HIP BONE TO THE KNEE BONE— HOW TO BUILD A LIFELONG CONNECTION

Yoga shouldn’t hurt

Daily gentle stretching maintains flexibility and prevents injury.

Walk it off

Going for a daily 30-minute walk can have lifesaving benefits. And, according to experts, the faster, farther, and more often you walk, the greater the benefits.

Bear the burden

Weight-bearing exercise, even using weights of as little as 2 or 3 lbs (1 or 1.5 kg), can slow bone loss.

Don’t worry, be happy

Spend time with friends and family and do something you love. Mental health is as important as physical fitness.

Vitamin D is vital for bone health—especially during Canada’s dark winters; nearly one-third of Canadians are vitamin-D deficient.

Turmeric is an excellent anti-inflammatory. However, Capasso explains, both turmeric and vitamin D should be emulsified in fat to reap their full benefits. Most liquid forms of vitamin D fall into that category. As for turmeric, Indian recipes often include ghee—a type of clarified butter—because it helps the body absorb the spice properly. (Hello, butter chicken!)

Natural treatments for joint & muscle pain

Capasso also suggests alternative forms of treatments for joint and muscle pain.

Acupuncture

“Acupuncture can be really beneficial, to get the needles right in there and do electro stimulation,” says Capasso. “And there’s castor oil—used topically, not internally.”

Exercise

Both professionals agree that there is no substitute for regular exercise. Vendittoli says, “When it comes to hips and knees, you cannot stop moving. Quite the opposite ... It could become a vicious circle. When you have pain from wear and tear in your joints and you stop moving, it becomes worse and worse.”

If you are experiencing joint or muscle pain, Vendittoli suggests switching to a less impactful activity such as walking instead of running, or swimming instead of tennis.

Following the diagnosis that put my dreams of a triple Axel on ice, I, too, modified my workouts. I became a competitive ice dancer (no jumping allowed). The highlight of my second career was representing my home province of Quebec in a competition held at the Olympic arena in Lake Placid, NY.

My partner and I performed on the same surface where, only a decade earlier, the American men’s ice hockey team defeated the Soviet Union to claim the gold medal. Their story was enshrined in the movie Miracle on Ice

I realize now—as I use yoga and jogging to manage my own arthritis and degenerated discs gifted to me by 17 years of figure skating—that that ice arena and I have something in common: we both have a lot of history in our bones, but we’re still standing.

Help

• Helps support gastrointestinal health

• Restores and normalizes intestinal flora

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Mastering midlife with imagination and some new perspectives

What resources do you now have that your younger self lacked?

> Greater empathy or self-understanding, perhaps?

> Better problem-solving skills?

> Job security and disposable income?

Celebrate those assets, and consider how they might further enrich your life.

Sound familiar? At some middle-ish stage of our life, many of us find ourselves contemplating our journey—past, present, and future—in unsettling ways. According to Patricia Katz, a well-being strategist with expertise in midlife issues, “midlife malaise” is a very common experience. But it’s also—if we welcome it as a catalyst for renewal—a potentially exciting and revitalizing one.

New perspectives on the past … Midlife dissatisfaction routinely involves longing for what once was (flawless skin? tireless libido?).

Eliminating such longings might be impossible; however, we can minimize them by consciously appreciating what we’ve gained over decades of living.

Looking to the past can also trigger regrets—about paths not taken or expectations not met. But here, too, we can adopt a more positive perspective. Katz encourages us to identify interests we may have “cast aside along the way” and explore ways of (re)introducing those enthusiasms into our life.

While completing the fine arts degree you dropped in your twenties might no longer be feasible, could you …

> Work or volunteer for an arts organization?

> Take some continuing studies courses?

> Turn your lifelong passion for colour into a regular activity, or even a business (as Katz herself did)?

As for unmet expectations about how our life “should” look by the time we hit middle age, it’s helpful to remember that many of those widely held expectations stem from arbitrary historical and cultural forces. In other words, there is no natural law dictating that we must achieve certain goals by a certain age!

… and the future

Fears about the future—health, finances, happiness—are another source of midlife malaise. But brooding about the future (or the past) not only sabotages our enjoyment of the present but also undermines the pleasure we might take in anticipating several more decades of passionate and engaged living.

Precautionary measures, such as staying up to date on recommended health checks or working with a financial planner, can, in addition to their practical benefits, help tame our worries. Equally powerful are exciting and ambitious plans for the future. If you knew for certain that you still had many decades of vibrant health and financial security ahead of you, what would you do? Is anything stopping you? (Maybe that fine arts degree is feasible.)

Exercise versus midlife blahs

Barry Petkau, a Vancouver-based fitness trainer who specializes in third-age functional training, maintains that the most powerful reward of regular exercise for his clients in midlife and beyond is the transformative effects on mental well-being. In addition to its numerous physical benefits, exercise can improve our mood, lessen anxiety, reduce stress, and increase self-confidence.

Back to the present

An excellent way of responding to midlife stressors is to remain as centred as possible in the here and now. A wealth of research, including studies focused on midlife, highlights the wide-ranging benefits of mindfulness practices.

Whether it’s meditation or another activity that settles you in the present moment, such practices will boost your mood, reduce your stress, and very likely improve many aspects of your physical health, from cognitive flexibility to immune response.

Finally, if your midlife present seems bogged down in old routines—a phenomenon that, paradoxically, both bores us and heightens our sense of “time flying”—get creative with introducing novelty wherever you can. As Katz maintains, episodes of dullness are “a normal part of the ebb and flow of life,” and sometimes small tweaks are all that’s needed to rekindle our enthusiasm.