It’s no secret that as you age sometimes you have to deal with more unpleasantness than you did in your youth. As a kid your biggest worry might’ve been what movie to watch, where you were going to play with your friends, or the mystery meat at lunch that may or may not still be alive. Exercise is usually not very high on. that list. Now as an adult you have to deal with work stress, taxes, weird hair growing in places you didn’t know existed, taxes, random joints in your body making odd noises or pains, taxes, and to top it all off you just learned that your body may or may not be a ticking time bomb for two different age related diseases and you now have to upend your entire life to try to prevent them!!
Two of the most common and impactful age related diseases people are dealing with here in the United States are Osteoporosis and Osteopenia. Osteoporosis has gotten a bit more publicity of the two and is defined by the National Institutes of Health as “a bone disease that develops when bone mineral density and bone mass decreases, or when the structure and strength of bone changes.” It is more common in women postmenopause but, can be seen in elderly men as well. Sarcopenia on the other hand has been coming to the forefront of healthy aging research in the last few years and is defined as “a condition characterized by loss of skeletal muscle mass and function”. Both happen as we age, both involve the progressive deterioration of our bodies, and both suck. Luckily, they both can be mitigated with exercise.
Here at Elias Sports Performance (ESP), we have four main ways we help promote healthy aging as it relates to osteoporosis and sarcopenia during our adult fitness sessions. We ensure progressive overload of the resistance exercises we prescribe, we utilize some form of jump training with all of our adult clients, we have our clients produce force quickly with some form of medicine ball throwing, and we put an emphasis on core training (maybe not in the way you think so keep reading!)
- Progressive Overload
If there is one single thing I want you to get from reading this article and tolerating all my jokes, it would be this one principle. Essentially it all boils down to doing things just a bit harder than you did last time. This could come in the form of adding just a little bit of extra weight, or adding an extra rep, or adding an extra set. As long as you’re adding a little bit of something so that your body has to adapt. That adaptation overtime leads to stronger and stronger muscles which in turn keeps the sarcopenia monster away. This progression also imparts forces upon your skeleton leading to stronger and denser bones.
2. Jump Around
Jumping is an important part of our program at ESP. Not everyone does a full classic jump like you might expect. We have people in our sessions doing everything from a one legged jump onto a box, to a slow calf raise. We want to meet people where they are at when it comes to our jump variation so we mitigate the risk of injury, but we do want to make sure all of our clients here can learn to produce force quickly, as well as absorb force quickly. Jumping has been shown to have great improvements in osteoporosis specifically in the hips, provided the person doing the jump training is using an appropriate jump variation. From a muscle strength perspective jumping allows us to train the ability to produce force in the lower body quickly. As fitness professionals we refer to this style of training as dynamic effort training which has been shown to have great results in getting people stronger. Adding strength is what we want when it comes to making sure we’re keeping those muscles healthy to deal with any Sarcopenia setting in as we age.
3. Throw Stuff Really Hard
I like to think of medicine ball training as jumping for the upper body. All the benefits I just described for jumping and the lower body can be applied with proper medicine ball training. The key details here though are that you need to throw a ball that is light enough, so every single rep is high velocity, and you catch the ball when it comes back to you so that your body absorbs the force.
- Iron Core Exercises
It might be easier to talk about what core training is NOT first before I tell you all the cool secrets on how proper training helps you as you age! Core training is not 1000000 reps of spine contortions on the ground, or trying to balance on a board while waving your arms in every direction possible, and it is definitely not wiggling your legs on the ground for 1 hour while you lie down in freezing cold water while an overly aggressive man at the empowerment retreat you got swindled into yells
at you. Core training is a combination of some exercises designed to take your core musculature through a full range of motion (knee raises, straight leg sit ups, etc.) and exercises that help the body learn to brace and resist motion (plank, bird dogs, etc.). Targeting the core musculature in this way allows us to not only improve the muscular endurance of our core, which in turn helps our posture and balance, but also makes us strong through a full range of motion.
CJ Stop Writing And Just Tell Me What To Do:
These are just 4 key components in a holistic exercise approach to healthy aging so that we can not only be here for a long time, but have a good time as well. If you care even a little bit about how you will feel physically in the next 5-10 years, then healthy aging needs to be a part of how you structure and think about your exercise routine. Make sure when you exercise you have:
- A system to make things harder week after week
- An appropriate and safe form of Jumping
- A medicine ball you can throw really fast
- Proper core training