Regardless of your age, there’s never a time when it’s too late for you to get fit. Here’s a quick look at some of the reasons you should and a few ways to do just that.
Benefits of Exercising for Older Adults
There are quite a few reasons why we slow down and become more sedentary as we age. It might be something like health issues, problems with pain or weight, or even just the ever-present worry about falls. However, as we get older, it’s more important to exercise than ever.
Regular exercise, like the kind you get in various team training classes, is good for your memory, mood, and your mind. It’s also able to boost your energy levels, help you with maintaining your independence, protecting your heart, and managing your weight as well as symptoms of pain or illness.
Physical Health Benefits
It’s important to take care of your overall health. One way to do that is to maintain or lose weight. As your metabolism slows naturally with age, maintaining a weight that’s healthy can become a challenge. Exercise can help increase your metabolism and build muscle mass – which helps to burn more calories.
Regular exercise, even something like water exercise, can improve your posture, flexibility, and strength, and this helps with things like coordination, balance, and reducing your risk of falling. Additionally, strength training can assist with the alleviation of symptoms from chronic conditions, like arthritis.
Mental Health Benefits
There are quite a few benefits of exercise for aging adults, and one of them is that it can improve your sleep. Good sleep is critical for your health. Regular activity can assist you when it comes to falling asleep quickly, sleeping more deeply, and waking feeling more refreshed and energetic.
It can also boost your self-confidence and mood. Exercise is wonderful when it comes to relieving stress, and the endorphins it produces can help relieve feelings of anxiety, depression, or sadness. Feeling strong and being active can help you have more self-confidence.
Building a Plan for Exercise
Remaining active isn’t a science. Just keep in mind that when you mix a variety of types of physical activities, it helps improve your health while also keeping your workouts interesting. It’s critical to find activities that are enjoyable to you. They should be based on the building blocks of fitness.
Balance is good for you because it improves your posture and the quality of how you walk. It can also reduce your fear and risk of falling.
Cardio helps to lessen your fatigue and being short of breath. It can promote independence by improving your endurance for those daily activities like running errands, cleaning the house, and walking.
Power and strength training can help prevent loss of bone mass while also building muscle. It improves your balance too, which is critical for avoiding falls and staying active. Power training can help with things like improving your speed as you cross a street, or prevent you from falling by making you better able to react quickly in the event you lose your balance or trip over something.
Flexibility helps your body to remain limber and can increase your range of movements for day-to-day physical activities, like looking behind you when you’re driving, shampooing your hair, tying your shoes, and even just playing with your grandchildren.
Finally, there are a plethora of activities you can do. You can walk, join fitness classes or water aerobics, do yoga, or practice Qi Gong or Tai Chi. The important thing is that you get out there and move.