Tag Archives: Anti-Ageing

December 5, 2022

BEST ANTI-AGEING EXERCISES TO LOOK & FEEL YOUNGER.

All exercise is beneficial as you age, but choose carefully and you can target the areas of your body you’re most concerned about to stay fit.

Unfortunately there’s no magic exercise that’ll help you stay young forever. Ageing is a natural process – and a privilege – that we should whole heartedly embrace. However, if you fill your days with unhealthy habits, like a poor diet and minimal movement, you could end up ageing prematurely and shaving years off your lifespan.

So, while there is no way to avoid ageing altogether, there are plenty of ways to keep yourself looking and feeling healthy as you get older. While diet plays a big part in maintaining your health, exercise is also crucial to supporting your body’s journey through the decades. 

Here are the best anti-ageing exercises to ward off age-related diseases and conditions and keep you looking and feeling younger as you age…

Walking
Accessible, thrifty and super-effective – walking is the ultimate anti-ageing exercise. Regular walking is linked to lower risk of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and osteoporosis. But don’t dawdle – experts believe that your speed might help you monitor how healthy you are. Studies have found that a person with a walking speed slower than 0.6m per second may be at increased risk of poor health.

Running
It’s good for your heart, but running is also a form of weight-bearing exercise, meaning it challenges and strengthens your skeleton. Studies have shown that runners have fewer disabilities, stay active for longer and halve their risk of an early death.

Yoga
Yoga offers a resistance workout, enhancing muscle strength and flexibility, and can help offset lower back pain, stiff joints and loss of balance. But yoga is also an effective stress reliever – in an analysis of its effect on the brain chemical GABA, research has found that it is superior to other exercise in terms of its positive effect on mood.

Pilates
Pilates strengthens the core muscles that protect your spine – but it also enhances joint flexibility, balance and coordination. Crucially, it’s great for injury rehabilitation and is gentle enough to be continued into old age. According to studies, a sustained programme can enhance mobility.

Dancing
Dancing is a weight-bearing form of aerobic exercise and can rev up your grey matter too. Research has found that alongside playing musical instruments, reading and playing board games, hitting the dance floor helps you ward off dementia.

Swimming
An excellent aerobic workout, great for muscle tone and joint mobility, swimming is kind on an ageing body as your weight is fully supported. Research has found that regular and moderately intensive swimming can halt the downward decline of your key age markers, blood pressure, muscle mass, blood chemistry and pulmonary function.

Pelvic floor exercises
Surprisingly, around four million British women have stress incontinence. It occurs when the sphincter muscle isn’t strong enough to withstand bladder pressure, and is common after childbirth and pregnancy. One preventative step is to shape up your pelvic floor muscles, which wrap from the front of your pelvis to your tailbone and keep all your internal organs in place. Daily Kegel exercises are a must.

Resistance training
Various age-related conditions, including osteoporosis, joint immobility and, crucially, dramatic muscle loss, can be prevented or at least slowed by strengthening your muscles with resistance work. And it’s never too late to start weight-training. Studies have found that it has the potential to actually reverse muscle ageing because it improves the way muscle cells work.

April 4, 2022

WANT TO LIVE TO BE 100? TAKE THESE LESSONS FROM THE JAPANESE.

Recent discoveries in the science of anti-aging show that we may be able to extend healthy middle-age well into our 80s and live to be 100, whilst keeping in pretty good shape.

So from whom can we draw the most valuable lessons about ageing? New research suggests those who live on the Japanese island of Okinawa have the answer. 

The Okinawans are often healthy well into their 90s or even 100s, with five times as many reaching the century than elsewhere in Japan. So what is the secret to their longevity?

1. Clean plates a no-no

The Okinawans eat a low-fat, low-salt diet of fruit, vegetables, tofu and seaweed. But it’s also about how much they eat – at least 10% less than Britain’s of the same height. This is what they call the ‘Hara Hachi Bu’, which means ‘stop eating when you’re 80% full’ – so leaving a fifth of your food on the plate, or stopping eating when you can say: ‘I’m not hungry anymore’ rather than: ‘I’m full’. 

How to do Hara Hachi Bu:

  • Eat slowly and concentrate on your food. It takes 10 minutes for hormones, secreted as you digest, to register satiety in your brain.
  • Put your knife and fork down occasionally and consciously sense how satisfied you feel.
  • Prioritise protein and high fibre foods. A person uses about 10% of daily energy expenditure in digesting food, on average. But this percentage changes, depending on the type of food you eat.
  • When you eat matters – daytime is better. Your body clock regulates sleep patterns, hormone levels, body temperature and metabolism. As we are daytime animals, our metabolism is slower at night.
  • Allow at least a 12 hour gap between dinner and breakfast to help your system utilise all available glucose. Once this is done, the body switches to using fat for energy.

2. Do the flamingo test

You may have read before about the benefits of standing on one leg – a simple way to improve balance. But did you know that how long you can stand on one leg is a good predictor of how long you live in good health?

To do the test, time how long you can stand on one leg with hands on hips. Stop counting when your raised foot touches the floor or your other leg, or you have to lift your arms off your hips to steady yourself.

This is what is considered ‘normal’ for your age:

Under 40:
Eyes open – 45 seconds
Eyes closed – 15 seconds

40-49:
Eyes open – 42 seconds
Eyes closed – 13 seconds

50-59:
Eyes open – 41 seconds
Eyes closed – 8 seconds

60-69:
Eyes open – 32 seconds
Eyes closed – 4 seconds

70-79:
Eyes open – 22 seconds
Eyes closed – 3 seconds

80-99
Eyes open – 9 seconds
Eyes closed – 2 seconds

3. Harness positivity 

Inspired by the Okinawans’ amazing longevity, research found that having a purpose in life was key to healthy mental ageing.

People with purpose take more care of their health and take up preventative medical screenings, have protective diets and a more active lifestyle. They want to stay around long enough to achieve their goals.

We also know that thoughts and emotions can affect your health even at a cellular level, meaning positive thinking can help you live longer. In Okinawa, positive thinking is known as ‘ikigai’, which translates as ‘motivating force’. It’s your sense of purpose, curiosity and excitement about life.

4. Drink seaweed soup

Miso soup is often made with brown seaweed, a staple of many Asian diets. It’s rich in fibre and minerals and also contains fucoidan, which can reduce inflammation and improve the immune system.

Fucoidan also appears to help mitigate the effects of viral infection where lung damage is involved – including in coronaviral infections. So eating seaweed could be a way to help protect yourself from COVID-19 too.