النص الكامل لحلقة Falling Without Breaking Because of Strength Training in Midlife: S2E6

WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.998 Can movement practice help you fall better as you age? What an odd question. And yet, I think last week I proved the answer was yes. 00:00:09.998 --> 00:00:18.074 Don't worry, I'm okay. I'll fill you in on all the details and why this is actually positive in 1 minute. 00:00:18.074 --> 00:00:29.226 Hi, I'm Steph, creator of My Body Can, a project where I am documenting my movement journey in midlife, trying to get comfortable with what I can actually do. 00:00:29.226 --> 00:00:38.071 With my body and letting those expectations from the previous decades of my life melt away and just enjoy what I can do. 00:00:38.071 --> 00:00:42.686 So I had a tumble last week. There's nothing major that happened. 00:00:42.686 --> 00:00:52.684 I literally was crossing a very tiny street in a tiny suburban place that we're staying until we move into Bilbao next month, and I fell. 00:00:52.684 --> 00:00:59.606 I felt something that my foot caught on, and I went forward straight. Oh no. Forward and down. 00:00:59.606 --> 00:01:13.450 Now, I had a pretty traumatic fall about 6 years ago in November 2019, and it— I think that's the reason why I then had about a year and a half of on and off vertigo. 00:01:13.450 --> 00:01:21.141 Was it that, or was it perimenopause? We'll never know. It could have been a combination. It was pretty nasty. 00:01:21.141 --> 00:01:22.295 Vertigo's Really? Yeah. 00:01:22.295 --> 00:01:36.523 So the fact that I fell last week and I'm talking about it already, that's different because it's, it's taken me a long time to be able to talk about that experience because of the traumatic aftermath. 00:01:36.523 --> 00:01:44.215 But this fall last week was nothing. I mean, okay, my knee hurt, but It wasn't painful of a fall. 00:01:44.215 --> 00:01:54.982 Um, it's a very different experience. I'm most surprised by my emotional and nervous system reaction to the fall, because of the things it could have brought up. 00:01:54.982 --> 00:02:04.980 So let me explain exactly what happened. I was crossing the street, and I fell. I fell literally forward, almost like a ruler just fell over. 00:02:04.980 --> 00:02:15.363 And about a few seconds after, uh, after I— it started, I saw— I mean, I kind of watched myself fall to literally my hands and knees. 00:02:15.363 --> 00:02:24.977 My head didn't touch the ground, thank goodness, like it did the first fall from years ago. And now I've had weak wrists for years. 00:02:24.977 --> 00:02:32.284 Well, no, I've, I've had weak wrists for years and years and years, ever since I was at university. 00:02:32.284 --> 00:02:44.590 I did something when I was riding my bike up hills a regular basis, and it just messed up my wrists, and I've never been able to get them back to normal. 00:02:44.590 --> 00:02:49.204 I don't even know what normal would feel like for my wrists. 00:02:49.204 --> 00:02:58.049 So the fact that I fell on my wrists and they protected me from going further and hitting my head blows my mind. 00:02:58.049 --> 00:03:01.126 It is absolutely wild to me. That's amazing. 00:03:01.126 --> 00:03:11.893 It makes me think that the wrist exercises and things I've been putting off until my wrists were stronger, I might be able to incorporate them in soon. 00:03:11.893 --> 00:03:19.584 So I fell on my wrists and knees, and I didn't hit my head at all. Didn't. I just didn't. 00:03:19.584 --> 00:03:28.044 There was no one there. There were cars coming, but they were really far away, and it's a very tiny, slow street. 00:03:28.044 --> 00:03:35.351 And so nothing happened. Nobody hit me. I didn't fall in front of anything. There weren't even any bicycles. 00:03:35.351 --> 00:03:38.043 It was very anticlimactic in that regard. 00:03:38.043 --> 00:03:49.195 The biggest result of it was physically, honestly, is that my left knee got scuffed and I've had to bandage it up daily because it is an open wound. 00:03:49.195 --> 00:03:58.040 And I have to put my feet up at work just to make sure that it doesn't, um, get worse while it's healing. 00:03:58.040 --> 00:04:08.807 Um, and it's a very sexy shade of yellow, if that's a thing. But I must have slid a little because it wasn't just that my knee hit. 00:04:08.807 --> 00:04:14.191 It looks like my knee might have dragged a bit when I fell down. 00:04:14.191 --> 00:04:28.420 Because it happened so fast, I don't even remember much other than the thing that I tripped on and then being near the ground but not hitting it with my head, which I was very happy about. 00:04:28.420 --> 00:04:45.725 Um, my phone fell out of my bag, interestingly, and then picking it up and limping over to the bench that was nearby so I could just kind of assess what happened, because I knew that I was going to have like a delayed reaction. 00:04:45.725 --> 00:04:55.723 Falls set me off because of the big fall from a few years ago. Um, I thought I'd be in fight-or-flight mode for a long time. 00:04:55.723 --> 00:04:59.569 But, like, after I calmed down, something would come back. 00:04:59.569 --> 00:05:07.644 Panic attacks would come back, or something would happen, because that's what's happened since the big fall a few years ago. 00:05:07.644 --> 00:05:22.257 So I was giving myself a little bit of time for my adrenaline to go down and to get over the embarrassment, and there was a man in a car who was far away but apparently saw it. 00:05:22.257 --> 00:05:29.949 And so when he got to me, he stopped, got out of his car to make sure I was okay. 00:05:29.949 --> 00:05:36.871 Oh my gosh. It was really, really sweet. When I fell in November of 2019, I fell sideways. 00:05:36.871 --> 00:05:39.178 It was a very different experience. 00:05:39.178 --> 00:05:54.560 There was a rickety stair as I was going from— it was in a restaurant— and as I was leaving my seat and going towards the exit, there was a rickety stair and I fell sideways completely off the stairs. 00:05:54.560 --> 00:06:01.482 It wasn't that high,