Pam Strand (00:05):
Hello, my name is Pam Strand. I'm your podcast host and welcome to the Longevity Gym. Longevity is about living longer, stronger, and better. Of those three words, longer, stronger, and better, it's stronger that resonates most powerfully with people. During a recent lunch with a girlfriend, she spoke so eloquently and passionately about how important her strength is to her. What is it about strength that feels so fundamental and so vital to our lives? Many of my clients see their strength at the heart of their pursuit of a high quality life. Several years ago, we asked clients at the personal training studio what being strong meant to them. Here are a few things that I remember most from those conversations. A man told me that strength meant being able-bodied so that he could live his life freely and do all the activities that gave him satisfaction and joy.
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A woman spoke to being around for her grandkids and being able to play with them. A dad described how the journey of building strength in his body and learning to take care of himself made him a role model for his son, helped him be the best father possible. In my work, I see my clients' faces light up when they experience their strength for the very first time. One client exclaimed, who knew strength was so much fun. There's confidence when you know you are strong. The journey towards strength is so very gratifying. I remember a friend telling me once. Strength seems to be twofold. It's a physical state that enables your lifestyle, whether that be activities or maybe a goal of living independently and self sufficiently for as long as possible. But there's also a psychological component to it. Strength seems to be a desired state within our psyche that once we experience it, we know we can't live without it. We know our lives are better with strength. What does being strong mean to you and how do we get there? That's a question I've pondered over the last several days as someone asks me, okay, tell me exactly what I need to do to be strong. Deep down. I know being strong is much more than strength training, so I spent some time organizing my thoughts and I came up with five key principles for
(02:58):
Being and staying strong. These are five, I guess, foundational elements that we need to equip ourselves with in order to be and stay strong. The five of them are, knowledge is power. Physiology matters. Don't leave your strength in the gym. Brilliance through resilience and the mind is mighty. Let's look at each in a little more detail. The first is knowledge is power. If you've listened to previous podcast episodes, you may have heard me say this before and it's actually part of a longer saying that I have, which is knowledge is power. Know more about your body, be more powerful in your journey.
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There are three kinds of knowledge that I think are important. One is to know what to expect with aging, what you can do about it and how to work with the process not against it. The second kind of knowledge is know your body, learn to connect with it and its movements and to understand its language and how to read its signs of distress or of strength. For example. What do various emotions feel like in your body? What's the difference between a sensation of pain versus discomfort? Knowing when your body or being able to hear your body say it needs a rest and a little TLC, and also knowing when it's ready for a challenge. Yeah, let's take it on. Let's go for it. Overall, we want to understand or have the knowledge of how our body responds to our lifestyle choices and habits. For example, do our choices elevate our heart rate, our respiration rate, maybe our cholesterol and sugar levels, or do our choices result in us moving through life with a fatigued body?
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Do we have unwanted weight gain, weight loss? All these are signs that your body may be trying to get your attention and say, Hey, your lifestyle choices aren't going so well for me. Let's take a different course of action. The third kind of knowledge is from the data that we get when we wear a fitness and health tracker. These are really great tools. I'm a big proponent of them, not only because they can track our steps and intensity of our activity, but they can give us some really great insights to our sleep, to how our body is responding to stress and the challenges or demands of our lifestyle. And
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It also gives us insights to how well our body is bouncing back. How fast is it getting back to its balanced, steady state of homeostasis. The second key principle for this journey of strength is that physiology matters. Our cells need four things. They need energy, they need nutrients, they need a healthy environment, and they need information. They need these four things in a high quality form in order to stay healthy and to perform well. And you guessed it, or you might've guessed it. Our lifestyle has a tremendous effect on these four things that our cells need. Exercise, for example, affects the energy production in the cells. The foods we eat impact the nutrients our cells get for their jobs and for their operation, whether we're hydrated, whether we've trained our body to be able to effectively use oxygen, whether we keep stress at bay, those things impact the healthy environment in that our cells need. And information that predominantly comes from our DNA and our genes. And our lifestyle as a whole is a set of input into the operation of our DNA and our genes.
(07:25):
So the higher the quality of input, the higher function, or the higher quality, more effective function of our DNA and our genes. And I do, under this category of physiology matters, I want to spend a couple moments talking about stress. And it is kind of funny when you start to talk to people about stress, they kind of sigh and their eyes roll back a little bit. Kind of like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know we are supposed to be managing our stress. But it is important because stress disrupts our physiology and it takes it off center. It takes it out of balance. Now, that may happen because we get sick or have an injury, but the body's equipped to move back to balance, but it's not equipped so well to be under a state of chronic stress. It ultimately creates a state of inflammation, whether that be pre-pro or actually in an inflammatory state. As I said, it disrupts our physiology. It takes us off balance or our body's off balance, and it speeds up the aging process. When our body is out of balance, things don't work so well and our life doesn't seem so smooth.
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The third principle of strength is don't leave your strength in the gym. You want to train for the movements you're going to perform in your daily life. I think it's so important to make the connection between an exercise and how that's going to enhance how you move through life. And once you think strength in motion or strength in my life, you also want to be sure to incorporate balance, joint mobility and flexibility and stamina. One thing that often gets missed is building the capability to move through all planes of motion. Remember, if you don't use it, you lose it. And this is the case with Planes of motion. So we want to make sure that we're training the body, familiarizing the body, and building the neural maps in our brain to go forward, backwards, side to side, and move through rotation and twists. And don't forget walking. Walking is the most essential, fundamental move we have in our lives, and we want to be sure to have the strength and train to have the strength to walk with an upright posture and a strong, balanced gait.
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My fourth key principle is brilliance through resilience. If we want to live life with big, beautiful, brilliant energy and strength, we need to tend to two sides of fitness, at least that's what I call them. We want the vigorous and sweaty side, which is a set of activities that challenges our body and gently, no not gently, safely stretches us beyond our current capacity and capabilities. And then the more quiet and mindful activities, they support our body's adaptation to the challenges of exercise and helps or help the body return back to that balanced state as quickly and completely as possible. And to return even better than before. Without the rest, recovery and rejuvenation, we have the potential of having just a lot of exercise and activity without building as much strength and energy as possible. The body needs both the vigorous and sweaty as well as the quiet and mindful to learn how to be resilient, to learn how to
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Meet to the demands of life or the demands of exercise, strength building, and to return to the balanced state. Without it, it kind of gets lost. And I think without both sides of fitness, we tend to get stuck in the build, build, go, go, go mode. But we want the body to be resilient. We want our energy to be resilient, so we do need to learn to take time for the quiet and mindful, and we need it for our lives where we want the daily activities of our lives to build us up and not to deplete us.
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The fifth and final key principle is the mind is mighty. You may have heard the saying where the mind goes, the body will follow. It's true. Thoughts, beliefs and perceptions do impact our physiology and do impact the direction our body takes. Thinking, believing and perceiving something that is perceiving it to be threatening, for example, mobilizes the body, mobilizes our energy, mobilizes our systems. Thinking, believing, perceiving something is safe, secure, calm, relaxes the body in its systems. The body hears everything you think and say, and it responds to that whether you want it to or not. And I'm not talking about false positivity, but rather I'm speaking to watching and observing our thoughts and how we speak to ourselves and even to others, and understanding if our thoughts build us up and move us forward, or whether they break us down and limit our growth and change. What we think about aging, ourselves and the world around us really does matter to our health and our wellbeing and to our journey of strength. When we think and believe we are strong and capable, we move through our life in that manner. If we believe we are not worthy or why bother, our actions and our habits and choices ultimately match those beliefs.
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Another component of the mind is mighty is cognitive performance, learning new skills, even in the gym, training our minds for the cognitive skills of focus, concentration, problem solving, mindfulness have shown to be beneficial to our minds and our brains. Physical exercise is also beneficial. And then there's balance. I put balance in this category of the mind is mighty because it feels like a mind thing. It uses our nervous systems and our neurological connections to our body to make sure we stay
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Upright and we can move and be steady on our feet . And we can train those systems. And those systems are our visual system. So what we see and how our brain ultimately translates that into signals for our body. Our vestibular system, which senses where our head is, if you will, in space and keeps us in balance, upright, agile. And then there's our proprioception system, which is our sensory system that gives our brains input as our limbs move through space. So we need all three of those and we can train them. And when we think about strength in motion or strength moving into our lives and us taking it into our lives for our daily activities, we need balance.
(15:45):
There you have it. What I believe are five key principles of living strong. Five things that we should equip ourselves with for the journey. And those again are knowledge is power. Physiology matters. Don't leave your strength in the gym. Brilliance through resilience and the mind is mighty. And of course the important question, what does being strong mean to you?
So that's what I wanted to share with you today. Hopefully it gives you a little bit or gives you ideas, helps broaden or deepen your perspective of a journey towards strength and living with your strength. And I hope it's been helpful.
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I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear what being strong means to you. So send me an email. My email address is pam at Strand Fitness online.com. It's also in the show notes below. And be sure to send any questions you have. I'm happy to answer those. And I'd like to stay in touch. If you want to stay in touch too, sign up for my newsletter. I send out a newsletter about every two weeks, updating or highlighting recent podcast episodes. And I also offer up tips about living a long, strong, healthy life and I announce ways in which to work with me. Thanks for tuning in. It was great to be with you and to talk about and to learn about Living Strong. I'll see you next time.