Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (40 page)

Fascia is a dense material that surrounds our tissues and muscles in a secondary nervous system that links all our organs and muscles in a seamless web. The fascia is where we store all of our traumas, whether physical, mental, or spiritual. These traumas all create thickened, dense fascia, which impedes full functioning and causes aches and pains we mistakenly believe are a normal part of aging. John Barnes, a physical therapist and pioneer in myofascial release therapy, points out that restrictions in the fascial structures of our bodies—which do not show up on X-rays, MRIs, or any standard medical tests—can exert up to 2,000 pounds of pressure per square inch on pain-sensitive structures in the body. In fact, I’ve come to believe that most of the muscle and joint restrictions we associate with aging are nothing more than dense fascia that needs stretching!

Bob discovered that he could actually lengthen and contract a muscle at the same time. In this way, he could remove the dense fascia from an injured muscle so that the muscle could shorten as it should. The result is a muscle that functions optimally through its full range. Each of us can do the same thing!

Here’s how you can experience what it feels like to stretch your fascia: Start with a cat stretch. Kneel down on all fours. Now arch your back and tense your arms just like a cat that has just gotten up from a nap. Repeat six to ten times. Here’s another: Lie down on the floor. Bring your knees to your chest and lift your head and chest. Pull your thighs into your chest
with hands behind your thighs. Kick your legs away from your chest while resisting the kick with the hands on the back of your thighs. Notice how this feels in the small of your back. You can also use resistance while doing yoga poses, tensing your muscles to get a better stretch. You’ll be able to feel the areas where you have dense fascia. It will feel tight and restricted and maybe a little painful. If you mindfully tense your muscles and stretch, you will soon find that you can move in new, freer patterns. And as you tense your muscles and stretch them in these planes over time, you’ll see that the dense fascia remodels. The only way to make muscles more flexible is to learn how to stretch them at the same time you’re contracting them, thus breaking up dense fascial patterns. Notice that animals do this all the time!

Bob Cooley trained Olympic swimmer Dara Torres, who won three silver medals in the 2008 Beijing games—at age 41, making her the oldest swimmer ever to compete in the Olympics. Now that is an ageless woman! Cooley has also worked with many other athletes, including speed skater Eric Flaim. But the real genius of his Resistance Flexibility work is that using it to change fascial structures is the key to ageless flexibility in body, mind, and spirit. Though there are many systems that address the fascia, including Yamuna Body Rolling and myofascial release techniques, Cooley’s is the fastest and most effective method I’ve ever worked with.

Resistance Flexibility, or Cooley Yoga, has to be experienced to be understood (which, as you’ve learned, is true of the pelvic floor muscles too—those make up another important internal structure that most of us can’t feel without some direction). Resistance stretching, unlike passive manipulation of the fascia by another person, is active and you can do it yourself. It works your fascia by shredding it as you would shred cotton candy or steel wool to stretch it—and you have to do this with your full attention and strength. Now, “shredding” your fascia may sound painful and damaging, but it’s not, because you don’t have nerve endings in these structures. In fact, if your fascia is dense and tight and in need of shredding, it can
cause
chronic pain. The pain is experienced not in the area of the dense fascia but in the muscle group that opposes it. Yes, your muscles can become
fatigued in stretching and contracting them simultaneously, but the fatigue and pain won’t be intolerable if you go slowly and pay attention to your body’s signals. You can do this yourself following Bob Cooley’s program as outlined in his book or go to his website to learn more:
www.thegeniusofflexiblity.com
. And if you’re really serious, I highly recommend undergoing some assisted stretching from one of Cooley’s elite trainers, whom you can reach via the website.

Earlier I explained how working certain pelvic floor muscles and not others can be a problem because it results in the opposing muscles being underdeveloped. It’s the same idea with resistance training. You want to work the complementary muscle groups. Think about your calf muscles: If you’re used to walking in high heels, your calf muscles have become shortened because they’re used to being in a contracted position. As a result, walking in flats can be uncomfortable. Of course, the opposite is true too: if you’re used to flats, it’s hard to balance when you’re wearing high heels, and you’ll feel uncomfortable contracting your calf muscles to walk in them. The ideal is to have
all
your muscles strong, flexible, long, and supporting each other. That’s what you can achieve with Resistance Flexibility.

Yoga, tai chi, qi gong, and other martial arts, along with Pilates, are other whole-body movement disciplines I recommend. But if you add resistance stretching to your movements, as explained by Cooley, you’re less likely to become injured by too much stretching without resistance to balance it. I have met one too many yoga instructors who needed a hip replacement. If you have naturally flexible joints, you’re likely to overstretch your joints doing yoga, and injury occurs when the body creates dense fascia in the joint capsule to protect it after it has been overstretched. Over time, this can result in all kinds of joint problems. You want to stretch your muscles and fascia, not your joints.

After doing a series of assisted stretching sessions with Bob and his trainers, I now have a series of stretches I do daily to maintain the changes in my body I’ve experienced from his program: improved sleep, much better digestion, a flatter abdomen,
improved breathing and stamina during exercise, and an enhanced sense of well-being and body confidence. This kind of training simply removes the blocks to the optimal functioning of the body. Hence, Bob calls it “training that leaves no residue.” You naturally stand up straight and breathe fully as the body was designed to do. You don’t need to think about it and “will” yourself to do it. And there’s something else that happens with this work. I feel as though I’m a new person—emotionally, mentally, spiritually—as though I’m now living the life I’m meant to live, in the body I was always meant to have.

MOVEMENT FOR HEALTHY BONES

Any movement that puts healthy stress on your muscles and tendons supports your bones in several ways. Pilates can keep your bones aligned properly, and two 40-minute sessions of weight-bearing exercise a week can prevent osteoporosis because of the pressure your bones experience. Bob Cooley’s Resistance Flexibility will do the same thing, as will yoga because it incorporates stretching with muscle contraction. Miriam Nelson, Ph.D., director of the John Hancock Research Center on Physical Activity, Nutrition, and Obesity Prevention at Tufts University and author of
Strong Women, Strong Bones
(Perigee, 2006), has said that high-impact aerobic exercise (think hiking, climbing, and jumping) builds healthy bones. However, do these movements in moderation. Listen to your bones, joints, and ligaments. Don’t try to conquer your body and force it to do a certain number of jumping jacks, or push yourself to hike if it doesn’t feel right in your bones. Work in harmony with your body. It’s not that you’re too old to move “that way”; you just have to be in tune with your body and listen to it when it says, “Enough of that movement for now—I need rest.” What it might be saying, too, is “Shred my fascia!” Getting older doesn’t mean deterioration, but it does mean that you have to pay attention to the wisdom of your bones and tissues, not your preconceived notions about how you’re supposed to move at a certain age. Bones are designed to be flexible and regenerate for a lifetime. And remember that
every structure in your body has to be subjected to the forces of gravity to continue to function well. Enough sitting! Just standing up regularly and doing tasks around the house can help you reap extraordinary benefits.

Speaking of bones, keep in mind that we’ve been oversold on the risks of calcium deficiency. It’s usually not that we’re calcium deficient so much as deficient in the nutrients that help us use the calcium in our diets. Take regular Epsom salt baths, which contain magnesium sulfate, or magnesium supplements. One of my favorites is CALM magnesium supplement, which comes as a drink containing magnesium citrate. Calcium and magnesium need to be present in amounts that are balanced. I strongly recommend that you avoid drugs that protect against osteoporosis, such as Fosamax. They can result in bones that are so dense and brittle that blood can no longer get into them and remodel them.
⁷
Hence, women on these drugs have an increased risk for needing root canal work or suffering hip fractures in the mid-femur that don’t heal.
⁸

Bones and connective tissue form our skeletons, but we also each have an energetic cytoskeleton that runs through our fascia, where the wiring of our secondary nervous system is. This energy field connects back to the heart and its strong electromagnetic field. And every energy meridian you have running along your fascia is connected to a major organ system. When you work with your muscles, fascia, and connective tissue to affect the energy flow along that meridian, you bring energy and health into the corresponding organ system. According to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), bone health is governed by the kidneys, where chi is stored. The kidneys keep your blood clean and your bone marrow healthy and flowing. When your fascial tissue is well hydrated and you do stretches related to the kidney meridian, it helps your bones stay healthy.

Keep in mind that when you try to get flexible by focusing on a particular muscle without simultaneously engaging its corresponding muscle, you put too much pressure on the joints. If you’re feeling muscular pain in your body, pay attention to the set of muscles opposite those where you’re experiencing discomfort. Restricted pectoral muscles, which are common in people
who have desk jobs, cause hunched shoulders and upper back and neck pain. You have to work on both sets of muscles, the pectoral and the neck and upper back muscles, to get relief. Fortunately, relief can happen quickly if you use a holistic approach that addresses all the muscles involved as well as the fascia. For 30 years I had discomfort and inflexibility in my right hip whenever I had been sitting for a long time. The problem lessened considerably when I started to do Pilates. In fact, without Pilates, I fear that I would have had a right hip replacement by now. That right hip got completely fine-tuned and back to normal after three or four sessions with one of Bob Cooley’s trainers because the resistance stretching broke up the remaining dense fascia and lengthened and stretched all the muscles involved. Cooley also points out that almost all back pain and disc problems are due to the inability of the hamstring muscles to optimally shorten because of dense fascia. Stretching the hamstrings takes care of the real problem and removes the strain from the vertebrae in the back.

MAKE PEACE WITH YOUR WEIGHT

If you’re worrying about not doing enough exercise to lose weight, or you’re doing it mostly because you haven’t made peace with your body, it’s time to let that go. Love your body enough to move it the way it calls to you to be moved—don’t try to browbeat it into submission so that you can regain the figure you had at 17. We’ve all been to the gym and seen women built like fireplugs sweating on the treadmill or doing decathlons yet not losing weight. If you don’t change your diet and get your cortisol levels under control, no amount of exercise will help you lose weight. And if you’ve been dieting for much of your life, your body may simply say to you, “That’s it. I’m done.”

Several times in the past, I went on a 500-calorie-a-day diet for almost a month and lost a mere two pounds. When this happened for a fourth time, it marked my final attempt to force my body into submission. I couldn’t believe that it was possible to restrict my food that much and not see the scale budge. “Calories in, calories out” as a theory for how to lose weight is dead wrong. Your metabolism shifts as your level of stress hormones becomes
chronically high, and your extra weight wins. That’s not to say you can’t jump-start your metabolism, but focusing on diet and exercise as you’ve been told to do all your life is a very limited and inefficient way to do it. A friend of mine has a Ph.D. in exercise physiology and, like me, she did that strict 500-calorie-a-day program with no results. Then she left her house and kids for a couple of months to go on a trip she’d been anticipating eagerly for a long time—and lost 25 pounds. You can lose five pounds overnight if you release grief you’ve been holding on to. The key is to love your body into permanent changes. That involves changing your old trauma patterns about your body.

When it came to making peace with my weight, the final piece of the puzzle was using the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT, commonly known as “tapping”). Tapping helped me uncover and release some old beliefs about my body, exercise, and diet that needed to go. Give it a try and see if it works for you.

Exercise: Tapping to Release Painful Emotions and Beliefs about Food and Your Weight