Move Smarter, Age Better: A Physical Therapist's Guide to Staying Strong After 50
Show Snapshot:
Want to stay active, strong and mobile in midlife and beyond? Physical therapy expert Dr. Katie Dailey reveals how just 10-20 minutes of targeted daily movement can help you build stronger bones, maintain muscle mass, and protect your joints. Perfect for women navigating menopause and anyone who wants to keep doing what they love for decades to come. Learn about Groove Health's personalized virtual strength coaching for adults 50+, designed by physical therapists to fit into your lifestyle. Get practical, science-backed strategies for knee and back health, learn which muscles are chronically undertrained and need the most attention, and discover how to move smarter with expert guidance. Your future self will thank you!
Transcript:
[00:00] Dr. Katie Dailey: We know that women who are entering menopause have marked bone loss, muscle mass loss, and a myriad of different things that will continue to occur unless something is done about it.
[00:17] Katie Fogarty: Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. All month long, we're exploring the Science of Living Well in midlife and beyond. I'm your host, Katie Fogarty, and today we are spending time with a guest who is going to help us power up our strength, balance, and mobility routines for 2025 and beyond, because we have big dreams for the new year, and we don't want to be sidelined by injury, pain, or low energy.
Dr. Katie Dailey is a Doctor of Physical Therapy and a founding clinician at Groove Health, which offers virtual strength and mobility coaching for adults 50-plus. Groove is designed by physical therapists and exercise physiologists to help you, me, and everyone we love fit movement into our daily lifestyle.
I've been working with Groove for a few weeks now, and I'm excited to share how highly targeted doses of daily exercise add up to results and can help us do everything we love for longer. I'm in it for my future self. I plan to travel the globe, play racket sports, and chase my future grandchildren in the decades to come. Your goals may look way different than mine, but if being fit, active, and mobile as you age is on your vision board, stick around – this conversation is for you.
Katie Fogarty: Welcome, Katie!
How's it going? I'm excited to hang out with you. Full disclosure, Katie has been helping me with my exercises, so we are meeting in a different format. Usually she's giving me some great tips and tools over a text message or an email. But it's really fun to be hanging out with you behind a podcast mic.
I'm excited to explore Groove Health and all that it offers in terms of strength and mobility coaching as we age, but I do want to start with some stage setting. We are at the start of the year, when many of us are choosing to focus on rebooting our fitness or recommitting to our usual routines. Give us a big picture. Everyone knows that we need to exercise – that is a given – but many of us don't know how to break it down or think about it more specifically. Are there recommended guidelines or benchmarks for physical activity that we should be hitting?
[02:32] Dr. Katie Dailey: First of all, I want to say thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here and have this conversation with you. And yes, there are recommendations and guidelines for benchmarks for physical activity.
In 2008, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services appointed a group of experts from exercise medicine and various related health fields. They essentially tasked them to build an evidence-based set of recommendations for physical activity. They had an advisory committee review thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles and studies, and then they put together a comprehensive scientific report on all of their findings.
The reason they started to design these recommendations is they really started to notice that many Americans were acquiring different types of chronic diseases, injury, and pain as they progressed through their lives. They wanted to take a deep dive into whether there were any physical activity recommendations that could help offset or mitigate these changes.
Their recommendations from the HHS are to get 150 minutes of what we call moderate-intensity physical activity, or 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity per week. To take a quick second to explain – physical activity really is any type of movement that you do with your body. It can include structured exercise or workouts, but it can also include regular daily activity like shopping for groceries, doing laundry, cutting the grass – anything like that can be categorized as physical activity.
Moderate physical activity means you're running at about 50-70% of your maximum heart rate. In a nutshell, this activity is something that gets your heart rate elevated but you can still talk through a couple of sentences, though you might need to stop to take a breath. Things like power walking, bike riding, or shooting hoops would qualify.
Vigorous physical activity is much more strenuous, classified as 70-85% of your max heart rate. This is something we usually associate with more formal types of exercise, like running, playing soccer, or hiking a really steep hill.
Human beings used to be more active – many of our occupations required physical activity. We worked on farms, in factories, we used our bodies to make money. We didn't have cars, we walked everywhere, we rode bikes. Our modern lifestyles essentially require us to sit quite a bit. We're required to sit for transportation, for work activities. A lot of us sit for recreational activities, whether reading books or watching television. So a lot of it is just general lifestyle constraints.
Diet plays a big role too. Our food system, in many ways, is contaminated. We're not able to eat or find good food sources that aren't laced with chemicals or other things that our body isn't really familiar with or used to processing.
[06:50] Katie Fogarty: I want to interrupt you for a minute. I had Dr. Jen Ashton on the show recently – she's going to be coming up a few weeks after you – and she was talking about this Standard American Diet, which has the acronym SAD, which is just hilarious and really says volumes about what we're fueling our bodies with.
I completely hear you on the sitting. I do a lot of sitting for my podcasting, I do a lot of sitting for my day job as a career coach. Regular listeners can probably hear that I sound quite sick. I've been doing a lot of sitting on my sofa at the start of the new year as I had a really horrible head cold. So I know when we're spending a lot of time sitting around, it definitely has an impact on your body, your mood, and your mind. I haven't been feeling 100% because I spent the last six days on the sofa versus doing what I love, which is yoga and playing sports and doing my exercises with you, which we actually had to put a little bit of a pause on due to my health.
But this is not about me. I know that my listeners care about this because one of my top five most downloaded shows in all of 2024 was on building bone health, building our bodies for longevity, mobility, and agility. This is something that Groove Health and you focus on – how do we create the strength, balance, mobility, and power we need to power our lives, especially after 50-plus? This is a big question, but yeah...
[08:18] Dr. Katie Dailey: It's a big question. I could talk about it for days, if not weeks. To be honest, before I get into it, I want to loop back really quick to the recommendations for activity. So 150 minutes moderate to vigorous physical activity – the 75 minutes you mentioned is actually just if you do vigorous activity. They also recommend doing targeted strength training for every major muscle group of the body twice a week, and incorporating balance and mobility as well. So it's kind of this complete package.
As for how we incorporate strength, balance, mobility, and power, especially after 50 – well, the short answer is we really have to look at two things. The human body is absolutely mind-blowingly incredible in that it is so adaptable and will do anything you ask it to do, regardless of your genetic constraints. Whatever deck of cards you've got, we've got to figure out where you are and how to get you to where you want to be.
The body is exceptionally adaptable, but anything you want to accomplish with your body, you have to train for specifically. If you want more strength, then you have to train for strength. If you want better balance, you have to train for balance. If you want more mobility in your life, you have to train for that. If you want more power, more cardiac output – all of those things have to be specifically trained for.
If you were in high school or college and you wanted to get a 4.0 and you only studied for English, then you probably wouldn't do that great at math. There's carryover between different types of movement, but you have to do different movements in different directions. This doesn't mean you have to exercise two or three hours at a time – you can keep these in short, targeted bursts, 10-20 minutes per day, but you have to employ facets from all these different disciplines.
There are some caveats after 50, especially with menopause, because we have these age-related changes like osteoporosis and sarcopenia – age-related bone loss and muscle mass loss that occur particularly in women. As we reach menopause, we lose estrogen, which is an anabolic hormone. It builds bone, builds muscle, protects our heart, protects our brain. As we start to lose estrogen, the most powerful tool we have to build strength, bone health, muscle health, tendon strength, ligament strength, and cardiovascular strength is actually exercise and physical activity.
We can mitigate the normal age-related changes associated with menopause and estrogen loss by doing strength training. We can mitigate cross-linking, loss of water, loss of elasticity in our soft tissues, tendons, and ligaments with targeted dynamic mobility training. We can mitigate the dampening of our proprioceptive and balance systems by training those systems. That's a high-level answer – I can get into the nitty-gritty per each aspect.
[12:02] Katie Fogarty: And we are going to do that because I want to hear all about these targeted bursts and how we can specifically work on these different core areas, which all need to work in harmony for us to have the lives we want to be leading in 2025 and beyond. We're going to explore that right after this quick break.
Katie, we're back from the break. When we went into it, we talked about targeted bursts, these targeted types of exercises we can be doing to work on the qualities you identified – agility, mobility, all the different systems we want to continue to work and hum along so we can have our best 2025 and beyond. I want to start by asking you, before we dive into some specific exercises: are there some muscles that are chronically undertrained?
[12:55] Dr. Katie Dailey: Yes, the short answer is yes.
[12:59] Katie Fogarty: I feel like I might have some of them, so I just want to make sure I'm not the only one.
[13:03] Dr. Katie Dailey: In my time spent in the clinic – as you mentioned, I'm a trained physical therapist with a doctorate in physical therapy, and I'm also board certified in orthopedics, which just means I've spent a lot of time in school and in the clinic working on human bodies. When you spend a lot of time doing that, you start to notice patterns.
I'm typically working with people coming out of surgery or recovering from an injury who need rehab. When folks come into the clinic with what we call insidious onset – meaning there's no definable trauma, accident, or surgery that brings them in, but they just have some sort of kinetic dysfunction, pain, or body part that's not working as they'd like – there start to be patterns that emerge in specific muscles that are chronically undertrained.
If you want to think about the human body in a really oversimplified sense, we have groups of muscles that we call proximal stabilizers. These muscles are our supportive postural muscles that work to hold our skeleton up against gravity – think about everything that's close to the centerline of the spine. Then we have another generalized group of muscles called the distal mobilizers. These are all the muscles that run along arms and legs that do the big gross motor movements of your body.
A lot of folks are chronically undertrained in the stabilizing muscles, particularly on the back side of your body and on the lateral or sides of your body. As we age out of childhood, we just stop moving in different directions. Most of the movements we do are in front of our body, whether with our arms or legs, so we're really not moving or utilizing the muscles that run along the lateral or outside of our leg and the back body of our leg and back shoulders.
[16:20] Katie Fogarty: What would some of those movements be? It's like somebody bent down roller skating, right? You see those kids in roller derby going from side to side and moving. You said we use these muscles more when we were younger, so what are some playful motions we might use to bring these muscles into action today?
[16:40] Dr. Katie Dailey: If you watch a kid, they're not really – I was going to say "hell bent," but they're not really constraining themselves into definitive planes of motion.
[16:51] Katie Fogarty: First of all, I like "hell bent," so we're aiming for hell bent in 2025. Let's bring a little energy to this! So we're looking at a kid – what are they doing?
[17:00] Dr. Katie Dailey: They're moving in diagonals. They're doing a lot of rotations, a lot of side bending, a lot of compound motions and complex motions. They're rolling around, running, sprinting. They're using a ton of power and speed. They're not sitting around – if you ever watch a kid, they don't ever walk from point A to point B, they're always running.
Humans move in diagonals too, if we're paying attention to it. If you reach for something on a shelf above you, you're not going to reach straight out in front of you – you're going to reach out to the side. We do a lot of diagonals and lateral motions.
Kids also run fast – they use a lot of power, contracting their muscles over a very short period of time. Strength is essentially how much force you can generate with a particular muscle; power is how quickly you can do that. This is a really critical component of musculoskeletal health, particularly as we age, because a lot of our functional motions in life require quick contractions. Getting out of a chair, for instance – children do that without thinking. They're just moving in tons of different planes and motions, lots of explosive movements. As adults, we stop doing that. We stop playing.
[18:21] Katie Fogarty: If we want to integrate some of these movements into our routines now, what would those types of exercises look like?
[18:28] Dr. Katie Dailey: There are a couple of ways we can approach this. If you're trying to hit the back side of your body, to strengthen or create power along all the muscles on the back side or lateral side of the body, there are some traditional exercises that work great.
For the back side of the body, if you want to do bodyweight exercises where you don't need equipment, anything where you're on all fours or laying on your belly and lifting your legs and arms will fire up the back side of your spinal muscles, which are critical for spinal health.
Any strength training for your glutes would include traditional exercises like squats and lunges in multiple directions. You can add explosiveness by incorporating plyometrics or jumping, such as box jumping in different directions, single leg or double legs.
There's a lot of band work you can do for the gluteus medius. You can wrap a band around your feet or ankles and do side steps, leg kicks out to the side or behind you. There are also Pilates-based exercises – Pilates is a great format to hit the deep stabilizers, lateral muscles, and back muscles. Pilates exercises like clams or pyramids, where you're doing side-lying leg lifts with or without a band, or any single-leg activity will really fire off those stabilizing muscles.
[20:04] Katie Fogarty: When you say single leg, do you mean balancing on one leg or just moving one leg from a prone position?
[20:10] Dr. Katie Dailey: Both. If you want to focus more on your back strength and hip strength, you can lay on your belly and lift one or both legs or arms. You can do this in an alternating pattern or lift all four limbs together. That's going to fire up your shoulder or scapular stabilizers, your low back muscles, your hip muscles, and everything along what we call the posterior chain, which are chronically undertrained.
You can also do single-leg activities while standing. Standing on a single leg will fire a lot of your stabilizing or postural muscles while in standing and hits that muscle I mentioned, the gluteus medius. You can do single-leg squats, single-leg Romanian deadlifts, torsional rotations. Things we normally think of as balance-based exercises will actually fire a lot of hip stabilizers or gluteus medius activities, which are super critical for knee and spine health.
[[21:22] Katie Fogarty: These are great exercises for the posterior, for the back, that are sort of chronically undertrained as we age and sit and stop running diagonally around like little kids. I have a question about a body part that I know from my personal experience and from watching friends struggle with – our knees. My husband went through knee issues that stopped his long-time running habit and interfered with his ability to play racket sports. I have any number of friends who've really struggled with knee issues that have really sidelined them. When your knee hurts and you can't exercise, I think it's like knocking over dominoes, right? Everything starts to fall apart. How do we take care of our knees as we age?
[22:08] Dr. Katie Dailey: It's a really great question, and honestly, there are some quick generalizations, but everyone's got their own unique overlay of how they're put together. So there is some uniqueness in that as well.
In general, the best way to take care of your knees is the same way you should take care of any joint – it's a diversity of movement and planning and training for the future. Every joint we have is essentially two bones that articulate or come together, and they are moved by muscles. Muscles run from one bone to another, and they can either contract to hold the two ends of the bones – the joint – stable, or they can move one bone on the other bone.
The way to keep joints healthy is to make sure they stay mobile. The knee is what we call a hinge joint, so it can essentially do two big movements: bending and straightening. It can also rotate a little bit. You want to maintain mobility in all the directions that the joint is capable of – that's one major component with any joint that you've got to maintain throughout life.
As we age, mobility gets a little bit harder because we lose fluid in our tissues. It's a normal part of aging that we lose these specialized molecules that attract water and make our joints gushy and squishy. As we lose those, the impetus to employ more mobility exercises actually ramps up as we get older because we just have more stiffness as we age.
You also need to keep the joint strong. For knees, just like any other joint, you not only have to strengthen at the joint itself – the muscles that immediately surround the joint (in the case of the knee, would be calves on the back of the lower leg, hamstrings on the back of the upper leg, and quadriceps) – but the knee is really the innocent bystander of what happens above and below the joint in a lot of ways.
If there's something going on with your foot or your hip, all of those aberrant motions, any weaknesses, lack of mobility – they're all going to play out in the knee as well. It's not going to be an immediate thing. This is the tricky part with musculoskeletal conditions and disease states like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc. – they're all processes over years or even tens of years. It's almost this tick, tick, ticking away of some sort of asymmetry where the joint is likely being asymmetrically loaded over a long period of time.
The best thing we can do is try to mitigate that by making sure that the joint itself, and above and below it, are mobile. The knee, in this case, needs to be strong, as do the foot and the hip. Then you need to make sure there's stability – so a lot of single-leg activities, power movements, explosive movements, progressive overload.
One last thing – actually, two more things. One is adequate rest. Again, an over-generalization for most humans is they're either going to fall into this overtraining paradigm (my athletes, where you're like, "Can you just please rest, because what you're doing is not working for you anymore?") or the other camp, where it's really hard to get them motivated to exercise at all. And then there's, of course, a lot of gray areas. But rest is critical to repairing and building strength.
Then there's the huge diversity of motion. A lot of people – I don't know your husband, obviously, I've never met him or examined his knee – but a lot of folks will say, "Oh, I'm doing a ton of cross-training: I'm running, I'm doing the elliptical, and I'm biking." Well, all of those motions are really the same motion for the knee. They're just bending, you know? They're not really that divergent, and they're not doing a lot of lateral or posterior movements. Cross-training to hit all these different types of movements above and below the joint – mobility, stability, strength – is really the key to keeping the knee and any other joint healthy, particularly as we age.
[26:39] Katie Fogarty: This notion of the tick, tick, ticking time bomb really speaks to me because what we're doing today is going to impact us. I'm 55 now – it's 65, 75, and beyond, honestly. I think it's easy to forget that what we're doing today truly is going to pay dividends in the future.
You were giving us great ideas about why we should manage our knees, how the knee is the innocent bystander, and what we're doing to our calf muscles and our hamstrings and to our quads really plays a role. Another body part that I know from friends and family that has given people challenges is back pain. I have a favorite yoga teacher who always says, "You're only as young as your spine." And every time she says that, I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm like 110!" So I'm like, "How can I bring my spine into the same zip code as my actual age, which is 55?" So what are some key exercises or stretches that we should be doing on a regular basis to preserve our back and spine health?
[27:42] Dr. Katie Dailey: That's another good question. I would say a lot of it falls into the same kind of paradigm or discussion that we just had regarding the knee. The same underlying principles apply. Your spine is really incredible – it's a stack of bones that's just held up by muscles and ligaments, and it's designed to move in all these different directions.
Employing that skill set, moving your spine in all the directions it was designed to move, is one thing you can do straight out of the gate – bending forwards, backwards, rotational movement, side bending. I actually really love yoga principles for mobility, because what yoga does in a lot of cases is what I call these big myofascial wind-ups.
None of the body parts in our body work alone. The lower back and hip are really intimately related. The shoulder and the neck and the upper back are very intimately related, and they work as these big complementary units. And of course, the spine runs from tailbone to the base of your head.
I love yoga for these big wind-ups where you're getting into these sort of pretzel-like positions. As an experienced yoga practitioner, when you get into those positions, you can really feel where the restriction is. I really like these big wind-ups, sitting in that position for longer than you probably want to, really focusing on exhalation to down-regulate the nervous system, relax the muscles, sit into the stretch, so to speak.
But at a high level, you need to move your spine in all different directions. Then you need to strengthen your spine and your hips. You also have to move your hips in lots of different directions because, as mentioned, they're intimately related. If your hips aren't moving great, your spine is going to move more to do the things you want to do. If your spine is not moving great, your hips are going to move more to do what they want to do.
It's really about making sure your hips and spine are moving well and are both strong. It's hard to pinpoint any specific mobility exercise because everybody varies in how they're put together. But I love things like the pigeon pose, any sort of big rotational stretch like the Iron Cross. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, but you basically lay on your back and cross one leg over your midline, so you're really getting the whole length of your myofascial chains from tip to tail. Any big rotational side-bending type stretch is best for mobility for the spine, but more critical to the spine, I would say, is making sure that it's really, really strong.
[30:30] Katie Fogarty: This is great news for me because I absolutely love pigeon pose and I'm really committed to yoga. I personally find myself feeling so much better – it definitely stretches out all those kinks from sitting at the desk, and I know it's doing a lot for my spine.
Katie, I want to switch gears for a minute now and ask you more specifically about Groove Health. Groove Health offers one-on-one strength and mobility coaching for people 50-plus. Spending time on your website, on your Instagram, I saw a lot of great fun facts. Women can lose up to 20% of their bone density in the first five to seven years of menopause. We obviously need to be putting the work in to be protecting our bones for the long run. How does working with Groove Health work? How does it help us keep the trains on the tracks as we age?
[31:19] Dr. Katie Dailey: Essentially, what we do at Groove Health is take all the knowledge that we've talked about so far and produce evidence-based exercise routines that are highly personalized and individualized to each human being that enters our system. It's digitally based, delivered through an app format.
With Groove Health, we have a coach who's a trained professional – I'm a physical therapist by trade. We have exercise physiologists, and you have a personalized, modifiable, movement-based routine to meet your specific goals. We can work around any paradigm you enter the space with – whatever your goals are, whatever your time constraints are, how many days you have to work out, what type of equipment you have, what you like, what you don't like. All of that can be embedded into your plan. I think what's really critically important to point out here is it's not just any other workout routine. You can go to Nike Fit and click on a lot of great workouts, and you can use that – and all movement is better than no movement. So I just want to highlight that.
But what we do that's a little bit different is we are building these with intention, based off of the knowledge we've gained from reading all of the journal articles, studies, and books to particularly help people who are going through age-related changes. As mentioned, we know that women who are entering menopause have marked bone loss, muscle mass loss, and a myriad of different things that will continue to occur unless something is done about it – unless you stop the train in its tracks, which is done through targeted strengthening, power, balance, and mobility.
It's not one exercise fits all. There's a correct way to do exercise – and I don't mean to be over-formulaic about it – but for every person that walks through the door, there's a correct routine for them to help them reach their goals.
The quick user flow for a client: if anyone wanted to sign up, they just go to our website, fill out an onboarding form, and schedule a call with a coach.
[34:29] Katie Fogarty: Is it a video call?
[34:31] Dr. Katie Dailey: Yes, it's a video call. We get to meet each other and chat. I get to understand who you are, what your goals are, and we run through a quick mobility assessment so I can understand if there are any limitations you have, if there's anything you need help with on form, like performing a correct squat or lunge.
Once that video call is done, I send all my clients a baseline physical assessment. There's a battery of tests that I want to see how you perform on – things like how's your balance, how's your mobility, how's your strength? I'm really looking at some of those muscles we talked about earlier that are chronically undertrained.
[34:29] Katie Fogarty: I'm going to jump in by saying it was a very easy assessment to do. It was very eye-opening and a little humbling. For listeners who are curious, I did the virtual assessment. I was joined by Katie over Zoom, we went through it – it probably took 10 or 15 minutes. It wasn't onerous, it wasn't hard to do. Some things were easy and some things were hard, and some things were a little humbling and eye-opening, as I said. Then what comes next is a series of training sessions based on where I need to be making improvements, and it's all delivered virtually, which is very cool.
[35:04] Dr. Katie Dailey: And then every six weeks, we basically recheck in after getting your baselines. We see what progress you've made, and we make adjustments based on your needs and what we're seeing.
[35:15] Katie Fogarty: And everything gets measured, and everything gets tracked. For me, this is so key, because what gets calendared, what gets measured and monitored, is just a little bit easier to keep track of. I've had to put it on pause because I am struggling with this head cold, which is hopefully the lowest part of my 2025. I'm expecting to get back into the program once I'm feeling a little bit better, but it's been super easy, digestible, and very well organized.
A quick question for you as we near the end of our time together, Katie – I want to hear your backstory. Everyone loves a person's backstory. How did you get started as a PT, and how do you incorporate some of these strength, mobility, and agility exercises in your own life?
[36:13] Dr. Katie Dailey: So I've always loved nature and science. I'm a bit of a nerd. I love being outside, I love all the outdoor sports. I'm obsessed with snowboarding, surfing, backpacking, mountain biking – all the things. I live in a mountain town called Bend, Oregon.
I love being outside, I love science, but I don't like being in labs. It was really hard for me to hone in on a career because I always really excelled in school and wanted to do science, but I didn't want to sit in a lab. I had never heard of physical therapy, so I didn't know it existed.
I was in my mid-20s, wild child, and I was out with some friends. On the way home, I decided to show them this cool trick where you run up the trunk of a tree and push off to do a backflip. I did that, landed it, but landed a little bit off-kilter. Heard a large snap in my ankle, played it off like, "Oh, I'm good, I'm good, I'm good."
The next day, it was the size of a grapefruit and purple. Drove myself to urgent care, asked for crutches. They informed me that they cannot just give you crutches without doing an x-ray. They did an x-ray – it was January – and we discovered that I had two fractures in my right leg. I started crying, not because of pain, but because it meant an end to my snowboard season for the year.
That led to me going to physical therapy for several months to rehab that injury, and I was introduced to physical therapy. I was just blown away by this melding of people – it's social, you get to hang out with people, you get to use your hands – and science. The good PTs are really evidence-based. They look at the entire human being, how they move, where are the holes in the system, look at strength, joint mechanics, etc., and basically work through this really scientific method type formula to figure out what's wrong and how to get you better.
Helping people seemed like a really fun way to blend all the loves that I had – sports, science, people – and so yeah, I've been doing that since 2011.
[38:23] Katie Fogarty: What a great story. And by the way, have you done that trick since?
[38:27] Dr. Katie Dailey: I have not, my friends.
[38:30] Katie Fogarty: Well, it started you on a path to helping other people. I absolutely love that. So are you still, you know, you're in Bend – are you still hiking, snowboarding, doing all the things?
Dr. Katie Dailey: Nice, very, very, very nice. Those are your fitness routines.
[38:45] Katie Fogarty: Katie, I want to close to end the show with a little bit of myth-busting. Groove Health focuses on people 50-plus – firmly in that camp, 55 over here. All my listeners want to continue to be active and mobile and vibrant and thrive as they age. That's why they tune into this show every single week to get tips and tools and information, inspiration for making the most of midlife and beyond.
We all know that aging is inevitable – aging is living, it's something to be embraced. But sometimes I think people believe that aging equals this inevitable decline, that there's pain coming for us, that there's decrepitude. Do we have to fall apart? What is your take on this?
[39:33] Dr. Katie Dailey: I think it's an amazing question, and I think it needs to be discussed more frequently, to be honest, because the short answer is no – aging is not synonymous with pain and chronic diseases.
There's been – I don't know if the right word is to say a false correlation, that might be too strong of a statement – but what really happens, at least in my opinion and from a lot of the research studies I've read and information I've acquired over my years, is that we do age. It's true – if we are lucky, we have the blessing of aging, and there are physiological age-related changes that do occur. Meaning a lot of our systems, in a nutshell, slow down, and particularly for women, as we move through menopause.
As we've mentioned certain times – I know your listeners are very savvy on this – we do have the potential to lose a lot of muscle mass, bone mass, tendon and ligament strength, but physical activity, targeted strength training, power training, mobility, balance can literally mitigate or prevent those changes from progressing to a place where you have to experience injury, pain, or acquire a chronic disease.
It's not really the process of aging that leads to disease states – it's the decades of many choices, which I would say is honestly a lack of education and time for most people. Many choices to stop moving. The physical activity guidelines of 150 minutes, two-time strengthening, strength training per week, mobility and balance – the reason those recommendations were made is because they hit this research threshold where that amount of exercise or physical activity had astounding health effects.
I know we're running out of time, but I just want to hit some quick stats to speak to this about what strength training, exercise, and physical activity can do if you follow just some basic guidelines. And again, some exercise is better than no exercise, and we are finding out that smaller bouts of exercise actually have huge health benefits as well.
You can reduce falls and fall-related injuries by 30-40%. You can reduce the chance of acquiring Alzheimer's or dementia by 30-50%. You can reduce the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease by up to 50%, certain types of cancer like colon cancer or breast cancer by 20-40%. Diabetes can be prevented or even reversed if it's Type 2. Then there's immune system function – there are so many things.
Human beings are designed to move, and as we age, what we stop doing, most of us, is we stop moving. A lot of people associate age with disease states, with pain, with dysfunction, but it's not really the process of aging – it's that human beings stop strength training, they stop moving, and a lot of these chronic disease states, pain, and injury take hold.
[42:46] Katie Fogarty: You have inspired us, Katie. You have totally inspired me. We are moving in 2025 – this is our commitment to ourselves and one another. Those are startling statistics, and we are fully committed to making movement part of our year.
I so appreciate this conversation. I'm so glad you joined me today. Before I say goodbye, though, I want to ask: Where can our listeners continue to learn more about Groove Health?
[43:12] Dr. Katie Dailey: We've got a couple of spots if you want to check us out. We have a website, groovehealth.com, and we also have an Instagram page where we're doing little educational blurbs. It's also Groove Health. So those are two locations where you can check us out.
[43:28] Katie Fogarty: Phenomenal. And I am kicking this cold to the curb. I am seeing you back in my text messages. I am picking these exercises back up. Thank you for helping me get fit, healthy, active, and mobile in 2025, and thank you for joining me on the show today. I so appreciate it.
[43:49] Dr. Katie Dailey: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, and can't wait to see you back in the workout scene.
[43:53] Katie Fogarty: Yes, me too. Bye, Katie.
Alright, adios beauties! This wraps A Certain Age, a show for women who are aging without apology. All year long, we are taking listener questions to close the show. So DM me yours over on Instagram at @acertainage.pod, or email them to me at katie@acertainage.pod.com.
Special thanks to Michael Mancini, who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then, age boldly, beauties!