For Seniors: Fun and Lively Exercise Recreation
Doesn’t a natural smile come to your face when you move along to nostalgic children’s songs and traditional tunes? A popular choice for recreation in senior care facilities is fun exercises that incorporate these familiar songs.
With easy movements you can enjoy while seated and simple choreography you can do while singing, these activities gently support both the mind and body of older adults.
Today, we’ll introduce joyful singing exercises that help stimulate the brain and maintain physical fitness.
Enjoy a smile-filled exercise time with seasonal songs and tunes full of memories.
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Brain Training and Dementia Prevention Exercises (1–10)
Exercise for touching facial parts
Here we introduce a brain-training exercise that gets lively just by touching parts of your face.
For example, touch your nose with your right hand and your left ear with your left hand, clap once, then switch so your left hand touches your nose and your right hand touches your right ear.
Once you can do that, cross your arms and try touching your right ear with your left hand and your nose with your right hand, and so on.
To make it more complex, try changing the number of claps.
It may seem simple, but it’s surprisingly difficult when you try it, which stimulates the brain, and stimulating the nose and ears is also good for your body—so give it a try!
Finger rotation exercise
Let me introduce a finger-rotation exercise where you touch the same fingers of both hands together and rotate them.
This exercise was devised by an internist, and it’s said to help improve cognitive function, speed-reading ability, and calculation skills.
Amazingly, more than a third of the cerebrum is devoted to moving and controlling the hands and fingers.
So simply moving your fingers stimulates and activates the brain.
Since you’ll be moving your fingers, it might help to gently massage the bases of your fingers before you start.
The motion is simple—just twirling your fingers—so it seems easy to fit into small pockets of time.
Goo-Paa Exercise
Since Goo-Paa exercises are simple finger movements, everyone can enjoy them, including people who use wheelchairs.
They increase flexibility in the wrists and fingers and improve coordination between the brain and hands, which can help prevent dementia.
Moving rhythmically also promotes blood circulation throughout the body.
Repeating the exercises makes hand movements smoother and helps maintain dexterity in daily life.
Participants can enjoy a friendly atmosphere while communicating with each other.
Although easy to do, this is a wonderful recreational activity that supports both mental and physical health.
Please try it together with everyone!
Inchworm Brain Training Exercise
Let’s stimulate your brain with a finger play that mimics an inchworm’s movement.
Inchworms move by stretching and contracting their bodies, right? We’ll recreate that motion with your fingers as a hand game.
Touch the tips of your index finger and thumb together on both hands.
From there, bend one thumb and touch it to the index finger of the other hand.
Then alternate by bending an index finger to touch the thumb on the other hand, and keep repeating this pattern.
The motion looks like an inchworm, doesn’t it? At first, it can be hard to make each finger meet the opposite one smoothly, but working to make the connections is said to help activate your brain.
Rock-Paper-Scissors Exercise
This “Rock-Paper-Scissors” exercise is done while speaking out loud.
Using your voice provides beneficial stimulation to the brain, so it’s recommended.
Even a small voice is fine—the key is to perform the rock-paper-scissors movements while speaking.
Exercises that change the movement on each side are also effective for activating the brain.
These can be easy to get wrong, so it may be difficult to do them correctly right away.
However, making mistakes is also important and can be a good opportunity to communicate with others.
Staff should actively speak to participants while they are exercising.
