The best exercises for the over 50yrs old
Our expert Lucy Wyndham-Read discusses the importance of being active, and suggests some simple exercises we can do anywhere to help us get into better shape as the holiday season approaches.
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Transcript
Lucy - See all these personal training tips are coming out now! Pat Jaye has been in touch with us, Pat says "I'm 51, what are the best kind of exercises for my age group?"
Lucy - Ok I would say to Pat it would be really important to do what we call resistance exercises. Now that is – so we have resistance is where you're kind of pushing your body weight against a muscle group basically. So that's a bit like when we do the press-ups, when we do squats, abdominals – and the reason why I'd say it's good for her age group is because at that age we have to take into consideration women are more prone to have osteoporosis, which is a weakening of the bones, and so by doing muscle strength exercises, it actually increases bone mass and increases muscular strength. And also the other benefit, because there's always more than one benefit for an exercise, it increases your metabolism, so she'll be burning more calories, and she could focus on areas that women want, you know think about doing some sort of like tricep extension, so you could just hold some little weights, and just straighten through the arms, so that will be good, and to do things like what we call a box press-up - I mean just really look at doing resistance exercises which again she can do at home, and I would say again – I mean I know I keep repeating myself, but the walking would be good because also at that age, even though that's still very young, you know you never want to do high impact, so the walking would be good, and also so you're getting a good range of movement – and swimming as well, because that keeps you nice and flexible
Presenter - Swimming is a great exercise isn't it?
Lucy - Totally and again you don't have any impact there and you can really sort of exaggerate the movements as well, so I would say for her age to prevent osteoporosis, look at doing resistance exercises and do some form of cardiovascular, whether it be swimming, or to do the walking
Presenter - You mentioned briefly there about specific areas of the body that need attention, you know you might have a bit of cellulite on the derriere or here, or – can you do that, can you single out certain areas of the body?
Lucy - It's – you can never, you can't specifically burn off fat, so if someone wanted to lose weight from the back of their upper arm you know you have to kind of –
Presenter - Double chin or something like that
Lucy - Yes. Unfortunately you can't do that but you can certainly tone a muscle underneath, so you know it takes 2 things, you've got to go out and say you want nice, toned arms, you'd have to go out and you'd have to power walk, you'd have to run, you'd have to do this swimming, something that is going to burn off the fat, and then once you've done that you then want to have the muscle toned so then you can do the specific exercises to tone that area
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