THE TOP 14 FITNESS TRENDS FOR 2020 The most popular fitness trends change every year as you can see comparing this survey with last year’s post The Top 12 Fitness Trends for 2019 and the post two years ago The Top 10 Fitness Trends for 2018. Here are excerpts from the new 14th annual survey from the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) published in its Health & Fitness Journal, Worldwide Survey of Fitness Trends for 2020. For the survey, the authors identified 38 possible fitness trends for 2020 and received responses from more than 3,000 fitness professionals who ranked...
START EXERCISING AT ANY AGE Here’s a New Year’s resolution I think we can all subscribe to: Get fitter. As we grow older, we need to keep active more than ever. But perhaps you haven’t worked out for years—or maybe never—and don’t especially know how to start exercising. If this is you, I’m giving you excerpts from two Cleveland Clinic online articles. The first is a February 2016 piece titled You Can Start Exercising After Age 60—Here’s How. Here are six practical tips to get you going. Get the go-ahead If you haven’t seen a doctor lately, that’s your first stop. He...
REDUCE YOUR ALZHEIMER’S RISK WITH THE MIND DIET The holiday season would seem like a lousy time to talk about diets. Yet, you can start following the MIND Diet and still enjoy those fantastic Christmas-time feasts. You’ve probably heard of the DASH diet (the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) for reducing blood pressure and the Mediterranean diet for heart health. Well, the MIND diet is a hybrid of these two. (MIND is the acronym for Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay.) Its goal is to reduce Alzheimer’s disease, other types of dementia, and the decline in brain health that normally occurs...
TO STAY SURE-FOOTED—KEEP UP YOUR MOBILITY I’m sure you, like me, have noticed your muscles getting a little stiffer over the years. And you probably don’t feel as flexible as you did when you were younger. However, not being flexible directly affects our mobility. Mobility can be looked at in a couple of ways: There is joint mobility, which is moving a joint or a group of joints—such as your hips or shoulder—through a full range of motion. And then there’s total-body mobility or how your body moves as a unit. For that you need multiple body parts to work...
YOUR GUT MICROBIOME CAN FORETELL YOUR FUTURE I just finished finishing reading Brain Maker [2015, Little Brown & Co., $28 ($12 at Amazon)], a fascinating book by David Perlmutter, MD. Its subtitle, The Power of Gut Microbes to Heal and Protect Your Brain—for Life, pretty much explains its subject matter. You are home to some 30 to 50 trillion microscopic creatures, mostly bacteria, both inside and outside your body. These bacteria create a micro-ecosystem called the microbiome (along with fungi, viruses and archaea). Your gut hosts by far the most bacteria Dr. Perlmutter, one of the nation’s leading neurologists, explains...
PLANKS —THE BEST EXERCISE FOR PUTTING BACK PAIN BEHIND US I keep reading where doing planks is one of the most effective exercises we can perform. So along with my hip stretches, I’ve added planking to my morning exercise routine. The basic plank is simple: All you need do is hold a push up position while resting on your forearms. But holding the position had been a bit of a challenge. I started with doing 3 sets of just 15 seconds each, and have now worked up to 3 sets of a minute each. Plank Benefits Doing planks is the...
MINDFUL EATING FOR THE HOLIDAYS I was intending to write a post this Thanksgiving week on how not to gain weight over the holidays. But you’ve seen all the suggestions many times before: snack wisely, don’t go overboard on appetizers, watch your portion sizes, limit desserts, limit liquids, skip seconds. In other words, deprive yourself and take the fun out of Thanksgiving (or Christmas) dinner. You don’t need to hear all that again. Matter of fact, from what I’ve read depriving yourself can actually lead to increased cravings and overeating. If you don’t eat that holiday dish you really want...
FALL PREVENTION —TALES & TIPS I’ve had periodic falls with resulting sprains and broken bones ever since I was a kid. Mostly, these resulted from doing foolish things—like jumping off the roof of my garage when I was ten. But, now as I age, I seem to be taking more tumbles—at least once a year. I’ve fallen three different times during half-marathons, luckily I was able to finish each. I also fall now and again while doing everyday pastimes. Several years ago when I lived up at Lake Tahoe, I fell on an ice patch while fetching a newspaper in...
ANXIETY —FINDING RELIEF WITH EXERCISE Like many folks, I have a certain amount of stress in my life. But some people I know are actually experiencing anxiety, which seems a step beyond stress. I wanted to know the difference so I went online and read a few articles. I found that stress comes in response to external causes, such as an overload of work or having to give a speech in front of a group. Stress subsides once a situation has been resolved, like catching up with your work or after giving the speech. Anxiety, on the other hand, is...
CHRONIC INFLAMMATION —HOW IT CAN ACCELERATE YOUR AGEING Lately, I’ve been seeing more mentions in both print and online of inflammation and its role in disease. So, I decided to research it a bit. I found that there is both the good & the bad; Acute inflammation vs. chronic inflammation Acute inflammation is your body’s response to protect and repair your body from an injury—say when you strain a muscle or from an infection such as the flu. With these, your immune system sends a host of white blood cells to fight the problem. You can see this form of...
