Seniors’ Health is About Making Positive Choices
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recommends four types of exercises:
- Strength exercises build older adult muscles and increase your metabolism, which helps to keep your weight and blood sugar in check.
- Balance exercises build leg muscles, and this helps to prevent falls. According to the NIH, U.S. hospitals have 300,000 admissions for broken hips each year, many of them seniors, and falling is often the cause of those fractures. Balance exercises can help you stay independent by helping you avoid the disabilities that could result from falling.
- Stretching exercises can give you more freedom of movement, which will allow you to be more active during your senior years. Stretching exercises alone will not improve your endurance or strength.
- Endurance exercises are any activity—walking, jogging, swimming, and other exercises like biking increases your heart rate and breathing for an extended period of time. Build upyour endurance gradually, starting with as little as 5 minutes of endurance activities at a time.
Exercise rejuvenates muscle tissue in seniors:
(Updated Tuesday May 22nd, 2007- CTV.ca News Staff)
A new study gives us even more evidence that exercise may be the ‘fountain of youth’.
Research conducted on seniors in Canada, shows that weight training can actually reverse aging in the muscle tissue of healthy senior citizens.
The study, co-led by Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky of McMaster University Medical Centre in Hamilton, Ont., took 25 healthy seniors over the age of 65 and put them on a six month program of lifting weights for two hours a week.
After the training, the strength of the older adults improved by about 50 per cent - they were only 38 percent weaker than the young adults.
"After training, they were halfway back to the strength of a young person," reports Tarnopolsky. What's more, the genes and the cellular material damaged by aging were completely rejuvenated in the weight-lifting seniors.
Exercise seemed to turn back the clock in mitochondria - the tiny structures that allow cells to convert food into energy.
"What we found was significant. The genes that were abnormal with aging returned to the patterns of youth," Tarnopolsky says.
Always check with your physician before embarking on an exercise regime to see if it is the right plan for you.
