“Popular workouts to help women stay fit after 50 - NorthJersey.com” plus 3 more |
- Popular workouts to help women stay fit after 50 - NorthJersey.com
- Cardio dance - Examiner
- For Your Health briefs for May 31 - Journal & Sunday Journal
- Health care reform starts with efforts from each of us - The Spokesman-Review
| Popular workouts to help women stay fit after 50 - NorthJersey.com Posted: 01 Jun 2010 11:01 PM PDT Message from Five Filters: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Hot flashes. Headaches. A tummy that won't go away no matter how many crunches you do. Menopause can be especially vexing for women trying to lose weight. As their estrogen levels drop, their testosterone exerts more influence. Because of the ensuing havoc, a woman's body will do what it can to retain whatever stores of estrogen it has. Alas, estrogen is stored in fat. Don't despair, says Leigh Shipman, an instructor with a YMCA in North Carolina. She's been working with "active older adults" for 17 years, and she's seen both men and women lose weight and get fit. "The average American woman should do just fine with one hour of moderate exercise a day," says Shipman, 51. The key is finding the right exercise regimen — one you enjoy, one you look forward to doing and will stick with, says Mary Petters, an exercise physiologist with the University of North Carolina Wellness Center. "There's something out there for everyone," says Petters. "You're never too old to start." We polled Petters, Shipman and Gerald Endress with the Duke University Diet & Fitness Center to find popular exercise classes for women 50 and older: * Zumba: This Latin dance workout originated in Colombia in the 1990s and then became popular in the United States. Classes are almost everywhere. Benefits: It's a full-body aerobic workout that gets you sweating, gets your heart rate up, burns calories — and it's fun. Why it's popular with the 50-plus set: Unlike other dance and aerobic routines, Zumba is less choreographed, more free-spirited. No tricky footstep combinations to memorize. * Water aerobics/swimming: Ten years ago, says Duke's Endress, water exercises focused on folks with arthritis and other joint issues. That's changed. "Water aerobics has really taken off — it's a much more vigorous exercise. ... We even have an aqua boot camp." Benefits: Good cardio, good toning. Why it's popular with the 50-plus set: You may not have arthritis, but at 50 your joints still need more TLC than they did 20 years ago; exercising in water relives the pressure on your joints. * Walking: Walking is the preferred exercise for 25 million women ages 45 and up, making it by far the most popular form of exercise for that group. Benefits: A vigorous daily walk of at least 30 minutes can manage weight, control blood pressure, decrease the risk of heart attack, boost "good" cholesterol, lower the risk of stroke, reduce risk of breast cancer and type 2 diabetes, and protect against hip fracture. Why it's popular with the 50-plus set: You can do it on your own schedule, it's cheap, and it can be a social activity — walking groups, formal and informal, are especially popular with older walkers. * Pilates: Exercises done with or without equipment that focus on core strength, flexibility and balance — the main areas we worry about as we age. Benefits: It can make you leaner and stronger, but the benefits can also help people move more gracefully and efficiently, making it possible to do some of the basic functions of day-to-day life that can become a challenge as we age. Why it's popular with the 50-plus set: It's adaptable. Pilates classes can be grueling enough to benefit a professional athlete or scaled back to accommodate people with less strength and flexibility. Five Filters featured article: Into the Abyss. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Posted: 01 Jun 2010 11:33 AM PDT Message from Five Filters: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. In the winter, it is very common to get bored with doing your cardio workout inside and doing the same thing every workout. One way to add some excitement into your cardio and still get a great workout, try cardio dance. Cardio dance is like an aerobics class, but is more structured as dance. There are many places to give it a try, even in your own living room. How to dress is something to consider. As far as clothes, you can wear whatever is comfortable for you and easy to move in. Make sure you dress as if your going to run, to make sure you are prepared for the bouncing and jumping. Your choice of shoes is important. You will be moving side to side and back and forth most of the time. Running shoes are not made for the side-to-side movement. You can get shoes that are made especially for cardio dance classes or you can wear a good cross training shoe, or even tennis shoes will work fine. You need the wider larger support area on the floor. If you want to try cardio dance, but you feel you don't know the steps well enough, or you just want to cardio dance at home, there are hundreds of videos available. The best way to pick, which one you will like, is to go on you tube and search for cardio dance videos. Watch some of the one that have sample clips and pick which one looks the best for you. Make sure when doing the video at home that you clear a large enough spot so you can do the dance without getting injured. After you feel comfortable that you can do the steps and keep up with the class, there are classes available at almost every health club. In the Twin Cities you can go to mspmag and find contacts and listings for many health clubs and YMCA group classes that are available. If you decide to go to a class, make sure the first one you sign up for is a beginner class and try to arrive early the first time and tell the instructor that you are new. Ask them if you can get a place where you can see what they are doing, and to see if they can give you some tips on learning the steps. Add some variety into your winter cardio workout and you will not get bored with it. Subscribe at the top of the page if you would like to get an email when a new article comes out. Five Filters featured article: Into the Abyss. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| For Your Health briefs for May 31 - Journal & Sunday Journal Posted: 30 May 2010 08:54 PM PDT [fivefilters.org: unable to retrieve full-text content] To be eligible to donate, donors must be 17 years of age, weigh at least 110 pounds and be in reasonably good health. Donors can give every 56 days ... In addition, also offered will be classes in aerobics, yoga, zumba, golf and more.This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Health care reform starts with efforts from each of us - The Spokesman-Review Posted: 29 May 2010 11:54 PM PDT Message from Five Filters: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it.
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No matter where you stand on the health care debate, I think most of us agree that Americans are not doing a good job of taking care of ourselves. The percentage of obese people, the out-of-shape recruits into the military and the problems with inactive, computer-addicted children — they all come at us like rolls of fat. It is not a pretty sight. Our physical woes add up to just one more example of the erosion of personal responsibility, of us not taking care of us. I have always been a preacher of balance in life, and that the higher you rise in your career, the more difficult it becomes to create and maintain that balance between home, family, work and self. But if we are not caring for ourselves, how can we expect to offer the best in any other area of our lives? In September 2008 my husband and I, after months of training, completed the near 200-mile Coast to Coast walk across England. Since then we have walked to the kitchen and into great restaurants as our aerobic activity, and it shows. So when the Spokane Club board of trustees challenged each other to get back in shape, seven of us committed to get fit. We set goals and went through a fitness assessment and body fat measurement, and we offered up several hundred dollars to be paid to the overall winner. We started Jan. 1 and the contest ended with Bloomsday. In the beginning, none of us was in horrid shape, or so we thought. I felt I was in fairly good shape, but my cardio-lung health was only fair and my body fat percentage was, well, embarrassing. The staff at the BBB has been watching this contest and listening to me talk about where I am in my quest to reach and exceed my weight and fitness goals. Their interest offered me an opportunity to get them on the bandwagon, too. The healthier they are, the lower our use of insurance will be and that should translate into lower premium increases for our benefits. So the BBB tossed some money into the pot, the participants had a small buy-in, and I purchased pedometers for everyone who signed up. I really thought the pedometers would show each individual just how active or sedentary they had become. And each person went to a trainer at the Spokane Club to have a full fitness assessment, including that ever-popular body fat measurement. Each week my staff participates in a fitness group meeting. They have number of step contests, share healthy recipes and challenge each other to simply get moving. The BBB contest will not end until mid-July, but we have some folks who have already lost more than 15 pounds. And I have noticed a difference in the snacks people bring in to share. (Doughnut sales in the west end of downtown have seen a steep decline.) Just the practice of writing down everything you eat is a real eye-opener. Back to the Spokane Club board contest: This is a highly competitive bunch. At one meeting, a couple of us arranged for a special treat for Greg Bever, publisher of the Journal of Business. As a participant, we knew Greg was off to a great start, so of course we wanted to undermine him. While salad was being served to the other trustees, Greg was presented with a huge platter of chili cheese fries. I had fellow board members leaving me cookies after my workouts. It was brutal! But an amazing thing happened: We all saw such a change in energy levels and mental health. To a person, we are all feeling so much better and can't imagine going back to our old bad habits. I cannot reveal the winner yet, but we all won in a way. And nobody did some crazy "just eat pomegranates" diet or extreme workout routines. We simply took responsibility for what we put in our mouths and what we did to invigorate and improve our bodies. Collectively we lost more than 100 pounds and added who knows how many years to our lives. Talk about health care reform. Jan Quintrall is president and CEO of the local Better Business Bureau. She can be reached at jquintrall@spokane.bbb.org. Five Filters featured article: Into the Abyss. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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