1. Warmup/Soft Tissue Work
If you have ever used a foam roller to do soft tissue work, you have found that there are spots on your body that are stiff and tight. Foam rolling is a great tool because it helps reduce the movement limitations that we all have in our body and warmup our muscles to perform better. At the beginning of your workout, spend 5-10 minutes just foam rolling the areas that are particularly stiff. After foam rolling, spend a few minutes doing some dynamic stretching exercises like arm swings and leg swings, followed by your workout exercises at no weight/extremely light weight to get your body ready. The warm up/ soft tissue work is probably that area most people skip because they just want to get their workout done, but it is also the area that will have you perform better and avoid some injuries.
2. Balance
One of the biggest differences for a senior workout is that balance and coordination should always be in it. Seniors should do static balance (e.g standing on 1 foot), and dynamic balance (e.g tandem walking) after warming up because you want your body to be fresh when trying to balance. Spend 2-5 minutes of your workout doing balance work. Also depending on the workout, you can add balance training while doing strength training to save time (e.g standing on 1 leg and doing shoulder flies).
3. Strength Training
While I think it is great that seniors do cardio; strength training is often much more under utilized or neglected. My advice when it comes to strength training is that you should train all your muscles groups. A great way to get a full body strength workout is to do compound exercises. Compound exercises are the movements that work multiple muscles at the same time. My favourite compound exercises are squats, back rows, pushups, lat pull down, lunges etc.
4. Core Training
While we naturally work our core muscles during strength training, its also good to do some core specific work. For seniors the 3 exercises that I would recommend are a plank, side plank and a bird dog. I’m a firm believer in quality or quantity, which means that it is a good idea to do your core work in sets (e.g. 3 planks for 20 seconds with breaks between, as opposed to 1 plank for 1 minute).
5. Flexibility
One of the limiting factors that many seniors have when working out is deficits in range of motion in their body. Stretching is the one of the few activities that you can do to maintain/restore this range of motion. Spend 30-60 seconds on each stretch while focusing on your hamstrings, quadriceps, neck, shoulders, chest, calves, glutes and lats. Typically when people have better range of motion, how they perform on every activity will dramatically improve.
