Some days I can really feel my age. I’m not achy when I get up in the morning, but there are days when I don’t have the stamina that I used to have. I noticed it last weekend after I did a couple of hours of heavy yard work.
I mentioned that to my friend Peter in Toronto, who’s a bit older than me. His physician told him that having a sedentary lifestyle is as dangerous today as smoking was in the past and the key to maintaining good health is to keep moving. It is a bit ironic that someone in the health and safety biz (me) is at risk to my own health because of all the sitting I do while driving and from doing office work.
Another person I know recently fell and has a mild concussion. I assumed that there was some medication that a person would take to treat this. I asked a registered nurse friend about what the latest recommendation is for treatment of concussion, and she said it’s exercise. It used to be rest, now it’s exercise. I’m noticing this as a common theme from other sources as well.
I recently heard an interview on CBC radio with Dr. Iris Gorfinkel. She talked about current research at Stanford University that has many new insights on the benefit of exercise. The heart beats harder and faster and it exercises the arteries and makes them more flexible and “washes atherosclerosis, which is the blockage that causes heart attacks and strokes. It can reduce the amount of blockage or smooth out and stabilize what blockage is there.”
She also said that although veins don’t have muscles, the muscles around them, such as your leg muscles, squeeze the veins when you move them, which forces the blood to go back to your heart, to reduce swelling and forming dangerous blood clots in your legs. Some other benefits of exercise include how it triggers appetite suppression and how it improves the richness and diversity of our gut microbiome. This reduces inflammation and leaky gut syndrome, and prevents toxins from getting absorbed by our intestine. She said that regular exercise will improve gut health for the 20 per cent of Canadians who suffer from irritable bowel syndrome.
Even better than this, Dr. Gorfinkel said that exercise is beneficial to our brains by releasing a hormone called irisin, which improves cognitive function and grows new neurons (brain cells) and the connections between them. Most interesting to me, she said this could explain why exercise improves mood and why it improves memory loss from dementia. She said that the bottom line is to not focus on burning calories but that our key hormones work better to reduce appetite, reduce blood sugar, and grow more brain cells when there is more muscle. The main goal of exercise is to stretch out our quality of life for as long as we can.
What do I do now?
She said that Canada’s guidelines for the average person are to have a 35-minute walk, five days per week or a 20-minute run, five days per week, but for safety, check with your doctor first.
Sometimes it’s not easy to find the opportunity to walk every day, so what do you do in that case? The important thing is to increase cardio fitness, so my dad, who is 90, walks around his apartment and uses his stationary bike for a few minutes each day. He also walks in the mall most days, now that the risk of COVID is less. I look for opportunities to keep moving, too. When I am at home, I walk when I’m on the phone and I use my stairs just for the activity. When I go to Sobeys, I drive to the far end of the parking lot then walk to other nearby stores instead of driving to them. I also say yes as much as possible when my nurse friend asks me to walk with her and her dog.
Finally, about a year ago, I heard about a fitness regime where the goal is to do 100 sit ups and 100 push ups each day, but not all at once. I try to stick to that as much as possible. I’ve read that sit ups have been replaced by new exercises, but you still can’t go wrong with push ups. I haven’t reached 100 push ups per day yet, but maybe I’ll get there by the time I’m 90.
James Golemiec is a Canadian Registered Safety Professional with over 11 years experience coordinating and managing complex safety systems at manufacturing facilities and performing inspections on project job sites across Canada.