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Move Your Body

Sitting around all the time won’t do you any favors if you’re trying to stay health and young at heart, not to mention in your body! It’s the opposite, in fact. If you don’t move your body enough, you’re going to age faster and end up with more health problems than you otherwise would have.

Immobility and sedentary lifestyles are risk factors for cardiovascular disease.  It also leads to obesity, which increases your risk for diabetes, kidney disease, high blood pressure, joint pain, and heart attack.  Really…. Is this what you want to look forward to?

Yes, that means you need to engage in that dreaded topic known as exercise. It doesn’t mean you need to join a gym and start doing daily cardio, however. That’s good for you and if you like that sort of thing, then you should do so.

If not, don’t panic because you have other options. Exercise has somehow become synonymous with going to the gym in our society over the last couple of decades, but there’s no reason it needs to be.

Exercise Is Simply Moving Your Body

That means getting up and doing things. Any purposeful activity you engage in that makes you move your body is exercise. Yoga and tai chi are two low-impact forms of exercise that are popular with older people.

Do you want to know one of the best forms of exercise you can engage in outside of a gym? Gardening. Growing a vegetable or flower garden is a great way to get in shape or stay in shape.

Walking is a great form of exercise too. You can walk on a treadmill if you want, but there’s no reason to. You can walk at the mall (some malls have walking clubs), at the park, on the beach, or on walking trails.

Hiking, swimming, and canoeing are also great forms of exercise if you’re healthy enough for them. Bicycling is also favored by many seniors. You can purchase a recumbent or electric bike to make it easier.

A type of exercise often overlooked as such is dancing. Every form of dancing is great exercise. Most towns have a place offering dance classes for seniors and many communities have older adult dances regularly. Some places offer a different form of dance each month -ballroom one month, line dancing the next, and so forth.

Strength training is also a very, very important part of being active.  Strength training is not the same as body building.  It doesn’t mean you have to “bulk up”.  Resistance training is probably a better description.  Even walking can be considered resistance training.

As usual, the most important thing is not what kind of exercise you choose, but that you choose to exercise at all and that you do so regularly. That’s what will keep you young and fit.

One of the simplest and practical programs you can do to integrate this into your life, is the Old School New Body (OSNB) program.  This has been my go-to program for years and it really works well.

You can be as intense or as casual with it as you want.  The F4X resistance training guide is perfect for the working adult or older adult you just want to stay healthy and fit.  As a plus OSNB has some practical nutrition advice included.

If you are looking at a consistent way to integrate more activity into your lifestyle, you ought to look at OSNB.

(Important note: if you’re not used to exercising, get your doctor’s permission before you start!)