As people live longer, most everyone in America has heard how important exercise is for your body as it grows older. The question is why is exercise important and the answer is very simple : flexibility. After age 30, the number one component of the body which fails most quickly is within the flexibility of the body’s tissues. This doesn’t just mean your ability to touch your toes or swing a golf club, although the lack of flexibility due to aging will be a key component for both of these activities. Flexibility is also related to non-structural tissues such as blood vessels, nerve casings, organ tissues, and even the viscosity of various fluids in your body.
Many health professionals will emphasize strength training for the aging population. This is due to recent studies which show that the body can lose 10% or more of its strength and muscle mass each decade after the age of about 35. Bone loss is also a very common boon to the aging process. Since strength training addresses both muscle and bone strength and integrity, this sort of exercise is often suggested to many people attempting to subvert the physical aging process. Strength training is an excellent method for slowing the degradation of bones and muscles, but it doesn’t address other issues like mental capacity, heart and lung strength, and ability to fight disease.
Before I go any further I should mention that aging is a very complicated process and its affects alter greatly from person to person based upon genetic factors, prior history of individual health, and current and future activity levels. Just because you exercise does not necessarily mean that you will all of a sudden live longer or more functionally than your neighbor who does not. You can’t base your own progress on someone else’s results and, therefore exercise will serve to improve your life relative to how that life would have been without the exercise, not relative to your neighbor (unless that neighbor happens to be a relative). Don’t get discouraged if you aren’t seeing as good results as your friend working with you, just remember that your body is handling your longer life of exercise the best way it knows how.
Everyone, no matter what their genetics or chosen path in life, can benefit from a healthy dose of cardio-vascular exercise in their daily life. For the younger population, this type of exercise usually means improved heart, lungs, veins and arteries, coordination, and joint and muscle function. For someone over 35 all of these characteristics apply as well as the added benefit of maintaining brain function, maintaining reproductive organ function (not necessarily the ability to bare young, but at least assisting in the absence of abnormality), maintaining digestive function, and hindering the effects of arthritis. Frequent and varied cardio training from hiking and biking to swimming or skiing is so important as we get older that practically every body system benefits as a result.
As many of us know, activity helps maintain flexibility in the physical tissues like muscles, bones, and joints. Frequent movement - tennis, walking, dancing or any other physical activity helps to maintain the inherent strength and integrity of the body structure and the muscles which hold it together. Freedom to move is one of the simplest feedoms we have and can be well maintained with proper repetitive activity. With lack of movement, the tissues and semi-liquid portions of your joints start to harden - both restricting mobility and causing pain. The only way to avoid this hardening is to keep exercising. Even your bones have flexibility related to the manner in which they consume nourishment and go through their natural building and rebuilding processes. Bone flexibility ensures fewer breaks related to impact and other unforeseen mishaps we may encounter in our daily lives.
A hardening of veins, arteries and lymph vessels (part of your immune system) restricts the ability of these systems to work properly. When your vessels harden you are more susceptible to internal pressure problems, scarring, clotting, and rupture all of which result in very serious and sometimes life threatening conditions. Again the flexibility of these tissues can be maintained with some form of cardio exercise.
It was classically thought that people could keep their mental acuity by doing “mental exercises” such as thinking games, reading, and puzzles. Thus far, there is no conclusive evidence that these activities actually maintain brain function. I’m not saying stop doing them - just because proof hasn’t been found yet doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist - but I am noting that the only result these activities have shown is better capability at solving thinking games, reading and puzzles. Cardio-vascular activity, however has actually been found to force the body to nourish the outer covering of nerves and nerve endings called the myaline sheath. In some extreme cases some studies have actually shown an increase in brain mass as a result of adhering to a new cardio routine. These results are not terribly conclusive, but even the possibility is encouraging.
Even your organs benefit from this heart pumping exercise. Cardio encourages your body to utilize oxygen and electrolytes which acts as the energy and nourishment for every one of your cells. Your liver, pancreas, stomach, lungs, intestines, and sex organs all benefit from continued activity in older age.
Hopefully I have convinced you that exercise - both cardio-vascular and strength - is extremely important as we grow older. The only question now is how much of each? Certainly it doesn’t make much sense to be doing more activity as we get older than we did when we were young and spry in our teens and early 20’s. Your body will slow down and natural processes will indeed make it more difficult to physically perform the way you did when your body was younger, but this means that to maintain some level of strength, balance and flexibility as we age, we must in fact put more effort into that maintenance. If you have the time, spend more time exercising when you are older than you did when you were young. Certainly not to the intensity you did when you were younger and don’t just jump right into it if you have been without exercise for a while, but your body will respond to exercise as you age the same as when it was younger - just more slowly. If you have the time to invest three or four hours a day of good physical activity whether that activity be in the gym, on the golf course, or anywhere else ... do it! Keeping your body active truly is the secret to everlasting life - at least everlasting capability and independence through a longer life.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Sunday, January 27, 2008
How Much Weight Training?
Similar to the “how much cardio” question I tried to answer earlier, some people want to know how much strength training to do in a given week. Opinions vary widely on this subject, but research data shows some basic fundamentals which can be applied to most people’s work out routine on a regular basis. Similar to cardio training, the frequency of strength training will depend greatly on your physical goals and what you plan to accomplish in the gym. Some people are interested in gaining strength, others are looking to gain size (they go hand in hand, but there is a difference). Some want to maintain strength, and still others want to maintain structures other than their muscles, such as their bones. In any case, there is a certain amount of strength training which is required to accomplish specific goals and I’ll try to order those goals from least time necessary to greatest time necessary here-after.
No matter what your goal, you should first understand the concept of “over-training”. Over-training is no simply doing to much but rather an actual condition of excessive fatigue your body can undergo if you are training at a level which exceeds your bodies capabilities to recover. Over-training is marked by a constant feeling of tiredness - particularly during a workout - muscle aches, joint aches, an elevated heart, weight loss and a rather than gain of strength. If you goal during strength training is to increase size, you must pay careful attention to what you eat and drink as well as how much you work out. You will be putting great demands on your body’s metabolism as well as your muscles and you must give it time to allow your body to rebuild from intense exercise. As a rule, your muscles need about 48 hours of rest time to recover from a loaded workout. Thats two days with strength expenditure of the utilized muscle group not exceeding about 50% before returning to fatigue training again.
As I mentioned, every one’s body operates under certain general rules of strength gain, loss, and recovery. If a muscle or group of muscles are enabled to maintain a certain amount of strength, say the chest and arms can do ten pushups, then that amount of strength will generally be maintained with as little as one day of strength training per week. As long as that muscle or group of muscles is brought to fatigue once every seven days, it will likely be able to maintain the strength it has for an extended period of time. After seven days, the body starts to lose a little muscle and, therefore, a little strength. This is by no means a drastic change, but going without strength training for a week or more will result in a little loss. So in order to maintain strength, each muscle group should be fully fatigued under load (with weights) at least once a week. This can be accomplished in one training session if that session is efficient and does in fact target all major motions for strength maintenance (See Major Power Movements of the Upper and Lower Body from January 08).
If you are trying to gain strength, you need slightly more activity out of your muscles than once a week... Twice a week. A second workout which again fatigues all the major movements of the body is enough to gain strength - not much, but a gain is possible. So if you want to increase your pushups from ten to fifteen, you could do so by adding a second strength workout a week which included pushups both times. You body would catch on relatively quickly and you’d probably be able to eek out those five extra repetitions within a month or two. After a certain period of time, your body would become used to the two workout per week regiment and you would need an alteration to your routine in order to continue gains, but increasing frequency would not necessarily be the answer.
For some special occasions your doctor may suggest strength training as the most productive alternative to various medical conditions or ailments. Osteoporosis and fibromyalgia are two of the more common maladies which can be managed and in some cases improved upon with proper loaded or strength training. Although the style of training one would perform to address these issues would not be the same as say, an athlete, the necessity for consistency is very similar. With conditions such as these, your body is essentially fighting itself and the best way to combat the poorer performance of your body is to maintain a higher standard than the average person. If you have one of these doctor prescribed conditions, strength training three, four, or sometimes even five days a week can reduce symptoms, reduce pain, and even slow or on rare occasions improve the processes which cause the degeneration in the first place. All the normal precautions for over-training should be managed as well as added considerations for managing the appropriate affliction, but this should not deter someone from pursuing strength training as a treatment.
Because it is so physically and even fairly mentally demanding, body building or gaining size requires the most strength training in the gym. In order to gain size, you must eat constantly and not small portions. You must also eat properly, indulging in foods which are easy for your body to use for energy, muscle rebuilding, and joint laxity. Body building is a very complex sport and only a few professionals succeed in managing the rigors of this sort of training. In order to appropriately grow muscle you must not only eat a significant amount of the correct food, but you must fatigue your muscles in a manner unlike all other gym goers. It is not uncommon for a body builder to spend 30 or more minutes fatiguing one muscle group (not in constant motion, but in cumulative effort). Thirty minutes spent on each of the upper and lower body power movements would amount to four and a half hours of training. However, the upper and lower body power movements are not exclusive for body building and there must be other actions taken to specify additional muscles in the body. To gain proper muscle weight it will likely take an hour and a half, four to six days a week of intense strength training along with appropriate eating. To gain the status of a body builder, you will likely spend two to four hours training each day you are in the gym. It is a rather significant undertaking. Even at such gregarious expenditure, the regular rules of the body apply. You have to give each muscle group at least 48 hours to repair itself after it has been fatigued so your work out schedule will need to be tightly managed.
Similar to cardio training, the time put into strength training varies greatly based upon your expected output. Unlike cardio training, however, strength training is not usually a necessity for survival. Often basic but precise movement is enough to maintain the strength necessary for your body to operate properly. In other words, in order to keep the strength your body needs to do the activities you frequently do, you need only continue to perform those activities. The weights in a gym are used to exceed these minimum strength requirements and are certainly another form of keeping your body healthy. Like cardio training also, they should not be pursued lightly and without guidance as doing so offers your body to great injury - and no one likes to back track.
No matter what your goal, you should first understand the concept of “over-training”. Over-training is no simply doing to much but rather an actual condition of excessive fatigue your body can undergo if you are training at a level which exceeds your bodies capabilities to recover. Over-training is marked by a constant feeling of tiredness - particularly during a workout - muscle aches, joint aches, an elevated heart, weight loss and a rather than gain of strength. If you goal during strength training is to increase size, you must pay careful attention to what you eat and drink as well as how much you work out. You will be putting great demands on your body’s metabolism as well as your muscles and you must give it time to allow your body to rebuild from intense exercise. As a rule, your muscles need about 48 hours of rest time to recover from a loaded workout. Thats two days with strength expenditure of the utilized muscle group not exceeding about 50% before returning to fatigue training again.
As I mentioned, every one’s body operates under certain general rules of strength gain, loss, and recovery. If a muscle or group of muscles are enabled to maintain a certain amount of strength, say the chest and arms can do ten pushups, then that amount of strength will generally be maintained with as little as one day of strength training per week. As long as that muscle or group of muscles is brought to fatigue once every seven days, it will likely be able to maintain the strength it has for an extended period of time. After seven days, the body starts to lose a little muscle and, therefore, a little strength. This is by no means a drastic change, but going without strength training for a week or more will result in a little loss. So in order to maintain strength, each muscle group should be fully fatigued under load (with weights) at least once a week. This can be accomplished in one training session if that session is efficient and does in fact target all major motions for strength maintenance (See Major Power Movements of the Upper and Lower Body from January 08).
If you are trying to gain strength, you need slightly more activity out of your muscles than once a week... Twice a week. A second workout which again fatigues all the major movements of the body is enough to gain strength - not much, but a gain is possible. So if you want to increase your pushups from ten to fifteen, you could do so by adding a second strength workout a week which included pushups both times. You body would catch on relatively quickly and you’d probably be able to eek out those five extra repetitions within a month or two. After a certain period of time, your body would become used to the two workout per week regiment and you would need an alteration to your routine in order to continue gains, but increasing frequency would not necessarily be the answer.
For some special occasions your doctor may suggest strength training as the most productive alternative to various medical conditions or ailments. Osteoporosis and fibromyalgia are two of the more common maladies which can be managed and in some cases improved upon with proper loaded or strength training. Although the style of training one would perform to address these issues would not be the same as say, an athlete, the necessity for consistency is very similar. With conditions such as these, your body is essentially fighting itself and the best way to combat the poorer performance of your body is to maintain a higher standard than the average person. If you have one of these doctor prescribed conditions, strength training three, four, or sometimes even five days a week can reduce symptoms, reduce pain, and even slow or on rare occasions improve the processes which cause the degeneration in the first place. All the normal precautions for over-training should be managed as well as added considerations for managing the appropriate affliction, but this should not deter someone from pursuing strength training as a treatment.
Because it is so physically and even fairly mentally demanding, body building or gaining size requires the most strength training in the gym. In order to gain size, you must eat constantly and not small portions. You must also eat properly, indulging in foods which are easy for your body to use for energy, muscle rebuilding, and joint laxity. Body building is a very complex sport and only a few professionals succeed in managing the rigors of this sort of training. In order to appropriately grow muscle you must not only eat a significant amount of the correct food, but you must fatigue your muscles in a manner unlike all other gym goers. It is not uncommon for a body builder to spend 30 or more minutes fatiguing one muscle group (not in constant motion, but in cumulative effort). Thirty minutes spent on each of the upper and lower body power movements would amount to four and a half hours of training. However, the upper and lower body power movements are not exclusive for body building and there must be other actions taken to specify additional muscles in the body. To gain proper muscle weight it will likely take an hour and a half, four to six days a week of intense strength training along with appropriate eating. To gain the status of a body builder, you will likely spend two to four hours training each day you are in the gym. It is a rather significant undertaking. Even at such gregarious expenditure, the regular rules of the body apply. You have to give each muscle group at least 48 hours to repair itself after it has been fatigued so your work out schedule will need to be tightly managed.
Similar to cardio training, the time put into strength training varies greatly based upon your expected output. Unlike cardio training, however, strength training is not usually a necessity for survival. Often basic but precise movement is enough to maintain the strength necessary for your body to operate properly. In other words, in order to keep the strength your body needs to do the activities you frequently do, you need only continue to perform those activities. The weights in a gym are used to exceed these minimum strength requirements and are certainly another form of keeping your body healthy. Like cardio training also, they should not be pursued lightly and without guidance as doing so offers your body to great injury - and no one likes to back track.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Exercising While Sick
Although I don’t imagine it crosses most peoples mind, I have been asked on occasion whether I think it is a good idea to exercise when you’re sick. Like so many other questions, I would have to answer this with extreme vacillation and say “yes and no”. Exercise is always important for your body - especially if we define exercise as simple activity as opposed to inactivity - but there are times when your bodies metabolic processes need to be focusing their attention somewhere other than external exertion (like combating an illness).
If you’re young, the answer to this question is often intuitive and, in fact, made for you... If Mom says stay in bed, you stay in bed. Even at a young age, however, perhaps as you progressed through college you noticed that nothing about your body was quite the same when invaded with some or another virus or parasite. Your attention may not have been as sharp, your energy depleted, even your coordination could have seemed muddled. We have a tendency to pay less attention to such details as we grow older and certain activities like playing football, studying all night or throwing a wad of paper at the cute girl across from you become less important and, therefore, less indicative of our overall well being. Certainly being sick on the job will result in a tough time, but it doesn’t always compare to the stress of being sick during finals.
Ultimately, if you have a mild illness, it is not a bad idea to get up and move around a little. In this case, we’ll define “mild” as little to no fever, and annoying but not habit altering symptoms like sneezing, headache, body ache, cough etc.. If you take this sort of mild intrusion on your body as a signal to shut down and you lie in bed until the symptoms subside, you may in fact be aiding the illness, not your body. The reason for this is found in the body’s complex transportation system for nutrients, fluids, and our battle systems like antibodies and white blood cells (although white blood cells rarely get involved with mild illness). This transportation system is based upon pressures, changing pressures which require alterations back and forth between and within vessels to keep the transport going. If we lie stagnant, our body is only able to utilize the natural pressure gradients which already exist in the vessel systems. If we move, however, the contractions of our musculature helps change the pressure as well, making transport easier. Thereby, as your body goes through killing the bug in you, it has an easier time both getting new combatants to the intruder in the first place and in removing the illness once it has been found. Lying in wait may allow a mild illness to spread more easily since it is not necessarily bound to the same sort of transport as your body’s defenses. All of a sudden your mild illness is no longer mild in a few days.
The flip side of this equation is a more severe illness - usually associated with more severe symptoms like high fever, possible rashes, mouth or nose sores, and a cacophony of other fun things no one wants to think about unless they find reading medical journals entertaining as I do. In this case you are probably under the supervision of a doctor (or at least Dr. Mom) and you do as they say. A more substantial illness will invoke further defenses in your body to work like the white blood cells I mentioned earlier. In this case, movement doesn’t assist your body in the creation of these cells no matter what you do. In fact, the added metabolic energy required to produce your new combatants puts such a strain on your system that using further energy for exercise can be damaging to your cause. In this case, you should move only when necessary - for food or when nature calls - and all other time should be spent in rest. Most people don’t have the inclination to exercise with this sort of illness - in fact they are not inclined to do much of anything, but if you are a die-hard, take careful account of what your body is telling you. If you get up to go to the bathroom and you’re exhausted by the time you return to your bed, don’t try to eek out a light run later that day after you’ve had a quick nap.
Either way, if you do decide to exercise while you are sick, scale back your activity immensely. Wether a strong or weak illness, your body is still focused on removing that illness at the moment and is not going to perform up to a normal high standard you may ask of it. Usually just getting up and walking around 15 minutes once or twice a day is plenty. If you choose to go to the gym, a very easy cardio workout of no more than half an hour may be acceptable if you are naturally used to exercise when healthy. Sitting on a recumbent bike at a low resistance or walking on a treadmill at 2-2.5 miles per hour will increase your heart rate enough to help the transportation processes I mentioned earlier without totally exhausting you. Strength training should be generally avoided because you are not in a physical condition to make progress with a strength workout and strength workouts don’t inherently maintain a high heart rate which is the necessary component for pressure changes.
Finally, pay attention to your body. If just getting to the car to go to the gym is a struggle, don’t pursue a workout! If, on the other hand, you have been lying in bed for 3 days and your symptoms just wont change or go away, try getting up and moving around a little bit - not too long - but see how it feels. You may be hastening your body on the road to recovery.
If you’re young, the answer to this question is often intuitive and, in fact, made for you... If Mom says stay in bed, you stay in bed. Even at a young age, however, perhaps as you progressed through college you noticed that nothing about your body was quite the same when invaded with some or another virus or parasite. Your attention may not have been as sharp, your energy depleted, even your coordination could have seemed muddled. We have a tendency to pay less attention to such details as we grow older and certain activities like playing football, studying all night or throwing a wad of paper at the cute girl across from you become less important and, therefore, less indicative of our overall well being. Certainly being sick on the job will result in a tough time, but it doesn’t always compare to the stress of being sick during finals.
Ultimately, if you have a mild illness, it is not a bad idea to get up and move around a little. In this case, we’ll define “mild” as little to no fever, and annoying but not habit altering symptoms like sneezing, headache, body ache, cough etc.. If you take this sort of mild intrusion on your body as a signal to shut down and you lie in bed until the symptoms subside, you may in fact be aiding the illness, not your body. The reason for this is found in the body’s complex transportation system for nutrients, fluids, and our battle systems like antibodies and white blood cells (although white blood cells rarely get involved with mild illness). This transportation system is based upon pressures, changing pressures which require alterations back and forth between and within vessels to keep the transport going. If we lie stagnant, our body is only able to utilize the natural pressure gradients which already exist in the vessel systems. If we move, however, the contractions of our musculature helps change the pressure as well, making transport easier. Thereby, as your body goes through killing the bug in you, it has an easier time both getting new combatants to the intruder in the first place and in removing the illness once it has been found. Lying in wait may allow a mild illness to spread more easily since it is not necessarily bound to the same sort of transport as your body’s defenses. All of a sudden your mild illness is no longer mild in a few days.
The flip side of this equation is a more severe illness - usually associated with more severe symptoms like high fever, possible rashes, mouth or nose sores, and a cacophony of other fun things no one wants to think about unless they find reading medical journals entertaining as I do. In this case you are probably under the supervision of a doctor (or at least Dr. Mom) and you do as they say. A more substantial illness will invoke further defenses in your body to work like the white blood cells I mentioned earlier. In this case, movement doesn’t assist your body in the creation of these cells no matter what you do. In fact, the added metabolic energy required to produce your new combatants puts such a strain on your system that using further energy for exercise can be damaging to your cause. In this case, you should move only when necessary - for food or when nature calls - and all other time should be spent in rest. Most people don’t have the inclination to exercise with this sort of illness - in fact they are not inclined to do much of anything, but if you are a die-hard, take careful account of what your body is telling you. If you get up to go to the bathroom and you’re exhausted by the time you return to your bed, don’t try to eek out a light run later that day after you’ve had a quick nap.
Either way, if you do decide to exercise while you are sick, scale back your activity immensely. Wether a strong or weak illness, your body is still focused on removing that illness at the moment and is not going to perform up to a normal high standard you may ask of it. Usually just getting up and walking around 15 minutes once or twice a day is plenty. If you choose to go to the gym, a very easy cardio workout of no more than half an hour may be acceptable if you are naturally used to exercise when healthy. Sitting on a recumbent bike at a low resistance or walking on a treadmill at 2-2.5 miles per hour will increase your heart rate enough to help the transportation processes I mentioned earlier without totally exhausting you. Strength training should be generally avoided because you are not in a physical condition to make progress with a strength workout and strength workouts don’t inherently maintain a high heart rate which is the necessary component for pressure changes.
Finally, pay attention to your body. If just getting to the car to go to the gym is a struggle, don’t pursue a workout! If, on the other hand, you have been lying in bed for 3 days and your symptoms just wont change or go away, try getting up and moving around a little bit - not too long - but see how it feels. You may be hastening your body on the road to recovery.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
