Ep 9. Feeling confident in your body after 50

Voiceover (00:02):

Welcome to The Confident Body, where experienced health professionals discuss how to get the most out of your body for the lifestyle you choose. We believe everyone can exercise and get the most out of life, regardless of your injuries or health issues. Now, here’s your host, senior physiotherapist, Michael Dermansky

Michael Dermansky (00:23):

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the show that helps you become more confident in your body so you can keep doing the things that you love. I’m Michael Dermansky, senior physiotherapist at MD Health, and today I’m speaking to Duncan McGregor, who is still an accountant. He’s a semi-retired accountant as well.

The reason why we asked him on the show today is to talk about what it’s like building your confident body until after you’re 50 and you’re old a few years are older than that too, but I guess you started this in your fifties as well. Can you just tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, your professional career, even just a little bit, and then we’ll talk a little bit more about your health journey?

Duncan McGregor (00:56):

I’m 74 now. I think I started working with you when I was about 60, and I’ve been a squash player for over 50 years now. During that period, I’ve had a number of injuries. The one that originally brought me to you was the torn rotator cuff in the left shoulder.

Michael Dermansky (01:15):

Yep.

Duncan McGregor (01:16):

After the operation, the arm was very stiff, so I went along to you, and we were working together, and that’s brought it back to about 90% of its original capacity. Then following that, I tore a medial ligament in my knee on the right hand side, so back to you again, and we fixed that. Then I realized as I was going along that my body was aging, but things were happening all the time.

Michael Dermansky (01:39):

Yes.

Duncan McGregor (01:40):

So, with your suggestion, I started doing supervised Pilates to sort of bring the general condition of my body up to a standard, because just playing sport isn’t enough. It’s more specific and it’s more an outcome of doing your physical activity than actually getting your body into the right shape. After I started working with you and Adrianne, who was there and was a little girl at the time.

Michael Dermansky (02:04):

That was prior to three kids.

Duncan McGregor (02:06):

Prior to three kids and a marriage, we started doing that. What I found was the first thing was that I started to strengthen my core.

Michael Dermansky (02:14):

Yep.

Duncan McGregor (02:15):

As you get older, and particularly when you get into your seventies, your ability, for instance, to stand on one leg is very difficult. You start to find that it’s not just center of gravity, I think it’s just your ability to do things. This is why old men fall off ladders, because they lose their balance. So, to hold your balance, it’s very important.

Doing Pilates strengthens that core, and I’m pretty good, touch wood. I haven’t fallen off a ladder ever, and I hope I never will. Then I went further into the philosophy of the whole thing, and I had read the biography of Plácido Domingo, the opera singer, and in his first edition of his biography, one thing that stuck in my mind was he wanted to burn out, not rust out.

Duncan McGregor (02:59):

I think this is a fear you have as you get older, that you’re going to end up sitting on a veranda with a rug on your knees in a wicker chair, and this is going to be your life. I thought the longer I can put that off, the better I like it. It’s the same with my accounting.

I am arrogant enough to not want to lose my brain capacity, which I think works at a fairly high level, so I keep doing accounting jobs in the consulting role these days because I’m so scared of losing that ability. I’m also scared of losing my physical ability, and the older I get, the more I see things happening, and we have to work with them. I mean, there’s no day goes by that you don’t find yourself with aches and pains, and we’re always working to solve one thing or another.

Michael Dermansky (03:42):

Yes.

Duncan McGregor (03:43):

Is that an answer to the first part?

Michael Dermansky (03:45):

Well, that’s a very strong answer to the first part, because the interesting thing, you said two things in that. But number one, as you get older, you want to burn out, not rust out.

Duncan McGregor (03:52):

Yeah.

Michael Dermansky(03:52):

And it’s a very important trend. There’s two things to that too. Number one, we are living older. We are living longer, full stop. The generation coming through now, the expectation is that about 25% of the people in their twenties now are going to live over 100.

Duncan McGregor (04:05):

Yeah.

Michael Dermansky(04:07):

So, you don’t want to burn out at 60 and rust out for the next 40 years. It’s a terrible prospect.

Duncan McGregor (04:12):

Yeah. My wife is the same. She’s joined the same journey with me, and she’s doing it with one of your other branches.

Michael Dermansky(04:19):

Yep.

Duncan McGregor (04:20):

She started out because she fell over during a drought carrying buckets of water and broke her shoulder. But after that, she continued on with it and she found it very beneficial as well, and I’m not the only one, because when I think back now 14 years ago, when I started with you, God help me, three or four of the ladies who were doing it at that time are still doing it with us today, all for different reasons, and not because we got together and formed a club or anything like that, we just happened to coincide. I think that’s the important issue, isn’t it?

Michael Dermansky (04:52):

I mean, I guess that’s answered a really strong question, why did you feel you needed confidence in your body? And you’ve said it very clearly, that you want to burn out, not rust out. You want to enjoy your life, not just retire and then sit in a wicker chair rocking and waiting for nothing.

Duncan McGregor (05:06):

Well, in God’s waiting room. I mean, we’re all there anyway, but I don’t want to go through the door if I can avoid it, thanks very much. I think what I’m finding now is with technology, and here we are using this computer, new things are happening to your body that we’re never anticipated in the past.

Michael Dermansky (05:22):

Right.

Duncan McGregor (05:22):

Shoulder injuries, and I noticed talking to your other physiotherapist, a lot of the stuff they’re treating is from computers, neck pain, shoulder pain from overuse of the mouse, for having the computers at the wrong height and things like that. This is something we never knew of, but I’ve suffered those along with all the other things and arrows.

Michael Dermansky(05:41):

Well, we’re seeing a lot more of that now too, because people have been working from home in funny desks because they’ve been working from home for two years.

Duncan McGregor (05:46):

Exactly.

Michael Dermansky (05:47):

So, it’s not exactly the best setup, and they’re stuck in one spot, and they’re actually working for longer in one position, and we’re seeing that too. But I want to go back to another thing.

Duncan McGregor (05:53):

Sure.

Michael Dermansky (05:54):

You talked about the reason why you started working on your confidence in your body. Tell me what it’s meant in your life. Now that you’re talking about 14 years and you’ve seen you, your wife, also you’ve seen a few other people be here for that long generation of time, I mean, they’ve told us reasons what it’s meant to their life.

What has it meant in your life building confidence in your body, but having the strength, having the core stability, having the ability to stand on one leg, which by the way, is a very, very, very, very strong predictor of mortality. People can’t stand on one leg, it’s a massive risk. But what has it meant in your life?

Duncan McGregor (06:24):

It meant that I can continue to do things such as play squash. Yeah. It’s just less visits to doctors, but also greater enjoyment of life. Can walk a lot more, you feel better within yourself. I get out of bed every day at quarter to seven at the latest.

Michael Dermansky(06:41):

A bit earlier.

Duncan McGregor (06:42):

Today it’s quarter to six, and I do exercises. Every one of your… in fact, it’s quite funny, every one of your physiotherapists has given me another exercise, so I’ve named them all. I get up, and for a half an hour, I do all of those exercises.

Now, you think, yeah, okay, that’s a routine, and you’re an accountant, so that’s why you do these things, but it’s not. What I’ve found is by doing those exercises, it wakes your body up, and so you face the day with confidence, with everything gets working. It’s a bit like starting your engine up and then warming it up before you drive off down the street.

Michael Dermansky (07:13):

Yes.

Duncan McGregor (07:13):

It warms you up, gets you going, your brain’s active, you can get on with the day. It’s just helped me a lot in that area.

Michael Dermansky (07:20):

But also you talked about, I mean, you said you play squash on a regular basis as well.

Duncan McGregor (07:24):

Yeah.

Michael Dermansky (07:24):

74, you’re still playing squash on a weekly basis.

Duncan McGregor (07:26):

Yeah.

Michael Dermansky (07:27):

But, I mean, I know that you and your wife travel, I mean, besides the last two years we couldn’t, but you take at least a yearly trip overseas as well. That’s often for about a month or so. Is that right?

Duncan McGregor (07:36):

Yeah. We’ve done that for the last… well, the last two years, yeah, 25 years we were traveling every year. Again, when you’re traveling, it’s good to be able to go and see things, to climb up stairways and all that, and get around, and not be geriatric sitting on a bus. We got stuck in a bus once in Ireland with a bunch of people who were considerably older than we were, or at least they were mentally, and it was [inaudible 00:08:02] to find you get to a place, and you bound out and want to go and do things, and the others either couldn’t do it, wouldn’t do it, and you think, “I don’t get like that. I want to be active.” You know? So, yeah, God bless us, here we are.

Michael Dermansky (08:16):

See, I’ve heard that story many, many, many times, where people have told us, “I want to go overseas and actually enjoy the trip,” or they started doing exercise and making themselves stronger, and they’ve come back and said, “You know what? I really enjoyed that trip.” I wasn’t stuck not being able to go down the stairwell, not going down the Spanish steps. Wherever they want to do, they can actually do it, as opposed to, “I don’t think I can try that out.” I’m seeing these beautiful views, landscape, sites, and I can’t enjoy any of them too, which loses the whole point of being overseas.

Duncan McGregor (08:44):

That’s right. We’re not as quick as we used to be, but we can still do it.

Michael Dermansky(08:50):

You can still do it. So, tell me about what’s changed between now and when you’ve started. When you started, you had a shoulder problem as well, you’ve had a knee problem as well. So, how do you feel different now compared to before? I know you’ve answered some of these questions already.

Duncan McGregor (09:02):

Yeah. I think the first thing is your approach. You’re not afraid to tackle things and you’re not afraid then to get them treated. You know you’re going to get injuries.

Michael Dermansky (09:12):

Yep.

Duncan McGregor (09:14):

I mean, it’s just the way of the world. You walk out the door and you twist your ankle or you do something or you sit around too long and you get a sore hip. These things are going to happen, but you’re not afraid to tackle them, because you know can fix it, or if you can’t fix it, at least you can modify it. That what it’s meant to me. I look back on my parents when they were in their seventies, and they were far more docile.

Michael Dermansky (09:35):

Dormant?

Duncan McGregor (09:35):

They would sit around a lot.

Michael Dermansky(09:37):

Yep.

Duncan McGregor (09:37):

I’m going to kill myself if I ever find myself sitting around watching daytime TV for five or six hours. I was watching a version of Midsummer Murders or something the other day, and they were an old couple, and they weren’t that old, and they were sitting, and that’s all I did all day, was sit and watch TV. That was their life. I thought, “You can take me now, God, if that’s what’s staring me in the face.”

So, being active, being able to do the gardening, being able to do your sport, get out, get around, be relatively healthy, I’m still convinced people give me injuries just so that I stay here, but anyway, and we work-

Michael Dermansky(10:10):

We won’t talk about that.

Duncan McGregor (10:12):

We work on all of those. But to know that you have the confidence to think, “Okay, if I’ve done that, okay, I’ll go and work on it and we’ll get it fixed.” You know?

Michael Dermansky (10:20):

See, I mean, what we even started the conversation with today is that this show is about helping people become more confident in their bodies so they can keep doing the things they love.

Duncan McGregor (10:28):

Yeah.

Michael Dermansky (10:29):

That’s what you’re describing to me. Can you tell everyone what you do as a regular exercise regime? Because you’re very structured with it. The biggest word I’ve spoken to in all these podcasts is the word consistency, and you and both your wife have shown that over the years, consistency, consistency, consistency, and the outcome is what you’re talking about.

But tell me about what your routine is, because it’s quite particular.

Duncan McGregor (10:51):

Well, consistency isn’t just mindlessly doing what always do because you’re in a habit. There is a target, and the target is to keep the body mobile, keep the body active, and to maximize the capacities you still have, even though they’re deteriorating.

On Mondays, I play squash for an hour with a friend, and you’ve got to be very careful doing that not to play a 16 year old or something or you’ll end up in hospital. But I play with a chap who’s now 79, I think, coming up, and we’ve been playing together for nearly 30 years.

Michael Dermansky (11:23):

Yep.

Duncan McGregor (11:24):

So, we play squash on Mondays. I do Pilates on a Wednesday. I do also do Pilates on a Saturday. I also do what used to be called HIITs training, but I do 20Ks on the static bike on a Saturday. I then go for a 5K walk just to get rid of the acids out of your body.

Every day I do between 20 minutes and half an hour of exercises that I’ve developed from the Pilates program, and then I walk, but not every day. I walk when I feel like walking. But as well as that, I do some gardening and what have you.

Michael Dermansky (11:59):

I mean, that’s amazing stuff. You said two very particular things there. You do Pilates and and strength base exercise twice a week, you do some cardio exercise, and then you do very consistently 20 kilometers on the bike on Saturday.

Duncan McGregor (12:10):

Yeah.

Michael Dermansky (12:10):

And you also don’t overdo it. You don’t say, “I exercise every single day. I do HIIT training six days a week.” You haven’t said any of that too. You’ve talked about the degree of balance in what you’re doing, and also the consistency of it too. They’re the two real goal parts of any kind of training, is that you do concentrated efforts, and then you actually give your body time to recover, and then consistent about it too.

Do you mind just sharing your journey in terms of your heart? You don’t have to, but you can if you want to, because that’s a very interesting story.

Duncan McGregor (12:37):

Yeah. Well, what was it now, five or six years ago, something like that, whatever, I was doing HIITs training here, and I wear a heart monitor all the time when I’m doing it. The heart rate was sitting on 150. It didn’t matter what I did, it stayed at 150. I mentioned it to you and said, “Your equipment’s busted.” Anyway, I went off. I felt fine, I felt terrific. I came back the next week and was doing it, still 150.

God knows how I survived the week anyway. You said, “It’s not the equipment. It’s you. You better go and see the doctor.” So, I went and saw the doctor, and I was supposed to be flying to America the next week. I saw the doctor and the doctor said, “Oh my God.” He said, “Your heart’s in fibrillation.” He said, “You won’t get to America. You’ll die on the plane.” He said, “You better get to hospital, emergency.”

Duncan McGregor (13:24):

My wife just happened to be coming in the door of the surgery, and he said, “How can you get there without you driving?” I said, “Well, that lady will drive me,” and he just went, “What?” Anyway, I went to the hospital, they’d used the paddles and they put the heart back in rhythm. Then I saw a heart specialist and he put me on Xarelto, which is a drug which slows your heart down, basically, and keeps it in rhythm. I then went to America, and I won’t go through the boring story about the ads of on Xarelto on the TV there, but when I came back, it did it again, which isn’t uncommon.

So, back to Epworth again and they put it back in rhythm. Came back to doing Pilates, it went out of rhythm again another couple of days later, so back to Epworth, and this time the doctor in emergency room said, “Look,” he said, “I can give you tablets and you can sit on them for the rest of your life, or you can see the electricians.” I went, “What?” These are, what are they? Electro…

Michael Dermansky(14:18):

Electro cardiologists.

Duncan McGregor (14:18):

Cardiologist. The guy’s name was Paul Spark, which killed me. Anyway, they put a wire up into the heart, they do a mapping of the heart, much like your old distributor on cars, remember distributors? They find the crack in your heart or the rogue signal, which puts it out of rhythm, they zap it with a diathermy and put the heart back in rhythm, and it stays in rhythm.

Back I came to doing this. When I was went for review with the surgeon, he said, “This will happen again,” he says, “At some stage,” and touch wood it hasn’t, because I keep doing Pilates and I keep monitoring my heart condition, particularly the rhythm, not so much the extremes, but the rhythm. Whenever I’m on the bike, I’m always checking the rhythm of the heart and it stayed pretty good for the last six years, and I haven’t had to go back and see him at all.

Michael Dermansky (15:06):

It’s pretty amazing, because one of the big differences with that, the procedure you had done was an ablation.

Duncan McGregor (15:12):

Yeah, that’s right.

Michael Dermansky(15:12):

Where they do the diathermy, like you said. The bit that’s overactive in the heart, they burn it so that it stops doing that, and the rest of the parts of the heart do their job properly, because it’s outpacing the other parts.

But we had at the time someone in a very similar position with you, and he was a lot younger than you, and he didn’t do the degree of exercise that you did. He wasn’t as consistent. It was an almost parallel journey of one person that did very consistent exercise and one that didn’t, and we just did not see the same result with him, and I know he’s had an ablation done as well.

Michael Dermansky (15:38):

Then he’s had arrhythmias again, where you really haven’t, because the consistency that you’ve done the exercise program with, which is a testament to the amount of commitment and work that you’ve done and the outcome of actually being consistent with a regular regime. You haven’t anything crazy, you haven’t done all this heavy HIIT, but it’s just been consistent working at your limitations. That’s been, I think, the real big difference.

Duncan McGregor (15:58):

It certainly helped all along, and particularly when I’m on the bike, I’m very conscious of not allowing the heart to go to extremes.

When I used to do it originally with the girls watching me, you’d take the heart up to 180 and somewhere up there, and these days I don’t do that. I only take it into about the 160 mark and then make sure it comes back. That’s the big thing, to watch it back, how quickly it comes back , and you get it down to about the 120s and then you push it back out again, you let it come back again.

So, it’s really exercising the heart through a range, but not a range that’s too extreme, hopefully. That’s good. That’s the other reason for coming and doing Pilates under in a supervised environment, because people are watching you all the time, and if they think “Hang on, you’re going too far with that,” they’ll always pull you back.

Duncan McGregor (16:44):

Also, they make sure you’re doing the exercises and the routines correctly, because when you do them on your own, and even when I’m home doing those exercise, you have a tendency over a period of time to drift off the mark and you come back to something that’s probably more comfortable and easier to do rather than pushing yourself to do exactly what you should be doing, or you find that instead of exercising a muscle in a particular way, you slide under that particular way and you’re not getting the benefit you could get when somebody’s actually watching you, saying “No, no, no, don’t do it that way. You’ve got to do it this way.” So, that’s why I’m still here.

Michael Dermansky(17:19):

I mean, that’s the general finding I find, is that people tend to do one of two ways. Well, the most common is they don’t do anything at home. That’s just normal. Majority of the time you give them an exercise at home, and I’m sorry, most people just don’t do it.

You’re one of the exceptions, but most people just don’t. We ask, “Have you done it?” “No.” “Have you done it?” “No.” “Have you done it?” “No.” The other thing is you can overdo it as well, and it’s nowhere near what you’ve given them too. So, it’s really important to make sure that they’re doing the right degree level, whatever you want them to do to achieve the outcome rather than a routine that may not suit them as well.

Duncan McGregor (17:48):

Yeah.

Michael Dermansky(17:48):

Just a couple of other questions as well, in this 40 year journey, what’s been hard?Anything in particular that’s made it hard that you’ve overcome?

Duncan McGregor (17:56):

Well, obviously at the beginning, the hardest part was the actual disability in the shoulder, the lack of movement in the shoulder. Since then, there’s been issues with my neck and so forth. Probably to make the time commitment to do it.

Michael Dermansky (18:10):

Right.

Duncan McGregor (18:12):

It was so comfortable in bed this morning. I didn’t really want to get up and come in here, but you think, “Well, I’ve got to do it,” so you do it. Once you get into the discipline, and that’s it discipline, it’s the whole core of this, isn’t it? It’s discipline. Discipline about time keeping, discipline about attending, discipline about doing the exercises every day, discipline about doing them properly. It’s all of that.

Discipline drives you so your life keeps going down that pathway and not just when you get older and you get semi-retired, you could slack off and stay in bed. What’s the pressure? Stay in bed till 10 o’clock. Hell, what do you want to do that for? You want to be up and about. You want to live life. You don’t want to either endure it or just have it as I’m passing through life. You want to enjoy it. You want to be active. That’s why I do it.

Duncan McGregor (18:59):

If I can just raise another topic, because it does come up, the cost of doing supervised Pilates is not cheap, and particularly health insurance covers part of it, and then after six months it cuts out and you’re on your own. Particularly when you’re doing five sessions a week, which between my wife and I we’re doing, it does get to be expensive.

But I was talking to a solicitor one day, and we were talking about Pilates and other things, and I said, “It does get a bit expensive, and I sometimes think maybe I should drift off it a bit.” And he said to me, “How much is your health worth?” And the penny dropped. How much is your health worth? It’s worthwhile paying for it if you can keep your health. It’s a valuable expense.

Michael Dermansky (19:40):

Well, go back a step with what you just said. When did you have the conversation? Because I know that was quite a long time ago.

Duncan McGregor (19:45):

Yeah. It was four years, five years ago at least.

Michael Dermansky (19:48):

Oh, a bit longer than that.

Duncan McGregor (19:51):

Yeah. It could be. As I probably mentioned, I’m old, my memory’s going.

Michael Dermansky (19:53):

It’s interesting that you had the conversation about 10 years ago, and that was 10 years ago, and what you’ve described after that too is the degree of life and things you’ve lived since then too, is that, why have you done this? To have the life you wanted to have.

One last thing as well, any other things that you want the listeners to hear about, know about having a confident body as well? I mean, you’ve shared a lot, but any else we haven’t covered that you want to let people know?

Duncan McGregor (20:17):

I think one thing I have noticed is that when you’re doing Pilates, you’re active and moving around and probably seeing other people, tends to help you avoid the sniffles and the other little illnesses and things that are going around. You do generally have a more healthy body. I notice even my children are in their thirties now, but one of my sons always seems to have a cold, and yet my wife and I rarely have colds. So, I do think that in your general daily life, it does help you.

Michael Dermansky(20:44):

Fantastic. I’m sorry. I can’t prove it in any other way as well, but I’m in a very similar boat. I’m rarely sick.

Duncan McGregor (20:50):

Yeah. I think it’s because you’re around other people, and therefore you’re exposed to the germs and things around, but your body is also more resilient, so you’ve built up a certain level of immunity to these common bugs, but also even when you encounter them, your body is in a better shape to deal with it and you throw them off more quickly.

Michael Dermansky (21:09):

Yeah. I can’t prove that, but I’ve felt the same thing as well.

Duncan McGregor (21:13):

Yeah.

Michael Dermansky (21:13):

Yeah.

Duncan McGregor (21:14):

I’ve got a friend, in fact, my squash partner, who unfortunately has Parkinson’s disease, and he got to a stage where he said… he plays golf and he plays squash and he’s a fantastic sportsman, and I thought he was going to give it up, and I said, “No, over my dead body you’re going to give it up,” because even he has found that with that illness, yes, his capacity to be a masters champion, which he was, is no longer there, but he is working his way through this journey of Parkinson’s disease much more actively, with a much better attitude, because he’s doing sport and keeping active, and I think that’s important. I think it’s very important.

Michael Dermansky (21:52):

Well, thank you very much for your time, Duncan. There’s been great insights of what your journey at building confident body was, and what it’s actually meant in your life. It’s fantastic to hear that.

For our next conversation we’ll have is from the other end of the spectrum, not fully, but almost, so building a confident body in your thirties and forties, particularly when you’re in the age group as well where it’s a very, very different mindset. Your life pressures are quite different, and what exercise regime means there. Thank you very much. I will look forward to talking to everyone next time about building confidence in your body in your thirties and forties.

Voiceover (22:21):

Thank you for listening to The Confident Body. For practical articles to help you build a confident body, go to mdhealth.com.au/articles.