Imagine a drug that reduces breast cancer mortality and the risk of recurrent breast cancer by 50%, reduces the risk of colon cancer and type 2 diabetes by two-thirds, and reduces the risk of heart disease, hypertension, and Alzheimer’s disease by 40%. please give me. What’s more, it’s as effective as antidepressants and cognitive-behavioral therapy in combating depression.
The drug exists, says Dr. Edward Raskowski of the Mayo Clinic: it’s called exercise.
“Movement is medicine,” says Dr. Raskowski, a physiotherapy and rehabilitation expert. The health benefits he cites have been repeatedly proven by quality research.
You don’t have to run a marathon to get the benefits of exercise. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that adults can benefit from at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of intense exercise per week, plus at least two weight training sessions.
Mary Edwards, fitness director at the Cooper Fitness Center in Dallas, can meet the CDC guidelines by going to the gym twice a week and walking for 30 minutes for the remaining five days.
But any exercise is better than doing nothing. Studies have shown that people can improve their health by exercising only 10 minutes a week, says Dr. Laskowski. Don’t make perfection an enemy of good.
What kind of exercise is best for you? All exercises are good for your health, but different shapes help you in different ways. As you can imagine, the cardiovascular system gets the maximum boost from aerobic exercise.
Doctors recommended maintaining a stable pace for at least 20 minutes, including cycling, walking, and swimming. That approach still works.
However, in recent years there has been a new focus on high intensity training. Instead of doing something at the same pace all the time, do a short burst of exercise with the utmost effort, followed by a brief exercise or rest period.
This allows you to get all the benefits of traditional aerobic exercise in less time and with some additional exercise. For example, high intensity exercise appears to be more efficient in reducing bad cholesterol (LDL) and improving fasting blood glucose levels.
High intensity exercise is usually done with 85% to 90% of maximum effort. You don’t need a heart rate monitor or other flashy gear to find the right level. Studies show that the perceived movement is about as accurate. If you sprint as fast as you can for 30 seconds and then walk for a few minutes, you’re exercising hard.
“It’s a matter of sprinkling high intensity, short, intense effort and then allowing yourself to return to a modest pace,” says Edwards of Cooper Fitness.
As we grow older, weightlifting becomes more and more important to slow down the loss of muscle and bone density. The CDC recommends lifting weights at least twice a week to move all major muscle groups, including legs, hips, back, abdomen, chest, shoulders, and arms.
“As you get older, everyone will lose bones and muscles,” says Dr. Jonason Sullivan, co-author of a weightlifting book for people over the age of 40. “It’s just a fact of life, but the ideal is to do as much as you can for you.”
Dr. Sullivan, who has worked as a doctor in the emergency room for many years, says he wants to live longer and should not exercise. Instead, your goal should be to stay as healthy as possible for the years you have.
“What we are trying to do is shorten the dying part of our life and lengthen the living part of our life,” he says.
Twice a week, 73-year-old Carol Bateman from Kingwood, Texas, grabs a barbell that weighs about the same as her and does squats and deadlifts. Bateman has been lifting for 14 years. “I knew I was old, so I had to do whatever nature could do to stop anything out of my way,” she says.
Her coach, Andy Baker, who co-authored The Barbell Prescription, emphasizes heavy lifts such as squats and deadlifts that stress the lower back and back muscles. “It reduces that tendency to lose strength, lose muscle mass, and lose bone density,” says Baker. “And there are double benefits to improving balance.”
Ideally, you should combine weightlifting with aerobic exercise. If you’re really busy with time, you can achieve this by adding a few minutes of high intensity exercise after your gym workout. Baker sometimes asks the client to push a weighted sled.
People with time can do weight training, moderate exercise, and high intensity exercise separately in the same week.
Exercise does not have to be done in the gym. Dr. Laskowski says he keeps moving all day, climbing stairs and trying to park a little further away from work.
For high-intensity work, Dr. Raskowski climbs up and down steep hills near his home.
“I accumulate 10,000 or 15,000 steps a day,” he says. “The better you can weave in the activity in a day.”
Write to retirement@barrons.com
..
