of fitness. Fitness is important at every age and with every kind of medical condition. A big challenge today is how we stay fit. a situation with social distancing, and of course, recommendations of sheltering in place. I think I talk to my patients every day about the importance of exercise. I still think walking is one of the greatest exercises we can do. It's wonderful for the whole, it's wonderful for our mental health. And I think it's good to get outside when possible. in a safe situation and get a little sunshine and breathe some fresh air. What I read indicates a risk of contracting the virus, exposure to the virus is fairly minimal outside as long as social distancing rules are being upheld. So I think one can even walk with an unrelated friend or partner as long as you're maintaining a little bit of distance. The virus, even if someone is an asymptomatic carrier, the virus dilutes very quickly in outside air. Many people, of course, have limitations where walking is not an issue. There are other options. And for people who, our gyms are starting to open up, but for people in vulnerable age groups, there's an obvious reluctance to go One's own living space, calisthenics type things, stationary bicycling if that's available, resistance band exercises. There are certainly options for people who are able. But I think the main thing is just to try to remain fit and not just be sitting around, reading or watching shows and becoming deconditioned during this time. Thank you, Dr. Foster. We really appreciate your time. You bet. Nice talking to you. Well, joining me now is Margaret Cease. She's one of our members here at First Presbyterian Church, and she is a physical therapist. And though she's not specialized, she has been working with the geriatric population for many years now. Is that right, Margaret? Maybe close to 30, you say? That's right, yes. That's great. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, you're welcome. I'm looking forward to talking with you. Yeah. So our topic is, uh, how can we stay fit even though, you know, in lockdown, we might have less access, um, to equipment or getting out of the house. So we wanted to hear your thoughts. Okay. Well, sure. Well, most importantly, Ronnie, is that folks need to find an activity they enjoy because, you know, I know it's true for me and for my patients in the past that If someone doesn't enjoy what they're doing, the chances are is that it will not be followed through. And, um, so it needs to be an activity that the person enjoys doing. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The important thing too, is, um, not only finding something you enjoy, but just to start somewhere. Um, I'm going to talk about five different types of exercises. And you know, you might try several things in order to find out what you enjoy the most. And you don't have to be the best at whatever type of exercise you try. You don't even really have to be good at it. The goal, though, is just to enjoy it and know that it is good for you, that you're giving yourself a gift because you're taking care of your body. God gave us our bodies and we need to be good stewards of them and take care of our health. The five I'm going to mention are balance exercises. flexibility or stretching exercises, postural exercises, strengthening or weightlifting exercises, and aerobic exercises. So that's five different types. So I'll start with balance. As folks age, balance can become more of a challenge, and balance loss is a sneaky thing. It just sneaks up on you, and before you know it, maybe you're not as steady on your feet as you thought. But the good news is, is that with a little practice, This will likely improve at any age. If you're going to challenge your balance, you might get a little wobbly. So balance exercises are safer if you stand at the kitchen counter where you can have a one or two hand support there if needed. If you're unsteady, you have that counter to put your hand on or to lean on. And balance exercises, interestingly, are best done barefoot. There are a lot of bones and muscles and nerves that work together in the foot, and being barefoot during balance exercises will give you a lot more feedback to your brain as to how your tendons are and your nerves are down there than the exercises that are done with shoes on. So, you know, you can start with something familiar, such as standing on one foot, But then maybe you could move that foot up and let it rest on the inside of your calf, which is more challenging. Or if that's a little easy, you can bring your foot out from your calf a bit. And then if you're feeling really confident, you can raise one or both arms overhead in the process. So you can increase the difficulty of it as you feel comfortable. If you focus, though, on an object at eye level, so while you're standing on one foot, if you are looking you know, at the wall or something, if you'll focus on one object there, it will make the balance exercise easier. And I can't really tell you why that is, but sometimes focusing on an object straight ahead of you while you're doing balance exercises will help. Wonderful. That's great. So that's balance. And with any exercise, you don't want to be holding your breath. You know, those nice, slow breaths will help you with any exercise you do. But it is tempting sometimes to forget to breathe when you're concentrating so hard. So the next one is flexibility or stretching. And as with the balance, we lose flexibility as we age. So not only do our joints get stiff, but our muscles and tendons also do because they lose elasticity. So some flexibility may be regained with careful and proper stretching, but it needs to be consistent. So one session of flexibility exercise is probably not going to help you too much. So it needs to be a consistent thing that you do several times a week. But when you're stretching, it's important to think of your muscles like rubber bands. So just picture rubber bands rather than muscles down there in your legs and your arms. Because if a rubber band, if you're trying to stretch it and it's pulled too suddenly or repetitively, you know, it's going to pop. But if it's stretched slowly, you know, then held there in that stretch position, then it's probably not going to pop. It's going to get a nice stretched out rubber band. So you want to have a nice slow stretch that's held in a fairly comfortable position. And you want to hold that about 30 seconds. and that's just a much safer way to increase your flexibility. So if you're doing stretch tried additions with a 30 second hold for each rep and that'll give you a nice proper stretch. But flexibility will take a little time to increase, so you want to be consistent, as I said. But there are a lot of benefits with increased flexibility. You may find that doing ordinary things will be easier, and there's less chance of injury, such as bending down to pick up something off the floor. You may find that that is easier and less painful. That was hurting you before. Reaching into a low cabinet to retrieve an object or maybe even standing up from a low chair, you'll find that that is easier for you and more comfortable. And it can even make, increased flexibility can even make getting off the floor easier. So if you should happen to fall, which we certainly hope nobody falls, but that's kind of a reality that people do, having increased flexibility may make it much easier for you to get up off the floor and get somewhere so you can get some help. That's a little bit about stretching, you can do stretching standing or sitting, and the kitchen counter will also come in handy for the stretching exercises if you're standing to provide you some support and stability so you don't feel too wobbly. Then if you combine those with postural exercise, you feel better and you carry yourself more confidently. You stand straighter, you walk easier. It's amazing that, you know, after only about two weeks of doing these exercises, two or three times a week, my patients a lot of times will say, I just feel better. People tell me that my stomach is, you know, I must be losing weight because my stomach is flatter. Well, they haven't lost any weight. They're just standing straighter. So they look thinner. That makes a big difference. It does. It makes a big difference, not only in how you look, but how you feel. Good posture is important because mainly, and especially during this time, with things going around, germs going around, it helps breathe better. Good posture is so good for our lungs and it helps us to fight those lung infections. It can decrease our back pain and the chance of back injuries. And it can also make us feel better and look better. So to check and improve posture, find a wall and stand with your back against it. so that your arms are resting at your thighs and relaxed, and your fingertips are pointing to the floor. If you have good posture, your heels, your bottom, your shoulder blades, and the back of your head will be touching the wall. Your heels, your bottom, your shoulder blades, and the back of your head are touching the wall, and that's good posture. And if you can do that, then try to hold that position and walk away from the wall holding that. If you can't do that, try to just give yourself a little stretch to see if you can. Now don't overstretch, but just a little stretch. And if you do that a little bit every day, you may find that you're standing up much taller. One exercise that you can actually do that will change your posture is that if you stand nice and tall and pretend like there's a string at the top of your head that's being pulled up to the ceiling, so you're getting a nice, kind of a pull from your neck and your head towards the ceiling with your feet grounded, and you're standing up nice and tall, and you're just kind of trying to think about moving those fingertips down toward the floor. And again, you're standing tall, but as you do that, you'll find that your tummy muscles kind of tighten up and it feels good. And so if you'll hold that about 10 seconds and then relax, and then do that for maybe a total of five times, you'll find that that will improve your posture. as well. So that's a that's one little thing that you can do to work on your posture. So then we've got strengthening or weight lifting exercises because research has shown that appropriate weight lifting will slow the aging process remarkably. There's been some studies done that reverses the muscle mass loss. So as we get older we lose muscle mass and weight lifting if done properly can slow this down and sometimes even reverse that. So weight lifting is really a vital part of an exercise program if you enjoy doing it, of course. Strengthening our muscles helps to slow that loss. You can say, I don't have weights at home. Well, you do, you just don't know it. So you open your pantry and oh, there's some cans of soup or tomatoes or a bag of rice or beans. And you can use those as your weights. And I would suggest maybe two pounds. They usually don't come in more than two pounds. But you can put those in your hands and sit in a nice chair that's supported so that you're sitting comfortably and tall. Do those weightlifting exercises. You can go to many YouTube videos and they will show you those. But my main advice with this is to go slowly. at first and make sure you're controlling the move and you're performing it correctly. Judy Douduchian is our handbell choir director at church and she tells our handbell players if you can't play the music correctly slowly, you're sure not going to be able to play it correctly at a faster pace. And that's true for playing music and it's true for lifting weights. You want to perform the exercise slowly to make sure that you're doing it correctly and to avoid injury. Lastly, there is aerobic exercise options for indoor and outdoor. But let's look at the outdoor ones first. And of course, these are two very common ones, but I did want to go over them. The first one is working in your yard or your garden, and this is fabulous exercise, just being outside. I personally just enjoy that so much. The second one is, of course, it's just walking, and even better, walking with a friend. Now, of course, staying socially distanced. But there are many benefits, not only physical, but mental. It's a wonderful opportunity not only to exercise, but to build relationships with other people. And sunshine is such a marvelous thing. It provides us with vitamin D. It helps kill germs. And you don't want to forget about your sunscreen. And you want to drink plenty of water. But being outside is a real blessing. Especially these last, well the last few days have had a lot of rain, but the spring I think has been unusually cool and pleasant and funny for the most part. Two aerobic ideas for you inside, outside of your home and now some inside of your home because sometimes people just don't like outside. If you've got a home that's large or has some nice walking space or has steps, you do have a place for a brisk indoor walk. or a nice aerobic workout climbing steps. Now, I want to warn you climbing steps, if you've got heart problems, you want to really check with your cardiologist before you go climbing a bunch of steps. But even if you're fairly healthy, slow and steady with steps is the best. You want to be aware of your breathing. It's easy to get winded on steps. And one last indoor activity that I personally think is just a blast is dancing. You know, bring out those old records or CDs And if you're not sure about dancing, but you enjoy music, maybe you can go to an aerobics class online, a YouTube video. I looked at some and there are a number of those for ages 50 and up that has the music that those ages 50 or 60 or 70 and up enjoy. So you may have to try for you to find an instructor that you like and the music that you like, but you can pretty much tell that within the first minute or two as to whether, you know, you're going to like this person that's leading the class or I'll think I'll try another one. So those are the five different types of exercises, but with any form of exercise, always listen to your body and exercise within your limits. If your body's telling you to slow down, then slow down. You want to respect what your body is telling you as you exercise. So remember, if you don't enjoy it, you're likely to not follow through with it. Try some different types of exercise until you find one that suits your style. Maybe you'll find one you enjoy or a combination of those that you enjoy. You may try one one day and one another and just give yourself a variety. But exercise can help you feel better, sleep better, look better, fight germs better, and give you many other benefits. So I encourage you to try. Start somewhere. Wonderful. Thank you, Margaret. You're welcome. We appreciate your time and your knowledge. Well, I've enjoyed it. Now joining me, I've got Jimmy Easterby. He's our sports ministry director here at First Presbyterian Church. And Jimmy has been involved in sports and athletics in one way or another his whole life. So Jimmy, thank you for joining us. Well, it's good to be able to share a few things with everybody. And just let me just mention a few things that I think might be helpful to you. I think that The basic thing is we want to stay as active as we can. And everybody's got certain limitations and all that. So let me just give you a few things that just might be things that help you to think about along the way here. Number one is your heart is an obviously very important part of who you are and being able to function properly. So your heart needs to be developed. It needs to be strengthened. that needs to be used. It's a muscle. Think about it like this, the blood flow that you get from your heart, which increases your oxygen level, which just helps you to be able to breathe and function better. Walking, of course, is a great way to do that, but you can even do it from a chair. You can just stand up, sit back down, stand up, sit back down, just to move just a little bit. If you've got places in your house where you can walk around Maybe even make a little obstacle course in some ways that make room for you to be able to move from this room to that room. But just think about it in terms of you're using your heart, you're developing your heart, which like I said, helps you in so many, many ways. And also I'd say probably another thing that's very important is your flexibility. It has so much to do with your balance and just being able to to not fall or lose your balance so easily. And the way we all have to develop our flexibility is through stretching. And you can, again, do that from a chair, where you just take your arms and spread them out, both to the side or straight up, or just move them up and down. But you wanna stretch your body out so that the muscle in it pieces of all your insides are stretched so that they can move more freely. And you do this through, you can do some twisting exercises. You can, again, do this from a chair, twisting. And again, just stretching your arms up and up, just moving your body back and forth. Another great exercise, even for your hands, is to take your hand and your fingers and right hand, your left hand, just put them together and just press against each other so that you can increase flexibility in your hands, which again, helps with blood flow. A lot of this really spoke to me when I used to go to the golf course sometimes and I'd see people that were older and they couldn't swing the golf club very well because they were limited in their range of motion. So ever since that, you know, I've been doing exercises I'll just from a standing position I'll learn to I just try to reach down and touch my toes and you know you can't get all the way down there a lot of times limited and how far you can go down but as long as you go as far as you can and then just hold that position your muscles are working and they're stretching as you do that so you just do it and then you hold it for for several seconds That really, really helps in your legs, particularly with that, and it just stretches that motion out. And then I do a lot of twisting, you know, like, you know, just standing with your feet shoulder width apart, and then you take your chest and just move it all the way to the left as far as you can, and then just hold that position, and then move it back straight like you had it originally, and then move it all the way to the right, and just hold that position. And I do that pretty regularly. And it gives me a tremendous amount of freedom to move left and right. And then my legs are very flexible. They're not stiff at all because of the stretching to the floor. So those are probably the two exercises that I do. And I also take my hands and I'll reach up as high as I can with both hands. And then I also take my hands and move them back while they're up. reached up towards the ceiling, then I'll move them both back. And this increases my range. I can't emphasize stretching enough because when you don't do that, you become very stiff and very rigid. And then your range of motion is greatly reduced. And it just, it makes everything else that you do or try to do very difficult. So heart. And then the second was, was it flexibility or balance? flexibility, heart conditioning, and then developing the heart and the flexibility through those exercises I just mentioned. And then, gosh, maybe this should be number one is your core shape. Your core, it really, in terms of particularly balance, is gonna come from your core. I will do things like even sitting down in a chair, you can just, you can take those core muscles and just with, uh, uh, I don't know how to describe that. You just hold them in, I guess, and then you let them out and hold them in and let them out and come back and forth like that. And that is taken again. It's like the heart muscle being developed. Same principle is you take those muscles and make them work, and then they will give you a lot of things back, such as, like I said, a balance when you particularly as you lose your balance a little bit, you can regain it quickly because of the core is gonna help reestablish your position wherever you were. And just, you can do a leg lift. You can do this from a chair too. Just stretch out one leg and hold it. And the core muscles are gonna have to be working while you're lifting up that leg. Then you can do the left leg. Do the same thing with that and then you can do both legs or you can lie down and do the leg lifts and just strut one leg because the only way you can do that is for your core to be active and to allow you to keep that leg up. But when you develop that core strength, that's really gonna give you a base of support. So as you function every day and all that, you're just gonna have more stability. And you can even, like I said, you can even start just by, just hold those muscles in, you know, just like you're tucking your stomach in and then let it out, tuck it in, let it out. Just if you do that for, you know, just four or five minutes, you are developing a lot of strength, particularly if you do it consistently, just that exercise alone. But then like I said, the leg lifts, you can even do that. You just hold your leg just slightly off the ground. or even in a chair, just lift it up just a little bit. Any of that's going to help develop because most of the time we don't even think about the core. We don't even do anything related to that if we don't really target that. Wonderful. Thank you, Jimmy. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your advice and your experience. Oh, my pleasure. It's been a big help to me and doing all the sports stuff, whatever I kind of realize how important this was, but it doesn't matter if you don't play sports or anything, you know, just to function daily in life. If your heart muscle is being developed and you're increasing your flexibility and you're developing your core in some form, then you really, really have made a lot of progress for your stability in life. As we conclude this episode of Senior Connect, I want to say thanks again to Dr. Foster, Margaret Cease, and Jimmy Easterby for their time and knowledge and expertise. Also, please remember to contact the church if we might assist you during these days. The pastoral care phone number is 803-513-7931. When you call this number, please leave a voicemail so the pastor on call may return your call. That number again is 803-513-7931. Thanks for listening. I'll leave you with this reminder from Proverb 19.23. The fear of the Lord leads to life, and whoever has it rests satisfied. He will not be visited by harm.