Baby Boomers Should Start Working Out Now If They Want to be Fit in Senior Years

No one likes to think about getting old and we generally don’t do much to prepare for it. But the truth of the matter is that if you are lucky enough to live into your seventies, eighties and beyond, your fitness level is going to decline.
Some of it comes down to unstoppable biology. But how much and how fast you lose muscle, bone, flexibility and aerobic capacity is also influenced by your individual fitness level going into older age.
So if you want to be sprightly in your seventies, you need to be working out in your forties, fifties and sixties, experts say.
Put another way: If you don’t pay into your fitness bank in middle age, you won’t have much to draw on later. And while you may not mind being too out of shape to go for a run when you are 55, you probably will care if you can’t pull yourself out of a bathtub at 75.
“I think you are on a slippery slope. Or another analogy would be you’re getting closer to the edge of the cliff,” says Dr. Paul Oh, medical director of the cardiovascular prevention and rehabilitation program at Toronto Rehab, a hospital in the University Health Network.
“We need to be thinking about prevention all along, but particularly as we hit our middle years.”
In your teens, twenties and thirties, for most people working out is about looking and feeling good, managing stress and keeping weight in check. But later in life, maintaining muscle is critical for independent and active living. In other words, we need to do it to be able to perform myriad functions we all take for granted — until we
You need strong leg muscles for walking, climbing stairs and getting up from the sofa. You need strong core muscles to protect your back. And you need upper body strength to carry groceries, push yourself up out of bed, open a jar or pick up a grandchild.
But adults begin to lose muscle mass as early as age 40, “so it’s important to try to defend it through our adult years,” says Oh.
In the U.S., the American Heart Association and the Centers for Disease Control recommend adults do weight training — with good reason, says Kent Adams, director of the exercise physiology laboratory at California State University Monterey Bay.
“For the boomers, critical to successful aging is strength training, resistance training,” he says, adding that even people who exercise regularly but who focus exclusively on aerobic workouts should broaden their routines.
“Running alone is not suitable for maintaining muscle mass,” Kent says. “From a public health perspective, we would do a lot of good if people would lift weights two or three days a week.”
“We don’t need to become Arnold Schwarzenegger. … But we do need to challenge ourselves and work harder.”
Elaine Cress agrees.
“For a long time, the emphasis was all on heart disease and cardiovascular fitness. But people are really realizing the critical importance of having strength training for precisely this,” says Cress, a former professor of kinesiology and gerontology at the University of Georgia who now lives in Bellingham, Wash.
Cress says performing day-to-day activities will not give you the fitness reserves you will need for later in life.
“You need structured exercise to keep the muscle capacity above what you need in your everyday life. Gardening’s not enough.”
Experts suggest a mix of types of exercise, aimed at maintain strength and bone

Baby boomers may have dreams of spending their twilight years basking in the glow of good health, but a new poll suggests they’ll have to work much harder to make that vision a reality.
The findings come in the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s annual report on the health of Canadians, which opted to focus on the habits of one of the country’s largest demographics.
The online survey found a noticeable disparity between people’s perceptions of their own health and the reality of their medical situation.
While 80% of survey respondents described themselves as healthy, the poll found details of the participants’ health habits told a very different story.
“Stiffness is a factor as you get older,” says Dr. Cy Frank, an orthopedic surgeon with the Alberta Bone and Joint Health Institute in Calgary. “So you have to do more stretching as you get older, because physiologically your tissues are tightening up.”

Cress suggests finding a reputable yoga or Pilates program, or other types of stretching classes to help you learn how to stretch properly.
For those who don’t have access to or don’t feel comfortable working out at a gym, brisk walking is a good option for an aerobic workout, Oh says.
He suggests a person in their 60s who walks at a pace of about 6.4 kilometres per hour would accrue real health benefits. He recommends 30 minutes of that five times a week. The aim is to exert yourself enough to be a little bit out of breath, Oh says.
“We don’t need to have everybody running around the neighbourhood drenched in sweat, feeling like you’re going to collapse or going to throw up. That’s an unreasonable level of intensity for the vast majority of people,” he insists.
Frank and Adams say there are no hard and fast rules about what types of exercise works best for middle-aged and older adults. It really depends on what kind of shape you are in. But if you haven’t been working out, don’t dive into a super vigorous workout. (That means you, Mr. Middle Aged Hockey Player.)
“You do have to be aware of your different limitations. And what’s good for one person may not be good for another,” Adams says.
Frank sees a lot of damaged knees in his line of work, and admits he often steers people away from running and towards other, less punishing types of aerobic exercise.
“I tend to get them to avoid things that injury them and that hurt. And running hurts quite a few people. So I tend to go with cycling and swimming and non-impact exercises.”
If you haven’t been exercising and feel that maybe it’s too late for you, there’s no excuse for throwing in the towel, Adams says. “It’s never too late to get started. Even the oldest-old can benefit from resistance training.”
For many busy adults, the issue may be finding time. But these experts suggest that if you don’t find the time your body will make it for you eventually.
“If you don’t take time to exercise, you have to take time to be sick and to get better,” Cress says.
They also insist it’s an investment that will pay off. Says Adams: “It’s the closest thing we have to the fountain of youth.”

Losing Weight May Require Some Serious Fun

By Gretchen Reynolds

 

If you are aiming to lose weight by revving up your exercise routine, it may be wise to think of your workouts not as exercise, but as playtime. An unconventional new study suggests that people’s attitudes toward physical activity can influence what they eat afterward and, ultimately, whether they drop pounds.

For some time, scientists have been puzzled — and exercisers frustrated — by the general ineffectiveness of exercise as a weight-loss strategy. According to multiple studies and anecdotes, most people who start exercising do not lose as much weight as would be expected, given their increased energy expenditure. Some people add pounds despite burning hundreds of calories during workouts.

Past studies of this phenomenon have found that exercise can increase the body’s production of appetite hormones, making some people feel ravenous after even a light workout and prone to consume more calories than they expended. But that finding, while intriguing, doesn’t fully explain the wide variability in people’s post-exercise eating habits.

So, for the new study, published in the journal Marketing Letters, French and American researchers turned to psychology and the possible effect that calling exercise by any other name might have on people’s subsequent diets.

In that pursuit, the researchers first recruited 56 healthy, adult women, the majority of them overweight. The women were given maps detailing the same one-mile outdoor course and told that they would spend the next half-hour walking there, with lunch to follow.

Half of the women were told that their walk was meant to be exercise, and they were encouraged to view it as such, monitoring their exertion throughout. The other women were told that their 30-minute outing would be a walk purely for pleasure; they would be listening to music through headphones and rating the sound quality, but mostly the researchers wanted them to enjoy themselves.

When the women returned from walking, the researchers asked each to estimate her mileage, mood and calorie expenditure.

Those women who’d been formally exercising reported feeling more fatigued and grumpy than the other women, although the two groups’ estimates of mileage and calories burned were almost identical. More telling, when the women sat down to a pasta lunch, with water or sugary soda to drink, and applesauce or chocolate pudding for dessert, the women in the exercise group loaded up on the soda and pudding, consuming significantly more calories from these sweets than the women who’d thought that they were walking for pleasure.

A follow-up experiment by the researchers, published as part of the same study, reinforces and broadens those findings. For it, the researchers directed a new set of volunteers, some of them men, to walk the same one-mile loop. Once again, half were told to consider this session as exercise. The others were told that they would be sightseeing and should have fun. The two groups covered the same average distance. But afterward, allowed to fill a plastic bag at will with M&M’s as a thank-you, the volunteers from the exercise group poured in twice as much candy as the other walkers.

Finally, to examine whether real-world exercisers behave similarly to those in the contrived experiments, the researchers visited the finish line of a marathon relay race, where 231 entrants aged 16 to 67 had just completed laps of five to 10 kilometers. They asked the runners whether they had enjoyed their race experience and offered them the choice of a gooey chocolate bar or healthier cereal bar in consideration of their time and help. In general, those runners who said that their race had been difficult or unsatisfying picked the chocolate; those who said that they had fun gravitated toward the healthier choice.

In aggregate, these three experiments underscore that how we frame physical activity affects how we eat afterward, said Carolina O.C. Werle, an associate professor of marketing at the Grenoble School of Management in France, who led the study. The same exertion, spun as “fun” instead of “exercise,” prompts less gorging on high-calorie foods, she said.

Just how, physiologically, our feelings about physical activity influence our food intake is not yet known, she said, and likely to be bogglingly complex, involving hormones, genetics, and the neurological circuitry of appetite and reward processing. But in the simplest terms, Dr. Werle said, this new data shows that most of us require recompense of some kind for working out. That reward can take the form of subjective enjoyment. If exercise is fun, no additional gratification is needed. If not, there’s chocolate pudding.

The good news is that our attitudes toward exercise are malleable. “We can frame our workouts in different ways,” Dr. Werle said, “by focusing on whatever we consider fun about it, such as listening to our favorite music or chatting with a friend” during a group walk.

“The more fun we have,” she concluded, “the less we’ll feel the need to compensate for the effort” with food.

13 Reasons Tea is Good for You

Put down those saucer cups and get chugging — tea is officially awesome for your health. But before loading up on Red Zinger, make sure that your “tea” is actually tea. Real tea is derived from a particular plant (Camellia sinensis) and includes only four varieties: green, black, white, and oolong. Anything else (like herbal “tea”) is an infusion of a different plant and isn’t technically tea.
But what real tea lacks in variety, it makes up for with some serious health benefits. Researchers attribute tea’s health properties to polyphenols (a type of antioxidant) and phytochemicals. Though most studies have focused on the better-known green and black teas, white and oolong also bring benefits to the table. Read on to find out why coffee’s little cousin rocks your health.

1. Tea can boost exercise endurance. Scientists have found that the catechins (antioxidants) in green tea extract increase the body’s ability to burn fat as fuel, which accounts for improved muscle endurance.
2. Drinking tea could help reduce the risk of heart attack. Tea might also help protect against cardiovascular and degenerative diseases.
3. The antioxidants in tea might help protect against a boatload of cancers, including breast, colon, colorectal, skin, lung, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, pancreas, liver, ovarian, prostate and oral cancers. But don’t rely solely on tea to keep a healthy body — tea is not a miracle cure, after all. While more studies than not suggest that tea has cancer-fighting benefits, the current research is mixed.
4. Tea helps fight free radicals. Tea is high in oxygen radical absorbance capacity (“ORAC” to its friends), which is a fancy way of saying that it helps destroy free radicals (which can damage DNA) in the body. While our bodies are designed to fight free radicals on their own, they’re not 100 percent effective — and since damage from these radical oxygen ninjas has been linked to cancer, heart disease and neurological degeneration, we’ll take all the help we can get.
5. Tea is hydrating to the body (even despite the caffeine!).
6. Drinking tea is linked with a lower risk of Parkinson’s disease. When considered with other factors like smoking, physical activity, age and body mass index, regular tea drinking was associated with a lowered risk of Parkinson’s disease in both men and women.
7. Tea might provide protection from ultraviolet rays. We know it’s important to limit exposure to UV rays, and we all know what it’s like to feel the burn. The good news is that green tea may act as a back-up sunscreen.
8. Tea could keep waist circumference in check. In one study, participants who regularly consumed hot tea had lower waist circumference and lower BMI than non-consuming participants. Scientists speculate that regular tea drinking lowers the risk of metabolic syndrome (which increases the risk of diabetes, artery disease and stroke), although it’s important to remember that correlation does not equal causation.
9. Regular tea drinking might also counteract some of the negative effects of smoking and might even lessen the risk of lung cancer (good news, obviously, but not a justification for cigs).
10. Tea could be beneficial to people with Type 2 diabetes. Studies suggest that compounds in green tea could help diabetics better process sugars.
11. Tea can help the body recover from radiation. One study found that tea helped protect against cellular degeneration upon exposure to radiation, while another found that tea can help skin bounce back postexposure.
12. Green tea has been found to improve bone mineral density and strength.
13. Tea might be an effective agent in the prevention and treatment of neurological diseases, especially degenerative diseases (think Alzheimer’s). While many factors influence brain health, polyphenols in green tea may help maintain the parts of the brain that regulate learning and memory.

Though most research on tea is highly positive, it’s not all definitive — so keep these caveats in mind before stocking up on gallons of the stuff:

1. Keep it cool. Repeatedly drinking hot beverages may boost the risk of esophageal cancer. Give tea several minutes to cool off before sipping.
2. The studies seem convincing, but a rat does not a human make. Chemicals in tea may react differently in the lab than they do in the human body. Tannins (and the other good stuff in green tea) may not be bioavailable for humans, meaning tea might not always benefit human health to the same degree as in lab studies suggest.
3. All tea drinks are not created equal. The body’s access to the good stuff in tea might be determined by the tea variety, canning and processing, and the way it was brewed.

The takeaway: at the very least, tea should be safe to consume — just not in excessive amounts. So brew up a batch of the good stuff — hot or cold — and enjoy.

by Laura Newcomer