Consumer Reports Exercise Bikes
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Garmin Forerunner 205 GPS Receiver and Sports Watch
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Schwinn 240 Recumbent Exercise Bike
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1-1/2" Thick - 12" Wide - Bicycle Seat Cover / Gel Pad-Wide
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Be 16 years younger in 10 short weeks
In two papers based on the experiments and published in recent months, UC Berkeley researchers report that postmenopausal women can achieve the same health benefits from regular, vigorous exercise as younger women do.
"There is some good news here for older women in the population, in that they respond much like younger women do to training," said study leader and exercise physiologist George Brooks, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology. "The results are very encouraging for exercise without weight loss as an effective means for increasing vigor and controlling risk factors for chronic diseases in older women."
"There have been very few studies looking at postmenopausal women, who are different because of decreased estrogen, decreased lean body mass and decreased aerobic capacity," said Zinta Zarins, a newly minted UC Berkeley Ph.D. who conducted the experiments and is now a post-doctoral fellow at UC San Francisco. "Yet, despite changes in hormones and changes in body composition, postmenopausal women can make significant changes in their cardiovascular fitness without going on extreme diets."
Although the endurance training involved cycling on an exercise bike for an hour, five days a week, at 65 percent of maximum lung capacity, the researchers noted that even less strenuous aerobic exercise would likely produce some benefit.
"Most people don't exercise at this level, but some exercise is better than none at all," Zarins said, noting that 60 minutes of jogging on a treadmill or swimming should be as effective as an hour on a stationary bike.
Brooks, the head of the Exercise Physiology Lab, noted that a woman's metabolism changes as her hormone levels change after menopause, affecting glucose clearance from the blood, for example. He proposed the study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, to determine whether women achieve the same benefits from endurance training after menopause as they did before.
"We've done lots of studies on the effects of activity and training on metabolism in younger men and women, but this is the first in an older population," Brooks said.
In a paper appearing in the September issue of the journal Metabolism - Clinical and Experimental, Brooks and Zarins report that participants increased their body's capacity to consume and use oxygen - their VO2 max - by an average of 16 percent and dropped their resting heart rates by an average of 4 beats per minute. Brooks said that after the age of 30, people lose the capacity to consume and use oxygen at about 1 percent per year.
"So, in effect, the women in our study had the cardiovascular and metabolic capabilities of women 16 years younger," he said.
By the end of the study, the women's blood pressure during exercise had dropped by 8 millimeters of mercury, while their heart rates were 19 beats per minute less when performing at the same intensity as early in the study. In addition, the women decreased their carbohydrate burning during exercise and increased their fat burning by about 10 percent.
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