Senior Fitness
Why exercise is Important
If you’re an older adult looking to establish an exercise routine, you should, ideally, be able to incorporate 150 minutes of moderate endurance activity into your week, that is how much exercise The Center for Disease Control and Prevention suggests for generally fit Americans aged 65 and older. They also recommend to have at least 2 days of activities that strengthen muscles and additional work to improve balance.
Consider what happens to someone bedridden for a period of time: muscle mass, flexibility, strength, bone density, and range of motion all diminish in just a matter of days. There are also unseen effects that are equally damaging; every organ reduces function and slows its activity. Lack of movement is devastating to the human body.
Aging is very much like a longer version of being bedridden. Slowly, over decades, the same decreases in capability occur AND the antidote is the same: MOVEMENT.
The benefits of exercising at any Age
The golden age can stay golden if you are ready and healthy enough to enjoy it! We are never too young or too old to exercise. Here are just some of the benefits of Senior Exercise:
- Improved Immune Function: So you can fight sickness more easily and quickly.
- Improve Cardiorespiratory and Cardiovascular Function: Lower the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke. If you have hypertension, exercise will help lower your blood pressure.
- Get stronger: Maintaining and building muscles makes you stronger and protects you from the risk of osteoporosis by improving bone mass and density.
- Improve Balance and Coordination: Reduce your risk for falls with exercise.
- Encourage Digestive Health: Boost your metabolism and promotes the efficient elimination of waste.
- Reduce the risk for Chronic Conditions and Cancer: Exercise lowers the risk of serious conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, osteoporosis, and colon cancer, to name a few. It also helps in the management of high cholesterol and arthritis pain.
- Manage weight: Lower the risk or fight obesity that is related to a myriad of health conditions.
- Improve Mental Health: Exercise helps with your mental acuity and focus.
- Improve Mood: Exercise reduces your stress levels and makes for a happier you!
- Sleep Better: Exercise can make you fall asleep faster and achieve that deep sleep easier.
- Boost Energy: So you can enjoy life more! It also helps to do it in a group and make it a time to connect with friends.
We help senior clients discover the key to a healthy and happy life
Frequent, purposeful, and often strenuous movement is required for optimal aging. Proper exercise can delay age-related functional decline by decades, preserving our independence and ability to enjoy a wide variety of activities.
We offer you a customized exercise program tailored to your specific needs and medical conditions to achieve the best possible outcomes.
Our programs include weight training, aerobics, and stretching and balance.
Weight Training
Nothing works to reverse age-related functional decline as well and as rapidly as weight training with progressive resistance. It raises testosterone production – the hormone of your youth – needed in both men and women to maintain muscle structure and increase growth hormone output and lower blood sugar. Weight training also encourages the burning of fat for energy, improves immune system function, makes bones stronger and more dense, and lets your entire body function on the level of a person decades younger.
Aerobics
The idea behind aerobics is that elevating our heartbeat rate and respiratory demands for a protracted period will improve heart-lung function, giving us the ability to exercise for longer periods, improving our endurance. Lung efficiency – our ability to get oxygen in and CO2 out of our bloodstream – greatly improves over someone of the same age who is sedentary.
A balance between aerobic and anaerobic exercise is the best strategy to achieve overall fitness for optimal aging.
Stretching and Balance
The importance of posture, fluidity of motion, flexibility, and balance are undeniable in terms of aging gracefully. We incorporate stretching before and after every workout. We start every workout with stretches to prepare your body for exercises we are going to perform, and we finish every workout with a set of stretches to make your body works like a well-oiled machine.
Today, one in three adults over the age of sixty-five experiences a fall each year, and the effects have far-reaching consequences that go beyond the initial injury. A good balance routine added to a regular exercise regimen will help seniors stay mobile longer than their non-exercising counterparts. Balance is the ability to move without falling and distribute your weight in order to hold a stable stationary position. It is like anything else in life, the more you practice, the better it will function.