Tag: Muscle

Aging Muscle: After Cancer Treatment and Menopause [PHOTOS]

(Title image: Photo by Samuel Girven on Unsplash)

This is a reality check to demonstrate how, even with the greatest of intentions and planning, coupled with a serious love of exercise, you can’t turn back time.

And that’s okay.

But first, the comparison. Taken from this previous post, here’s a photo right before I started chemotherapy for triple-positive breast cancer, April 27, 2017:

April 27, 2017: I was exercising with a vengeance

After finishing chemo, radiation and Herceptin, AND after two years of estrogen-lowering Tamoxifen and a year into Letrozole, I’d lost some muscle even though I was lifting as heavy as I could.

This photo is from December 11, 2020:

December 11, 2020: Still exercising with a vengeance, but…

While I was still working out hard, endocrine therapy and menopause took their toll on my progress. Interestingly, estrogen is not simply a “feminizing” hormone; in women, it also helps preserve both muscle and bone mass. Menopause puts the breaks on estrogen production.

This becomes worrying as we age because less estrogen means weaker muscles which can lead to a greater risk of falls and chance of bone fractures. Endocrine therapy, which is designed to decrease the estrogen in the body in order to lessen the recurrence risk of hormone-sensitive breast cancer, adds to the problem.

And more than seven years after the top photo, this was taken today before posting, September 23, 2024:

September 23, 2024: New phone, different lighting (sorry!), more wrinkles, same moles. I’m working hard just to keep what I have, but loss is inevitable.

I’m still lifting but the entire landscape of my workout routines has changed. I have to give myself more recovery time between strength training sessions. I am much more susceptible to injuries—seriously, I can tweak something by turning or stretching out in a weird way. I have neuropathy in my feet which makes getting up on my toes (such as in plank or doing lunges) painful.

We recently had an intense heat wave: for a week the temperature inside our apartment didn’t fall below 80F degrees, and during the day it climbed as high as 95F degrees (again, INSIDE our apartment). I managed to work out through a chunk of that week, but the heat eventually got to me. And recovering from that took almost another week.

So, the spirit is willing but the flesh is barely managing at times.

However, there is an upside to being 58 years old with a lifetime of fitness experience. I still love working out. Even tough training sessions are manageable because they feel like an awesome accomplishment, and I feel bouyed afterwards.

Even on the days that I don’t do a formal workout, I make sure that I’m moving as much as I can. Fitness is an integral part of my life, even though it looks different now than it did seven years ago. In the post that I reference earlier, at the very bottom I wrote about how yoga was becoming a larger part of my life.

And that’s continued. Through my yoga teacher training in 2022 and upcoming yoga4cancer advanced training starting in January 2025, this direction feels so right for me.

While I don’t plan to give up my gym sessions anytime soon, yoga has given me a path to physical and mental fitness as I age. I am gradually moving into a more meditative approach to exercise that is less about intensity and more about staying healthy by integrating mind and body.

Wound a Bit Tight? Meditating with Muscle Release

I, like so many people, keep a lot of tension in my neck and shoulders. Some days it feels as though my neck is made of steel, but not in a good way.

The reality is that I don’t even realize how tight those muscles are until I lie down and try to relax.

So I have made a meditation of this for bedtime. Instead of focusing on the sensation of my breath, the focus is on releasing the tension in my neck and upper shoulders.

It may sound like I would not be able to squeeze an entire meditation session out of this, but oh, I can.

Complete release takes focus!

Lying down on my back I inhale, and then with the exhale, I focus on my neck and relax it, releasing the rest of my body along with it. With the following exhale, I do that again. That’s because while I may think that the initial release took care of the tension, there is still tightness there and I really have to work on it mentally to release that.

It’s as though my neck muscles are springs that I can stretch, releasing tension through the exhale, but once I let go (inhale) the “memory” in my muscles tightens them up again.

It helps to imagine my body melting, as if I’m being drawn downward into the Earth.

I can keep going like this, feeling my chin inch slightly towards my chest as the tension releases. Melting into the mattress. The more I release, the more subtle the sensation, yet very satisfying. The more I relax, the more deeply I breathe and everything lets go.

The awareness of what is going on in my body helps so much, but the tension is tenacious. This is not surprising, given how much mental weight my neck and shoulders bear. So it is a dance between releasing and returning to release again. Little by little until I eventually fall asleep.