#aging and exercise

As we age, it’s essential to maintain an active lifestyle to stay healthy and independent, which is why senior-friendly workouts are designed to be low-impact, reducing the risk of injury while still providing numerous health benefits, such as senior fitness routines and low-impact exercises for seniors1. Regular physical activity can help boost energy, maintain independence, protect your heart,…

By Patricia Neighmond, NPR, December 10, 2018

We know we need to exercise for our health, but a lifelong exercise habit may also help us feel younger and stay stronger well into our senior years. In fact, people in their 70s who have been exercising regularly for decades seem to have put a brake on the aging process, maintaining the heart, lung, and muscle fitness of healthy people at least 30 years younger.

Take 74-year-old Susan Magrath, a retired nurse practitioner who lives in Muncie, Ind. Magrath has been running almost daily for 45 years. She often runs outdoors and describes it as addictive. “It’s just such a release, just a wonderful release,” she says. “I ran today and there were little snowflakes coming down and I was down by the river and it’s just wonderful and I think it’s become more of a contemplative meditative process for me.”

Magrath may be living proof that lifelong exercise helps with cardiovascular and muscle health. She recently took part in a study at the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University, also in Muncie, headed by exercise physiologist Scott Trappe. Trappe is among the first to study the enticing new population of lifelong exercisers.

After the running and aerobic boom of the 1970s, a large numbers of septuagenarians stuck with it and have been exercising regularly for the last 50 years. In this population, Trappe says, “we were interested in basically two questions: One, what was their cardiovascular health, and two, what was their skeletal muscle health?”

What he saw surprised him. “We saw that people who exercise regularly year after year have better overall health than their sedentary counterparts. These 75-year-olds--men and women--have similar cardiovascular health to a 40- to 45-year-old.”

“Exercise wins is the take-home message,” he says.

In the study, Trappe divided 70 healthy participants into three groups. Those in the lifelong exercise group were on average 75-years-old and primarily kept their heart rates up through running and cycling. They had a history of participating in structured exercise four to six days a week for a total of about 7 hours a week.

The second group included individuals who were also on average 75-years-old but did not engage in structured exercise regimens, although they might have participated in occasional leisure walking or golf.

The third group consisted of young exercisers who were, on average 25 years old, and worked out with the same frequency and length of time as the lifelong exercisers.

Although the study was relatively small, the findings, which were published in the Journal of Applied Physiology in August, suggest a dramatic benefit of lifelong exercise for both muscle health and the cardiovascular system.

“Lifelong exercisers had a cardiovascular system that looked 30 years younger,” says Trappe. This is noteworthy because, for the average adult, the ability to process oxygen declines by about 10 percent per decade after age 30.

“It’s kind of a slow decay over time that’s probably not so noticeable in your 30s or 40s,” says Trappe, but eventually as years go on, becomes apparent. People can get out of breath more easily and may have difficulty pushing themselves physically.

As for muscle health, the findings were even more significant, says Trappe. Trappe says researchers were surprised to find the 75-year-old muscles of lifelong exercisers were about the same as the muscles of the 25-year-olds. “If I showed you the muscle data that we have, you wouldn’t know it was from an older individual, you would think it’s from somebody that’s a young exerciser,” he says.

82-year-old David Costill was not part of the study but is a former colleague of Trappe’s and professor emeritus of exercise science at Ball State University. As an exercise physiologist, he has always known about the benefits of exercise and has been committed since high school.

He says he’s spent about “60 years actively exercising.” Costill ran marathons for about 20 years until his knees started to bother him, so he headed to the pool. “And I’ve been swimming for the last 35 years.”

When Costill looks at his friends, he says he finds he can do a lot more physically than they can. “If I’m out with a group of my peers, guys who are near 80, and we’re going someplace, it seems to me they’re all walking at half speed.”

Trappe says the findings are clear: Thirty to 60 minutes of exercise a day may be the key to a healthy life. But you don’t have to run marathons or compete in cycling events. “If you want to do 30 to 45 minutes of walking a day, the amount of health benefit you are going to get is going to be significant and substantial,” he says, “will it equal the person training for competitive performances? No. But it will outdo the couch potato.”

Dr. Clyde Yancy, spokesperson for the American Heart Association and chief of cardiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine says the findings suggest, “a lifelong investment in health and fitness appears to be associated with a really sustainable benefit out until the outer limits of life.”

By Wendy Lyons Sunshine, NY Times, March 7, 2017

I returned home the other night exhausted, quadriceps aching, twinges in my foot, salty with sweat. My husband asked me how my evening was.

Glorious, I told him.

I had spent 90 minutes in a gym crammed with 10 Ping-Pong tables and assorted players, all coaxing and smacking a little ball over the net. By 9 p.m., I was exhilarated, depleted, triumphant. I had beaten two young men half my age and lost battles against worthy opponents. To a casual observer, the night was unremarkable. To me, it was a miracle.

I had taken up Ping-Pong during college, and in my 30s dove in more deeply, climbing the long stairway up to a table tennis center in Westfield, N.J., where I watched Olympic hopefuls and took lessons. Arthroscopy for torn knee cartilage soon sidelined me. Shortly afterward, a distracted driver made an illegal turn at a pedestrian crossing and drove directly into my bum knee.

Joint replacements are a poor bet for 30-somethings. The surgeon did his best to repair my crushed knee, inserted a titanium screw, recommended I stay slim, advised against afternoons of power shopping, and told me never to jog or run again.

Three months in a cast left my atrophied foot floppy and useless. Standing was excruciating. I hunted for shoes that could cushion my knee and set my sights on walking and climbing stairs again. Years later, I tried to play Ping-Pong and limped for a week. I put the game out of my mind.

When I was 53, a new challenge arrived. A dimple in my right breast proved malignant, so I underwent lumpectomy, followed by chemotherapy and radiation. By treatment’s end, clothing felt intolerable, and a stroll around the block winded me. My old knee injury hurt anew; flesh around the scar felt fragile as old rubber bands.

But I wanted to start fresh. I quit eating barbecue, shunned dairy, embraced kale. I attended therapy and a support group. At a $450 course in mindfulness-based stress reduction, I learned to befriend painful stretches and breathe new life into atrophied muscles without injuring myself.

One day my bad leg was working slightly better. The knee hadn’t been oppressively swollen in a while. I felt a flicker of hope.

Could Ping-Pong be feasible for me, now--in my condition, at my age?

Ping-Pong, or table tennis as it is officially known, is one of the fastest racket sports, requiring muscular and cardiorespiratory endurance. Players need nimble footwork and upper body flexibility to return balls that can fly over 60 miles per hour, demanding faster response times than tennis or badminton. While energy expenditure tables list the sport as requiring four METS of energy, about the same as archery or bowling, skilled players can peak at 11.7 METs during a match, said Alessandro Moura Zagatto, a sports physiologist and researcher at São Paulo State University in Brazil. That’s a workout comparable to intense racquetball or moderate rowing.

Ping-Pong’s unique visual and spatial demands, strategy requirements and vigor may even offer benefits for the brain. A study of 164 Korean women age 60 and older showed that table tennis improved cognitive function more than dancing, walking, gymnastics or resistance training. Other research suggests Ping-Pong may ease attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

“The great thing about our sport is it can be played by anyone,” said Jimmy Butler, a four-time national USA Table Tennis Association champion who overcame a debilitating muscle condition in his 20s and 30s to reclaim the title at age 44. “I see 90-year-olds and 10-year-olds.”

Four years after completing radiation therapy, I set out to make my own Ping-Pong dream a reality. My performance goals were realistic: Just be good enough that other players were willing to rally with me. No diving for crazy shots. Remember how to sweat.

I arrived at my local table tennis club cautiously, a breathtakingly out-of-shape woman in a sea of men, some in their 20s, a handful over 80. A man with a kind face invited me to hit with him. After 20 minutes I wilted, but went home happy. My knee didn’t implode.

I returned the following week, hit balls, lost matches. I fumbled with scorekeeping, but who cared about points? Just by playing I felt like a winner.

It soon became obvious that I got too easily distracted by shouts from my opponent or stray balls flying wildly from other tables. I had to stay focused on the little ball. Keep alert to spin. Don’t rush the attack.

Months passed, and almost imperceptibly, my stamina improved. Opponents started to compliment my shots. I won a game. I assumed it was a fluke. Then it happened again.

These days, slamming aces feels wonderful. I keep a water bottle nearby as sweat rolls off me. I stop when tired and praise my flimsy knee for its good work.

By Amy Zipkin, NY Times, Sept. 16, 2016

Three times a week David Gladfelter, an 80-year-old semiretired lawyer, dons a swimsuit, goggles and cap. For the next hour, varying his strokes, he swims 80 laps at a community center pool.

Earlier this year, he traveled from his home in southern New Jersey to the Bronx, where he placed first in three events among 80- to 84-year-olds in a United States Masters swim meet. After more than three decades in the water, he now concentrates on maintaining momentum.

“If you don’t keep it up, times are slowing, swimming becomes more difficult,” he said. He travels up to 20 days a year, entering as many as a dozen competitive meets.

The weekend after Labor Day, Mr. Gladfelter raced unopposed in several competitions in the New Jersey Senior Games to qualify for the National Senior Games, a biennial athletic competition for adults over age 50. Sponsored by the health care company Humana, the next big event will be in Birmingham, Ala., in June 2017.

At the last National Senior Games, held in Minneapolis, nearly 10,000 participants competed in 19 sports--not just swimming and running but also little-known contests like pickleball and retirement standards like shuffleboard. The first National Senior Games nearly 30 years ago drew 2,500 contestants.

These athletes may not capture the headlines at the Rio Olympics and earn big rewards like Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt and Simone Biles. But that isn’t stopping many fitness-oriented older Americans from undertaking rigorous training and testing themselves in competitions.

“The focus is on fun, fitness and fellowship as opposed to financial reward,” Marc T. Riker, chief executive of the National Senior Games Association, said in an email response to questions.

Senior Games are now held in 49 states; North Dakota is joining in 2017. The organization, which is based in Baton Rouge, La., has a partnership with the United States Olympic Committee to foster national interest in sports.

Mr. Riker estimates that 200,000 older athletes compete in these organized games at the local, state and national levels. Some, like Mr. Gladfelter, also participate in masters competitions. While their reasons for participating vary, the late-in-life athletes generally praise the benefits of competition and sportsmanship.

Their dedication sets them apart. In the most recent American Time Use Survey, released last fall by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the typical adult over age 65 averaged 25 minutes of exercise a day. Those 75 and older reported only 12 minutes.

Candace Kennedy-Hess, 62, who lives in Bucks County, Pa., was a cyclist and surfer in her 20s but “hung up the bike between 40 and 55” to concentrate on work and family, she said.

But when her daughter learned that she had breast cancer seven years ago, Ms. Hess entered a charity event, a 75-mile road race sponsored by the Livestrong Foundation. Out of shape, she walked the bike up hills. “I finished the race,” she said.

Now she travels around the country competing in about 25 races a year, training five to six days a week by riding one to three and a half hours daily.

She retired two years ago and works part time in marketing. Cycling can be expensive, she concedes. Her most recent bicycle, one of six, cost $12,000.

Ms. Kennedy-Hess races against women of all ages. “Young 20-year-olds literally decimate me,” she said. At national competitions, older athletes inspire her. “I’d love to have a long life and still be active.”

She qualified in Connecticut for the National Senior Games. In Birmingham, she expects to defend her titles in the women’s 20-kilometer and 40-kilometer races.

Ms. Kennedy-Hess’s return to cycling doesn’t surprise Thomas Prohaska, dean of the College of Health and Human Services at George Mason University who has studied what motivates older adults to exercise. “A big predictor of exercising when you’re older is if you did it when you were younger,” he said. For older athletes, exercise becomes part of their identity, he added.

Pickleball has become a way of life for Hubert Townsend, who will turn 66 on Oct. 6 and played collegiate tennis and table tennis at the University of Wyoming. The sport, which had 2.5 million devotees last year, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, a Silver Spring, Md., trade group, is played on a badminton court, with a lowered net, using oversize paddles and a Wiffle-like ball instead of a shuttlecock. (By comparison, there are 18 million tennis players.)

“It took about 30 seconds to pick up,” said Mr. Townsend, who is on the court 15 to 20 hours weekly. As a volunteer, he travels around Wyoming to promote the sport at clinics for the USA Pickleball Association. An estimated two-thirds of the players are over age 60.

During a recent visit to his son in Sioux City, Iowa, Mr. Townsend played every day. In June, he flew to an advanced clinic in North Carolina to improve his game.

Although athletes need to compete in only one state competition to determine national eligibility, Mr. Townsend expects to play in four: Wyoming and Colorado this past summer, and Nevada and Utah in October.

The final stop on his current itinerary is St. George, Utah, a desert community near the Arizona border. He is already registered for the Fall Brawl, a pickleball tournament sponsored by the city. He considers it a warm-up to the Huntsman World Senior Games, also in St. George, which is an annual sports mecca for seniors.

Nancy Shute, NPR, April 18, 2016

When it comes to getting old, some of us are a lot better at it than others. If I’m going to live to be 95 I would much prefer to be healthy, cogent and content. So I want to know the secrets of the healthy and very old.

Fortunately, scientists are starting to figure that out, “The good news is that there’s a lot we can do about it,” says Dr. Luigi Ferrucci, a geriatrician and scientific director at the National Institute on Aging. He wants to see more and more people in that state of “aging grace.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes for a robust old age because my dad just turned 95. On his birthday, he pruned trees in the yard, took a walk, played a little online solitaire and had dinner with the family. We stayed up late and laughed a lot. Last week he did his taxes--the old-fashioned way, with a pencil, a calculator and a stack of IRS forms.

Clearly Dad has genetics in his favor; his father lived to be 97. But genes aren’t fate, Ferrucci says: “There’s some destiny; we are children of our genome and what we inherit from our parents. But we can do a lot to avoid the destiny that was predisposed to us.”

Studies have found that genes are a factor in extreme longevity just about 20 percent of the time, but being physically healthy while very old is much more likely to run in families. Clearly those families must be doing something right.

To find out, in 2009 the NIH launched the IDEAL study, which focuses on the families of people who were able to delay or evade ill health in their 80s and beyond.

They’ve already gotten some physiological clues. Healthy old people are much more likely to have a lower resting metabolic rate, Ferrucci says, which means that their bodies are still working efficiently. “They have energy left for other activities,” he says. “It allows them to do many, many things during daily life.”

The lucky ones also tend to have fasting glucose numbers more typical of people in their 20s. Obesity and lack of exercise increase the risk of insulin resistance, so keeping weight under control and staying active from early adulthood can help there, Ferrucci says.

Other studies, including the landmark Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging, have found that participants’ attitude about the inevitable losses of aging matters, too.

“Some of them thought that aging sucks--your friends die, you get disease, you can’t do whatever you want, you can’t eat and drink what you like,” Ferrucci says. “But others thought aging was not so bad.” And people who had a positive view of aging at age 40 had significantly less cardiovascular disease later on.

“How that works will require a lot more work from us,” Ferrucci says. “But clearly these people have found ways of behaving and thinking and interacting with the environment and other people that works for them.”

I have no idea what my dad’s fasting glucose level is, but I’ve got to think that still doing his own yardwork and playing duplicate bridge has got to play a role in his good health. That and the fact that when I ask him how he’s doing he says “fantastic,” even when I know that’s a stretch.

Aging Muscles and Weakness

It does not have to be this way

Aging Muscles and Weakness

By: Laurence T. Gayao MD, Fitness Doc

Kobe Bryantrecently announced his retirement from the basketball after the NBA’s 2015-16th  season. He is undeniably he is one of the best basketball players of his generation who after a superb 20-year performance began showing lately some obvious decline in his performance as shown by his much lower…

By James Gallagher, BBC, 15 May 2015

Regular exercise in old age has as powerful an effect on life expectancy as giving up smoking, researchers say.

The analysis of 5,700 elderly men in Norway showed those doing three hours of exercise a week lived around five years longer than the sedentary.

The authors, writing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, called for campaigns to encourage fitness in older people.

The study comes as a charity warns about low levels of exercise.

In the study--conducted by Oslo University Hospital--found both light and vigorous exercise extended life expectancy.

Official advice in the UK recommends 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week in the over-65s.

The trial tracking 68 to 77 year olds found that doing less than an hour a week of light exercise had no impact.

But overall those putting in the equivalent of six, 30-minute sessions of any intensity, were 40% less likely to have died during the 11-year study.

The report said: “Even when men were 73 years of age on average at start of follow-up, active persons had five years longer expected lifetime than the sedentary.”

It added that physical activity was as “beneficial as smoking cessation” at reducing deaths.

The study comes as the British Heart Foundation publishes a report warning people are getting too little exercise.

Its analysis shows that the percentage of adults doing no moderate exercise is:

69% in Portugal 55% in Poland 46% in France 44% in the UK 34% in Croatia 26% in Germany with Netherlands doing relatively well at 14%

Julie Ward, from the charity, said: “Regular physical activity, whatever your age, is beneficial for your heart health and ultimately can help you live longer.