devashish_paul wrote:
Blacky wrote:
It's hard to believe that at the same intensity, swimming and cycling could not do the same
Swimming and cycling you don't have to balance on one leg while visually processing the world around you and reacting stride to stride. Big difference in terms of how this affects aging. Watch an old person walk up and down stairs to understand this better or cross a street in busy pedestrian traffic. Running actually translates to many day to day life activities. Cycling or swimming won't improve your coordination while balancing and they are non weight bearing....so they may help organs and soft tissue, but that's about it. At least swimming has some neurally complex work going on. There is not much to cycling technique, although processing the world coming at you at speed is helpful as you age...but since you're not doing it balancing on your feet, the only useful thing that the biking neural processing will mainly benefit is driving a car. Swimming is helpful in preventing falls in older people.
"Men in the study who swam were 33 percent less likely to fall compared with all men in the study. [/url]In contrast, the men who did other forms of exercise — including golfing, doing calisthenics, working out on treadmills or stationary bikes, or playing lawn bowling games (similar to Bocce ball) — were no less likely to fall, the researchers found. "Unlike [with] land-based sports, swimmers are required to create their own base of support and at the same time, to produce a coordinated movement of both upper and lower extremities," said study author Dafna Merom, an associate professor of physical activity and health at the University of Western Sydney in Australia.
The researchers also found that the swimmers did better on a test of "postural sway," compared with the average of all men in the study. In this test of standing balance, a person is asked to stand as still as possible for 30 seconds, and researchers measure how much his or her body moves, at the waist level, from the center position.
http://www.livescience.com/48336-swimming-best-exercise-older-adults.html