Having time on your hands after a long career and a slew of grandkids can be a blessing. However, after those years of working hard are over, the mind can become complacent. Who needs exercises anyway? Perhaps you’ve proven that after a successful 40 plus year career without injury or illness, you know what you’re doing. With the advancement of age and a decrease in physical activity comes a plethora of probabilities to injuries and health maladies. Maintaining a healthy regular routine of exercise improves our quality of life mentally, physically, and psychologically. So, how can we start a routine after our working years have reached the finish line? For some, this might be a foreign position where a sense of direction could be useful when choosing an exercise routine. Here are a few key tips we give to our personal training clients who find themselves in a “where should I start?” moment at this point in their lives.
Choose a routine with no more than 3 exercises to start. Additionally, to save time and get the most out of your exercise routines, choose compound exercises. These are exercises that cover a wide group of muscles crossing multiple joints. The squat exercise utilizes the hamstring, quadriceps, and glutes. A push up engages the pecs, deltoids, pectorals. The simple and effective plank covers almost all the muscles along the anterior portion of the body. To achieve a benefit from these 3 exercises, you only need to perform one set of them once before your day starts. Just 10 repetitions of the squat and push up along with 20 seconds of the plank can give you the muscle strengthening and injury prevention benefits needed to improve your life.
Pick a form of exercise you enjoy. If you are retired with a set of grandkids, why would you want to engage in an exercise routine that resembles a military issued standard operating procedure? Activities that are easy to look forward to are more likely to be achieved than a list of chores. Do you detest crunches, aerobic step classes, or a 30-minute workout videos? Then you should probably stop doing them. While these forms of exercise may resonate with others, fitness is not a cookie cutter solution. Adherence and consistency are to key components to a successful lifetime fitness journey. Activities that are exciting and enjoyable significantly enhance the ability to keep the body in a rhythm of exercise for a long time.
Pick simple and effective exercises. I have a friend in the advanced age population named Tyson who works his butt off around his homestead. Plowing the yard, touching up the paint around the house, and pulling weeds in his garden is an everyday activity he does from when the rooster crows at the break of down until the owls come out to hunt mice at night fall. He is in fantastic shape for his age. When thinking about fitness routines to refine Tyson’s lifestyle, there is some pertinent information that needs to be gathered before offering exercise advice. Would it be helpful to present a routine that lasts 60 minutes requiring him to perform 3 times per week? Knowing Tyson, this routine would be thrown in the trash faster than a hummingbird’s heartbeat. Tyson is pretty set in his ways and know what he wants to do, when he wants to do it. However, Tyson could benefit from a simple, effective, and time efficient routine that would improve his performance in the upkeep of his projects that he holds so dear. What would help Tyson have more energy? What would fend off back, knee, and hip injuries that could impede Tyson’s work? How could Tyson get theses exercise done without getting bored?
If I asked Tyson to perform this routine before he hammered out his physically active projects to complete those projects sooner, he might accept the invitation to do so. What’s in it for him? A structural sound, durable, high performing body that will get his homestead looking sharp. He could finish this routine in less than 2 minutes. After he sees that he can still get what he wants accomplished pain free while having increased energy, it might not sound that bad to a retiree with more time on his hands to do. In fact, a routine as simple as 20 movements and holding a plank for 20 seconds could be permanently inserted to become an important part of his lifestyle.
If you don’t know where to start and are of older demographic, choose exercises that are simple and effective. Start with a very modest number of repetitions to ensure you can receive the benefits exercise offers to improve our lives for years to come.
Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.
