Fitness for the Over 50s
Stay young – Stay active
CICERO: 44BC
A walk is one of the secrets for dodging old age
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
There is a saying in China that ‘old age is inevitable, but there is no excuse for senility’. The ageing process varies from person to person, and although it is in evitable, experts now agree that most people could look younger, be fitter, feel more vital and live longer if they exercised regularly throughout their lives.
Huber Warner, PhD of the National Institute on Ageing in the USA, is 55 and says: ‘People should be concerned about ageing from the earliest stages of their lives. The problems of ageing are cumulative, and the sooner you start correcting them, the better off you are in the long run,’
It’s never too late to start.
As you get older the effects of sedentary living and a passive lifestyle start to catch up with you – weak muscles, reduced stamina and suppleness, reduction in aerobic capacity and proneness to disease. By walking regularly and following the additional exercises in the wholebody fitness section of the book, you can increase your aerobic capacity, strength, stamina and suppleness even into the decades of your life.
Walk longer – Live Longer
Take a two-mile walk every morning before breakfast
HARRY TRUMAN
(advice on how to live to be 80, on his 80th birthday)
They say that ‘old age puts more wrinkles on our minds than on our faces’. You are as you feel. A 50-years who feel 40 is 40 – a 40 year- old who feels 50 is 50. A bored 40- years-old is the same as a bored 50-years-old. In the fight against ageing, mental fitness is as important as physical fitness.
Mental fitness gets you up and going; mental fitness gives you a new attitude, a new outlook to life; mental fitness gives you the drive and energy to make plans for a healthy future.
Many people drift into old age as though it’s inevitable. They make financial plans for their middle age and retirement but they don’t give the same consideration to a physical plan in order to enjoy these years to the full. They drift into their middle and later years sitting around waiting for a heart attack, when what they should be doing is following an exercise and diet plan to help them enjoy life to the full.
It’s not the passing years that’s a problem – it’s passive lifestyle. By their 50s more than 40 per cent of males and 80 per cent of females are sedentary – they spend too much time sitting.
To give you some idea just how a passive lifestyle can damage your health, a report in a US magazine, prevention, in February 1991, estimated that 22,000 people in New York alone might die during the year ‘clinging to their armchairs’.
A sedentary lifestyle is considered so bad for you that the American Heart Association now lists it as a major ‘risk factor’ on a par with high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure and cigarette smoking. The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, USA, found that the least active people were almost twice as likely to have heart disease as the most active.
There are many aspects of your life over which you have no control – but you do have control over your exercise and diet. Getting started now and making small changes to your lifestyle will help you regain aerobic capacity, stamina strength and flexibility. And the easiest way to do this is to walk regularly and follow The Walk Slim Diet.
Dr Ralph Paffenberger of Stanford University in the USA, in The College Alumni Study found that people who walked regularly were than their less likely to suffer or die from a heart attack than their less active colleagues, and men who walked 9 or more miles a week had a 21 per cent lower mortality rate than those who walked 3 miles or less. He also found that the benefits tended to increase with age.
And it’s not just cardiovascular health that improves: walk-ing helps with back pain, arthritis, osteoporosis, varicose veins, reducing cholesterol, and other medical problems where inactivity is a factor.
By walking regularly you cut your rate of physical decline by half. ’Use it or lose it’ is the adage. If you don’t exercise, muscles deteriorate, you aerobic capacity deteriorates and you have less stamina, strength and flexibility. Life becomes a strain and you have less energy and vitality to get you through the day.
Aerobic capacity (the ability of the cardiovascular system to deliver oxygen to working muscles) declines slightly every year after the age of 30. After 30, your maximum heart rate declines and your lungs and blood vessels become less elastic. Because your heart and lungs supply less oxygen to your tissues, your vitality diminishes each year and you tire more easily.
What you need is a an oxygen This is what walking will do for you:
AEROBIC ENDURANCE
ü Improves cardiovascular fitness
ü Improves respiratory capacity
ü Improves muscle endurance
ü Burns calories to help maintain optimal body weight
ü Raises HDL, ‘good’ cholesterol
ü Reduces psychological stress
ü Guards against heart disease and other health problems
STRENGTH AND FLEXIBILITY
ü Delay loss of strength and muscle mass
ü Maintain muscle tone and joint range of motion
ü Assist balance and good posture
ü Slow bone shrinkage and weakening
Regular aerobic walking will make your heart stronger and fitter it will give you a better figure and it will help shape and tone your body and keep off those unwanted pounds. And it will help you feel fitter mentally.
Aerobic walking improves fitness and slows. ‘By improving your physical fitness, you’ll look and feel much younger than calendar age, ’says Dr Kenneth H. Cooper, author of Aerobics, and a firm advocate of the benefits of walking.
So if you want to have a healthy heart, strong muscles and flexible joints then walking will help you do this. Regular walking will add years to your life to your years.
