Most mornings at the Wellness Center, a north Macon health club that is a branch of The Medical Center of Central Georgia, the number of middle- and retirement-age exercisers meets or exceeds the number of fitness buffs in the younger set.
Seniors are perched on recumbent bikes, some reading newspapers, while others march on the indoor track or on stair climbers and treadmills while watching TV, reading books or just listening to the piped-in music that, at that hour, is often upbeat stuff from the ’50s and ’60s.
On a recent morning, Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me,” from 1956, came on and many of those working out could no doubt recall a time when the tune was on the radio.
Hazel McCloud, who is 86 and has been going to the gym since the mid-1990s, has found a second home in the exercise environment that caters to all comers.
“We older people get up earlier in the morning. We’re not sleep-ins. Or I’m not,” McCloud said. “One of the things that gets us over there early is that I think we realize how important it is. ... To me it’s like getting up and going to work.”
She hits the gym five days a week for two to three hours at a time. She does yoga, water aerobics and strength training.
“My health wouldn’t be worth a hoot if I didn’t go,” she said. “And I think exercise helps keep older people happy. I’m always happy. I love being there (at the gym) and I love speaking to all the people.”
As it turns out, fitness is not the exclusive, young person’s playground you might think it is. Far from it.
While surveys by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over the past decade reveal that slightly more than half (53 percent) of adults 65 and older consider themselves inactive when it comes to exercise, what is noteworthy is how the 65-plus crowd that does exercise compares to similarly active younger age groups.
Fewer than 10 percentage points separate those in the CDC survey’s 65-and-up group who describe themselves as regular exercisers — getting in at least three “vigorous” workouts a week — and those in the 18-to-44 age group who put themselves in the same exercise category. That is, 22 percent of retirement-age people work out regularly compared to 31 percent in the younger group.
Aiding independence
The National Institute on Aging recommends seniors take part in a combination of endurance workouts to “build ‘staying power’’’ and bolster heart and circulatory health as well as incorporating strength training, stretching and balance improving exercises “to reduce the chances of a fall.”
The Institute, on its website, notes that an exercise regimen for seniors can “prevent or delay diabetes and heart trouble. It can also reduce arthritis pain, anxiety and depression ... (and) help older people stay independent.”
And independence is one of the benefits not to be taken for granted, says Sandra Stone, a Wellness Center instructor who has taught exercise classes since 1984. She specializes in workouts geared for older people.
“One of the ladies, when she came to my class the first day, she said, ‘I love taking a tub bath. I am fearful. I live alone. I am scared to get in the bathtub and then not being able to get out of the bathtub and then your alternative is to have to call 911 and here comes the fireman.’ You know, how embarrassing,” Stone recalled. “Four or five weeks after she had been attending classes, she came in so excited one day. She said, ‘Guess what I did!’ It’s, like, ‘What, did you book a cruise?’ She goes, ‘I took a bath last night and I got out of the tub by myself.’’’
Stone says that as we age, we lose some of our balance and range of movement and that aches and pains crop up in places we haven’t had them before. That can combine to gradually curtail everyday activity.
“Things as simple as still being able to get up out of your chair,” Stone said. “You’ll be surprised how many older adults have trouble with just that small of a maneuver with their bodies. Or getting your foot up on the side of the sidewalk.”
Stone is something of an exercise cruise director for dozens of local seniors. She guides an insurance-based program called Silver Sneakers in which classes of between 40 and 50 retirement-age exercisers are put through the paces. One of the classes Stone leads is dubbed “Aging Gracefully Through Exercise.”
Stone refers to one woman in the Silver Sneakers group who is in her 80s and has been taking exercise classes for three years now as the program’s poster child.
“The first day she came into class, she could barely walk. ... I thought, ‘I’m really gonna have to watch this lady because her mobility, she had none.’ After class she came up to me and was just tearful,” Stone recalled. “She said, ‘My family doesn’t think that I need to be living at home alone anymore. ... And the thought that I’m gonna have to go move in with one of my children in Atlanta just saddens me.’ And I said, ‘We’re gonna get you better.’ It wasn’t much longer after that ... the change in her, it just warms your heart.”
Said Stone: “The more you sit in that chair, day by day, the less likely you are to have your independence. You’re gonna end up relying on someone to help you or just do certain chores for you.”
Starting early
Professor M. Elaine Cress, an exercise physiologist at the University of Georgia who specializes in physical function in older adults, says that as baby boomers who aren’t active approach age 65, there is still time for them to make healthy lifestyle changes.
But by the time they hit, say, 85, Cress said, “We’re just gonna have a huge amount of frailty if people are not only doing their 30 minutes of moderate intensity (exercise) on most days of the week, but also strength training.”
Cress, director of UGA’s Aging and Physical Performance Laboratory, it helps if people develop good fitness habits while they’re still of typical working age.
“Make a decision and just say, ‘This is it.’ I say all the time, ‘Did you sleep last night? Yes. Did you eat today? Yes. Have you exercised? No. Well, that is the problem, because if you eat and you sleep, you have to exercise. It is the same importance,’ ” she said. “When people say they don’t have time to exercise — and this isn’t unique with me, but I don’t know who to attribute it to — you better find time to be sick.”
Without proper exercise, Cress said, it takes people longer to do everyday chores and they feel more pain, stress and exertion while doing them. A regimen of moderate exercise five or more days a week for at least 30 minutes is a baseline level, she said.
“If you want to be more fit so that life is more enjoyable, you have to do more than that. But the payoff is just like savings for retirement. If you do a little bit every paycheck, it’s painless. But if you decide in the last year that you’re gonna save up everything for your retirement, you’re not living on anything,” Cress said. “And it’s the same way with exercise for older adults. You can’t just decide, ‘OK, when I get to be 65 I’m going to start exercising.’ ”
Exercise, she said, is another way to save on medical costs. Regular physical activity can, in a lot cases, she said, fend off a patient’s reliance on prescription drugs.
“There is,” Cress said, “no medication that takes the place of what physical activity can do in terms of warding off all the chronic conditions that come along with aging and the absence of exercise.”
Paula Hardin, a 67-year-old Wellness Center exerciser, had been an avid walker before she joined the gym about six years ago after retiring. She had never been one to take exercise classes, but now she rides stationary bikes and routinely works out on weight machines “just trying to keep everything I’ve got working,” she said. “And I feel better.”
When she started going to the gym she was taking 11 prescription drugs for various ailments. She has since trimmed that to four. She recently had foot surgery, and balancing workouts have helped her recover. She thought she’d have to have back surgery, too, but exercise has, for now at least, staved it off.
Hardin’s five-day-a-week routine of at least 90-minute workouts each day are “something I’ll do as long as I’m able to.” She plans her errands and appointments around her gym sessions.
An acquaintance of Hardin’s from church, a woman in her 90s, has recently inquired about joining the gym herself.
“It’s just amazing to me,” Hardin said. “I think people are seeing and hearing what (exercise) can mean to them and their health by just getting up and getting out and doing something for yourself, not just sitting home and sitting on the sofa.”
Miss Hazel’s example
McCloud, the 86-year-old Wellness Center go-getter, or “Miss Hazel” as many at the gym call her, attends 10 exercise classes a week.
“Without the health club, I don’t know what I would do with myself unless I went back to school,” she said.
Yoga is probably her favorite routine.
“Everything is so slow,” she said, “but think how strong you get by doing things slowly if you put your whole self into it.”
McCloud says she hates to see the state of the American waistline, how so many people neglect themselves when it comes to physical activity.
“Most people eat too much and they don’t think what it’s doing to their health. We all have the opportunities to do all this stuff and someone that would just sit at home and not take advantage of it, I think it’s a crime. I hate to see these men with their big bellies sticking out and women that can’t hardly walk. I feel sorry for them. They don’t know how good life can be,” she said.
“I’m heavier than I should be, I realize that,” she went on. “At 86, there are times where I’ll say, ‘Hey, at this age I should have anything I want.’ But the exercise keeps my weight down with me going every day like I do. ... I wouldn’t give it up for anything.”
And not just for what it does for her physical well being.
Before her pool workouts, McCloud is notorious for welcoming each exerciser into the water before every session.
“Of course I’m the oldest one there, and I speak to each one as they come in, and you can see the look on their faces, they’re just ready for me speak to them and say, ‘Hi,’ and then they give me this big old smile. And do you think that doesn’t make my day happy?”
To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.
E-Mail
Print
Reprint|license
