Add this to your favoritesExercise, Fitness, Health, and the Old People
If just a couple of weeks without physical exercise can undermine physical fitness temporarily, decades of the no-sweat, effort-free, push-bottom American life-style can do far worse. Thanks to medical advances, today’s generation has been the first culture in history to be spared the infectious diseases that once killed millions in their prime.
Individuals now live 23 years longer than Americans did at turn of the century. But they do not survive just to die of natural cases; only too often, they self-destroy.
The killers and cripplers of their society are the degenerative diseases, such as heart attacks, hypertension, strokes, respiratory troubles, arthritis, and connective tissue disorders. Individuals rust out long before they wear out, mostly because they fail to put their bodies to proper use.
In the past fifty to seventy-five years, active activity has become the exception instead of the rule for physical fitness, both at home and on the job. Individuals drive wherever others once walked. They flick a switch and machines do their hauling, lifting, pushing, and pulling for them.
On weekends, most individuals get their physical exercise vicariously by following professional athletes on television. What individuals do—and overdo—is as harmful as what they dont do.
Individuals eat a bit much, drink a bit much, and smoke a bit much, and individuals brush off a disturbing fact of life: that they do what they do and do not doing it day-after-day affects how long and how well they will live.
In a now-classic study of the impact of day-to-day habits on physical fitness and wellness, California researchers surveyed almost seven thousand individuals about their smoking, drinking, hours of sleep, breakfast eating, meal regularity, weight, and active activity.
Men who had good habits in 6 or 7 of these fields lived 11 years longer than those with fewer than four; the difference in life anticipation for women with and without good habits was seven years.
Of all healthful habits, physical exercise can be the most significant. Individuals are meant to be vigorous. The “unexercised physique,” even if free from the symptoms of illness, is not at its full potential—not in state of positive well-being.
This frame of mind and physique meets the same definition that the President’s Council on fitness uses to define optimum health: “a reflection of your power to work with vigorous pleasure, without undue fatigue, with energy left for enjoying hobbies and recreational activities and for meeting unseen emergencies.” They say that this relates to how people feel mentally including physically.
The quest for physical fitness and wellness has pulled more than 17 million Americans out of their armchairs and into running shoes. The physical fitness council describes the current trend as “the first peacetime physical exercise boom in history and the first ever to include women and older people.
In one recent marathon in New York City, 423 runners were between the ages of 50 and 60; 41 challengers were over 60. In almost every marathon or endurance race, the oldest runners are likely to get as many headlines as the fastest ones.
This confirmed the expert’s determinations that men and women over 50 are just as capable of physical exercise and derive just as much benefit from it as the young and middle-aged.
For older men and women, physical exercise has an extra payoff — it slows, stops, and even reverses some of the deterioration related with aging. Older individuals who become and remain active may not be reborn, but they surely are regenerated. Physical exercise lops years off their chronological ages.
How does physical exercise do this? It gains the strength, efficiency, and endurance of the muscles of the heart, easing its workload. It seems to slow the tightening of the blood vessels, and some think it may build up networks of small blood vessels through the heart and physique to transport oxygen more efficiently.
All of these things are reduced to the fact that physical fitness and wellness can never be accomplished even by elderly individuals if they do not incorporate a great physical exercise program in their routine.