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How much exercise is enough for an older adult who is either a beginner, or one who hasn’t exercised in a long time? How many exercises should be in the mix? How much is too much? How much is not enough? What are we trying to accomplish with exercise anyway?

Older adults need to extend their range of motion, do moderate to difficult resistance movements, get the heart and breathing rate up a bit and recover over a slightly longer amount of time. Seniors need to extend themselves just like anyone else, but not necessarily to the extent that younger people do. And of course almost any exercise is better than no exercise.

There are a lot of books on Amazon and at the bookstores about exercise. Most of them are for younger, more active people with bodies that are a little more supple, or at least a little more used to movement. There are a few “over forty” or “over fifty” books, but there are very few for those entering their sixties. Nearly all the exercise books on the market have far too many different and difficult movements for the average senior whether we have exercised in the past or not. For most of us, it’s too confusing to be confronted with so many exercises and to decide which ones to choose.

There are also many exercise classes for Seniors at local Health Clubs and Community Centers. Many of them are excellent programs and will provide you with good fitness results. There are also specific programs for Seniors such as “Silver Sneakers” which have good reputations among seniors. Most classes last 45 minutes to an hour. It might pay to look into one of them.

Keep in mind that most of those classes are ongoing and don’t consider that you might be just starting out. You need to be careful that you don’t overdo the exercises when you first start.

How should you feel at the end of a period of exercise? Tired but not exhausted. You will probably have some muscle soreness when you first start out, and even during the first several weeks. If the soreness is not excessive, you can keep exercising and work through the soreness. If you are very sore, back off a little, but you don’t need to stop exercising unless the pain is sharp or severe.

How long will it take to recover from exercise? If you start slowly and don’t push yourself too hard, you can do simple range of motion movements, stretches and non-resistance exercises five or six days a week. As a Senior, you should allow yourself a couple of days between each session of resistance exercises to allow your muscles to recover, strengthen and grow. Two or three days a week of resistance exercises is all you need.

There are some interesting techniques that older exercisers can use to move around on the ground much more easily and freely, that younger people simply don’t need. These include leg threading techniques and using body points, such as elbows and knees, as levers, fulcrums and pivot points to allow effortless movement on any surface. I’ll cover these in an upcoming article.

The point of all this is that you need to exercise, not too much, but enough to improve your range of motion, flexibility, mobility and strength and to allow you to do all the things that older people need to be able to do as part of every day living.

If the above sounds like a commercial, it is and it isn’t. I have a large print, large size book coming out in a couple of months. It will concentrate on just a few movements for a dynamic overall exercise and movement experience. It’s being written specifically for Seniors who are new to exercise or who haven’t exercised in a long time. There will be a series of only a few basic exercises, plus some alternative movements for those who can’t quite do the basics to start with. One point to mention though. I’ve called it a program a few times. It’s not. It’s a group of exercises that should be combined into a daily routine, but I would certainly not consider it a program. Maybe a method? How about if I call it The SeniorFlow™ Method. Look for it on Amazon.com in early to mid-March.

Thank you for reading.

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Bob McMillan is a blogger, writer and speaker on the subjects of Health, Fitness and Personal Energy for Active Adults over Sixty. Contact Bob at: bob@thecomealiveproject.com.

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As we look at the headlines about the “obesity” crisis, the crisis with “chronic illness,” and the increasing number of kids and seniors who don’t exercise and eat right, we might be tempted to believe that this is all something new. It’s not. As far back as the mid to late 1800s, people who came into the cities to take advantage of the industrial revolution had similar problems. In his book Revolution at the Table, by Harvey Levenstein, the author looks back at the nutrition habits of urban people of the late 1800s as consisting mostly of salt pork, bread and potatoes with little or no greens*. There were also at the time, a small number of physical fitness buffs who recognized the poor physical conditions of Americans across the board.

The most notable was Bernarr Macfadden who really “popularized” the efforts toward making Americans into a more fit people. He started the best selling magazine Physical Culture in the early 1900s to alert Americans of the existing crisis in health, and to provide ways of doing something about it. Many of today’s fitness experts take their material almost directly from Macfadden’s pronouncements. For example, Paul Bragg, who I mentioned last week, was a writer for Physical Culture magazine and ultimately toured the country lecturing about health, exercise and proper nutrition. One of his lecture attendees was a young, sixteen year old Jack LaLanne, who’s mother dragged young Jack to the lecture because of Jack’s poor health as a teenager. The rest is history.

Does the name Angelo Siciliano ring a bell? He was a protege of Bernarr Macfadden and was the winner of the magazines most perfectly developed man contest.  He went by the name Charles Atlas, and became most well known for his “97 pound weakling” and “sand in your face” advertisements in many popular magazines and comic books of the era.

Macfadden’s magazine was a direct influence on Rodale Publications and the well known Prevention magazine. Macfadden was a brief mentor of the late Joe Weider who created his own Health and Fitness publishing empire.  Many of Weider’s magazines are still being published today.  Many Hollywood stars of the day endorsed Macfadden’s viewpoint.

Macfadden disliked the medical community. He felt that doctors were mostly unnecessary and that any disease could be cured by totally natural cures such as FASTING, exercise, colon cleansing, hydrotherapy and deep breathing. He believed doctors were nothing but pill pushers.

The “pills” today still do more to relieve symptoms but they still don’t go to the source of the problem so you have to continue to return to the doctor for a “follow-up”. Old time patent medicines are gone but some supplements available today are questionable. Cod Liver Oil and “iron tonic” were in vogue when I was a kid. Today we recognize cod liver oil and other fish oils as a powerful source for Omega 3 fatty acids and for fat soluble Vitamins A and D, all considered necessary. Back then though, it was used for growth, and to stave off disease (at least that’s what my mother told me when she forced it down my throat).

In retrospect, Americans appear to be healthier today than back then, particularly in the cities, and in spite of the obesity problems and out of shape adults and kids today.

So as we look at our Obesity” epidemic and our out of shape kids as well as our out of shape selves, we can take comfort that it’s been that way for over a hundred years right here in the United States and although our food habits may have changed, they haven’t necessarily improved. Neither have our fitness habits. We are healthier as adults today than then because of massive improvement and technical advancements in medical care. But for most of us, we would eliminate a lot of the lifestyle diseases if we would only heed the same advice as good old Bernarr Macfadden gave back in the late 1800’s up until the middle of the 20th century. He may have been considered a nutcase back then, but his admonitions remain mostly true today. It’s best we put good fuel and exercise into our lifestyles if we want to live a long and healthy life.

If you are interested, here is a link where you can find many issues of Physical Culture Magazine in a collection from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Click here to view to the collection online. The differences between then and now aren’t as great as we might have expected them to be.

Thank you for reading.

* Source: Captain America, How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad and the Ultimate Starvation Diet, Mark Adams, Harper Collins, 2009.

Well, here it is, the first Blog Posting in 2015. What are your Resolutions? Exercise? Diet?

My wife mentioned yesterday that the “buzz” among the teachers at the school where she substitute teaches, is something called the “Whole30” Diet. More than a few of the teachers have started it and are already complaining about some of the things they can’t eat that are so natural to them. Looking at it online, it seems to be a take-off on the “Paleo diet” without legumes. My wife commented that if they would just eat right, they wouldn’t need a diet.

At the other extreme, I have been trying to gain weight back ever since I got down to 152 pounds following a stint in the hospital earlier this year.  That was a thirteen pound loss. I have eaten bread, ice cream and everything I could think of to add pounds while at the same time, sticking with the daily exercise to keep the new weight from turning to flab as well as adding back lost muscle. I am now up to 170 pounds and would like to get up to 175. But I have noticed a subtle deterioration in the way I feel. I have been more lethargic and less filled with energy. Yes, the energy is still there but I actually “feel” heavier and feel like I had better stop the over eating now!

My answer is to go back to what I was doing earlier in 2014 which is eating just a few more vegetables and cutting back a little on meat. I don’t plan in any way to cut out meat, but like most people, I eat too much of it. Of course now I’ll cut out the excess bread and ice cream. No big deal.

It seems that at the beginning of every new year, everyone goes on a “get healthy” kick and then by mid-February, they go back to their normal habits. Gym memberships swell at the beginning of the year, and then the people stop going around the middle of February. Gym owners love it because the new members keep their memberships but don’t show up and take up space. I was at the gym yesterday and the place was packed. The attendant at the front desk said that it had been that way all day and all week. Lots of new members have signed up and are showing up – for now.

It would seem that we could do all this on an incremental basis. Start with 10% more exercise and a ten percent improvement in what we eat. That would give us ten percent change pretty quickly. Then as we see a 10 percent improvement in the way we look and feel, we would easily go for ten percent more. If we did that once a month, we would see a substantial improvement over a year. Not bad.

For some that wouldn’t work. Some people need massive change all at one time. What works for one person won’t work for another. There simply is no “one size fits all.”

But here’s a point to consider. As seniors, massive change all at once can be a real shock to our system. I would suggest that unless you are in good condition going in, you make incremental but real and lasting change.

“Fad Diets” don’t work well for long. They rarely have. Some diets are common sense such as the Mediterranean Diet, and the maybe one of the versions of the Paleo Diet. They represent long term lifestyle adjustments and result in incremental changes rather than the sudden and unsustainable changes found in most Fad Diets. Many of the Fad Diets work for a short time because they deprive you of something that results in short term, fast acting weight loss. But the reality is, much of what you are deprived of is necessary for your health in the long term. For example the drastic low fat diets of recent years cut back on healthy fats as well as the unhealthy fats. That works for a while, but your body needs a certain amount of fat to sustain itself and to keep the internal organs functioning properly. So at some point one needs to add fats back in to the mix. You can’t stay on them for long without some sort of deprivation and damage to your overall physical system.

Don’t forget that one can go without any food at all for a while without major damage to the systems of the body.  FASTING is a great way to clean up your system. But you can’t stay off food forever. Forty days and forty nights of FASTING is a bit much to ask of anyone, but a one day FAST monthly with only water and nothing else, will increase your energy and help rinse out your system. A two day FAST can be even better. I have done both in the past and they worked for me without any discomfort. I may give it a try myself again a few times this year.

I’ll be curious to see the results of the “Whole 30 diet” on my wife’s friends, and curious to see just how long they stick with it.

I’m not allowed to prescribe individual nutritional advice. But I am allowed to talk about what works for me and suggest that it might work for readers of this blog. More veggies and less meat, and cutting out as much sugar and refined foods as possible, worked for me. I lost nearly 30 pounds over a year without even trying. Will it work for you? Probably. If you really want to lose weight over the long term, give it a try and see if it works for you. It won’t be a dramatic or immediate change, but you will probably feel better pretty quickly and see noticeable improvement within a month. Combine that with a little exercise and watch and feel your energy soar.

Have a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.

Thank you for reading.