Category: Exercise

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

Sarcopenia

Muscle loss in your 60s and 70s can really accelerate. The appropriate response to that appears to be upping one’s protein intake somewhat (because your digestion of protein in old age is not as efficient), and increasing strength training so that you keep restoring muscle as a counterbalance.

But doing nothing about it leads inevitably to frailty in old age.

Deficiencies

Health — No Accident

Health isn’t an accident, it is a choice. You make choices when it comes to nutrition, exercise, rest/sleep, etc. Make the right choices and you get health. If you make the wrong choices, then…

The person who smoked since their teenage years and died prematurely from lung cancer made the wrong choice. It was no accident, it was not fate, it was not in his genes. That person did it to himself.

If you eat a diet low in fiber, you will have intestinal issues and probably leaky gut, which leads to all the autoimmune disorders.

If you eat a diet high in meat and dairy, you are more likely to have heart disease, cancer, and intestinal issues.

If you eat a diet high in saturated fat and dietary cholesterol, you are more likely to have heart disease.

If you eat a lot of refined sugar, refined flour, and processed foods, you are like to have significant weight gain, insulin resistance, and ultimately diabetes.

If you don’t discipline yourself and get regular exercise, you will subject yourself to all the major diseases.

If you don’t get regular and deep sleep, you are not allowing the body to repair itself, and you will suffer the consequences.

All of the above are choices. Make the right ones, not the wrong ones, for the sake of better health. It’s your choice.

Teas