“I want to be a strong and capable parent/grandparent for my kids and family.”
“I want to have less aches and pains.”
“I want to keep my mind sharp.”
These are some of the aspirations I hear often from you, the older adult (generally 55+). You may be ready for retirement from your job, but not from life.
In order to achieve your goals, we need to consider how aging affects the body and acknowledge the importance of having a prioritized and methodical approach in your fitness program.
A client of mine named Jen is an English teacher and writer. She told me during our initial consultation, “I’m 63, and if I’m not active, my body speaks to me in ways I’ve never been spoken to.”
Here are the 4 key areas to include in a fitness program for the older adult:
1. Mobility
What is mobility?
Think of the word mobile - to be mobile is the ability to move or be moved freely and easily. When talking about the body, it is the ability to move a joint freely through it’s full range of motion.
Example: While standing and keeping good posture (not arching your back), raise your arms forward over your head. Are you able to point your fingertips in a straight line to the ceiling? If you cannot do this, your shoulders have limited range of flexion.
If we have limited mobility, our body will create compensatory methods of movement. If you had trouble lifting your arms overhead like the above example stated, instead of the shoulder doing the work to reach overhead, you’ll probably arch your back to make up for the needed range of motion and doing so will eventually lead to overuse and irritation of those back muscles.
A focus on mobility is important to be able to move efficiently and to also achieve optimal muscle strength, because with adequate range of motion of the muscle it is free to grow, and get stronger.
2. Balance
Have you noticed that putting your pants on while standing takes a bit more focus than it used to? Our ability to balance decreases with age. What came easily to us when we were younger, now has to be actively worked on to bring our system back up to speed.
Our body awareness and how we connect our mind and body has a major influence on our ability to balance. We need to rekindle the fire between our mind and muscles (neuromuscular system) by moving more often in different positions, such as shifting our body weight to stand on one leg.
As mobility and balance improve, so will coordination and agility. Coordination is the ability to use different body parts together fluidly. Agility is the ability to move quickly and easily. Both are ever so important for physical function.
3. Physical Demand
Physical demand often incorporates strength, power, and endurance. It is when you are pushing the limits of the capacity of your muscles. Here are a few methods of incorporating physical demand:
Resistance training (using an external load, like weights, or your bodyweight). This offers a plethora of benefits. To name a few, it increases muscle strength, bone density and metabolism, all of which decrease with age.
Power training. With age, power output declines more rapidly than strength and is a critical determiner of physical function in older adults. Power training involves exerting the maximum amount of force as fast as possible. You can train for power by simply adjusting the tempo of most exercises. For example, when performing the bodyweight squat, the downward phase is slow and controlled while the upward phase is performed as fast as possible.
High intensity interval training (HIIT). This is a great way to add intensity to the workout and challenge the cardiorespiratory system, while still being able to incorporate strength exercises along with it.
4. Cognition
Exercise inherently has been shown to improve cognition in older adults and even lower the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
What if we combine physical exercise with cognitive tasks? The benefits of cognitive fitness are even greater than physical exercise alone!
For example, a person is surrounded by different colored cones. They get a prompt of one color at a time, they go to that color, return back to the center, and receive the next color. Alternatively, they get a pattern to remember like blue, yellow, and black, and colors are added onto the pattern in each round.
Drills like this are powerful because they work the client's agility - moving their bodies side to side, forward and back. There is quick thinking and pushing of the memory’s limits. All fun stuff that challenges the mind while moving the body to keep those connections sharp and increase awareness, attention, and focus.
An effective fitness program should focus on your unique needs while incorporating components that translate into every-day scenarios.
Aging is inevitable, but it’s empowering to know that by taking an active role in our health we can embrace it, instead of fear it.
-Luciano