Staying Active as a Senior
The overall benefits of exercise in your senior loved ones’ lives show great improvement of mental and physical health along with many other improvements. Exercise as a whole has the potential to improve social interaction, mood, mental health and capacity, strength, mobility, cognitive function, and overall healing. Health and wellness are improved in the long-term through physical activity, even mild daily activities like walking or an exercise class.
10 Ways Your Senior Can Stay Active
Senior Care Chester, PA: Staying Active as a Senior
1. Take advantage of the services offered at senior centers. Senior centers are found in various communities and offer a number of services that range from day programs, support groups, classes, and social meals. Senior care is available in these centers including therapeutic massage, health clinics, outdoor hikes, dances, and other activities.
2. Complete activities for enhanced physical well-being. These include moderate aerobic exercises, dancing, brisk walking, swimming, raking leaves, simple hand weights lifting, balancing, tai chi, and yoga. It is helpful for your senior to take on aerobic activities they can do for 30 minutes at a time. Senior care often helps walk your loved one through these activities, whether it is individual home care or community centers with multiple seniors involved in groups and classes.
3. Be a volunteer or attend local events. Your senior can volunteer or attend local events, even if it includes volunteering alongside senior care with those at a center or in a group working for the benefit of a non-profit. This helps with activity and social interaction. Your senior loved ones can work with Habitat for Humanity, United Service Organizations, Senior Corps, or the Red Cross. Have senior care work with your senior to determine their interests in the community and find a way to help out locally.
4. Start or pursue a hobby. Hobbies help with knowledge, activity, and much more. While it may not be easy for a senior facing their elder years to remember all the details of prior knowledge, senior care can work with them on a daily basis. Some interesting hobbies, whether they come from the past or not, include coloring, fishing, cooking, scrapbooking, crocheting, and painting.
5. Perform mind-stimulating activities. Mind-stimulating activities like puzzles, memory games, word games, trivia, and other strategy games can help keep adults stay fit, sharp, and witty. Even though the ability to learn decreases with age, the brain is not lost. Your senior loved one can work on crossword puzzles, computer games, playing a musical instrument, or reading books and magazines.
6. Go on a road trip. Road trips are one of the best ways to explore new sights and places along with deserved relaxation for seniors. Your seniors have access to senior travel deals with the ability to make use of their flexible schedules on a trip. Even during the need for senior care, there is access to someone who can help with the daily assistance your senior loved one may need and make sure that all benefits of the trip are gained. Whether you go along with family members, it can still be a safe and beneficial trip for your loved one.
7. Get a massage. Because the body slows with age, sometimes it takes a simple activity to help with therapeutic improvement. Sometimes this is part of senior care or a caregiver who is trained in massage therapy. Massage can be a quality response to diseases like Parkinson’s and others. Physical activity, or even a massage, can improve flexibility and mobility including mental health.
8. Grow an herb garden. Growing an herb garden is easy, and your senior doesn’t need to have a lot of skills. Senior care can help with maintaining this herb garden as well, while also practicing with the collection of herbs for cooking. It can help with a nutritious diet for your senior as well. Herbs that grow great indoors include thyme, basil, oregano, lemongrass, chives, parsley, and mint.
9. Share your expertise through teaching. Your skills or knowledge from the past may be of interest to others as well. Your senior loved one can volunteer to teach a class, sharing their knowledge. They may need to check the requirements for teaching, but often at centers, it is simply a voluntary activity, especially when teaching some of those hobbies that they have worked to regain. Some of those may be as simple as dance, baking, sewing, cooking, boxing, and cycling.
10. Catch up on reading. At the library or home allows for reading a good book. Reading keeps the mind alert, improving consciousness. Some cafes even have their own bookshelves filled with books to match their cozy interior for their book-loving guests. However, you may find yourself so engrossed which makes you lose track of time.
Luckily, senior care can help your loved one keep up with a regular schedule of any or all of these activities. Senior care may be any in-home caregiver that remains involved with your loved one during the day or even 24-hour home caregivers that look after your senior loved one when any of these physical activities may be needed.
If you or an aging loved one are considering Senior Care in Chester, PA please contact the caring staff at True Direct Home Health Care today.
Sources
https://www.umh.org/assisted-independent-living-blog/bid/337684/the-importance-of-keeping-your-aging-senior-active
Doc, as he is called by everyone - staff, patients and clients - first experienced home health care and hospice care while as a colleg student at King's College as he cared for his mother every day while she first battled COPD and then lung cancer. It was during this time that he came to understand that caring for a patient was more than just clinical expertise.
"Admittedly, my strongest attribute is my communication skills and the simple fact that I love to help people. Even the smallest thing you can do for someone really can mean so much to them long term. In fact, it could change them forever. That's what providing quality personal home health care should be all about."
In his spare time, he cooks for homeless shelters and children's music and arts events. He also is highly involved in his local youth sports soccer academy as a coach and Board member.
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