What are the 4 types of fitness?

The mantra and sports medicine is exercise is medicine everyone knows that exercise is good for them but the question is how do you get started how much is enough we know that exercise improves cardiovascular fitness and more importantly it can prevent and treat a lot of chronic diseases such as high blood pressure stroke diabetes obesity osteoporosis the list goes on and on there are five types of exercise believe

  It or not number one is general activity I get a lot of patients who tell me well I mow the lawn for exercise or I do gardening or I have three flights of stairs and that's good we want you to be active but that's not quite enough number two cardiovascular exercise most people know the definition of this it's usually in the form of running walking jogging hiking basically getting your heart rate up enough that you can still Talk to a person but you're not so wended that you can't speak number three resistance exercise most people know that some form of weightlifting to strengthen their muscles is a good thing and resistance exercise really comes in two forms either in the form of weightlifting like we talked about and it doesn't have to be where you get big and bulky you can just be lightweights multiple reps and the other form for those of us that maybe don't want to go To the gym or don't want to lift weights is just with resistance bands and you can get those at any local store or they're kind of a stretchy rubber material and you can attach those to door frames or stationary objects and just use those against excuse me as a form of resistance number four balance balance is really important particularly as we get older and a lot of our patients come in saying that they're afraid to fall and the best Way to decrease the risk of fall is to exercise and one of those types of exercises I just mentioned is balance exercise there are really easy ways to do that one is literally just to stand on one foot and balance yourself up to countertop or a chair and try to go a little bit longer on that one foot every day that's a static exercise you can then move to a more dynamic balancing exercise where maybe you're jumping from One foot to the next number five flexibility exercise this is extremely important we know that as we get older our muscles and our connective tissues get stiffer and they get dehydrated so it's really important for us to stay flexible as we get older and there are a couple of ways we can do that there's static stretching where you just for example bend over and stretch your hamstrings but there are also other ways that we can do that where somebody helps Us stretch or we put a leg up on a table and do a more active type of stretch this should be done at least two days a week even on the days where you're not doing any of the other exercises we just talked about I get a lot of patients who ask me how much should I exercise and as a general rule of thumb the recommendations are this five days of moderate intensity exercise for 30 minutes at a time if you don't want to do moderate activity which would be like A brisk walk you want to get your heart rate up even more we recommend at least three days a week of vigorous exercise we also recommend two days of strength training like we've previously discussed of course there are a lot of people who want to do both they want to do some vigorous activity but they also want to strength train a couple of days a week and we certainly advocate for that if you want to start an exercise program or ramp up your activity level the first Thing you need to do is talk to your doctor we have a lot of recommendations for people who have chronic diseases and for those who maybe are completely healthy but just want to get more active now one of the things we do recommend is EKG or stress testing in men who are over age 45 or women who are over age 55 and those who have chronic diseases like diabetes where they may have some risk factors that require them to be SuperBot supervised by a physician while they're Doing their exercise program certainly there are contraindications to starting an exercise program and those would be a recent heart attack unstable chest pain uncontrolled high blood pressure or uncontrolled diabetes somebody who's just fallen and it's unexplained it's not just a simple trip over something where anybody has EKG changes so those are contraindications to exercise you certainly need to talk to your doctor before you start any kind Of a program in closing sedentary lifestyle is the most modifiable risk factor for chronic disease so get moving even if it's just walking to the curb to get a newspaper get up and get moving this is really important for your overall health not just physical but mental and emotional we know that cognition is improved in older individuals who exercise regularly we also know that there's less anxiety and depression across the board and people Who exercise regularly and certainly like we talked about before the risk of chronic disease is significantly reduced with regular exercise there have even been studies that have shown that exercise decreases risks of certain types of cancer like breast and colon cancer so again I encourage you to get out and move and remember that exercise is medicine