Elderly men and women may not be able to perform the same exercises as easily or comfortably as they did in their younger days, but they can, and should, stay active, experts advise.

“It’s a fact of life that as you get older, your body changes and you generally can’t perform physically as you did when you were younger,” they write in this month’s issue of the Mayo Clinic Women’s HealthSource.

“This doesn’t mean you can’t be fit. It just means you need to modify your expectations,” they add.

The aging process is accompanied by many different physiological changes, including a decrease in the amount of blood the heart is able to pump, which means that less oxygen is delivered to exercising muscles. The lungs’ ability to move oxygen into the bloodstream diminishes, leading to decreased overall strength and endurance, and bones lose density with age, making older men and women vulnerable to bone fractures. What’s more, muscles, as well as tendons and joints, lose strength as well as mass and flexibility. This means it may take an elderly individual longer to recover from a muscle sprain or trauma than it would if the same injury had occurred years earlier.

“The good news,” the experts write, “is that by being physically active, you can help minimize nearly all of these aging effects.”

In some cases, however, seniors may need to modify the exercise routines they easily performed years earlier.

“If you can perform your previous exercise that’s fine, but if you’re limited by pain or discomfort, modifying your activity may be the best way to keep active,” Dr. Karen Newcomer, a sports medicine physician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota told Reuters Health. Newcomer was not involved in writing the Mayo Clinic letter.

A life-long jogger, for example, may need to switch to walking, while the high-intensity aerobics lover may need to try low-intensity aerobics, yoga, or tai chi instead.

Seniors who were never physically active, on the other hand, should not consider themselves too old to start. Even those with a chronic illness can participate in some type of exercise to improve their level of fitness, according to the health letter. Doctors can often help these individuals to create an individualized exercise program or offer recommendations about their joining a formal program.

“Keep being active,” Newcomer said. Muscle mass decreases by 30 percent between the ages of 30 and 70, but it can be built up through strengthening exercises as well as stretching and aerobic conditioning, she explained. Elderly men and women may be “limited by musculoskeletal injuries” more so than at younger ages, but they do not have to decrease their level of activity or stop participating in certain activities as long as they are free from pain and not experiencing shortness of breath, she added.

In fact, men and women who have not allowed their increasing age to slow them down may be able to continue participating in the same activities they participated in as a young adult, according to Dr. Angela Smith, past president of the American College of Sports Medicine.

Smith, a 51-year-old figure skater, said she can still do some double jumps as well as she did at 18 years old, despite being heavier and having a different body composition.

“It is astonishing how much people can maintain if they keep it up,” she told Reuters Health.

While acknowledging that adults may not be able to do all of the same exercises that children can do, Smith said the science “keeps astonishing me in a positive direction,” about what elderly men and women can be trained to do. “No one knows what the limit is as to how far the body can train,” she said.

Source: Mayo Clinic Women’s HealthSource, March 2005.