Swimming is one sport that gives the practitioner a thorough and comprehensive workout. Swimming not only ensures that your muscles and heart remain fit but lets you socialize as well.
Two primary challenges seniors face ensuring proper heart health and staying young at heart. And both centers around the heart, one as a figure of speech and the other quite literally. But there is indeed an easy way for seniors to achieve both these life objectives as a senior. They can accomplish both through staying active and adopting sports activities. When an older person indulges in sports activities, they exercise the various parts of the body. In turn, such exercise helps manage weight, ensure they remain mobile, and keep chances of often fatal diseases like health ailments and cancer to a bare minimum. Sports also help keep the other heart in the pink of health- mental health and well-being.
However, it is indeed a fact that their age makes many sports activities unsuitable for people of this age group. But the process of finding one that you can practice regularly need not be an arduous task, and this article will help you in the same. The six best sports activities that look after both mind and body and which seniors can practice is as follows:
1. Golf
Don’t be fooled by the slow and still manner in which people play golf. It does not lessen a single of the average 721 calories you burn by playing nine holes of the game while carrying your clubs yourself. Besides the additional clean and fresh air it provides, it serves as a workout for your brain as well. The vastness of a golf course translates to loads of walking to be done while playing the game. Further, courses are rarely flat, and the undulations make uphill walks a standard part of a golf game. Playing golf also ensures a workout for your body muscles, and you gain balance, flexibility, and core body strength. The kind of movement you need to practice playing golf is especially beneficial for seniors.
Another thing to stress is the importance of golf balls for seniors, which needs the proper feel and distance. If you don't enjoy the game, you are unlikely to practice it. Lastly, golf helps the brain by exercising different organ functions, like hand-eye coordination and concentration. It boosts your memory and thinking skills, too, as you commit to memory the course holes and the appropriate golf clubs. It helps to keep diseases like dementia at bay.
2. Swimming
Swimming is one sport that gives the practitioner a thorough and comprehensive workout. Swimming not only ensures that your muscles and heart remain fit but lets you socialize as well. Swimming is a particularly calorie-intensive workout besides being a sport that greatly facilitates building muscle mass. Many of the significant health advantages of swimming as a sport is due to the resistance of water. Water is 800x denser than normal atmospheric air. This translates to your muscles having a far harder time moving in the water.
Additionally, your lungs and heart need to stretch themselves to provide your body with an adequate amount of oxygen. It ensures that your cardiovascular system remains healthy and effective. Another great use of swimming is the benefits arthritis patients get from doing such a physical activity. Water assists such patients in exercising as the joint strain is less than other activities like jogging. Swimming derives this effect by taking up almost 90% weight of the person's body. Besides the calorie burn, swimming also helps arthritis patients to tone the supporting muscles of the joint.
3. Tai Chi
When a person carries out Tai Chi activities, they move their body in a slow yet fluid manner. Medical and fitness professionals designate Tai Chi to be a very low impact activity. However, don't be fooled by the gentleness of this particular activity as it confers significant benefits to the following health areas:
● Muscle strength
● Aerobic capacity
● Body flexibility
● Blood pressure
Another great benefit seniors can derive from practicing Tai Chi is enhanced body balance, which makes falling risks significantly less.
Photo by Anupam Mahapatra on Unsplash
4. Yoga
Yoga is another type of low-impact activity with tons of health benefits. Regular practice of Yoga will help seniors maintain and enhance body balance but serve to increase their strength as well. It has additional benefits that are especially relevant to the isolated lives we lead today to manage depression and stress. Yoga derives these well-being benefits from the way it relaxes both mind and body.
5. Shuffleboard
Let's now consider another low-impact sports activity with plenty of potential benefits to golf professionals. Shuffleboard is a game that you can pick up and learn remarkably quickly. The very nature of the game lets players continuously improve their game strategies and skills. Additionally, the game also serves to stimulate the mind and make room for socialization. Such socialization is vital for seniors, and Shuffleboard promotes it irrespective of ability and skillfulness.
6. Dancing
As we all know dancing is an enjoyable sport. Besides the fun, seniors stand to get a large number of health benefits by practicing it. Dancing helps enhance energy levels, keep heart disease risks to a minimum, improve mental faculties like memory. Heck, it improves mood and even enhances body balance. Chair dancing is one form of activity in which seniors with limited movement ability can participate.
To sign off, we can say that it becomes only more critical for you to stay fit as you age. And what better way to maintain fitness and health by playing sports. However, it is indeed true that seniors' bodily limitations make playing a large number of more aggressive sports unviable. This article should have acquainted you with some that you may indeed practice. Hope you stay in the pink of health!
Main photo by Jorge Zapata on Unsplash
