Fitness For Older Adults

Even if you’ve never been active, it’s never too late to reap the many health benefits of regular exercise. Regular cardiovascular exercise, such as brisk walking, bicycling or swimming strengthens the heart and muscles, boosts energy and endurance. It also helps control blood sugar and cholesterol levels and works as a natural mood elevator.

Being sedentary raises the risk for developing such serious health conditions as diabetes and heart disease. Strength exercise, or resistance training, helps preserve muscle tissue and bone health. It’ll help you stay strong, so you can go about your normal daily activities.

Always consult with your health care provider before starting an exercise program. Ask about precautions specific to your condition and which exercises are beneficial and safe for you. Regular exercise helps manage health conditions and can speed up the recovery process of serious illnesses, including heart attack, stroke and joint-replacement surgery. Your doctor may recommend that you start exercising in a medically-supervised setting before you exercise on your own.

Water exercises (swimming, water walking) or non weight-bearing exercises (bicycling, rowing, elliptical machines) are easier on the joints and often recommended for people with joint issues. However, your health care provider may recommend some weight-bearing exercises (walking, jogging) to protect and strengthen your bones.

Start with 5 minutes or whatever you can manage, then gradually work up to 30 minutes a day of cardiovascular exercise most days of the week. You should notice a difference in how you feel within 6-8 weeks. Perform muscle-strengthening exercises twice weekly with at least 24 hours in between sessions.

Even if your weight is in a healthy range, regular exercise is key for maintaining good health and to reduce health risks. One study showed that physically fit overweight people had significantly lower health risks than thin, sedentary people. An inactive lifestyle raises your risk for developing serious health conditions, including metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and heart disease.

Strength-training is critical for older adults. Adults lose 4-6 lbs. of muscle tissue per decade, which means a significant loss of body strength and a lower resting metabolism.  Older adults who undergo a structured strength-training program have shown to regain lost muscle mass, increase their strength, metabolism, bone density and balance and improve their quality of life. 

One study linked muscular strength to reduced stiffness in the aorta, the major artery carrying blood from the heart to the rest of the body, which can reduce the risk of death from cardiovascular events, independent of current aerobic fitness levels.

However, if calorie intake isn’t also reduced, fat weight increases.

250 Calories, forfeit or jog?

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/12/16/if-250-calorie-label-doesnt-stop-50-minute-jog-label-might/

How to slim down abdominal fat

Pummeling your stomach with hundreds of repetitions of abdominal exercises doesn’t achieve what you think it should.  By doing hundreds 0f repetitions of an abdominal exercise, you gain muscles which are rock solid, but the fat is obscuring it. And all those abdominal moves won’t touch the fat. So, many people blast away at their abs thinking that the burn that they feel is zapping off fat. It’s not.  One classic study at the University of Massachusetts found that men who did 5,000 sit-ups a day did not decrease the size of the fat cells in the torso and they did not reduce waist size.

You should see more fat loss by rearranging your routine to do more cardio. A larger accumulated calorie burn will make the biggest dents in your fat stores.  You should aim for at least 30 minutes or more of any cardio exercise three times per week.  There is always a chance that you are simply genetically predisposed to store much of your excess body fat in your stomach, and you may be able to only whittle it down so much. It’s easy to gain weight with age in today’s environment. And in women, when estrogen levels start to lower, more abdominal fat comes on. Certain dietary habits like excess alcohol and eating foods high in saturated and trans- fats may also encourage abdominal fat.

Ideally, you should be doing 60 minutes of cardio exercises per day, on most days. If 60 minutes a day sounds like a lot of exercise, it is. But you can spread it out: little 15-minute bouts of walking throughout your day count, too. If you are regularly active and take the stairs instead of the escalator or pick a farther spot in the parking lot, for example, you can easily accumulate an hour of more of low- to moderate-intensity activity. Of course, if most of your activity involves sitting on a couch or in front of your computer, unless you are making a concerted effort to get up and move every hour, it may be hard to fit in a full 60 minutes per day.

Theoretically, 3,500 calories equals 1 pound of fat. So if you walk around 60 minutes per day, you can lose 30 pounds in about seven months. You can speed up the weight loss by making small calorie reductions in your diet (for example, saying “no” to regular desserts or using skim instead of whole milk). If you are not yet fit enough to do a lot of exercise, take it one step at a time. Start with 10-minute sessions and add a few minutes per week.  These efforts should help whittle away body fat, and hopefully in the abdominal area.

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