FACE up to Your Future
Want to get in shape? Vonda Wright, M.D., is confident that you can. “You are never too old or sedentary to begin an active lifestyle,” she says. “We can all be healthy, vital, active at any age ... through exercise.”
Wright offers these tips on exercise after 50—or, as she puts it, ways to FACE your future:
• Flexibility is the key to preventing joint and muscle stiffness. Stretch every major muscle group daily for 30 seconds if you are younger than 65 and for one minute if you are older than 65.
• Aerobic exercise, the kind that raises your heart rate, is the key to preventing and treating more than 33 chronic diseases that develop with age. Wright recommends 30 minutes of brisk exercise—walking, running, tennis, cycling—three to five times a week.
• Carry a load: To maintain muscle strength and aid bone health, resistance training is vital. Carrying a load can be as easy as lifting your own body weight or using exercise bands for resistance. Doing two sets of 10 repetitions per major muscle group (legs, arms, back, chest, abdomen, shoulders and gluteals) three times a week is sufficient.
• Equilibrium/balance: One in three people over 65 falls and may break a bone. Refresh your balancing skills by standing on one leg while lightly holding on the back of a chair or counter. Try to get to the point where you can do it without holding on for 20 seconds on each leg.
Read more tips and advice from Vonda Wright.
Guidelines for Older People
Don’t start an exercise program until you’ve checked with your doctors. Fitness experts say generally that adults over age 65, or adults 50-64 with chronic conditions such as arthritis, need to do the following:• Moderately intense aerobic exercise 30 minutes a day, five days a week or vigorously intense aerobic exercise 20 minutes a day, 3 days a week.
• Eight to 10 strength-training exercises, 10-15 repetitions of each exercise, two to three times per week.
• Balance exercises, if you’re at risk for falling.
Source: American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association.
Gene Wright is a personal trainer with the START program at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Sports Medicine. Vonda Wright, his daughter and a sports medicine orthopedist, began START in 2007. —Photo by Mia Boccella/Boccella Productions
In some past life, Gene Wright might have been a drill instructor.
The Great Race: Meet the PRIMA START participants. |
Perhaps not one of those sadistic “drop and give me 20” types from the movies, but more like the ex-Marine gym teacher in high school who worked you hard, but kept you laughing—when you weren’t busy panting and grimacing.
“Come on!” extols Wright, as a ragged line of older adults, ages 46 to 59, try gamely to comply with his commands to lunge, stretch and run. At 68, Wright is lean and wiry and looks like he could go out right now and run a marathon—after doing 50 pushups. His charges, although younger, are not nearly as fit as he. They struggle and shake in “plank,” the grueling midsection exercise in which you raise your body in a pushup-like position and hold it there, stiff as a board or plank.
“Git that butt down,” Wright says in his prairie-flat Kansas accent, straightening out the profile of one prone participant. “We’re gonna hold it for two minutes. You can do this!”
Bodies tremble, brows furrow with sweat, a few knees hit the ground. Wright looks at his watch and calls out the time left. “Thirty seconds to go ... 15 seconds ... five seconds.” He stops for what seems like an eternity, then tilts his head toward his charges and grins mischievously. The suffering exercisers look up at him expectantly. Someone howls. “Come on, Gene!”
He waits one more beat and then relents. “OK, let ’er down. Now, on your elbows for side planks.”
A groan goes through the group, a sound that is lost in the cavernous 125,000-square-foot indoor athletic facility of the Center for Sports Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). Watching nearby, Vonda Wright, M.D.—Gene’s daughter—smiles. That groaning, she chuckles, is the sound of what she likes to call “adult-onset exercise syndrome.”
“These are former couch potatoes,” Vonda Wright said. “When we started, they couldn’t do any of this.”
Getting Fit After 50: Hear Vonda talk about how you can shape up later in life. |
The ex-spuds are now members of the START exercise program for older adults that Wright initiated in July 2007. It’s part of her Performance and Research Initiative for Masters Athletes (PRIMA), which also includes ongoing research into exercise and older adults, and a program for advanced masters (age 40 and over) athletes.
START, as the name suggests, is for those who have not advanced much past the kitchen or the living room couch. For $300, individuals age 40 and over train for 12 weeks, following a comprehensive regimen developed by Vonda Wright with Ron DeAngelo, who directs the Sports Performance Program at the Center for Sports Medicine. Each START-er gets a pedometer to count daily walking steps and a routine of strength and stretching exercises to do at home. Twice-weekly group sessions at UPMC are led by Gene, who retired from his title search business in Wichita two years ago, then moved to Pittsburgh and got certified as a personal trainer so he could help his daughter.
“That touch of gray really helped,” said Vonda, who at 41 still looks far removed from the need for any hair colorist. “Better to have someone in their age group leading the classes.”
Gene likes to joke that “I taught my daughter everything she knows,” quite a claim considering that Vonda went through four years of medical school and a six-year orthopedic surgical residency at UPMC. That was followed by a fellowship at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery. Along the way, she emerged as one of the country’s leading authorities on fitness for older adults. That’s why Freddie Fu, M.D., chairman of the UPMC Department of Orthopedic Surgery, coaxed Wright back to Pittsburgh last year, pledging to support the START program. “I thought it was a wonderful idea,” Fu says.
Vonda, in turn, cites her dad as the one who motivated her.
“My father has been a runner my entire life,” she said. “I remember watching him finish marathons back in the late 1970s.” At that time, older runners and athletes were not nearly as common as they are today. Contrasting her high-functioning dad with the mostly sedentary older population she saw around her in Kansas, young Vonda sensed something was amiss. “It occurred to me that older people are capable of much more than just sitting around,” she said. As she began to pursue a career in medicine, “that idea caught fire with me.”
Of course, in the last 10 years, the rest of the pack has caught up with Vonda’s observations. Now, every major public health organization endorses regular physical activity for older adults, and last year the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association even added specific exercise guidelines for this population.
The START program goes well beyond the basic minimum exercise requirements. Each class is composed of 45 minutes of strength and balancing exercises with Gene, followed by a 45-minute run/walk. At the beginning of the 12-week program, many people might have trouble doing walking lunges for 20 paces and holding the plank position for two minutes. So it’s probably not surprising that out of the 24 people who registered for this session of START in July, only 17 were still attending in September.
But for those who go the distance with Gene and Vonda, the rewards are worth it.
“My balance has improved tremendously, and my core muscles are stronger,” said Barb Woolcott, a 59-year-old Pittsburgh resident. “I am just thrilled by it!”
“It’s been the best thing for me,” said Mary Anne Salsgiver, 53, as she and the group power-walked along the bike path that separates the sprawling medical center from the Monongahela River. She sees Gene leading the pack up ahead. “He’s our inspiration!”
A week later, on Sept. 28, it’s Gene's and Vonda's turn to be inspired. The “final exam” for the START program is the Great Race 5K, a popular 3.1-mile race in Pittsburgh. There, all 17 members of the group finish what they STARTed by completing the 5K. “This was life-changing for them,” said Vonda, who walked the distance with some of the members. “I was absolutely proud and excited for them,” said Gene, who finished third in his age group—with a running time of 25:08 (about eight minutes per mile)—before turning around and going back on the course, offering words of encouragement to all the START-ers he passed.
One of them, 55-year-old Linda Kim, is doing the program for the second time. She knocks six minutes off her time from last year’s Great Race, finishing in 39 minutes, 59 seconds. “This class is the hardest thing I do,” said Kim, who has lost 40 pounds in the past year. “It’s a slow trip to fitness for someone who was way out of shape like me, but it’s a nice journey.”
John Hanc lives in Farmingdale, N.Y., and writes about health and fitness.
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