Fitness For Seniors

Fitness for seniors should include a good, general fitness program that will prepare you for golf and more intense forms of exercise as you build your exercise proggram. Here's a plan for the over 50 crowd, that you may find useful.

There is new evidence that emphasis should be on strength training. For the fifty plus age group, there has traditionally been a concern to focus on weight training to help slow the degeneration of muscle capacity, reduce the reduce the risk of injury. But lately, comparatively new information reported by the American Heart Association points to benefits including reduced risk of heart disease, improving balance and weight control.

The biggest plus from weight-based exercises is that, proper programming will lead to increasing your muscle mass. More muscle cells mean your body has more capacity to burn calories. Fat cells just get stored, muscle cells help increase your base metabolic rate -- your ability to burn the fuel need to perform exercises. Muscle cells will burn fat even while at rest, helping you achieve and maintain a healthier body weight.

This is not to demean aerobic exercise; walking and running are still good, but they do not increase muscle density.

A book by Wayne Westcott and Thomas Baechle, Strength Training Past 50 (Human Kinetics, 1998) cites twelve reasons fitness for seniors should include strength training:

To benefit from strength training, the following factors should be considered when building your program:

I strongly recommend you read the book. It contains very detailed information about fitness for seniors, including weight training techniques, detailed descriptions of exercises, how to choose a physical trainer, nutrition, equipment selection, characteristics of machine and free weight programs (for men and women); and starting weight levels for age categories 50-59, 60-69 and 70-79. The authors have conducted detailed surveys and discuss test results from their strength research programs. This is definitely a book with integrity and experience behind its content.

Finally, the authors outline a series of suggested workouts for men and women. The programs are broken into exercises that are:(a)machine-based; or (b) free weight-based. The programs are for a 10-week period, starting with an introductory phase of five basic exercises, the program is broken into 2-week sections, after which new exercises are added. The authors even provide exercise logs for you to record number of reps, workloads and number of sets for each exercise over time. This fitness for seniors program could be adapted for all age levels. Vary the weight levels, number of reps and intensity of the exercises, and the program outlined here could apply to any age group.

For illustration, here's a link to an example Training Log table format for a 10-week program of machine-based exercises outlined in the appendix. The image shows the first two weeks, but all 10 weeks are provided in the book.

For the list of exercises recommended for the full 10-week program, have a look at the table below:

	Exercise
Order	Week 1-2	Week 3-4	Week 5-6	Week 7-8	Week 9-10
1	Leg press	Leg press	`Leg press	Leg press	Leg extension
2	Chest press	Hip adduction	Hip adduction	Hip adduction	Leg curl
3	Compound row	Hip abduction	Hip abduction	Hip abduction	Hip adduction
4	Abdominal curl	Chest press	Chest press	Chest crossover	Hip abduction
5	Back extension	Compound row	Compound row	Super pullover	Chest crossover
6		Abdominal curl	Tricep extension	Lateral raise	Super pullover
7		Back extension	Bicep curl	Tricep extension	Lateral raise
8			Abdominal curl	Bicep curl	Tricep extension
9			Back extension	Abdominal curl	Bicep curl
10				Back extension	Abdominal curl
11					Back extension

The sample table shows five standard exercises that work the major muscle groups. Once you've made it through 10 weeks, you can continue by mixing machine and free-weight exercises, perform more sets of each exercise or go on to more advanced strength training programs laid out in the book.

The logs enable you to adjust the exercises, weight-loads and reps to tailor it to your strength level and progress. I encourage you to get the book, or visit the authors' website at: humankinetics.com