Garrett Peltonen, WNMU associate professor of kinesiology, talks about the benefits of exercise found in the Get Fit Senior program, which offers classes through the Western Institute of Lifelong Learning (WILL).
Susan Morée:
Talk about the importance of staying active for seniors, especially. Why is this important?
Garrett Peltonen:
Yeah. Great, great question. So as we age, right, we get higher risk of things like sarcopenia, where we lose our muscle mass, osteopenia or osteoporosis, we lose our bone mass, et cetera. And exercise is probably the single best thing that we can do for all parts of our body. There's basically no side effects, and it benefits everything from our head, our brain, right, all the way down to our muscles, our bones, and our individual cells. So you could never go wrong with exercise, and that's why it's my goal, especially my job, to get people to exercise, because the benefits are so great from exercise.
Susan Morée:
And isn't it helpful for seniors, especially, to exercise as part of a class, because then there's the sort of social aspect to it as well. Can you talk about that?
Garrett Peltonen:
Yeah, definitely. So if you look at a lot of the exercise research out there, a lot of activities, including things like dancing, right, tennis where you need a partner, exercising and fitness classes tend to have a real additional benefit of not only exercise, but they have the social component. And as we age, the social component is very important for not only our health and well-being, but our quality of life as well. So this includes a social component, even though it's on Zoom, right? [The classes are accessible through Zoom or in person.] The individuals get to interact and be with each other on this virtual platform, and that is helpful to them as well.
Susan Morée:
And besides our bone health and our heart health, isn't doing exercise in a regular way and trying to stay fit and active really helpful for our mental health and our brain?
Garrett Peltonen:
Yeah, oh, definitely. So as I mentioned before, like there's pretty much nothing that exercise does not benefit. And so if you look at kind of there's these four pillars of chronic disease, right? We have cancer, we have metabolic health, or diabetes, we have heart disease, but then also our cognitive function as well. And exercise plays a strong role in helping our cognition. It releases things called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which helps grow neurons. And exercise is the only thing that's really known to increase our brain mass. So it can slow cognitive decline or even potentially reverse it. So it's kind of a silver bullet from that standpoint.
Susan Morée:
And is there any sort of age restriction for the classes?
Garrett Peltonen:
No, not at all. So it tends to be an older group of individuals. It's always called Get Fit Seniors. So we've had people in their 50s all the way up to 80s, 90s. And what's really neat is we have our Kinesiology students, they lead the program. My colleague and myself, my colleague Dr. [Takahiro] Sato, we oversee it and we help structure some of the exercise programs, but we kind of hand it over to our students so that they can practice what they learned. And so for those who, let's say, have a shoulder injury or back injury as we're going through the exercise program, they can provide adaptions or adaptations to these exercises so that everyone can do them regardless of their current ability levels. So it's kind of good to have these wide ranges so that we can challenge our students so that they can find exercises that are helpful for all individuals.
Susan Morée:
And what about the students? Are they going on to become kinesiologists or what's their path with this in participating in this class?
Garrett Peltonen:
Yeah, so they often, it's part of our internship program at Western. So they get some internship hours and then it's great. We can provide them good letters of recommendation. For their performance in in these classes. But typically people in kinesiology go into things like we've had a lot of people going to physical therapy, occupational therapy. Some can go into athletic training. They can go into coaching, those type of things or if you follow a path like me you can go down research right? And then do more medically-oriented research into the benefits of exercise. So there's a variety of paths that you can go along when you go into kinesiology.
Susan Morée:
So it sounds like there's nothing but good to come from taking one of these classes.
Garrett Peltonen:
Yeah, that's what, you know, I may be a little biased, right? But no, I totally agree. So if you're an older individual looking to get some exercise, it's a great way to connect with other individuals. And it's kind of neat to see people like, oh, they're struggling at this, I struggle at that, or things like that. So it's always fun to exercise with individuals. And as we talked about, there's a lot of mental health benefits associated with the social aspect of exercise as well.
Susan Morée:
And what about the fact that there are myths out there for older people about bad knees or there's only so many heartbeats?
Garrett Peltonen:
Yep.
Susan Morée:
Can you talk about that? Is that, are any of those, is there any truth to any of that?
Garrett Peltonen:
Yeah, there's not. So I actually go over these in my lectures in my class. And so if you look at the heartbeat one, right? When you exercise, your heart rate actually goes up. So people are like, oh, I'm wasting my heartbeat on this exercise. But what's really great is that when we're done exercising for the other 23, 23 and a half hours a day, right? Our heartbeat is a lot lower. So even, if you just looked at the number, which there isn't a whole lot of truth to it, but our heart actually beats less and it becomes stronger when we exercise. For knees, when we are moving, right, we have this fluid in our knees, and when we move, that fluid helps get nutrients into our cartilage and those type of things and it can help alleviate some knee pain. And there are some things like people have arthritis, right? You might want a slower warm up or swim or ride a bicycle instead of, you know, some activities that are painful. But generally speaking, the more we move, especially for a variety of these conditions, it is beneficial to alleviating pain and promoting health and longevity.
Susan Morée:
All right, well, thanks so much, Garrett. I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to me.
Garrett Peltonen:
Yeah, not a problem. I appreciate talking with you, and we hope to see people enroll in our classes.
