New Studies Suggest You’ll Feel Less Slow If You Strengthen These

With many of us attempting to kick up our exercise regimens to ensure that we start 2017 off right, I felt it would be very helpful to share an article that my Canadian client Gino Scapillati sent me recently from his major hometown paper.

The topic is the importance of building ankle strength and maintaining it as we age.  It suggests that because new bio-mechanical research has been done that has linked decreased ankle muscle strength and power to being slower and to having more inefficient gait (which makes you get tired quicker while walking or running), if you strengthen your feet and ankle muscles you can offset the feeling.often described as “I’m slowing down as I get older..”

As a Rehabilitative and Performance Exercise Specialist, I’ve been preaching the importance of building foot and ankle strength for years.  I highly recommend you check out this article.  Here’s a snippet..

 How Ankles Hold Us Back As We Age   The Globe and Mail  Metro 1/2/17

It might be time to think less about weight training and more about strengthening those fundamental joints.

When we marvel at the incredible feats and rippling muscles of the world’s greatest athletes, we’re not usually thinking about their ankles.

But, that may be an oversight, according to a series of recent studies. The muscles of the ankle and calf, it turns out, play a disproportionately large role in our ability to walk, run and sprint. And the progressive loss of ankle power as we age may be one of the key reasons we slow down, suggesting that skipping the biceps curls and spending that time on ankle strengthening instead might be a smart move.

This suggests that the ankles are much more likely to hold you back if they’re weak, according to Juha-Pekka Kulmala, the study’s lead author. “The muscles working closest to their upper functional limits are the ‘weakest link,’ ” he says.

The new findings help explain earlier results that Kulmala and his colleagues published in 2014. In that study, they compared the walking and running gaits of three groups of runners, with average ages of 26, 61 and 78. All three groups produced similar power from the knees and hips, but the power produced from the ankles declined steadily with increasing age.”

Click here for the full article

As a result of reading this article, I felt it would be very helpful to my readers to offer a free 60 minute foot and ankle exercise class teach you what to do to keep yours strong.  I haven’t scheduled anything yet but I wanted to let you know in case you are interested.

If you’re interested, just reply and say “put me on the list.”

To a strong foundation for 2017,