It is January. This month always gets us thinking about a fresh start. The new year is the perfect time to think about ways to stay healthy, and it’s a popular time to start a new physical or mental fitness program. At Unison at Veiner Centre and Unison at Kerby Centre, we have classes and programs for both.
This month, I want to talk about our Active Aging Programs in Medicine Hat and Calgary. I thought I would start by finding research about why physical exercise is so important for older adults. I went to PubMed online and searched “aging and exercise” to find a really good article about why you need to get physical this month. Well, instead of a few articles, PubMed produced 18,258 research papers about aging and exercise.
As it turns out, exercise is good for your mental health, it reduces the likelihood of falls, and the probability of a cardiac incident, it has been associated with decrease risks of dementia and Alzheimer’s.
I quickly gave up on trying to scan almost 20,000 articles.
In my PubMed reading, I found it interesting that researchers took a group of ninety-year-olds and put them on a weightlifting program. You might not typically think of your ninth decade as the
time to start pumping iron, but the evidence is clear.
The nonagenarians in the PubMed study built muscle and strength. Their muscle fibers grew, and their resistance to injury from falls diminished. You don’t have to wait until you’re 90, though. You can start today.
The fitness classes offered by our Active Aging staff in Calgary and Medicine Hat have plenty of options, and you can find them on our website. These days, you have a choice of in-person classes, or joining in online, so it’s never been easier to start exploring Active Aging.
We have been beefing up our online fitness classes, and you hop on a Zoom class (and you
can turn your camera off if that makes you more comfortable). Virtual, remote classes are a regular part of our Active Aging program. Plus, they are free to our members, so you can take as many classes as you want without worrying about additional costs. Not that the added health benefits
and longevity aren’t worth the cost of membership and then some.