Diet and Fitness

We found four types of exercises that are important to help seniors get health benefits:

. The resistance exercises increase your breathing and the rhythm of his heartbeat. These exercises improve the condition of the heart, lungs, and circulatory system. Having more endurance not only makes it more healthy, but also improves their energy, for the individual to do things for himself, climbing stairs, or go shopping, for example. Resistance exercises are also able to delay or prevent many diseases associated with aging, like diabetes, colon cancer, heart disease, stroke, among others.

· The strength training increases muscle, making them stronger, giving them more strength to enable the person to do their things for himself. Very small increase in your muscles can make a big difference in physical capacity, especially in weak people. Strength exercises also increase metabolism, help to keep the weight and control blood sugar in the blood. That’s important because obesity and diabetes are serious health problems for older adults. Studies suggest that strength exercises also may help prevent osteoporosis.

· The Balance exercises help prevent a serious problem in the elderly: falls. In the elderly, falls are a permanent cause of hip fractures and other injuries that often leave him incapacitated. Some balance exercises strengthen the muscles of the legs, others improve balance requiring that they do simple activities like briefly standing on one leg.

· The flexibility exercises are stretching exercises that help maintain the flexibility of the body, stretching the muscles and tissues that hold the body’s structures. Flexibility also may play an important role in preventing falls. Both physical therapists and other health professionals, recommend certain stretching exercises to help patients recover from injuries.

The American Heart Association (American Association of Cardiology, Veterans Hospital) recommended that older people to exercise at least 30 minutes three or four times a week, 10-24 minutes 5 times a week, and get closer the optimum level for each session. As time passes, the individual is evaluated and depending on the physiological adaptation are looking for different exercises to be performed by the person, increasing slightly the intensity according to their characteristics.

The level of effort varies with each type of exercise.

Proper muscle conditioning work in old age

When considering the fact of meeting physical activity programs that affect so clear in muscular conditioning must understand that work as a way to maintain muscle tone and trophic (4), as the primary basis for achieving an appropriate response in activities required in daily life.

At no time should use high loads, since it is not the intent to increase force levels of the individual, but to maintain tone and prevent the gradual deterioration of the active muscle tissue.

The exercises must be carried out using globalized practice strategies, using large muscle groups in the embodiments, taken in particular tasks such as travel, transport with lightweight, launch light objects, push and climb at low altitude, so it was avoided completion of jumps as a lower body conditioning (5), since it could result in serious injury due to bone fractures. The only analytical advocacy work will be carried out tasks that seeks to address postural and respiratory work.

We must bear in mind that the erector muscles of the trunk is losing its ability to keep the body erect, a circumstance that involves the appearance of multiple postural alterations in the elderly. In this sense, we will seek advocacy work on that muscle, together with appropriate stretching exercises (associate at all times work with muscle conditioning exercises, joint mobility and stretching of muscle groups under stress). What we do is to avoid at all times is the realization of excessive stress on the vertical axis, to punish severely the spinal joints.