Recommended Fitness Regimens for All Ages from Experts

More and more people in the Western world suffer from diseases that could have been avoided had they just exercised regularly, but the idea of exercising every day is daunting and causes many to give up very quickly. However, many experts argue that you don’t have to go to the gym every day to be healthy, and in fact, there are some new guidelines to know about the amount and type of exercise recommended for each age group. In fact, the most important thing is to make exercise enjoyable for you, all you need to do is find an activity that interests you, it doesn’t have to be weight lifting or jogging, and engage in it with pleasure. Here are the recommendations for the amount and type of exercise recommended for each age group.

Ages 6-17

While children aged 3-5 need to be active all day long, older children need only one or more hours of moderate to high-intensity activity three times a week. Such an activity can be:

• Aerobic exercise like a dance
• Muscle-strengthening exercises like swimming
• Bone-strengthening exercises like running

There are many different classes to enroll children in which can activate their bodies. Let them go to a few different classes and see which form of exercise they enjoy the most.

Ages 18-64

Adults need to do more physical activity than children because they are also more vulnerable to disease due to lack of movement. Each type of exercise has different guidelines to achieve maximum health benefits, and you should dabble in them all:

• Aerobic exercise - at least 150-300 minutes per week at moderate intensity, or 75-150 minutes per week at high intensity. You can combine the two of course, and its recommended to spread these hours across a whole week. You can take up dancing, squash, swimming or cycling.
• Muscle-strengthening exercises - at least twice a week at medium to high intensity, with weight lifting or resistance exercises that strengthen all muscles, including legs, hips, back, abdomen, chest, shoulders, and arms. Swimming is a very recommended activity, but of course, you can also do weight training.
• General exercise - any exercise you add to the previous recommendations will benefit your body. Moderate intensity training can be quick walking or even raking leaves, and high-intensity training can be running and carrying heavy bags from the supermarket home. Know that every time you do such activities you only benefit your health. 

People aged 65 and over

Older adults should follow the recommendations for ages 18-64, but if they can’t because of chronic health problems, exercise should be done twice a week for one of the following types: aerobics, muscle-strengthening, or balance training. It is recommended that you combine these types and perform a different kind of workout each time. Simple examples of such exercises can be ballroom dancing or even walking backwards.
To understand what medium or high-intensity training is for you, rate the level of effort you need to use in a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being sitting on a chair and 10 being the best effort you can make. Moderate intensity activity should be between 5-6 in effort, where you can talk while exercising but not sing.

Pregnant and postpartum women 

Every woman should consult with her healthcare professional about exercising during and after pregnancy to understand how much exercise is safe for her. If the doctor approves physical activity, the guidelines instruct you to perform moderate-intensity activity up to 150 minutes per week, and of course not once or twice, but spread over several days. If you were very active before getting pregnant, you may be able to continue your regular regimen with a few tweaks, but you should consult your doctor.

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Why vitamins may be bad for workouts

Many people take vitamins as part of their daily fitness regimens, having heard that antioxidants aid physical recovery and amplify the impact of workouts. But in another example of science undercutting deeply held assumptions, several new experiments find that antioxidant supplements may actually reduce the benefits of training.

Antioxidants became popular dietary supplements largely because they were said to sop up free radicals, the highly reactive oxygen molecules that are generated during daily activities. Physical exertion, through its breakdown of oxygen, results in the creation of large numbers of these molecules, which, in excess, can lead to cell death and tissue damage. So it seems logical that reducing the number of free radicals produced by exercise would be desirable.

Enter antioxidants, which absorb and deactivate free radicals. While the body creates its own antioxidants, until recently many researchers believed that we produce too few natural antioxidants to counteract the depredations from free radicals created during exercise. So many people who exercise began downing large doses of antioxidants such as vitamins C and E, even though few experiments in people had actually examined the precise physiological impacts of antioxidant supplements in people who work out.

For a study published last week in The Journal of Physiology, researchers with the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo and other institutions gathered 54 healthy adult men and women, most of them recreational runners or cyclists, and conducted a series of tests, including muscle biopsies, blood draws and treadmill runs, to establish their baseline endurance capacity and the cellular health of their muscles.

Then they divided the volunteers into two groups. Those in one group took four pills a day, delivering a total dose of 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C and 235 milligrams of vitamin E. Members of the second group got identical placebo pills.

Finally, they asked all of the participants to complete a vigorous 11-week training program, consisting of increasingly intense interval sessions once or twice per week, together with two weekly sessions of moderately paced hour-long runs. By the end, all of the volunteers were more fit than they had been at the start, with their maximum endurance capacity increasing by an average of about 8 per cent.

But their bodies had responded quite differently to the training. The runners who had swallowed the placebo pills showed robust increases of biochemical markers that are known to goose the creation of mitochondria, the tiny structures within cells that generate energy, in cells in their bloodstream and muscles. More mitochondria, especially in muscle cells, means more energy and, by and large, better health and fitness. The creation of new mitochondria is, in fact, generally held to be one of the most important effects of exercise.

But the volunteers who had consumed the antioxidants had significantly lower levels of the markers related to mitochondrial creation. The researchers didn’t actually count the specific populations of mitochondria within their volunteers’ muscles cells, but presumably, over time, those taking the antioxidants would see a smaller uptick in mitochondrial density than among those not taking them.

That finding echoes the results of another study of antioxidant supplementation and exercise, also published last year in The Journal of Physiology, in which half of a group of older men downed 250 milligrams daily of the supplement resveratrol, an antioxidant famously found in red wine, and the other half took a placebo. After two months of exercising, the men taking the placebo showed significant and favorable changes in their blood pressure, cholesterol profiles and arteries, with fewer evident arterial plaques.

The men taking the resveratrol were not as fortunate. They had exercised as much as the other men, but their blood pressures, cholesterol levels and arteries had remained stubbornly almost unchanged.

The supplements did not improve performance in comparison with a placebo, so why bother with them, Dr Goran Paulsen, a researcher at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, who led the vitamin C and E study, asked. “Personally, I would avoid high dosages” of antioxidants while training, he said. The science on the topic may not be complete, but the intimation of the recent studies is that by downing the supplements, “you risk losing some of the benefits of exercise”.

ps- this is only for information, always consult you physician before having any particular food/ medication/exercise/other remedies.

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