In the United States, about 20% of seniors who suffer a hip fracture will die within a year.
Teresa Liu-Ambrose, PhD, has been investigating the impact of women’s weight training for helping seniors decrease the rate of fractures out of her laboratory at the Center for Hip Health and Mobility, Vancouver General Hospital.
Now she has found that not only does weight training build up muscle and bone health (as you might expect) but it also improves cognitive functioning.
According to international statistics, one-third of all seniors who get admitted to hospitals with hip fractures also have some kind of cognitive impairment, so this could be very important.
Building on her prior research, Liu-Ambrose et al. randomly assigned 155 women between the ages of 65 and 75 to two groups. The first group did resistance training using dumbbells and weight machines, while the second group did balance and toning exercises of similar duration (Archives of Internal Medicine.)
A year later, the women assigned to the strength training group had improved their cognitive functioning by 10.9 to 12.6 percent. The toning group actually experienced a slight decline in their cognitive functioning (about 0.5%).
Improvements to the strength training group included heightened ability to make decisions, resolve conflicts and improve focus.
Exercise is just one step (albeit an important one) toward ensuring that our seniors maintain cognitive functioning as long as possible.
If you find this work exciting, you might also like our 6-part teleseminar series, The New Brain Science series.
Each webinar, we interview an expert, drilling down into how we can harness the power of neuroplasticity. This has given us the exciting opportunity to look at new ideas that were not even considered 3 years ago, ideas that will change our current practices in health and mental health care.
You can sign up for the series here.
I used a free self-help program i found on line and it took some practice, but it worked. The key for me was learning about the effects of adrenalin, and understanding that anxiety symptoms are caused by adrenalin, and that no matter how severe the symptoms might be, there is no actual risk. Fast heart beat, shallow breathing, light headedness, nausea, feeling shaky, and feeling woozy are normal responses to adrenalin. Most of my anxiety was caused by worrying about the effects of anxiety – a viscous circle, but one that was easy to break once i got the whole picture. . . Here’s the link:
Eureka!
Here’s an interesting connection between the teleconference series you’ve been conducting and this research. I actually had a chance to see Dr. Dan Siegel (whom you talked with a few weeks back) when he came to talk at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center last weekend. One of the things that came through loud and clear was that intentional, focused, mindful activity clearly affects the brain’s health. Even 10 minutes a day can have an impact.
I have been lifting weights, on and off, for over 30 years. I have also engaged in other sorts of exercises, including toning and balance movements. I can personally attest that the focus and intention that is required when lifting weights — even if they are not very heavy — creates a much more involved state of mind than lighter exercise.
Even lifting light 2.5 – 5 lb weights requires more attention — both to movements and to the state of your body. And when you lift heavier weights, focus and intention and attention are not optional. The last thing you want to do is strain or injure yourself. When you’re lifting weights, you MUST pay deliberate attention. Sometimes to every aspect of your movement and posture.
Interestingly, after a number of sedentary years, I began doing light weight training each morning — nothing too intense, but it is weight training — within the past year. I’m in my mid-40’s but I noticed a significant difference in how well my brain was working, all across the board, in the space of a few weeks. I was more alert, more responsive, and I needed a lot less coffee to get going in the morning and keep going throughout the day.
Now, many months on down the road, I’m ‘hooked’ and I do this as a mindfulness practice each and every morning. It gives me a clear edge in my work, and in my life. The benefits and tangible results are numerous: a job promotion, improved time management, better rest, 15 fewer pounds to carry around (and my weight holding steady), and improved overall happiness, to name a few.
I’m a believer. And I would love to hear what Dr. Dan Siegel has to say about this.
The connection between hip fractures and cognitive decline is logical to me. I do many long term care assessments for seniors and constantly recommend that they remove the scatter rugs in their home. Many resist. Combine that resistence wih one of the early signs of demenmtia – the ubiquitous shuffle gait. People shuffle and do not clear the edge of the scatter rugs and down they go, especially in the bathroom, the most dangerous room in any home.
Perhaps we will find that hip fractures are the result of inattention or an inability to any longer exercise the kind of attention necessary when perambulating on insecure surfaces and terrain. That the high incidence of cognitive impairment translates most of all into inattention. It continues to mystify why the obvious relationship between energetic physical activity and wellness in a profoundly sedentary society should somehow be proclaimed as a find around its salutary impact on wellness and insurance against injury, falling and the like. Have we gotten so far away from our own awareness and experience that we’ve somehow forgotten or never known of this linkage?
So very true. I am an eclectic therapist, NLP and Vision Trainer and a senior and I have chosen to invest in myself and train now in the Feldenkrais Method of Body Awareness (NLP of the Body) and Bones for Life with Ruthy Alon to allow me to live a healthy old age whilst making new neural connections . (I also harness neuroplasticity to improve vision.)
One of the most important things I’ve learnt is to make friends with my skeleton and think of it as being pink and diffused with blood that feeds the bone . Make g friends with the floor and learn to fall well. Gravity is our frined. Thanks for a great series.