Fitness Over 40

The 206 bones in your body make up the structural infrastructure that supports your soft tissue. Bones are also storehouses for calcium and phosphorus, and bone tissue is continously being broken down and repaired within your body. Approximately every ten years, your entire skeleton will be replaced with new cells. Stressful forces on the bone, such as you experience when you exercise, cause the bones to create more new bone tissue, while a sedentary lifestyle results in greater loss of bone tissue than generation of new tissue. Your challenge, as you age, is to keep the pace of cell regeneration ahead of the pace of degeneration.

You may have heard about functional fitness, a relatively new trend in fitness training, but you likely still have questions. Here’s a round-up of all the essential information you need to understand this fitness trend and determine if it’s a good choice for you.

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.

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.

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.

Functional Fitness is a term you hear more often in recent years, especially in reference to fitness training for older adults. But don't worry, just because it's a new term, doesn't mean it's one more thing you have to make time for in your day. Functional fitness is all about training your body for life, rather than for a specific sport or for a certain esthetic appearance. It's especially helpful for older adults because it addresses muscle imbalances and asymmetries, and it trains your body to move in the ways we move in everyday life.