How To Keep Your Brain Sharp As You Age

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Maintaining mental sharpness as you age involves various factors:

1. **Exercise:** Regular physical activity, especially aerobic exercises, promotes blood flow to the brain, reducing cognitive decline. Engage in activities like brisk walking, strength training, or sports for optimal brain health.

The American College of Sports Medicine say adults over 18 should try to get moderate-intensity aerobic activity (think brisk walking or doubles tennis) for a minimum of 150 minutes each week or vigorous-intensity aerobic activity (like soccer, basketball or singles tennis) for a minimum of 75 minutes a week. And then add in strength training (like lifting weights) twice a week.

2. **Cognitive Activity:** Stimulate your brain by reading, learning, and challenging yourself mentally. High cognitive activity later in life is linked to a significant reduction in dementia risk. Start these habits early for lasting benefits.

3. **Socialization:** Quality friendships and frequent social interactions contribute to better cognitive functioning. Combining exercise and mentally challenging activities with friends enhances overall brain health.

4. **Nutrition:** Adopt a Mediterranean-style diet rich in vegetables, fruits, grains, beans, fish, and olive oil. Moderation is key for items like eggs, dairy, and poultry, while reducing red meat, refined grains, and sweets.

5. **Sleep:** Prioritize 7-8 hours of consistent, quality sleep each night. Avoid excessive caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine, and maintain a regular sleep schedule. Sleep is crucial for clearing accumulated brain waste associated with Alzheimer’s risk.

6. **Holistic Approach:** A 2011 UCSF study suggests that avoiding diabetes, obesity, hypertension, smoking, depression, pursuing education, and engaging in exercise could prevent half of Alzheimer’s cases. Addressing mood changes is crucial, as mood can impact brain function and structure over time.

Remember, making small, consistent lifestyle changes—such as finding enjoyable forms of exercise, embracing cognitive challenges, fostering social connections, maintaining a balanced diet, prioritizing quality sleep, and considering holistic health—can collectively contribute to keeping your brain sharp as you age. And don’t forget to laugh—it’s a key ingredient in navigating the changes that come with aging.

Source: Voneta M. Dotson, neuropsychologist and professor of gerontology at Georgia State University. Her book is “Keep Your Wits About You: The Science of Brain Maintenance as You Age.”

The 7 Keys to Longevity

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According to aging experts, while extreme measures like transfusing young blood may not significantly extend human lifespan, adopting simple behaviors can help people live healthier for longer, potentially reaching ages like 80, 90, or even 100 in good physical and mental condition. These practices include:

1. **Exercise Regularly:** Staying physically active is crucial, reducing the risk of premature death, maintaining heart health, and preventing chronic diseases. Even moderate exercise, like walking for 150 minutes per week, can be beneficial.

2. **Eat Healthily:** Experts recommend consuming more fruits and vegetables, reducing processed foods, and adopting dietary patterns like the Mediterranean diet, known for its heart and brain health benefits.

3. **Prioritize Sleep:** Quality sleep is essential for healthy aging, with a correlation between sleep duration and longevity. Seven to nine hours of sleep per night is generally recommended.

4. **Avoid Smoking and Excessive Drinking:** Quitting smoking and limiting alcohol intake are well-known practices for avoiding deadly diseases and promoting longevity.

5. **Manage Chronic Conditions:** Many adults have conditions like hypertension, high cholesterol, and pre-diabetes. Lifestyle changes, along with following doctor’s advice and medications, can help control and prevent these conditions.

6. **Nurture Relationships:** Psychological health is as important as physical health. Isolation and loneliness can have detrimental effects on health, so maintaining social connections is vital for both physical and mental well-being.

7. **Cultivate Positivity:** Positive thinking and optimism have been associated with a lower risk of heart disease and increased lifespan. Optimists tend to adopt healthier habits and have lower rates of chronic diseases.

While all these practices contribute to a longer, healthier life, prioritizing physical activity and maintaining a positive mindset are particularly highlighted as essential steps toward longevity. Ultimately, there’s no magic pill, but adopting these behaviors can lead to a longer and more fulfilling life.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/well/live/live-longer-health.html

What’s stopping us from exercising in older age?

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Exercise in older age is high on the agenda, but the idea that with age comes bags of time and a desire to ‘get out there’ isn’t true for a lot of us.

How do you juggle exercise around caring for partners, grandchildren or staying in work?

What if you haven’t exercised for years? What can your body take, and how has it changed with age?

James Gallagher hears how octogenarian athlete ‘Irongran’ keeps going, he explores the mental and physical barriers that stop us exercising and he finds out what he might feel like in 40 years as he pulls on an ageing suit.

BBC Link

Senior Tennis Blog

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Carolyn Nichols Senior Tennis Home Page; Ranking Tables, FAC, Historical Records; USTA Adult National Tournament Schedules; USTA Standings; ITF Seniors Home Page. ITF Rankings; USTA Senior International Competition. 2021 USTA Team Selection Guidelines; 2021 Level 1, 2, 3 Tournaments; 2021 Gold Ball Champions ; Instagram.

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NYT: How Walking Can Build Up the Brain

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How Walking, Dancing, Tennis Can Build Up the Brain

Exercise can freshen and renovate the white matter in our brains, potentially improving our ability to think and remember as we age, according to a new study of walking, dancing (tennis) and brain health.

It shows that white matter, which connects and supports the cells in our brains, remodels itself when people become more physically active. In those who remain sedentary, on the other hand, white…

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ATP: You’re never too old to regain that lost muscle.

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Starting sometime in our 30s (the data aren’t precise), we lose up to 8 percent of our muscle mass per decade, a decline called sarcopenia, along with up to 30 percent of our strength and power. This leaves us weaker, less mobile and — especially after we cross age 50 — more vulnerable to injury from falls and similar accidents.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Men and women can regain some of that lost muscle mass and, importantly, stay strong enough to enjoy youthful activities well into their winter years, experts say.

You’re never too old to regain that lost muscle. And you can do it at home. “Building and maintaining strength is one of the most important things you can do at any stage of life, and it’s extremely important after age 50,” a sports medicine physician said.

Read more —>

Source: Washington Post Wellness

Could a Keto Diet Be Bad for Athletes’ Bones?

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Race walkers on a low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diet showed early signs indicative of bone loss.

A low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diet could alter bone health in athletes, according to a thought-provoking new study of elite race walkers and their skeletons. The study, one of the first to track athletes during several weeks of intense training, finds that those following a ketogenic diet developed early signs indicative of bone loss.

The study adds to the considerable existing evidence that how we eat can affect how exercise affects us. It also raises concerns about possible, long-term health impacts from popular diet plans, including a high-fat, ketogenic diet.

Anyone interested in health, wellness, weight loss, exercise, food or best seller lists is familiar, by now, with ketogenic diets. Known more familiarly as keto diets, they are extremely low-carbohydrate, high-fat regimens, with as much as 90 percent of daily calories coming from fats.

Ketogenic diets, if followed scrupulously, reshape how our bodies fuel themselves. Because carbohydrates can be rapidly metabolized, our bodies typically turn to them first for energy, whether the carbohydrates come from our diets or stored sources in our muscles and livers.

But if people follow a low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet, they soon burn through their stored carbohydrates and their bodies start relying on fat for energy. The fat must be broken down first, however, and, as part of that process, the liver creates substances known as ketone bodies that can be converted into energy.

Ketogenic diets are popular now — as they have been off and on in the past — among people hoping to lose weight, control blood sugar or otherwise regulate their health. Some athletes also follow the diet, hoping that it will improve performance, since fat, as fuel, is ample, slow-burning and long-lasting.

By Gretchen Reynolds NYTimes Read more –>

The Quiet Brain of the Athlete

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The brains of fit, young athletes dial down extraneous noise and attend to important sounds better than those of other young people.

By Gretchen Reynolds

Top athletes’ brains are not as noisy as yours and mine, according to a fascinating new study of elite competitors and how they process sound. The study finds that the brains of fit, young athletes dial down extraneous noise and attend to important sounds better than those of other young people, suggesting that playing sports may change brains in ways that alter how well people sense and respond to the world around them.

For most of us with normal hearing, of course, listening to and processing sounds are such automatic mental activities that we take them for granted.

But “making sense of sound is actually one of the most complex jobs we ask of our brains,” says Nina Kraus, a professor and director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who oversaw the new study.

Sound processing also can be a reflection of broader brain health, she says, since it involves so many interconnected areas of the brain that must coordinate to decide whether any given sound is familiar, what it means, if the body should respond and how a particular sound fits into the broader orchestration of other noises that constantly bombard us.

And they have found interesting variations in proficiency. The brains of trained musicians, for instance, tend to show greater spikes in processing activity when they hear the “da” than do the brains of other people, indicating that learning and practicing musicianship also hones and refines the portions of the brain that process sound.

Some of the athletes’ acoustic agility most likely developed during years of attending to crucial sounds despite clatter, Dr. Kraus says. “You have to be able to hear the coach yelling something or what a teammate is saying,” she says. “Brains change in response to that kind of repeated experience,” and the sound-processing components within the brain strengthen.

But many of the athletes played sports that, typically, are not noisy, she points out. Cross-country running and golf, for instance, most likely demand less sound filtering during most practices and competitions than a sport like football or basketball. But the university’s runners and golfers had brains just as quiet as those of linemen.

For them, “fitness and regular movement of the body also change the brain,” Dr. Kraus says. And sports that seem quiet can still demand a focus on subtle sounds and signals, like the whoosh of a breeze through branches alerting golfers and runners to wind speed or a creak in a joint that could warn of early injury.

Over all, the results suggest that being active, whether as part of a team or on your own, may alter how well brains respond to and understand sounds.

This kind of study cannot tell us definitively, though, whether being an athlete changed the young people’s brains or whether they succeeded as athletes because they were better at sound processing from the start. Dr. Kraus hopes that her continuing research with the university’s sports teams will help to answer that question, as well as whether older people can reshape their sound processing by becoming active.

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Stop Chronic Injuries

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Tennis can be tough on your body!  Just ask Federer, Nadal and the typical club member at Manly Lawn.  It’s been cold, wet and windy in Sydney for Badge — the perfect recipe for injury!

At some point, particularly as we age, our injuries become chronic — and our recovery time between play becomes longer. The result: we play less and, even more, are less inclined to play!

For chronic injuries, the Guys from Trident may be able to help you like they did for me — and my bum shoulder. Their methodology — small, targeted interventions to keep you moving,  is similar to the Carrolls, the tennis trainers, who used to keep me on the courts in California.  US Nationals are typically five day events on brutal hard courts, so you needed all the help you could get to make it through to finals day — if you were good enough.

For the rest of us, here’s a link to a youtube series of dynamic warm-up and cool-down exercises that were created specifically for tennis players to stop injury or discomfort before it begins.  I have used a variation of Pete’s exercises for many years to continue to play competitively — here’s an example.

I can attest that these exercise, when done regularly, will help you feel more agile, relieve any joint or muscle tightness, and ensure that you are ready for most shots that comes your way — so you can play tennis for life!

Wishing you good health and tennis for life,
Rob
USPTA