Fitness Over 40

Your job may be a pain in the neck, especially if you have a sedentary desk job. As more and more Americans spend 8-10 hours a day sitting at a desk staring at a screen, the incidence of poor posture and chronic neck and back pain is rising. Our bodies were designed to stand and move, not to sit for a third of our lives.

Show of hands: who can no longer touch your toes? How about reaching back to zip up your dress? Low back pain, anyone? If this sounds like you, you could have a problem with decreased flexibility. Flexibility decreases naturally as we age because muscles, tendons and ligaments stiffen and lose elasticity, but you don't have to lose the ability to manage your daily activities. Maintaining and even improving your flexibility is possible at any age with just a few exercises done regularly.

Getting older is not for sissies. If you neglected to take fanatical care of your body and your health in your 20s, 30s and 40s, all heck starts to break loose once you hit your 50s and 60s. Joints ache, muscles stiffen and stamina wanes. If you’re like 68% of adults in America, you’re also overweight or obese. It seems unfair that just when your kids go off to school or you start looking forward to retirement your body stops cooperating.

Yesterday’s post was all about the things I hate about The Biggest Loser. Like some 8 million viewers per week, I do find the show compelling, no matter how much I hate some of the portrayals of the trainers and the contestants. Today I’d like to look at what there is to love about the show.

The premise of The Biggest Loser is pretty straightforward. Take a group of morbidly obese Americans, isolate them on a ranch and put them through a rigorous diet and exercise program/competition to see who can lose the most weight and win the curiously backhanded title of Biggest Loser. With approximately 34 percent of US adults classified as obese and an additional 34 percent classified as overweight [source CDC], you would think that anything that inspires people to lose weight would be a positive thing. I’ll talk about the positives in another post, "Why I Love The Biggest Loser," but today, let’s look at what’s not to love.

Signing up for personal fitness training is a big step, and hopefully it's your first step down a path of lifelong fitness. But the first time you do anything it can be a little intimidating, so here are some things you can expect when you sign up for one-on-one personal training sessions with Prime of Life Fitness.

As obesity rates climb in the U.S. and the rate of debilitating chronic diseases climbs right along with it, the message to improve our diets by eating fewer processed foods and more fruits and vegetables is hard to escape. You’d have to be living under a rock to have missed the word that fruits and vegetables are low in calories, high in fiber and nutrients and much healthier for us than fatty, sugary, salty processed foods. But if you’re not a natural veggie lover, how do you get more fruits and vegetables in your diet? Try these seven easy tips:

An article by Jeannine Stein in today's Los Angeles Times reports on a new study by Kenneth E. Thorpe and Zhou Yang in the journal Health Affairs. According to the authors of the study, expanding a successful YMCA diabetes prevention program to a nationwide audience could save Medicare $1.8 - 3.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

By the time most of us get into our 40s, 50s or 60s, we start to have achey, creaky, painful joints. The pains can result from injuries we've sustained, health conditions like arthritis, or just poor movement patterns and muscle instability that we've developed over the years. The knees in particular are a common source of pain, because they get used with every step we take.

I just read an article in the New York Times about accidents in the bathroom. According to Centers for Disease Control records, 235,000 adults per year visit an emergency room because of injuries they sustained in the bathroom.