Baby boomers and "Boomeritis": How to avoid exercising injuries

CBS This Morning—February 22, 2013

Doctors are seeing an explosion of baby boomers coming in with injuries from exercise. The influx has been dubbed "boomeritis."

It's a result of the mentality boomers have about exercise, Dr. Riley Williams, an orthopedic surgeon who practices sports medicine at New York's Hospital for Special Surgery, explained on "CBS This Morning."

"You have to understand that this generation of individuals 45 and up have been bred on the idea that exercise is going to not only lengthen your life, but increase your quality of life and thus they've been exercising their whole lives," he said. "As you get older, joints, ligaments, and tendons, they change, as we all know, and you're going to have some injuries from time to time if you exercise vigorously."

Williams said he doesn't consider "boomeritis" to a big problem because it is associated with exercise. He said, "I always stress in my office that I'd rather have a problem with my limbs as opposed to problems with my core, diabetes, heart disease and things, so as we know, vigorous exercise is a helpful approach. However, we start to have a certain type of commitment to our exercise and we ignore these normal signs that may warn us if something is coming about."

To avoid injury longer, Williams suggests a diverse set of exercising routines. He explained, "Take running, for example. I see a lot of five-day-week runners. It's almost virtually impossible after a certain age to continue with that frequency, so I encourage people to do other things, biking, intense gym training, things that give you that high that we heard about that's associated with running exclusively.

The full story and video originally appeared at cbsnews.com.