Fitness Exercise
Exercising regularly, every day if possible, is the single most important thing you can do for your health. In the short term, exercise helps to control appetite, boost mood, and improve sleep. In the long term, it reduces the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, dementia, depression, and many cancers.
fitness exercise
Whether you were once much more physically active or have never been one to exercise regularly, now is a great time to start an exercise and fitness regimen. Getting and staying in shape is just as important for seniors as it is for younger people.
Why is exercise important for older people? Getting your heart rate up and challenging your muscles benefits virtually every system in your body and improves your physical and mental health in myriad ways. Physical activity helps maintain a healthy blood pressure, keeps harmful plaque from building up in your arteries, reduces inflammation, improves blood sugar levels, strengthens bones, and helps stave off depression. In addition, a regular exercise program can make your sex life better, lead to better quality sleep, reduce your risk of some cancers, and is linked to longer life.
Strength training, sometimes called resistance training, should be performed two to three times a week. Squats, lunges, push-ups and the exercises performed on resistance machines or using weights or bands help maintain and even build muscle mass and strength. Strength training also helps prevent falls, keep bones strong, lower blood sugar levels, and improve balance. Do a combination of both isometric and isotonic exercises. Isometric exercises, such as doing planks and holding leg lifts, are done without movement. They are great for maintaining strength and improving stability. Isotonic exercises require you to bear weight throughout a range of motion. Bicep curls, bench presses and sit-ups are all forms of isotonic exercise.
Balance exercises call on the various systems that help you stay upright and oriented, such as those of the inner ear, vision and muscles and joints. Tai chi and yoga are great forms of balance exercises that can help you avoid falls and stay independent well into your senior years.
If you have noticed problems with your balance, such as unsteadiness, dizziness, or vertigo, talk to a healthcare provider for recommendations about balance-specific exercises. Get in three half-hour workouts each week in addition to a 30-minute walk at least twice weekly.
The benefits of exercise on mental health are well documented. For example, one major study found that sedentary people are 44% more likely to be depressed. Another found that those with mild to moderate depression could get similar results to those obtained through antidepressants just by exercising for 90 minutes each week. The key appears to be the release of brain chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine, which help lift mood and combat stress.
Everyone can and should do some form of exercise, even if they face severe limitations. Experts have designed specific exercises for seniors that are low-impact, safe and able to be done even from a sitting position if necessary.
Even core-strengthening exercises for seniors can be adapted to those with limited abilities. For example, a standard plank is done by holding yourself parallel to the floor with only your forearms and toes touching the mat. An easier version allows you to also place your knees on the mat. But a still easier method is to do the plank while standing and leaning forward. You put your elbows and forearms on a desk, table or wall while resting on the balls of your feet and keeping your back straight.
There are a variety of stretching exercises for seniors to suit people of different abilities. If holding poses on your hands and knees is out of the question, you could try a full-body stretch in which you lie on your back, straighten your legs and extend your hands along the floor past your head. Some stretches can be done while seated, such as overhead stretches and neck rotations.
In fact, other types of exercise also can be done from a seated position. Other chair exercises for seniors include bicep curls (with dumbbells or elastic bands), overhead dumbbell presses, shoulder blade squeezes, calf raises, sit-to-stands (chair squats) and knee extensions.
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Micky Lal is a certified strength and conditioning specialist and a registered yoga teacher. Micky is a gym owner in California, where he holds personal training/health coaching sessions. He teaches classes on topics which include exercise, weight loss, stress management, sleep, and healthy eating.
Endurance activities, often referred to as aerobic, increase your breathing and heart rates. These activities help keep you healthy, improve your fitness, and help you perform the tasks you need to do every day. Endurance exercises improve the health of your heart, lungs, and circulatory system. They also can delay or prevent many diseases that are common in older adults such as diabetes, colon and breast cancers, heart disease, and others. Physical activities that build endurance include:
Balance exercises help prevent falls, a common problem in older adults that can have serious consequences. Many lower-body strength exercises also will improve your balance. Balance exercises include:
Stretching can improve your flexibility. Moving more freely will make it easier for you to reach down to tie your shoes or look over your shoulder when you back your car out of the driveway. Flexibility exercises include:
Objective: To compare the effectiveness of the physical fitness exercise program and the cognitive behavior therapy program on primary (depressive symptoms) and secondary outcomes (6-min walk distance, quality of life, and social support) for community-dwelling elderly adults with depressive symptoms.
Methods: Fifty-seven participants were randomly assigned to one of the three groups: the physical fitness exercise program group, the cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) group, or the control group. The primary (Geriatric Depression Scale-15, GDS-15), and secondary outcomes (6-min walk distance, SF-36, and Inventory of Socially Supportive Behaviors scales, ISSB) were collected immediately (T2), at 3 months (T3), and at 6 months after the interventions (T4).
Conclusions: Immediately after a 12-week intervention, there were significant decreases in depressive symptoms and more perceived social support amongst those in the CBT group. When considering the effectiveness in the decrease of depressive symptoms longer term, the increase in the 6-min walk distance and raising the patients' quality of life, physical fitness exercise program may be a better intervention for elderly adults with depressive symptoms.
That said, experts agree that not all exercises are created equal. Some are simply more efficient than others, whether they target multiple muscle groups, are suitable for a wide variety of fitness levels, or help you burn calories more effectively.
Any exercise program should include cardiovascular exercise, which strengthens the heart and burns calories. And walking is something you can do anywhere, anytime, with no equipment other than a good pair of shoes.
Strength training is essential, the experts say. "The more muscular fitness you have," says Cotton, "the greater the capacity you have to burn calories." And our experts tended to favor strength-training exercises that target multiple muscle groups. Squats, which work the quadriceps, hamstrings, and gluteals, are an excellent example.
"I'm very much into planking exercises, almost yoga-type moves," says Petersen. "Anytime you have the pelvis and the core [abdominals and back] in a suspended position, you have to rely on your own adherent strength to stabilize you."
Push-ups can be done at any level of fitness, says Cotton: "For someone who is at a more beginning level, start by pushing from the kitchen-counter height. Then work your way to a desk, a chair, the floor with bent knees, and, finally, the floor on your toes."
For a standard crunch, says Cotton, begin lying on your back with feet flat on the floor and fingertips supporting your head. Press your low back down and begin the exercise by contracting abdominals and peeling first your head (tucking your chin slightly), then your neck, shoulders, and upper back off the floor.
"Crunches work the ab muscles; [they're] not to be mistaken as exercise that burns the fat over the abdominals," he says. "That's the biggest myth in exercise going." Learn more about the best ab exercises and how to perform them.
Here's how to do it with good form. Stand with feet shoulder-width apart, then bend knees and flex forward at the hips. (If you have trouble doing this exercise standing up, support your weight by sitting on an incline bench, facing backward.) Tilt your pelvis slightly forward, engage the abdominals, and extend your upper spine to add support. Hold dumbbells or barbell beneath the shoulders with hands about shoulder-width apart. Flex your elbows, and lift both hands toward the sides of your body. Pause, then slowly lower hands to the starting position. (Beginners should perform the move without weights.)
These seven exercises are excellent, efficient choices, the experts say. But with just about any strength or resistance exercise, says Petersen, the question is not so much whether the exercise works as how well you execute.
Struggling to snooze? Regular physical activity can help you fall asleep faster, get better sleep and deepen your sleep. Just don't exercise too close to bedtime, or you may be too energized to go to sleep.
But there's even more to it than that. Regular physical activity may enhance arousal for women. And men who exercise regularly are less likely to have problems with erectile dysfunction than are men who don't exercise. 041b061a72