Top exercise tips for older adults

On Thursday, we featured our latest Facebook live broadcast as part of our series with DCU’s School of Health and Human Performance.

Exercise and activity older adults can do while ‘cocooning’ at home was the focus of the piece delivered by Ciara McCormack, who specialises in the delivery of home-based exercise and rehabilitation for older adults and people living with chronic disease.

Ciara works with DCU’s Professor Niall Moyna in Clinical Exercise Physiology which entails working with older people and with people who live with chronic disease such as cardiovascular disease, pulmonary disease such as COPD, diabetes and some forms of cancer.

Measures imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus, has meant that older adults and people aged over 70 have been “cocooning” at home and limiting their daily movements to a maximum of 2 km respectively.

Ciara’s broadcast focussed specifically on the challenges facing this group and solutions to help.

Here are some of Ciara’s tips from last week’s broadcast:

Recommended daily exercise

If you have trouble getting your recommended daily amount of exercise (30 minutes per day) in then why not try and get your recommended daily amount of exercise in via accumulated bouts of exercise.

If you adopt the accumulated exercise approach it means breaking your exercise down into chunks during the day.

For example, ten minutes in the morning, ten in the afternoon and ten in the evening. For example, jogging or stepping on the spot, using a stationary bike and/or dancing are some of the examples- break this down over the course of the day.

Strength building exercises.

It is important that we continue to use our muscles - and to try and maintain existing strength and/or build upon it.

Ciara recommends building some strength training exercises per day into your schedule and highlights that it is never too late to start!

Using Technology and Exercise- make family calls fun

Why not try and get your exercise in via technology.

Why don’t the whole family get a work-out done by doing some simple exercises together on the call? Simple things such as lifting the arms up and down, reaching down and touching their toes etc.

The main thing is to have fun and make it easy and come up with something that everyone can do together- grandparents and grandchildren.

Missing activities with your different groups- again the suggestion was to use technology to try and connect and do the exercises/dance together over Zoom, Facetime etc.

Try and get a routine going

it is important to try and build exercise/daily activity into your weekly schedule.

Start gradually, perhaps aim to get some exercise in three days per week. Start small and build upon it each week.

Examples of this, could be increasing the time spent on the exercise or perhaps increasing the intensity.

Be consistent

Try and make sure to be consistent with what you do.A little each week is far better than doing one big thing and nothing for a number of weeks.

Perhaps keep track of it all by using a handy calendar- it helps to keep you accountable and keeps you on track plus you can look back at how well you are doing.

Check out the full broadcast here including the series of guided exercises by logging on to facebook.com/DCU.

Stay safe - stay active- it is never too late to start exercising 

Focus on what you can do- not on what you cannot do

Ciara advises to focus on what you are able to do. Some movement is better than none and it is never too late to start exercising.