How to Stay Active as You Age

As we get older, our mental and physical powers naturally decline, right? Not necessarily. If we follow all the lifestyle tips to keep ourselves healthy, it helps a lot. But most of all we have to keep the right attitude. The key concept is “Use it or loose it.” If we believe we can keep our powers long into the evening of our lives, we will continue to use them. If we continue to use them, they will stay with us much longer. Read on to learn how to stay active as you age.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Start telling yourself now--no matter what age you are--that you can remain mentally and physically active all your life.
2. Take up a physical activity that is within your physical limits and then stretch those limits. Try something you have never done before. How about karate? Believe it or not, most martial arts can be practiced by people at all fitness levels and ages. You don’t have to be Chuck Norris. But, if you keep at it, you could become surprisingly good and gain flexibility and strength in the process.
3. Play video games. These develop mental agility and hand-eye coordination. And you can start at the beginner’s level and work your way up. Plus you can try out new personas. Wanna be a boxer, a wizard or a rock star? What’s good for your imagination is good for your brain. Games for the new Wii system offer some physical exercise as well.
4. Learn a new subject. Have you always wondered how the human brain works? Find out. Astronomy? Physics? Car mechanics? Australian wines? Choose any topic. Learning keeps the brain agile. Keep your brain busy making new neural pathways and it won’t have the chance to forget how.
5. Travel. Your brain has to keep working to assimilate new sights and experiences. Your body has to keep working to get you up and down those hiking trails or urban boulevards.
6. Keep going. There will always be things you can do, even if you have some health issues as time goes on.

Tips & Warnings

• If you learn something new everyday, you will even sleep better. The body needs a certain level of mental and physical activity to trigger sound sleep.
• My 102-year-old great-grandmother was my hero. She lost most of her eyesight at age 100 and had to accept help, but she could run rings around me in current events until the day she died and she never failed to dress up on Sundays.