There are ways you can get strong and healthy while giving your joints a break.
Low-impact exercise is physical activity that involves minimal stress on your joints. It emphasizes smooth controlled movements that improve strength and cardiovascular health. Walking, swimming, cycling, and weight training are popular low-impact activities.
Even small weights can make a big difference!
“There’s lots of science and research behind the effectiveness of low-impact exercise,” says Paulette Yamada, Ph.D., University of Hawaii associate professor of Kinesiology and Rehabilitation Science.
Key benefits of low-impact exercise
“Low-impact exercises can provide substantial benefits for cardiovascular, muscle, and bone health, often matching or even exceeding the benefits of high-impact exercises, especially because low impact can protect and reduce tension on joints, allowing you to sustain activity over the long term,” Yamada says. “Sufficient intensity and regularity are also key.”
Health benefits include:
- Cardiovascular: “Exercising on an elliptical machine gets your heart rate up,” Yamada says. “And if your heart rate’s elevated, you’re putting stress on your heart, so your heart adapts and your body adapts, and it just gets stronger.”
- Muscle: Yamada says that low-impact exercises, especially weight training and isometric exercises (like wall squats or planks), are effective for building and maintaining muscular strength. These are low impact by nature.
- Bone: “Bone health is a little bit different,” she says, “because the more stress or tension on the bone, the greater the rebuilding of it. Weight bearing exercise, walking, running, anything where you’re putting extra strain on your skeletal system, is beneficial for bone health.” Similarly, proper upper body weight training adds strain to that part of the skeletal system, making bones stronger.
Holding poses strengthens your body.
Consider high-intensity interval training (HIIT)
Research is changing how we look at the most-effective ways to use low-impact exercise, especially for older adults.
Low-impact exercise can be effectively combined with high-intensity interval training (HIIT), a workout method that alternates short bursts of intense exercise, performed at near-maximum effort (typically 80%-95% of maximum heart rate), with brief periods of low-intensity recovery or rest.
Yamada says HIIT can be safely and effectively adapted to low-impact exercises for older adults who are properly supervised and cleared for exercise by focusing on intensity rather than impact, leading to improved cardiovascular health, muscle strength, and even cognitive function, while minimizing the risk of joint injury. And it may be more effective and enjoyable, as sessions are shorter and results can be significant.
“High-intensity interval training is popular in the older age range,” she says. “It used to be thought of as a big no-no in older individuals. Then slowly, the research started to show it’s even better than their usual exercises. And the participants like it better because they're done sooner and they’ll see the same benefit.
“You can build your own high-intensity interval training program using low-impact exercise,” Yamada says, “and you will still get cardio benefit. You’ll get muscular, skeletal health, and cognitive benefits as well. And cognitive benefits could be higher with high-intensity interval training.”
Modern perspectives on exercise
Clearly exercise is beneficial no matter your age. But newer research suggests that reducing the amount of time you’re sitting around and not moving (also known as sedentary time) may be more important for health than the amount of exercise performed.
And it doesn’t have to be a formal exercise program that gets you moving. Activities that many in Hawaii traditionally participate in are beneficial for good health, such as hula, canoe paddling, cultivating land, fishing, and hiking. These are generally low impact but require strength, endurance, and cognitive focus.
Fishing counts as exercise!
“Research is suggesting that it’s not how much exercise you get, it’s how little sedentary time you have,” Yamada says. “More sedentary time is linked to mortality and all the bad stuff like heart disease, obesity, depression and even poor posture. If you exercise an hour each day but sit for 12 hours straight, that could be worse for your health compared to exercising for 30 minutes a day and reducing your sedentary time.”
Move more
Here are a few tips to get you moving safely:
