In early 2013, I signed up for Jill Miller’s Yoga Tune Up® teacher training as a new yoga teacher looking to learn more about the body. This training, and many of the others under Tune Up Fitness, surpassed any curiosity I had about anatomy, fascia and movement.Now in my 40’s, interviewing Jill for this Celebrating Age themed issue, felt like perfect timing.

Jill Miller, C-IAYT, is a fascia expert, cofounder of Tune Up Fitness Worldwide Inc. and bestselling author of Body by Breath and The Roll Model. Here, she shares her thoughts on aging and how her life experiences shaped the course of the work she teaches today.

This issue is themed “Celebrating Age.” What are ways you celebrate your age?
I remind myself of all of the wisdom that has accumulated, which gives me perspective and it also has dampened a painful and unquenchable desire to strive. I think that striving is something that is definitely baked into our culture. (Not that I’m not continuing to want to strive or strive towards excellence or be the best that I can be.) It’s given me the ability to have gracious reflection, perspective, and it’s deepened my appreciation of love.

I also recognize that I’m not the baby anymore, and the benevolent responsibility as a human citizen to share with younger people and share with others. That has been a really delicious part of aging—realizing that people look up to me. Parenting has taught me a lot of that, but also being a business owner and a teacher of teachers has taught me that. You don’t age in isolation. You age in community, and you age in relationship to all these other age groups.

Can you tell us a little about the evolution of your yoga practice and how it brought you to Tune Up Fitness?
I started practicing yoga when I was around 11 or 12. My mom had brought home the Jane Fonda Workout video and the Raquel Welch yoga tape. We lived off-the-grid in a solar home outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, so we didn’t have a television. These videos lit me up, and I became obsessed with them. What happened over the next 8 or 9 years of my life was a spiral of disordered eating, orthorexia, and using yoga as a way to regulate my nervous system. There was a certain point in college where I knew that my bulimia was absolutely not going away, and I needed help.

My roommate, who was pre-med, was taking the same pilates class as me. She would always be sore in her abs, and I was never sore. I had a feeling that the reason I was never sore was because I couldn’t feel my abs, and I was just bypassing them because I was bulimic. I had this disconnection from myself. So I confessed to my yoga teacher that I was bulimic, and that I felt numb in my abs. She showed me a prop that they use in the Iyengar space that looks like a hamburger bun stuffed with sand. She said, “put it on your belly and lay down and breathe into it.” It was absolute agony. But I finally felt. The pain that emerged connected the dots for me about what I was doing to myself with the bulimia. I started to wake up every morning and roll up a hand towel (which was a lot gentler than this bean bag) and I would lay on the towel and move it around my abdomen. What ended up happening was I was able to move beyond the bulimia. I attribute a lot of that in part to creating this connection from my guts, my heart, and my mind. The self-massage work has been instrumental for being able to locate myself and being able to locate my emotions. In the context of practice, I am practicing as safely as possible. But also while in myself and not bypassing myself or continuing to objectify myself the way I used to.

That’s an incredible story and very inspiring. I appreciate you sharing that. Can you explain to the reader what self-myofascial release is?
Self-myofascial release is using a tool to attempt to improve gliding motions between tissues, to improve overall mobility, eliminate pain, address muscle imbalances and improve one’s proprioception (the ability to know where you are in space). I use self-myofascial release to help people improve their embody map, which is that body’s sense of itself. This concretizing of your soma, your anatomy, so that you can be a better participant with what you intend with your movements. The self-myofascial release that I teach is called Roll Model Method®. I use soft, pliable rubber balls of different sizes to help people locate tissues, improve mobility, and transform pain. This is the work that I teach to clinicians, to sports and athletics communities, to the general population, people that don’t like yoga, people that love yoga. All sorts of people can benefit from self-myofascial release.

Because the science behind anatomy and movement changes so rapidly, how do you adjust your training and teaching to align with the new information? What are your thoughts on the people who challenge the effectiveness of rolling?
When people challenge the effectiveness, it’s really easy to counter because we have evidence. In the fascia research community, we’ve moved on from a lot of terms. For example, a lot of people get caught up in this term, “adhesions.” That’s really not frequently used anymore. We’ll hear people talk about agglomerations or lack of gliding or true visceral adhesions, but people don’t really talk about adhesions in a musculoskeletal way very often anymore. That is a term that I used to use because that’s what was used a decade ago. My book, The Roll Model, was written when that term was popular, but in the new book, Body By Breath, I have been able to update those terms and try to continue to evolve. Science is as much an art as it is a science, so we have to keep updating our terms and explain what we mean.

What is your recommendation for women over 40 who want to maintain longevity in their fitness routine and everyday life?
I am a manual movement medicine person! I believe (and the research shows) that load bearing exercise is so important for the aging body, especially with women over 40. The loss of estrogen is deleterious for every system of the body. However, you are working with the symptoms that come along with the disappearance of estrogen in your system, there is no good reason to not do load bearing exercise to continuously stress your muscles so that they stay healthy. We lose our fast twitch muscle fibers at a very fast rate as we age. We also lose our ability to generate power, which weakens the muscles and weakens the bones, so our connective tissues stiffen, and we are more likely to have ruptures and tears. It’s important to do load bearing exercise that is likely beyond yoga. Yoga is important for whole body motion as well as stability. It’s incredible as a mind-body exercise to enhance focus and induce the relaxation response.

The aging body also needs self-myofascial release. Self-massage can get into nooks and crannies of the body that, unbeknownst to you, aren’t being moved by your exercise. Therapy balls can create motion where motion is not occurring well and can also help you update your mind’s ability to connect to your tissues so you can get a more robust contraction. There’s really great evidence about rolling being able to improve a muscle’s ability to create torque or force generation as well as improving your body’s proprioception. Slips and falls are the highest leading cause of hip fractures, and hip fractures are the leading cause of death in aging bodies.

We want ankles that move well, and we want to have good reactive hips and strong bones in those hips, so if we do fall, we are less likely to fracture.

Is there anything else you like to share with the readers?
My newer book, Body by Breath is all about that journey through the gut to embodiment. What I realized when I started to teach these methods to other people is that I got lucky because I healed my eating disorder. But these were applications that ended up helping people with neck pain, with asthma, with chronic shoulder pain, and with low back pain. There were so many varieties of people that were helped by doing these types of gut, massage, rib cage massage applications, and now, I see it’s really quite an endless side-effect free application. The traction just blows me away. This simple thing. This sad little bulimic girl laying down in her dorm room trying to wrestle with what she was struggling with, but there is this universal application that is way beyond what I thought.

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Learn more: tuneupfitness.com

As a longtime NYC Jivamutkti Yogi and Broome Street Temple Ashtangi, I had mastered all of the asanas with dedicated practice in my late 20s and through all of my 30s. I remember training up to five hours per day in the beginning of my yoga journey. For a 12-year stretch, I immersed myself in vinyasa yoga while abandoning the strength training and running which had been part of my holistic training as an athlete.  

However, at around age 40, I began to notice subtle but significant shifts in my body—changes that made me realize yoga alone wasn’t enough to sustain my well-being. Approaches to practice that once yielded success, were now causing injuries and frustration. I was a world-famous yoga teacher with a successful yoga TV show and teaching sold out, 75-person classes at the most popular studio in Manhattan. Why were asanas failing me? After coming to terms with the idea that I was now in the second half of life, and that my personal records were behind me, a new perspective dawned. 

We must remember that an important aspect to yoga is “letting go of our attachments,” and keeping a pliable, flexible mind. Taming my ego opened a deeper exploration into how to adapt my practice to support a more sustainable approach to mindful aging. I realized that I needed to re-integrate the strength training that focused on weak areas that yoga did not train, and cardiovascular training for toning my heart, that I did before my days in yoga began. 

There are supplemental practices and approaches to asana that will keep you practicing through every decade of life, as long as you remain open to changing your routine, shifting things around, and tweaking what needs to be tweaked.  

We Must Account for Age-Related Changes

As we age, our bodies undergo several transformations that can impact our yoga practice. Let’s explore four key things that change for all of us by age 40. 

Decreased Flexibility Due to Fascial Changes: 

As we age, the fascia—the connective tissue surrounding muscles and organs—becomes less hydrated and more rigid. Muscles that are draped upon other muscles, at the shoulders and hips, no longer slide as smoothly on top of one another as they once did. This leads to reduced flexibility and a diminished range of motion.

Reduced Muscle Mass and Strength: 

Known as sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass and strength is common with aging. This loss of muscle mass brings with it a reduction of our metabolic rate, and increased body fat. 

Slower Recovery Times: 

Older bodies generally take longer to recover from physical exertion. This slower recovery can lead to overtraining and increased risk of injury if not properly managed. Doing long, grueling workouts every day will now lead to injury. 

Decreased Bone Density: 

With age, bone density often decreases, increasing the risk of fractures and falls. This change necessitates special attention to maintaining bone health through physical activity.

Solutions for a Sustainable Yoga Practice

1. Addressing Decreased Flexibility: 

To counteract the effects of fascial rigidity, incorporate a comprehensive warm-up routine before your yoga practice. You can experiment with gentle dynamic stretches, mobility exercises, a brisk walk or slow jog, and breathwork to prepare the body and enhance flexibility. 

You can also try walking 10,000 steps per day, six days a week. This will keep your fascia from getting sticky, and maintain hip extension, while enhancing your basal metabolic rate. Walking is a low impact and  low cost, while providing high yield, high return on your investment. Walking 10,000 steps per day will keep the heart, your body’s engine, running smoothly as you age. 

Additionally, use myofascial release techniques, such as foam rolling, to maintain fascial elasticity. Self-massage is an incredible form of self-care and maintenance. 

1. Combating Reduced Muscle Mass and Strength: 

The aging yogi must incorporate weight-bearing poses that involve weight-bearing on the arms and legs. Longer holds for downward dogs, planks, warrior asanas, and tree pose stimulate bone growth and strength. 

Bringing in resistance bands to warm up the body with rows and pulling motions, and doing core work before the start of your yoga sessions would be incredible for adding strength and toning up the body holistically. Perhaps warm up longer, and cut the length of your yoga practice to strike the balance between stability and flexibility.  

1. Managing Slower Recovery: 

Master sleep. Get eight hours of it. Go to bed and wake up at the same time to tune the circadian rhythm of the organs. Proper rest will enhance the functioning of your androgenic hormones, which help you to recover from training sessions.

You can also incorporate restorative yoga practices, such as Yin Yoga and Yoga Nidra, to facilitate deeper relaxation and recovery. 

To resist the pull of gravity, you will have to engage in positive habits. Getting older can be paired with increasing wisdom and refinement of our personality.  

1. Maintaining Bone Density: 

Lift heavy things in a variety of planes. Kettlebells, dumbbells, and medicine balls are great, but bodyweight exercises like high-rep air squats, push ups, and assisted pull-ups will do the trick. In the second half of life, frailty is a disease. Lift. Heavy. Things!!!! 

Two 30-minute weight lifting sessions per week will extend your health span, and will help to keep you on the yoga mat well into your golden years. 

As you integrate these practices into your life, you will find that it’s important to exercise six days per week. On the days you lift, you may skip vinyasa yoga and add static stretching or self-massage. On your vinyasa yoga days, you may add 10,000 steps. The idea is that your aging body will crave variety and stay happy when you mix things up. 

Embracing Change for a Lasting Practice

Adapting to these changes has transformed my yoga practice into a more holistic and sustainable routine. By integrating these supplemental practices, and doing less vinyasa yoga, I have been able to address the physical challenges of aging while continuing to enjoy the benefits of yoga. This approach has not only enhanced my physical health, but also provided me with a deeper understanding of how to care for my body as it evolves.

I feel the benefits of holistic training. My endurance and heart are addressed, my bones and tendons are cared for, and my mobility is at fulfilling ranges that provide freedom to do the activities I enjoy. 

Healthy aging is all about staying pain-free while remaining active. Doing splits, handstands, and placing our leg over the head becomes a low priority when we are older. 

For those of you in the second half of life, I encourage you to embrace these changes with a proactive mindset. Your yoga practice can remain a powerful tool for well-being, provided it is adjusted to meet your body’s new needs. By incorporating strength training, cardio, restorative practices, and mindful adjustments to your training program, you can maintain a vibrant and fulfilling yoga practice well into the future.

Remember, yoga is not just about the poses—it’s about nurturing your body and mind through every stage of life. By adapting your practice thoughtfully, you can continue to reap the rewards of yoga while honoring the unique needs of your aging body.

Learn more: theartofagingmindfully.com