Doctors advocate dietary vigilance for seniors, but unless you're willing to survive on lettuce and cottage cheese, exercising remains an important facet of weight control and loss. Receive a bonus when you work out: exercise helps you become and stay healthier. So while you're knocking off pounds, you can also improve the quality of your life.
Aerobic Exercises
Start your exercise regimen with an activity you already know, such as walking, swimming or bicycling, and gradually build up to an hour a day of doing one or all three. If exercise doesn't thrill you, change things up so you don't walk or bicycle the same route five days straight, which can invite boredom. You can burn between 228 and 346 calories if you stick to a walking route for an hour, according to MayoClinic.com. Jogging at 5 mph can bring the number of calories you burn to more than 700.
Strength Exercises
Adopt simple strength-training moves designed for seniors and polish off around 273 calories per hour. Wall pushups are a breeze: place your hands flat against the wall and do pushups standing up. Do chair squats by sitting in a chair, leaning forward and then alternating standing and sitting. Clutch bottles of diet soda in your hands to perform bicep curls, bending your arms at the elbow then lowering the bottles to your sides. Before you retire those soda bottles, keep them by your side and shrug your shoulders.
Machine Exercises
If it's hard for you to get out and walk, you don't bicycle or swim is not fun for you, get up-close and personal with any of the streamlined exercise machines on today's market. Stick one in front of a TV so you lose yourself in reruns of the "Golden Girls" while you row. Use an elliptical trainer, stair stepper or a type of exercise machine that appeals to you. A stair stepper can burn about 800 calories during an hour's worth of work once you've built up some endurance, according to MayoClinic.com. If you live in a retirement community, it likely has machines you can use and trained personnel to help you. Or get a membership at an athletic club or gym. Or invest in your own machines.
Dance Exercises
Though today's 70 is amazingly youthful, it still takes 3,500 calories to vanquish a pound of fat at any age, so don't use the number of birthdays you've celebrated as an excuse. Eliminate 273 calories in just one hour by dancing. No need to burn up the floor like Buzz Aldren on "Dancing With the Stars" to winnow down the pounds, but great music can help you forget that part of your objective in taking to the dance floor has to do with your waistline.
References
- Science Daily: Diet-Exercise Combo Best for Obese Seniors; March 2011
- FamilyDoctor.org; Exercise and Seniors; Is it Safe For Me to Exercise? January 2011
- American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons; Seniors and Exercise; February 2008
- National Institutes of Health; Older Adults Have to Exercise More to Maintain Muscle Size, Study Finds; Robert Preidt; July 2011
- Centers for Disease Control; How Much Physical Activity do Older Adults Need?; March 2011
- MayoClinic.com; Exercise For Weight Loss; Calories Burned in 1 Hour
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