Joanne Hannon's Fit Tip
DISCLAIMER: Always move and work at your own pace. These health & well-being tips are not intended to replace your medical professional. These tips should serve as suggestions for your health & well-being.
Lack of Hydration
Water comprises about 60% of our body weight and 70% of our muscles.
We absolutely need to drink water:
to transport our blood, our nutrients, our nerve signals
to cushion our muscles, bones, and soft tissue (including our spinal cord and brain)
to regulate body temperature and for digestion and toxic waste removal.
Dehydration reduces physical and mental performance, promotes fatigue, and can cause dizziness. Water has always played a concrete and mystical role in human lives. It was and remains essential for transportation of people and goods. Major cities have grown up on its banks. In many third world cultures, walking daily (usually a woman’s role) for hours to a water source for basic survival is still an unavoidable reality. It plays a significant symbolic, purifying role in many religious rituals. Global warming and icecap melting has affected the salinity (salt level) of our oceans, which affects ocean life and ocean currents. The ocean currents are affecting our climates. Climate changes affect economies in many areas including: agriculture, sanitation, health, and transportation. Recognizing an opportunity, multinational corporations have quietly bought water rights in various parts of the world including North America with very little interference or public debate. Bottled water has become a major commodity – even when it differs little from regular tap water.
As an instructor, perhaps you can share with your participants how the qualities of the water improve their workouts. If you start to feel thirsty you are already partially dehydrated. Water forms approximately 70% of muscle; if the body becomes dehydrated the muscles are going to work with less efficiency so the workout will suffer accordingly.
Make a handout to remind your participants that it is essential to remain hydrated.
Water: the most important substance in the body after oxygen.
Everyone should drink at least 8 –8oz glasses of water per day. What is the easiest way to do this? Keep water nearby and sip often.
Sources: Natural water, fruits and vegetables and meats.
Affect: Muscle Cramping
Muscle Cramping in different parts of the body such as in the calves, hamstrings, lower back and the feet can be an extremely painful condition and is a frequent “bugbear” in an older adult class. Unfortunately, older people are more susceptible to muscle cramps due to normal muscle loss (atrophy). Cramping can start as early as the late-40s and accelerates with age and inactivity.
Often the participants who get muscle cramps are the very people who need to exercise and this can really put a damper on their enthusiasm to come to the program and they drop out. Cramping problems can usually be helped with adjustments to exercise within the class if you stop the activity, do some gentle stretching and massage the affected area. However it must be realized that recurrent cramping can be signs of much deeper problems.
What can you do within the class?
The answer could be as simple as re-training foot mechanics Maybe you need to go back over some basic movement such as teaching the correct use of the feet when walking: – heel-ball-toe on the forward movement and toe-ball-heel on the backward phase. When working in the shallow end check to see that the participants are in the correct depth. Sometimes participants like to work too deep where buoyancy or depth does not allow them to bring the heels down to finish the movement. They may spend half the class balancing on their toes. Make sure to do a lot of easy travel patterns for mobility rather than allowing participants to bounce around in one spot for any length of time. When bicycling, or doing other suspended work on a noodle, cue for correct ankle/foot movement to engage the water correctly.
Still Using Bottled Water?
Bottled water creates tons of trash. Each year, more than 38 billion bottles are thrown away (less then 13% are recycled) as of 2023. The plastic from these bottles doesn’t biodegrade – it now a permanent part of our landfills. Bottled water is no safer than tap water. Non-profit Natural Resource Defence Council conducted a four-year review of the bottled water industry and the safety standards that govern it, including a comparison of national bottled water rules with national tap water rules, and independent testing of over 1,000 bottles of water. The conclusion was that there is no assurance that just because water comes out of a bottle it is any cleaner or safer than water from the tap. And in fact, an estimated 25 percent or more of bottled water is really just tap water in a bottle — sometimes further treated, sometimes not. Bottled water hurts the environment.
Plastic bottles pose a health risk. Studies have shown that chemicals called phthalates, which are known to disrupt testosterone and other hormones, can leach into bottled water over time. One study found that water that had been stored for 10 weeks in plastic and in glass bottles contained phthalates, suggesting that the chemicals could be coming from the plastic cap or liner. Although there are regulatory standards limiting phthalates in tap water, there are no legal limits for phthalates in bottled water — the bottled water industry waged a successful campaign opposing the FDA proposal to set a legal limit for these chemicals! And when bottled water marketing convinces one in five people that the only place to get drinking water is from a bottle, it threatens the political will to adequately fund our public water systems.
