Staying Active

The Right Exercise Program Can Benefit All Ages

Listen to Dr. Bamman's discussion:

Do you believe that lifting weights at the gym or taking a few laps around the jogging track are activities best suited for energetic business executives aged 30-something? Think again.

Strength and endurance training can pay big health dividends for exercisers of any age, according to Marcas Bamman, Ph.D., director of the Core Muscle Research Laboratory and associate professor of physiology and biophysics at UAB. In fact, says Bamman, those benefits extend beyond general cardiovascular fitness and muscle tone—they can actually help older adults control such health problems as hypertension and blood sugar fluctuations without drugs.

“We’re not trying to create bodybuilders,” Bamman says. “We’re just trying to restore muscle mass that people once had, when they were younger. Because as they restore muscle, they regain a lot of the function that came with it.”

An added benefit of an appropriate exercise program for older adults is what Bamman calls “self-efficacy”: “This sort of confidence-building comes from two things. One, there’s a sense of accomplishment when you start a program like this and stick with it. And there’s a carry-over too, because of a real improvement in mental acuity. People who are active exercisers tend to restore brain function better, which is very good news for people who might be at risk of dementia, for instance.

“As you raise the overall activity of your internal physiology, you get the nerves firing more, the muscles contracting more, the heart working harder. Any time you put a stressor on an organ system, it’s going adapt. And one of the benefits of exercise is that the central nervous system—which is composed of the brain and the spinal cord—will undergo some adaptation as well. You sort of fire up those regions of the brain that perhaps tend to be less used and tend to decline, which helps keep the brain active and healthy. Overall you feel more confident, more capable of doing things.”

Moreover, according to Bamman, regular exercise can set in motion a positive physical momentum that helps reverse the “vicious cycle” of leading a sedentary lifestyle. The key, he says, is improving a measure called “maximum rate of oxygen consumption”:

“With endurance-type exercises such as walking or jogging, you actually improve your body’s ability to utilize oxygen. As a result, whenever you do a standardized activity like walking at three miles an hour, you’re then doing it at a lower intensity relative to your maximum ability. So I think that’s an important benefit for people. Not too many of us like to do things at maximal effort.

“As your muscles become better at utilizing oxygen, and your heart and lungs become better at delivering it, you have a reduced heart rate requirement, so your heart rate goes down, as does your ‘perceived exertion.’ We tend to avoid participating in things that are hard for us, so if we stay sedentary a vicious cycle can set in—because it’s difficult we don’t want to do it, so we de-condition further. But if you can break that cycle by making exercise easier to do, then you’ll want to do it more often. You’ll find yourself doing things such as taking the stairs instead of the elevator, because climbing stairs is easier for you than it was before.”

Bamman says lowering disease risks is yet another important benefit of exercise:

“Exercise will dramatically alter the blood lipid profile, so that your good cholesterol will go up and your bad cholesterol will go down. If you have borderline hypertension, that will come down.

“One of the things that happens to us all with aging is that we face an increased risk of insulin resistance which might lead to Type 2 diabetes if we’re not careful. But as you exercise the muscles and improve not only their mass but also their function at the receptor level, the body becomes better at metabolizing glucose in the blood—which is the ‘blood sugar’ we all worry about.”

Seeing a physician before beginning an exercise program is crucial for older adults, Bamman says—an up-to-date physical exam and a treadmill stress test can ensure there are no untreated health problems that would interfere with getting the most from an exercise regime.

A downloadable audio file of Dr. Bamman’s article is also available.