Put simply, regular exercise is probably the single best way to maintain your mental and physical health as you age. In addition to providing many benefits, it also reduces the effect of most other physical ailments (massive surgical incisions aside).
We are all looking for that magic bullet that is going to keep us young and healthy, and well, exercise is it. In medical manuals, textbooks, and clinical studies, you will find the phrase “regular exercise” in the treatment section of pretty much any adverse health condition you can imagine.
That’s because exercise effects several different physiological systems, spreading its healthfulness to every single part of the body. Let’s look at how exercise can benefit your health.
Boosts Circulation
Exercise increases circulation, which helps prevent vein trouble. If you have a desk job, your rear end takes an 8 hour beating every day of the week, and by the time Saturday rolls around, many of us are tired that we decide to spend the weekend watching TV and, of course, do so sitting down. How ironic!
After a few weeks of that kind of treatment, our veins may feel they are about to burst and about the only thing to do is dangle upside down by the ankles to get at least some of the blood flowing back up into the body!
Even if you are not a senior yet, if you don’t take care of yourself now, you may wake up and find that your veins have resigned and gone to Hawaii for a permanent vacation. But what can you do about it? That’s where exercise enters the picture.
Exercise is the best thing you can do for your veins. Exercise helps in a couple of ways, the first being that it clears your veins of excess blood. Your heart is a pumping demon, but it still doesn’t produce enough power to push the blood all the way through your arteries (the vessels that carry blood away from your heart) and then make it back through the veins (the vessels that carry blood towards your heart). So the muscles pitch in to give the heart a break.
Each time the muscles in your legs contract, they squeeze the veins that are nearby, forcing the blood inside of them upwards and towards the heart. The reason people pass out when they lock their knees is because the bones take all the weight and the muscles get to relax.
When the muscles don’t contract, the blood doesn’t make it back to the heart, or the brain, and that’s when you wake up on the ground wondering who the heck laid you out. But that’s not all. When your muscles aren’t forcing the blood back to the heart, it begins to get backed up in the veins, causing them to swell and stretch past their normal capacity, which is the cause of varicose veins. So you can use exercise to avoid pain and swelling in the legs, and also avoid ugly veins.
Therefore, exercise is good for the veins…got it, but I still don’t feel like getting up at 6 in the morning to go jogging.
Fine, how about this: Exercise helps control your blood sugar and sensitivity to insulin and thus reduces inflammation in the body and helps you maintain a healthy weight.
Those four factors are HUGE when it comes to maintaining your health and a weight as you age.
According to the American Diabetes Association, more than 1 in 4 seniors has diabetes.
The Centers for Disease Control report that in 2011 35% of U.S., adults aged 20 years or older had prediabetes (50% of adults aged 65 years or older).
Those are people that are psyching themselves up to get type II diabetes, which has a profound effect on both health and lifestyle, and it can be minimized, avoided, or even reversed in some cases, using regular exercise and proper diet.
How is this possible?
Exercise has some very peculiar effects on muscle tissue. When your muscles contract, it tells the muscle cells to absorb sugar from the blood, just like insulin does. This helps you out in two ways. For one thing, it obviously lowers your blood sugar immediately, but it also makes it so your body requires less insulin to absorb blood sugar. As a result, your blood sugar levels are lower on average.
I cannot express to you in words how important that is!!
Insulin, while absolutely vital to sustaining life, can kill you in high doses over a prolonged period of time. But why are insulin levels so important?
When you eat poorly and don’t exercise, your body needs a lot more insulin to lower your blood sugar, and your blood insulin levels start to climb. Over time, your body becomes tolerant to those high levels of insulin, and it requires even more insulin to get the job done.
Just like a drug addict who needs more and more crack to get high each time, your cells eventually need insane amounts of insulin just to get the energy they need to survive. When this happens, you are already pre-diabetic. If that pattern continues for long, you will develop type II diabetes in no time.
If it continues after you become diabetic, you will suffer from increased inflammation, which will cause sensitive cells, like those in your blood vessels, to deteriorate. When that happens, the blood vessels die off and your body doesn’t get the oxygen it needs and you start to lose fingers, toes, and whatever else is not getting good blood supply, ending any dreams you had of becoming a professional pianist – or whatever!
When you exercise however, your insulin levels go down, your body becomes even more sensitized to insulin, lowering the amount of insulin your cells require, and thus lowering blood insulin levels even more.
So exercise alone is something that can make or break your golden years by helping you avoid the chronic irritation of type II diabetes.
If you aren’t entirely sold on that monthly gym membership yet, that’s fine. Exercise doesn’t have to be drudgery.
There are tons of activities you can do that will get you the exercise you need and that are also enjoyable.
Popular activities include tennis, badminton, gardening, hiking, martial arts and boxing, rock climbing, skiing, ice skating, biking, taking a ballroom dance class, going to a Latin dance club on the weekends, doing yoga, Zumba, and even Tai Chi.
There is an activity for everyone. Don’t count an activity out until you’ve tried it. My experience has taught me that the more you learn about something the more you appreciate it. Many people love learning a new skill too, it might even be beneficial for you to pick something you are not that good at yet so that the learning process serves as motivation for you to do it.
If you try one activity and it doesn’t work for you – don’t give up! There are dozens more. Once you do find it though, it will add another dimension of happiness and fulfillment to your life that you will never want to live without.
