Hi! friends, I am Dr Milind Pimprikar. And you are listening to fighting fit Fridays with Dr. Pimprikar. today we are going to make people run with us who are in their fifties into healthy sixties. We must realise that all of us are going to grow old though we are reluctant to accept this universal truth. So, if it is a fact why not age gracefully?
One suddenly realises that once jet black the hair has gone grey. They have grown scanty as well. The belly is pouting out. One struggles to hide the bare scalp. The colour of the hair does not support you for long. Mirror becomes ruthless and starts telling you the truth. You feel breathless while taking the stairs and here the warning bell rings……. till now you have been running around settling the family and have seen through children education, you never looked after yourself, once a sportsman in college days are merely reduced to medals and cups in the showcase or for those who never indulged in any kind of physical activity start thinking about exercise. Yes! This is the time one realises and usually you have crossed the age of fifty for this revelation.
Today we are going to talk about how we reconnect with the good old days when you actively exercised or for those who never did, how can we start doing exercise. NO AGE IS BARRED AND IT IS NEVER TOO LATE.
How can we have a head start?
First and foremost is getting oneself checked by a physician as heart issues can be accentuated and it is imperative to rule out any myocardial ischaemia by getting an ECG done. A simple test which one could do is, to make an individual walk 50 mt. or climb a flight of staircase to evaluate the perceived exertion. A blood pressure of more than 200 systolic and ischaemic changes in the ECG should be treated first. Although they are not absolute no, no for exercise but need to be sorted out before you start exercising.
Now let us take for example people who have been inactive for all their lives and have never indulged in any sort of physical activity.
For them the first goal is to start somewhere. (START LOW AND GO SLOW) It may not be going to the gym or taking up serious exercise and stuff but simple measures like taking stairs instead of an elevator, if you are visiting a mall, parking your vehicle a little away and taking a walk, decreasing your sitting time, even walking inside the house several time in a day, with ultimate goal is to achieve 30 min. of moderate activity per day should be sufficient to give you health benefits.
Now, let us come to another group of people who are generally active, they have gone to fitness centre some or other time or are irregularly irregular attending the gym. The goal here is first to regularise the exercise behaviour and be regularly regular as far as possible. One should hit the gym at least 4 times a week.
Then slowly increase the volume of aerobic exercise. stationary bicycle or treadmill walks are ideally suited for this although some of these people may have arthritis and may not be suited for walking on a treadmill, they can resort to elliptical trainer to achieve the aerobic fitness.
The typical programme should be a warmup with light walk for 10 min.
Stretching of all the muscles for 15 min. which is followed by moderate intensity aerobic exercise on a bicycle or a treadmill. The session ends with a cooldown walk for 5 min. and stretches for 15 min.
Resistance training in the form of free weights can be added 2 times a week which helps improve mood, sleep pattern and overall health. Care should be taken not to hold the breath while lifting the weights as this can give rise to fainting attacks in elderly population. The word of caution is, don’t be heroic, you don’t have to lift heavy weights to be fit. And you are not proving anything to anybody. Nobody is going to judge you by amount of weight you lift.
When it comes to women in the same age group, a lot of them complain of neck pain, low back pain, shoulder pain and headaches. They are also associated with mood fluctuations, feeling of loneliness and depression. This is more so in premenopausal women, where hormones are playing a role and in recent past studies have shown that, the exercise indulgence can grossly improve these symptoms. There is no point in just attending the orthopaedic consultation and gulping down medicines. Orthopaedic surgeons also have a role to play in the sense, they can create awareness regarding exercise as a part of prescription. Again 4 days of cardio and 2 days of strength training is good enough to achieve the desired results.
We also need to understand that, some of these people may be taking certain medication for may be diabetes or blood pressure. These are very common after the age of fifty and should be disclosed to the trainer training you.
Certain medication for blood pressure may limit the endurance activity as some drugs will reduce the cardiac output ( which means these reduce the amount of blood pumped by the heart every time it beats) this will reduce the availability of oxygen to the working out muscles and early tiredness will set in. some can even have fainting attacks hence, moderation is the key.
Anti-diabetic medicines lower the blood glucose. Similarly, exercise helps utilize sugars and thus can cause hypoglycaemia. Which means reduced sugar levels causing sweating and dizziness. Diabetics should always carry a sugar containing sports drink when they take up exercises to avoid this complication.
Thus, it really does not matter when you start exercising in life. Start tomorrow if you haven’t. enhance to moderate exercises, if you are already doing one. You are already fifty, don’t crawl into sixty with a bunch of medicines. Start walking, progress to jogging then to running and enter sixty with bold running steps.
To conclude let me end with saying you are fifty now run into your sixties. Keep yourself fighting fit and keep running.
Here we come to an end of this episode. You can hear me on VTLPODCAST and all leading podcast platforms on every Friday. If you have liked the views, please share like and comment.
Thank you for listening
