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| Downward-Facing Dog Pose for Upper Body Strength |
As a family doctor, one of my many roles was that of doctor to my patients who found themselves admitted to a nursing home. For many of these patients, they were admitted for post-operative recovery and physical therapy following a hip fracture and hip replacement related to osteoporosis. So their underlying issue that led to the broken hipbone was the thinning of the bones that affects the vertebrae of the spine, the wrists and the neck of the femur (thigh) bone, this last one usually causing the most problems. If these patients got to work promptly on their physical therapy to improve strength in the legs, they often had short stays in the nursing home and were happily discharged home to complete their recovery there. However, many patients, for a variety of reasons, would not progress in physical therapy and so began to get very weak from inactivity and quickly began to lose muscle mass. For a younger person, rebuilding lost muscle mass doesn’t take that much time, but for older people, that time could double or triple, so preserving muscle strength is a much bigger issue in these individuals.
In addition to my nursing home folks, I also noticed that as my general patient population began to age, somewhere in their 50s many began to notice an overall loss of muscle mass and strength. We’ve written about this idea in previous posts, such as Strength and Aging, a concept known as Sarcopenia, which in some ways is an expected part of the aging process—that is, unless we chose to intervene with specific practices to maintain our muscle mass or increase it. Our now in-house Physical Therapist Shari Ser had this to add about Sarcopenia:
“The composition of our muscle fibers changes from being able to contract quickly and explosively to slower contraction rates. There are also changes in how the information is transmitted through the central nervous system and the “rate of processing information” slows down. There are also changes in our proprioceptive system, that is, in how we sense where our body and its various parts are in space. Our range of motion may change with a decrease in our stamina and our overall flexibility due to system trauma (acute and chronic diseases, decrease in endurance and cardiovascular efficiency). And our genetic predisposition to disease will also affect our overall strength.”
You may have personally noticed this sort of challenge in the spring that first time you worked in the garden, or when you decided to store all that Christmas stuff up in the attic one afternoon, and the next day you were surprisingly sore, weak and tired in the muscles you had used the day before. This could be early evidence that you are having a bit of Sarcopenia setting in!
The main culprit on planet Earth that necessitates that we have adequate strength is, of course, gravity. We have to have enough strength, along with that other essential skill, balance, to get up each day and move around to do the things we have to do and want to do! And we have to have enough strength to simply get out of bed, stand well and move about the home, community or work space in easy fashion. This would lead us to want to keep the muscles of walking and standing very strong, and add in decent strength for the arms depending on other activities we engage in. In an early interview for YFHA, Shari Ser noted that, “Strength … has to be reproduce-able and renewable.” So, you have to be able to get up and down many times a day easily, and have ways to maintain, restore and improve your strength from day to day.
A lot of people turn to the gym and circuit training to do isolated muscle strengthening on machines that, for example, strengthen muscles that flex the elbow (biceps and a few assistants!). This is great for building strength in that isolated muscle group, but unless you are doing curls with the milk cartoon as an everyday activity, it may not translate into smooth, strong, balanced movements in your daily routines. For that, yoga asana practice is a great combination of both isolated muscle strengthening and coordinated, graceful strong movement. And because a balanced asana practice includes standing poses, backbends, forward bends, twists and inverted poses, a regular practice that includes a wide range of poses will build strength in the muscles and bones throughout your entire body.
Isolated strengthening is accomplished via the process of holding poses statically for a certain amount of time. Research has noted that bone strengthening starts around 10 seconds into a held pose and continues for up to 70 seconds or so, and muscle building starts around the 90-second mark. This has led me to recommend working up to a 90 second hold in many of your poses to achieve both goals. Now, if you are starting out on the weak side, you may find that after a short while you lose the ability to hold the pose safely. So, that is your starting point, that amount of time you could go before feeling like you had to come out, and you’d add a few seconds to your hold every few days or once a week and gradually work your way up to the 90 second goal.
Shari also noted, “Repetition of effort with your current range of motion builds strength.” That means you can also get the benefit of the repetitions you see folks doing on those machines at the gym by entering and exiting the poses dynamically with your breath for a given number of times. I often use the timing I learned from TKV Desikachar of coming in and of a pose six times with the breath. For certain poses, this can mimic real life activities, such as Powerful Pose (Utkatasana), which would help with transitions in and out of a chair. When you extend your practice to include the dynamic complex sequences like Sun or Moon salutations, you will add in more practice balancing and improving your agility, so you get even more bang for your buck. Taken all together, these ways of utilizing the asana to build strength will give you quite a complete system for bond and muscle strength as you age.
And you could also extend the benefits of a complete practice that includes pranayama in order to improve the muscular strength of the breathing muscles, whose primary muscle, the diaphragm, needs the assistance of many other muscles when strong breathing takes place, like anytime you exert yourself. So improving the subtle assistant muscles of breathing, such as, the intercostals, and the larger more powerful muscles of breathing, such as, the abdominals, will give your overall respiratory system a work out, too. Of course, your asanas will also strengthen many of the accessory muscles of breathing, so there is a nice synergistic result from including more than just one yoga tool!
And for those of you out their that want to get even more detailed about how yoga improves strength, check out this juicy post by our scientist extraordinaire, Ram, called Yoga Asanas: Endurance Training or Resistance Training?
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