Article by Wendy Moyer
No matter what your age, one of the keys to staying healthy is exercising on a regular basis. Essentially, there are four main kinds of exercises for senior citizens and older adults that will help them to remain independent and stay healthy.
These four categories, designed for seniors, include: strength, stretching, balance, and endurance exercises.
Strength
Doing strength exercises will increase the metabolism and build muscles in older adults. Doing strength workouts will help to keep anyone’s blood sugar in check. It is also great for keeping the pounds off.
Stretching
By doing stretching exercises, seniors will increase their freedom of movement. This will allow them to be much more active. These exercises should typically be combined with other drills because, by itself, stretching will not improve strength or endurance.
Balance
Many people suffer from hip injuries every year and seniors who have fallen down account for a sizeable portion of these injuries. If you do balance exercises, they can help prevent you from becoming one of these figures because they aid in strengthening the leg muscles that keep you upright and on-track.
Endurance
Endurance is a broad category of exercise that includes any activity that will increase a person’s rate of breathing and heart rate over an extended amount of time. Workouts in this category include: walking, swimming, jogging, and bicycling. Even getting out in the yard and raking the leaves is an endurance exercise.
However, if you haven’t exercised in a while, it is very important that you gradually build up your endurance. You don’t want to try to run a five mile race the first time out. Instead, you should begin with as little as five minutes of endurance exercising and slowly increase that amount over time.
Once you’ve reached a certain age, it is very important that you see your doctor before beginning any exercise routine. A seventy-year-old’s body, for example, simply cannot take the same amount of stress that a twenty-year-old’s body can take. Keep in mind that exercises are meant to help you feel younger, not make you younger. Be cautious when it comes to planning your routine.
The reality is that, no matter how much exercise we do, at some point in time everybody’s life will come to an end. In today’s challenging economic times, a lot of people are reluctant to purchase the amount of insurance necessary to help cover the expenses associated with passing away. That is why affordable burial insurance has become so popular in recent years.
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