20 October 2024

Older and Stronger

Kirstin Ahmed
Healthy aging, Healthy body, Personal trainer in Brighton

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Older and stronger

As we enter middle age, fitness goals often shift toward maintaining health, mobility, and strength rather than high-intensity, competitive goals. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t be in the best shape of your life! Brightonfit personal training programs tailored for middle-aged individuals are designed to meet the unique needs of this stage in life, ensuring longevity, strength, and overall well-being.

Here’s everything you need to know about training in middle age

Why Training is Important for Middle-Aged People

As we age, our bodies undergo several changes, such as:
– Decreased muscle mass (sarcopenia)
– Reduced flexibility and mobility
– Slower metabolism
– Increased risk of chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis.

Incorporating a well-rounded fitness routine that includes strength training, cardiovascular exercise, flexibility, and balance work can help counteract these changes, improve quality of life, and boost energy levels. With the help of a Brightonfit personal training program, you can develop a routine that fits your lifestyle.

1. Strength Training: Prevent Muscle Loss
One of the biggest concerns for middle-aged individuals is muscle loss. Regular strength training, at least 2-3 times a week, can help preserve and even build muscle mass, which boosts metabolism and supports joint health. We can guide you through safe, effective exercises that target major muscle groups without over-stressing your joints.

2. Cardiovascular Health: Keep Your Heart Strong
Cardiovascular exercise is crucial for maintaining heart health, reducing the risk of heart disease, and managing body weight. Aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity cardio per week, which can include walking, cycling, swimming, or light jogging.

3. Flexibility and Mobility: Stay Agile
Flexibility naturally decreases with age, which can lead to stiffness and reduced range of motion. Incorporating stretching and mobility exercises into your routine can help maintain joint flexibility and prevent injuries. Matthew is our Brightonfit mobility expert and he can introduce you to yoga or dynamic stretching routines to enhance flexibility and keep your body moving freely.

4. Balance and Stability: Prevent Falls
Falls are one of the leading causes of injury among older adults. Incorporating balance training—such as exercises using balance boards or stability balls—into your routine can improve coordination and reduce the risk of falls. We can show you how to focus on exercises that strengthen your core and lower body to improve balance.

5. Nutrition and Recovery: Fueling Your Body
Training effectively in middle age isn’t just about the workout; it’s also about nutrition and recovery. Proper nutrition plays a vital role in muscle recovery, fat loss, and overall health. A well-structured diet that includes adequate protein, healthy fats, and complex carbohydrates can support your fitness goals. Additionally, getting enough sleep and allowing your body to recover between workouts is crucial to avoid injury and burnout.

6. Tailored Personal Training for Middle-Aged Clients
Whether you’re new to exercise or returning after a long break, working with a Brightonfit personal trainer ensures that your workouts are tailored to your specific needs We can adjust exercises based on any pre-existing conditions or limitations, helping you build strength and fitness while avoiding injury. The personalized approach ensures steady, sustainable progress.

23 December 2021

Fit in your 40s with an office job?

Kirstin Ahmed
Exercise routine, Fitness and training blog, Healthy aging
fitness tips, functional training, goal setting, habit changes, healthy eating, HIIT training, muscle gain
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brightonfit bike commute

I write this post from many tried and tested methods to integrate a full time desk job with a desire to retain a fully fit and functionally strong body. Having spent 20 years on my feet all day every day at work, I found the transition to a desk job extremely challenging. At the start I could not even sit for more than 1 hour without an aching pain in my buttocks! After some time (about a year) this discomfort eased and I was able to sit for a day, around the same time I began experiencing lower back pain. Flashbacks of my clients complaining about lower back pain over the previous 2 decades popped into my mind and I realised I had gone from someone whose body was not subjected to the physical restrictions that modern life and work choices brings to someone that very definitely was….and in an amazingly short period of time.

I then tried all sorts of training schedules and styles in order to regain what I had lost which was predominantly functional strength and a decent fitness level. What ended up becoming a sustainable pattern for me combines an active living approach with sessions I dedicate to exercising. I ride my push bike (pictured) into work every single day (5 miles) come rain or shine (having invested in some Gortex waterproofs!); I aim for speed without stopping. I go straight to the gym and workout for an hour predominantly weight lifting except for one weekly HIIT session I put in on a day that I feel energetic! After work I ride home for food and maybe to tie up some work hanging over from the day. I try and get out every evening after this; I will take my mountain bike out alone or with friends or go to my local indoor climbing centre for a couple of hours. These types of fun, social sessions are best for me at this time of the day since I’m tired and it’s often dark and wet/cold so it takes something like this to get me out of the house. Of course once I’m riding around in the woods feeling alive and connected to the earth doing what I love, the thought of sitting on the sofa seems like a crazy alternative.

Weekends are a mixture of active and relaxing activity but intentionally without the routine of the week. The result has been that I have returned to pre desk job fitness and strength levels and I feel that both my brain and body are fuelled in an equal way. Of course I realise that having kids would make this much harder but not impossible if motivated enough….the key message here is that I encourage you to find something that works for you. If it means getting up earlier, preparing bags/food the day before, getting bike tyres pumped or climbing wall sessions booked it will all be worth it once you are in the groove – you really can have it all!!

30 June 2019

How HIIT training can combat ageing

Kirstin Ahmed
Exercise routine, Healthy aging
cellular age, combat ageing, exercises for the older person, HIIT training, home workouts
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personal trainer brighton

The physiological age of our body may be quite different from our numerical age; you’ve seen it in your friends everyone is a similar age and yet some look like they are 10 years older or younger than others. Some of this comes down to genetics but a lot of it can be attributed to the way we lead our lives.

What we put in our bodies and what we put our bodies through, makes a difference to what is called our cellular age. This is the age that your cells operate as despite your actual age and the regulation of calcium influences it. During a HIIT session chemical channels in muscle cells alter their calcium regulation making them more efficient; similar to how they did when the cells (and you) were younger. This is seen even in the 65-80 year old age group.

A HIIT session is purported to be more beneficial to cellular ageing than resistance training alone even though many HIIT sessions involved weights it is not necessarily that which promotes this benefit.

Preventing cellular ageing can make them more resistant to stress and inflammation and increase longevity. Psychological factors may be at hand here too as part of adapting a more active lifestyle will mean that you tend to choose better foods, sleep better and drink less alcohol so the gains can be across the board.

To perform a HIIT session you simply need to incorporate a blast of high intensity working out with a period of less intense exercise and cycle the exercise types for the duration of the session. Often the workouts will fatigue you quickly and may only be 30 minutes long. When you start this kind of training it may be that you can only manage 5-10mins to start with and that is fine! Just weave this type of session in gradually and build up to it over time….after all your going to be around for longer!

18 August 2018

Is the wait worth the weight?

Kirstin Ahmed
diets, Healthy aging, Healthy body, Nutrition, Weight loss
calorie restriction, diet, fasting for weight loss, gut flora, gut health, healthy eating, how to fast, IF, intermittent fasting, longevity, nutrition, periodic fasting, PF, Ramadan, weight loss
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Intermittent fasting

Intermittent fasting, what is it?

There are a number of ways of achieving the same goal here but simply put this is a period of fast in your eating. Common ways of introducing a break in eating are introducing a 14-16 hour fast into a 24 hour period, whilst this may sound like a long time one way people find relatively easy to achieve this stretch is by including the 8 hours of sleep at night time into this and skipping breakfast in the morning. Other ways you may have read about are the 5:2 diet, the 24 hour fast, alternate day fasting, the warrior diet, spontaneous meal skipping and many more!…

The 5:2 diet has previously been discussed here , the 24 hour fast is tricky for a lot of people as the fast window is so big, on the alternate day fasting it is recommended to eat 500kcals on your fast day, the warrior diet proposes a period of fast during the day and feast at night, and so on…

Q: What do the marketeers promise from the results of intermittent fasting? and what do some in the fitness industry (marketeers?) promise from the results of intermittent fasting?

A: Weight loss and improved athletic performance respectively

TRUTH:

Firstly throw away anything you read that promises you anything, you want to read only information backed by peer reviewed scientific study; this will ensure you receive objective, unbiased information not motivated by your cash. You will be offered statistics to prove or disprove a hypothesis made in the publication followed by a conclusion based on the stats, i.e. simply offered the scientific results.

We often hear from people that there is too much confusing and conflicting information out there, this is because you are reading information from the wrong source! The majority of people writing online are doing so because they are making a living doing so and therefore need to influence you!.A good place to start if you do not have access to scientific papers through a university is Google scholar. Fortunately I do have access to a University library (I am completing my doctorate as we speak!) and have filtered out some relevant papers on this subject to clarify the debate:

The subject of weight loss as a result of intermittent fasting (IF) is inconclusive. Testing hundreds of fasting protocols across many species in many research groups has not led to the guaranteed weight loss solution that is punted by get rich quick marketeers. The weight loss results from IF are no better than the results from calorie restriction and have actually been shown to increase sleep disturbance and reduce concentration/accuracy result when tested with patients in a Ramadan fasting study (similar to the warrior diet). What this means is that whilst you may lose weight as a result of IF it may not be directly due to the metabolic and hormonal changes that IF induces, instead probably being the results of a reduction in overall calorie intake.

Reducing your overall calorie intake has been proven scientifically to reduce weight, however this is only maintained long term under certain conditions for example; reducing calorie intake (generating a calorie deficit) by a small amount (a percentage of your daily BMI is usually the way we calculate this) over the medium term, ensuring you still hit your daily macro nutrient split (although varying these is reputed to have effects on satiety, which we will discuss in another post) and then gradually increasing your calories after the period of deficit. These results will be maximised with a balanced exercise program, but significantly the weight loss gains you make have been proven to be best in those who engage in regular exercise after the period of calorie deficit as well as during.

What the studies do agree on with IF, however, is that of gut health improvements leading to lifespan extension, it ameliorates the clinical course and pathology of Multiple sclerosis (MS) and can counteract other disease processes, has profound beneficial effects on many different indices of health, can improve functional outcome in a wide range of age-related disorders including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancers and neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease Parkinson’s disease and stroke. All due to a cascade of reactions related to the gut flora changes.

So that’s the science. Now you make up your own mind

16 September 2016

How healthy are our leaders?

Kirstin Ahmed
Healthy aging
age healthily, body mass index, exercise for older people, immune system, obese
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trump-clinton state of health

Politics is full of promises, some are kept and others are not. But when a politician makes a promise you want him/her to be around for their term to see it through. Right? So what if the potential leader of a country is not in good health?

David Cameron at 43 became the youngest prime minister of our country in 200 years, and if we take BMI (body mass index) as an indicator of how much care someone pays to their health its clear to see he was a healthy investment for the nation.

Over the pond the picture is less clear; 2 candidates twice Cameron’s age are battling it out for premiership. What’s catching the media attention is Clinton’s recent diagnosis of bacterial pneumonia; and rightly so because despite her campaign’s attempts to debunk any fear the condition can become nasty. People over 65 with a weakened immune system are prone to the bacteria causing the infection. Yes the antibiotics can clear it up, but if her immune system was this weak to start with then how sure can we be about her general state of health. She already takes blood thinning medications for a blood clot that was found in her head 3 years ago whilst only 65 years old.

On the other hand we see Trump cherry picking medical reports to show the media, typical of his subversive manner, whilst joking about needing to loose a few pounds. A FEW POUNDS ? Clinically he is OBESE at 121kg and 181cm tall!

At 70 years old this makes it firstly much harder to loose the weight but secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it means that at the stage of life where the body is in a state of decline one really has to ask whether putting so much extra pressure on his internal organs is wise….usually wisdom comes with age, but with Trump we’ve seen enough to not put the words in the same sentence I think!

19 March 2014

Turning 40

Kirstin Ahmed
Healthy aging
ageing exercise, exercise for the older person, older athlete, veteran exercise
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It’s happening to me this year:

So I need to get over myself! Actually after a mild shock when I turned 39 that “it” was just around the corner I have come to see the huge benefits of wisdom and insight – the only thing is that what I live and breath i.e sport, fitness, flexibility, agility, coordination and so on – are deteriorating at a rate of knots!!

Continue Reading

1 December 2013

Not bad for an old bird

Kirstin Ahmed
Healthy aging
10km run, 5km run, age category, half marathon, hill climbing, intervals, road racing, running races, running time trials, trail running
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running-blogSo its done! Overall I came 15th out of 41 females and in my best race (10km run) I came 12th. I came 4th in my age category overall. My overriding feeling is that I am pleased with my results but wanted to do a lot better. I am less fussed about the ranking against the other runners and more bothered by my times.

The first day was a 6 km time trial which was a quick hot run in the afternoon on tarmac. They set us off at 10 second intervals and basically we pegged it around the course trying to gauge our pace without getting confused or distracted by the runners out in front or behind!

The second day was an 11 km hill climb with a 600 metre ascent. I arrived 10 mins late to the start line due to getting lost en route and they were kind enough to keep the start open for me. Psychologically being the last and only person climbing worked well for me. I realised on day 1 that what I dislike about racing is the sound of thumping feet and heavy breathing right behind me. So again I pegged it up the mountain as fast as I could without stopping. At 3km I came across the stragglers who were walking the route and that gave me more incentive to keep going and try and catch more and more of them, which indeed I was able to do and in fact by the end I even managed a sprint over the finish – a truely enjoyable race finished in 1hr 18mins.

Day 3 was the half marathon and I felt a little achy! As you know i was hoping for a 90 min time. I was way off, in fact the winner was only 98 mins (her PB is 78 mins)and I realise that this was not the event to choose a PB half marathon as a goal. Firstly it starts with a 10 km ascent of 300 metres, secondly it the descent is treacherous with gravelly, rocky sections of dry earth covered in huge pits and cracks making it very tricky to pick a path out down once you have slogged it out to the top! Anyway excuses aside it took me 2 blooming hours!

Day 4 was a 10 km flat run, I ran well coming in at 47 mins and considering I had done the whole 4 days with a chest infection I felt totally relieved it was finally over as my body was KNACKERED!  This is a great event well organised and really friendly, I will definitely be coming back with even more training under my belt to try and smash some of my times and do better overall in the rankings.

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