Take Charge Fitness

How fitness proffessionals can help seniors increase activity for healthy aging

Wednesday, June 17th, 2015 | Aging, Common Fitness Mistakes, Exercise, Exercise Plan, Measuring Fitness, Training Regimen | No Comments

Aging isn’t fun for anyone. Your memory starts to fade, your body slows down and gains weight, and your joints start to stiffen. And while no one can reverse or stop the aging process, one of the best ways to reduce the speed at which your body is changing is to be more active.

“As the years go by, staying active becomes one of the key factors in staying independent, pain-free and feeling good,” says Randy Gustafson, a physical therapist and the owner of Physiquality member Mesa Physical Therapy in San Diego, California. Exercise is known to help prevent and reduce such problems as heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, along with its more obvious benefits of increasing strength and reducing — or at least maintaining — weight. And, Randy points out, better health from increased activity often allows patients to reduce their reliance on some medications, allowing patients to take them less frequently or sometimes quit them altogether.

If you want to exercise more but haven’t done so in a while, walking is an easy activity to begin with. It’s low-impact and has been shown to reduce the risk of heart attacks. It doesn’t require training or special equipment, just a good pair of shoes. And it’s easy to measure your progress with a pedometer, or even simply timing your walks.

Mika Yoshida, a certified strength and conditioning specialist, recommends the Arthritis Foundation’s Walk With Ease program as a way to measure progress. As a fitness instructor at the Take Charge Fitness Program at Clinton Physical Therapy Center, a Physiquality member in Clinton, Tennessee, she often works with patients who are uneasy about returning to exercise after an injury or chronic illness. The Walk With Ease program offers local groups, where patients can walk with others hoping to improve their health, and guidelines if people prefer to create their own program. Read More

Tags: Aging, Arthritis Exercise, Seniors

How do you measure your fitness level?

Wednesday, March 19th, 2014 | BMI, Exercise, Fitness Testing, Measuring Fitness, MET, Metabolic Equivalent | No Comments

Am I fit enough? Whether it’s a daily question, one we ponder before visiting with the doctor, or one we guiltily think before grabbing another cookie, this is a question many of us ask ourselves. Unfortunately, there’s not a simple answer, but Physiquality’s physical therapy professionals have some useful insights.

“How people measure their health and fitness depends on the person,” says Angela Manzanares, the creator of the fitbook™, a Physiquality partner. She warns against using numbers like BMI, or the body mass index, on their own, as they only take into account a person’s height and weight, not body composition. It’s possible to have low body fat and high muscle mass, and therefore a higher weight, Angela explains, which could categorize someone as overweight or obese when it’s really not the case.

It’s better to look at a variety of tests and think about both health and fitness, rather than simply your BMI or the number on your scale. Joy Winchester, HFS, from the Take Charge Fitness Program, a wellness facility run by Clinton Physical Therapy Center (a Physiquality network member in Clinton, Tennessee), recommends using a site like www.sparkpeople.com to test your fitness. The website has a variety of challenges that can be done at home to test your endurance, including one-minute push-up and crunch tests, a three-minute step test and a one-mile walk test. Each of the tests is simple to execute and requires little more than a stopwatch for timing, and maybe a friend to help keep count (or to keep you honest!). The site charts results by age and gender, ranging from “very poor” to “excellent,” giving you an idea of how your endurance ranks against others your own age.  See more