Retirement For Dummies<sup>&#174;<sup> by Lita Epstein

Author:Lita Epstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

Keeping Up with Good Health and Fitness

In This Chapter

Assessing your fitness level

Balancing aerobic, anaerobic, and stretching exercises

Exploring exercises for the mind and body

Aging is inevitable, but you don’t have to shuffle into old age as a hunchback with a cane, always looking for the nearest place to sit and rest. You can feel 10, 15, even 20 years younger than the birth date on your driver’s license. And if you take charge of your fitness today, you’ll increase your chances of living longer and improve your quality of life. When you’re healthy, you’re able to travel, care for loved ones, give back to your community, spend time with your family and friends, and more.

Don’t worry if you haven’t exactly been a regular exerciser your entire life — it’s never too late to start. In this chapter, we show you how.

The Many Benefits of Being Fit

When you become physically fit, you

Increase your chances of living a longer, healthier life

Reduce your risk of developing high blood pressure

Decrease feelings of depression and anxiety

Help control your weight

Help build and maintain healthy bones, muscles, and joints

Become stronger and better able to perform not only the tasks you need to do (like household chores) but also the activities you want to do (like traveling and hiking)

Increase your energy

Regular exercise and being fit invites overall good health to visit and stay with you a long time. Your mood will improve, you’ll feel better about yourself, and you’ll be able to lead a longer life.

Sizing Up Your Fitness Level

If you’re facing retirement and you suspect you may not be as fit as you’d like, one of the first steps you have to take is to figure out what shape you’re in right now. Doing so gives you a benchmark to measure your results by. After several months on your fitness program, this reference point enables you to look back and say, “Yes, I’ve come a long way.”

Here are several ways to determine what shape you’re in:

Any fitness center worth its mission statement can assess your fitness level. Just ask for an assessment when you sign up. A staff member measures your resting heart rate, your heart rate under physical exertion, the number of push-ups and sit-ups you can do in a minute, your strength on various exercise machines, and how long you can walk on a treadmill, among several other in-house tests.

A personal trainer, at a gym or your house, can take the same measurements.

Self-administered tests, like the ones described in the following sections, are easy to perform and take just a few minutes. These tests, though not scientific, should give you a rudimentary idea where you stand on several components of overall fitness.

After you do the tests in the following sections, take a cold, hard look at the results. If you score well, treat yourself to a banana split (just kidding); seriously, congratulate yourself for being more fit than many

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