Mobility for more life in your years

Recently, we talked about healthspan–how long you live well within your lifespan, and the importance of muscular strength to increase your health span to match your lifespan. 

If you’ve never heard of healthspan before–you will. It’s now in the dictionary, and since my last email on the subject, the software I use to write these things now recognizes it as one word instead of two. 

I also made the case that there are six pillars of healthspan:

1. Muscular strength
2. Cardiac endurance
3. Mobility where you should be mobile.
4. Stability where you should be stable
5. body composition
6. A sense of community

Today I want to talk about mobility (we’ll get back to cardiac endurance later). In particular, the hips, shoulders, and the entire upper two-thirds of your spine.

First up: hips.

Your ability to squat has a massive effect on your quality of life at every stage, from infancy to your twilight years. For example, babies learn to squat as a precursor to walking. And when you’re in your eighties, being a master of the squat means maintaining independence. As long as you can get on and off the toilet independently, you can keep living without assistance. And you need mobile hips to squat well.

Not every hip is built the same, however. People of Irish, Scottish, English, and French descent are more likely to have deeper, more stable hip sockets, which limits squat depth but increases stability. People of Asian, and Eastern European descent, as well as most of the continent of Africa, tend to have shallower hip sockets which make them better squatters but with more problems with hip dysplasia. These facts help explain cultural differences when it comes to the way people sit to eat and socialize.

Having mobile shoulders is also important–you have to reach that stuff on the top shelf, after all. And therein lies the problem: we rarely put our shoulders in positions other than straight out in front where the keyboard, phone, or steering wheel are. 

I’ve had my share of shoulder mobility issues, primarily because I work with my hands in front of me all day, just like everyone else. However, the thing that made the most remarkable difference has been to hang from a pullup bar and do rowing-type exercises routinely. There’s an entire book devoted to hanging from a bar that explains in detail how it works. And for me, it worked.

Finally, the spinal joints of your upper back and neck are supposed to be pretty mobile. However, your lumbar spine resists movement. We’ll get to the stability part of the research in another newsletter. But if you can’t get the full range of motion in your neck and upper back, you’ll likely develop issues in the lower back and hips because of the tendency for those areas to compensate. That’s the area where I can help you the most.

I’ve written about this before, but to stay functional, you need mobility to pass the Sitting Rising test, which is precisely what it sounds like: you sit down and rise back up. But without using your hands. If you can pull off a perfect ten, your next ten years are pretty much guaranteed unless you have an accident of some sort. Here’s a video of mine a couple of years ago on my birthday. Again, you need that hip and upper back mobility to pull this off.

Here’s an article about the Sitting Rising Test in case you want to know more.