At the beginning of every New Year the news media is all about diet and exercise. We pay attention and start to diet and start to exercise in January and by the end of the year we realize we did little more than the year before.
There are going to be three posts about exercise for Boomer Grandmas in 2016, and effect upon diet and effect of diet, the whys and wherefores, and then suggestions for us Boomer Grandmas and, of course, our precious grandchildren.
In 2015, this Boomer Grandma paid attention and collected articles all year long on studies about exercise and diet. By the end of 2015, there were several studies about fitness, as always. This time the studies were of great interest to Boomers, seemingly deemphasizing the grit and intensity we thought necessary to stay fit. This Grandma was sure the 2015 studies were conducted and written by Boomer researchers. I became more certain when I read the first exercise article of the new year in the New York Times, January 4, 2016, “A Gym Where You Flex Abs and Data,” by Ginia Bellafante, about Soul Cycle and Orangetheory.
My older daughter, in her early forties, is into Soul Cycle. She LOVES Soul Cycle. She even brought our twelve year old grandson who said this is HARD. She likes hard. Yes, she does pilates, but Soul Cycle is where her heart is NOW. I say now, as those of us of long years know, fads come and go. Ms. Bellafante mentions that Soul Cycle “is the preferred workout of well-off mothers with time on their hands.” I beg to disagree as it seems to be the preferred workout of everyone in their forties, with or without time on their hands.
A dear friend, in her fifties, convinced me to change to her pilates trainer. It was a wonderful decision and my body thanks her. However, now she is rarely there. She has discovered and LOVES Orangetheory. She tried to convince me to try it, but yoga and pilates and walking are my thing and work for this Boomer Grandma body. As a working professional, I would have to give something up, and I could not see what that would be. It seems that Orangetheory is the preferred workout of everyone in their fifties, with or without time on their hands.
What was fascinating about Ms. Bellafante’s article was what she teaches about Orangetheory, more than just the gimmick of bathing exercisers in orange light as they exercise. It has monitors that broadcast your performance to the whole class!
She writes:
“Orangetheory, the latest trend, comes with no veneer of the mystical, and little of the “wellness” jargon so popular now. The classes, which are an hour long, combine various modes of cardio with push-ups, some plyometrics and free weights. The idea originated in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and made its way to New York last winter, with a branch in Chelsea. In the coming weeks and months, Orangetheory studios will open in Brooklyn Heights, Williamsburg and Park Slope. It’s a franchise business, 325 branches of which have opened around the country, with close to 500 more branches coming, including one in Tokyo.”
It originated in South Florida, my area! “Orangetheory is the workout of strivers,” according to Ms. Bellafante. Yes, the fifties is the decade of strivers! She tells of its beginnings and why:
“Orangetheory was founded five years ago by a woman named Ellen Latham, who in the late 1990s had been let go from a job running a fitness center at a spa in Miami Beach. She started teaching Pilates classes out of a spare bedroom in her house but was perplexed by a single question, as she put it to me recently: “How could I get fat blowing off my Pilates clients?”
Okay, so Pilates builds strength, stamina and flexibility first, with weight maintenance a side benefit. It is not necessarily for weight loss unless you select the right trainer who adds cardio training as I have, which seems to be what Orangetheory is all about.
She continues:
“Its gimmick is an added element of the Darwinian. Clients wear monitors during the sessions that measure heart rate and number of calories burned; individual performance statistics are then broadcast on electronic boards at the front of the class with your name (or of course, if you anticipate slacking, your pseudonym). Levels of output are color-coded, and the goal is to spend at least 12 minutes but preferably more in the orange zone, which measures maximum effort. The program stresses that your best effort is good enough, but competition, or rather the terror of winding up with the lowest scores in the class, keeps you breathlessly pushing forward. . . .”
This Grandma is beyond the need to “keep up with the Joneses” in anything, much less exercise! Is this for Boomers?
“To surpass the limits of toning, she created the one-hour metabolic workout that grew into Orangetheory, incorporating work that drives up heart rate and helps people lose weight. If there are certain exercises in a class that a client can’t manage, instructors provide alternatives. “I have eliminated the word modifications because I don’t like it,” Ms. Latham told me. “We use `options’ now, because modification makes people feel less than. It’s not encouraging.”
No, Orangetheory does not interest me. Especially since the studies in 2015 touch me more! We Boomer Grandmas know, if we are to be forever young, we have to be into exercise for the long haul and not the current trend. The 2015 studies help us to make a plan, which you will see in the second post in the series of “Exercise for Boomer Grandmas in 2016.” The studies give us the background, the why first, and what the long haul means for us.
Gretchen Reynolds, who has written about exercise and fitness for a decade for the Times, in “Exercise on the Brain,” New York Times, December 29, 2015, reviewed and summarized all the 2015 studies which this Grandma religiously read and kept to share with you all in posts:
“Several studies in 2015 showed that being physically fit keeps one mentally fit. The most persistent theme in exercise science in 2015 was that to live long, age well and maintain a nimble mind and shapely brain, we must be physically active –but not for as much time as many of us might fear, or in the ways that many of us might guess.”
Reviewing what I had collected, I discovered that all the articles were written by Gretchen Reynolds during the year, who is in charge of fitness articles for the Times.
August 12, 2015, she wrote “The Right Dose of Exercise for the Aging Brain.” The study included adults at least 65 years old, and she writes: “the encouraging takeaway from the new study. . . is that briskly walking for 20 or 25 minutes several times a week – a dose of exercise achievable by almost all of us –may help keep our brains sharp as the years pass.” Okay, “ more exercise will likely make you more aerobically fit. . . “
However, this level of walking IS ACHIEVABLE BY ALL OF US Boomer Grandmas! The benefits of walking were confirmed in her November 18, 2015 article on a study on middle aged female twins, “Brawn and Brains,” combining “genes and environment.” This is interesting about our legs, the strongest muscles in our body:
“The study also was not designed to uncover how muscle power builds brainpower, Dr. Steves pointed out, although she said she suspects that working muscles release biochemicals that travel to the brain and affect cellular health there. And the sturdier the muscles, the more of these chemicals they create.”
Here is the takeaway from this study:
“. . .the results imply that whatever your genetic make-up, building muscles can strengthen your mind, and should your legs currently be spindly, you might want to consider walking, running, standing or dancing more often.”
We can all use more dancing in our lives!
MORE!
October 28, 2015, in “Does Exercise Slow the Aging Process,” reporting on another new study, Gretchen Reyolds, taught us about the importance of telomeres, “tiny organic caps at the ends of our chromosomes. Telomeres generally decline in length with age, just as the functions of the cell that contain them slow and degrade. Short telomeres indicate, in effect, that a cell is biologically old, no matter what its chronological age.” So, “as a cell ages, its telomeres naturally shorten and fray and exercise may slow the fraying of the telomeres.” She says, “Past studies have found, for instance, that master athletes typically have longer telomeres than sedentary people of the same age, as do older women who frequently walk or engage in other fairly moderate exercise.”
MODERATE!
Fairly moderate is for this Boomer Grandma. This new study was the largest, including 6,500 participants. Okay, one takeaway is that “middle age may be a key time to begin or maintain an exercise program if you wish to keep telomeres from shrinking, “ so the forty somethings and fifty somethings are doing it right on Soul Cycle and Orangetheory. But we are still good as our takeaway is that “almost any amount and type of physical activity may slow aging deep within our cells . . . and, ‘more exercise in greater variety’ is likely to be even better.”
VARIETY!
This Grandma learned at Canyon Ranch in Lenox one year that cardio is disliked by everyone. They recommended trying a variety of cardio exercises until you find one you can tolerate to keep. The fitness staff there recommended picking a cardio that is the least offensive and stick with it. I did Zumba for a while, but it did not stick. Variety for one may mean doing a bit of two or three. I walk, do cardio in pilates, and do power yoga. Each gives me a bit of cardio that I can tolerate. Each of us has to find the variety that works for us.
IT IS NOT TOO LATE TO START!
According to Gretchen Reynolds in “Older Athletes Have A Surprisingly Young Fitness Age,” July 1, 2015:
“Older athletes can be much younger, physically, than they are in real life, according to a new study of participants in the coming Senior Olympics. The study found that the athletes’ fitness age is typically 20 years or younger than their chronological age, providing a clear inspiration to the rest of us to get out and start moving more.”
“I wrote last year about fitness age, a concept developed by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim who had taken note of epidemiological data showing that people with above-average cardiovascular fitness generally had longer life spans than people with lower aerobic fitness. So at any given age, fit people were relatively younger than were people who were out of shape. “So you can start any time,” she said. “It’s never too late.”
SLOW AGING IN THE BODY AND THE BRAIN WITH WEIGHT TRAINING AND STURDY MUSCLES!
In the “Exercise on the Brain” article, written at the end of 2015 on December 29, Ms. Reynolds summarized the “several studies this year [that] looked for the first time at whether and how weight training and sturdy muscles affect the brain. In one of those studies, healthy older women who completed a yearlong, twice-weekly program of light resistance training showed fewer and smaller lesions in their brain’s white matter afterward than women of the same age who had completed a stretching and balance-training program or gone to the gym only once a week. White matter connects and passes messages among different portions of the brain, so it is critical for memory and thinking.”
So, the take-away from Part ONE of exercise for Boomer Grandmas in 2016 is we should be concerned about brain, mood, and body in that order:
“Certainly the most encouraging research this year focused on the links between regular exercise and improvements in our thinking and the structure of our brains . . . increases the number of new neurons in the brain and sharpens thinking skills and mood, especially as we”
. . . .get longer! Forever young! We learned this year what and whys in this part ONE of exercise for Boomer Grandmas. Next the tips for 2016 come in part TWO on the hows and wherefores in 2016 with
Joy,
Mema
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