County to seniors: Get Active for Life

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Jul 4, 2006 | by Rebekah Gordon, STAFF WRITER

Redwood City resident Shirley Johnson walks wherever and whenever she can.

Not bad for this 66-year-old, who a year ago weighed 30 pounds more, couldn't get far without losing her breath and depended on portable oxygen.

"At first I started out slow," she said about her walking effort. "I could only go so far. I had a hard time breathing. Gradually I worked myself up more and more."

And as for that oxygen machine?

"Now I just don't need it," she said.

Johnson's penchant for walking came after joining the county's free Active for Life program, which recognizes the benefits of physical activity for adults 50 and over and motivates them for six months to exercise. Grant-funded and part of a larger study, the program helps participants determine their exercise needs and goals with a health educator, and sends them off with a pedometer, a tracking calendar and a resource guide of some 45 exercise programs in the county.

Walkers receive regular encour-aging and monitoring phone calls from their educator for six months.

Word about the program spread mostly through senior centers and living facilities, and 700 older adults have taken advantage since it began in January 2003. The county aims to serve 900 by year's end when funding expires.

Among the hundreds, Johnson is a standout success story; a diabetes and asthma sufferer, she said she now walks an hour a day, an effort that hardly feels like, well, effort anymore.

"I'm so used to it now," she said. "I think it keeps me motivated and keeps me going."

How older adults are best motivated to get moving is the larger question that Active for Life is attempting to answer. Overseen by the Texas A&M University System Health Science Center School of Rural Public Health in College Station, Texas, the program examines how best to offer physical activity programs for large numbers of older adults and sustain them through community institutions such as public health departments and senior centers.

According to the Health Science Center, almost 64 percent of adults ages 65 and older do not meet the Surgeon General's recommendations for 30 minutes of moderate physical activity several days a week.

San Mateo County's Health Services Agency was one of nine different types of agencies nationwide to receive funding for the program, provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The county received more than $900,000 to run the program for four years, sharing it with Berkeley's Public Health Department.

Some sites have employed the telephone-based program, originally created at Stanford University; others have implemented a 20-week classroom-based program. Results of the program's first year, released this month in the American Journal of Public Health, found both methods worked well in community settings, increasing physical activity while decreasing depression, stress and body mass index.

After their initial meeting here, participants receive a phone call once every two weeks for two months, and then once a month for four months to monitor their progress.

"It's a different piece of what it takes to make somebody active," Doris Estremera-Rohleder, the county's project director, said about the phone calls. "It's just that support, that encouragement, someone reminding them."

Anecdotally, she said she has seen it working.

"We do have great success stories," she said. "Individuals that weren't exercising previously now are."

Vicki Janin, an occupational therapist at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, said getting older adults to exercise is sometimes a challenge because they worry they might fall.

"There is an assumption, I think, as we age, that when we start to feel less agile, less flexible, that we don't have much control over falls, that it's not preventable. So people don't make much effort to keep up their physical activities," she said.

Exercise can be as simple as taking a walk, or doing arm lifts and stretches in a chair. While there are physical benefits such as staving off osteoperosis and hypertension, there are mental benefits from exercise, too.

"If they actually started exercising or increased their activity level, they feel renewed in some way, and not surrendering to age, and (think) 'I can do something about what's happening to me,'" Janin said.

That holds true for South San Francisco resident Maria Celli, 78, who started the program about three months ago and now takes walks three times a week, and does arm and leg exercises in her apartment.

"I'm happy with this program," she said in Spanish. "It helps me feel better, I feel more amiable, more animated, everything."

For more information about Active for Life, call (650) 573-2003 or go to http://www.smhealth.org. To be eligible, participants must be 50 or older and exercise less than two days or 120 minutes a week.