Abstract des Autors

The purpose of this study was to clarify various components of walking activities among the high aged people, in relation with physique and heart rates at rest and post exercise recovery period. Subjects were 53 female residents of a care house in Hyogo Prefecture, average age 78.9+/-0.9 years. They were tested in various parameters that are relevant to the study, such as height, weight, BMI, resting heart rate, total amount of weekly walking steps (recorded twice, i. e., in September and in October), walking velocity, walking stride, time length for climbing 15 step stairs and self-rate health, the major findings are summarized as follows: (1) Various physical functions that are related to daily activities and therefore related to muscular strength and neuromuscular coordination, were found to decrease significantly upon aging, such as walking velocity and time length for climbing stairs. (2) The results of multiple correlation regression analysis, taking total amount of weekly walking steps with self-rated health, time length spent for 15 steps of climbing stairs and age were existent. (3) Walking velocity, walking steps size and stair climbing velocity of good walkers (upper 25% in total amount of weekly walking steps) and it was found that the good walkers walked faster with greater steps size and climbed the stairs faster than the less walking subjects. (4) The total amount of daily walking steps of various days of the week were compared with each other and it was found that the good walkers recorded significantly less amount of walking steps on Thursday than others days, the fact that a large scale shopping center which is located near by the care-house closes on Thursday every week suggests that the amount of walking steps are influenced by social factors, such as shopping behavior. (5) In terms of the going out behavior outside of care-house, visiting the large scale shopping center (40% of subjects), and hospitals and alike (25%) were recognized. The results suggest that there are certain common elements in the motivation and behavior of out-of-care-house activities. The above results suggest that the study of walking behavior of the high aged people would be extremely variable not only in assessing the fitness level and physical function of the residents, but also in possible evaluation of efficiencies of the care-house location. Verf.-Referat