Get Moving, Workout or Else

   Unless you’ve been in a coma or living on another planet for the last 25 years you know that the research is unanimous; exercise can add years to our lives.  At the very least regular aerobic activity can help prevent premature death.  As we age the first rule of exercise must be to toss out the ineffective and fictitious notion that we can get by with a paltry 30 minute workout, three days a week. Those days are long gone, if they ever existed at all beyond the age of 12. 

   By the time we’ve reached 50 we should be treating our workout routines exactly as we do eating, sleeping and other non-negotiable bodily functions.  We must set aside a prescribed number of minutes to exercise daily.  Ideally we should spend a minimum of sixty minutes doing some aerobic activity. That is unless we don’t mind watching our bodies turn into a frail and furrowed blob of yesterdays play dough right before our eyes.

    I suppose we could avoid facing such an unsightly and disheartening discovery by never examining our skin while wearing reading glasses! But in all seriousness, regular exercise is a n must. It will not only help keep our bodies in shape but we’ll be much more pleasant to be around since it also will boost our moods. And as you know, a positive outlook can make all the difference, especially as we tackle the many changes that will be taking place in our lives as we move through menopause and beyond.

   I’m an avid reader of health-related topics and do my best to follow the stream of studies on the host of topics associated with anti-aging. The various findings can provide valuable information as we work to make the most knowledgeable midlife choices possible.  This book includes excerpts from dozens of studies to help you become more educated in the subject of greatest importance to you, and that’s YOU!

   One study found( Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, May, 2009.) that moderate physical activity in women over age 50 added 1.1 years and those were highly active could plan on living 3.2 years longer than they would have had they refrained from such activity.1  In addition, people who exercised more also lived more years free of cardiovascular disease. While moderate exercise increases life expectancy, some researchers claim highly active people more than doubled the benefits. Now if you’re a bona fide lazy person, an additional couple of years of life may not seem worth the effort.   But I’ll take every extra day I can get.

Eat right, exercise regularly, die anyway!

~Author Unknown

   Let’s figure this out. If you would have died at 77 without exercise but you’d live until 80 with it and since the experts now say 60 minutes a day is required to really “count,” that means starting age 50 you’d have to work out a grand total of a year and a half straight to gain three year of life. The studies never seem very clear on how long of a period of time we must exercise in order to add those years to our lives.

   Even though I am willing to work out in order to tack on a few extra years to my life, physical activity is not all about how long we live, it’s equally important to feel better and have a greater quality of life along the way.

   A study published in the “Washington Post” in 2008 said physically active people have cells that look younger on a molecular level than those of couch potatoes.The study involved more than 2,400 British twins. It found for the first time that exercise appears to slow the shriveling of the projective tips on bundles of genes inside cells, perhaps keeping fragility at bay.

   Tim D. Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College in London who led the study, published in January, 2008 in the Archives of Internal Medicine said “These data suggest that the act of exercising may actually protect the body against the aging process.”

   Another study conducted by Swedish researchers (published in British Medical Journal) found that increasing the amount of exercise you do in middle age could help to reduce your risk of premature death.

    I am not attempting to portray myself as a highly active person. That would be an exaggeration. Yes, I exercise nearly every day but no, you’d never see me training for a triathlon. I am most accurately described as a moderately highly active person.  I’m committed to taking a walking, jumping on the treadmill and swimming for a total of 90 minutes 6 days per week. On the 7th day, I’ll typically take a 30 minute walk.  I also enjoy medium to high impact dancing. That is something I can do at home by simple turning on my I-Pod, or I can take a class at my gym.

   Don’t despair if you haven’t been a regular exerciser up until now. I know it’s not a habit that one can necessarily ease into overnight. I didn’t wake up one morning on a whim and decide to start working out for at least one hour six or seven days a week. It was a gradual process that began for me one morning in April of 2002.

I don’t exercise. If God had wanted me to bend over, he would have put diamonds on the floor

~Joan Rivers

   I was 42 years old, sitting on the couch, watching the old “Jenny Jones” talk show when I looked down at my thighs.  Frankly they were not hard to miss. My how they’d grown!  What        had happened to my legs? I always had nice legs!  I smashed out my cigarette and took a three mile walk around a nearby like.

   I started walking every other day then every day and within a few weeks I was walking around the lake twice in a row. Soon I was walking over 40 miles a week. It wasn’t too long before my thighs began thinning out. That was enough of an incentive to get me hooked on walking!

   But sticking with an exercise plan requires more than the pleasure of witnessing a thinning of the thighs. It requires commitment. There’s that “c” word again.  In fact a healthy dose of obsessive thinking doesn’t hurt either. Now my daily workouts have become such a part of my life that on the rare occasions that I miss it, I go a little crazy. My body has grown to crave it, to need it, to enjoy it.  

   Of course it’s great to see our bodies take shape as a result of our workouts, but physical activity also can reduce the likelihood of suffering from some of the more common ailments among the over 50 crowd. They include Coronary Heart Disease, Heart Attack, Diabetes, Hip Fracture, High Blood Pressure, Obesity and being Overweight. In a nutshell it appears that sitting can make us sick, so keep moving as much as possible.