Exercising Is Madatory - For Stroke Recovery, for Life Extension - Health - http://maxpages.com/resurrection/The_Importance_of

Aside from the obvious benefits of exercise such as losing weight there are many age-fighting, life- extending benefits.
A sedentary lifestyle contributes to hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), inactive people are twice as likely to develop coronary heart disease as those who are physically active.
They also determined that 23 percent of deaths from nine chronic diseases can be linked to lack of exercise. Those chronic diseases are heart disease, diabetes, stroke, lung cancer, breast cancer, cervical cancer, color ectal cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and chronic liver disease, These statistics alone should be enough to get people off their couches and outside for at least a daily walk!
And there's more. Active people are less likely to develop high blood pressure, osteoporosis, heart disease and mental health problems, such as dementia.
Regular physical activity speeds up your metabolic rate, helping burn calories and reduce obesity. And higher meta bolic rates make the body more resistant to the damage of free radicals, says Dr. Julian Whitaker, in Anti-Aging Miracles: Your Guide to Healthy Longevity (Phillips Publishing). This means better ability to stave off aging. Getting regular physical activity doesn't have to be
difficult. Just get out and do things you enjoy, such as aerobics, bike riding, dancing, swimming, bowling, gardening, golfing, skiing, roller skating, scuba diving and walking. If you're regularly active, you'll benefit.
Aim to exercise at least 30 minutes a day, four or five times per week. If you've been inactive for a period of time, start slowly and build up to your goal in order to prevent injuries and overworking your muscles. Charting your exercise progress helps you see how well you're doing - a potent motivator to continue your fitness program.
Aerobic exercise has been proven to extend life. It im- proves the ability of the heart and lungs to pump blood -and oxygen -throughout the body. A dramatic 25- year study of 17,000 men showed that burning 2,000 calo- ries per week adds more than a year to one's life span. And it's never too late to start -studies show that physical performance doesn't decline very much with age.
"You don't slow up as much as people think," says Al Sheahen, editor of the National Masters News, a magazine for older athletes. " A 40-year-old can be expected to run about 95 percent as fast as he did in his prime (21 to 30). By 50, he can still run 89 percent as fast."
Aerobic exercise isn't enough, however. A total fit- ness program must include weight training. Working with weights to build muscle is extremely important to overall health and fitness -and to extending life.
Muscles Are Good for You -and Your Long Life
Muscle tone is vitally important. In older people especially, using weights to improve strength and muscle tone provides huge benefits. "It used to be thought that I once you lost it at 65, you couldn't get it back," writes physiologist Peter Raven in Practical Life Extension. "But
now it is clear that the benefit of exercise at any age is that it helps build muscle."

Dr. Ben Hurley of the University of Maryland says: '
1"Recent reports show a direct relationship between loss of muscle mass and strength. Strength training can
lead to denser bones, healthful metabolic changes and improved digestion."
At the University of Maryland, volunteers in their 80s do vigorous weight training. At Tufts University, one volunteer was over 100 and still pumping iron!
One way muscle contributes to excellent health is its role in manufacturing HDL, or "good cholesterol." Doc- tors have long known that muscle mass boosts HDL levels.
Another benefit links healthy muscles to healthy eyes! Because muscles have a role in removing sugar from blood, it helps reduce the risk of diabetes and a process called "glycation."
According to William Evans and Irwin Rosenberg of Thfts University: "In the lens of the eye, this sticky buildup of sugar molecules leads to cataracts. Fortunately, mus- cle loss is remarkably reversible. We can make 65-year- old men or women stronger than they have ever been in their lives, as measured by strength tests."
Muscle also helps you to be more aerobically fit. In fact, a 70-year-old man or woman with relatively high muscle mass can have more aerobic capacity than a 30- year-old with less muscle mass, according to the Balti- more Longitudinal Study on Aging. And there's plenty of real-life evidence.
Delores, a retired legal secretary living in south cFlorida, loves scuba diving and daily workouts with hand weights. She also walks at least two miles a day. When Delores heard about a new scuba diving lub for Iwomen, she decided to join. At her first meeting, she
wasn't surprised to find she was the oldest person there -Delores was 75 years old and had just learned to dive three years before! I The club planned a dive for that coming weekend and Delores was excited to join her new (and much younger) friends.
On the dive boat, Delores was paired with Lynn, a 38-year-old veterinarian. They chatted on the way to the dive sites, and Delores learned that Lynn was so wrapped up in her veterinary practice that the only ac- tivity she got was to go diving once a month. Delores won- dered if Lynn could keep up with her!
They arrived at the first dive site. It was the kind of day Delores loves most -calm, clear water and visibil- ity that seemed to go on forever. The divers descended to the beautiful reefs below and began exploring. Delores was caught up in the sights, as always, but kept a vig- ilant eye on her buddy Lynn, as she was trained to do.
Soon -in fact, too soon for Delores -Lynn caught her attention and gave her the underwater hand signal that she wanted to go back up to the boat. Delores looked at her questioningly and Lynn signaled that she was low on air.
Delores was stunned. It felt like she'd only begun her dive. She swam next to Lynn and looked at her air i tank gauge. It was true. Lynn had nearly breathed her tank dry, but Delores still had half a tank left! There was no choice but to go back to the boat.
On board, Lynn looked sheepishly at Delores and said, "I guess I'm not in the best shape." Delores agreed, since it was obvious that she had far more lung capaci- ty than Lynn, who was about half her age. Delores de- cided she'd need a different dive buddy if she expected to spend any amount of time underwater on her next trip!

Women and Exercise

Can Exercise Delay Senility? Australian researchers have found that
exercise improves thinking ability and memory in women over 60. In a test of
200 women without dementia, those who engaged in a program of exercise
classes--twice a week for a year-- improved in memory span and
problem-solving ability.

The researchers used tests that would show an age-related decline--puzzles,
for example, that require people to think quickly and use logic.

And they doubted that the group experience alone accounted for the increase.
According to Dr. Stephen Lord, one of the reseachers, other "social interaction
such as history groups or card-playing do not show these beneficial effects."

The study was published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public
Health.

Women tend to shy away from weight workouts be- cause they're afraid of getting too bulked. But this is a myth, according to exercise guru and TV personality Tony Little. Those huge muscles on weight lifters and body builders come from hours and hours of pumping iron every day, he says. "You won't develop huge muscles like that from working a good weight program three days a week," he says in his video.
For women, weight training combined with aerobic ex- ercise is extremely important because they fight off os- teoporosis. This loss of bone mass occurs after menopause and is evident in the elderly population. We've all seen old women with "dowager's humps" or walking bent over with curved spines. The danger of broken bones in elderly women is very high, unless you start taking measures now to prevent bone loss.
Aerobic exercise, done regularly in the years immedi- ately following menopause, can greatly reduce the rate of bone mineral loss -as much as a 50 percent reduc- tion! Daniel Martin, a physical therapist and co-author of a one-year study at the University of Florida says: "We found that in the immediate five to six years after menopause, women who exercised regularly cut their bone mineral loss by 50 percent when compared to a group of women who did not exercise."
Weight bearing exercise and weight training are very important because muscle mass appears to be related to bone density. When the muscles attached to the bone are more developed and have more mass, the bone den- sity tends to be higher. This indicates that building muscle mass may help alleviate osteoporosis, says Mac- Farlane.
Hate Exercising?
What most people dislike is the idea of visiting a gym and doing repetition after repetition on boring weight ma- chines or walking to nowhere on a treadmill. Exercise doesn't have to be boring, difficult, or exhausting!
It's a long-standing belief that you could only gain health benefits from doing 20 minutes or more of con- tinuous activity at least three days a week. But that's changed since research has shown that benefits are achieved in different ways.
One way is to exercise more often -in 10-minute in- crements adding up to 30 minutes per day, for at least five days a week. According to Dr. Russell Pate of the University of South Carolina School of Public Health, daily workouts don't need to be continuous and may be scattered throughout the day.
"A 10-minute ride on an exercise bicycle in the morn- ing before work, a 15-minute walk at lunchtime and five or 10 minutes of gardening at home after work in the evening would all be beneficial and could add up to an acceptable level of exercise."
Another way is to consciously add more physical ac- " tivity to your daily life. Take the stairs instead of the
elevator; park at the farthest (yet still safe) end of the parking lot at work or when you go to the store; walk to work if you live close enough; do gardening or yard work; go dancing -any of these activities count as physical activity and will provide health benefits.
Robert, a 45-year-old accountant, had passed his phys-tical exam, but not with flying colors. He was slightly overweight and out of shape, had elevated blood pres-
Isure, got winded easily and was feeling some depres-
sion at having been passed over for a promotion at work. Robert's doctor gave him a simple prescription: Get
i active! Robert led a very sedentary life -he sat at a desk all day, came home and sat in front of the TV most evenings. His weekends weren't much different, except he didn't go to work.
"You're boring," the doctor (who was also his friend) told him bluntly. "You need to get some activity into your life or you'll waste away." Robert's medical prob- lems weren't serious enough to require medication or other treatment. The doctor felt that activity would be enough to help put things back in order. He impressed on Robert how important becoming active was to his health and how it could help prevent more serious prob- lems further down the road. And once Robert felt better, he'd be more inclined to get into a serious exercise pro- gram. Robert listened.
He started parking his car as far away from his office as he could, resulting in a five-minute walk to the front door. Though difficult at first, Robert skipped the eleva- tor and walked up the stairs to the fifth floor. He began regular walks after dinner and even tried walking in the morning before going to the office. After the initial aches and pains, he felt more alert and energetic.
Robert started to look at his overgrown yard with a new eye -and decided to rip out the dead and dying plants and do some serious landscaping. He made yard work his weekend project, and over the course of sever- al weekends, turned it from dull to lush.
By this time, Robert was feeling better mentally -he
wasn't nearly as depressed. He felt like doing even
Imore, so he found his old bicycle in the garage, removed the rust and oiled the chain and started riding through
his neighborhood. !
With the new activity and a few dietary changes, Robert's next physical exam improved. Six months later, he had lowered his blood pressure, increased his lung capacity, dropped a few pounds, toned his muscles a bit and relieved his depression. His doctor was pleased and so was Robert, because he didn't really feel he'd made any great sacrifices to accomplish his goals. He just made a point to add more activity to his life and once he did, he wanted to add more and more. So the doctor i suggested he begin a weight-training program.
Weight training does not require a health club mem- bership or expensive equipment. Many discount stores sell small hand weights starting for as little as $1.25 each. A starter set of dumbbells that includes 1-pound, 3-pound and 5-pound weights cost less than $20. But you don't even have to buy weights to do weight training. A full bottle of water, a large phone book or anything else you can lift makes a good weight.
Ask your doctor about a weight-training routine. Most hospitals offer physical fitness programs, includ- ing instruction on how to lift weights properly. Many local schools offer evening adult education classes that include physical fitness programs. There are many good books and videos available with simple at-home weight workouts.
Before you start lifting, discuss your goals with your physician, particularly if you have any kind of back or neck problems. It won't mean you can't lift weights, but you may have to do certain exercises differently from someone who doesn't have such problems.

Walking, Even If Difficult, You MUST Do At Least This...

Walking -The Best Exercise
Walking is still the best exercise for young and old. It carries little risk of injury and provides many health benefits. It doesn't require any special equipment other than a good pair of comfortable shoes with proper arch support -any good sneakers will do. A pleasant stroll doesn't even require a nice sunny day -some people enjoy the refreshed feeling they get from walking on rainy days, particularly when the rain is a slow, steady drizzle.
Walking used to be thought of as only a workout for beginners, injured athletes and senior citizens. But it's gaining new respect, particularly because it's a low-im- pact way of getting in shape.
"It's about time walking lost its 'wimp' image," says Casey Meyers, author of Walking: A Complete Guide to the Complete Exercise. Walking is the perfect lifelong exercise, as long as you're in good health and your doc- tor says it's okay for you.
Regular walking helps with weight control and, if done at a brisk pace, can provide cardiovascular benefits and help for moderately high blood pressure. Because it's a weight-bearing exercise, it's good for the prevention of osteoporosis, says MacFarlane.
How long and how hard you walk depends on what you want to accomplish. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends walking three to five times per week for 20 to 60 minutes, not including warm-up and cool-down time.
Doctors say that burning 1,500 to 2,000 calories per week will provide health benefits. Walking one mile burns 75 to 100 calories, so you'd want to build up to 15 to 20 miles per week. This isn't as difficult as it sounds. It's easy to walk three miles a day, five days a week. Casey Meyers says three miles per hour is considered a mod- erate pace. Considering the health and longevity bene- fits of walking, five hours per week is very little time to invest in yourself and your future health.
"The biggest misconception about walking is that you have to walk a lot longer to burn more calories," he says. "But things happen if you just walk a little faster. The faster you walk, the more benefits you get and the less exercise time needed."
Like any exercise, there's a right way and a wrong way to walk. "Most people, particularly slower walkers, walk with their heads down, like they are looking on the street for a winning lottery ticket," says Meyers. The prop- er way to walk, he says: Keep your shoulders back, hips forward and chin up so that it's parallel to the ground. If your posture is good, it's easier to increase the inten- sity of your walk. And swing those arms! A good full arm swing enhances your workout. If you're a faster walker (12 minutes per mile or more), you must bend your arms at the elbows to keep your body synchronized.
"Most people think they are walking faster than they are," says Meyers. "You need to push yourself a little bit, while still enjoying the scenery and the relaxation that comes with taking pleasure in the walk."
Oriental Exercise
The Chinese idea of exercise is quite different from 6urs. Television shows about China often show images of people exercising outdoors. A group of people, often elderly, are gathered on a lakeshore or along a tree-shad- ed riverbank. They perform precise, slow, flowing body movements that look like dancing. They're actually ex- ercising, executing routines from one of several ancient methods believed to maintain health and wellness. Chinese exercise is a great alternative for those who dislike pumping iron or going to a fitness club. But it's not a complete workout, so those who take up an east- ern form of exercise should find a way to get a good aerobic workout. Still, for strengthening and toning, Chi- nese exercise is quite powerful. One need only look at the well-toned bodies of martial arts practitioners to see the benefits of eastern forms of exercise.
Tai Chi is one form of eastern exercise that's quite pop- ular in the western world. Another similar form rapid- ly gaining adherents is Qigong (pronounced chee- goong). Its practice may go back 10,000 years in China, predating acupuncture and the martial arts, says Dr. Charles T. McGee with Effie Poy Yew Chow, Ph. D. in Miracle Healing from China. ..Qigong (MediPress, 1994).
The Qigong theory says that a powerful energy sys- tem exists in the body. The energy, qi, flows throughout the body along known channels. The qi system can be diagrammed in the same way the respiratory or lymph system can. A person becomes susceptible to disease if the flow of qi is blocked or disrupted, usually by emo- tional stress. When the qi is rebalanced, the person be- comes healthy again.
Practitioners of Qigong say it provides higher levels of energy and stamina, improves sports performance, su- percharges the immune system and super-oxygenates body cells. According to Gloria, a 50-year-old advertis- ing executive: "The very first time I took a Qigong class, I felt like my body was lighter. It was the most remarkable feeling, as if I could float above the ground. I felt so energized!"
Practitioners also believe Qigong has powerful healing potential and say it can reduce insomnia and sleep dis- orders, relieve acute and chronic pain, speed recovery from vinjuries, reduce healing time after surgery and improve mental performance. Many even claim it can heal diseases and conditions such as tuberculosis, nearsightedness, liver disease, asthma, allergies, obesity, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries and even treat substance abuse.
Most important to our discussion, Qigong has been found to reverse the effects of aging. In more than 30 research studies, Qigong was shown to improve or re- verse conditions common to aging. It improved heart EKG and brain EEG readings, normalized sex hormone lev- els and improved blood sugar levels.
Its ability to slow the aging process is easily seen. "Dr. Chow and I have met many Qigong masters in China and elderly masters routinely look about 20 years younger than their chronological ages," says Dr. McGee. "Their cheeks are smooth and shiny. They emit a healthy glow and they have few wrinkles in their skin."
Qigong is a discipline that involves time, patience and commitment. But since it appears to be very sim- pIe, it's difficult to comprehend its potential. Many peo- ple begin practicing Qigong, but stop after a short time because they don't see how this simple exercise can pos- sibly provide benefits. Qigong masters say it's easy to learn, but too simple to believe. If you practice and are committed to staying the course, you will see benefits.
Young and old can practice Qigong. It's best learned by taking classes from a Qigong master and with the
: form's increased popularity, it's not difficult to find such classes. Many fitness centers, gyms and even New Age centers offer classes in the discipline. Videos are available for home training.
However you choose to learn, Qigong is a healthy form of exercise not only for the body, but for the mind. And it will make you feel younger! popularity, it's not difficult to find such classes. Many fitness centers, gyms and even New Age centers offer classes in the discipline. Videos are available for home training.
However you choose to learn, Qigong is a healthy form of exercise not only for the body, but for the mind. And it will make you feel younger! iscussion, Qigong has been found to reverse the effects of aging. In more than 30 research studies, Qigong was shown to improve or re- verse conditions common to aging. It improved heart EKG and brain EEG readings, normalized sex hormone lev- els and improved blood sugar levels.
Its ability to slow the aging process is easily seen. "Dr. Chow and I have met many Qigong masters in China and elderly masters routinely look about 20 years younger than their chronological ages," says Dr. McGee. "Their cheeks are smooth and shiny. They emit a healthy glow and they have few wrinkles in their skin."
Qigong is a discipline that involves time, patience and commitment. But since it appears to be very sim- pIe, it's difficult to comprehend its potential. Many peo- ple begin practicing Qigong, but stop after a short time because they don't see how this simple exercise can pos- sibly provide benefits. Qigong masters say it's easy to learn, but too simple to believe. If you practice and are committed to staying the course, you will see benefits.
Young and old can practice Qigong. It's best learned by taking classes from a Qigong master and with the
: form's increased popularity, it's not difficult to find such classes. Many fitness centers, gyms and even New Age centers offer classes in the discipline. Videos are available for home training.
However you choose to learn, Qigong is a healthy form of exercise not only for the body, but for the mind. And it will make you feel younger!

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