Exercise: Why You Should Make It A Life-long Habit
According to the American Heart Association, you should be exercising at least 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise or 75 minutes per week of vigorous exercise (or a combination of both). Indeed, "[t]hirty minutes a day, five times a week is an easy goal to remember." If you already workout consistently, high five! You have already begun to form a healthy habit that hopefully continues on as you age. Of course, we all want to be healthy and age well but the hard truth is, it's not easy and it only gets harder as we get older.
Dream big.
If you're not someone who regularly works out, you better get going - and here's why: exercising regularly as you age will keep your mind sharp.
New research from the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that moderate exercise a few times a week improves cognitive functioning if you're over the age of 50. Exercise interventions include aerobic exercise, resistance training, multicomponent training (MCT), and yoga, all of which had positive cognitive impacts on the study participants. MTC encompasses endurance training, muscle strengthening, balance exercises, and/or stretching (i.e. flexibility training) and/or coordination training. Yoga in particular reduces stress, improves posture, balance and general mobility, and increases muscle strength. Aerobic exercise enhances cognitive abilities and resistant training, and promotes executive functions, memory, and working memory (short-term memory with regard to immediate conscious perceptual and linguistic processing). Woa the benefits.
The most exciting impact is that those over 50 who engage in at least 150 minutes of aerobic and resistance training per week can improve overall brain health and eventually become what a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association calls "super-agers." These 80 year old fit grandmas and grandpas have a thicker brain cortex than their same-age peers (with average-for-age memory) and are able to resist age-related cortical atrophy. Compared to the super-agers over an 18 month period, average agers atrophied at more than twice their rate! The fit g-mas and g-pas seemed to be resistant in some way to the atrophy process common in the aging process.
So what does all this mean? More reasons to spend time with your loved ones. Get out there and get your yoga on with your parents. Take your Mimi to lift at the gym and get a bike ride in with your PopPop. (Or vice versa if you're the "fit" mommy or daddy -- get out and move with your kids!)
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