Amazing, isn’t it, how many virginally ignorant devotees of the health club culture there are today? They stumble about hi-tech gymnasiums, blind to the hazards of their glitzy environment. For one, they don’t realise that gym machines talk with forked tongues. Naïve and trusting, they haven’t learned to mistrust those brightly lit exercise machines that promise to tell them the number of calories they’re burning as they climb, walk, jog, and cycle.
Like all machines with tiny computerized brains, these are usually hopelessly inaccurate. They’re intended to flatter the trainer with inflated figures. At the American College of Sports Medicine Conference a few years back, the results of a study of men weighing 150 lbs (68 Kilos), exercising moderately on an elliptical trainer, showed that they burned about 4 to 5 calories per minute. This was 40 to 80% less than the figures calculated by the bird-brained machine!
Go into locker rooms and you’ll witness showered enthusiasts pawing like bulls in the Corrida de toros. See them wiping their feet dry on the communal mat, strategically placed at the border between showers and dressing room. See them sharing and spreading the athletes’ foot bacteria being cultivated in the damp and contaminated fibres of the shared mat. See them wondering where the hell they picked up the scratchy foot syndrome?
Notice, too, how many guys in the gym, training around you, still boast barbed wire tattoos on their swelling biceps? As a fashion statement, this is really out; razor wire was never cool. To prove ripping toughness, wear the real thing. Wrap a length of fashionable razor wire around the top of each arm; there’s plenty available on the walls of most upmarket neighbourhoods!
Gyms are often filled with lazy slobs slumped over the handrails of cardio machines such as treadmills, climbers and steppers. This ruins the effect of the exercises. The rails are for assisting balance only. Good, upright posture (core stability), with the spinal support from back and abdominal muscles, will ensure that the legs perform, leaving lungs unimpeded, with no risk of injury to a misaligned spine.
Treadmill or Stationary Bike? If push comes to shove, go for the treadmill. More major muscles are recruited during your work on this machine. It’s also a better weight-bearing form of aerobic exercise. This means stronger bones and less risk of osteoporosis. Further, it will help you develop better balance, agility and coordination than any fixed cycle, without ever becoming a pain in the ass!
For summer trainers, why not take a cold shower immediately before your workout? This can help delay burnout during hot and sweaty exercise as fatigue occurs when body temperatures reach 103.5F. Stay fully hydrated by consuming water before, during and after training. To improve endurance performance, ingest adequate carbohydrates to maintain good blood sugar levels, but remember, if you’re working hard, it is still normal to finally experience fatigue
Actively Mature
Let’s get rid of some of the twisted old clichés first. You’re only as old as who you feel; don’t eat healthy foods, you need all the preservatives you can get; grow old gracefully, not disgracefully; now that you’re retired, you should slow down; to be a picture of health, don’t worry about your frame; being over the hill is better than being under it.
Having inflicted you with this batch of confusion let me confess my real feelings. We don’t stop exercising because we grow old. We grow old because we stop exercising. On paper, at least, I’ve reached the mature years of my life. But, I’m as committed as ever to sharing my life-long enthusiasm for moderate, safe, balanced exercise. Old is a word seldom used in my vocabulary, except to describe antiques or paintings by dead masters (old mistresses are a lot more satisfying!). Fifty percent of the physical decline associated with ageing has to do with our own inactive lifestyles, while the evidence continues to mount to show that regular exercise can slow down the ageing process and keep us looking and feeling good longer.
The greatest threat to our well-being is the physical inactivity that the mature are often encouraged to adopt. I’m going to be writing continually to persuade the more mature readers to totally reject this invitation to decrepitude and, instead, invite you to take the exercise path to extended and vital years of productive living. Use it, don’t lose it!
Sedentary first-world living means that we are now imperilled by inactivity, the dangerous consequence of the technological age. We have machines that can do the work of 100 men in a fraction of the time (a woman?), and we rely less and less on our own mechanical labours.
To prolong and save our lives, we need to reactivate our systems, stimulate our bodies, move more. Happily, research shows that it is possible to achieve fitness through short, moderate, broken sessions of activity throughout the day.
By becoming more adventurous, innovative and imaginative, we can jazz up even the most mundane moments at home, in the car, at work or shopping. By increasing the intensity with which we perform daily, conventional activities, we can enhance fitness levels, look and feel a lot better, and save on gym fees!
The golden rule is to resist modernity’s efficiency mode. Become selectively inefficient, at chosen moments, to force you to become more active. Take more, not less, time to do certain things. Positively push up your activity quotient, to burn extra calories, and force the heart to pump more oxygen-enriched blood to the muscles, which you work harder and make more flexible.
Selective inefficiency will increase fitness. At home, when moving about the house, stretch, squat, lunge, use more movement than is usually necessary.
Never use lifts or escalators; stair climbing is a great heart and lungs stimulator. When vacuuming, do so vigorously. Perform a Mrs Doubtfire; lunge, pull and push, twist and twirl to add resistance and motion to your task. When mopping and cleaning, increase the intensity of your movements. Transform raking leaves into a full body workout; use a manual lawn mower as your mobile gym to increase strength and accelerate the heart rate.
When shopping, park away from the entrances and walk. Before exercising credit cards, walk briskly around the mall or supermarket, as a prelude to the business of consuming. Push a trolley, using it as resistance for shoulder and arm muscles. Squat regularly, to gaze at lower shelves; stretch up to high ones, to lengthen the body and increase flexibility. In the check out line, perform calf raises and stretches.
Start to use your body more fully and it will reward you by becoming a healthier instrument that will enable you to cope with all challenges. Don’t sit, listening to the sound of your arteries hardening, move!
Moving for the Mature
On my recommendation, my 78-year-old neighbour started walking 2 kilometres a day. She’s 80 now, and we don’t know where the heck she is! For those of us wishing to become more active and healthy, walking is an excellent form of exercise for all ages. Walking has many advantages. It is inexpensive, can be done at any time and allows the pleasure of working outdoors. Exercise is one of the great social practices, and it is most enjoyable to walk with others. For safety, it is sensible to walk accompanied, selecting times and locations with care, to place yourself less at risk (a massive Rottweiler makes an admirable companion!).
As a walker, keep away from major roads. Inhaling noxious traffic fumes is hardly conducive to respiratory fitness, and we all know that air-pollution is more than a mist-demeanour! By controlling the pace at which you fitness-walk (a stroll, appreciating the gardens or pricing properties, is not the same), you can govern the level of intensity at which you work. As you grow fitter, this should be increased progressively, just as you can increase the duration of your walk and the distance covered, to enhance the workload as you become abler.
Raising the speed at which you walk will burn more energy, so aim to accelerate your pace slightly each week and vary the pace during each walk. Vary, not only the terrain and pace, but, as the mood takes you, change your gait. Large-step sideways for 15 paces, change leg and repeat; walk on, then add a few skips, hops; walk backwards, introduce variety to your movements and you’ll surprise not only your companions and passers-by, but your body as well.
Swing arms vigorously, elbows bent, to raise the pulse rate, and to improve your condition over time (you want to walk for half an hour, at least 3 times a week) remember to increase the distance you travel at a steady pace, before you begin to raise the speed at which you walk.
For added variety in your actively mature programme, you might also consider bowls as an enjoyable social exercise. Played since the sixteenth century, bowls is anything but a geriatric pastime that popular prejudice would have it. It requires postures descending from the upright stance, to balanced stoops, one leg-advanced step forwards, followed by an assortment of skips and glides as the enthusiastic player pursues the flight of the wood as it curves its way across lush lawns. At its most competitive, bowls requires high-order tactical skill and dexterity and good eye-hand coordination, concentration and some stamina, not to mention a strong back and balance.
At a more social level, with its draconian Edwardian dress-code becoming more relaxed, bowls allows one to compete, corset-less, and most clubs offer coaching to enable the uninitiated beginner access to a really enjoyable form of recreation.