As we have noted throughout this site, exercise is a key element to staying healthy, improving one’s outlook on life, and providing an outlet for social interaction. One challenge in establishing an exercise routine is where to start, what exercises to engage in, how to monitor your progress, and sharing your thoughts about exercise with others. The National Institute on Aging has recently launched Go4Life, an exercise and physical activity campaign designed to help you fit exercise and physical activity into your daily life. This program seeks to address the needs of older adults who have not been engaging in exercise, those who may have not engaged in exercise for some time, and those who may wish to add exercise into their present regime of physical activities. Go4Life offers exercises, motivational tips, and free resources to help you get ready, start exercising, and keep going. The Go4Life campaign includes an evidence-based exercise guide in both English and Spanish, an exercise video, an interactive website, and a national outreach campaign.
Exercise and physical activity are good for just about everyone, including older adults. No matter your health and physical abilities, you can gain a lot by staying active. In fact, in most cases you have more to lose by not being active.
Here are just a few of the benefits. Exercise and physical activity:
- Can help maintain and improve your physical strength and fitness.
- Can help improve your ability to do the everyday things you want to do.
- Can help improve your balance.
- Can help manage and improve diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and osteoporosis.
- Can help reduce feelings of depression and may improve mood and overall well-being.
- May improve your ability to shift quickly between tasks, plan an activity, and ignore irrelevant information.
Exercise and physical activity fall into four basic categories — endurance, strength, balance, and flexibility. Most people tend to focus on one activity or type of exercise and think they’re doing enough. Each type is different, though. Doing them all will give you more benefits. Mixing it up also helps to reduce boredom and cut your risk of injury.
As you begin an exercise program it is essential to determine where you are in terms of performing endurance, strength, balance, and flexibility exercise. By identifying your starting point you will know where to begin your exercises, not exert yourself, and hopefully make exercising more pleasurable. To determine this, the Go4Life program provides an interactive tool to identify where to begin and an activity log to keep track of the amount of time you are devoting to exercise.
Once you have identified a starting point using the Go4Life interactive on-line tool, you can select exercises designed to build endurance, increase strength, balance and flexibility. Exercises for each category are provided on the website and include written descriptions as well as videos of the exercises.
The website includes an interactive tool to write down some ways you think you can increase your daily activities and establishing long and short-term goals. Users are encouraged to write down their goals and post them where they can serve as an encouraging reminder and hopefully make exercise a part of your daily life.
The Go4Life website also contains personnel success stories, the option to order free exercise guide or video, and the opportunity to sign-up for an electronic newsletter.
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncanh1/5975355073/sizes/m/in/photostream/
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