In all the exercise focus on heart health, other parts of the body are largely forgotten. True, if your heart stops for very long, you're dead. But if your ankles and feet don't function well, you might as well be dead because you're going to be limited in what you can do and lose your independence much earlier.
Most TOJs are a little ahead of their sedentary peers, but depending on the type and frequency of the exercise they do, their lead might not be as large you might think. Hours running or riding a bike or hitting the weight room don't guarantee strong, responsive ankles and feet. What good is a super strong heart in a rickety body?
Remember that all your physical power starts from the ground up with the action of your feet and ankles. They propel you forward, keep you level, and help protect from shocks, like when you recover from tripping on a rock instead of falling.
If you've survived to TOJ-dom, through all those years the 26 bones, 33 joints, and more than 100 muscles in each foot/ankle have done their job. You might have some old damage, but you're still pretty mobile. However, around age 50, the muscles, ligaments, and tendons inevitably start to lose some of their youthful elasticity. You see downward progression when you see frail people take flat footed baby steps and shuffle their feet to turn around. The end point of this progression is loss of balance and falls.
To maintain mobility, you must train to strengthen the weakest links, and as you age you can't take any of your links for granted. A shortcoming with TOJs is we can be set in our ways and do only the exercises we prefer and avoid those we could use, but may not enjoy that much - like those specifically for the feet and ankles. But the more I learn about aging, I realize how important it is to work on your whole body, including your ankles and feet.
Here are some excellent ankle and foot exercises to incorporate a couple times a week into your exercise routine.
When you're just hanging around your house chatting or watching TV, take your shoes off and slowly rock back and forth up onto your toes then back onto your heels. With your feet directly beneath you a few inches apart, circle your knees so you roll onto the outside and inside edges of your feet. When you get proficient at this, do it on an unstable surface like a pillow or piece of foam rubber.
Do some very light jumps and short hops where you spring off your toes and gently come down on your full foot. When you get proficient at this, jump and hop a little higher and further and faster.
Just balance on one foot for 30 seconds, then the other. Repeat. Progress to 45 seconds, then 1 minute.
Balance, strength and power come from the ground up.
Showing posts with label anti-aging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-aging. Show all posts
May You Live Long And Prosper
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TOJs live to exercise more than they exercise to live. But we have a natural interest in wellness because without wellness you have no energy, and without energy you have no strength and endurance.
Because many wellness books are written by aging Boomers for Boomers, they tend to focus on anti-aging and longevity. The titles promise you an easy six week plan that will make you look twenty years younger and feel as horny as a teenager. Rarely do they say their recommendations may not work at all, or if they do, might take a lot of time and effort on your part for relatively modest gains. In truth, nothing stops aging. But some of these books are based on solid science that will help you stay healthy, which is good reason to read them.
So you don't waste another moment of your precious life sliding helplessly towards old age and death, here, absolutely free, are all the oft-cited secrets of health and longevity as distilled from the books I've read:
1. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables, preferably organic
2. If you eat meat, eat small portions, only grass fed and without antibiotics or hormones
3. Smile, be happy, don't sweat the small stuff
4. Live in a place with a temperate climate like Palm Springs or Costa Rica
5. Avoid environmental pollution
6. Have a purpose in life that gives you a reason to get out of bed
7. But don't get out of bed too early, get plenty of sleep
8. Connect to family, friends and community
9. Eat fish, preferably from the deep not poisoned with PCBs and mercury
10. Eat good fats like Omega-3s found in flax and nuts
11. Learn to breath deeply with your diaphragm
12. Take anti-oxidant supplements and a daily multi-vitamin
13. Go easy on alcohol
14. Avoid sugar and refined grains like white flour and white rice
15. Don't smoke
16. Eat to live, not live to eat
17. Drink 4 - 8 glasses of water a day
18. And, yes, exercise!
You don't have to workout as hard as most TOJs to gain the life-enhancing benefits of exercise. In fact, the prominent cardiologist Dean Ornish, M.D., says in his latest book "The Spectrum" that only
60 to 90 minutes a week of exercise is plenty to keep you healthy. For years he was best known for recommending an austere low fat diet to reverse and/or prevent heart disease. However, a huge volume of incontrovertible evidence has been collected in the past couple of decades since the aerobics-running-exercise revolution swept nation that proves the incredible contribution of exercise to health. So now diet gurus like Ornish prescribe it right along with near starvation and fish oil pills. He's not the only one. The latest version of the South Beach diet also recommends a dose of exercise, which before was noticeably absent.
My hunch is that the secrets of longevity are well beyond our understanding, at least for now. It is probably a complicated brew of diet, exercise, genes, personality and sheer luck, like avoiding being hit by a drunk driver or crossing paths with street gangs at midnight in LA.
Being preoccupied with either longevity or wellness can become an unhealthy mania. The actress Suzanne Somers wrote a book called "Breakthrough: Eight Steps to Wellness." The book is a collection of interviews with some innovative and visionary medical professionals who recommend some very extreme measures to stay alive. Somers wants to live to 120. To reach her goal, every day she injects herself with human growth hormone, rubs on estrogen cream, rubs on "a little glutathione cream on top of my liver to stimulate it," injects Vitamin B12 and vitamin B complex, injects Iscador (a mistletoe extract popular in Europe as a substitute for chemotherapy - Somers is a breast cancer survivor), plus she takes unnamed supplements and vitamins, bioidentical hormones, and reverstrol twice a day. Monthly she also receives intravenous Vitamin C and glutathione. She also uses nanotechnology patches which stimulate acupuncture points. As final longevity insurance, she writes that she banked her stem cells in case she every needs a new organ, eyes, teeth, skin or limbs. Her exercise is walking and yoga.
She is not alone in her lust for long life. A more extreme example is the futurist and inventor Ray Kurweil, who is trying to attain a form of immortality in what he calls singularity. Wired magazine had an article that said he takes between 180 to 210 vitamins an minerals per day, plus DHEA and testosterone. His regimen is so elaborate that he employs someone to keep track of them for him. In addition, he spends one day a week being intravenously fed phosphatidylcholine in hopes it will keep his tissues young. He even uses special filters to ensure his water is alkaline, thus producing negative ions to eradicate any free radicals hiding in his body. Visit
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/16-04/ff_kurzweil to see how zany the search for the fountain of youth can get.
Most TOJs aren't too preoccupied with longevity. In fact, their passions put them at risk of inadvertently shortening their lives, a topic I'll address in my next blog. Certainly they would never have the time (not to mention the money) to follow the exotic regimens of a Somers or Kurzweil, even if their elixirs of youth proved to work. Who wants to be hooked up to an IV when they can be outdoors running? Why would you inject B vitamins when you can drink a beer?
Because many wellness books are written by aging Boomers for Boomers, they tend to focus on anti-aging and longevity. The titles promise you an easy six week plan that will make you look twenty years younger and feel as horny as a teenager. Rarely do they say their recommendations may not work at all, or if they do, might take a lot of time and effort on your part for relatively modest gains. In truth, nothing stops aging. But some of these books are based on solid science that will help you stay healthy, which is good reason to read them.
So you don't waste another moment of your precious life sliding helplessly towards old age and death, here, absolutely free, are all the oft-cited secrets of health and longevity as distilled from the books I've read:
1. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables, preferably organic
2. If you eat meat, eat small portions, only grass fed and without antibiotics or hormones
3. Smile, be happy, don't sweat the small stuff
4. Live in a place with a temperate climate like Palm Springs or Costa Rica
5. Avoid environmental pollution
6. Have a purpose in life that gives you a reason to get out of bed
7. But don't get out of bed too early, get plenty of sleep
8. Connect to family, friends and community
9. Eat fish, preferably from the deep not poisoned with PCBs and mercury
10. Eat good fats like Omega-3s found in flax and nuts
11. Learn to breath deeply with your diaphragm
12. Take anti-oxidant supplements and a daily multi-vitamin
13. Go easy on alcohol
14. Avoid sugar and refined grains like white flour and white rice
15. Don't smoke
16. Eat to live, not live to eat
17. Drink 4 - 8 glasses of water a day
18. And, yes, exercise!
You don't have to workout as hard as most TOJs to gain the life-enhancing benefits of exercise. In fact, the prominent cardiologist Dean Ornish, M.D., says in his latest book "The Spectrum" that only
60 to 90 minutes a week of exercise is plenty to keep you healthy. For years he was best known for recommending an austere low fat diet to reverse and/or prevent heart disease. However, a huge volume of incontrovertible evidence has been collected in the past couple of decades since the aerobics-running-exercise revolution swept nation that proves the incredible contribution of exercise to health. So now diet gurus like Ornish prescribe it right along with near starvation and fish oil pills. He's not the only one. The latest version of the South Beach diet also recommends a dose of exercise, which before was noticeably absent.
My hunch is that the secrets of longevity are well beyond our understanding, at least for now. It is probably a complicated brew of diet, exercise, genes, personality and sheer luck, like avoiding being hit by a drunk driver or crossing paths with street gangs at midnight in LA.
Being preoccupied with either longevity or wellness can become an unhealthy mania. The actress Suzanne Somers wrote a book called "Breakthrough: Eight Steps to Wellness." The book is a collection of interviews with some innovative and visionary medical professionals who recommend some very extreme measures to stay alive. Somers wants to live to 120. To reach her goal, every day she injects herself with human growth hormone, rubs on estrogen cream, rubs on "a little glutathione cream on top of my liver to stimulate it," injects Vitamin B12 and vitamin B complex, injects Iscador (a mistletoe extract popular in Europe as a substitute for chemotherapy - Somers is a breast cancer survivor), plus she takes unnamed supplements and vitamins, bioidentical hormones, and reverstrol twice a day. Monthly she also receives intravenous Vitamin C and glutathione. She also uses nanotechnology patches which stimulate acupuncture points. As final longevity insurance, she writes that she banked her stem cells in case she every needs a new organ, eyes, teeth, skin or limbs. Her exercise is walking and yoga.
She is not alone in her lust for long life. A more extreme example is the futurist and inventor Ray Kurweil, who is trying to attain a form of immortality in what he calls singularity. Wired magazine had an article that said he takes between 180 to 210 vitamins an minerals per day, plus DHEA and testosterone. His regimen is so elaborate that he employs someone to keep track of them for him. In addition, he spends one day a week being intravenously fed phosphatidylcholine in hopes it will keep his tissues young. He even uses special filters to ensure his water is alkaline, thus producing negative ions to eradicate any free radicals hiding in his body. Visit
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/16-04/ff_kurzweil to see how zany the search for the fountain of youth can get.
Most TOJs aren't too preoccupied with longevity. In fact, their passions put them at risk of inadvertently shortening their lives, a topic I'll address in my next blog. Certainly they would never have the time (not to mention the money) to follow the exotic regimens of a Somers or Kurzweil, even if their elixirs of youth proved to work. Who wants to be hooked up to an IV when they can be outdoors running? Why would you inject B vitamins when you can drink a beer?
About the time I was finishing Somers' book, I read that Amanda Roberts Jones had died at the age of 110 in Austin, Texas. She was the daughter of a slave, the mother of 10 children, who picked cotton and had a deep religious faith. I doubt she ever wore nanotechology patches or laced on a pair of running shoes, yet her life touched three centuries. She knew the real secrets.
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