Training is of advantage to the aged
The passage talks over the topic on whether middle-aged people and senior citizens should go in for physical activities. More and more middle-aged people like running and the elder people accede to the running club as well.
All these are different to the demand from the old in America. The cardiologist, doctor Theodore Gel Crop wishes that elderly people put the nationwide exercise plan into practice. He said: “we are adopting an approach which is excessive protective. Our middle-aged and people and senior citizens are always advised, or actually compelled to decrease the physical activity, with the result to the extent of atrophy on account of inactivity, thus it results in the destructive result-even if it is not lethal”. In recent 20 or 30 years, there was an argument about whether the middle-aged should participate in the physical exercise. P J Stan Crone in 1905 says in his book How to Stop Suicide: “Exercise is a state of mind, like the sheep, we also follow the foregoer. We have heard that “sports are good for you”, and thus we regard it as pithy saying no matter it is reasonable, and put our creaking joints and the stiff muscles which don’t work through the unnecessary exhaustion just because we treat it as essential accessory of normal life. Do keep in mind that you don’t have to exercise.
But now there come the signs of change. One of them is that more and more people over forty begin to run. We can know from the report provided by the Nationwide Data Center of Running: among the 18466 runners who participated in the official games, about 2250 runners were over the age of 40. In addition, they exercised hard and ran well compared with the young runners in twenties and thirties. Some competitions are graded by age (graded is divided by the age gap of 5 years) and it’s not rare to see that the champions of higher grade (e.g. 50-year-old to 54-year-old) run faster than the champions of lower grade. I met a 72-year-old runner called Lacy E Perry in a race in the city of Soak Sana in New Jersey not long before. He began to run at 60 after a doctor had exhorted him to do some exercise. Now he is one of the members of the local Old Defenders Club of Young Men’s Christian Association, and he runs for 6 miles a day and can surpass the runners who are of half of his age. He said to me: “I can run till 50 years later by the doctor’s words.
As mentioned before in the forth chapter, Doctor Fred Karsh has testified that physical exercise can restrain or even remove some main physiological changes concerned with ageing phenomenon. FurthermoreHealth Fitness Articles, the report of research in women from 52 years old to 79 years old made by Doctor Herbert Devries and Gene Adams (their work are roughly mentioned in Chapter 2) in University of Southern California indicates that only 3 months of exercise can significantly improve the cardiovascular system and reduce the rest of the heartbeat rate.