I have some good news and some bad news for you. The good news is we’re living longer than we’ve ever lived before. The bad news is we’re living longer than we’ve ever lived before. Never before in history has there been a time where personal choice has had so much to do with our personal health and longevity. One hundred years ago, human longevity was limited to forty-five, today it’s over 75 and experts are projecting that with a few more medical breakthroughs by 2020 our life expectancy will be at an average of between ninety-five to one hundred years of age.
Longevity Reducing Factors
It’s the old saying if I knew I was going to live this long I’d have taken better care of myself when I was younger. The reason we’re living longer today is that we’re dying from different things than we did a hundred years ago. Back then infectious diseases wiped us out in large numbers. Today, the major causes of death are:
- Heart Disease which will kill 1 out of 2
- Cancer will kill one out of five of us
- Diabetes has jumped from 6th to 3rd in the last 5 years
- Accidents are number 4
- Infectious diseases are on a come back
The bottom line is 80% of the causes of our deaths and therefore factors that effect Longevity is directly related to how we live our lives. Experts have discovered that we can combat these longevity risks by
- Diet
- Exercise
- Smoking
- Abusive Use of Drugs and Alcohol
- Stress
Diets alone don’t work. You must eat a balanced diet and eat real food plus every diet program also states that you must exercise. There is no permanent weight loss without regular exercise. Smoking takes oxygen away from the cells of our bodies. Smoking is harmful because it takes oxygen away from the body. By oxygenating your body 6 to 30 minutes per day with a little exercise you improve the heart, blood cells, strength; you look better feel better and perform better.
If you injured your back you go to rehab and do therapy and exercise. Experts agree that exercise is a very important habit and exercise is important and we’d all like to be physically fit. Another great influence factor towards Longevity. So what’s the problem with exercise?
Five problems of Exercise
There isn’t one problem with exercise, I’ve found 5 problems:
- Time
- Boredom
- Soreness
- Convenience
- Staying With It
Time is a major problem. In 1968 Dr. Ken Cooper wrote a book called aerobics and everyone started jogging, thinking that they had to jog 30 minutes a day 2 to 3 days a week. In reality, Dr. Cooper came up with a point system and stated you needed a certain number of aerobic points per aren’t week. For example, a person that runs one mile every day under 6 minutes and 30 seconds achieve the same number of aerobic points as someone jogging 30 minutes 3 days a week. Which would you rather do? Of course to run a 6:30 mile you have to have some other things going for you, such as strength, flexibility, and good nutrition. You know you should do 30 minutes of exercise each day but lack of time is a major factor. I’m going to show you how to get great results in 15 minutes a day and do a lot for your Longevity.
Let’s cover the next major problem in exercise, Soreness. The busiest three days of exercise a year, are January second, third and fourth. In my neighborhood, it looks like the Olympic Games have begun. Everyone has their new shoes, shorts, and jogging outfits on and are running all around. But by the weekend it’s over and that’s enough till next year. What happened? Anyone ever gets stiff and sore? Has that been a problem with your fitness program – it was for mine.
The next problem is Convenience. Ever thought about running or jogging? Let me tell you why a lot of us will never jog or run. If I’ve got a fitness problem the last thing I want to do is expose it to the neighborhood. 70 to 80 % of people of everyone that joins a health club never go back regularly after the first 30 days. Because of the time to get there and get our workout in and get back home, the club becomes inconvenient.
The biggest key to exercise is to stay with it. If you were going to make a decision today to start exercising, how much time would you spend on a regular, daily basis for the rest of your life? As important as I know exercise is for Longevity, I couldn’t commit consistently to an hour a day. It sounds great, but it’s time we start thinking about Foundational Fitness and getting into condition so if we wanted to get to 45 minutes per day we would have the strength, flexibility and cardiovascular fitness increase our workout time.
One of the greatest breakthroughs that have ever occurred in Fitness and Sports Training is Variable Resistance. In the past, we got down and did push-ups and sit-ups. If we did 5 today, a year from now, we’d have to do 105! The problem was that as we got stronger we had to do more reps, which took more time and became boring. Anyone know why we do reps? To get to the last one. The last rep is the one that does us the best. Once this was discovered variable resistance was added to an exercise to lower the number of reps needed to fatigue a muscle and the last rep was the one that built strength. In a moment I’ll demonstrate how you lower the number of reps by adding resistance to an exercise.
The Solution: Isokinetics for Longevity
Now to the advantages of Isokinetics. In an article by the “National Weight-Lifting Coach” back in 1974 about athletes using a new system of exercise, they stated:
- Better and quicker results
- In a shorter period of time
- Little, if any soreness
- Total recovery within 20 minutes
What would you like to see in your exercise – or better – Longevity program? Pain relief? Do you have neck or shoulder discomfort? Lower-back pain? Sagging abdominals? Or better known as furniture disease – where your chest drops into your drawers. What happens to the back of your legs or hamstring muscles sitting all day? Are they getting shorter and is our heart muscle getting weaker every day? What type of exercise concepts are out there and how we might use them to get started to get you a healthy, active and long life, lifting your Longevity?
- Isometrics – pushing or pulling against an immovable object. It’s a great way to build muscular strength but unfortunately, it only works at the angle applied and doesn’t do much for the heart.
- Weightlifting – Why do repetitions? To get to the last one. The last one is as close to an isometric contraction as you can come. That’s why you build strength and do it through the full range of motion.
- Calisthenics – Most of us were raised on this. Is it a good way to exercise? It is if you have a large group and need to get them all doing something at the same time and it does take more time to get tired. What happens if you put a 10 lb. weight out there? You get tired a lot quicker- is that good? Nothing good happens in exercise until you get tired. Fatigue is the key.
I’d like to share with you an exercise program that I have personally been on for the last 30 years. Today, at 63, I’m in better physical shape than I was at 21! And I don’t say that lightly. I know the pressures of trying to balance your work with your marriage or family. About 3 years ago, I spent a fifteen month period so stressed out from the demands of running my own company that I couldn’t physically work for more than 4 hours a day! Stress was destroying my body. At that point, I realized it was no longer an option for me not to exercise – or I had to say goodbye to Longevity. I needed one program to fit into my schedule. Today, I’ve got more energy than ever, my weight is down, my blood pressure has dropped, and maybe just as important, I feel better about myself. I’m able to go out and do the kinds of things I like to do… all as a result of my 15 minutes a day Longevity program.
Fifteen minutes a day – for Your Longevity. Well, I hope you are skeptical. I’m going to share with you an exercise program that was developed with the help of some of my associates and used in the NASA Space Program. By the way, NASA spent somewhere in the neighborhood of one to one & a half million dollars in research to find what would work the best for exercise in microgravity. It went to the moon on the Apollo space flights. Our program was first used in professional athletics by Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers, and then over 80 professional teams started using the system because it works. Today the system is in use with major professional football, basketball, hockey, golf, tennis, rehab, and training centers as well as with thousands of college, high school and amateur athletics – though obviously not for Longevity but performance reasons.
