Fitness after 40
Stand up for yourself
Our bodies were not designed to sit. They can do it for hours at a time, but not without paying a price. When we nestle our length into an office chair, car seat, theater lounge, bar stool, restaurant booth, or even a comfy couch, we are folding at the knees, hips, and waist; caving our chests; and rounding our backs and shoulders. It’s hard to get air, let alone mobility. Some of us even cross our legs.
“Every cell in the body understands standing and walking,” says Joy Colangelo, supervisor of occupational therapy at Community Hospital. “Every muscle and bone attachment, the placement of internal organs, our eyes, and our ears are all oriented toward walking. Yet, many of us have invented countless ways to avoid that, instead spending 80 percent of the day sitting.
“Every organ in the body loves standing, lying, squatting. Sitting is a horrid position for, among other things, the disk pressure in the back and for the diaphragm, which breathes and moves oxygen throughout the body and to the brain. When it can.”
It isn’t the day at the office, the ride in the car, the occasional evening at the theater that wreaks havoc on your body, but the collective effects of folding your frame into a seated position day after day, year after year, decade upon decade for hours at a stretch.
“The side effects of bad habits or merely a lack of good habits are measured in decades,” says Colangelo. “It’s not the French fry you ate yesterday; it’s all the fries you’ve consumed. It’s the same with how you treat your muscles and bones. The pain and deterioration are cumulative.”
By middle age, the reckless behaviors and habits your body was able to absorb during your 20s begin showing up in your skin, your back, your joints, and your internal organs. You can’t take it anymore. And you shouldn’t. There’s no time like the present to implement healthful lifestyle changes in the way you eat, move, and think to help mitigate the effects of the life you lived with youthful abandon.
But even if you’ve taken good care of yourself, Colangelo says, inevitable, natural changes are taking place by the time you reach your 40s, especially among women. Which can exacerbate existing conditions. Eye muscles weaken, making it difficult to read the fine print. Neck flexors slacken, resulting in jowls or a double chin. The muscles of the pelvic floor start to deteriorate, sometimes to the point of incontinence. And since women start losing estrogen and its hydrating effects around 40, tissues dehydrate, causing stiffness and allowing injuries to occur more easily.
As you age, exercise more often causes soreness, if not injury, possibly resulting in a reluctance to continue the workout routine so important to the health and wellness of your cardiovascular system, your muscles and bones, and even your mind.
“It is important for both men and women of middle age to maintain healthy feet, muscles, and back,” Colangelo says. “People tend to work a lot on their stomach muscles for aesthetics, but you need a strong back to remain upright, which brings us back to the importance of walking. It is the best low-impact, cardio exercise to support general health and good posture.”
It’s easier to recognize the link between fitness and function once you understand that most of your body’s systems — digestion, elimination, breathing — are dependent on your posture.
“You can help find and support those positions that enhance the functions of your body,” says Colangelo, “or you can ignore them and be a brain carried around by a body getting fat, sick, sore, and tight. Of course, once the body gives out, you don’t even have that.”
Here’s the problem: We are culturally conditioned to care about our health, and also to participate in rituals and practices that can be counterproductive to our aims. Many of us spend long days seated before our computers, straining our eyes and locking our hips, only to move from there to the dining room chair. Plenty of women still wear high-heeled, pointy-toed shoes, crossing their legs and cutting off circulation with control-top pantyhose. And how many of us have ended the day by kicking off those heels, slumping into the couch, and reaching for the remote or the phone to order take-out?
“The point,” says Colangelo, “is that, especially at this age, people need to
do some healing activities to offset these behaviors. Incorporate walking
or swimming into your day, not starting off ‘whole hog’ but increasing activity as you are able. Start doing your own vacuuming and mowing the lawn, putting more activity into your functional day.
“You can take the stairs and park farther away. You can walk to the store and buy only what you can carry, which may keep you from buying the case of soda or the box of cookies, thus making smarter choices for your diet and the walk home.
“We get the freshest air in the world off Monterey Bay, and we’re the first
ones to breathe it, making this a very smart place to live as long as we take advantage of it. We just need to go out for a walk and get that first
hit of healing air.” 
Throughout her 20s, Angela Baruffi-Guerra was having too much fun living life to spend time or energy on exercise. Any appearance of fitness was merely a by-product of youth in all its exuberance.
Her 30s began similarly, but as the decade progressed she started putting on the pounds and shifting shape. As she suddenly saw in the mirror, she was succumbing to her genetic proclivity for obesity. So she set up a workout room in her basement and began lifting weights before heading outside to walk an hour a day.
“When I first started working out,”says Baruffi-Guerra, now 42, “it felt so good I decided to make it a lifestyle. Once I came to California 15 years ago, I joined a gym, which was the best thing ever for being accountable, having a place to work out, and having people to show me how. For three months, I actually had a personal trainer who taught me how to do my program properly, which I recommend highly.”
Baruffi-Guerra can still remember the time when fitness wasn’t her focus. Today, she calls herself an athlete and, in addition to her workout routine of running, weight training, kickboxing, hiking, and spin classes, she plays competitive underwater hockey for San Jose State University. Fitness has become her first line of defense against whatever life throws her, as well as her ticket to an active, adventurous life.
“My life did change at 40,” she says, “ not because I got older but because I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in, physically, mentally,
and spiritually. Commitment, I believe, is the most important part of maintaining fitness after 40, because it’s not easy but it’s essential.”
At this point in her life, Baruffi-Guerra’s commitment is to balance. She eats nutritious meals but has a bite of chocolate now and then. She drinks the requisite amount of water each day but enjoys two or three glasses of red wine each week. She exercises enthusiastically every day but stretches slowly and carefully in a weekly yoga class.
“I imagine I would go insane if I didn’t take care of myself,” she says. “When I exercise, I work out so many things in my mind that I would not have addressed. But I have to say my spirituality is the most important part of my balance. It’s essential to have a god or something in life to provide the supernatural strength beyond your own abilities and expectations.”
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