It may not be too late for you to get in shape. Study finds that sedentary middle-aged people who begin a rigorous program can turn back the cardiac clock. Even if you’re middle-aged and haven’t been exercising, you still may be able to turn the clock back in terms of your heart’s health — but be prepared to work for it.
Starting Exercise Late in Life Can Still Improve Your Heart
A recent story in the New York Times cited several cardiac studies by a cardiologist and medical professor who found that while our heart muscles tend to atrophy and weaken and our cardiac arteries stiffen as we get into our late 50s, causing higher blood pressure and other risks for health problems, the decline is neither inevitable nor irreversible.
In the most recent of these studies, Benjamin Levine, M.D., a professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine in Dallas, discovered that the heart can indeed improve in function even among those ages 45 to 64 who don’t hit the gym regularly until later in life.
But the exercise must be regular and intense for the best outcome, Levine cautioned. The healthiest subjects in the test exercised nearly every day for more than 30 minutes, mostly moderately but with at least one session per week of brief but strenuous activity.
The results, Levine told the Times, show that hearts can “retain plasticity” deep into middle age and can change for the positive with vigorous exercise.
“In previously sedentary healthy middle-aged adults,” Levine and colleagues concluded in a research article in Circulation, “two years of exercise training improved maximal oxygen uptake and decreased cardiac stiffness. Regular exercise may provide protection against the future risk of heart failure.”
Like most people, you have probably heard that muscle strength, absent some weightlifting, starts to decline in middle age. And you probably expect things like your balance, coordination and flexibility to naturally take a bit of a downturn …. someday. But new research from Duke University shows that these fitness-related changes begin much earlier than many people expect — often when they’re still in their 50s.
To assess age-related changes in people’s fitness abilities, researchers at Duke’s Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development had 775 participants from their 30s to their 90s perform tests designed to measure things like strength, endurance, balance and walking speed.
At all ages, the men generally performed better than the women, but the age at which physical declines became truly apparent was consistent for both genders — the 50s. That’s when both sexes began to have trouble rising from and sitting in a chair repeatedly for 30 seconds (an indicator of declines in lower body strength) or standing on one leg for up to 60 seconds (a measure of balance).
Additionally, people in their 60s and 70s showed a marked slowing of gait speed (based on distance covered per second of a four-meter walk) and a drop in aerobic endurance (based on a six-minute walk test). By contrast, those in their 80s and 90s had dramatic declines in their balance, gait speed, lower body strength and aerobic endurance.
“People were very surprised by these changes because most of these tests aren’t typically done if you go to the doctor,” says study coauthor Katherine Hall, an assistant professor in medicine at Duke University School of Medicine’s Division of Geriatrics. “Some of this is inevitable — our bodies are machines, and if you put 60 or 70 years of wear on any machine, it’s going to show some decline.” Even so, the rate or severity of these declines varies significantly from one person to another based on how active — or sedentary — you are.
Article Source: aarp.org
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