Working Out to Outwalk the Zombies

When I recently got my “jab” at the Fairfax County Hospital, I followed the 65 and over crowd into the hospital. It was like walking among the Night of the Living Dead – dead slow and stooped Zombies. Many of these are people who have just given up. The good news is that it is never too late to start exercising and the benefits of it are spectacular. The best part of it for many people - most of the benefits come from just starting. That observation leads to another one, there is no one exercise program that is right for everyone. We have different disabilities and different needs – what we might call “personalized exercise.”

If it is so beneficial, why doesn’t everyone do it? In a remarkable new book, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy and Rewarding, author Daniel Lieberman explains that we evolved to conserve energy whenever we weren’t gathering food or procreating. Since gathering food expends so many calories, we tend to rest when we’re not doing either. Hunting or gathering food today means pushing a four wheeled grocery cart or waving at a busy waitress to get your appetizer’s ETA.

What do we do instead of exercise? We mostly sit. But if you replace an hour or two sitting with walking, you can lower your chances for premature death by 20 to 40 percent. On average, Americans are immobile between 9 and 13 hours per day, not counting being asleep. Sitting is a killer, the more time you sit uninterrupted, over 30 minutes, the higher your risk of inflammation and chronic diseases.

How should you start? First move – pretty much anything. Then do a little bit of everything. It can include a warm-up (always, actually), weight training, stretching (after exercising), balance training (like standing on each foot and counting slowly to a hundred), core exercises, and cardiovascular exercises. One particularly healthy cardiovascular regime is called high-intensity interval training (HIIT). It involves intense exercise for a short time and then rest for a short time and it doesn’t require any equipment.

If you are older, do you need to do strength (like weight) training? Absolutely, it can slow reverse sarcopenia (loss of muscle) which is a major cause of disability and disease. It also reduces the possibility of osteoporosis, depression and other mental health diseases. Even those in their 80s should bulk up some.

Is the 150 minutes of moderate activity a week recommended by the CDC enough? It will help you feel better and will help some with chronic diseases, but it won’t help you lose weight. For that, you should probably double that amount (and tighten up your diet).

Chronic diseases affected by lack of exercise include type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer, depression, anxiety and dementia. But aren’t all these diseases just a natural part of aging? Some are but, for example, type 2 diabetes is much less connected to age than it is obesity and physical inactivity. In one experiment, fifty year-old volunteers who had been sedentary for thirty years found that, after six months of moderate exercise, their blood pressure, resting heart rate, and cardiac output returned to the levels they had been when they were twenty. People over 70 exercising a sufficient amount reduce their risk of dying by half in a given year. Not getting enough exercise leads to 300,000 excess deaths per year in the U.S.

Exercise helps everyone but it is especially tragic to see out-of-shape kids, most of whom get less than an hour a day of physical activity in school. When they become overweight or obese, they do not, as many parents think, tend to run-it-off as they get older.

But, as some people have suggested to me, “Why do this? I’d rather just take it easy and die a few years earlier.” If only it were that simple. For me, it’s not about dying earlier or later, it’s about morbidity. One in five Americans over 65 is in poor or fair health. If you don’t continue to exercise, you increase the likelihood that you will be disabled for 5 to 8 years of your life, i.e., being sedentary has twice the effect on morbidity as mortality. 

If you’re exercising, you’ll have an easier time sleeping, less chronic pain, less of a likelihood to be depressed or get Alzheimer’s, and more likelihood of avoiding chronic diseases. In fact, you get immediate rewards. After exercising you’ll feel better, be in a better mood and be mentally sharper. But you should do what is right for you. And if you keep doing it, you’ll at least be able to walk faster than the Zombies.