FITNESS AS AN AGE EXTENDER: OPTIMIZING HEALTH AND WELL-BEING
Fix your schedule. Compared to keeping your wife, mother, and kids happy, scheduling in your three exercise modes should be simple. For general health, a 3-2-5 plan should work, says Ed Burke, Ph.D., vice president of the National Strength and Conditioning Association in Colorado Springs and co-author of Getting in Shape. Put your two strength-training days between your three aerobic days, and stretch on all five. You’re still at a half-hour a day, and you have the weekends off.
Try the combo special. You can even cut down your days from five to three by doing aerobics and strength training at the same time. “You can actually get an aerobic workout by doing weight training,” Taranta says. “Go from station to station or exercise to exercise without taking long breaks so that you maintain a high heart rate.”
Warm your muscles. There are lots of good reasons to warm up before working out. For one thing, warming up puts your brain in sync with your muscles, making them ready to be called upon to work hard. “And common sense tells us that warmed-up muscles are probably going to be less likely to be injured,” Dr. Baechle says. “Plus we know that warmed-up muscles are able to pick up and use oxygen more efficiently.”
When exercise experts talk about warming up, they mean it. Do something to raise the temperature of the muscles you’re going to be using. In weight training, for example, that could mean duplicating the motion of the exercise at very low weight. “Just pick the exercise you’re going to do and use about half the load,” Dr. Baechle says. “If you’re warming up for an activity, make it specific for that activity. Using one-half of the training load in an exercise is a great way to make it specific.”
Stretch out your workout. “Most of us who are 35-plus grew up thinking that warming up was stretching,” Sobel says. “It’s almost the opposite. You want to warm your body up and then do your stretching. Warming up involves increasing the body’s temperature and heart rate through low-level aerobic, full-body activity.”
In fact, a good time for you to stretch is after you’ve done your aerobic or weight workout. “If you cool down by stretching, you don’t get that after-exercise soreness and you get more of the stretching benefits,” says Sobel.
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