Eight Minutes to Ageless: The Manual on Maturing That You've Never Read—But It’s Not Too Late

By Dr. Kelli Pearson

This book is for the bare minimalist who wants maximum health benefits. The KISS principle for your well-being. Dr. Pearson outlines how to care for the muscular system quickly, the ligamentous structures, get the fundamental nutritional requirements, with a focus on the easiest way to care for the cardiovascular system. Flexibility is the key to life. While Einstein reminds us that nothing happens until something moves, Dr. Pearson reminds us that poor aging is the only thing that happens when nothing moves!
If you feel confused and sense more and more you’re not living up to your potential, take heart and know that the body is responsive to doing the right things, in particular doing the right things every single day. This manual, filled with excellent illustrations, will show you to easily stretch your body in less than 4 minutes a day while standing up and wearing street clothes. (Taking all the excuses away is essential!) In the additional 4 minutes a day, you will also learn how to use a roller not to stretch the muscles, but rather to lengthen the ligaments of the spine that are commonly the reason we end up hunched over, and worried about falling all the time.
Dr. Kelli hopes you can live well up to the moment of your last breath, and not follow the slow downward spiral that so many people experience. Eight minutes to Ageless is your solution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Mar 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781982241995

Dr. Kelli Pearson

Dr. Kelli Pearson has been a Chiropractic physician, a health-care advocate and fitness expert for over 37 years, working with every type of healthcare discipline. As she moved into her 7th decade and understood that aging, while unavoidable, does not have to be overwhelming, she knew she had to share the truths she learned with others.

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Copyright © 2020 Dr. Kelli Pearson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Interior Image Credit: Kamas Wood

Photos © by Diane Maehl Photography

ISBN: 978-1-9822-4198-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-4200-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-4199-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020901551

Balboa Press rev. date: 03/18/2020

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Concept of Aging

Chapter 2 Mind Shift

Chapter 3 Back to Basics

Chapter 4 Body Tissues That Get Issues

Chapter 5 We’ll Start with the Most Delicate System

Chapter 6 The System That Moves You: Myofascial and Muscle System

Chapter 7 GALS (Gravity-Assisted Ligamentous Stretching)

Chapter 8 The Minimalist Approach to Fighting off Expected Patterns of Weakness

Chapter 9 Why Walking Is Therapy for the Mind and Body

Chapter 10 High-Intensity Interval Training

Chapter 11 Bare Essential Supplements

Chapter 12 When Pain Says You Can’t, Then What?

Chapter 13 Your Daily Calendar

Appendix 1: Schedule

Appendix 2: Two-Bounce Protocol

To my patients who continue to teach and inspire me.

To my mentor, Dr. Lou Sportelli, whose sage advice

always points me in the right direction.

Most of all, to my husband, Dr. Dana Weary, my best

friend and business partner, who generously finds

the space to allow me to pursue my dreams.

Thank you to Kamas Wood for her artistic talent

and to Heather Thompson, who so effectively

managed the illustration project.

Men are born soft and supple;

dead, they are stiff and hard,

Plants are born tender and pliant;

dead, they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible

is a disciple of death.

Whoever is soft and yielding

is a disciple of life.

The hard and stiff will be broken.

The soft and supple will prevail.

— Lao Tzu

INTRODUCTION

Concept of self-management

You are not a self-cleaning oven.

You are not a frostless freezer.

You are not a melt-free ice cream cone. (What fun would that be anyway?)

You are a person with a body that needs management.

Your body requires self-management—not willpower or discipline—merely management.

You choose to do it or not. But for sure you can’t do it if you don’t know what to do.

This book is dedicated to teaching you about self-management. But don’t panic; it’s designed to be easy and to take very little time. Hopefully, you are lucky enough to get to have arrived at your forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, or even into your tenth decade. There is no best starting place except the moment you pick up this book. That is an excellent time to start. So here we go.

You already know a few of your body’s rules of self-management.

Brush your teeth, or they will fall out, and then soft food will be your only option. (Gummed-up potatoes chips are not fun; you can never feed the craving for the crunch.)

Brush your hair unless you have begun the stringent discipline of building dreadlocks. (Is building the right verb? Maybe fabricating or assembling?)

At the very least, wash your armpits every day. Europeans have a two-day rule, but Americans are more prone to the one-day requirement. Hair can go a few days longer, but after a fashion, greasy hair gets smelly and becomes an excellent breeding ground for lice. (This is not to say lice won’t set up camp in clean hair, lest some parent reading this starts to freak out, recalling that phone call requesting they pick up their clean lice-infected kid.)

Wear clothes that are in keeping with the climate. As an example, for those of us north of the equator, shoes and coats are good, especially in the winter. If you ignore this rule, you could freeze to death or develop a sympathetic nervous system bias, which means you are always cold, prone to sickness, grumpy, and have a greater tendency to worry all the time.

Use toilet paper. No needed comments here.

We have covered some ground.

But alas, what about the rules for your spine, feet, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, and hands? Most of us have heard incessant nagging, usually from an elder.

Stand up, for God’s sake.

How many times do I have to tell you to sit up?

For the love of God, quit slouching.

Put your shoulders back.

It must have been important to the nagger, as every other request required the help of God. Maybe said nagger wished he or she had listened to his or her mom nagging, now being unable to stand up straight at all.

CHAPTER 1

The Concept of Aging

Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape. — Michael McGriffy

Is it true that life is only fun when you’re young? The answer is it depends entirely on how you live and age. This book exists to remind you that life can become much more fun as you add on the years.

You might be thinking, What a stupid thought. Everyone knows that aging is not for sissies. I am here to offer the counterpoint that aging is a bugger only if you don’t know how to do it well. Most of us don’t know how, and that is the why behind this book. By the way, this book is not about avoiding wrinkles. They don’t affect your ability to move but may or may not change your attitude. If those wrinkles bother you much, google plastic surgeons. My focus, however, is that you keep moving like you’re twenty, because movement makes us happy and healthy. If you wonder how true that statement is, let me ask what you say to yourself while trying to get up after sitting through a movie. Is happy the first emotion that comes up? Or is it frustration that you are moving like Methuselah, who lived to a ripe old age of 969?

Here is a bold statement: I believe we choose our aging outcomes. After more than thirty-seven years of working with bodies, I have seen many in pain with twisted postures and teetering folks afraid of falling. I have also seen patients who can stand tall, squat down so their bum hits the floor, get up with ease, and hold one foot for several seconds at a time at the age of eighty. We choose to live in bodies that can function well until the day we die, or we let go early—maybe even decades earlier—and slump over, losing the strength in our glutes to get us up a short flight of stairs. I don’t want to be too hard on you; the reason many of us give up is we’ve been told there is no hope, and very few of us have mentors showing us the way. This book is for you if that is the case.

You choose between these two options:

1. Being able to walk to the store and back with an armful of groceries, to lift your big dog into the back of the car, to carry a pack into the local foothills, and to schlep your luggage into the overhead bin without needing another passenger’s assistance

2. Sitting in your chair slumped over with a drool pad that gets moved when your head falls to the opposite side as you sleep in an overmedicated coma

If you are reading this book, my hope is we share the common goal of vibrantly living to that final moment. Or maybe you are that guy or gal who can hike ten miles a day with great posture but wants to inspire someone you care about to choose this lifestyle option as well.

Critical to accomplishing my mission is being sure to teach you how to do what is necessary while spending the least amount of time possible. I am a minimalist; I want to take the least amount of time each day to ensure I function well. This plan is not for the perfectionist who already devotes two hours a day to exercise and proper eating. If you have that time and that inclination, I applaud you, but you don’t need this book. The other 95 percent of people need this book.

As a bare minimalist, it’s all about doing what you need to do every day—nothing more and nothing less—and doing it every darn day. Of course, you can do a whole lot more than what I am suggesting, but this book is about doing the bare essentials that will keep your maturing body active and healthy. After being in health care for more than thirty-seven years, what I know to be the truth is, if we make any task too hard, most people will not do it.

When your family doctor tells you that your stiff joints and achy bones are because you are getting old at the age of forty-five or sixty-five, you need to ignore that message. (Walk away slowly.) It is not true. My patients tell me regularly their take-home message from meeting with their MD is they are getting old, and there is nothing to do about it. Stop believing these limiting opinions. I understand why it’s easy to adopt that perspective, but let this be the first day of the rest of your life.

Who am I to write this book?

Why not me? When I was ten, I watched a middle-aged woman sitting in a wheelchair and knew something was wrong. What if something could be done to get her moving again but she didn’t know what it was? At the time, I hoped she just needed a little encouragement and love. It might have been she had a severe neurologic problem, but it could have been she needed to have been introduced to the contents of this book.

Here is another bold statement: Almost all walkers and wheelchairs are in use due to people not knowing what to do to make our bodies stay happy. Of course, I am excluding people with neurologic disease or trauma that disables the brain from controlling the muscles. But those problems represent a tiny fraction of people who are not aging well. The truth is most folks end up slowing down to the point of standing still, much like the Tin Man. His solution was to have Dorothy find his oilcan. Your answer is not that much different. But instead of oil, you need a foam roller, maybe a few pillows and towels, and some free space—about four feet by seven feet.

When I was young, knowing that I wanted to help people was the natural part. Figuring out what that would look like in real life was the challenge. Maneuvering the path to my chosen profession was chock-full of unexpected twists and turns.

Dad was a successful realtor, and Mom mostly stayed at home caring for my sister, my brother, and me, barring a few years working as a medical assistant. My parents moved us from my birthplace of Seattle to Northern California the year I entered sixth grade. The newfound sunny skies were a pleasant surprise, so sticking around California seemed like a good idea. After completing high school at Campolindo High in Moraga, I got accepted at UCLA, and my parents gifted me with four years studying in Los Angeles.

It was an easy decision to declare as my major kinesiology, sort of a catchall for anyone wanting to pursue the art of healing. The head of this department, Valerie Hunt, EdD, professor emeritus of physiological science at UCLA, was light-years ahead of her time. Her rigorous and well-respected research focused on bioenergy. She was the first person to scientifically describe the relationship between energy field disturbance, disease, and emotional pathologies. (Years after I graduated in 1979, she was recognized internationally in the field of physiology, medicine, and bioengineering.)

During my freshman year, Dr. Hunt selected a handful of us from her class of more than three hundred students attending her Communication 101 course. The dozen of us she picked were lucky to be part of an inside group watching her coordinated research with Rosalyn Bruyere, who is still considered foundational in Dr. Hunt’s research, given her proficient reading and interpretation of the human aura. My exposure to these amazing women set the stage for me to believe in the magic of the connection of mind, body, and spirit, never allowing me to question the power of recovery and recuperation.

My family tagged me as being a wackadoodle, airy-fairy sort who seemed to be less interested in data and more interested in how it all felt. That may have been the reason I was so dedicated to getting straight As in college—to prove I was at least book smart.

Because of my early out-of-the-box exposure in college, the traditional health-care disciplines seemed, for me, to be based too much on observation and measurement and not enough on feeling or sensing. I knew that my ability to touch and feel how my patient was doing had to be embedded in my chosen profession.

Most of the kinesiology students were geared to move into traditional medicine. I knew this was not my path. The few times I had been to a doctor, I had barely been touched and then just shuttled away with medication. My instinct told me to find a discipline where touch was integral to healing. While the surgical disciplines in medicine certainly included touch,