Ooh! Ouch! Oh! A 20-Minute Weight Training Workout for Seniors

THE NEXT FEW DAYS AVOIDING IT BY FOCUSING ON THE FEW EXERCISES THAT YOU HAVE SPECIALISED IN OVER THE YEARS. YOU KNOW THE ONES – WRIST TWISTING AND ELBOW BENDING. THEY ARE THE ONES THAT ENABLE YOU TO GET THE WINE BOTTLE OPEN, THE WINE POURED AND THE GLASS RAISED TO YOUR MOUTH.

Well, I recently came across an excellent web page article written by Chris Freytag on verywellfit.com.

This sets out a 20-Minute Weight Training Workout for Seniors. So I suggest that you log on to this web page and study what Chris has said. He stresses the importance of leading an active life as we get older – which in fairness to this website is something that we have long espoused. He quotes the American Council on Exercise, which has published a report stating “As you grow older…regular exercise can help boost energy, maintain your independence, and manage symptoms of illness or pain. Exercise can even reverse some of the symptoms of aging.” None of us will disagree. It’s just getting started that is the difficulty. There is an emphasis on strength training and it is highlighted that this can help lessen the symptoms of the several chronic conditions for most older adults, viz. Arthritis, Osteoporosis, Diabetes, Obesity, Back pain, and Depression.

I am not going to replicate all of the details from the web page, and recommend that you have a look at it. But I will summarise the different activities described. They are:

• The Warm-Up: 4 Minutes;
• Jog in Place – 1 Minute;
• Punching – 1 Minute;
• Knee Thrusters;
• Basic Squat – 1 Minute;
• Squat Curl Knee Lift;
• Shoulder Overhead Press;
• Reverse Grip Double Arm Row;
• Bird Dog (Which involves kneeling on a mat on all fours);
• Glute Bridge (Which involves lying on your back and lifting your hips);
• Kneeling Shoulder Tap Push Up;
• Mid-Back Extension; and
• A Full Body Roll Up

Now, I am pretty certain that this list will have got you excited/ curious/ depressed [Delete as appropriate]. But whatever your personal reaction, the list serves as a good guide to the amount of effort that you need to put in to keep yourself in good shape. Obviously, if you are not particularly fit, then simply going down the list and trying out the different exercises will be helpful. You can then judge what is best for you and then gradually increase the pace until you are doing everything within 20 minutes. It doesn’t matter if it takes 45 minutes or an hour when you start – the most important thing is that you have started! So log on have a look, and just be glad that the pictures are not of me in lycra!

Read more @ GBOOMER

Time - A Confounding Mystery

Time is the only component of the natural world that competes with the vastness of our cosmos in the ability to inspire awe and befuddlement. We struggle to grasp it. Its relentless march surprises and confounds us. Its trickery exposes our innate hubris.  And, in the end, it humbles us. Time is the ultimate overseer. We see mere snapshots.  It sees everything. The expanse of time is virtually unknowable. The human race is still struggling to come up with a universal definition of Time. How can we define something that we cannot even fully comprehend?

The Expanse of Time – How Big is It?

Most cosmologists agree that the universe is ~13.8 billion years old. How big is 13.8 billion?  If broken down into individual buckets of time, with each bucket containing 1 million years, you would end up with 13,800 buckets. The age of our planet—at ~4.5 billion years—makes it a relative youngster within the grand scheme of cosmic time.

A human fortunate enough to live to the advanced age of 100 will have experienced 0.000000007% of those 13.8 billion years. The epitome of infinitesimal.  The further it is sliced the harder it is to grasp…..

13.8 billion years = 138,000 millennium = 166 billion months = 700 billion weeks = 5 trillion days. OK, enough already!

There is also the vexing question of time’s origin. Did time exist prior to the birth of our universe? Want to give yourself a headache? Try to sort that one out without having to call Stephen Hawking.

Our Perception and Treatment of Time

Humans are very curious creatures. We obsess about the mundane while ignoring the extraordinary. We are thankful for the trivial but cavalier about the essential. For most of our lives our treatment of time is flippant and wasteful. Like the air we breathe and the water we drink we blindly assume that our allotment is unlimited. And, as is often the case, wisdom and perspective do not alight upon our oblivious heads until either advanced age or disaster have befallen us. Perspective is not easily gained nor easily retained.

Time is indeed expansive. Within the human experience it is also slippery, elastic and compressible. When we ache for it to speed up, it slows down. When we wish for stillness it instead becomes a blur. Our concept of time is fundamentally restricted by our limited experience of it. We can marvel at the enormity of it while still bemoaning our meager allotment of it.

The old phrase “time stands still for no man” is almost too benign. Not only does time ignore us, it seems to take some sinister delight in our inability to fully respect it.

The last laugh is, has always been, and will always be, on us.

Boomerangs Versus Empty Nesters

So your kids have grown up and gone off to university, travelled the world or got a job in some other town or city. After the initial upset at your nest being emptied and the realisation that this is another landmark in your life’s journey, you settle down to a new routine where there is quite a bit more freedom: where you aren’t required as a taxi late into the night; where your drinks cabinet hasn’t suddenly been stripped of all its contents; and where the television programmes and music played are what you want to watch and hear. You can go out for the evening in the safe knowledge that their ‘friends’ won’t have called in and help trash the place with cigarette stubs and vodka spills killing your prized cactus. You still keep in touch with your cherubs, usually when they decide that they need something, and you exchange visits, particularly if there are grandchildren (and they need someone to babysit). But then you receive that telephone call that you’ve always feared and dreaded: “Can I come back home to live with you?” Yes – your kid is a boomerang!

A major study has looked at the impact that adults who move back home after moving away have on their parents¹. And THEY CAUSE THEIR PARENTS STRESS AND CONFLICT! What a surprise! In fact, the biggest surprise is arguably the fact that the academics at the London School of Economics and Political Science got funding to research what to most GBoomers is the b!@@$% obvious! Seventeen countries were covered: France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Estonia and Poland. Conspicuous by its absence is the United Kingdom! Those amongst us who adhere to conspiracy theories suspect that this might be because if the UK HAD been included in the research the results would probably gone right off the scale!

The research found that parents' (aged between 50 and 75) whose adult children moved back into the family home saw a decline in their quality of life and wellbeing. But this slump in wellbeing was only when there were no other children still at home, i.e. there was no impact if other children were already living in the family home. Quality of life and wellbeing was measured across four areas: control; autonomy; pleasure; and self-realisation. The higher a score, the better the quality of life. The study found that when an adult child returned home to an "empty-nest", scores dropped significantly. Its report stated that such a drop had a substantial effect on quality of life; it was similar to developing an age-related disability, such as difficulties with walking or getting dressed! (I suspect that some of the boomerang kids had difficulties with getting out of bed and getting dressed!)

The study observed that “Over the past half century, intergenerational co-residence has declined dramatically in Western countries. However, this pattern has recently altered, and in some countries multigenerational co-residence has increased; a shift interpreted as a family response to high unemployment rates, poor job prospects and financial hardship among young adults." Clearly there are different reasons for adult kids returning home, e.g. unemployment and partnership breakdown, which are themselves distressing to parents. But after controlling for this, it was found that the return of a child still caused a significant decline in parents' wellbeing.

Apparently there is a greater effect in Protestant countries compared to Catholic countries, but there is an effect in all countries. Part of the reason is that when parents no longer have children at home their marital relationship improves and they find a new balance, enjoying life through new hobbies and activities. This all goes out of the window when adult children move back.

So be warned! Make sure you have an escape strategy if your own kids look like they might boomerang back to you. I am reminded of a true story that I was told by a couple of work colleagues many years ago. They had a mutual acquaintance who had left home to go to university. One Friday, on the spur of the moment, he decided to go home for the weekend. He arrived at his home and rang the doorbell. The door opened and the man answering the door asked “Who are you?” to which he replied “Who are you?” It transpired that his parents had moved house and not told him! Was this an oversight or a cunning plan? Keep this story filed away in the back of your mind in case of emergency.

1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-43321512

Youth, Age And Perspective - by Keith Merrill

“YOUTH IS WASTED ON THE YOUNG”. WHO SAID THOSE PROFOUND WORDS? THE GENERAL CONSENSUS IS THAT THE QUOTE CAME FROM GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. I DON’T KNOW WHAT EPIPHANY LED MR. SHAW TO THAT UTTERANCE BUT, FOR ME, THOSE SIX WORDS BEAUTIFULLY CONVEY A SENSE OF UNAVOIDABLE TRUTH, SADNESS, AND HUMOR ALL ROLLED INTO ONE. THE OLD REFRAIN “IF I HAD KNOWN THEN WHAT I KNOW NOW!” OF COURSE, THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS. NOT ALL OF US GET WISER OR MORE REFLECTIVE AS WE GET OLDER AND NOT ALL OF THE YOUNG ARE DEVOID OF ANY WISDOM OR PERSPECTIVE. BUT, THOSE ARE THE EXCEPTIONS. YOUTH, AGE, AND PERSPECTIVE ARE PREDOMINANTLY A ONE-WAY JOURNEY.

ARROGANT AND IMPATIENT YOUTH

Do you recall how, as a child, time crawled between one Christmas and the next? Or, how a school year seemed to plod on and on in excruciating sluggishness? It seemed like the calendars our moms hung on their refrigerators lasted five years instead of one!

Part of our childish perspective of time was due to our relatively short experience of it.  When we were, say, 8 years old the passage of a single year represented a whopping 12.5% of our total life experience up to that point. Therefore, that single year appeared to pass oh so slowly.  We were arrogant in our treatment of time because anything that moved at such a snail’s pace could not have been in short supply. That childish impatience had usually morphed into unadulterated arrogance by the time we hit our teens and, pitifully, lasted well into young adulthood. We wasted time away in much the same way as we now treat the useless pennies in our car’s coin holder.  So what if we procrastinated? What’s the big deal if we mentally wished time away?  There was always plenty more where that came from.

I have a personal memory that is very vivid. I was 23 years old at the time.  I was into sports. I played on high-end softball teams, played a lot of tennis, basketball, etc.  One night after a softball game I was lying on the couch in my cheap apartment marveling at how my athletic prowess had not seemed to diminish even at the advanced age of 23.  I remember thinking that maybe I would be a freak of nature and never lose that proverbial “step”. Ooops!! That silly vision did not quite pan out.

THE TRANSITION BEGINS

At some point a subtle shift begins. Gradually—almost imperceptibly—it begins to manifest itself for most of us in mid-adulthood.  By that point we have all experienced the hard slap of mortality within our circle of family and friends. The passing years have started to speed up just a bit. At 35 years old a flip from old calendar to new now represents less than 3% of our accumulated life. The years have just now started to crowd upon one another in a way that is noticeable. We also have our own children, which provide us with an ever-present yardstick to measure time. Reality has started to reveal its stern face but we only catch an occasional glimpse.   Perspective remains elusive…..

HUMBLED AND STUNNED SEXAGENARIAN

Flash forward to the age of 60. Were you not 40 just 5 years ago? Stunning. One passing year on that annoying calendar is now just a blip. Are you still groaning because it takes so long to get to the next Christmas? Probably not. Instead, it seems that by the time you stow away your Christmas tree you need to hurry up and go buy Halloween candy!  Whenever you try to recall when a specific event occurred—like a movie release—you are way off the mark. You estimate that something happened 5 years ago but when you do a bit of fact-checking you discover that it was actually 10 years back. That would have never happened during your youth!

Whatever physical prowess we once took for granted has left the building. Quick reflexes, speed, fast recovery time…..all kaput. Every now and then, in a moment of exceptional delusion, we think we can recapture some of that vigor, only to have to reconsider as we lay at the bottom of a ladder or maybe in a recliner nursing two pulled hamstrings.

We are now much more jealous of our time. Maybe we get up earlier in the morning so as not to waste any more of our remaining allotment. We are not nearly as willing to fritter away time on pursuits that add no real value to our lives. We have finally gained some perspective.

AND SO THE CYCLE REPEATS

We now take our inevitable place in the generational cycle. A cycle that has been repeated for millennia.  We try to convey to our grandchildren, or other youth, the same wisdom that our elders did their best to impart on us. The lesson that time is precious.  That nothing should be taken for granted. That good health and longevity are not birthrights.

And the divine comedy is that those youth look at us with blank faces and nod their heads in agreement; all the while mentally wishing next week would hurry up and arrive so that they can get their new iPhone 8! Our hard-earned perspective—that we ourselves completely lacked at their age—will be casually cast of as “old person’s syndrome”.

Fret not, however; in 40 years or so they will get it.

“Youth is wasted on the young”.  Yes indeed.  Just an unchanging fact in the wonderful, precious, maddening, and meandering thing we call life.

More posts from Keith: 

http://gboomer.co.uk/2018/02/20/from-across-the-pond/

http://gboomer.co.uk/2018/02/20/baby-boomer-legacy-two-sided-coin/

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Snow Good

WELL THE WEATHER IS FRIGHTENING, AND ALTHOUGH THERE’S NO THUNDER AND LIGHTNING, THE SCENES THAT ARE BEING BROADCAST ON TELEVISION FROM ACROSS THE UK BRING IT HOME TO YOU THAT IT CAN BE VERY UNCOMFORTABLE AND EVEN DANGEROUS TO VENTURE OUT WHEN THERE IS SO MUCH SNOW. MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN STUCK IN THEIR CARS OVERNIGHT ON THE ROADS, DESPITE THE POLICE AND WEATHER PEOPLE TELLING EVERYONE TO STAY HOME AND KEEP WARM. WE THEN GET PANICKED BY THE NEWSPAPERS SAYING THAT THE COUNTRY IS RUNNING OUT OF GAS! (I AM TEMPTED TO RESPOND WITH THE RETORT THAT AS LONG AS WE HAVE THE CURRENT MEDIA IN THIS COUNTRY THEN THERE WILL BE NO SHORTAGE OF HOT AIR!!).

..telling everyone to stay home and keep warm

Image by Olivia Henry via UnSplash.com

So what can you do? The message is to stay indoors and keep warm by wrapping up with sufficient clothes, and if you have to venture out then make sure you have appropriate outerwear and proper footwear. For those of you that have been getting deep snow – whether or not it is being measured in inches or centimetres – you will undoubtedly have to put your wellies on and grab a spade so that you can clear your pathways and dig out your car (if you have to use it). But remember that there will be neighbours who might not be able to do this because they are frail or ill. So once you have dealt with your own property, have your essential hot cup of tea or coffee, and then look around to see if there are neighbours in this same situation. And if there are then check if they are OK and need their paths clearing as well. (This might involve phone calls, wading through snow up their path or yelling from the road). Even if you are not deep in snow, a quick check that elderly neighbours are coping well will not go amiss, and no doubt they will very much appreciate the fact that you have taken the time to call on them and have a natter, and maybe (another) cup of tea.

Other than humans, we should not forget that there is wildlife out there that will be finding it hard to find food in heavy snow. Birds are the obvious example, so putting out some seed, bits of bread and topping up birdbaths with water will be a great help. They might even send you a tweet!

Finally, make sure that you keep the television or radio on so that you can hear what the weather is like now and what it is likely to be in a few hours time. When you hear official advice then heed it – do NOT take the typically British attitude that such guidance doesn’t apply to me, and that “I’ll be OK”. Some people will have done this and then lost their lives. Also, remember that there are people who are out there trying to look after everyone else – from doctors and nurses fighting their way to get into their hospital to do their shifts; to the police, fire brigades and ambulances having to attend an accident in the countryside deep in snow; to the mountain rescuers trekking over the hills trying to find someone who is lost or trapped. The fact that they might not have come to you as quickly as you would like might be because they are already tied up saving a life somewhere. So, if your own life is not in imminent danger, please be patient and bear this in mind.

So remember what Sergeant Phil Esterhaus said in Hill Street Blues – ‘Let’s be careful out there‘

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