Whether you've been consistently physically active most of your life or you've been wanting to increase your activity for a while but life got in the way, the way we think about fitness can change as we approach our later decades and retirement. Rather than focusing on performance-related goals, like "running a 5K," we start to consider (or perhaps are forced to consider due to injury or illness) our fitness in the context of our functionality in our daily lives. There's nothing like a broken hip to make you realize how much you need the strength of that other one to be able to get in and out of chairs. Or scrambling grandkids to show you how much less weight you can lift since you had your own children. But even beyond these daily activities, maintaining our physical fitness as we age has a vast range of benefits we should all be aware of when we're figuring out what to prioritize in our health goals as we age.
What Does It Mean to Be Fit?
The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans defines fitness as:
The ability to carry out daily tasks with vigor and alertness, without undue fatigue, and with ample energy to enjoy leisure-time pursuits and respond to emergencies.
As many of us may know, carrying out daily tasks without undue fatigue and with ample energy to spare can feel like an increasingly difficult benchmark to reach as we get older. But as we get older, it's also increasingly important to maintain that baseline level of physical ability. So how do we do that when we're fighting against the body's natural decline?
Better Metrics
If you've spent a lot of your life looking at the scale, it's time to rethink how you monitor your physical health: weight is not the full picture. What should you look at instead? Body composition. Particularly, muscle mass. After the age of 30, our muscle mass decreases approximately 3-8% per decade, and the rate increases even more after the age of 60. But don't let that discourage you: resistance training exercises can improve muscular strength at any age.
And it's a worthwhile pursuit, with tremendous health benefits for folks who keep up their strength and rather undesirable outcomes for those who don't. Maintaining muscle mass and strength is correlated with a decrease in all-cause mortality, while a decrease in muscle mass is correlated with increased incidence of disability in older adults.
As you consider your body composition metrics, it's important to also keep an eye on your fat mass in relation to your muscle mass. If you're noticing muscle mass trending downwards and fat mass trending upwards, it's a signal from your body that you are at greater risk for other health complications, such as bone density decreases, insulin resistance, and joint stiffness.
Some commercially available household scales can measure your body composition, albeit with some room for error. Many gyms offer body composition measurements with personal trainers using tools like skin calipers, but often your measurements are only as good as the person taking them: less experience can equate to less accurate results. If you're not too hung up on having perfectly accurate measurements, however, you can use scales and skin calipers to track how your body composition may be changing over time.
One of the most accurate ways to measure body composition is with a DEXA scan, which was originally developed to measure bone density, but also differentiates between lean mass and fat mass. This can be a more costly option that may not be available in all locations, but if you can get one, it gives a clear and accurate picture of your body composition.
Another metric to pay attention to while aging is your VO₂ max, or your maximal oxygen consumption, which measures the maximum amount of oxygen that you can utilize during exercise. VO₂ max indicates cardiovascular health and aerobic endurance and also decreases with age, on the order of 10% per decade. Traditionally, doctors would measure your VO₂ max by hooking you up to a heart rate monitor and having you run on a treadmill. Some fitness trackers will calculate your VO₂ max, or you can do a home test on your own treadmill with a fitness tracker that measures your heart rate and an online calculator (but don't do the test alone or without consulting a medical professional if you are not already active as the test can be intense). You can use VO₂ max data to work backwards from what you want to be able to do in your last 10 years of life: if you know that you want to be able to walk two miles, carry two 20-pound bags of groceries, or lift a 30-pound suitcase into an overhead bin, you can look at what VO₂ max you would need in order to do those things and compare it to where you are now. From there, you can determine whether you need to improve or maintain your current VO₂ max.
Consistency Over Perfection
The concept of "fitness" can be overwhelming for a lot of people. We all have a very clear image of what "Fit" looks like: young, strong, sweaty, and working at maximum effort in slow-mo in a Nike ad. It's clear skin, abs, and a lot of kale. But when we go back to the definition of fitness the Physical Activities Guidelines for Americans gives us, there is no mention of six-packs, dress sizes, or "maximum effort." When we can get away from focusing on an image of perfection, a result, we can let go of a lot of the emotional and psychological barriers that keep people stuck in unhealthy routines. There's the perfectionist mindset of "all or nothing" that plagues many of us, and the fitness industry has done us no favors in creating the expectation that we should work out at our maximum effort every time in order for it to "count."
Rather than aiming for The Perfect Workout, aim for consistency. You don't have to be at a 10 out of 10 for every exercise. You don't have to feel like you're going to die in a spin class to make progress on your health goals. In fact, it's important to incorporate a mix of varying intensities in your exercise repertoire. When not everything has to be at the highest intensity, you can allow yourself to get moving with much less pressure.
Consistency requires building habits. And habits are much easier to develop and maintain when you build them to be more pleasurable than not doing them. Finding exercises and physical activities that you love is a far more effective way to incorporate them into your routine rather than trying to force yourself to do something you actually hate doing but fits the idea of a "good" workout. Engaging in mindfulness while you workout can also increase your enjoyment of the activity. Getting in touch with the sensations of your body while you perform an exercise and learning to love those sensations can help create a sense of craving for them, so that you miss those feelings when you stop exercising.
Aiming for consistency rather than perfection can also release you from creating those "pre-goal" goals. If you have some idea of where you need to be before you can begin your true fitness journey that doesn't account for the reality of your current health and abilities, you may never get started. Accepting yourself as you are today is the only prerequisite for starting a fitness goal centered on consistency. You work with what you've got, today. When the only goal is consistency, everything else is flexible. You can adjust exercises to fit you rather than feel like you must fit the exercise.
How Reclaim Lifestyles Helps Support Your Most Vibrant Retirement
So you know how important it is to maintain your physical fitness as you age, but if you're starting from a less active spot, or with an injury or illness to adjust for, how can you ensure that you're incorporating physical activity that will support an aging body in all the ways you need? To truly improve and maintain muscle mass and strength, balance, mobility, and cardiovascular health, you can't exactly just do the same exercise every day and hope for the best. This can be another sticking point for folks: where do I even start to build a fitness routine that works for me and my body and incorporates activities that support all aspects of my fitness?
This is exactly what we created the Restart! app to answer. You don't have to build your own plan from scratch. You don't have to drop thousands of dollars on a personal trainer at the gym. You don't even have to leave your home. If you have a smart phone, we have your back. We built Restart! to be exceptionally accessible, infinitely customizable, and downright practical. Our exercises have all been specifically chosen for how they support the everyday functional movements we all should be able to do: getting in and out of chairs, pushing, pulling, lifting, gripping, etc. And they are all customizable based on your preferences and abilities. Your plan automatically adjusts based on your feedback.
How do we know our exercises support your full mobility? All of the exercises included in our exercise library have been chosen and developed by our exercise expert, Ben Dreyer, the co-owner of Studio Melt, a Madison, WI-based fitness studio that specializes in helping people with specific challenges get back to their health, be it recovering from a surgery or injury, or working around a chronic illness. Ben is not just a trainer; he is a 10-time All-American athlete in three different track events and a two-time NCAA National Champion at 400m. After his successful collegiate running career at St. Norbert College, Ben became a professional Track & Field athlete and received full funding from the U.S. Olympic Committee, training at the Olympic Training Center, and competing internationally in Europe.
A lot of injuries along the way and a hip surgery to reshape his femur at 33 have given Ben a keen appreciation for the kinds of setbacks people can experience in their fitness journeys over the course of a lifetime. Both his personal experience and the experiences he's had in supporting clients facing similar barriers for over 15 years at Studio Melt fuel Ben's passion for leading with acceptance. Rather than viewing your current level of fitness negatively, simply accepting yourself for where you are today allows you to stay in the moment and improve from that point. Ben brings his belief in everyone's ability to improve to the Restart! app and has helped us create a tool that is even more accessible and effective than what we had imagined.
What Is Your Most Vibrant Retirement?
When we started Reclaim Lifestyles, we were driven by our own personal "whys" for why we wanted to make it easier to be physically active while aging. For our co-founder Jeff White, that "why" is his daughter, a miracle baby who made him a father in his 50s, and for whom he wants to be there for as long as possible. What's your "why"? How do you want to spend your 60s, 70s, and beyond? Having a strong picture of how you want to spend your time in retirement will be more motivating than any health data. And when you know what you want to be able to do, you can work backwards from that to determine what your health goals should be now in order to get you there.
So what will you be doing in your most vibrant retirement? Traveling? Spending time with family? No matter what you choose, the Restart! app is here to support you. All you have to do is start.