Staying Fit Over 50: Conditioning for Outdoor Activities [Paperback]

Jim Sloan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1999

Provides the evidence, advice, and insights for developing or maintaining new levels of fitness in the aging body.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A thorough examination...Neophytes will appreciate the list of specialized resources. -- Tail Winds

Follow the path in this book, and the next time you hit the Mount Fatigue trail, it’ll be on the run.(Bremerton Sun (WA)) -- Bremerton Sun, WA

Here's a book that the leading edge of the boomers should take a look at ... combining new research and the benefits of experience -- The Herald - Everett, WA

About the Author

Jim Sloan is an avid outdoorsman and an assistant managing editor at the Reno (NV) Gazette-Journal. He lives in Truckee, California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Mountaineers Books (October 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0898866685
• ISBN-13: 978-0898866681
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #729,415 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Someone else still needs to write a book on the subject, November 21, 2004

By 

Douglas A. Greenberg (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Staying Fit Over 50: Conditioning for Outdoor Activities (Paperback)

Not everyone will agree with me (I'm sure), but based on my own being a fifty-something male who is fighting Father Time as part of my never-ending quest to stay reasonably fit, I think that any book that purports to cover the subject of "fitness over fifty" needs to address the realities of what happens to the human body as it ages. This requires more than a trivial reference to a few measurements of physical decline, including percentage loss of "VO2 max," it demands frank and full discussion of what it actually means to be aging and yet trying to remain athletically active.

Here's the deal, like it or not: as we get older, we get more brittle, less flexible, more prone to gaining weight, and more prone to injuries, which in turn take longer to heal. And on and on. Consequently, it becomes increasingly important to be smart, prudent, and strategic in the way one approaches physical activities.

A good book on this topic would devote a great deal of its contents to these realities of aging, and would serve as a guide to avoiding injury, dealing with various kinds of soreness and other age-related physical issues, and addressing the *psychological* issues related to the realization that one's body no longer can do what once it did.

Instead, this book is, for the most part, just another general treatise on "beginning exercise," with but a very few comments that might be helpful to 50+ people in particular. In fact, the first part of the book is actually counter-productive, in my opinion, as its message is essentially the old "inspirational" saw about how "age is only a number," etc. Folks, this isn't true, and even the best-trained athletes over fifty years old will confess as much.

Most of the book is a slog through "how to begin" various sports, including running, swimming, cycling, and cross-country skiing. This information may be useful for people who absolutely have never done any serious exercise, but these sections are addressed to a general audience, with practically no information that is of particular use to an "over fifty."

With so many people who have exercised one way or another getting older, there remains a crying need for a book that actually addresses the issues that aging athletes will encounter as the years go by. As the old saying goes, aging isn't for cowards, it's a tough process that has to be addressed head-on, not sugar-coated and pep-talked out of existence.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Staying Fit Over Fifty: Conditioning for Outdoor Activities, September 9, 2001

By 

Denny Granstrand (Yakima, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Staying Fit Over 50: Conditioning for Outdoor Activities (Paperback)

I was hoping that this book would tell me how to go from a moderately fit fifty-year-old to a very fit fifty-one-year-old. Unfortunately, it is written for the person who has been incredibly fit through their forties and tells them how to maintain that through their fifties. I think its target audience is quite small.

The examples of fitness Mr. Sloan uses are definitely those of people who have been running marathons, racing on cross-country skis, and who have been punishing themselves physically for many years. In one chapter, he tells his readers how to find their ideal exercising heartrate. He uses the example of a forty-two year old man with a resting heart rate of 43. This person is already incredibly fit and probably doesn't need a book to tell him how to stay that way.

In another example, he says suppose you now run ten kilometers in forty-three minutes. That is a pace of about seven minutes a mile for six miles - there are very few people approaching fifty who can do that.

There is a lot of good information about training using heart rate has a monitor. The chapter on stretching is also very good and probably the most useable chapter in the book. Unfortunately, most of the book is directed to people who are more fit than most of us can even dream about.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good material, could have been better for non-jocks, May 1, 2002

By 

John Payne (Berryton, KS United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Staying Fit Over 50: Conditioning for Outdoor Activities (Paperback)

This book teaches a lot about the body, its production of energy, diet, and philosophy behind a training program. It's focused on aging jocks. It's weak on specific examples for non-jocks like me. But it does explain what happens to the body as it ages and how physical activities are affected and what can be done about it (and, at times, what can't), which no other book deals with that I've seen. I'm glad I bought/read it. I can now converse with my cross-country runner & cyclist 17-year old son! For more specifics on exercises you'll need another book, such as "Conditioning for Outdoor Fitness", authored by Musnick & Pierce.