Aging, Exercise, and Health Maintenance
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ADAM ROBERTS: Now, I want you to make it almost like this is almost like a drinking song. You know what I'm saying? They have all those drinking songs that are in the shows and all the movies. This is what we want for this, OK? Ah, two, three, four.
[MUSIC - STEPHEN COLLINS FOSTER, "SOME FOLKS"]
CHOIR: (SINGING) Long live the merry, merry heart.
ADAM ROBERTS: That's what we want. Excellent. Again, one more time. To "celebration"—go.
CHOIR: (SINGING) Long live the merry, merry heart that laughs by night and day, like the Queen of Mirth, no matter what some folks say.
BLANCHE TRACHTMAN: My name is Blanche Trachtman. And on April 30, I was 91 years old. This picture is of me when I was about a year old.
I just feel great. I go to the J, and I take part in a lot of their programs. So when I saw all these different activities, that was the place for me.
LISA QUAY: My name is Lisa Quay, and I'm a gerontologist and a social worker. And I direct the programs for seniors at the Jewish Community Center. We are trying to create programs that address all the dimensions of wellness for the senior adults who come to the Jewish Community Center.
7 equals B for SB.
Flex Your Brain is a classroom setting where in the course of an hour, we run through activities that are intended to stimulate different areas of your brain.
MAN: Oh, I've got it, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
WOMAN 1: Oh!
WOMAN 2: The movie, the movie.
LISA QUAY: Why is it hard to see it this way?
MAN: That's not usually the way we think.
LISA QUAY: Exactly. We know these expressions. We've heard them all, but we don't usually see them written as a math equation.
BLANCHE TRACHTMAN: That was real trivia. Even though I'm so old, I'd never heard of these things.
LISA QUAY: What we know about keeping your brain strong and healthy is that you need some elasticity between the areas of your brain. And so it's getting people to access information they already have in a different way. For example, we don't generally sort our food by alphabet.
David, did you give me three?
DAVID: Pork.
LISA QUAY: Pork and—
BLANCHE TRACHTMAN: I'm just going to say that's a dirty word, a dirty word.
DAVID: Popcorn.
LISA QUAY: Popcorn. That's a good one.
What we know about keeping your brain as fit as possible and as healthy as possible, a lot of that knowledge comes out of the Longevity Center at UCLA and Dr. Gary Smalls.
What's really cool about Dr. Small's research is what he has found is that this is cumulative. So if you exercise and you eat a healthy diet and if you exercise and you eat a healthy diet and you're doing things to de-stress, that it's all cumulative. It's exciting because you have an incentive to incorporate as much of this as possible into your life.
WOMAN 3: So how are we doing today?
BLANCHE TRACHTMAN: Fine.
WOMAN 3: Good.
BLANCHE TRACHTMAN: Then we have the PACE exercise, which means people with arthritis can exercise.
WOMAN 3: There you go. Arms up, heels up. Work on the body, working on flexibility. All is important.
LISA QUAY: PACE started out as a program in conjunction with a grant to find a way for people who had arthritis to exercise.
WOMAN 3: Reaching up, reaching up, reaching up—ery healthy.
LISA QUAY: Everything that's good for your heart and good for your body is good for your brain. Cardiovascular exercise has been correlated with increasing brain size and capacity. We need the oxygen that we get from doing a cardiovascular workout.
BLANCHE TRACHTMAN: I think it's great because a lot of people, if they weren't going to these programs, they wouldn't be doing exercise at all.
Showoff!
[LAUGHTER]
I love people. And if I have to sit home and not be surrounded by people, to me, that's boring. I love to be with people.
The program's to sing "Hernando's Hideaway," Phillip took out his orthotics and he was using them for castanets.
LISA QUAY: That's funny.
A lot of ladies in our programs had told me that they used to knit, they used to crochet, and they didn't have anybody to do it for anymore. So we created this program called the Mitzvah Knitters.
BLANCHE TRACHTMAN: The word "mitzvah" means "a good deed." We make blankets for the cancer patients, preemie blankets for the very tiny ones—scarfs and hats for the homeless people. So it's doing good for somebody else.
LISA QUAY: It's purposeful for the folks who are doing the knitting, but it's also wonderful to know that their objects are being loved.
ADAM ROBERTS: Great. OK. So now we know it. That was great. Now we need to have way more drama. You know what I'm saying?
BLANCHE TRACHTMAN: The Deltones is a singing group at the J that was formed about 10 years ago. We go to assisted living. We go to independent living places just to give a little more pleasure to the people that live there.
ADAM ROBERTS: And then the punch line, right? "But that's not me nor you." And then drinking song—"Long live the merry, merry heart that laughs," right? That's what we're going for, right?
Yeah, we need to have that. That's what we're going for with that, right? All right. Beginning again—
BLANCHE TRACHTMAN: We're learning all new songs or songs that we'd never heard of. And it gives us a new angle about music.
LISA QUAY: They're using their brains. They're breathing well, which is great for your body. And music has a whole different place in your memory. I had a choir once with people who were very impacted with Alzheimer's and whose families had not heard them speak for years. And they could actually sing songs.
[MUSIC - STEPHEN COLLINS FOSTER, "SOME FOLKS SAY"]
CHOIR: (SINGING) Long live the merry, merry heart that laughs by night and day, like the Queen of Mirth, no matter what some folks say.
Long live the merry, merry heart that laughs by night and day, like the Queen of Mirth, no matter what some folks say."
ADAM ROBERTS: Very nice.
[LAUGHTER]
[MUSIC PLAYING]