by Jane Fonda
Let’s discuss all the components of a good weekly exercise regimen—aerobics, resistance, balance, and stretching—and why these are especially vital for people over fifty.
In the early 1980s, I was in my midforties and I had just launched my workout studio.
PHOTOS BY HARRY LANGDON
Why Is Aerobic Activity Important?
Aerobic activity is important on many levels and, certainly, is critical to one’s overall health. But right now, we’ll begin with weight loss. Aerobic activity is the only thing that gets rid of fat from all over your body, including the marbled fat deep inside your muscles; dieting alone can’t do this. In fact, for permanent body-fat weight loss (as opposed to fluid or muscle weight loss), the combination of reducing calories (from unhealthy food) together with aerobic exercise is the answer.
Aerobics for Your Heart
Heart disease is the primary cause of death in older men and women, killing one in four. How well our cardiorespiratory system functions is one of the best clues to our overall fitness, and something we can have considerable control over, even if we are genetically predisposed to heart disease. In fact, aerobic exercise can influence whether the genes for heart disease, diabetes, or other illnesses are ever activated. Understanding the importance of cardio fitness, including what can go wrong, helps us understand why aerobic exercise is so important.
The cardiorespiratory system is responsible for delivering blood, which carries oxygen and nutrients, to every cell in the body, and for carrying away carbon dioxide and other waste products. This is the system that supplies the muscles with the oxygen essential for burning calories for energy. It determines our “maximum aerobic capacity,” or V02 max, as it’s known in sports circles. This is one of the most critical measures of our body’s performance: how much oxygen we take in; how much blood is pumped, and with what degree of ease, throughout the body; and how well oxygen is taken up and utilized by the muscles and other cells. These dynamics are a master key to our vitality.
With age, the heart and the circulatory system gradually begin to lose some of their effectiveness. After age thirty, there is an average decline of about 1 percent a year in our V02, or aerobic, capacity. The lungs are less elastic and, because they can accept less air, transfer less oxygen into the blood. The heart muscle and the blood vessels thicken and become more rigid, which means that each stroke of the heart pumps less blood. Inelastic and narrowed arteries cause the heart to work harder to move blood from the chest to the head, arms, and legs. As the heart pushes the blood more forcibly through the circulatory network, our blood pressure tends to rise.
All of this is common and needn’t mean a loss of basic health, provided we don’t also become sedentary. Inactivity increases the likelihood that fatty plaque will begin to cling to our arterial walls, causing atherosclerosis and chronic hypertension, which can spiral into a heart attack or, if the brain is involved, a stroke. Atherosclerosis, hypertension, heart attack, and stroke combined account for half of all disabling health problems in women and men alike.
So just do it! Stay vigorously and aerobically active!
I was 72 and was doing my first workout DVD for boomers and seniors after twenty years out of the business.
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Aerobics and Your Brain
“Perhaps the most direct route to a fit mind is through a fit body,”3 says Jane Brody, the wonderful health writer for the New York Times. All brain experts will tell you that physical activity will do more for your brain health than the expensive computer-based brain games that are so much the rage these days. (Although Dr. Michael Hewitt, at Canyon Ranch, suggests that doing both might be the smartest move of all!)
Obviously, aerobic fitness helps the brain by reducing the risk of heart attack and stroke. But it also improves cognitive functioning by slowing the age-related shrinkage of the frontal cortex of the brain, which is where “executive functions” like reasoning and problem solving take place.
In a 2007 New York Times op-ed piece, Dr. Sandra Aamodt, a freelance science writer and former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, and Dr. Sam Wang, an associate professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, wrote, “Exercise causes the release of growth factors, proteins that increase the number of connections between neurons, and the birth of neurons in the hippocampus,” which is the seat of memory and where Alzheimer’s disease starts. Reports show that as many as fifty million older Americans may get Alzheimer’s by midcentury. While research is under way to prevent or postpone the disease, scientists already know, as Jane Brody writes, that “people who exercise regularly in midlife are one-third as likely to develop Alzheimer’s in their 70s. Even those who start exercising in their 60s cut their risk of dementia in half.”4
A decline in cognitive functioning has long been seen as a “typical” part of aging, but it is not normal. New brain science now shows that seniors who have remained fit and who continue to exercise continue to have good brain functioning.
Earlier I mentioned how aerobic exercise releases endorphins, brain chemicals that give relief from pain, enhance the immune system, reduce stress, and bring us a sense of well-being. Some people need only ten minutes of moderate exercise to experience the endorphin rush; others might require thirty minutes. The effect is often called a “runner’s high,” and it is one reason why physical activity is increasingly becoming part of the prescription for the treatment of depression and anxiety—a beautiful side effect of exercise that motivates many of us to keep doing it.
What About Weight-Training Exercise
for People over Fifty?
Weight lifting—or resistance training, as it’s sometimes called—is great for people over fifty, even essential! While it doesn’t increase your endurance the way aerobic exercise does, it does maintain or increase the size and strength of your muscles, and there are several reasons why this is important at any age.
For one thing, increasing your muscle mass helps you lose weight, because muscles are the active tissues in the body. They determine your basal (or resting) metabolism rate, the rate at which your body burns caloric energy. Muscle tissue turns your body into a calorie-burning machine even when you’re resting.
We tend to put on weight as we get older. This is due partly to our tendency to be less active while continuing to eat the way we always have. But it is also due to the fact that we lose, on average, 3 to 5 percent of our muscle tissue each decade after age thirty. This means that by the time we reach seventy-five, our resting metabolism (basal metabolism) will have dropped by about 10 percent—unless, of course, we become active enough to maintain our muscles. In either case, we should also consciously eat fewer (but more nutrient-rich) calories.
Here’s a dramatic example of what can happen: If you eat just one hundred calories more than you burn up every day, you can expect to gain more than fifty pounds in five years. In order to lose this fat, you have to burn it up as a source of energy. (That is, if the calories you eat are fewer than the number of calories you are burning as energy, then the additional energy you need will have to come from stored fat.) To sum up: Aerobic or fat-burning types of activities will help with weight loss, as will increasing your resting metabolism rate through weight-training or resistance exercise to maintain your muscle mass. According to research done at Tufts University on people fifty to seventy-two years old, muscle mass can actually be increased by more than 200 percent with exercise.
Weight Training and Your Bones
Lifting weights or doing resistance training with elastic resistance straps or tubing will not only maintain or increase your muscle mass, it will also improve the strength of your bones, which, in turn, will reduce your risk of osteopenia and osteoporosis, the loss of bone mineral density.
The Tufts study that reported increased muscle mass in older people through resistance training also reported that bone mass can similarly be increased. This is important because osteopenia and the more advanced condition osteoporos
is put us at greater risk of fractures, especially of the hip, wrist, ankle, and spine. There are more than 250,000 hip fractures in the United States every year, 80 percent of them to women, and, in 10 to 15 percent of older people, these fractures can lead to death. Something else that is increasingly important with age is the fact that strong muscles can reduce stress on the joints.
Weight Training and Your Brain
Researchers in British Columbia found that women who did an hour or two of weight training every week had better cognitive function than those who did only balance and toning exercises. After one year, the women who lifted weights scored higher in the ability to make decisions, resolve conflicts, and stay focused.5 As Dr. Michael Hewitt, the research director for exercise science at Canyon Ranch Health Resort, says, “Looking better and being stronger are wonderful, but functioning better is life-enhancing!”
Some Specifics on How to Do Weight Training
If you want shorter workouts, you can work one set of muscles on one day—say, your upper body—and target a different set the following day—in this example, your lower body. Or instead of spreading your weight workouts over several days, you can do a longer, full-body workout three times a week; even two times is beneficial.
For muscles to become stronger they have to be stressed enough to cause overload or cellular fatigue, after which they need forty-eight hours to recover. This is why you should never work the same muscles on consecutive days. However, because of the nature of abdominal muscles, they can be worked every day!
I recommend doing two sets of twelve to fifteen repetitions for each muscle group: abdominals, chest, shoulders, back, arms, legs, and so forth. (See Appendix II for a chart of the muscle groups.) If you need to use lighter weights because of uncontrolled blood pressure or joint health, make up for it by doing more repetitions.
Keeping our quadriceps muscles (on the fronts of the thighs) strong is so important now because those are the muscles we use (together with our gluteal, or buttocks, muscles) to get up from a chair, or into and out of a car. But muscles come in pairs: the quadriceps (front of the thighs) and the hamstrings (back of the thighs), for instance; the triceps (back of the upper arms) and the biceps (front of the upper arms). To have a balanced body that is less injury-prone, it’s important to exercise both sets equally. When we lift weights to strengthen our biceps, we should also work the triceps. Exercising the large quadriceps muscles should be balanced with exercising the hamstring muscles, and so forth.
Posture
It’s critical, especially now, to pay attention to your posture when you’re working out. If you are in the wrong position, you have a greater risk of injuring yourself than when you were younger. This is why it is a good investment to spend some time with a certified professional trainer—not some gung-ho, push-to-the-limit sort, but one who is knowledgeable about older bodies and knows what to look out for and when to correct you. Be certain that in addition to training and certification, your trainer also has a personality and style compatible with yours.
Key 3: A Three-Step Exercise Program
For those of you with very little time, I have included a short, three-step exercise program called Key 3 (see Figures 1–3), developed by Dr. Michael Hewitt, who, as I have said, is the research director for exercise science at Canyon Ranch Health Resort. These three exercises, done with handheld dumbbells—wall squats, chest presses, and the single-arm row—will challenge 80 to 85 percent of the body’s muscle mass. Dr. Hewitt says that once you get the hang of it, you can complete two sets of the Key 3 exercises in about ten minutes.6
When it’s this quick and easy, is there any reason not to just do it?
Figure 1. Chest Presses: Lie on your back, knees bent. Hold your dumbbells with elbows bent out to the sides, shoulder height, and bring them together up above your chest. KAREN WYLIE
Figure 2. Standing Squats Against a Wall: With feet hip distance apart, hold your dumbbells with arms hanging straight at your sides and squat until your hips are level with your knees—not below your knees! Your feet must be far enough out from the wall that when you squat, your knees are not farther forward than your toes. KAREN WYLIE
Figure 3. Single-Arm Rows: Place one knee and one hand on a chair or bench. Bend the standing leg. Hold the weight in your other arm and let it hang straight down. Then bring your elbow up close to your side, and control it down. Keep your back flat. Think of sawing a big log as you bring your elbow up and down. Keep your elbow close to your body. Exhale as you lift. Inhale as you lower. KAREN WYLIE
Balance and Core Training
“Without regular muscle-building exercise,” says Scott McCredie in his book Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense, “strength levels decrease by about 12 to 14 percent per decade, starting at about age sixty in men and about age fifty in women.”7 This loss of muscle mass and tone, especially in the legs, hips, and trunk, has a direct effect on balance.
Every year, one in three people over sixty-five fall. As I have already said, this can lead to potentially crippling fractures, even fatalities. The reason we fall more as we age is that we are more likely to lose our sense of equilibrium. Actually, like muscle loss, balance loss is natural and begins very gradually, as early as in our twenties. As we age, various physiological changes in the inner ear, the bottoms of our feet, and our eyesight challenge our sense of balance. More important, we process these signals more slowly and less accurately than when we were younger. I’m not sure which of these (or maybe it’s all of them) is the culprit in my case, but balance is definitely my Achilles’ heel. One reason I try to keep my muscles strong is to compensate for this.
I also do exercises specifically designed to improve my balance. Whenever I can, like when I am brushing my teeth or hair or waiting in a line, I practice standing on one foot. At home, to challenge myself even more, I do the one-legged stand with my eyes closed. Once a day, I walk for a dozen or so steps, placing one foot directly in front of the other, as though I’m walking a plank. Balance can be developed just as muscles and aerobic capacity can.
Certain medicines and combinations of medicines can make you dizzy. If you find yourself having trouble with balance, have your doctor or pharmacist take a look at all your medicines (including any over-the-counter ones) to see if that could be a contributing factor.
Physical therapist Karen Perz offers a useful tip: “When someone is off balance, it’s better for them to hold on to you, rather than for you to hold on to them … and you should offer your elbow, not your hand.”8
Yoga and tai chi, a Chinese martial art where you do a series of slow, flowing, standing movements, are excellent for developing balance. So are core training and Pilates, which more and more gyms are offering. In core training you do exercises while standing on various surfaces that wobble. In addition to stimulating adaptations in the balance centers of the central nervous system, these exercises deliberately create instability, which recruits the smaller, stabilizing muscles, such as the gluteus medius, in the hip; the vastus medialis oblique, in the knee; and some of the small muscles in the back and the shoulders that aren’t normally challenged. My Prime Time Workout also includes exercises to improve your balance.
Physical Therapy
I woke up one morning unable to lift my right arm above breast height. A physical therapist explained that sleeping on my side had aggravated an already-existing rotator cuff problem, and the injury required six months of manual therapy. After that, my back went into spasm, which reminded me of what my friend Bette Davis said: “Aging isn’t for sissies.”
Chiropractic therapy, if done by a qualified practitioner, can provide quick relief through joint manipulation; it’s a lifesaver for many people. But with a trained and talented therapist, physical therapy can get to the underlying causes of your problems by deeply working the muscular, skeletal, and nervous systems. The therapist uses her or his hands and arms to apply sustained pressure where the muscles have become hard and claylike, as opposed to springy. This
makes the knot relax and increases circulation to the area. Very often, the knot is caused by a lack of mobility in the joints and/or the related muscles, tendons, and ligaments, which is why the therapist works on all the systems.
In searching for your own manual therapist, what you want to look for are the letters OCS (orthopedic clinical specialist) or SCS (sports clinical specialist) following the person’s name. Or you can visit the American Physical Therapy Association website at www.apta.org. They provide lists by region of therapists and their certifications. Once at the APTA website, choose “Find a PT,” then select “Musculoskeletal” and fill in your zip code.
Get the therapist to help you understand the underlying causes of your problem: what muscle weaknesses and joint immobility brought you into therapy, and what exercises you can do to address them. Treating the cause of the problem is usually much more effective than treating the symptoms. Many such therapists can be reimbursed through health insurance.
For example, I learned from my manual therapist that my posture had contributed to my back, neck, and shoulder pain. The slight rounding of my shoulders (begun, as with so many women, in adolescence) had gradually gotten worse. The smaller back muscles that pull our shoulders back had weakened, causing pressure on my neck and shoulders. Doing something about it after years of neglect is hard, and correct posture feels awkward at first—at least it did for me. But with practice, it has become (almost) second nature. (My therapist says it takes six weeks on average to reeducate the muscles.) I now check regularly to make sure that while I sit at my computer or at the movies, in a restaurant, or in the car, I always use good posture.
