Watching our beautiful summer, once more stolen by wildfire smoke, is depressing. Even more so hearing that it could extend into the fall and return next year. We wait all year for summer and then — this!?
Dr. Michael Koehle knows, in minute detail, what the complex wildfire smoke recipe does inside your body. Not only is he a medical doctor, he has a Ph.D in kinesiology. He teaches in both streams and researches athletes and pollution. He also has clients in their 70s, 80s, and 90s so he knows senior fitness. He understands the damage done by wildfire smoke in our bodies and he understands the damage done to a senior body by stopping, or never starting, a fitness regime.
Dr. Koehle endorses moving your fitness routine inside, into clean, filtered air, and keeping at it. So here’s a list of ideas for doing just that in Kamloops BC, ideas that apply in cities from Barcelona to Boston Bar, where fitness is an issue in the time of wildfire smoke.
For walkers: walking in malls, sports facilities with indoor tracks, libraries, and even in your own building, upping your game to stairs, even running up and down stairs. There’s a serious workout.
Most communities offer indoor pools. In Kamloops, swimmers have three. A casual swim, laps, aquafit, and even playing with your grandchildren in the pool constitutes a workout.
Martial arts clubs are welcoming to all ages: karate, tai chi, taekwondo, boxing and kick boxing — you’ll find them on-line and discover they are more fun than you would have thought.
YMCA fitness opportunities — the air is clean, cooled, and the range is astonishing: gentle seniors’ classes, bar classes, step classes, line dancing, and for those ready to challenge themselves, spinning classes on stationary bikes and HIIT – high-intensity-interval-training – just like it sounds. These facilities provide thoroughly equipped workout rooms with every kind of weight imaginable, plus treadmills, step machines, and recumbent bikes.
Kamloops’ Tournament Capital Centre Field House is now re-opened from annual maintenance and the space, equipment, support available there is reasonably priced with special classes and rates for seniors.
Branch out, think of summer as the time you experiment: Pilates, yoga, dancing — modern, tap, social ballroom, Highland, even pole dancing — why not? Get out and go bowling, play billiards, go indoor skating, try an indoor climbing wall or trampoline, explore what your community has on offer. Consider investing in your fitness with a qualified personal trainer. That focussed work can do more than keep you out of the smoke, it lets you up your game.
If you can find an on-line class with a qualified instructor and have an air filter at home or in your building’s community room, you can bring in a friend or two to join you. Note: without an air purifier, your residence could contain up to 75 percent of the pollution from outside.
Just power through and keep exercising outdoors? Dr. Koehle knows why not. When exercising, the toxic mix of 2.5 particulate matter (microscopic) and gasses in wildfire smoke are breathed in at ten times your stationary breathing rate. And then that soup starts its work in your nose, throat, lungs, and your eyes. Coughing, red eyes, sore throat, heaviness in your chest. We know all about that.
Once in your lungs, this brew does more lasting damage and anyone with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — COPD, emphysema — can tell you what that is like. But this gift keeps on giving. Wildfire pollutants can make it through your lung’s protective barrier into your bloodstream and that’s where the serious, long-term damage gets done. Dr. Koehle sees three diseases that can result: heart disease, diabetes, and dementia.
Three life-altering diseases. Dementia certainly gets our crossword puzzling attention. Dementia strikes fear in all our hearts and the silent advancement of that is unnerving.
Why are seniors on the list of individuals particularly vulnerable to the effects of wildfire smoke? Dr. Koehle explains that, unbeknownst to us, our bodies have probably aged in subclinical ways that we haven’t noticed. Those leave us wide open to further damage from smoke. Staying active is the only tool we have to combat natural aging.
Why not just take a break from our fitness routine during smoke? What’s wrong with a fitness holiday? Dr. Koehle is adamant that “all three of those diseases are reduced in people who maintain their fitness.” He is an advocate, based on the science he knows and the front-line research he does, that finding ways to keep fit is what matters. Keep doing it and find clean air to do it in — that’s your best bet.
This is now the way our summers unfold. Let’s not get caught flat footed. Let’s go into our summers with a list of keep-on-keeping-on and play through, fitfully. Hear Dr. Koehle at: www.youtube.com/@agingfitfully where you will also hear Kamloops Health and Wellness Coordinator, Kimberley Maine, outline safe, indoor alternatives.
Margaret Archibald is an 80-year-old Canadian retiree, who is neither medically nor fitness trained. She is not qualified to diagnose nor recommend health or fitness. She is simply learning how to develop her own fitness, bound and determined to keep on loving aging.