How Physical Therapy Helps Seniors Stay Active for Healthy Aging.

Aging isn’t fun for anyone. Memory starts to fade, the body slows down and gains weight, and joints begin to stiffen. No one can reverse that process, but one of the best ways to slow it down is to stay active. As the years go by, staying active becomes one of the key factors in staying independent, pain free, and feeling good. Exercise is known to help prevent and reduce problems like heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, and better health from increased activity can also allow some patients to rely less on certain medications.

Start With Walking

If you want to be more active but haven’t exercised in a while, walking is an easy place to start. It’s low impact, has been shown to reduce the risk of heart attacks, and doesn’t require training or special equipment, just a good pair of shoes. It’s also easy to track your progress with a pedometer or simply by timing your walks. The goal of any walking program is to increase activity gradually: time or measure how far you walk, even if it’s only one minute or one block at first, then build from there once that distance feels comfortable. A reasonable pace is increasing your distance by about 1,000 steps, roughly half a mile, and holding that new distance for a week or two before increasing again.

According to the American College of Sports Medicine, 10,000 steps a day is a reasonable goal for most healthy adults, and 10,000 to 12,500 steps a day is considered active. The CDC recommends 150 minutes a week of moderate intensity exercise, or 75 minutes a week of vigorous intensity exercise, or an equivalent combination of the two. If you’re working toward that through walking alone, that works out to about 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week. To change up the intensity, try jogging, climbing stairs, or adding hills.

Working With a Physical Therapist

A physical therapist can build an activity plan around your age, specific goals, current fitness level, and any medical conditions, starting with a comprehensive evaluation of your musculoskeletal health. Working on strength and balance at your own pace helps lower the risk of falls and further injury, and a therapist is trained to watch for and respond to signs of distress along the way.

Know When to Ease Off

If you’re exercising on your own and start having trouble breathing, or experience chest pain or dizziness, it’s time to take a break and check in with your doctor before continuing. Afterward, pay attention to how your body feels: you don’t need to be sore to see results. A helpful guideline is the “two hour pain rule” set by the Arthritis Foundation. If you’re more sore two hours after exercising than you were before you started, you’ve overdone it. Pain in the joints specifically is a sign to back off and reduce your intensity so you don’t cause an injury.