Chapter 4: The Baby Boomer’s Exercise Regimen
Everyone hates the word exercise, but it is a vitally important component to health and well being. With so many people striving for improved health, there are gyms opening up everywhere. On top of this, you’ll find countless opportunities to do simple exercise at home.
But, when we are talking about the health and wellness of the Baby Boomer,
there is much more to it than just this.
In fact, it is essential that you install a plan of overall exercise
that incorporates several key types of exercise and movement.
Why Does Exercise Have To Matter?
Since we were children, we were encouraged to get outside and play. Today, the children that aren’t doing this are unhealthy and overweight. Many have problems with learning and attention deficit problems. Much of this can be blamed on the fact that they don’t get out there and play.
As a Baby Boomer, it’s important for you to realize that exercise can do many things for your health and well being. In fact exercise, when done correctly, will actually help you to look and feel younger.
Yes, this could be considered the anti aging tool of a century because it can be that powerful when done correctly.
Have you ever been the type of person that did exercise regularly? If you ever went through a phase of going to the gym and working out, then you know that exercising does make you feel good. It makes you healthier too.
· You are stronger and therefore can accomplish more for longer periods of time.
· Your muscles are lean and fit, which means that they are less prone to injury or pain.
· Your body is working at optimal levels which help to keep the immune system working well.
· Your heart is working hard and therefore becoming stronger with each workout that you do.
· You are likely the right weight which means that you have less chance of heart attacks.
There are many ways that exercising makes a difference in the body and the Baby Boomer can not ignore these facts if he or she is going to improve their overall health and well being.
Now, what do you need to do to gain the benefits that exercise can offer to you?
There are actually three key parts of the exercise regimen that you want to install into your life as part of your regular program. This is not a program that should be done only for a certain time period but over the course of your lifetime as long as your doctor approves of it.
By incorporating these key elements into your lifestyle, you will actually be building a healthier body that will live a longer and healthier life.
The three things that you must take into consideration include these:
· Your Heart: You need cardiovascular training that is centered on improving your heart’s function.
· Your Muscles: Strength training is necessary for you. You need to improve the function of your muscles.
· Your Joints: Flexibility training increases the range of motion and discourages the onset of conditions such as arthritis.
If you don’t believe that it’s important to take into consideration any of these elements, consider these very frightening facts:
When you turn 60, you can look forward to having lost at least half of the strength you used to have. You also won’t be able to count on not breaking a bone if you fall because your bones are much weaker. In addition, your lungs can’t pump out nearly the amount of air as they used to.
But, if take the time to install an exercise regimen like the one we are encouraging you can completely wipe away these risks and improve your health and well being considerably.
How To Do It
First and foremost you should see your doctor before starting any type of exercise regimen. This will insure that your body is healthy enough to handle what you are going to do to it. Don’t worry; you won’t be hurting yourself unless you don’t take this first step.
Once you get the all clear from your doctor, you can begin at looking for
solutions to your exercise needs. First,
start by working on your heart.
Improving Heart Function
To do this, you’ll want to take into consideration the aerobic exercises. If you get in an aerobic exercise program,
you will help improve your heart considerably.
During these workouts, you are pushing your heart to its limits. As you do that, you are also encouraging it to
strengthen. Aerobic exercise improves
your heart’s function.
How much aerobics do you need to get in? For most people, it is necessary to do an aerobic exercise at least three times a week for at least 20 minutes per day. That’s only one hour of your time that you are dedicating to aerobic exercise and you will see improvement.
But, for that improvement to happen, you do need to pay attention to what you are doing. In order to see benefits, you need to get your heart pumping at the right speed. To measure this, you will want to increase your exercise intensity to a level that is no more than 65 percent of your maximum heart rate.
To determine what that is, do this. Start with 220 and take away your age. Then, multiply that number by .65 (you can go as high as .75 if you are physically fit.) You want to get your heart rate to that level for at least 20 minutes three times per week.
Check out the web for ways to learn how to measure your heart rate. Or, a better solution is to ask your doctor
about what your maximum heart rate target should be. When doing this level, it should be difficult
to talk but not so bad that you feel exhausted.
Strength Training
While aerobic training is important, so is that of strength training. Don’t worry; you don’t have to work out so that you have bulging muscles. But, you do need to have some exercise regimen that incorporates building your muscle mass.
Strength training is actually the use of weights and movements that will increase the size and function of the muscles in your body. Although some individuals only think of strength training as weight training, the two are completely different. You don’t want to over develop your muscle groups, but you do want to increase them in the way of health.
Increasing your muscle mass is important for a number of reasons. The key element will be to help you to maintain a healthy weight. You see, lean muscle mass, which is the type of muscle that you develop through strength training, is actually better at burning through stored fat. It also is helpful at burning calories faster. The combination means that they can help you to get rid of stored fat that you have throughout your body.
In technical terms, when you add additional muscle mass to your body, it is able to be more metabolically active than that of the fat that is stored in your body.
By increasing your muscle mass, you increase your metabolism as well. That means that your body remains lean and trim, which is ideal for heart health as well as overall organ health.
But, what if you don’t have weight to lose? Even when you do drop to your ideal weight or if you are already there, it is still quite important for you to take care of this aspects for other health reasons.
Lean muscle mass is important for optimum health. Your body, especially your muscles, are trim and they can then pump blood easier. In addition, they are less likely to be injured or to develop problems later in life. The longer that your muscle groups are healthy, the longer that the rest of your body does well.
If you end up being in a seditary lifestyle because of injuries and just lack of energy (something else that is a benefit from strength training) you can end up with countless health conditions that go along with it.
In addition to all of this, strength training also aids in keeping the heart strong. With the right training, you can increase the pumping power of the heart.
How much strength training you do depends on your needs for weight loss and your current muscle condition. One of the best things to do to gain both this type of exercise as well as aerobic is to join a gym or visit your local recreation center where you can work out weekly.
Again, with strength training like that of aerobic training, a regimen of three times per week is ideal for weight benefit and muscle training benefits.
Keeping each of these functions of your body healthy is something that you absolutely need to do. But, even with aerobic training as well as strength training, there is more that you’ll need to tackle to complete the entire exercise package.
Flexibility Training
Believe it or not, you have to do your stretching. Stretching is yet another key function of improving your health and well being. One of the key reasons that you need to use flexibility training is that of keeping your joints healthy.
Did you know that the onset of arthritis can start any time after the age of 25 (even younger sometimes)?
The arthritis that you feel now is only going to get worse and since it is a degenerative disease, it is likely to leave you with deformed, disabled joints. But, with the help of flexibility training now, you can avoid these conditions all together.
Flexibility training keeps you moving right. By stretching, you help your muscles to stretch and therefore keep them from getting hurt. Your muscles become lithe and limber. You can move like you did when you were in your 20’s, accomplishing the things that you want and need to do. When you increase your body’s ability to move in all directions, you feel younger and your body is actually improving in age, too.
Stretching and toning your muscles and joints is an important part of improving your overall health. With this type of training, you can keep your joints working optimally and you reduce your risk of strains, pulls and sprains significantly.
One of the most common complaints today from the Baby Boomer age is that of back pain. No matter what you may have done to it or what you think is wrong with it, back pain is a very common condition that happens more and more as you age.
But, when you add in a strength training workout to your exercise regimen, you improve the quality of those muscles and increase your spinal’s movement and flexibility. You actually reduce the pain that you may be in and even prevent further injuries from happening to your back or hips, yet another common pain location for the Baby Boomers today.
A flexibility training regimen should be done at least 3 times per week for 20 minutes at a time. If you want to see rapid improvement here, you should try to do some form of stretching each morning and each evening. Just a few minutes of doing this will increase your body’s tone and flexibility and it’s a great way to start and end the day!
Pulling It All Together
Now, does all of that sound like it is just too much to do? It doesn’t have to be.
In fact, really all you need is just 1 hour three times per week. Or, you can break apart these workouts to give yourself less of a lump of time commitment. You need:
· 20 minutes of aerobic training for heart health three times per week.
· 20 minutes of strength training for muscle improvement three times per week.
· 20 minutes of flexibility training for movement and joint improvement, three times per week.
A great way to gain these benefits is to invest in a membership to a gym. To help you to get started, work with a personal trainer, telling them what your goals are. You don’t have to continue working with them but after a month or so of training, you’ll be able to do your workout routine on your own. Just don’t falter from it or you’ll have to start all over again.
For flexibility training, consider taking in a yoga class or another type of easy movement training. This too is something that you can learn and then do on your own if you would like to.
When you do these things, you get to transform your life in so many ways. Consider the people that you know that are over the age of 60. When you meet John and he shakes your hand, do you feel how weak and frail it is? Do you feel his bones and realize that this once very large and tough man is now frail and very weak. You may even feel like you could break his hand if you hold onto it too hard.
Is that the type of handshake that you want to give? Or, do you want to be able to firmly grasp someone’s hand and feel the strength coming through? When you incorporate an exercise regimen like this, you can gain those benefits and so much more.
In addition to this, exercise can actually help to improve your age. Aerobic training as well as strength training helps to stimulate your body to produce growth hormone. This hormone is a key ingredient to improving the health of your individual cells. If you remember, improving each of your cells is important in keeping yourself healthy longer.
Therefore, when your body produces more growth hormone, it can actually reverse the aging that your body has already gone through. That’s because growth hormone actually can restore the health and the youth of each of your cells.
One important thing to realize from this is that through exercising, you can improve much if not all of the damage that you’ve done to your body over the years. You can restore your youth to a degree and then maintain it for some time to come.
Exercise simply must be a part of your life. The Baby Boomer requires this type of movement for benefits that come later on in life, too.
Chapter 5: Supplementing And Hormones
As a combination of the diet and exercise regimens of the Baby Boomer, it is also important to take into consideration supplementation and your body’s hormones, both of which are critical at preserving the body’s health and longevity.
You may ask why you need to add supplements to your diet when you have just started on a healthy diet that’s been described here. The reason for this is really unfortunate for most.
Even with a healthy diet that is filled with just the nutrients from healthy food, you are still not getting all of the nutrients that you need to maintain optimal health. This is due to several key things including the way that your food is grown. For example, the way that your food is farmed has allowed for the soil to be depleted for many of the nutrients that you need. Many of these nutrients can actually help you to improve the longevity of your life.
Supplementation is needed for other reasons as well. Here are some examples of why you need to add the right nutrients to your diet now.
· Pesticides and herbicides are commonly used to help keep bugs off of the foods that are grown. While you think that this is a good thing, it still causes problems for the production of nutrients in the soil.
· The soil itself is often not even authentic soil! Some of the most modern farms are using synthetic types of soil which allow for faster and longer growing seasons that produce more products that’s also good looking.
· With genetic mutation, scientists of have developed fruits and vegetables (not to mention virtually any other type of food that you eat) products that are genetically altered enough to produce the perfect specimen every time. The nutrients get left out.
As you can see, there are many reasons that the foods you eat don’t have the nutrients that are needed to increase the longevity and health of your life. Still, you should also realize that even when you do get the right foods, you still have so many other factors that play a role in the way your body uses them. The sugars that you eat, the fats, and the high amounts of sodium cause the real nutrients to get lost in the mix. Your body doesn’t get a chance to bring them in.
When you don’t get the right types and amounts of nutrients, your body will break down faster with the onset of degenerative diseases. In fact, some studies have shown that with the proper nutrients you can die early. As you know, we are working on keeping you healthy, longer and supplementation can take us there.
What Do You Need In Supplements?
As we mentioned, it is quite important to insure that you are eating a healthy diet, like the Baby Boomer diet that we’ve described. But, in addition to that, supplementing your diet with the right vitamins and minerals will also be important.
Here are some things to remember about supplements in regards to what you should be consuming.
Select supplements that are right for your body. This should take into consideration your age, sex and your current health situation. Remember, you need to insure that the supplements you take will help improve the rate at which you are aging.
Antioxidants are an important part of the supplement that you take. Find one that offers a high amount of antioxidants which help to remove free radicals from your body. They help to deter diseases like heart disease and cancer. In addition, they help each of your organs to work better. Antioxidants also help to stimulate natural growth hormones to be released throughout your body.
You also want the supplement that you select to provide you with the necessary nutrients to help keep your organs running at the highest level. You want a product that will keep problems like heart disease at bay as well as Alzheimer’s disease.
Mood benefiting products are also important. You want a product that will help to relieve stress and improving your general state of well being.
The supplement that you take should also promote a healthy sex drive in both men and women. Not only is that something that you will want to have working optimually, but it also helps to secrete hormones that are necessary for health in the long term.
Look for a supplement that provides cellular rejuvenation. This means that the product will help in the restructure and repair of the cells of your body. You want the supplement to be able to promote this well being in each of the cells of your body.
Your hair, nails and skin should also be aided by the supplement hat you take. You want a product that will promote healthy skin cells and healthy, young looking nails and skin.
You should also look for the supplement to be a time released product as these generally are able to enter the body slowly and therefore are absorbed better into the body. Other products that are water soluble simply get washed away.
Finally, take the time to find out what’s in the supplement. You want to find a supplement that is as natural in composition as possible. You should check to see if