I’ve assumed that, at age 86, I'd never be considered fit. But if you define fitness—as some do—as being able to perform an activity without undue fatigue, then I guess you could call me fit. Now. After two back-to-back knee replacement surgeries last spring, I spent the summer on the couch. While I faithfully performed the exercises to strengthen my knees and recover my range of motion, my normal exercise routines—which don’t amount to a lot—fell by the wayside. The first time I tried walking upstairs I was huffing and puffing. It’s taken me nearly a year to get my old stamina back.
Because regular exercise helps your body to deliver oxygen
and nutrients in a more efficient way, one of the first things that declines
when you become inactive is your cardiovascular endurance. After just a few
days of inactivity, the volume of blood plasma circulating in your body
decreases. Studies show that after 12 days of inactivity the total amount of
blood the heart pumps every minute decreases, along with the amount of
oxygenated blood available to muscles and other cells.
If you’ve always been an exerciser, even after a break in
your routine, your fitness level remains above those who have been sedentary
their whole lives. For example, while muscle fibers can shrink during long breaks,
they don’t completely disappear, and they do retain a molecular “muscle memory’
that can help them bounce back after you stop exercising. One study showed that
older adults needed less than eight weeks of retraining after a twelve-week
break to attain their earlier fitness levels. The higher the intensity, the
faster the rebound.
I got back to my exercise routines—which consist mostly of
on-line classes plus weekly golf—as soon as I could. I wouldn’t call
them “intense.”
For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.
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