We’d like to commemorate Seniors’ Month with the first in a series of articles on our favourite topic: active aging. Many people are aware that getting regular exercise, and spending less time on the couch, are helpful for their health and well-being, but most people aren’t aware of the dramatic impact these habits can have on the aging process – so much so that physical inactivity and sedentary behaviour (sitting a lot) are considered accelerators of aging. They actually speed up age-related degenerative processes (weakening bone and muscle, reducing cartilage health, reducing cognitive function, etc.), and hasten people towards frailty, hospitalization, and long-term care.
Our society has become extremely sedentary. For those of you who are older now, take a moment to remember how active people were when you were young. When you were a child, you probably walked a fairly long distance to and from school, and spent most of your free time outside running around with the neighbourhood kids, and helping out with chores. As an adult, there’s a good chance you continued to do be active, doing things like growing, hunting and fishing some of your food, cutting and stacking your own firewood, shoveling snow by hand, building your own house or cottage, landscaping your property, and helping your family members and neighbours do the same. Your grandparents were doing all these same activities – they weren’t taking it easy in retirement. Nowadays, people of all ages are much less active. Children aren’t allowed to walk to school alone or run around the neighbourhood unattended. Most people of all ages spend the vast majority of their time sitting, starting at screens – and this isn’t our fault. Our modern world strongly promotes convenience rather than health, and we are all suffering physically and mentally as a result. Our collective fitness and resilience have dramatically decreased, and much of what older people now experience and attribute to aging isn’t actually due to aging – it’s due to poor health.
It’s normal for most of the body’s systems to slowly deteriorate with age. Sarcopenia, for example, is a normal age-related decrease in muscle strength and function. However, sarcopenia isn’t what causes people to lose the strength they need to get out of a chair, off a toilet, or up a flight of stairs. When people do regular strengthening exercise as they age, they maintain more than enough strength to do these sorts of everyday activities, and remain physically able to care for themselves and manage their households independently until end of life (barring a serious illness or health event).
In fact, all the leading causes of long-term care admission (incontinence, fall-related injuries, dementia, and loss of independent mobility) are dramatically reduced when seniors do 150 minutes per week of moderate-to-vigorous cardio exercise, 2-3 days per week of strengthening exercise targeting all major muscle groups, and a few minutes of balance exercise several days per week. Unfortunately, seniors are rarely encouraged to do the sorts of exercise that could help them avoid losing the things they value most – and when they are provided with opportunities to exercise, they’re almost always encouraged to do so at a subtherapeutic (low) level unlikely to result in significant gains – particularly when it comes to strength training.
If you’re interested in pursuing strengthening, cardio, and balance exercise in an effort to optimize your health and independence as you age, keep an eye out for my next columns, in which I’ll be focusing on each of these types of exercise in depth, to help readers understand what our national physical activity guidelines recommend for healthy aging, as well as practical strategies for incorporating each type into your week.
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