Your Safety is our Priority! Masks May Be Required at Millennium Offices. Regular physical activity and exercise are important for healthy aging and can help with chronic disease management. What if you could get a prescription for exercise from your doctor? One you can do at home. Millennium Physician Group Sports Medicine Physician Reginald Pinder weighs in on these workouts.
“I love prescribing home exercise programs,” he says. “Our patients tend to want to do them more often than I prescribe actually.”
While the benefits of regular physical activity on general health and overall quality of life in older adults are well established, the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) reports that more than a third of adults 65 and older report no leisure-time physical activities.
“All patients are candidates for a home exercise program,” admits Dr. Pinder. “More often than not, patients with back pain I tend to prescribe the home exercises to. Because we really want to focus on working out those stabilizing muscles and waking them back up again.”
Dr. Pinder assures us you don’t need fancy equipment or an expensive gym membership to reap the rewards of working out. But you do need motivation, a solid plan, and some professional guidance. The AAFP says key components of an exercise prescription should include:
- setting achievable activity goals
- identifying barriers and providing potential solutions
- and providing specific recommendations on the type, frequency, and intensity of activities
“What we do in the office is I will trade places with the patient and actually demonstrate those exercises and then have the patient go back on the table and repeat them,” Dr. Pinder explains. “And the benefit about doing those is you don’t have to leave the house, you know exactly what’s being asked of you.”
Reducing sedentary time has proven cardiovascular and metabolic benefits in older adults. And the fact is, any amount of exercise is better than being sedentary.
“The benefit about home exercise programs is doesn’t cost anything, you don’t have to go anywhere. It’s very beneficial,” Dr. Pinder says
Now that sounds like a solid prescription for better health.
Reginald Pinder II, DO