Once a week exercise enough for elderly women: Study

Here is a good news for elderly women who hate doing excercises daily. A new study says, women over the age of 60 may need to exercise only once a week to significantly improve their strength and endurance.

Greater frequency, intensity and duration of exercise is beneficial in young people. This study suggests the things that necessarily apply to younger adults are not valid for women over the age of 60 as far as health and fitness are concerned.

Study

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham carried study on 63 elderly women performing combined aerobic exercise training (AET) and resistance exercise training (RET) for 16 weeks.

One group performed AET and RET one time per week, a second group two times per week and a third group three times per week.

At the beginning of the study, each participant completed a 4km-per-hour walk test to determine heart rate and oxygen consumption during the task. The average heart rate was 110 beats-per-minute.

After 16 weeks of AET and RET training, the women’s heart rates averaged 92 beats-per-minute during the walk, indicating that the women required much less effort to do the same daily task following the exercise programme.

Findings

The researchers found significant increases in muscular strength, cardiovascular fitness and functional tasks in each group, but there were no significant differences in outcomes among groups.

“This study demonstrates that doing as little as one AET and one RET workout each week can provide a lot of benefit for older women’s overall quality of life and health,” said Gordon Fisher, primary investigator of the study.

Fisher said the study goes against the common belief about exercise – that more is better.

The study was published in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.