Healthy Tips Video: Mobility As We Age

Video Transcript

I'm Dr. Andrew Collins from here at Owensboro Health. I'm the geriatric physician. As we come to you today with a healthy tip for Older American Month in the month of May, we talk about our nutrition, and we talk about our movement and our medical fitness as we age. I only deal with patients 65 and older, and we talk about the four M's of geriatric care. Those are what Matters most, our Mobility, our Medication and our Mentation.

We focus in on mobility with this segment to discuss some of the things that are imperative for mobility as we age. And one of the things I hear from older adults a lot is they want to remain independent and in their own home. So how do we do those things is in twofold.

One, move. So one of the things we tell older adults a lot is move more, sit less. The regular physical exercise as we age has shown to decrease disability in older adults, even those older adults who may have not engaged in regular physical exercise as they age. We also talk about nutrition, muscle health. Protein is imperative as we age to maintain our muscle health and ensure that our muscle health does not deteriorate as we age to levels that might require more assistance, such as with assistance devices.

So some people will ask about what types of exercise to engage in and how much of exercise to engage in. So generally, we recommend 150 minutes a week. I usually say 30 minutes a day, five days a week is imperative for health and is really the minimum at which we see maximum benefit. Anything more than that, although we would want you to counsel your position, sometimes there's a diminishing effect with more than 150 minutes a week, but we do see benefit with at least 150 minutes a week.

When we look at exactly what is broken down into those 150 minutes a week, we do recommend 30 minutes a day of what we would consider moderate exercise. So if zero is sitting on the couch and 10 is running on a treadmill as fast as you can, that really four-to-six zone is what we recommend. And really, 30 minutes of that, along with two days a week of a stretching routine.

Stretching is imperative as we age. We become more stiff as we age, and that stretching really helps benefit a lot of different things, including balance, decreases rate of falls. Some other options for exercise, things such as chair yoga-- so every patient really needs to have an individualized approach to their movement and to their nutrition and their fitness.

And that individualized approach need to take in a bunch of factors-- factors such as what kind of care-- what kind of health problems they have, what's their chronic disease status, things such as that. Things such as chair yoga, Tai Chi, water aerobics really can concentrate on those patients who may have crippling arthritis, may have other mobilities. They can still maintain their physical fitness and try to improve upon what they already have. Really, twice a week of moderate intensity weight-bearing training really improves a lot of access as well and really has shown to decrease the rate at which we lose muscle, which is imperative as we age.

We also talk a lot about the different types of muscle groups to target as we exercise. We really recommend targeting all 10 major muscle groups with really a set of 10 to 12 repetitions at least three times of those 10 major muscle groups at least twice weekly. For more information on what we discussed today, please contact the Healthpark at 270-688-5433.