The FACE Framework: The Exact Exercise Prescription for Midlife Women | Dr. Vonda Wright

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:00)
Sedentary Death Syndrome. Every time I say that out loud in a room of people, it immediately snaps people to attention because they've never heard it before. Sure, they've heard that heart disease will kill you. In fact, it's the number one killer of men and women. Sure, stroke, diabetes, fracture, but together, 33 chronic diseases that are positively impacted by exercise and mobility cannot be denied. Sedentary Death Syndrome is the 33 chronic diseases that will raise their ugly heads if we do not intervene with mobility and exercise. But aren't there drugs for that? Actually, yes, there are. There are myriad of medications for heart disease, but the heart disease med is not going to cure your diabetes. The hypertension med not going to cure your diabetes. Your diabetes med is not going to cure your fracture risk. There is one medication that will treat all these 33 chronic diseases of sedentary death syndrome, and you know what it is. It's daily investment in your mobility and exercise. I know.
Exercise is medicine. You've heard it. And I wonder why we don't do it when the evidence is so compelling. Well, you may have heard me talk before about sometimes it's not the mere fact of you not knowing. You know. And not the mere fact that you don't want to. You do want to.
Sometimes it's the fact that your skeletal longevity, your muscles, tendons, bones, ligament, cartilage just hasn't kept up. And you want to, but you can't. And I've talked about that before. And it's the subject of another solo episode. But what about sedentary death syndrome? And is there really anything we can do about it? Well, the answer to that is yes, or I wouldn't be here spending time with you.
And the way I prescribe exercise for people in midlife and beyond, takes the form of an acronym called FACE. You need to face your future. What does that even mean? Well, when we're 20, we've got infinite regenerative capacity and youthful vigor and can get away with no sleep. Well, you can do whatever you wanna do. But in midlife and beyond, when we can harness the wisdom of aging, this is what I want you to do. I want you to face your future. F is for flexibility and range of motion. A is aerobic. C is carry a load. E is equilibrium balance and foot speed. So let's unpack this a little bit. What do I mean when I say face your future? F, flexibility and joint range of motion. As we age, it is the natural history of our collagen fibers, which make up our tendons, our ligaments, our skin has collagen, almost everything has collagen, just different types of it.
So our tendons and ligaments have type 1 and to a lesser degree, type 3 collagen. And the natural history is that as we age, the bonds between the collagen fibers get tighter and tighter and they become shorter and shorter, as do our muscles. Well, you know that a muscle is connected to our bone via a tendon. Without tendons that are working at optimal length, you're more prone to injury or chronic tendonitis, or worse, chronic tendonitis that doesn't heal, which is tendinosis, which becomes this chronic inflammatory achy process. You may have it in your achilles, in your patellar tendon, in your hip tendons. What do we do about it? Well, every single day, we must stretch our tendons and ligaments back out to optimum length. One, so they work better, but two, as well as with the soft tissue around our joints, need to be at optimum length so that we're not injured. We don't start shuffling gait, you know, shuffling with little bitty steps as we age due to loss of joint range of motion.
And we maintain full range of motion across our lifespan so that we stay mobile. You can do this with a dynamic warmup before your exercise or with static stretching afterwards. This is where yoga and pilates fit beautifully into a full week's exercise program. For F, flexibility and joint range of motion. A, aerobic training. Now, if you've heard me long enough, you know that I'm of an age when I was raised with cardio was queen. Cardio continues to be important, but I prescribe cardio in a different way than I did then. The way I like to see you do your cardio so that you get maximum metabolic flexibility, as well as intense enough to really recompose and change the blood flow in your body, is a very polarized way.
Meaning, I want you to spend three hours a week at low heart rate base training, which can be walking, it can be bike, it doesn't matter the apparatus, this is all about your heart rate, right?