What’s more important as you age: stretching, balance work or strength training? | Hacker News Reader

What’s more important as you age: stretching, balance work or strength training?

cnn.com

10 pointsclouddrover12 comments

Like any countermeasure, it depends greatly on your threat model.

For people retiring from a sedentary job, with poor eating habits and a history of heart disease or stroke, consistent mild cardiovascular exercise is probably best.

For nearly everyone else, strength training. Older people lose muscle mass and bone density. For a huge number of the elderly, the final spiral begins as a broken hip or spine fracture. Strength training counteracts that in two ways: hormonally and mechanically. The act of strength training increases production of growth hormones and testosterone. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15831061/ And if you have stronger muscles, your bones will take less of the brunt of life's stressors.

Regardless of which group, nicotine reduction/elimination is important. Not just smoking - vaping has a similar effect on bone density, meaning other non-tobacco nicotine sources probably do as well.

Strength training, particularly lower body strength training will help with balance. Cardio is a must, but needn’t be running (my personal favorite). Rowing and swimming are excellent cardio exercises as well.

Both resistance and cardio training have shown well established health benefits in the scientific literature, stretching less so however:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/well/move/stretching-exer...

The most important is not listed in the title. It's cardiovascular exercise.

Skip breakfast and do some kind of sport or fun workout that you are self-motivated for. I like Eleven VR table tennis.

Cardiovascular exercise isn't the most beneficial, high intensity strength training is; as has all the benefits of cardio, whiles improving strength and working the whole body.

But is it fun, or appropriate for elderly people?

All of the above?

Doesn't yoga combine all three?

Not at all. Yoga doesn't get you heart rate up, require much strength or increase bone density. It does improve flexibility, but that really isn't much of a benefit on it's own.

Yoga doesn't really give you the strength training aspect, in the way of traditional strength training

can you elaborate, i have found yoga practitioners to have much more strength as compared to people using weights. For example take a look at this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayurasana . It is incredibly hard to do and i have seen so many muscular people failing at it.

You become strong at doing what you train at. If its traditional strength training, then lifting weights is going to make you stronger in lifting and carrying things.

You are only going to gain so much strength when lifting or moving parts of your body, until you will need to focus on lifting heavier weights. There's nothing wrong with that at all as it's not everyone's aim to have huge muscles.

At the end of the day in Yoga you are still lifting or holding something, it's just your own weight.

I have been a weight lifter for 20 years, practiced BJJ and dabbled in Yoga. Yoga practitioners really are not strong by any measure. It's a terrible form of exercise, although it is good for improving flexibility which is good if you take part in sports which require it.

Yoga poses that appear to require strength are simply balancing with locked muscles. You have to be light and flexible for such things, but it doesn't require any strength.

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