Elderly Exercise

Exercising at 70 can literally be a life saver. With elderly exercise plans below, Cardiovascular exercise combined  with a healthy elderly diet, can prevent cardiovascular disease. Strength training can improve your balance. This means you will be less likely to fall. It also strengthens your bones. This means that if you do fall you are less likely to break something.

Even though exercise does so much to lengthen your life span and improve the quality of that life, most Americans don’t do it. Once recent survey found that only 10% of Americas over 60 get regular, meaningful exercise. Out of the 90% who don’t, 50% of them are totally sedentary.

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Why People Don’t Exercise

People have all kinds of excuses for not exercising. For people over 60 they usually include ‘I’m tired,’ ‘I’m too old,’ ‘It’s too late for me to start that kind of thing.’ Some of them may even blame a specific medical condition for their lack of exercise. This is despite the fact that most health conditions would actually improve with regular exercise.

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Most people do not like exercise. This may have something to do with the way we are hard-wired. Way back in history we had to work hard to find enough food to eat. It may be that our bodies are wired to rest whenever possible to conserve the calories from the food we did find. It isn’t hard to find food these days. You don’t even have to leave your house to get a hot meal delivered right to your door.

In this age of home delivery and fast food, we have to work hard against our natural inclinations. Granted, it is hard to exercise if you are in pain from a recent knee surgery or the like. This doesn’t change the fact that most doctors recommend you get moving right away—even if you have a medical condition. In the next section, we will discuss a problem that often plagues mature adults.

Exercise and Arthritis

If you don’t have arthritis it is hard to understand the pain it puts people through. When you’re hurting, it takes everything you can do just to move normally. If you have arthritis in your hands, turning doorknobs can be a trial. If you have arthritis in your knees, one cold wind can leave you aching and limping. After a few flare-ups, the last thing you want to do is irritate your joints again.

Exercise looks like one of those things that can cause a flare up. After all, you can have a flare up if you over do it somehow. You may be surprised to learn that exercise is an excellent way to prevent and treat arthritis. Exercise isn’t a cure-all. It is, however, a significant part of any arthritis treatment plan.

Check with your doctor before you start exercising. He or she may send you to a physical therapist who can help you to develop an exercise regimen that is appropriate to you. Ask you doctor or your physical therapist for guidelines on which types of exercises are safe and which need to be avoided.

Exercises Appropriate Arthritis Sufferers

This is meant as a general guideline. Consult your doctor, a physical therapist, or a personal trainer with experience training mature adults, for pointers on what to do and how to do it. If you have arthritis this goes double for you.

Range of motion exercises: Range of motion exercises help you to maintain normal joint movements and relieve stiffness. These exercises also increase your flexibility so you can use those joints properly.

Strengthening exercises: Strengthening exercises help you to maintain or restore your muscle strength. Strong muscles protect and support joints affected by arthritis. Strong muscles keep your body in alignment so that you don’t twist or tear the ligaments and tendons that hold your joints together.

Aerobic exercises: Aerobic exercise also helps in an indirect way. When you exercise and eat right, you lose weight. When you lose weight, you take excess pressure off of the effected joints. Some studies have even shown that aerobic exercise can reduce the inflammation in some joints.

How to Get Started

Take it easy. Exercise works best when you are consistent. You can’t be consistent if you over-do it. Exercise at an intensity level that’s challenging for you, but easy enough to maintain for 20 minutes. Eventually, you will work your way up to 45 minutes of exercise, but for now start with what you can do regularly. You will be coming back to the gym almost every day from now on. Pace yourself. You want to work hard, but not too hard.

Buy a heart monitor. Get a grandchild to find one on the internet for you if necessary. Don’t fight me on this one. It is vital that you work out at a level that is safe and appropriate for you. The best way to keep track of that is with a heart monitor. One glance at your heart rate will tell you if you need to back off or turn up your effort.

You want to be working out at 60-75% of your total capacity. This isn’t something you can check out while you are huffing and puffing on the stationary bike. The process goes something like this:

Before you can find your appropriate aerobic range you need to find your total capacity. To do that, subtract your age from 220. If I were 70, for example, that would be

220

-70

150 = my maximum capacity.

This is the number you would hit if you were trying to work out at 100% of your capacity. But you don’t want to work out at 100% of your capacity. It doesn’t do anything for you. You want to work out at somewhere between 60-75% of your total capacity. You learned how to calculate percentages in high school. Since that was a little while ago for some of you let’s review how to do it:

To find 60% of 150:  150

x .6

90 = beats per minute

To find 75% of 150:  150

x .75

112.5 = beats per minute

So you would want to stay in a heart rate range between 90-113 beats per minute. Now that you have the formula, you can calculate your range no matter what you age is. Remember that the example above is for someone who is 70 years old. If you are older or younger you will have to redo the math to get an accurate number.

With this information you can strap on a heart monitor and give it a quick glance here and there to make sure your heart rate is where it is supposed to be.

Warning: When you go shopping for a heart monitor the salesman will try to sell you an expensive model that does all kinds of things you don’t need it to do. All you really need is a basic monitor that displays your heart rate.

I have a heart rate monitor that calculates my optimal aerobic range for me, and keeps track of how many calories I burn. Then again, I am a little more obsessive about exercise than most. You can buy a basic heart monitor for about $60, and buy one like mine for about $100.

You can find heart rate monitors at sporting goods stores, from fitness centers, at your gym, through mail order catalogues, and on the internet. A good discount website you might want to look at is HeartRateMonitorUSA.com.

Your New Exercise Schedule

The human body is meant to move. Therefore you will move yours six days a week from now on. Remember, if you don’t use it you lose it. And the older you get, the faster you lose it.

If you flip through the other ‘age’ chapters of this book you will notice that everyone one is doing some form of flexibility, strength training, and aerobic work. This is because these are key areas that will improve your health and keep you feeling good no matter what age you are.

There are only a few things that change as you age. The first is the relative importance of each category. The second is what your body will tolerate in terms of the amount of impact you can withstand, and your recovery time.

What to do if you are just starting out:

Focus first on building up your cardiovascular conditioning. Swim, do aqua aerobics, do low-impact aerobics, walk briskly, or take a spin class. If all you can do is walk to your mailbox and back a few times, so be it. The point is to get moving.

Stretch out before and after your workout. This is the age where your joints stiffen up if you don’t watch them. Stiff joints shorted your range of movement and can contribute to falls. You want to avoid anything that might cause you to lose your balance.

Get into a routine. Try to do your exercise at the same time every day. Once you get into a habit exercise is easier to do. Eventually you want to be working out for 45 minutes of cardiovascular work a day along with 5 minutes of stretching. This is your first goal.

Once you’ve reached your first goal you are ready to take on balance and strength training. Cut your cardiovascular work down to three days a week. Strength train (either with weights, resistance bands, or your body weight) two days a week. Work on your balance exercises every day.

If you want to occasionally throw in an extra long day once a week, add in some cardio on a non-cardio day. If you are short on time you can trim your cardio down to 30 minutes and do your balance exercises for 15 minutes to keep your total exercise time down to 45 minutes. Try not to do this too often. You’re retired now. Make the time to exercise. It’s your job. Your boss at your old job wouldn’t have put up with you cutting out of work 15 minutes early every day—or even once or twice a week. Don’t let yourself off the hook.

You may have noticed that this adds up to only five days of exercise. That is because you are going to devote one day just to balance and flexibility exercises. I would recommend making this the last exercise day of your week.

If you are already active:

Note: You do not qualify as active if you count golf, gardening, or housework as “exercise.” This work may or may not get your circulation going, but either way it isn’t meaningful exercise.

There are a lot of people who are going to fight me on this. ‘I have a big garden,’ they say, ‘I really work hard when I clean my house.’ Let’s get real here. Look at your body. Are you lean, strong, and at your optimal weight? No? Then your golf or gardening ‘workout’ isn’t doing anything for you. Go back to the ‘just starting out’ section of this chapter and start there. Come back when you’re sweating regularly for six days a week.

If you want to keep your health you need to keep your workouts effective. ‘Effective’ means you’re sweating, your heart rate is elevated, and your breath is coming a little faster. Get that heart monitor! Make sure you are really working out where you are supposed to be.

Pick a cardiovascular activity you like and will do regularly for 45 minutes three days a week. Follow that up with stretching and 10 minutes of balance work.

Strength train three days a week for 30 minutes. Get some pointers from a personal trainer who has worked with mature people before. If you already know how to handle weights safely, but it has been a while sine you last worked with a trainer, you may want to hire one for a session or two. We all have a tendency to fall into bad habits. Bad habits have a way of injuring you when you allow them to creep into your weight workout. Be safe.

Follow your strength training sessions with 15 minutes of balance and core work. Concentrate on proper form and control throughout.

On the last day focus on balance and core exercises exclusively. Take a Pilates, yoga, or tai chi class. You can do this work on your own if you are familiar with the moves. I would suggest that beginners, and even more experienced Pilates or yoga people will get more out of the workout if you do it in a group.

You can perform this one day of balance/core work any day of the week. I suggest doing it at the end of your week as a reward to your body for working hard. These activities will make you feel great. They will also relax you, putting you in a better frame of mind to enjoy your day off.

For Everyone

Pay attention to how your body reacts to each exercise session. Even in your seventies, you are a work in progress. If you continue to exercise every day you will gradually have to make your workout more challenging.

Most people pay attention to their bodies when something is going wrong. Try to notice when things are going right. Perhaps that weight you are using is a little to light now. Maybe you need to increase the incline on the treadmill. Whatever you do, don’t fall into a rut. That way leads to decay.

How to Relive Minor Pains

As you work out, your body will talk to you. Sometimes it will be saying ‘I’m sore.’ Other times you may have pains unrelated to exercise, like from arthritis. There are things you can do before and after your workouts to help you lessen the pain and keep moving. We’re talking about minor pains here. Do not attempt to exercise through extreme pain or self medicate. Go to a doctor if the pain persists for more than an hour, is sharp and/or sudden, or increases in intensity.

Moist heat: This is good for when you are feeling stiff. A warm towel, hot bath, heat pack, or hot shower applied 15-20 minutes up to three times a day can relieve some symptoms and improve flexibility.

Cold: This works for inflammation. Wrap a bag of ice or even a bag of frozen vegetables in a towel. This can reduce the swelling of inflamed joints. Don’t leave the ice on your body for more than 15 minutes of every hour. Don’t use this method if you have Raynaud’s phenomenon.

Again, these tricks are useful for minor aches and pains. They are not meant to take the place of a doctor’s care. If you are in pain for more than an hour, go see your doctor.

The next section will cover how to eat right in your seventies. Do you think you already know how to do this? Are you following the government’s food guide pyramid? Well, when you turn seventy you may be in for a surprise…

Looking For Specific Age Information?
Health Issues Over 40 50 60 70 – Elderly
Exercises in Your 40s 50s 60s 70s – Elderly
Foods / Diet After 40 50 60 70 – Elder

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