To keep fit and active Seniors, like the rest of us, need exercise. Walking is the easiest and best way of achieving lifetime fitness. You just have to start slow and work up to a mile or more a day. Keep it up and you will lose weight and become a lot fitter.
Along with a Senior walking fitness program you should try some exercises. It is easy enough to find out the type of exercises on the internet, but not always easy to get information on what to do. So here are a few tips.
Cardiovascular. This is the simplest way to overall fitness. Cardio exercise burns calories, strengthens the heart and increases lung capacity. It also helps reduce the risk of heart attack, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes. So it is well worth doing. Your Senior walking fitness program will use up 180 calories in 30 minutes if you walk briskly. There are other things you may do as well.
Bicycling uses up 250-500 calories in 30 minutes depending on speed.
Swimming uses up 400 calories if you do 30 minutes of breaststroke.
Strength. Your Senior walking exercise program will strengthen your lower body. Try arm raises to strengthen the upper body and shoulder muscles. Put together these exercises will help to reverse the muscle weakness which can occur in old age.
Sit in a chair with back straight and hands at sides.
Raise both arms to shoulder height.
Hold for 1 second.
Slowly lower.
Repeat 8-15 times. Do this every day.
Flexibility. This will increase your freedom of movement and make you more supple. Gently stretch each one of your muscle groups – arms, legs, back, shoulders 3-4 times for each muscle group. Do this for 30 minutes every other day.
Balance. As we get older we can have problems with balance. Roughly 9% of people over 65 years old can find balancing difficult. This exercise will help.
Hold a table or chair for balance.
Lift one leg 6-12 inches out to one side.
Slowly lower the leg. Repeat with other leg. Do this 8-15 times every day.
So there’s nothing too arduous in any of it. The fitness walking program you should, if possible, be doing anyway, working up from a short distance to a mile or so a day, so getting your cardio exercise. If you bicycle or swim so much the better. The other exercises you can add on if you want to. They will not burn off anything like the calories of the cardio exercise. That is not the idea, but they will make you stronger for when you do the cardiovascular exercises. If you have any pain, or difficulties in doing exercise do stop and talk to your doctor.
When people say they want to get fit they often mean they want to lose weight. So along with exercise you must eat a healthy diet. There are a lot available, some better than others. One of my favourites is the Mediterranean diet, consisting of fresh vegetables, lean meat and oily fish. Eaten with an occasional glass of wine this is one of the nicer ways to diet and it works.
So just put light exercise and a healthy diet together and you will feel good, look good and live longer. Seems to me that’s a good idea.
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