This month in Gym Talk we will be focusing on brain health. When most people think of exercise and physical activity they think of building strength, improving balance and flexibility, or going for a walk. However, exercising the mind is just as important as exercising the body. The mind needs to be challenged daily in order to keep the brain working to the best of its ability for as long as possible. 

As we age, maintaining a sharp mind is a top priority. Activities you do to improve your body also benefit your brain. Exercise can increase the blood flow and oxygen to your brain as well as help your brain grow new neuronal connections. Mentally stimulating activities for your brain are just as important. Brain games help individuals to stay focused on the task at hand, remember instructions and improve our working memory so we have the skill to remember and use relevant information while performing an activity. Try participating in arts and crafts, do word puzzles and logic games, work on a jigsaw puzzle, attempt a sudoku puzzle or trivia game to help exercise your mind. 

Try a few tasks that target memory and attention:

1. Name two objects for every letter in your first name
2. Say the months of the year in alphabetical order
3. Name six or more things you wear on your feet that start with an “S”

There are many ways to exercise the mind through brain games and activities. Try the game below for fun! Say aloud what color you see in every word, NOT the word you read as quick as possible. Go from left to right, from top to bottom.

Ready. Set. Go!

Fears of being placed in a nursing home preoccupy a supermajority of older adults as in surveys about their course of aging they consistently ranked memory loss, financial insecurity and losing independence as their top three concerns.¹ Yet, after age 80, the risk of being placed in a nursing home increases significantly. Seniors of advanced age experience what is termed “functional aging”, that is an inevitable, progressively declining continuum in functional ability from having a stable capacity to perform daily activities through a state of physical vulnerability (influenced by cognitive loss) in which the person is losing independence.² At advanced ages, some caregiver support becomes necessary for many, and for some, a nursing home admission. 

Although most seniors accept that the aging process accelerates physical and cognitive decline after age 80, they want to know whether they have any means to control the degree or pace of their functional losses. This article discusses the evidence-base showing that changes in lifestyle, particularly engaging in exercise targeted to improving functional fitness even in seniors who were mostly sedentary, can slow and in some cases reverse functional impairment, which in turn reduces the risk of being placed in a nursing home. In fact, there is strong evidence that long-term habitual exercise is linked to a slowing of the biological aging process, which certainly enhances independence.³: but, studies also show that even sedentary older adults who begin to exercise in later life can see significant improvements in physical and cognitive health.⁴

Functional impairment is caused by not only age, cognitive decline, multiple chronic medical conditions or following an acute medical event, but also from lifestyle choices- a sedentary lifestyle is shown to decrease functional fitness levels which in turn increases functional impairment while engaging in a physically active lifestyle appears to derive a polar opposite effect.⁵ Functional impairment reduces ability to perform activities of daily living, “ADL’s”:⁶ and, consequently, the most common reason that very old adults are placed in a nursing home is loss of ability to perform ADL’s.⁷ (Over 80% of nursing home residents need assistance with 3 or more ADL’s). Thus, when functional fitness is improved through exercise, that is, when an older adult experiences an enhanced ability to the summon strength, energy and executive function needed to carry out basic ADL’s, independence is retained for longer which reduces the risk of being placed in a nursing home.⁸