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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.
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Don't worry, I'm okay. I'll fill you in on all the details and why this is actually positive in 1 minute.
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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.
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With my body and letting those expectations from the previous decades of my life melt away and just enjoy what I can do.
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So I had a tumble last week. There's nothing major that happened.
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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.
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I felt something that my foot caught on, and I went forward straight. Oh no. Forward and down.
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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.
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Was it that, or was it perimenopause? We'll never know. It could have been a combination. It was pretty nasty.
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Vertigo's Really? Yeah.
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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.
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But this fall last week was nothing. I mean, okay, my knee hurt, but It wasn't painful of a fall.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Well, no, I've, I've had weak wrists for years and years and years, ever since I was at university.
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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.
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I don't even know what normal would feel like for my wrists.
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So the fact that I fell on my wrists and they protected me from going further and hitting my head blows my mind.
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It is absolutely wild to me. That's amazing.
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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.
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So I fell on my wrists and knees, and I didn't hit my head at all. Didn't. I just didn't.
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There was no one there. There were cars coming, but they were really far away, and it's a very tiny, slow street.
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And so nothing happened. Nobody hit me. I didn't fall in front of anything. There weren't even any bicycles.
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It was very anticlimactic in that regard.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It looks like my knee might have dragged a bit when I fell down.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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But, like, after I calmed down, something would come back.
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Panic attacks would come back, or something would happen, because that's what's happened since the big fall a few years ago.
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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.
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And so when he got to me, he stopped, got out of his car to make sure I was okay.
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Oh my gosh. It was really, really sweet. When I fell in November of 2019, I fell sideways.
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It was a very different experience.
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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.
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It wasn't that high,
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but I fell onto Ate one of those giant potter plants, like giant, giant.
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Like the diameter was probably two feet, and it was very thick and hard.
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When I went to the doctor, she literally and I showed her a picture of the plant pot.
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She literally gasped and looked at my head like, "How are you okay?" Oh. Yeah, so that was something.
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But I honestly don't even remember most of what happened last week. Just tripping and being on the ground, but not my head, which I was really happy about.
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It took me a few hours to get past the embarrassment. I did replay it over and over in my head, I'm not gonna lie.
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Why do I keep tripping? I mean, it was once in 2019, once, once then.
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So I mean, that's not— once every 6 years, if that were to repeat, that's not a lot of tripping.
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And then I remember that the last fall was that long ago, 2019. That's not someone who falls a lot, that's just life.
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And if I actually sat down, if I actually sat down and listed all the times in my life I had fallen down, it's really not that many.
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I'm just really embarrassed when I fall. I don't know where that comes from. Ah, so I was just really embarrassed because it was such a non-fall fall.
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There wasn't anything that jutted in front of me.
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I've gotten hit by motorbikes before and not fallen down, so I'm like, hey, how did I fall with almost no catalyst?
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Like, what happened? Something snagged my foot and I fell down, but when I went back— and yes, I went back— I couldn't find anything.
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But I've literally gotten hit by more moving things before and not fallen down, and yet I fell down with this tiny thing I couldn't even find.
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So all of this did kind of go around my head a little bit, especially the first few hours.
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It took me a while to get past it, but the biggest takeaway that I had after this time was this: I fell on my hands and knees.
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My hands and knees are part of my body that I don't feel are particularly strong right now.
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My wrists have been weak for years. My knees are the first things that cause me to have problems when I do a new exercise the wrong way.
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That's probably normal for my age, although I really don't— I don't really desire to be normal if it's painful, but— or weak, right?
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Strength is definitely one of my goals for this year. Physical strength, emotional strength, financial strength, and so on and so forth.
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But that's a whole other issue. Let
me know if you're curious about my new vision board. I'm happy to talk about that in relation to movement goals.
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Feel free to leave a comment anywhere that you can.
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Compared to the previous big fall— compared to the big fall— I have to do a comparison because I don't know how else to process all of this, to be honest with you.
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Compared to the la— that fall. This was a quick reaction.
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My balance exercises didn't stop me from falling, but man, oh man, my form must have been pretty good because my wrists are fine, and my shoulders from the kind of jolt when I hit the ground were only sore maybe a day or two, and I didn't actually do my arm workouts that day or the day before.
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I might have given myself a day off, and then I went lighter bands the leg week afterwards.
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And then for the first workout after that, about 3 days, I went back to the medium band.
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And exercising this soon after an quote-unquote accident— I don't need the quote-unquote, it was an accident. I did fall.
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There was impact. So exercising that quick afterwards is not something I would normally do. I would normally wait and continue to get weaker and less flexible.
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And then kind of have to start over. But I didn't go down to my full squats, but I've been doing squats.
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So I'm keeping up to some degree until my knee heals. My sexy yellow knee.
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So my takeaway, my big takeaway after the fall— this one, not the one years ago— is I feel more efficient.
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Is that the phrase I want to use? Efficient.
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I'm not even sure how to talk about this because I'm not— I don't know how to talk about this, but I'll try.
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So I felt— I fell more efficiently in a way that did minimal damage to my body, and I was able to, instead of rest until all the bruises healed, I was able to listen to my body and continue to do movements that helped me recover well and slowly regain my natural movement back.
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Like, after all of the band workouts and all of the arm workouts, dumbbell workouts, and I— that I'm doing, and doing— I'm doing fascia exercises to continue to stretch things, to stretch the fascia out and make sure that things don't get stuck anymore.
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Because I think a lot of my injuries in the past have been because I moved in a way that moved things that were stuck.
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In my body. I honestly think that.
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And by having my fascia be loosey-goosey like it's supposed to be, I think that makes it easier to fall, or less dangerous to fall.
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I don't know. I don't know
if it was muscle-eye-hand coordination or the fascia being loosey-goosey.
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What I know is the combination of things, even though I don't feel like I'm making as much progress as I would like to, Something worked.
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Something was different. That feels like a win. I mean, the first time I did the fascia exercise, I didn't do the 10 minutes, I did 8, and it hurt.
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So I waited for it to not hurt, and I did 8, and I did 8, and I did 8, and I did 5 some days, and eventually I worked up to 10.
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But then 2 times after that, I did the regular 10 minutes. So I felt better.
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I guess you could say I felt better, and I didn't wait as long to keep doing movements, movement exercises, strength exercises.
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I didn't wait as long. Those— that's a huge win. These are all huge wins. I don't want to be super positive about falling because it wasn't fun.
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There was recovery. I had ice on my leg for days, and walking was awkward, and so on.
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But there's something in the failure or falling that made me realize that I've gotten better, that my body has gotten better with mishaps.
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I'm wrapping up the antibiotics and other medications, trying to get rid of the bronchial infection. So this was another thing happening on top of another thing.
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So I felt a little overwhelmed. I can't lie about that.
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But if I really do the umbrella thing and look at it from a bigger picture perspective, this fall actually reinstated— this fall actually makes me realize that what I'm doing is working.
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The exercises I'm doing, the pace, the rate, the amount, the intensity, the joy that I like, that I get from it.
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It's all working. I'm just a little bored, but that's okay. It feels good and it's working. Do I have to like what I'm doing?
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Do I have to be stimulated all the time? Do I have to feel like I'm going to be swell afterwards?
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No, absolutely not. So I didn't just rest.
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I actually kept going, and that could be a first for me because I used to rest every time something bad happened to my body, to the point of probably damaging it more.
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I could have stopped and waited for everything to be perfect, but in my mid-50s, that would take forever, and I would get worse, so I didn't.
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I pushed a tiny bit and I listened to my body, and I'm really glad that I did.
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So can you— can the right movement exercise help you fall better in midlife? I don't know. This N of 1, I want to say yes.
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So my body can, and your body can protect us from ourselves and from random things on the sidewalk that might Make us fall.
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And from things in life.
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Not exactly something I had put on my last year's vision board or even remotely thought about when I'm looking at different exercise equipment and videos to try out and different exercises I want to experiment with.
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Never, never in a million years did I think this was something I needed to think about or that would be something I needed to Do.
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But I'm really grateful that all, all of this movement journey in my midlife. But here we are.
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And so I'm going to rack this up as a win, as a double win, triple one once my knee heals.
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I feel better and I got back sooner. So those are wins. Those are wins. Feel free to share your experiences with any and all of this.
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I'd love to hear if you dealt better with injury or physical things that you weren't expecting to happen once you started moving more.
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I would love to hear it.
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I appreciate you listening to this, and yeah, I look forward to hearing your experiences with falling, dealing with injuries, and the mindset of it all.
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And all that good stuff. All right, remember, your body can and my body can do a lot more and protect us from a lot more than we realize.
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See you next time. Bye.