By Edward I.O. Sakwe, RN, BSN

How many times have you woke up in the morning feeling like crap, exhausted, low energy, not wanting to go to work or do anything at all? Well to your biggest surprise, that’s every day for the elderly. As you age, your body ages, your mind also age, you lose strength, energy, appetite, interest in many things including sex, weekly hobbies, taking part in club meetings, vacationing, and a host of other things. It is also possible that during this time, your body have seen the better part of itself, and it’s now going through maintenance with very little options for repairs and full recovery based on your genetics and lifestyles as a youth and as an adult, which may come with comorbidities such as high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney failure, liver cirrhosis, osteoarthritis, congestive heart failure, depression, cancer, stroke, obesity and a host of others.

At this point in your life, you may not really be asking yourself or your 80-year-old parent or grandparent to start making new lifestyle changes, because as you know, it may take just a few months to form a habit, but it may take you the rest of your life to break away from the habit.

Which means if your parent or grandparent have been used to, for the past 40 years to smoke 1 pack of cigarettes a day, or drink 12-pack of beer a day, it could be very difficult if not impossible for you to convince him that cigarettes or beer is bad for him, otherwise you may get response like ” I have been doing this for 40 years now, and I’m still alive, by the way, something must kill a man, what about the kid who got killed yesterday in the mall by the serial shooter, was it cigarette that he was smoking that got him killed?”.

The truth is that whatever the behavior or habit or medical condition our parents have, we may not be able to do much about it to save them from it, besides making sure they are getting all the medical attention they need and are being monitored closely by a medical professional. However, we could be able to make a small difference in their mental and physical health by helping them incorporate simple 5-minute exercises into their daily routine. Something they may enjoy doing, that they could look forward to in the morning when they wake up. It doesn’t have to be for 30 minutes a day; they’re not trying to compete in the Olympics. We could come up with short and simple exercises that could take 5 minutes for them to do without going to a gym, and make it fun for them, something they could be able to do 2 to 3 times a day, in the morning before or after breakfast and at night before they go to bed, or before or after each meal.

When designing such exercises, asking ourselves what we are trying to accomplish may guide us to choose what kind of exercise would be right for them, and sometimes it could be helpful if to do these exercises with them at least in the first few days to get them into the routine. For example, your mom was able to walk to the bathroom by herself, but since she came back from the hospital after her 21-day stay due to COVID 19, you realize she’s been asking for help with transfer to get out of bed, and she’s also asking for her wheelchair instead of her walker. This kind of a situation will be a red flag to tell you that your mom has lost some strength and may need some physical therapy to get her back or close to her baseline prior to hospitalization. The best thing to do in this case will be to contact her primary care physician and request for a referral for her to see a physical therapist for evaluation and treatment.

Once she gets evaluated, the therapist will be able to design a treatment plan on how to help your mom regain her strength back, and also share with you some common exercises that you could do with her at home to help speed up recovery. Most of these exercises are designed such that you can do them in blocs of 5 minutes at a time multiple times a day without necessarily putting too much stress on the resident or patient. Assisting your mom with these exercises’ multiple times a day, every day, could be the difference between keeping your mom at home or moving her into a rehab or long-term care facility.

Besides regaining strength, there are also a lot of other benefits that comes with daily exercise routines as they exercise daily. The regain their strength back, their mood and appetite improves, they start feeling better about themselves, they begin to see the need to do more for themselves and take part in other activities knowing that they will no longer be too much of a burden to their children, the grandchildren, or the care givers taking care of them. All of these positive changes put a bright smile on their face, because they can once again be able to do most if not all of the things, they used to be able to do for themselves, and all it took was just 5 minutes of compassionate care.