Thrive for the good life!

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Sunday, December 12, 2021 | 3

THE GOOD LIFE/THRIVE

It’s never too late to start moving, but science is finding you may not catch up to

LIFELONG EXERCISERS STACEY BURLING

The Philadelphia Inquirer‌

S

eventy-seven-year-old David Pallett, who began exercising seriously earlier this year, started a recent workout by donning a 15-pound vest and climbing 100 stairs — two at a time.

After that little warm-up, personal trainer Jim Hart, who specializes in working with older adults, led Pallett through an hour of exercises meant to improve strength, balance, power and metabolic health. The semi-retired lawyer gamely worked his abs while perched precariously on a 72-cm ball. Hart combined such movements as punches and lunges so that Pallett was using his arms, abs and legs all at once. That required the kind of whole-body coordination needed to avoid falls or do physically demanding work at home.

They finished with some upper-body work on weight machines set at about 45 pounds.

Pallett, a trim man with a white beard and silver hair, has increased the weights he’s using by about 30% since he began these workouts. Hart thinks his client is still in the “beginning stages of his potential.” It will likely be at least eight more months before Pallett plateaus.

Could he catch up to similar men who have exercised their entire lives?

Hart, 61, thinks that is sometimes possible if older exercisers work hard enough and have the right genes, but most experts say people who put off exercising until their retirement years are at a disadvantage. They enter late life — a time when strong muscles and good aerobic capacity can make the difference between independence and disability — with poorer-quality blood vessels, nerves and muscles than peers who have always been fit. New exercisers can repair much of the damage, but, probably, not all of it.

“We can’t undo 20 years of terrible living,” said Dan Ritchie, co-founder and president

of the Functional Aging Institute, where Hart trained to work with elders.

The good news is that you don’t have to catch up to the lifelong runners and gym rats to improve your health and quality of life. “You can take really unfit people at 70,” Ritchie said, “and get them really fit and doing amazing things.” One client started working with him at 78. Now in her late 80s, she can leg press her own body weight, and use 5- to 10-pound dumbbells.

Pallett jokes about looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger and besting his very strong 30-year-old son at arm wrestling. He would like to live longer than his mother, who made it to 97, and avoid the dementia that took his father in his early 80s. For now, he’s happy that his posture is improving and that his shirts fit tighter across the chest as he’s gained muscle.

A man who came late to fatherhood and loved it, Pallett listened when his son encouraged him to exercise. “I told him I could beat him,” Pallett said. “I know I’ll never beat him. I’m too old, and he’s too young. He wanted me to get healthy because he didn’t want me to die.”

As Melissa Markofski, an exercise physiologist and aging expert at the University of Houston, says, “Comparison is the root of unhappiness.”

But let’s start by doing it anyway.

Physical activity is one of the most important things people can do to increase the number of healthy years in their lifespan, and experts say it’s better to start young.

“I’m a huge fan of exercise, because, without question, it’s the most effective means that we have today to counter the fundamental biology of aging,” said Nathan LeBrasseur, a physiologist and physical therapist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who studies muscle growth and metabolism.

Aging, he said, is the “accumulation of molecular and cellular damage.” It drives dysfunction and disease. Exercise can slow it down. Obesity, which often accompanies

JOSE F. MORENO, THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER VIA TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE‌

David Pallett, 77, of Philadelphia uses an eight-pound medicine ball to work out with Jim Hart, a personal trainer who specializes in working with older adults, at Optimal Sport 1315 in Center City, Philadelphia.

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4 | Sunday, December 12, 2021 low activity, accelerates it.

People reach their physical peak about age 30, said Steven Austad, chair of biology at the University of Alabama-Birmingham and senior scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research.

We lose about 30% of our muscle mass and 50% of strength in later life. Exercisers sustain higher levels of mass longer, so they start their decline from a higher point than sedentary peers. Although you can still add muscle in your 80s and 90s, it becomes much harder, researchers said.

“You want to walk into your 80s with as much muscle mass as possible,” said Kevin Murach, an exercise physiologist and muscle biologist at the University of Arkansas. His recent research — in mice — suggests that people who exercise in early life but take a long break might build muscle more quickly if they start again than never-exercisers.

LeBrasseur said that, for most people, the ability to grow bigger or stronger muscles begins declining in their 40s.

Increasing numbers of older Americans have exercised for decades thanks to fitness trends when they were younger, researchers said. That has given physiologists a group of high achievers to compare with lifelong couch potatoes. The exercisers are clearly stronger and healthier. Scott Trappe, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University, said that longtime exercisers have a bigger physiologic reserve that helps them bounce back from illness or injuries in their retirement years. “Their tank is bigger,” he said.

Lifelong exercisers in their 70s have cardiovascular capacities that are physiologically similar to those of recreationally active people 30 years younger. And, he said, the muscles of the lifelong exercisers have enzymes involved with aerobic metabolism that are the same as exercisers in their 20s.

There’s also evidence that people who change their habits in later life reap significant benefits, but much less data on the upper limits of achievement for, say, someone who retires at 65 and decides to devote hours of newly available time to aerobic and weight-bearing exercise.

Even scientists love to point to rare elder super-achievers who started exercising late: a 100-year-old bicycle racer who was able to improve his aerobic capacity or Charles Eugster, who started a fitness plan at 85 and then won rowing and bodybuilding competitions. Hurofumi Tanaka, an exercise physiologist at the University of Texas-Austin, studies masters athletes, who often have not been lifelong exercisers. Many people who were elite athletes when young no longer compete in their 50s and 60s, he said.

But most experts said there’s reason to think you probably won’t be a masters

THE GOOD LIFE/THRIVE

Lifelong exercisers in their 70s have cardiovascular capacities that are physiologically similar to those of recreationally active people 30 years younger...the muscles of the lifelong exercisers have enzymes involved with aerobic metabolism that are the same as exercisers in their 20s.

JOSE F. MORENO, THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER VIA TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE‌

David Pallett, 77, works out on the steps of Optimal Sport gym during a session with personal trainer Jim Hart. champion if you do your first exercising in your 60s or 70s because you’re starting so far behind. It’s easier to maintain strength and fitness than it is to increase it, said Thomas Buford, director of the University of Alabama-Birmingham’s Center for Exercise Medicine. “Most of what we’re talking about is preventing decline,” he said.

It is true that some fitness fanatics enter their retirement years with bad knees and ACLs or pain from traumatic injuries that limit their activity. Sedentary people who are not obese could have healthier joints and fewer injuries. But the joints of nonexercisers could also have suffered from the lack of strong supportive muscles and from obesity. Sedentary people have more back trouble and more cardiovascular problems that can limit capacity. They are more likely to have fat deposits in their muscles that make contractions less effective.

Whether we exercise or not, we lose muscle mass over time. You don’t have to have big muscles to be strong, but experts said mass correlates with strength. There’s a limit to how much you can bulk up an old muscle, but you can make it stronger.

The composition of muscle changes, with fewer and shorter fibers. In heavier, more sedentary people, fat deposits can make muscle look like marbled steak. Trappe said the muscle cells become less able to process energy. Paul Coen, an exercise physiologist for AdventHealth in Orlando, said the ability to use protein from food for muscle building is blunted in aging bodies. Older people also have fewer mitochondria, which facilitate muscle contractions.

All of these problems are worse in sedentary people. Some can be improved with exercise.

LeBrasseur said people who study muscles have long been consumed with agerelated decline in muscle mass, but are starting to look at other factors. “Have we oversold the importance of building mass as opposed to building muscle quality?” he wonders.

By that, he means that muscles don’t operate independently. They need a good blood supply and well-connected nerves that tell them when to contract and relax. These things decline with age, too, and they decline more in people who haven’t exercised.

A healthy brain is key to strong muscles because that’s where the signals that control muscles start, said Brian Clark, an Ohio University exercise physiologist who directs the Ohio Musculoskeletal and Neurological Institute. “The muscles are the puppets of the nervous system,” he said. Our brains typically atrophy with age and that affects

parts that control motor function as well as thinking. This can make habitual motions like walking more challenging, a reason that older people find it harder to walk while checking their phones than their grandchildren do. Nerves are also dying, and they become less connected.

The best activity for your brain is aerobic exercise. However, weightlifting can slowly build better connections between nerves and muscles. In fact, much of the improvement that sedentary people experience during the first eight weeks of lifting weights is due to this improved neuromuscular coordination, LeBrasseur said.

Then there’s your heart, which supplies your muscles with nutrients and oxygen.

At any age, exercise as simple as walking can help them avoid catastrophic falls and stave off the day when they’ll need a walker or wheelchair.

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THE GOOD LIFE/THRIVE

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2021 |

high correlation to the overall stock market and the volatility that entails — is the inability to defer taxation on any capital gains from the sale of shares. In other words, when you sell your REIT shares, you will have to pay capital gains tax on any gains.

gains are reinvested in other investment properties. (The reinvestment occurs in the form of a 1031 exchange, which your tax or legal adviser can tell you more about.)

That’s one reason but not the only reason to consider DSTs. DSTs are entities that hold title to investments, such as incomeproducing real estate. Most types of real estate can be owned in a DST, including industrial, multifamily, self-storage, medical and retail properties. Often, the properties are institutional quality similar to those owned by an insurance company or pension fund, such as a 400-unit Class A multifamily apartment community or a 100,000-squarefoot industrial distribution facility leased to a Fortune 500 logistics and shipping company.

Delaware Statutory Trusts (DSTs)

Tenants-in-Common Properties (TICs)

With DSTs, which are a form of direct real estate ownership, you have the ability to defer capital gains tax on gains so long as the

A TIC structure is another way to passively invest in real estate as part of a retirement planning strategy.

With a TIC, you own a fractional

Retirement planning?

Don’t forget about

INVESTMENT REAL ESTATE DWIGHT KAY

Y

Kiplinger Consumer News Service

ou’re planning ahead for retirement, and determined to invest in a diversified basket of stocks, bonds and alternative investments. Maybe you have no exposure to income properties now, or maybe you’re a landlord either as your primary business or as a part-time investor. If it’s the latter, you’re likely ready to shed the responsibilities in favor of a passive approach that allows you to try to stress less and enjoy more.

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) The market for publicly traded REITs is long established, and many people access the market through their retirement plans and stock brokerage accounts. REITs are generally companies that own and operate real estate, so you’re investing in the company, not just the underlying real estate. REITs pay out their income in the form of dividends, which are taxable.

The biggest downside to REIT investments — aside from their

interest in the property and receive a pro rata portion of the potential income and appreciation of the real estate.

Qualified Opportunity Zone Funds Qualified Opportunity Zone Funds, which were enabled by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, are a form of private equity funds. They offer some capital gains tax deferral and elimination benefits. A fund of this type can invest in real property or operating businesses within an Opportunity Zone, typically a geographic area in the U.S. that has been so designated by the government because it may be underserved or neglected.

If you seriously consider this investment option, be aware that there may be a higher level of risk based on the location of the property, and the time horizon of the fund may be as long as 10 years, which means tying up your capital for that length of time in an illiquid asset.

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| SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2021

THE GOOD LIFE/THRIVE

PLAYING CARD GAMES COULD STAVE OFF

ALZHEIMER’S

EMMA STEIN

G

Detroit Free Press

ood news for competitive people: Those family euchre tournaments that get a little too intense may be delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s by five years, a new study reveals.

Scientists have long thought that brainstimulating activities like reading, puzzling and playing cards could prevent dementia, and the July 14 study in the Neurology journal shows cognitive activities may be helpful in staving it off.

The researchers examined about 1,900 older people, averaging 80 years old, who did not have dementia and monitored their participation in “cognitively stimulating activities,” and then clinically evaluated them to diagnose dementia and/or Alzheimer’s.

“We tried to pick activities that would not have too many physical or social barriers, or

financial barriers, so these are things that most older people are able to do,” said Robert S. Wilson, lead researcher and professor of neuropsychology at Rush University Medical Center.

“And what we looked at was the age at which dementia was diagnosed, and we found that people who reported being cognitively active got dementia at a much later age than those who were cognitively inactive.”

The study found that participants with a lower cognitive lifestyle developed dementia at around 88, on average, while the mean onset was 93 for those with higher levels of cognitive activity.

Wilson said it is an observational study that does not prove causality, but there are very few alternative explanations.

“This is suggestive of the idea that a cognitively active lifestyle doesn’t make the underlying disease go away, but it can delay the appearance of the symptoms which disable

you,” he said.

A new study For Midwesterners, the card game shows that playing you’re most likely to play is euchre, competitive card according to a survey conducted by games like euchre can TopUSCasinos. help stave off dementia.

The study, which surveyed 1,000 DREAMSTIME VIA TRIBUNE Americans, also found that Americans NEWS SERVICE played card games more frequently during the COVID-19 pandemic. About 55% of Americans learned a new card game this year.

Wilson said that, despite how passionate Midwesterners are, euchre might not technically be better than other card games in this do, so I think the particular scenario, but all that trying to read key with cognitive your partner’s mind or trying to remember activity is something that what suit the jack is this round could be pay- is sustainable and hopeing off. fully enjoyable because we “It’s not the actual cognitive activity that is think that the important key,” Wilson said. “The brain is not something thing is that it’s somethat just sits there like a blob, it’s constantly thing that you repeat responding to the activities that we ask it to over time.’”

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You’ll thrive at Western Home Communities New villas being constructed in 2022

Western Home Communities recently purchased another 19 acres, expanding the footprint of its south Cedar Falls campus and paving the way for more villas for active living to be built in coming months.

“We’re happy that we were able to work with Pinnacle Prairie developer Merrill Oster on this purchase as we have in the past,” CEO Kris Hansen says. “Merrill has been great to work with through the years, as we both focus on win-win opportunities.”

The purchase creates a contiguous campus to the north nearly to Greenhill Road. Prairie Parkway borders the land purchase on the east, Bluebell on the west and Greenhill Road to the north, excluding the property owned by Kimball & Beecher Family Dentistry and the green space owned by the city, which is just west of the dental office.

The land purchase includes all of Wild Rye Way and the western portion of Bluegrass Court, except for the lot where periodontist Shawn Reese, DDS, MS, PC, is located.

Architects and engineers are at work on site development, including utility layouts and street designs.

“If we use all the space for villas, we could build about 28 more duplexes,” says Hansen, “but it may be that the land lets us create something else that appeals to new residents. So we’re still investigating all the options.”

Development on south campus started in the early 1990s when Windgrace and Windermere independent living communities were built on 13 acres of farmland that once belonged to Charles A. Rownd, who built the house and round barn in 1911.

“It’s been 20 years since residents moved into the first villas on Iris Drive in 2001,” Hansen reflects. “Here we are with 244 villas and townhomes finished and ready to do more. I sure didn’t anticipate we’d reach Phase 10, but it’s all driven by demand and having the space to grow.”

The organization recently completed Phase 9, a two-year construction process that saw 36 new villas completed near Jorgensen Plaza. This was no simple feat, as 2021 brought a host of challenges in the supply chain that impacted new construction. But all new villas welcomed new residents by this fall, who were settled in time to enjoy the holiday season.

For information on joining the Club Ruby waiting list, contact Maria Murphy at 319-277-2141.

Expanding a Regional Footprint

Another construction project takes place farther south in Cedar Rapids, where a collaboration with UnityPoint Health – St. Luke’s Medical Center will bring specialized cottages for dementia care to that city.

A groundbreaking was held in late October for three memory support cottages similar to those that debuted in Cedar Falls in 2015. Two will be assisted living and one will be long-term nursing care.

The household design allows life to unfold just like it does in a family home. Residents enjoy life with a small group of just 16 to 20 residents and a team of consistent caregivers who work to create each resident’s best day.

The organization previously opened The Cottages at Creekside in Grundy Center three years ago, and one of those cottages was recently certified for specialized dementia care.

“We know this model works so well for people living with dementia,” Hansen explains. “We’re happy to work with other partners who recognize what a different this makes in people’s lives.”

WesternHomeCommunities.org

Make your move in 2022

Love your lifestyle in a new villa at Western Home Communities!

Spacious, modern, close to everything you want or need and customized your way.

Lots available starting in early 2022 so join the Club Ruby waiting list now!

WesternHomeCommunities.org

Call Maria or Casey at 319-277-2141to start your new adventure.