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Exercise, Health, and Quality of Life

Posted By: Paula Allia, PT, DHSc on 07/29/2010

Through life, always remember the thought that you can do anything in moderation. This thought should represent how a person incorporates exercise into their daily routine.  Aging affects our hormones, bones, and muscles, amongst many other things.  Some people get that message that exercise is pertinent to health while others wait until they have illnesses or weight issues that prompt the doctor and friends to prod you to begin an exercise routine.

 Skeletal muscles are the muscles that the body recruits to perform activities.  They are under voluntary control so that you can recruit them when you need them.  A person has three different types of muscles fibers in skeletal muscle.  As a person ages, fast twitch muscle fibers diminish and the nerve cells that signal these fibers have a harder time to respond.  What can you do personally to keep your muscles alive and ready for action when you need them?

It is important when you exercise to mix it up and stimulate all of the different muscle fiber types in the body.  We exercise to look good, feel good, and be healthy inside, and to have the strength to perform various activities in which you choose to participate.  These activities can be as simple as getting up and down from a chair to running, jumping, swimming, or even lifting.  Exercise should be done incorporating both aerobic and anaerobic activities.  Different resistances and different speeds are important as well.  You want to stimulate all of your muscle fibers consciously and then get them to participate naturally in movements to protect and enhance your body.

This will help ensure that upon demand different muscle fiber types can respond as needed.  For example, muscle fibers are recruited by size, stimulating the smaller motor units first.  As demand increases, larger motor units are called upon to assist in the task.  Recruiting smaller motor units is certainly important but better yet recruiting more muscle fibers will help you maintain muscle tone and give you more strength and power.  These terms are relative to your own body so keep the fibers stimulated so that you do not lose them.  Losing them limits the body’s performance and they have to be stimulated correctly to get them back.

It is important that fast twitch muscle fibers can fire when needed.  These fibers help us with quick ballistic motions and help protect us with loss of balance, falling, coming to a quick stop, etc.

It is important to perform slow movements and develop muscle strength and endurance but it is equally important to further advance quicker motions, provided that they are done with proper movement and biomechanics of the joints involved.  If you force a joint into a quick motion on a knee that biomechanically cannot function properly, you can further damage the knee joint. 

Muscle have certain firing patterns and the recruitment of the right muscles to perform an activity help to keep your body aligned properly and allow your body to participate in activities with less chance of injury.

Incorporate a balanced exercise program into your life.  If done right, it can provide you with better strength, balance, and vitality throughout your life.  Be smart.  Be the best that you can be and choose the right activities that will enhance your life.