Hearing of Aging K&MA’s

Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)

Part of awareness in self-defense comes from our senses and the primary sense often used is sight but for self-defense it is best to utilize the three primary senses of sight, sound snd touch. One of those three, sound, can become problematic to those of us practicing in our winter years (age 60+). Personally, over my years of enduring sounds that adversely effect hearing I ended up losing a good portion of mine. 

Of course the best self-defense is to be aware of environments and situations that would lead to conflict and violence and as long as you live, work and play in area’s of low threat you really don’t have to worry much but just the same you do have to compensate for loss of sounds. 

Everyone, mostly, may have to deal with losing some of our hearing as we travel the roads of out winter years. It might be time to enhance our visual scanning to detect things that may lead to dangerous situations. The crux of hearing is when it starts to go or is gone you don’t want your awareness to still assume you will hear things especially if an event may arrive from you rear. 

Then there is always hearing aids. Yet, as I wear mine daily and in practice I realize that it doesn’t take much to dislodge hearing aids sending them flying off leaving your hearing diminished to gone. 

How you combat such things is to practice for hearing loss before you have to live with hearing loss. My idea is to train for self-defense using scenario’s while you insert ear plugs to block out all or most of your hearing. You remove your dependency to hear a fast approaching person by their feet or rustling of clothing or some other sound. You will find that your awareness changes when one or more of your senses is removed. Use your imagination but remain within the realm of reality-based training. Another aspect is to try this with your teacher of adrenal stress-conditioned reality-based training drills and scenario’s. 

If you are lucky to still have all your senses in those winter years remember also that senses still diminish in smaller increments as we get older so training for their state of effectiveness seems - logical and beneficial. 

Bibliography (Click the link)

Sight Sense in Aging K&MA’s

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We all tend to rely heavily on our sight to see dangers in our environment. Please understand that other factors contribute toward encountering dangers and awareness for self-defense is a whole other subject for an article. Often we don’t realize just how much we depend on sight in our K&MA training, practice and especially applications. Those who tend to handle sight issues better are those who have a dominant sense of either touch, tactile, or sound, hearing. Otherwise, many of us are sight dominant meaning our entire lives depend primarily on our sight sense. 

Note: Sense Dominance is also a huge subject worth an article as well.

Aging means our senses will suffer to some degree and our sight can be effected by our age a lot more. If you wear glasses now just imagine if you lose them, break them or forget them then consider how that will affect our defense-awareness state (assuming you are required to go places where dangers are higher than normal). 

Here again, consider practicing with a sight handicap and then focus on how you can use hearing and touch to remain safe and secure. Of course, avoidance of situations that would lead to violence or avoidance of environments that have a greater level of conflict and violence would be your primary goal but for those rare instances when you are exposed how would you handle things if your sight were restricted or diminished with hearing and touch?

Try wearing glasses with strong lenses especially if you don’t currently need glasses. Use those readers to blur out your vision a bit. Take notice also that if your vision is diminished your peripheral may be even worse. Also train by putting on blinders to restrict your peripheral vision because it is safe to say that as we age both direct and peripheral vision may/will suffer. Training to use other senses to remain safe seems smart to me. 

We as aging K&MA’s just because we are old/older can become targets. I mean, some predatory types will see an older person as a possible easy victim simply because older folks are targets/victims. Granted, you may have experiences, training and other abilities that put your presence in a state  of personal aura that will deter many predators but what about that one who decides your age alone makes you an easy target. Then consider if your vision is faulty or limited how do you compensate to remain not a victim/target. 

We tend to ignore the fact that all of us are going to get older and we tend to bury our heads in the sands thinking because we train, practice and apply our skills that we don’t have to give time or effort to the aging requirements of K&MA but guess what, human bodies will succumb to the effects of aging, maybe not at sixty, maybe not even at seventy but sooner and especially as to later, you will have to deal with aging. 

One of the greatest benefits of being a K&MA is it is easily adjusted so that regardless of our ages we can practice and train and learn and change with its disciplines so why not adjust to keep it all going to the very last moment of our lives. 

Use your imagination to restrict and change your sight then do the reality-based self-defense training and while you get good at that then see if your adrenal stress-conditioned reality-based self-defense training teacher will try it out. 

Bibliography (Click the link)

K&MA Aging Brain

Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)

Note: Throughout this and future articles K&MA refers to, “Karate & Martial Arts.” I don’t consider karate a martial art and most martial arts don’t relate to karate except in very simplistic connections. I feel that this distinction is important. 

There is something strange and unique about the brain. Not what we normally consider but “certain mechanisms that underlie memory: their purpose is not simply to record what has gone before but to allow us to project forward into the future. To imagine tomorrow’s experiences to situations, via the hippocampus, in particular, plays a key role in assembling an imagined future by recombining information from the past.”

This is about our cognitive decline and the possible “diseases as common causes of dementia: Alzheimer’s, stroke and Parkinson’s. It is very interesting to note that in recent research it was found: having brain tissue that is riddled with the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease didn’t necessarily mean a person would experience cognitive problems. Some peopler were dying with a full-blown Alzheimer’s pathology without having cognitive loss.”

Keeping active in brain oriented activities would contribute to this ability to bypass the cognitive declines often associated with such diseases, i.e., activities that provide for a “cognitive exercise - that is, activity that keeps the brain active, like crosswords, reading, driving, learning new skills, and having responsibilities - is protective.” Reading and studying such historical and factual materials on our system of K&MA along with the physical and mental challenges such practices, if done properly and correctly, along with writing articles and books as well as teaching others with increased subject matter changes and new data, etc. all contribute to that type of cognitive exercise. 

It was also found that “social activities, social networks and interactions, and physical activities also contributes hugely to that cognitive exercise.” It is becoming clearer and clearer that dojo participation is a social activity and the dojo collective along with associations and organizations that connect dojo collectives around the world all are about that connectivity and exchange that stimulates our brains and exposes the brain to cognitive stimuli and exercises. Because K&MA are very “Physical” that also contributes toward counteracting the effects of such cognitive diseases and their effects. It appears, on the surface, that our endeavors in K&MA regardless of the distinctions as to the why, i.e., sport or self-defense or philosophical, etc. or any combination means mental cognitive exercises. Add in self-defense reality based adrenal stress-conditioned training and practice models and the challenge to our minds, our brains, increases a lot. All good for our aging brains and minds.

Since these diseases and their effects are a major obstacle to aging with grace and serenity it makes such efforts on our training, practice and applications take on a whole new and greatly beneficial health, fitness and well-being light to why we do what we do. I actually have come to believe that K&MA are awesome contributors to the Okinawan’s longevity. 

Personally, as an aside to this view, I have benefited hugely in my health, well-being and fitness toward longevity simply by keeping my body, mind and spirit active in my K&MA training, practice, studies, understanding, teaching, writing and applications. Ain’t life grand? 

Bibliography (Click the link)

Eagleman, David. “The Brain: The Story of You.” Pantheon Books. New York. 2015

FaceBook Disabled

Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)

I just disabled my FB account and feel sad and sorry the step doesn’t actually remove all the data especially the data’s connectivity and residence in other forms of data-collections, etc. It is too bad our Internet systems are collection grounds for both data-brokerage as well as cyber-criminal use and abuse. It is a shame that activities of the average individual cannot be protected as well as that of cyber-criminals, cyber-terrorists and terrorism, criminal activities and so on. 

Those who followed me on FaceBook (friended and followed) will have to remember to seek out my articles on the blogs. I don’t for one instance assume that blogs are any safer but taking the action to NOT allow CONNECTIONS to other media sources like FB and Twitter as examples means I can continue with caution writing my articles. Like my recommendations in this blog, it may not remove the danger but it might just reduce the probability making my victimization less definite. 

I know that what I put out there via social media is not actually all that personal, I have managed to keep the more personal sides at a very minimum, i.e., in all probability anything out there actually of a personal nature was accidental but who really knows. Regardless, in the last day or so I came to experience something I felt was less likely, my Apple iMac actually froze up, locked completely as if a Windows machine and that made me anxious. I gravitate toward a feeling that if I had not participated in such social media the probability might not have existed let along exposed me to such events. 

In a nutshell, I don’t do twitter or other socially driven media and I did FaceBook only as a means to express theories, ideas, and information on my favorite life subject of karate and martial arts and self-defense but still, it was publishing a comment on that media that led to the freeze and hard boot of an Apple system, something I thought might not happen for a longer span of time. It is and was inevitable but still ….

So, no more Facebook and a more restricted participation in such things until someone somewhere is able to create a safety net like they use, called Tor, in the dark underworld residing below our Internet. 

Bibliography (Click the link)

Goodman, Marc. “Future Crimes: Everything is Connected, Everyone is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It.” Doubleday. New York. 24 February 2015. 

What is the Point

In the following article written by Mr. Rory Miller the aging processes are how we handle them. In this article a friend of his makes the point, a very good point. 

“Growing Old in Wales” by Rory Miller

Our Brain on Aging Karate-ka and Martial Artists

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Many of us who still actively teach karate and martial arts tend to lean toward a more demonstration type of teaching, i.e., we still feel it necessary to get on the dojo floor and mix it up with practitioners, even those many, many years younger than us. As an aging karate-ka and martial artist it might benefit our longevity to adjust our training, practice, teaching and applications toward the protection of our brains. 

Our brains are the “Matrix” of our world, our universe, and lead our bodies and spirits while encoding, programming and creating our worlds so if they are damaged we lose a lot including possibly our lives. Here is a quote from a Neurosurgeon that explains it a bit: (https://drgo.us/?p=2574Z)

“Subacute or chronic subdural hematomas, on the other hand, occur in older people, also as a result of blunt head trauma, and are very common, even after relatively minor injuries. This occurs because as we age the brain sags, the subdural space enlarges, predisposing older folks to the tearing of the bridging veins at the top of the head inside the skull. Chronic subdural hematomas can occur after relatively minor injuries or even after a vigorous struggle or simply the shaking or bumping of the head during a scuffle with an assailant.” - Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D. is Clinical Professor of Surgery (Neurosurgery, ret.) and Adjunct Professor of Medical History (ret.) Mercer University School of Medicine. 

As we age the above exposes us to great harm of our brains. As can be readily observed this means older karate-ka and martial artists may want to re-evaluate their teaching and practices accordingly, i.e., stay away from those activities in pair practice where one will find themselves “struggling” or “shaking” or “bumping” of their head. We spar so we are actually “scuffling” with our opponent. 

Take this a bit further in self-defense, we should therefore take the extra training and precautions to remove or at least limit our exposure to being attacked either socially, as a bar incident, or asocially, as in a predatory attack for either resources and/or processes. 

The great thing about modern times is most of us live lives where we have a lot of control over our exposure to conflict and violence that would result in the “shaking, bumping and/or struggles” that would cause our brains to bounce around in our heads. Regardless, even if we find ourselves in situations of conflict that could lead to violence we, hopefully, learned how to avoid, escape and evade an attacker. 

“Sometimes difficult to diagnose, subacute and chronic subdural hematomas may present in older victims days or weeks after an assault. Yet these hematomas can also cause severe brain damage, incapacitation, or death. In other words, a serious or mortal injury can occur when a weaker person is attacked by an assailant who is intent on injuring or incapacitating his target, men or women, to rob them or sexually assault them.” - Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D. is Clinical Professor of Surgery (Neurosurgery, ret.) and Adjunct Professor of Medical History (ret.) Mercer University School of Medicine. 

Yeah, I agree, aging when it comes to this type of stuff really does suck. Regardless, I look at it this way, if we want to continue teaching and practicing even into the winter years of our lives we have to consider making such adjustments for it you cause damage to your brain, even if you live, it will have grievous repercussions on your abilities to learn, teach, practice and train. It may be the type of fun you really enjoy but if you don’t adjust are you willing to pay the price of losing that ability and capability? Reading the entire article that inspired this opinion really tells us a lot about the dangers of head trauma. 

Do you want to gamble you can go the distance? Remember also, our mind-set and mind-STATE are critical to practice but even more so to self-defense. If you damage the brain you lose a lot of your capabilities and abilities to defend and protect, is it worth it to expose ourselves, myself, to those dangers?

Bibliography (Click the link)

Note: I learned over the years that, “Small Circle Jujitsu” was a solid discipline suited well to self-defense, at least as an additional discipline so I found a dojo in my local area well-suited and respected. My intent was to start out there to gain that knowledge and experience but then as an aging karate-ka and martial artists I did a self-assessment both physical and mental. Mentally, I was more than capable but as I assessed myself physically I found that some issues were present that would mean I would expose myself to grave physical harm as to health and fitness, i.e., I have both shoulders with minor tears to the rotator cuffs. The tears are minor and didn’t require surgery to get back normal movement and capabilities but jujitsu as with any other discipline that uses the joints for control and manipulation would mean exposing the minor tears to possible greater tears requiring surgery. I assessed that if I exposed myself to the possibility that the surgery would be a huge set-back and could, like the brain above, lead to very long recuperation and possibly even a state of health resulting in discontinuance in training. I realized that I can still practice and train my karate with adjustments but the overall goal and related obstacles with possible repercussions meant changing my plans. The long terms considerations with the aging process and the possible limitations a new injury might incur when properly weighed said, “Not a good idea.” I also took into consideration what I would need to do to learn and study the system, the discipline, and found that to sacrifice those needs for training are also not acceptable overall. It should be noted one of the reasons I no longer train actively with others in the dojo and practice and train solo are due to the aging considerations. It is just me, these types of decisions are individual in nature that MUST be made by each person so this article as with the other aging articles are about information to make appropriate decisions. 

Cognitive Skills and Aging

Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)

See the link at the end to read the entire article. What I want to express is the consistent message that we, as in self, have control over how aging effects us physically and mentally. There is a constant that transcends any one discipline but the principles this article mentions really can be achieved regardless of what we use to reach that goal. 

Lets begin with “Memory,” i.e., remote memory or recall of past events tends to remain regardless of age. I theorize that this includes procedural memory, the memory that we most often use to take actions such as in self-defense, i.e., the type of memory trained in to come from what many term as instinctive actions. As long as all other factors are taken into consideration this one should be available even in aging. 

Next is our attention: Our focus or simple attention also tends to remain. One aspect to consider is what they term as “Divided attention” that tends to suffer as we age. Trying to focus on one thing and simultaneously talk to someone or on the phone - tends to be more difficult in aging processes. Our attentive abilities toward the various forms of awareness can keep this issue from becoming too problematic, i.e., keeping up the practice through training as is often done in karate and martial arts for defense. 

Ok, what about reasoning and problem solving? Those more “Traditional approaches” to solving problems are maintained as we age. New issues and problems simply take a bit longer than you might be used to experiencing tend to crop up in our winter years. Another reason why our appropriate and effective training and practice of karate and martial arts in principles such as those developing and conditioning our minds, our bodies and therefore our spirits tend to excel in combating the aging process.

There are other health issues and factors that would exacerbate the aging process and its effects. The recommendations toward combating those are:

Reduce Stress

Maintain Good Health

Mentally Stimulate Yourself Regularly

Use memory cues and methods to facilitate memory and use routines

Stress is a bad thing - but it is also a good thing too. Yin-yang concepts from the principle of theory and philosophy found in karate and martial arts fundamental principles foster cognitive maintenance for keeping our skills effective and efficient even into our winter years. The combination of physical and mental activities found promote good heath, i.e., what is best is that this type of activity is adjusted as we age so it can be practiced even in the higher age ranges. 

The fun one can find in practice and training makes learning easier and that also provides the aged a means to remain motivated even when the aging process throws is those curve balls such as my recent bout with vertigo. My karate and martial arts resulted in faster healing and promoted a more “Stable (pun intended)” ability to train, etc.

Karate and martial arts are all about using methods to encode both conscious and procedural/unconscious memory activity. It brings together a physical, mental and tactile like teaching and practice model best suited to trigger and stimulate those very cognitive skills necessary for a better aging process. 

http://alzheimers.emory.edu/healthy_aging/cognitive-skills-normal-aging.html

Bibliography (Click the link)