Tips For Keeping Active When Elderly

No matter what your age, it’s always important to know how beneficial keeping active is to our overall health. It may not be as easy to keep active in your senior years, but it’s certainly achievable.

Taking regular exercise is vital for older people and can help control various aspects of your health. It can help keep your blood pressure under control, maintain a healthy body weight and keep your cholesterol levels within a normal range.  Keeping your body as strong as you can also helps reduce the risk of having a heart attack and stroke.

As well as keeping your vital organs in check, physical activity will also help strengthen your muscles and bones. Should you take a fall, then the chances of serious injury are lessened and you’ll also recover from any injuries much quicker too.

It’s never too late to start enjoying exercise and how it boosts the body and brain, so what do you need to be focusing on when keeping active?

Flexibility

Start to incorporate gentle stretches into your daily routine. If you find that it’s becoming arduous to reach up for items in the grocery store, or in your cupboards at home, then it’s time you focused on your flexibility and range of movement. Think about which areas of your body often feel the tightest and begin to stretch those parts for a few seconds.

Aerobic endurance

This sounds more rigorous than it is, although it can be as active as you like. The best aerobic exercises that are low impact are walking, cycling and swimming. 

Choose the activity that suits you the most and stick to it for at least six weeks to see some changes. Even if your mobility is poor, you can use walkers for elderly to get you up and mobile and aiming to strengthen your core.

Having a consistent routine in place will result in you feeling much more comfortable in your abilities and overall vitality.

Strength

Our strength is something that we can lose fairly quickly if we don’t use our muscles properly, so it’s imperative to keep your body strength up. If you don’t use your muscles enough, it will soon become noticeable when climbing stairs, rising from a chair, getting out of bed or even just carrying your groceries.

If you feel able to, then strength training workouts will really make a difference to your abilities. It can be as simple as using some dumb bells to help strengthen your major muscle groups – your legs, hip, abdomen, arms, shoulders, back and hips.

Balance

Your sense of balance can be impaired as you get older and unfortunately a lot of injuries derive from falls. 

Once again, simple exercises like yoga and pilates can help you improve your overall balance, should you happen to stumble and lose your footing.

If you incorporate all of the above, then you will see noticeable results in a few weeks. It’s however, crucial that you take it slowly to start with, as you don’t want to be doing yourself an injury when starting a new regime. 

There is no rush, the results will come in time and make sure that you always listen to your own body.

Disclosure: This is a collaborative post.  

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