Keep your spark!
W ant to feel more youthful and energetic? Want to boost your confidence and self-esteem? If the answer is ‘yes’, then it’s time to get physically fit. A strong, flexible body looks younger, and the health benefits go far beyond physical appearance.
Noone disputes that cardiovascular exercise is essential for heart health and weight control. Exercise strengthens your heart muscle and increases flexibility of your arteries. Plus exercise increases your lean muscle mass. A more muscular body burns more calories per day, helping you to manage your weight. But exercising is also important for overall health.
EXERCISE IMPROVES POSTURE
Your muscles hold your skeleton erect by providing tension against your bones, however daily activities can overuse some muscles while others remain dormant. Working weak muscles and stretching tight muscles restores balanced tension, keeping your spine in healthy alignment and taking pressure off the disks and nerves between the vertebrae.
FLEXIBILITY CANNOT BE NEGLECTED
If your muscles are tight, they can cause a reduced range of motion throughout your body. This can give you trouble with everyday activities such as reaching overhead to take a dish out of the cupboard. Becoming more flexible, through a program like Gentle Yoga can make these types of activities safer, and improved flexibility increases the range of motion throughout the body to help you move more easily and safely.
MAINTAIN YOUR STAMINA
The loss of strength and stamina attributed to aging is, in part, caused by reduced physical activity. Inactivity increases with age. By age 75, about one-inthree men and one-in-two women engage in no physical activity.
As neuroscience educator Robert Sylwester notes that ‘mobility is central to everything that is cognitive, whether it is physical motion or ‘the mental movement of information.’ Plants have to endure whatever comes along, including predators eating them. Animals, on the other hand, can travel to seek food, shelter, mates, and to move away from unfavourable conditions. Since we can move, we need a cognitive system that can comprehend sensory input and intelligently make choices.
Once again, the message is ‘keep mobile’.
DON’T FORGET YOUR BRAIN
Learning something new stimulates your neurons to develop new pathways, thus making you smarter. When brain cells die and synapses weaken with aging, your memory fades. Your nouns go first, like names of people, because there’s only one neural pathway connecting to that stored information. The good news is our brain constantly rewires its neural pathways, as needed. So give it a reason to develop new pathways.
LEARN SOMETHING NEW.
Take a class at Goward House and challenge your mind and body. This will stimulate the connectivity of your brain by generating the need for new pathways. Difficult classes are better for you as they will create a greater need for new neural pathways.
RESEARCH SHOWS MORE IS BETTER
Did you know a 21-year study of senior citizens, 75 and older, led by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, funded by the National Institute on Aging, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine June 19, 2003 found that if the subjects participated one day a week in a leisure time activity, this was associated with a 7 per cent reduction in risk for dementia. Subjects with higher participation rates had up to 63 per cent lower risk of dementia. So set your goal and participate as much as you can.
And do it today. It’s essential to start building your cognitive reserve now. Don’t wait. Start building new neural connections now. Do it often! Do it now!
EXERCISE YOUR BRAIN!
Goward House offers French language, Spanish language, Italian conversation, Mah Jong, bridge (duplicate and social), bridge lessons, art and craft groups, billiards, Scrabble and more.
FITNESS CLASSES
Mondays: Tai Chi, strength & balance Tuesdays: strength & balance, Tai Chi for
beginners, line dancing Thursdays: Tai Chi, strength & balance Fridays: gentle yoga, Tai Chi for beginners Goward House, 2495 Arbutus Rd.
Goward House Society is a non-profit organization that operates as an adult activity centre for those aged 50+. For info, visit: gowardhouse.com