Reclaim Your Youth:
Growing Younger After 40
by
Richard Sullivan
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2009 Richard Sullivan
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Chapter 1
Only You Can Decide How Old You Are
Chapter 2
Growing Younger After 40
Chapter 3
Strength Training: New Muscle, New Bone
Chapter 4
The Open Secrets Of Strength
Training
Chapter 5
Your Strength Training Workout Routine:
Exercise Menu and Advice
Chapter 6
My Workout
Chapter 7
The Simple Reclaim Your Youth Diet
Chapter 8
What Do I Eat?
Chapter 9
22 Things You Can Do Right Now
To Take Back Your Youth
Chapter 1
Only You Can Decide How Old You Are
If you’re standing in the bookstore right now reading this, and wondering whether you should buy this book, maybe I can save you some money:
—There is no magic pill, and there never will be.
—There is no revolutionary diet.
—There are no effortless exercises.
Reclaiming, or taking back your youth requires as much diligence, persistence and continuous effort as anything else that has been worth pursuing in your life, such as your career, or a primary relationship.
Although in the last chapter this book outlines quite a few ways to immediately make yourself younger, Reclaim Your Youth is not about a fast and easy quick-fix. It’s about taking back control in those precious few areas of your life where it is actually possible to do so.
We have little control over our lives... our friends, lovers, family. People can move away, find someone else, or die.
How much control do we have over our job, career, or business? We might get laid off, people can stop buying our products or services, or, as we have already experienced, the economy can suddenly tank. Whatever we own can be taken away from us.
In virtually every aspect of our lives, attaining satisfaction depends heavily on the cooperation or permission of others, with one exception: our own body.
Our body is the only thing in life we truly control. Only we decide what we eat and how much, what we drink or inhale; whether we exercise and in what ways, and how much. We control all these things. No one else has a say.
The body we inhabit right now, the way it looks, and the state of health it’s in, are the precise result of all our past decisions. Any change we make in our decisions today will be newly reflected in the way our bodies look, feel, and move tomorrow.
What this means is, once we make up our minds to do so, we really can turn back the hands of time, right now, literally. There are dozens of things we can do to turn things around, some of them easy and immediate, others more challenging and longer-term. But nothing comes close to possessing the all-encompassing power to change our lives so completely as does strength training.
Taking control over our own aging process is the ultimate in self-empowerment. Personal trainers, plastic surgeons and anti-aging gurus may all have their place, but ultimately we alone are responsible for slowing, halting, and reversing aspects of our own aging process.
Believing that we can’t do it without “expert” assistance deprives us of one of the most powerful anti-aging strategies we have at our disposal: our independence.
Take Back Your Youth 101
In my role as coach you might find me a tad unsympathetic at times. Blame it on the fact that I was a personal trainer in LA who, for too much of that time, felt more like a baby sitter. LA is the place where everybody feels compelled to look great, but too few feel compelled to actually do the work required to look great.
On the bright side, I am empathetic, encouraging, and highly optimistic, because I’ve been there myself. I’ve struggled with inertia and lack of direction. I’ve been lazy more than I’ve been enthused. I’ve had major problems getting my butt out of the chair during certain periods of my life. I worked out for way too long without any coherent exercise plan, eating plan, or specific goal, and therefore didn’t accomplish what I’d hoped. Along the way I learned and sought advice from media materials and from individuals who had already accomplished what I wanted to. I read and studied and listened, and little by little applied what I learned, and was happily surprised to see that when I set a goal, decided to go after in a focused manner, and stuck with it, making it part of my lifestyle, I began to excel physically in a way few people my age have.
Above all, I’m a good coach because I’m successful at doing this, both for myself and for others, and have been steadily increasing my knowledge and experience for forty years. And I get better at getting better with every passing day.
What Does “Happiness” Mean To You?
When people describe what happiness means to them…what it would take to make them happy right now at this moment…their responses are highly individual. For some it might mean meeting the love of their life. For others it would be having enough money to pay all their bills and travel the world experiencing new things, or remodeling the house, or being able to spend more quality time with their kids or grandchildren. But all of these responses have one given in common: that we will be healthy and able enough for these things to even be possible.
If you have breathing difficulties, tire easily while climbing stairs, or can’t run 50 yards to save yourself, your quality of life is already diminished. If you are sick or disabled with diabetes, heart disease, cancer, or stroke, your chances and opportunities for finding the perfect lover, spending quality time with the grandkids, taking on a months-long remodeling project, or traveling the world experiencing everything new and exciting are not that promising.
Every desire for our happiness depends on two things: good health, and physical strength. A strong and healthy body is necessary for performing well sexually so we can win over and keep our dream mate. A strong and healthy body is necessary for running after, playing with, and most importantly, protecting your kids or grandkids while they are in your charge. A strong and healthy body is necessary for the rigors of traveling the world or tackling new and exciting things, like that remodeling project.
Strength is something that people choose to lose as they age, because there is no scientific justification for this loss.
Humans never lose their capacity to build new muscle and bone, nor to significantly strengthen what they already have… not even seniors who are well into their 90s. If we are not intentionally building new muscle after age 30, then we’re losing it by default, day by day.
It is curious that we focus so intensely on our face or hair and how others may be judging our wrinkles or bald spot, while ignoring the fact that the true measure of youth is our strength, agility, health and the physical ability to enjoy everything life has to offer.
Men obsess over hair loss and spend a fortune trying to combat that, yet they do not obsess one bit over muscle loss. Men feel less virile and less masculine when they lose their hair, but how strange not to feel less virile and less masculine when their muscles evaporate. Along with muscle loss, men lose their manly strength, manly sex drive and sexual ability, their sexual and overall attractiveness to others, and manly physique and presence.
Women too obsess over hair and nails and all forms of superficiality while ignoring the one thing that will truly mark them as youthful and attractive, and that is a strong, tight, agile physique. A healthy person looks good and projects high self esteem, an unhealthy person does not. Trying to become more attractive via unhealthy or superficial cosmetic methods means literally taking one step forward and two steps back.
Good looks go hand in hand with, and are the result of, good health and physical strength. Once you make peace with your body rather than waging war against it, you will succeed. Once you supplement your desire to look younger, or to have the perfect body, with the sincere desire to do what’s right for your health and well being, everything else will fall into place.
Once you stop seeing your body as the enemy and the obstacle to happiness, and begin to view it as the vehicle capable of transporting you to realms you’ve only yet dreamed of, its shape, size and abilities will begin to change almost effortlessly.
In an interview a couple of years ago, Oprah Winfrey said that it wasn’t until she weighed 237 lbs. and was listening to the announcer while attending a Mike Tyson fight that she realized she weighed more than the heavyweight champion of the world. That was her epiphany.
After years of struggling with her weight, she abruptly decided to make friends with her physical heart instead, and promised her heart that she would do everything she could to help it do its job pumping blood, transporting oxygen and giving her life.
It wasn’t until she embraced the idea of optimum health and the promises that mobility, vigor and longevity hold, rather than obsessing about having a perfect body, that her entire attitude toward nutrition and exercise changed. And lo and behold, she ended up getting the kind of body she always wanted in the bargain anyway. Her years of weight battles and diets got her nowhere, but that one second it took her to surrender to the service of her own health and well-being completely changed her body from the inside out.
Then, in 2008, she again ballooned up to 200 lbs., admitting her diet and exercise regimen had somehow gone out the window. By 2008, Oprah’s friendship with her heart was apparently on the rocks.
Stay tuned.
What’s Wrong With Me Anyway?
We could spend a couple of chapters of this book delving into our childhood traumas and all the nasty people who screwed us up so bad that we ended up using food, alcohol, drugs and nicotine to mask our hurt, calm our fears and create barriers between us and the rest of the scary world, but then we’d still end up in the same place anyway: the place where we need to make a change. So let’s skip ahead and get right down to the part where we decide to stop the self destructive behaviors that stonewall our happiness and rob us of our youth.
Some wizened soul has said, “Getting older is not for sissies”. All of us are guilty of complaining, which if you’ve noticed, hasn’t gotten us anywhere. So let’s get busy with actually turning our lives around in the right direction.
Chapter 2
Growing Younger After 40
In recent years a wonderful and exciting change has swept over the science of aging. Destructive beliefs about getting older, rooted in hopelessness and negative tradition and embraced as truth for millennia, have been challenged —and dismissed. Inspiring new scientific discoveries continue to be made almost daily concerning the ways our bodies can and do repair themselves, despite decades of damage. These discoveries are responsible for the optimistic turnaround in the way our aging population has now begun to view itself and its future.
Perhaps it’s just embedded in our genetics for us to bulldoze ahead through life as if we are indestructible, despite the troubling image of that stranger we may see in the full-length mirror right after our shower. Ignoring that disquieting reflection, we continue to insist on believing that whenever we get around to mending our ways we can actually undo most of the damage we’ve inflicted upon our bodies.
So, can we really? Or are we just kidding ourselves?
It used to be unimaginable that someone past the age of 40 could create a body virtually indistinguishable from that of someone in their 20s. But paging through any bodybuilding magazine at the supermarket today will reveal it’s not just possible, but relatively common.
Only recently has it begun to sink into people’s consciousness that building a healthy, strong and attractive body has little to do with chronological age, and is achievable well past the age of 40. It is no longer possible to blindly ignore the thousands of people who have done this very thing just so that we can justify our own life choices, or to believe that only Hollywood stars are privy to the “secrets” or have the resources to hold back the march of time.
There is indeed a lot more fact than fiction to our not-so-egotistical belief that we can undo a significant amount of the damage that we have visited upon ourselves through our neglect and bad habits…indeed, even that caused by decades of chain smoking, for example. It has been proven beyond any doubt that the positive effects of cessation of smoking most significantly the ceasing of damaging chronic inflammation begin within minutes after stopping, and not years down the line, as most people seem to still believe.
Chronological vs. Biological Aging
There are two types of aging that we experience: chronological aging and biological aging.
Chronological aging is something we all do at the same rate. After 60 years have passed, we’re all 60 years older. But biological aging is far less rigid and predictable. Biologically, after 60 years have passed, one person can look and feel 40, while another can look and feel 75. Most of us don’t “get old” just because time passes. We actually work very hard at wearing our bodies out and diminishing our health. In our quest to escape our problems and cope with our day-to-day stress, we continually make decisions that negatively affect how quickly and how significantly we age.
Our negative choices involving food, physical activity and intoxicants contribute overwhelmingly to our individual aging rate.
Until recently, only the ever-elusive Fountain Of Youth was thought to be the answer to restoring our bodies to vigorous form and function. For centuries man has fantasized about finding this fictional solution to his inevitable fate. The stubborn truth is that our ongoing unwise eating, drinking, inhaling, and physical inactivity decisions have been responsible for robbing us of much of our health, looks and strength. We have to make changes in these problem areas if we expect to turn back the clock and take back our youth.
The Fountain Of Youth idea, and its closely related Magic Pill and Secret Hollywood Formula cousins, illustrates our deep-seated desire to believe in a quick and easy fix. Taking back our youth will never be as simple as doing one thing, like drinking from a fountain, taking a pill, or discovering a secret.
There is no single answer to reclaiming renewed health, strength or beauty. Since there are many factors that contribute to attractiveness, health and strength, there are dozens of different options we have to choose from to work on so we can achieve our ultimate goal. The more constructive behaviors that we can adopt to replace the destructive ones, the younger and healthier we will appear, feel, and actually become. Taken together, the way we eat, think, move, react, stand, communicate, and sleep will give us back a body we can be truly proud of, the health we fear we are losing, and the strength we need to accomplish every new goal that lies ahead. Reclaiming our youth is a holistic, ongoing endeavor involving a lot of little baby steps and a few well-timed challenging leaps.
Muscle And Bone Are The Very Foundations Of Our Being
The muscle that is our heart continually pumps blood through our bodies, while other muscles hold our skeleton together and make our every move possible. Muscle is the engine that drives our immune system and our ability to fight every kind of disease, from the common cold to cancer. Muscle burns fat.
Muscle is the house where our metabolism lives. The pernicious loss of our precious lean muscle mass over the years means that we now get fat on the same amount of food that used to keep us slim just a few years ago. Muscle loss also means we get sick more easily, more often and for a longer period of time, and take longer to recover.
Our skeleton is the foundation of our entire being. Upon accidentally walking into the furniture, strong bone makes all the difference between a sore shin and a life-altering compound fracture. Together, muscle and bone make everything we do in our daily lives possible. Most of us know what it’s like to be sidelined by a leg, foot, or toe injury, and how intrusive that is on our ability to accomplish all that we need to during our day.
Imagine how your abilities would be altered if suddenly every muscle in your body were weakened and diminished, along with your bone density as well. The term “shrunken”, which is a term associated with the slow, almost imperceptible loss we are all now experiencing, is too inadequate to describe such a devastating loss. After shrinking, a sweater will still weigh the same as it did before, even though the size changes. But when muscle and bone shrink, they are gone. Their size, their weight and their density have evaporated. Yet, we still have the ability to reclaim them.
Starting around age 30, the very core of our physical being literally begins to dematerialize.
Beginning at age 30, we lose an astonishing 7% of our total lean muscle mass each passing decade thereafter. As a result of that muscle loss, we also lose a significant amount of strength, our capacity to efficiently burn calories, our youthful body shape, form, contour and movement, and our ability to resist and conquer illnesses.
Some men and women may come to suffer from the chronic disease called osteoporosis. But as we age, everyone experiences a thinning and weakening of the bones unless they are actively working to combat it.
We now have scientific proof that we can actually reclaim decades’ worth of lost muscle and bone, the very underpinnings of a strong, youthful body. Even though we fitness professionals have witnessed this very regeneration phenomenon for decades among our own clients, most of the general public has clung to the false and hopeless belief that, whatever their age, it was “too late” for them to turn back the clock by rebuilding lost muscle and bone, and along with it, youthful looks and movement.
Tufts University’s Ground-breaking Findings
Revolutionary research carried out at Tufts University in the 1990s scientifically proved once and for all that rebuilding lost muscle and bone is within everyone’s capability. Indeed, it is possible for people to be stronger and physically more attractive even in their senior years than they were in their youth.
The ground-breaking research by Miriam E. Nelson PhD and colleagues at Tufts has proven what many of us in the fitness community already had knowledge of anecdotally, but up until recently had no hard scientific evidence to support: that many of the weaknesses and maladies blamed on aging are in actuality caused by the insidious loss of muscle and bone, which in turn are caused almost exclusively by lifestyle choices.
Dr. Nelson’s studies confirmed that we never lose our ability to replenish dissipated muscle and bone, or to build anew. The fact that a man or woman in their 80s can be in better physical shape than ever been before is an astonishing concept, yet entirely possible. After all, people in their 80s who are running marathons now, but who were couch potatoes in their 30s, are not genetic anomalies. True, they are currently the exception to the rule, but they certainly don’t have to be. Anyone in reasonably good health can exponentially improve his or her overall health, strength, physical beauty, and quality of life, to paraphrase the Nike slogan, by Just Doing It.
Scientists, a very curious species who doubt or ignore their own anecdotal experiences and observations until some colleague publishes a paper to support them, formerly believed that loss of strength, muscle and bone were just part and parcel of getting older.
In a report published in 1990 in the Journal of the American Medical association [JAMA], a Tufts research group led by Maria Fiatarone MD conducted a study with elderly residents of a senior citizens home employing weight training to see if strength and muscle size could be achieved by the extremely aged.
In this case, four men and six women between the ages of 86 and 96 dependably showed up three times a week for eight weeks in the nursing home’s exercise room. The weight training machines used were the same as those found in commercial gyms and health clubs.
The results were unexpected and quite extraordinary. As might be surmised, these subjects were frail human beings. All suffered from at least two serious chronic diseases, including heart disease, osteoporosis and diabetes. Most got around with the help of walkers and canes and a number of the subjects could not even get out of a chair without assistance.
In only eight weeks these very elderly people increased their strength by an astonishing average of 175%. In a test for balance and walking speed they increased their scores 48%, and two of the subjects were able to walk again without the aid of their canes.
We humans are not predestined to become hopelessly fragile as we age. Among the elderly, loss of strength, loss of balance, and repeated falls are all related directly to loss of muscle and bone mass, which are completely preventable and to an astonishing degree, reversible.
Science has proven that strength, agility, muscle shape, physical attractiveness and even our sense of balance are all recoverable commodities, no matter what our age or strength level at the present time.
Why We Need To Reclaim Our Youth
If you’re past 40 you already have noticed a number of the differences, many of them troubling, between the 20 year-old you and the over-40-year-old you. Everything from a body that bears little resemblance to what it once was, to bleeding gums and aching knees remind us each day that aging not only isn’t much fun, but has a lot of undesirable side effects we ‘d rather do without.
As we said earlier, everyone ages at the same speed chronologically, but biologically we age at different rates. Aging is actually a choice, biologically speaking. Our biological age is governed by two factors: our genetics, which we have more control over than people like to think, and our lifestyle choices, which we have complete control over.
The best genetics on the planet cannot overcome damaging lifestyle choices. However, great lifestyle choices can overwhelmingly prevail over inopportune genetics.
Type-2 diabetes is overwhelmingly a lifestyle disease. 90% of all type-2 diabetes sufferers never need develop the disease at all. Their lifestyle choices and damaging habits bring on pre-diabetes condition, and continuing or escalating these same habits over as long as a decade allow their pre-diabetes to develop into full-blown diabetes. That’s a heck of a lot of lead-time to reconsider changing one’s debilitating ways! Type-2 diabetes doesn’t develop overnight. It takes many. many years of unwise nutrition and inactivity choices to develop.
Scientists estimate that we ourselves create 70% of all the maladies associated with aging through our determination to continue, and even accelerate, damaging lifestyle choices.
Puzzlingly, most people prefer to believe that aging is something that just happens to us and over which we have no control. They will fight the idea that any dietary changes, physical fitness activity or the surrendering of destructive habits will make a difference. They will look older sooner, become chronically ill with a greater number of diseases earlier in life, and die younger on average than those who understand and implement the simple rationale behind goal-oriented nutrition and fitness.
On the other hand, those individuals who acknowledge responsibility for their past choices, are willing to substitute new behaviors for old, and accept the scientifically confirmed idea that it’s never too late to make significant changes will be the most successful at reclaiming their youth.
Some people race toward old age as if it were a sprint, while others pace themselves, marathon fashion. It seems by the sprinters’ choices, they just can’t wait to get there fast enough. They boast about their artery-clogging fat intake, joke about their lack of physical fitness, and light up yet another cigarette.
They are condescendingly amused by others who work diligently to improve their health, strength and attractiveness, disparagingly referring to these odd creatures who are crazy enough to care for themselves as health nuts. They explain that they are unwilling to “deprive” themselves because they’ve “earned it”, and because “life is too short”...and indeed, for most of them, it will be.
Enjoying life to its fullest means different things to different people. For some it means eating whatever they want whenever they want it, never physically exerting themselves any more than necessary, or freely indulging in alcohol, tobacco and prescription or illegal drugs at will.
To others it means having a body they can be proud of and to be secure in the knowledge that it can perform as needed, when needed, painlessly. It means being able to run from danger or to quickly climb out of a car window if need be. It means knowing they have the ability to save themselves and their loved ones in an emergency that requires physical strength, agility and speed. It means getting older without being weighed down by chronic illness or disability and the deep depression and hopelessness that often accompanies these conditions.
Most Of Us Have No Idea Just How Bad We Feel
The human body has an almost surreal ability to adjust and accommodate even near-fatal physical maladies. During the worst years of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and early 1990s, physicians marveled at how many times a single patient could recover from a series of fungal, bacterial and viral infections, any one of which could have killed a perfectly healthy individual. How could people so emaciated, weakened and damaged recover from not just one, but a series of potentially fatal episodes? As far as I know, no one has ever formally studied this particular phenomenon, in which it seems lies valuable answers for the treatment of all human disease.
Due to this remarkable ability our bodies possess to adjust to the most adverse of conditions, few people are conscious of how physically unwell they presently feel.
The hard truth is that we middle- and senior-aged people, in addition to having already lost a significant amount of muscle mass and bone density, have a long history of wear-and-tear and bad habits that have exacted an ongoing toll on our mobility, strength, health, agility, and energy. Most of us are literally walking around in a dull, less-than-well state without being fully aware of just how poorly we feel. We’ve just gotten used to it gradually as we allowed it to creep subtly and diabolically into our lives. We accept it as normal… as if it were an inevitable outcome of getting older.
The ongoing, almost imperceptible loss of muscle strength and size does not become critical in most people until their senior years. By that time it can reach a point where an individual begins to experience an unsettling sense of panic related to the physical unsteadiness they experience due to the loss of strength and balance. Disturbing new thoughts and experiences can lead to unwelcome personal dilemmas, such as damaged self confidence, overall fear and anxiety about the future, and social withdrawal.
For many people, denial of aging might manifest itself in the acceleration of their existing bad habits, or adopting new ones to mask and soothe apprehension concerning their perceived loss of youth and ability. Overindulgence in favorite foods, alcohol, nicotine and prescription or recreational drugs are the most common methods of masking pain, both physical and emotional. Eventually, though, the problems will snowball to a point where they must be faced head on, or the results for the individual can become irreversible and catastrophic.
Today we know far more about the repair, reclamation and rejuvenation of the human body than ever before, and instead of dulling our senses with comfort substances to keep from having to face the loss of our youth, we now have the tools to set about recapturing it.
For many people, more than just reclaiming the youthful attributes and abilities they once had, they can actually become physically better today in many ways than they ever were in their chronological youth.
The Reasons Why We Need To Remain Biologically Young
It’s no secret that aging brings with it the specter of some truly frightening possibilities most of us claim we would do just about anything to avoid. However, the damage that the bulk of the adult population is willfully visiting upon themselves right this minute contradicts that claim. Denial can be the only logical explanation for this curious self-destruction. Over 60% of all adults in the US are overweight, but the senior population is the fattest, most unfit population of all, and certainly by far the most vulnerable to the destructive effects of obesity.
It is not irrational to fear aging, especially for those who are beginning to question their negative lifestyle choices. The desire to alleviate our fears can be a powerful impetus in propelling us toward taking action against biological aging by making new choices It is difficult to enjoy one’s longevity if chronically ill, disabled or bedridden. Quality of life is far more precious than the length of one’s lifespan. Living longer means little if we’re in too much pain —physical, emotional and spiritual— to enjoy those extra years.
For those people who ignore their physical health, advancing years and medical crises like heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes will be exacerbated by inevitable feelings of hopelessness, regret, and depression.
Those individuals struggling financially in addition to facing one or more serious health events can multiply the weight of their tribulations tenfold.
The bottom line is this: rational people do not ever want to go there, and will begin taking steps to avoid it, now.
Saving Ourselves And The Ones We Love
After hearing firsthand accounts and seeing vivid images of horrific events, all of us have imagined what it might be like to be in some terrible situation, like a fire, automobile or airline crash, or terrorist attack. Could we make it out? Perhaps more importantly, could we also get our loved ones out safely?
The weight loss and fitness industries are multi-billion dollar enterprises, and the number one driving force behind them is personal vanity.
And that’s okay.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to look great. The additional rewards that come from being attractive will shower down upon you each and every day.
A distant second in most people’s minds when it comes to fitness and weight loss is wellness. They know they will stand a better chance of maintaining good health, and living longer in good health, rather than in infirmity, if they lose excess weight and become physically fit.
But perhaps the most important, yet least considered aspect of being physically strong and fit, is the ability to remove ourselves and loved ones from danger…to save ourselves in a life-threatening situation.
Can you fit through the car window if the door can’t be opened and the vehicle is submerging or on fire? Could you bring your children out with you? Can you swiftly make it down, or up, multiple flights of stairs to escape mortal danger? Can you scramble up a riverbank, scale a wall, run 3 or 4 blocks at top speed without tripping? Do you dismiss these scenarios, believing it will never happen to you?
When the spectre of calamities such as these enter our minds, most of us try to banish them as quickly as possible, but it is important to imagine yourself in your own home, vehicle or workplace in just such a situation, and then formulate an escape route or plan. And then imagine that if that route were blocked, what would your alternate plan be?
Being physically strong means that you have the ability, and the agility, to transport yourself down the stairway, out the window, or over the fence and away from danger.
September 11
Vividly recounted survivor stories from the September 11 terrorist attacks disturbingly illustrated how mere seconds made the difference between life and death for scores of people. Dozens of individuals later recounted how they were just one or two seconds inside the window of opportunity for escape as debris crashed down, floors collapsed, or fires raged.
How many deceased or now-disabled individuals do you think might have been just one or two seconds outside their window of opportunity? How many were just one or two precious seconds short of being able to save themselves? Who knows how many died because of their physical inability to flee quickly enough, to surmount obstacles, to climb or run, because their escape was compromised by their weight or poor level of fitness? The few seconds that could have made the difference between life and death for these people may have been lost due to these factors.
Only strength training builds significant strength, muscle and bone. Aerobics, yoga, jogging, swimming, power-walking and the like are all terrific fitness exercise, but they don’t build significant muscle, strength, or bone. The dictionary definition of significant is meaningful, and meaningful means “that which will make an important difference.”
It’s clear that the wrong generation is in the gyms and health clubs. The twenty and thirty year olds still retain most of their genetically-bestowed muscle mass, yet there they are, pumping away, creating more.
But it is us geezers —oops— I mean us middle-agers and seniors who have lost major amounts of both muscle and bone as we’ve aged who should be beating a path to our local gym, or strength training at home.
Getting older regrettably does mean getting shorter, smaller and weaker for the majority of people, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Your rate and degree of aging is a choice, and choosing to instead become stronger and more vital as we get older is a very powerful option that is within everyone’s capability. It is the fountain of youth that man has searched for since the beginning of time.
Fear
Physical weaknesses can dictate how we live and alter our lives in literally hundreds of conscious, unconscious, pervasive, and invasive ways. Our lack of strength slowly shrinks our world and pens us in. Our choices are diminished and our joy substantially lessened.
We ultimately begin making decisions to not do certain things or to not go certain places based of our lack of strength, our fears, and consequently, our ability. People can go so far as to become house-bound due to both rational and irrational trepidations, such as fear of physical attack, fear of falling, fear of being chased by dogs or other apprehensions that have accumulated and festered due to a prolonged period of diminishing strength and the self-doubts that accompany that.
Many people haven’t even made the connection yet between their puzzling new fears and hesitations, and the fact that their recent lifestyle limitations are directly related to their reduced physical ability and resulting diminished self-confidence.
All too often people will say “It must be because I’m getting old” to explain away something that’s limiting them that in reality has far more to do with diminished physical strength and ability that it does aging. Increased physical strength is equally as powerful a result of adopting a strength training regimen as is newfound attractiveness and enhanced health.
The strength which allows us to face the world head-on or to flee danger is just one kind of physical strength. Another kind is the strength our bodies develop to battle, reverse and conquer illness.
Diabetes is but one example where it has been proven that increased fitness has a profound effect on reversing symptoms. 17 million Americans are currently suffering from diabetes. In addition, another 16 million are on the verge, suffering from what is called pre-diabetes condition, caused in large part by the increase in obesity in the US. These people will most likely develop full-blown diabetes within ten years, but few actually need to.
Recent studies have shown that the symptoms of pre-diabetes can be reversed. A government clinical trial called the Diabetes Prevention Program has shown that those designated as pre-diabetics can help prevent the onset of Type-2 diabetes by engaging in a moderate, 30 minute per day, 5 days a week exercise program, and by cutting down on fat and calories in their diet.
The study was conducted with 3,000 overweight people and it was found that by losing only 5% to 7% of their total bodyweight —which for a 250 lb. person only amounts to 12.5 lbs. to 17.5 lbs.— that they cut their diabetes risk in half. This is a much better result than any currently available medication can achieve.
For a 250 lb. person, dropping to approximately 235 lbs. is a small price to pay for such a huge impact on one’s health. Diabetes is the number one cause of blindness in adults, and a major cause of heart attack, stroke, and loss of limbs by amputation. Adopting a challenging —as opposed to moderate— ongoing fitness regimen, and reducing weight to near-normal levels will allow most people to cross diabetes completely off their list forever.
Diabetes is such a hideous disease, and so easily preventable for most people, that it is beyond reason that any human on the verge of contracting it would reject the chance to reverse their horrendous fate. Yet, millions continue to do exactly that. Overweight people over the age of 40 should be screened for pre-diabetes during their annual medical exam, but for black people in particular this is especially critical.
Physicians’ Dilemma
Adding to the long list of problems and drawbacks associated with aging unhealthfully, there is a severe and escalating shortage of physicians specializing in geriatrics in the United States. Considering the vast numbers of rapidly aging baby boomers, this shortage is very disquieting.
The elderly are not an attractive patient population to most physicians for many reasons. Medicare payments to doctors have been repeatedly reduced over the years, forcing doctors to make the difficult choice of either dropping Medicare patients altogether, or taking a financial loss.
Doctors need to spend more time with geriatric patients than with others, but are not only not paid more for this time, but in the example of Medicare cutbacks, are actually paid less.
Medical residents who might otherwise be drawn to geriatrics have the very real quandary of trying to figure out how they could possibly repay gargantuan med school loans when geriatric care pays so poorly compared to specialties like cardiology or gastroenterology.
Because many younger doctors through the eyes of youth see senior patients’ medical problems as intractable, they often may not be as aggressive in determining the genesis of a problem or in their treatment of the problem itself. Doctors who are focused on a successful outcome and who are driven by a desire to make patients feel better, if not cure them completely, can be uncomfortable treating patients for whom they see no cure or significant improvement ahead.
In other words, some older people die before their time simply because their illnesses are not detected as early or treated as aggressively as the same illness would be in a younger person. A doctor may tell an 80 year old that his knee pain is due to his age, “so deal with it”, whereas the same doctor would search for a way to treat a 20-year-old presenting with the exact same symptoms.
What Is The Definition Of “Youth”, Anyway?
For some, youth is displayed by an absence of wrinkles, an attitude, a certain body image, or even a way of walking.
But youth is more than just outward appearance. Youth is more than a fit-looking body. Youth is a way of moving, talking, thinking, anticipating the future, working toward new goals, caring for and about one’s self and loved ones. Youth is good health and an absence of self-destructive behaviors.
Youth is self-focused, but not self-centered.
Youth is a feeling and a mood and a way of looking at the world and its possibilities in an optimistic way. Youth means not believing that the best of you exists only in past memories. Youth is being more enthused about tomorrow than about yesterday.
This book’s message is Reclaim Your Youth. It’s about cultivating nostalgia for your future, rather than your past.
Chapter 3
Strength Training: New Muscle, New Bone.
“If I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken a whole lot better care of myself.”
—Mickey Mantel
The terms strength training, resistance training and weight training are all interchangeable. We make use of all three terms in this book, but they all mean the same thing.
Most men have very little problem with the concept of building muscle, but since many women think of strength and muscle as unfeminine, they seem to respond better to the term resistance training. The truth is, ladies, without strength you can’t pick up toddlers —or have as much fun creating them— rearrange the living room furniture, or remove yourself or your loved ones from danger.
Whatever your gender, strength training can take your body to undreamed of frontiers of attractiveness, ability, agility and mobility.
Despite protests from those suffering the consequences of self-neglect and the silly complaints that society and the media place too much emphasis on youth and attractive people, our own experience and common sense tell us differently.
All of us have experienced the favorable reactions of others when we have looked especially good because of weight loss, a change in hairstyle, or new clothing. These favorable reactions, which bolster our ego and brighten our lives, need never cease. They can continue coming our way for the rest of our days.
Miracles Will Happen.
We all know what muscle does for a man’s appearance, but what about women?
What actually makes a woman’s legs or arms or back beautiful is muscle. Well-toned, well-maintained muscle. Increased attractiveness is just one of the incredible benefits that weight training brings. Weight training will make you more attractive.
Weight training will not just make you feel younger; it will actually make you younger. Strength training reverses the aging process.
Weight training not only stops bone loss, but creates brand-new bone, increases tendon and ligament strength and size, and enhances the beauty and size of your muscle exactly in those places where you need or want it most.
Weight training will ease depression or dissipate it altogether.
Weight training builds self esteem, imbues general feelings of well being, eases our fears about growing older, diminishes or stops insomnia, and allows us to eat favorite foods more often.
Weight training reinforces our immune system, allowing us to more vigorously fight off everything from colds to cancer. Strength training increases physical energy to the point where you might want to go out dancing for the first time in years, instead of sitting home watching Dancing With The Stars.
Best of all, weight training helps renew our sex life by stimulating our libido and increasing our vigor and stamina. Weight training makes us more attractive to potential sex partners. Weight training strengthens the muscles that allow us to attain and maintain specific pleasurable sexual positions. And that increased energy and staying power will allow the sex act to last longer and be performed more vigorously and in a more controlled manner.
Weight training increases our energy stores. Although it might seem a contradiction, since we already know from personal experience that lifting and moving heavy objects can zap our energy and cause our muscles to ache the next day, this is actually true. You will find at the beginning of your program that you will feel somewhat drained and stiff, because your muscles, unaccustomed to this new routine, will be tired and your newly-awakened body will ache a little. But after your first 4 to 6 workouts, wonderful changes will begin to occur.
Your body, owing to 2 million years of evolution, will become accustomed to the stress of strength training by adapting. Adapting to the stress. Adapting to the weight load by growing new muscle and increasing in strength. And that stiffness you feel, and will continue to feel on those days when you push yourself a little harder, is what growing muscle feels like as it is repairing itself from the stresses of weight training and builds new strength to better handle the increased load you have placed on it.
Perhaps the best weight training perk of all is that muscle actually burns fat. Even while you’re asleep, 24/7. The more muscle you build and strengthen, the faster your metabolism, and the greater your fat-burning capabilities.
Although these claims may sound like some late-night infomercial come-on, they are all scientifically true.
The Unbreakable Triangle
Whether your main goal in following the principles laid out in this book is to either become more attractive, or healthier, or physically stronger, all three of those benefits will be yours automatically.
Think of strength training as an unbreakable triangle, with one side representing attractiveness, the second representing health, and the third representing strength.
Strength, health and attractiveness are equal and inseparable components of the same strength training triangle, no matter which of the three might be your primary goal.
Magic Pill
It not only seems that the majority of people are waiting around for science to come up with a pill that will give them many of the benefits that weight training does, but polls have shown that many people actually believe such a pill is right around the corner.