How Can Women Keep from Gaining Weight as They Age?
Posted Mar 25 2010 4:29am
A common complaint I hear from women generally over the age of 40 is that they seem to gain weight as they age even though they're careful about what they eat and they exercise regularly. And then if they get injured or have surgery, things just get that much worse.
Well, there's some good news bad news about this issue. The good news is that a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found a way that women could prevent aging-related weight gain.
The bad news is that women have to exercise sixty minutes per day everyday.
But, the good news is that the kind of exercise that was performed in the study was mostly aerobic. What seemed to be missing was intensity.
The bad news is that higher intensity exercise is hard work. A lot harder than an hour on a treadmill or jogging around a track.
The good news is you don't have to do it everyday.
I suspect that if you included higher intensity, shorter duration training sessions along with some form of resistive exercise, you could exercise fewer days per week, for less total time and avoid the weight gain. In fact, there's some recent research that shows 10 one minute high intensity cycling intervals three times per week is just as effective as several days of much longer and slower cycling*.
Add some resistive exercise a couple of days per week and you might even lose some weight as you age.
Now, that's good news :)
********
You can follow my recovery from a shoulder injury (rotator cuff tear) here .
*Jonathan P Little, Adeel S Safdar, Geoffrey P Wilkin, Mark a Tarnopolsky, and Martin J Gibala. A
practical model of low-volume high-intensity interval training induces
mitochondrial biogenesis in human skeletal muscle: potential mechanisms. The Journal of Physiology, 2010;
A common complaint I hear from women generally over the age of 40 is that they seem to gain weight as they age even though they're careful about what they eat and they exercise regularly. And then if they get injured or have surgery, things just get that much worse.
Well, there's some good news bad news about this issue. The good news is that a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found a way that women could prevent aging-related weight gain.
The bad news is that women have to exercise sixty minutes per day everyday.
But, the good news is that the kind of exercise that was performed in the study was mostly aerobic. What seemed to be missing was intensity.
The bad news is that higher intensity exercise is hard work. A lot harder than an hour on a treadmill or jogging around a track.
The good news is you don't have to do it everyday.
I suspect that if you included higher intensity, shorter duration training sessions along with some form of resistive exercise, you could exercise fewer days per week, for less total time and avoid the weight gain. In fact, there's some recent research that shows 10 one minute high intensity cycling intervals three times per week is just as effective as several days of much longer and slower cycling*.
Add some resistive exercise a couple of days per week and you might even lose some weight as you age.
Now, that's good news :)
********
You can follow my recovery from a shoulder injury (rotator cuff tear) here .
*Jonathan P Little, Adeel S Safdar, Geoffrey P Wilkin, Mark a Tarnopolsky, and Martin J Gibala. A practical model of low-volume high-intensity interval training induces mitochondrial biogenesis in human skeletal muscle: potential mechanisms. The Journal of Physiology, 2010;