If you're searching for an all-natural way to lift your mood, preserve muscle tone, and protect your brain against the decline that comes with aging, look no further than the closest mirror.
One of the most powerful means of reaping these benefits is exercise — and in many cases, you already have everything you need to get it: your own body.
As we age, two forms of exercise are the most important to focus on: aerobic exercise, or "cardio," which gets your heart pumping and sweat flowing, and strength training, which helps keep aging muscles from dwindling over time. Most of the time, they don't require any fancy equipment or costly classes. Read on to find out how to incorporate both forms of fitness into your life.
Aerobic exercises like jogging may help reverse some heart damage from normal aging.
Many of us become less active as we get older. Over time, this can lead some muscles in the heart to stiffen. One of those at-risk muscles is in the left chamber of the heart, a section that plays a key role in supplying the body with freshly-oxygenated blood.
A recent study split 53 adults into two groups, one of which did two years of supervised exercise four to five days per week while the other simply did yoga and balance exercises. At the end of the study, published in January in the journal Circulation, the higher-intensity exercisers saw significant improvements in their heart's performance. Those results suggest that some stiffening in the heart can be prevented or even reversed with regular cardio.
"Based on a series of studies performed by our team over the past 5 years, this 'dose' of exercise has become my prescription for life," Benjamin Levine, the author of the study and a professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern, said in a statement.
Strength training moves like Tai Chi are best for preserving muscles against age-related decline.
Strength or resistance training can take many forms, but it typically involves a series of movements geared towards building or preserving muscle.
Tai chi, the Chinese martial art that combines a series of flowing movements, is one way to strength train. The exercise is performed slowly and gently with a high degree of focus and a special attention paid to breathing deeply. Since practitioners go at their own pace, tai chi is accessible for a wide variety of people — regardless of age or fitness level.
Tai chi "is particularly good for older people because balance is an important component of fitness, and balance is something we lose as we get older," I-Min Lee, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said in a recent Harvard Medical School health report called "Starting to Exercise."
There may be a powerful link between regular cardio exercises, like swimming and walking, and a lower risk of dementia.
A study published this spring in the journal Neurology suggested that women who were physically fit in middle age were roughly 88% less likely to develop dementia (defined as a decline in memory severe enough to interfere with daily life) than their peers who were only moderately fit.
Neuroscientists from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden studied 191 women whose average age was 50 for 44 years. First, they assessed their cardiovascular health using a cycling test and grouped them into three categories: fit, moderately fit, or unfit.
Over the next four decades, the researchers regularly screened the women for dementia. In that time, 32% of the unfit women were diagnosed with the condition; a quarter of the moderately fit women did. But only 5% of the fit women developed dementia.
Despite that strikingly positive finding, the research only showed a link between fitness and decreased dementia risk; it did not prove that one caused the other. Still, the work builds on several other studies that suggest a powerful tie between exercise and brain health.
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