Author: Henry Barnard

I am a voracious reader and also enjoy writing. I often have a very different point of view than the popular one. I do see value in debate, and thought it might add to the public debate on controversial issues if I were to express my contrarian opinions. I also started keeping my poems recently (I've written little pieces my whole adult life but never kept any); and I've been a photographer now for over 25 years. So I will be adding an occasional poem and hopefully interesting photograph to the blog along the way, just to spice things up.

Strength and Old Age

Aerobic exercise is not enough to maintain your strength in old age. You need to use weight training/resistance training to break down the muscle so that it can rebuild with protein. That’s the process that maintains muscle and strength, and that’s what the majority of older people don’t do, and therefore suffer from severe sarcopenia.

You see this all the time in very old people, that they don’t have the strength to do simple things — like just standing up is a real effort for them. The other day, I saw an old woman who needed help getting out of the hot tub. She didn’t have the strength to step up to the next level. Clearly, this was person who never did any of the weight training for years, so her muscles atrophied.

Don’t let that happen. Do the weight training/resistance training on a regular basis — at least 3 times a week at the gym. Just do it. Your strength depends on it.

Breathe

Importance of Sleep

How well you sleep determines how you will feel the next day. Get a solid 8 hours of deep sleep and you feel like you can take on the world. Get 6 or fewer hours and you feel like the world is going to take you on.

Basically, sleep determines the quality of your life. It is that important.

Breathe

Epictetus

Epictetus, a former slave turned Stoic philosopher, came up with the key Stoic concept of focusing only on what one can control and ignoring anything beyond one’s control. You can see how someone who was a slave might become very familiar with the second half of this concept, as slave’s have little control over what befalls them.

Most people are very focused on the first part of this axiom — concentrate on what one can control. But the second part — ignoring what one cannot control — is also very liberating, for why waste any time on things one cannot even influence, and so much of modern life falls into this latter category. Best to just ignore such things entirely, although this can be difficult when they are threatening.

Discipline

Dangerous Foods

What you have to realize is that about 85% of what you find in your local supermarket, even the better supermarkets, is processed foods dangerous to your health. Yes, actually dangerous. And extremely low in real nutrients.

You need to wean yourself off of eating this garbage, and move toward eating real food, which of course is high in nutrients. Start of think of the supermarket as a landmine where you have to step very carefully because that is what it is relative to your health — a landmine.

When you make this sharp change in your diet, you will feel much better and have much more energy because the mitochondria in your cells will be producing much more ATP, which is very energizing. Your overall health will improve significantly in a variety of ways.

Breathe

Complacency

Remarkable, that the market seems to be totally ignoring the threat of escalation in the Ukraine situation with the firing of missiles into Russia.  You would think the market would be plunging, but instead it is going back to the previous high — completely ignoring the situation.  I don’t get it.  I really don’t understand such complacency. 

Must be the notion, which is very false in my opinion, that nuclear war can’t happen because it is too catastrophic.  

Russia/Ukraine

Breathe

Learn how to breathe. That sounds odd but it is true that most people don’t breathe the right way. They just do very shallow breathing.

What is much better is to do deep breathing where you emphasize complete and long exhales. With long exhales, don’t concern yourself with big inhales — they will happen very naturally.

The value of deep breathing is twofold: you get more oxygen, which is so essential for many body functions, including the creation of energy at the level of the cell, and you significantly reduce stress. Deep breathing and stress reduction go hand in hand.

So learn how to breathe. Practice deep breathing throughout the day. The more you practice it, the more it will become a habit.

Protein