8 Best Exercise Tips for Boomers
I’m always looking in newspaper and magazine articles for good tips from experts to keep us healthy.
Here are 8 insider tips from nationally known personal trainers, coaches and exercise physiologists to help us get a little more oomph!
1) The minimum workout you need to stay healthy
Muscle strengthening exercises twice a week plus 2 1/2 hours a week of moderate activity like walking. Or 75 minutes a week of a more intense activity like jogging. Please ask your doctor before starting a new exercise routine.
2) Get fitter faster
A more intense workout burns more calories in less time, says Pamela Peeke, M.D., author of Fit to Live. “You can walk 3.1 mile race in 40 minutes, jog it in 30 minutes or run it in under 20 minutes. Either way, you’re burning the same amount of calories,” she says.
3) Short spurts are best
Alternate spurts of hard, high-speed activity with periods of slower activity to shorten a workout while improving fitness, says Ron Woods, a coach at the Human Performance Institute in Orlando Florida.
4) Stronger muscles in minutes
We lose muscle mass as we age, making us weaker. Two or three 30-minute weekly sessions using free weights or resistance bands will restore muscle and keep bones strong, says David Sandler, author of Fundamental Weight Training.
5) Upper and lower body moves
Alternating an upper body strength training exercise with a lower-body move is a time saver, says Gina Lombardi, author of Deadline Fitness, who has trained celebrities such as Andy Garcia. Alternate cardio moves, like rope jumping, with strength exercises such as lunges.
6) Say yes to yoga
A few minutes of yoga type stretches after a workout improves flexibility, range of motion and strength in a way that aerobic activities can’t, says Beryl Bender Birch, author of Boomer Yoga. An introductory class is best for beginners, since regular classes often last 90 minutes.
7) Buddy up
Exercising with others makes time fly. Dodo Stevens, 67, of Portland, Maine, meets 10 women and a trainer for a 45 minutes workout at a neighbor’s house. Cost: $11 per person. “I love working out with other people, “she says. “The whole thing is over before you know it.”
Mix it up
Exercise programs need variety. This is key. If you do the same thing all the time, your body adapts and you stop making progress, says Pamula Peeke, the fitness author. Look for classes that provide an introduction to Zumba, Bellyrobics or other new, fun activities.
Keep in mind what James Fries, M.D., said about exercise. He is an expert on aging at Stanford University. He says “If you had to pick one thing that came closest to the fountain of youth, it would have to be exercise.”
Love is a Powerful Painkiller
Love is a powerful painkiller, study finds. I have always thought this, but now we have a study to examine.
Researchers say just a photo of one’s beloved activates the brain’s reward centers something like a drug might. Learning how to harness this could help relieve pain without drug induced side effects, scientists suggest.
The study, published online in the journal PLoS ONE, sprang from a meeting of minds between Arthur Aron of State University of New York at Stony Brook, a longtime researcher of the science of love, and Dr. Sean Mackey, a pain scientist at Stanford University. The two shared a hotel room while attending a neuroscience conference a few years back. Their epiphany came one evening over drinks. ”I’d had a couple glasses of Zinfandel and was chatting about pain and the brain systems involved and he was chatting about love and the brain systems involved,” Mackey said. “And we realized, you know, they could be influencing each other.” They knew that a few earlier studies had suggested that love relieved pain, but they wanted to go further and find out just what was happening in the brain.
They put out a call on the Stanford campus for people who were in the first nine months of a relationship and still in the throes of romantic passion.
”It was clearly the easiest study we’ve ever recruited for within hours we had these students banging on our doors saying, ‘We’re in love! We’re in love! Study us,’ “Mackey said.
Jarred Younger, then a Stanford graduate student, and the team tested 15 subjects. All were asked to bring in six photos: three of their beloved and three of a comparably attractive person they knew. The researchers heated the palms of the subjects’ left hands to a point that caused either a moderate or high degree of pain, at which point the subjects looked at a photo, either of their beloved or the acquaintance. In a third round of experiments, the researchers tested the effects of mere distraction, which is known to reduce pain, by having the subjects perform mental tasks (such as thinking of all sports that didn’t involve a ball) while their palms were heated.
The photo of the beloved and mental distraction appeared to reduce pain by about the same amount: 36% to 45% for moderate pain, and 12% to 13% for high pain. (The photo of the peer had no effect.) But when the scientists redid the experiment while scanning subjects’ brains with a functional MRI, they saw that the photo and the mental distraction task activated very different parts of the brain.
The distraction task engaged the higher, thinking parts of the brain. A photo of the beloved, on the other hand, engaged the more primitive, “reptilian” regions reward centers related to urges and cravings that are also implicated in addictions.
Learning how to harness the power of a loved one could help relieve pain without drug-induced side effects or perhaps help people quit smoking, the scientists suggested.
”Will I be going back to my patients and prescribing one passionate love affair every six months? I don’t know if I’m going there,” Mackey said. “But it tells us there’s a lot more to the experience of pain than just the injury.”
Bruce Naliboff, co-director of the UCLA Center for Neurovisceral Sciences & Women’s Health, said that the next step could be to separate out how much, if any, of the pain reduction was related to sexual desire.
”It’d be interesting to do an experiment with not just an acquaintance, but someone you feel close to just not a sexual attraction,” said Naliboff, who was not involved in the study.
That might include budding platonic relationships.
Like I said, I have always thought this, but now there is a study to examine. It would be interesting to see the results from a study of platonic relationships. oomphtv will certainly publish the results of their next study.
Taking Early Retirement May Also Retire Your Memory
I am very proud of my mother for many reasons. Last year she started a new clothing and accessories business called “Green Buddha” (Check out the video called “The Green Buddha.”) with my sister. I have noticed it has given her a new boost of “oomph!” now that she has turned 80. A recent study suggests people like my mother have another reason why not to retire.
The two economists call their paper “Mental Retirement,” and their argument has intrigued behavioral researchers. Data from the United States, England and 11 other European countries suggest that the earlier people retire, the more quickly their memories decline.
The implication, the economists and others say, is that there really seems to be something to the “use it or lose it” notion. If people want to preserve their memories and reasoning abilities, they may have to keep active.
“It’s incredibly interesting and exciting,” said Laura L. Carstensen, director of the Center on Longevity at Stanford University. “It suggests that work actually provides an important component of the environment that keeps people functioning optimally.”
While not everyone is convinced by the new analysis, published recently in The Journal of Economic Perspectives, a number of leading researchers say the study is, at least, a tantalizing bit of evidence for a hypothesis that is widely believed but surprisingly difficult to demonstrate.
Researchers repeatedly find that retired people as a group tend to do less well on cognitive tests than people who are still working. But, they note, that could be because people whose memories and thinking skills are declining may be more likely to retire than people whose cognitive skills remain sharp.
And research has failed to support the premise that mastering things like memory exercises, crossword puzzles and games like Sudoku carry over into real life, improving overall functioning.
“If you do crossword puzzles, you get better at crossword puzzles,” said Lisa Berkman, director of the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard. “If you do Sudoku, you get better at Sudoku. You get better at one narrow task. But you don’t get better at cognitive behavior in life.”
The study was possible, explains one of its authors, Robert Willis, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, because the National Institute on Aging began a large study in the United States nearly 20 years ago. Called the Health and Retirement Study, it surveys more than 22,000 Americans over age 50 every two years, and administers memory tests.
That led European countries to start their own surveys, using similar questions so the data would be comparable among countries. Now, Dr. Willis said, Japan and South Korea have begun administering the survey to their populations. China is planning to start doing a survey next year. And India and several countries in Latin America are starting preliminary work on their own surveys.
“This is a new approach that is only possible because of the development of comparable data sets around the world.” Dr. Willis said. The memory test looks at how well people can recall a list of 10 nouns immediately and 10 minutes after they heard them. A perfect score is 20, meaning all 10 were recalled each time. Those tests were chosen for the surveys because memory generally declines with age, and this decline is associated with diminished ability to think and reason.
People in the United States did best, with an average score of 11. Those in Denmark and England were close behind, with scores just above 10. In Italy, the average score was around 7, in France it was 8, and in Spain it was a little more than 6.
Examining the data from the various countries, Dr. Willis and his colleague Susann Rohwedder, associate director of the RAND Center for the Study of Aging in Santa Monica, Calif., noticed that there are large differences in the ages at which people retire.
In the United States, England and Denmark, where people retire later, 65 to 70 percent of men were still working when they were in their early 60s. In France and Italy, the figure is 10 to 20 percent, and in Spain it is 38 percent.
Economic incentives produce the large differences in retirement age, Dr. Rohwedder and Dr. Willis report. Countries with earlier retirement ages have tax policies, pension, disability and other measures that encourage people to leave the work force at younger ages.
The researchers find a straight-line relationship between the percentage of people in a country who are working at age 60 to 64 and their performance on memory tests. The longer people in a country keep working, the better, as a group, they do on the tests when they are in their early 60s.
The study cannot point to what aspect of work might help people retain their memories. Nor does it reveal whether different kinds of work might be associated with different effects on memory tests. And, as Dr. Berkman notes, it has nothing to say about the consequences of staying in a physically demanding job that might lead to disabilities. “There has to be an out for people who face physical disabilities if they continue,” she said.
And of course not all work is mentally stimulating. But, Dr. Willis said, work has other aspects that might be operating.
“There is evidence that social skills and personality skills — getting up in the morning, dealing with people, knowing the value of being prompt and trustworthy — are also important,” he said. “They go hand in hand with the work environment.”
But Hugh Hendrie, an emeritus psychology professor at Indiana University School of Medicine, is not convinced by the paper’s conclusions.
“It’s a nice approach, a very good study,” he said. But, he said, there are many differences among countries besides retirement ages. The correlations do not prove causation. They also, he added, do not prove that there is a clinical significance to the changes in scores on memory tests.
All true, said Richard Suzman, associate director for behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging. Nonetheless, he said, “it’s a strong finding; it’s a big effect.”
If work does help maintain cognitive functioning, it will be important to find out what aspect of work is doing that, Dr. Suzman said. “Is it the social engagement and interaction or the cognitive component of work, or is it the aerobic component of work?” he asked. “Or is it the absence of what happens when you retire, which could be increased TV watching?”
“It’s quite convincing, but it’s not the complete story,” Dr. Suzman said. “This is an opening shot. But it’s got to be followed up.”
Life Expectancy Decreases in US
The researchers were among two dozen USC faculty who spoke at the April 20 conference, “What’s Hot in Aging Research at USC: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,” hosted by the USC Davis School of Gerontology and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research Advancement.
Demographer Eileen Crimmins warned that the U.S. is falling behind other developed countries.
“Life expectancy is low in the U.S. and has been getting worse, relative to other countries like us. For a country that is the richest in the world and spends the most on health care, you might think that we’d do a little better,” Crimmins said.
World leaders in life expectancy include Japan, France, Switzerland, Spain and Italy.
Health care reform will help slightly, Crimmins said. Smoking, obesity, economic disparity and other deep cultural problems have a greater impact on life span. More than health care reform, the nation needs health reform, Crimmins told the nearly full auditorium at the Andrus Gerontology Center.
According to Crimmins, one of the biggest influences on life span is the inequality in health and mortality between the top and bottom of society, which is greater than in other countries.“People who are poor and have low education live different lives,” she said, regardless of their race.
Crimmins’ frequent collaborator, University Professor and neurobiologist Caleb Finch, described a future in which most people will lead less healthy lives than the wealthy few, due to rising health care costs and uneven environmental conditions. His current research studies possible links between air quality and brain development.
“There are very powerful counter longevity forces that are building. Future benefits of longevity may be limited to a very small privileged group of people,” he said.
However, you can make a difference in your own life, no matter who you are. 50% of the factors that influence your own life span, is your own behavior, according to Walter Bortz, MD, a clinical associate professor of medicine at Stanford University. Please read “Tips on how to be 100” These are very simple tips we all can learn from.
We need to examine the current data coming out of the Universities and learn from what they are telling us.
