Health and fitness
As you age, your health and fitness levels become much more important for your overall life. A regular schedule of exercise and physical activity is one of the best ways for you to keep your health when you get older.
Many older people lose their health and ability to do things on their own simply because they have become inactive.
To stay healthy, older adults need to focus on specific areas of their health: endurance, strength, balance, and flexibility.
Do you want to know what kind of activity you have to do to improve these four areas and keep your health? If yes, just read below.
What endurance activities help to do is to increase your heart rate and your breathing rate over long periods of time. To improve the overall health of your lungs, heart, and circulatory system is what these activities will do.
You should include these endurance activities in your everyday schedule to help your body delay or even prevent the start of certain illnesses.
If you do not have strength, your general health may deteriorate quickly. When you reach a certain age, strength exercises are helpful for keeping strong and able to do activities on your own.
Balance exercises help older adults keep the all-important ability to keep balance. When you keep this skill in later years, it will help you avoid falls and accidents, which are common causes for disabilities in older adults.
These disabilities will also diminish a person’s overall health.
As a person gets older, many parts of the body lose range of motion. What you have to do to maintain your body flexible and limber is to do stretching exercises.
It is easy…if you do not use your body regularly, your health will not get better. It is similar to the old saying that states that you have to “use it or lose it”.
There are also several ways to change your eating habits to keep your health and allow your body to maintain its active status. Cutting down on fatty foods has been shown to prevent and delay cardiovascular disease, one of which is high blood pressure.
Increasing fruits and vegetables in your diet may reduce your risk of getting some types of cancer. The USDA has a guide for how much to eat of what types of food, called the food pyramid. The closer you follow that guide, the greater health benefits your body can achieve.
So, eating right and exercising throughout your life is imperative to keeping your health. Starting these habits earlier in life will make it easier, but you can get healthy no matter what your age!
Health and Fitness for men and women are SO IMPORTANT to each of us. Over the past several generations our physical activity is threatened, men and women have become more dependent on our cars.
How many of you only have one car in a family? I bet very few. How many of you do regular exercises during the week? Maybe a few more. It is estimated that only 15 – 20% get regular exercise.
Eighty percent (80%) of us are not getting a reasonable amount of regular exercise. Fitness is not a priority. We are paying for this with the obesity epidemic, now into our grade schools as well as a significant rise in diabetes.
Some of the benefits of regular exercise are lowering your blood pressure, lower the risk of colon cancer, increase bone strength to prevent osteoporosis among other benefits.
A good exercise program consists of both aerobic activity, resistance training as well as stretching. A program to work towards is one that consists of the following:
Aerobic exercise (eg. brisk walking) for 30 minutes at least 3 times per week
Resistance training should exercise each major muscle group for 20 minutes twice a week. Stretching should be twice a week for 10 minutes.
My suggestions will depend on their current level of activity. For someone who has little or no physical activity, I would recommend a program of easy things to do. These could include the following: park your car further from the store entrance, climbing stairs instead of taking the elevator, walking initially 10 minutes 3 times a week and gradually over a month or 2 to slowly increase this to 30 minutes, 3 – 4 times a week.
For those of you that currently does some form of exercising try to get it up to the one recommended above. Let me give you some information on the calorie burn rate. Currently, the recommendations are to exercise so that you are burning off between 700 and 2000 calories per week. In order to burn 100 calories in an hour, you will need to walk about 4 miles an hour.
Some of you may be saying how does he think I can do that? Well start slow and over a few months work your way up. You should always consult your doctor before you take on an exercise program.
Remember, it is a proven fact, exercising will help you to decrease weight, improve your heart, lower your risk of early death, and keep you PHYSICALLY FIT.