Inactivity Is a Great Enemy of Fitness and Health
as We Get
Older
By Patty Levine -
South Bend Tribune
If you want to age well, you should follow
the marathon road of Johnny Kelley, the holder of the most storied running
career in Boston history.
Kelley started exercising young, and he
never stopped. In the years between 1928 and 1992, Kelley ran the Boston
Marathon 61 times, winning twice. He also ran the New York Marathon 15 times
(winning twice) and made three U.S. Olympic teams.
Kelley ran in his last Boston Marathon in
1992 at age 84, and today he still jogs, swims and works out several times a
week with a trainer.
There is a simple, essential fact about
exercise and your health: Fitness reduces your risk of death. It doesn't get
much more "bottom line" than that.
But even though you know you should be
exercising, something always seems to keep you from even getting started. No
matter what the excuse (including the most truthful reason of them all —
you hate to exercise), know that you're not alone.
More than 60 percent of Americans get little
or no exercise, despite continual reminders about the many rewards of regular
exercise to body and mind.
An even more telling statistic is that one
in three Americans over 50 is completely sedentary.
This means that it's time for a wholesale
shift in the way we live our lives if we want to age successfully, and it's
never too late to start.
There is a middle ground between the perky,
white-haired tennis buffs who show not a hint of sagging muscles or weak bones,
and the grandmother in her rocking chair.
Unless we take some action to the contrary,
as we age, the less physically fit we become. The decline of physical fitness
does not suddenly begin at age 65 but begins in middle age and progresses
steadily. When aging promotes a gradual physical decline starting in middle
age, a downward spiral often ensues.
The experience of feeling weak leads us to
become more sedentary, and this inactivity leads to further frailty. The
important thing to remember is that you do not have to age in the usual manner.
The weather in Chicago was cold, sunny and a
little bit windy this past October when Richard Pappas, president of Lake
Michigan College, ran his first marathon at age 51.
"I've always exercised," he says. "I played
basketball in high school and college and started running when I was in my
30s."
Pappas works out every day doing stretches,
using the Stairmaster and free weights.
"I feel bad if I don't exercise," he
reports, "like I'm not cooking on all burners."
Steve Silcox, chairman of the board of
trustees of Lake Michigan College, ran with Pappas that day. Silcox, 58, has
been running for eight years after 15 years as an avid tennis player. Silcox
trained for the Chicago Marathon by following the 16-week marathon training
schedule advocated by Runner's World Magazine and says that even when he
is not in training he runs five times a week plus weekends.
"Running is like an escape," he says. "I'm
outdoors, I can clear my mind, and I can think."
"Exercise," says Dr. Stephen Simons, a
physician with South Bend Orthopaedic Surgery and Sports Medicine and a
marathoner himself, "is the closest thing we've got to the fountain of
youth."
A study by Dr. Ralph Paffenbarger of
Stanford that followed more than 17,000 Harvard graduates for 25 years found
that expending at least 2,000 calories a week in exercise (roughly equivalent
to jogging two hours a week) adds a year or more to life. Moderate exercise can
reduce the risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, osteoporosis, diabetes,
colon cancer and clinical depression.
According to Simons, you don't have to have
been an athlete when you were younger. Neither do you have to run for decades
like Kelley to be fit as you age. The key, he says, is to keep exercising if
you want to maintain strength and prolong life.
A study of members of the 1972 Olympic
rowing team showed that even men who were elite athletes in their youth were no
better off than "couch potatoes" if they stopped working out.
But how far can an older athlete push the
limits, and just how good can you be as you age? You may not be as fit, fast
and strong as you were in your youthful heyday (assuming you had one), but,
says Simons, you can be a lot fitter, faster and stronger than you might think,
even if you resume exercise after years of sloth.
For example, no matter what you do, your
aerobic capacity, or VO2 max — the maximum rate at which the heart, lungs
and muscles can burn oxygen to make energy — declines with age. Several
studies have shown that it falls at a rate of 10 percent per decade after age
25. With regular, aerobic exercise, it declines at half that rate.
Your muscles are another biological wall.
Even though muscles can and do get bigger and stronger with use, we are born
with all the muscle fibers we are ever going to have. There is a decline in
muscle mass because of a decrease in the number of motor nerves that activate
muscles. The biggest factor in the decline of athletic performance with age is
muscle atrophy. But it pays to stay active to keep muscles strong as you
age.
Studies have reported that an active person
will hit this biological wall at 95 or even 100, whereas an inactive person may
reach this threshold at 60.
The muscles of people who lift weights
regularly are bigger and contract with greater force than those of people who
don't. Scientists also have found that some types of muscles age faster than
others.
Simons says that Type I muscles that are
used for speed seem to fatigue more quickly and decline more rapidly with age
than Type II muscles that are used for endurance. This might explain why older
athletes can't run or swim as fast as young ones but can do quite well in
endurance events.
The bottom line, Simons says, is that
inactivity, more than age per se, is the great enemy of fitness and health.
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