Staying Fit and Healthy Aging

The aging process starts from the day we are born. A person may not realize it but
we need to work on staying fit and healthy everyday. In the end, you'll feel and
look younger all during the aging progression.


There are many things you can do to stay healthy and feel good. Watch your diet
and continue activities throughout the course of your life. Your diet has a lot
to do with aging and health. Your diet contains vitamins, minerals and other
nutrients you need to stay healthy.

If your over weight try getting yourself into an exercise program. Walking is a
great program to get involved. Start out walking gradually and work your way up
to 12 to 15 miles by walking two or 3 times a week. Walking brings up the heart
rate making it do its work. You can loosen the tight and stiffness in your legs
and besides loosing weight with diet it will help to tone your muscles. Combined
weight lifting with your walk agenda but don't over work, yourself because it
will make your muscles sore. Along with your new walking and weightlifting
program trim down your diet and take supplements to make up for the vitamins
you are cutting out. Exercising will burn up some of your vitamins too so
make sure you take enough but not too much of the supplements. If you are
not sure about the amount to take, consult you physician, something you
should definately do before starting any new health program.

As you build new activities, you will be meeting people and that always gives
you something new to talk about to help keep the depression away. You will
need encouragement and support throughout your goal to stay healthy. Seek
support from family, friends, or people with the same goals.

As we grow older high cholesterol becomes a health issue with most of us. Your
new walking program is a good start to lowering your levels. 2 miles a day, 3
times a week will help you to lower your cholesterol by helping you lose the
excess weight you've put on in the last couple of years. If walking doesn't
seem to be helping to level out your cholesterol, try eating seven nuts. The
combination of both will sometimes bring it to a balance. Be sure your doctor
knows what your doing as these things continue. Grease is good in nuts and
olive oil to help lower the blood pressure and blood sugar as well. Try
changing your diet and eat more whole grain foods while you cut back on the
meat you love so much. Instead of using, spreadable fats use olive oil and
canola margarine. As a snack...sneak in those nuts:

Has your blood pressure gone up in your older years? Try adding three servings
of low-fat dairy products to you diet. Calcium, magnesium and potassium are
good to help lower that blood pressure.

Cancer is always a threat to us young or old so we need to start early on
trying to help prevent it. Vitamin D is a good vitamin to take along with
getting 10-15 minutes a week of sun with no sunscreen on. Watching your
diet and taking vitamins, helps reduce the risks of getting colon, breast,
or ovarian cancer.

Ovarian cancer for women is very common, yet women have the power to lower
their risks. Green and black tea 2 times a day or even eating an apple or
grapefruit will help. Anything that is high in antioxidants is good.

Mixing your foods to cover everything daily is a good idea so you don't
get bored eating the same things all the time. Mixing up what you eat in
a recipe or on your plate the nuts, maybe some black-eyed peas, whole
grain wheat bread or cereal and add a little peanut butter on that bread.

Changing your foods that you eat may not stop you from getting cancer but
it is known to lower the risk and help prevent it. Remember your not a
doctor so be sure to have regular check ups.

Revving Your Lean Machine: The Truth About Soreness

When you first started working out, you probably hated it. Soreness hurts! But as you progressed, you no doubt embraced it—most of us consider it a signal that we’ve done our diligence and stimulated plenty of muscle growth. But is that true?

The fact is, there are no studies connecting muscle soreness to hypertrophy. Okay, don’t stop reading yet; you will get some good stuff from being a bit sore–and you’ll probably even want to strive for it. But first you need to know what causes muscle soreness.

It’s believed that the pain is caused by microtrauma in muscle fibers—and it’s primarily triggered by the negative, or eccentric, stroke of an exercise—like when you lower a bench press, squat or curl rep.

Once your body repairs those microtears, it follows that the muscle should grow larger; however, that trauma is in the myofibrils, the force-generating actin and myosin strands in the fiber. Those strands grab onto and pull across one another to cause muscular contraction. When you control the negative stroke of a rep, there is friction as those strands drag across each other in an attempt to slow movement speed to prevent injury—and that dragging, it’s believed, is what inflicts the microtrauma.

That’s a simplification, but you get the idea. So it appears that some growth can occur after muscle soreness is repaired, but it’s in the myofibrils. More and more research is beginning to show that those force-generating strands do not contribute the majority of muscle size; serious mass comes via sarcoplasmic expansion. That’s the “energy fluid” in the fibers that’s filled with glycogen (from carbs), ATP, calcium, noncontractile proteins, etc.

So if soreness is an indication of only small amounts of muscle growth, why strive for it? Well, even small amounts of growth contribute to overall mass. Most of us want every fraction we can scrape up. But the real reason to seek some soreness is to burn more fat.

When the myofibrils are damaged by emphasizing the eccentric, the body attempts to repair them as quickly as possible. That repair process takes energy, a lot of which comes from bodyfat. The process usually takes many days, so your metabolism is stoked to a higher level for 48 hours or more, helping you get leaner faster. (Note: High-intensity interval training, like sprints alternated with slow jogs, damages muscle fibers during the intense intervals, the sprints, which is why HIIT burns more fat in the long run than steady-state cardio where no muscle damage occurs.)

Do you need heavy negative-only sets to get that extra bit of size and metabolic momentum? That’s one way, but negative-accentuated, or X-centric, sets may be a better, safer way.

For an X-centric set you take a somewhat lighter poundage than your 10RM and raise the weight in one second and lower it in six. That one-second-positive/six-second-negative cadence does some great things, starting with myofibrillar trauma for some soreness. While you’re coping with that extra post workout muscle pain, remember that it can build the myofibrils and that it’s stoking your metabolism during the repair process for more fat burning.

The second BIG advantage is sarcoplasmic expansion. At seven seconds per rep and eight reps per set, you get almost an entire minute of tension time (seven times eight is 56 seconds). A TUT of 50 to 60 seconds is something most bodybuilders never get—which is a shame because that’s optimal stress for an anabolic cascade and this is the perfect way to train as you age.  I call it Old School New Body!

You can do an X-centric set after your heavy pyramid—if you’re into heavy training. In other words, use it as a backoff set.

If you’re more into moderate-poundage, high-fatigue mass building, as I am with the F4X method featured in the Old School New Body method, you can use X-centric as the last set of the sequence. Reduce the weight and do a one-up-six-down cadence. You’ll get sore, build some extra size and—bonus—burn for fat. How great is that?

Till next time, stay tuned, train smart and be Built for Life.

Steve Holman

For more information  Click Here