Abstract des Autors

Important social-cultural problems should be faced in a social reality in which the average life-time has the tendency to increase. Statistical previsions assure that thanks to the enormous progress in Medicine and to the general improvement of life's conditions, around the year 2000 on third of the population of our country will have reached old age. In the actual social contest and situation, and even more in the future, where the logic of economy prevails and any intervention that considers "man" its central point with its needs and his desire of well-belanced progress in terms of the quality of life, become practically useless, because any person who has reached the age of pension and is therefore at the end of his relation with the economic world, is judged a burden for the whole collectivity (society) and he is considered a person predestinated to a more or less forced "rest". To affirm the right of a higher quality of life should be our only aim, because it is no longer possible to promise and to permit longer spans of life whithout improving its quality. In this contest we are witnesses in modern society to a total reevaluation of physical exercises, a phenomenon that also interests old age. On the other hand we are convinced asserters of the action which states that physical qualities of an improvement in psychological capacities (abilities) and therefore of the overall quality of life determining a slowing up of the physiological processes of senility. As confirmation of this opinion scientific evidence exists and agonistic sports offer examples of athletes that in old age achieve outstanding results; indeed many sports recognize (acknowledge) the advanced adult age as the best period of activity. As a result of these considerations this essay has origin, with the intent of illustrating a vade mecum (handbook) elaborated for aged persons and proposed to thirty of them, of both sexes in the district and focused on exercise of aerobic type. It includes 3 sessions a week, 50 minutes each, comprehensive of a warming up phase and of an active restoration phase, with slow running exercises alternated to periods of exercises at slow velocity on the tapis-roulant or a low resistance cyclette completed by free body exercises, in wich the neuro-muscular coordination is privileged. This programme has been completed by 32 old agers (17 women and 15 men with an average age 67) that do not suffer from cardio-vascular illness of the degenerative type. At the end of this programme, we verified an improvement as regards mood and self-esteem; it was been investigated with appropriate items; furthermore an improvement of the vital capacities of the lipid profile with an increase of the HDL cholesterol. This way, it has been possible to ascertain a real action of prevention of the atherosclerosis illness, having contemporarily worked on some of its predisposing factors. Verf.-Referat