Tips To Stay Fit Over Age 50 - Scooby's Home Workouts

10 Tips To Stay Fit Over Age 50 - Scooby's Home Workouts



I am in my mid fifties and I consider myself in the best shape of my life now even though I have been active in sports and in great shape my whole life. At age 51 I completed my first half Ironman triathlon and did my first double century. Here are my 10 tips for staying healthy, fit, and happy in your 50′s and beyond. 50′s and 60′s does not mean “senior”! Strike that word from your vocabulary. If you think of yourself as old then you will act old. 50′s and 60′s means midlife to me – the prime of your life. I believe in a holistic approach to fitness. There is a mind body connection and in my opinion to be in top shape and in top health requires not just physical but mental well being also. Its all about attitude, think and act young and you are young. The placebo effect is real and you can let it work for you by having a positive, excited outlook on life and believe in your heart and soul that you can improve yourself thru exercise or you can let the placebo effect work against you by being a pessimistic victim. Without further ado, here are my 10 tips for staying fit and healthy after age 50:

1. Cultivate your passion, retirement is around the corner

Don’t be one of those people who goes home from their retirement party feeling like someone died. Long before you retire you need to find your passion and make it a part of your life so that when you retire you can totally immerse yourself in it. When you start following your passion, magical things happen. You will find your energy increases. You will find that as soon as you awaken you JUMP out of bed excited to start the day. Your mood improves too, you sleep better, and you are generally fired up about life. If your passion is collecting baseball trading cards then get started NOW. Read everything you can about trading cards, work on becoming the worlds #1 expert, join clubs, make a website. Who knows, your passion might end up making money so that you can retire early and get paid doing what you love.

2. Volunteer – Do something for others

Be selfish, volunteer! If you ever catch yourself feeling sorry for yourself you need to drop whatever you are doing and volunteer ASAP. Think YOU have problems? Find a way to volunteer at a VA hospital or a children’s hospital and it will put your problems in the proper perspective. The volunteers often seem to get just as much or more out of the charity than the people being helped. Think outside the box and find something that takes advantage of your unique talents. It would be awesome if you could couple it to #1, your passion, and kill two birds with one stone. If as in the above example you are becoming an expert at baseball trading cards, consider make a website to help others learn the joy of collecting. Or perhaps couple it with your work. If you are a plumber, consider volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. Whatever knowledge you have, think of a unique way to share it. Cant think of anything? Try volunteering at the local animal shelter.

3. Read one book a month – keep your brain engaged

Reading is a great for many reasons but mainly because it makes you think. It exposes you to wonderful and strange ideas you have never thought of. It keeps your brain young. It can be an excellent component of a stress reduction plan. Read whatever you want, it can be “brain-candy” or serious – whatever floats your boat. Don’t read what you think will be good for you because then its a dreaded chore, read what you *want* to read so its fun! If reading really isn’t your thing, come up with something cerebral that works for you: crossword puzzles, sudoku, or whatever but you gotta have some activity you do that causes your brain to go into overdrive.

4. Find your retirement sport

Hopefully you have a sport you love by now but if not you need to find one asap! It doesn’t matter what it is as long as you love it: shuffleboard, hiking, cricket, golf, horseshoes. If you already have a sport you love, it might be time to think of a more age appropriate one. Skateboarding is fun in your 30s and 40s but its probably not advisable for 70 year olds so think about cultivating another sport.

5. Diet – Eat as unprocessed as you can

1. drink water like a fish
2. eat vegetables like a rabbit – full color spectrum
3. eat fibrous whole grains like a horse
4. lean cuts of meat third
5. full color spectrum of fruits fourth
6. 5g EFAs.
7. minimize fast food and junk food

6. Make weight training part of your daily life

Bodybuilding style weight training is excellent for older folks as are all bodyweight workouts, and many DVD workouts – find a style that you like. Workouts like 5×5, Crossfit and SS are only advisable if you have already been doing them for decades as its too late to start this kinds of workouts after age 50 in my opinion. Being strong helps you have a higher quality of life, for longer. What good is living to age 90 if you cant do the things you enjoy doing? Strength training not only makes you look and feel better but it keeps you doing the things you find fun longer, be it gardening, golf, or marathon running.

7. Make cardio part of your daily life – get a dog!

Over age 50, cardiovascular health is most peoples #1 problem – make daily cardio part of your daily activity. If you have never done daily cardio then you need to get a dog, TODAY, and you need to walk it twice a day. Having a dog is a great way to force you to do your daily cardio and if you haven’t established a solid habit of daily cardio by age 50 then you NEED to be forced and a dog is a perfect way. Not only that but pet owners live longer, happier lives. Please don’t buy a puppy, adopt a dog from the local shelter! Rescue dogs are the most loving dogs on the planet.

8. Throw away your alarm clock

Yep, in my opinion alarm clocks only serve one purpose and that is to wake you up before you have had enough sleep, in other words, alarm clocks only purpose is to insure you are sleep deprived! Sleep deprivation has many, many problems associated with it. Reduced reaction times, increased stress levels, decreased ability to concentrate, increased bodyfat. So, what to do? Throw out that alarm clock! “I cant possibly do that, I wouldn’t make it to work”. Malarky. Alarms are a poor solution to a time management problem. Which leads us to #9.

9. Do the important things first and forget about the rest.

Sleep is important, do it first. How do you do this practically? Easy! Go to bed about 12 hours before you have to be to work and don’t set an alarm. When you wake up naturally and then begin your days tasks with the most important first. You have precious little time left in this world, make the time count. Do a time audit to see if you are truly spending your time on the important things. Just for one day, keep a ‘timecard’ and ‘charge’ every activity down to the 0.1 hour. Is spending an hour on facebook every day really that important? Will the earth stop rotating if you don’t clean your house weekly? Is spending an hour watching the news a priority when you can read it in 5 minutes? How important is watching those three sitcoms you love? Please read one of my favorite books, the seven habits of highly effective people. Its a $7 book that will help you insure you are spending time on the things that are most important to YOU.

10. Take control of health and be minimally invasive

Take control of your health

YOU are the only one who can make and keep yourself healthy, not your doctor. Your doctor can assist you, but its 95% you. Even when surgery is involved, the outcome is as much more dependent on YOU than it is your surgeon. The surgeon makes the healing possible but if you don’t follow thru with your share of the work, the surgery will fail. If you get knee surgery but don’t do any rehab other than what they force you do to in those six post-op sessions, then your knee will never be 100% and its YOUR fault, not your surgeons.
Don’t blindly do what the doctor says, weigh the pros and cons and make your own decision. Remember that doctors need to CYA. If they don’t order all possible tests, they could be sued but that doesn’t mean that its always in your best health interest. Take catscans for example, these expose you to hundreds of times the radiation of an x-ray and increase your risk of cancer. If your doctor recommends a catscan, ask them why, what they expect to learn, and how their treatment of you will vary depending on the outcome of the test. Its your body and you need to decide if the benefit of the test or procedure is worth the risks. If your doctor cant explain the risks and benefits clearly, find another doctor and get a second opinion. If your doctor tries to bully or intimidate you into doing something you are uncomfortable doing with the “If you don’t do this you have to sign a wavier because I cant be responsible for your death” then find a new doctor. A great example of how to do this is what my 95 year old friend Helen did 10 years ago after she had a cancerous polyp removed from her colon. The doctor said there was a 95% chance that he got it all so she needed to do chemotherapy and to that Helen replied “no way!”. She explained that she was 85 years old and that the decreased quality of life from the chemotherapy wasn’t worth it considering there was a 95% chance she was fine. Her doctor respected her decision and she is now a healthy 95 years old – who knows what problems might have happened had she done chemo.

Be minimally invasive

• Stress: Try exercise, yoga, and meditation before medication
• Sleep: Try exercise, yoga, and meditation before medication
• Joint and back pain: Try PT and Yoga before surgery
• High Cholesterol: Try exercise and diet before medication

Thats it. I have a nagging feeling I left out something important but I hope not because “11 tips” sounds wrong and I’m not sure what I would cut out of my list!

Why bodybuilding at age 93 is a great idea: Charles Eugster at TEDxZurich - YouTube

Successful aging requires work, diet and exercise. The huge mental and physical potential of the aged remains unexplored. Bodies can now be rebuilt at any age and a new life started. Beauty kings and queens in the 80-year-old category or a beach body at the age of 94 are not impossible. We will all, regardless of age, have to take greater responsibility for our own health in order to confront the immense challenges confronting the human race.

Run at a comfortable pace, and not too far: James O'Keefe at TEDxUMKC - YouTube

Published on 27 Nov 2012

"The fitness patterns for conferring longevity and robust lifelong cardiovascular health are distinctly different from the patterns that develop peak performance and marathon/superhuman endurance. Extreme endurance training and racing can take a toll on your long-term cardiovascular health.  For the daily workout, it may be best to have more fun endure less suffering in order to attain ideal heart health."

Dr. James O'Keefe Jr. is the director of Preventative Cardiology Fellowship Program and the Director of Preventative Cardiology at Cardiovascular Consultants at the Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute, a large cardiology practice in Kansas City. He is the co-author of four bestselling books including The Forever Young Diet & Lifestyle (Andrews McMeel Publishing LLC, 2005). In 1989, he became a professor of medicine at the University of Missouri - Kansas City and has contributed to over 200 articles in medical literature. He is also the chief medical officer and founder of Cardiotabs, a company that creates nutritional supplements to aid in a healthy lifestyle.

Does Cardio Cause Heart Disease?

December 5, 2012 by Armi Legge 9 Comments

The United States has a big problem.

Heart disease is the number one cause of death, with one person dying every 39 seconds in the United States in 2008.⁽¹⁾

There is growing concern that too much cardio can damage your heart. This series will teach you if that’s true or not.

To help counter this problem, you’ve been told for years that one of the best ways to protect your heart is to exercise — especially “cardio” like swimming, cycling, and running.

There’s plenty of data to support that advice,^(2-4) but there’s also emerging evidence that too much cardio might damage your heart.

If this is true, it would mean that:

• Many of our best efforts to become healthier are really backfiring.
• Many of our favorite activities have been increasing our risk of an early death.
• As we watched athletes like Michael Phelps win 21 gold medals, we were also watching him damage his heart. 

Most of the information on this topic has been in the form of overhyped news articles focusing on single studies, misinterpretations of the research, pet theories, and anecdotes. You deserve a clear answer — an unbiased, thorough, critical examination of a simple question:

Does cardio damage your heart?

Whether you do cardio for the health benefits, enjoyment, or both, wouldn’t you like to know if your exercise regimen is secretly killing you?

How Cardio Might Damage Your Heart

In theory, excessive cardio causes small amounts of damage in the short-term. These small injuries turn into more significant long-term changes that can hurt your heart, blood vessels, and even kill you. This is thought to occur in a four step process:^(5-8)

1. Endurance exercise places a higher than normal load on your heart. It increases your oxygen and energy needs. It raises stress hormones, heart rate, blood pressure, and strains the walls of your heart. It also causes oxidative stress and inflammation. The heart is starved for oxygen and overwhelmed with these demands, and in some cases is irreversibly scarred by the exertion.
2. After each workout, your heart is tired from the effort and heart function drops. There are often changes in electrical activity, heart rate, and an increase in blood markers of heart damage. The inflammation and oxidative stress from the effort damages your heart, blood lipids, and blood vessels.
3. With enough training, your heart increases in size, develops erratic electrical activity, loses some of its ability to function, and develops small patches of scar tissue that grow with more training. The blood vessels around the heart and throughout other parts of the body also become harder and develop thicker deposits of calcium and plaque.
4. Over time, these long-term changes increase the risk of developing atherosclerosis, heart attack, coronary and peripheral artery disease, and in some cases, sudden cardiac arrest and early death.

 We’ll refer to this process as the “cardiotoxicity cycle.”

The Cardiotoxicity Cycle

Figure 1. The conceptual model of how cardio might cause heart disease.

Here is a good TEDx video from Dr. James O’Keefe. He is the author of several recent studies claiming that chronic endurance exercise is bad for the heart. It provides a nice summary of the cardiotoxicity cycle.

How I dropped to 5.6% body fat and gained muscle, part 1 - Art De Vany on Line

How I dropped to 5.6% body fat and gained muscle, part 1 - Art De Vany on Line

05/10/2013

 

As I approach my 76-th birthday this August, I have made some changes in how I eat and exercise. I weigh about 203.6 +- 2 pounds and my body fat reading several days in a row is from 5.3 to 5.6%.  That I continue to weigh what I have weighed for the past 50 years while eating a bit less and carrying less body fat than I ever have says something about what I have been doing. My body composition has improved with a bit more muscle and less fat while remaining at the same weight.

I want to share that with you and let you make up your own mind about following this approach or something similar to it. This post is about the diet, eating pattern and supplements I take. The next post will discuss my new way of exercising.

The changes are simple:

• I most often eat just two meals a day, as was the practice in Medieval England and many other places and locations around the world even today. Now and then, I eat three meals.
• I exercise, not counting play as exercise, a bit more; usually 4 times a week. The workouts are usually well less than half an hour, but they are done in new way (next post).
• I have been using Branched Chain Amino Acids far more.

The star of this regimen, if there is one, is the Guardian BCAAs with B12 that I co-developed with Dr. Demopolous. I have only sparingly used BCAAs over the years, but now I am a big fan. They keep me from getting hungry, keep my brain from lacking energy, promote muscle growth, and, above all, protect and stimulate my mitochondria. As you will see below from my references, the BCAAs give my body a metabolic advantage on both sides of the energy equation.

On the energy expenditure side, the BCAAs stimulate energy production through mitochondrial biogenesis and activity, by stimulating muscle growth, by increasing fat leptin secretion, by decreasing body weight via mTOR signaling, and by improving muscle glucose uptake and whole body glucose metabolism. This is at least a triple hit on the energy expenditure side.

On the energy intake side, the BCAAs provide energy substrate for my brain, so I do not get hungry, they decrease food intake and increase insulin sensitivity and improve antioxidant defenses.

I think the central mechanism that drives what we call aging is a shift in protein synthesis and loss toward a net loss of muscle protein. That is to say, the balance of protein degradation (catabolism) and protein addition (anabolism) shifts from growth or maintenance to a loss of body protein. This seems to be the underlying mechanism behind the progression to sarcopenia and loss of strength that is almost universal among the aging. Not only muscle protein is diminished, so is organ and mitochondrial protein, as well as enzymes and neurotransmitters.

As I said in my book, our mitochondria are guests in our cells and have their own agenda. Their fate is tied to the cell in which they reside, which offers them protection and nutrients. Mitochondrial and nuclear DNA were exchanged eons ago, tying their fates together. Thus, we age in direct proportion to the density and function of our mitochondria. These helpful partners can promote the nuclear cell or execute a death program  to kill it.

I believe I am leaner and more muscular than at any stage of my life because I have focussed on my mitochondria using the tools of autophagy, ICR, and FT-specific exercise along with an increased intake of BCAAs. My approach emphasizes switching between anabolic and catabolic states. It is the switching of anabolic and catabolic states with autophagy intervening that promotes muscle growth and quality by clearing damaged proteins and maintaining the density of mitochondria. That is the focus of my eating and exercise.

To give some idea of the importance of mitochondrial density and function, I qoute from D’Antona et. al cited below that supports ICR, strength exercise, and BCAA supplementation:

“Among the plethora of biological phenomena affected by aging, the malfunction of mitochondria and the decrease of mitochondrial biogenesis, together with increased oxidative damage, seem to exert some of the most deleterious effects on the organism (Guarente, 2008; Lopez-Lluch et al., 2008). A variety of strategies that alleviate age-related deficits in mitochondrial biogenesis and activity, including calorie restriction (CR) and moderate physical exercise, promote survival in mammals. These interventions increase the expression of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor g coactivator-1a (PGC-1a, a master regulator of mitochondrial biogenesis and reactive oxygen species [ROS] defense system) and of sirtuin 1 (SIRT1, a member of the sirtuin family linked to life span extension, enhanced mitochondrial biogenesis, and decreased ROS production), thus reducing oxidative damage in metabolically active tissues of mice and humans (Civitarese et al., 2007; Nisoli et al., 2005; Ristowet al., 2009)....Here, we demonstrated that the BCAA supplementation increased average life span of male mice, and this was accompanied by increased mitochondrial biogenesis and SIRT1 expression both in cardiac and skeletal muscles, unlike adipose tissues and liver of middle-aged mice. Further, the muscle ROS defense system genes were upregulated by BCAA supplementation, resulting in decreased indices of oxidative damage.”

Here is what I am doing on the eating and supplement side.

• I am eating rather pure, which I prefer to do, but now with real purity. That means no bread or milk, rice, potatoes, or beans and limited fruit. I still trim my meats if I eat beef and am eating more seafood, chicken and pork than beef. I suggest that this eliminates most all sources of inflammation from my diet.
• On most days, I eat just twice a day. I do not eat nuts in the evening as I am sometimes inclined to do. When I feel hungry after a few days at this level, I will eat three times or eat a really large, but early dinner. This is all done by feel with no planning and the eating is spontaneous, not scheduled.
• I work out at least 4 times a week, in very brief workouts that I will describe later. I have long felt that 1, 2, or 3 workouts a week is insufficient to give the muscle quality that I seek.

I take about from 1 to 2 grams of Guardian BCAAs with B12 a day. I use a teaspoon if I am hungry and do not want to stop to eat. I take another mid day for an energy boost, if convenient, and another an hour after dinner and well before bed.  The BCAAs supply for my liver to go into gluconeogenesis to make glucose for my brain’s energy supply. The BCAAs with the B12 encourages my mitochondria to increase in size, function, and number by upregulating protein synthesis in the mitochondria. The B12 has a little known, subtle effect on the electrical coupling of the mitochondria, which I think only Dr. Demopulous understands. We put the B12 in the BCAAs at his suggestion and you can see it as small dark crystals in the BCAAs. In my humble opinion, it is the BCAAs that have brought my fat level down to less than 6% on most scale readings.

I simply do not get tired as a result of these doses of BCAAs with B12. Taking a teaspoon with plain water may be the best energy drink you could ever consume. The leucine in the BCAAs act as a permissive signal that tells your metabolism that amino acids are available so protein synthesis increases.

I am determined to protect my eyesight. Macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness among the aged. The doses of leutin and zexanthin in Guardian are higher than the amounts shown to be effective in delaying or preventing macular degeneration in the famous ALRED trials. You will also be getting a bit more than 2 grams of Vitamin C a day if you take two packets as I do, another important protector of eye health (the eye has the highest concentration of Vitamin C of any tissue in the body for good reason since the eye is exposed to intense light and oxidation).

A few points on the value of BCAAs.

BCAAs appear to have unique obesity-related effects. BCAAs, and in particular leucine, increase fat leptin secretion, decrease food intake and body weight via mTOR signaling, and improve muscle glucose uptake and whole body glucose metabolism.

A promising area of preclinical research is regarding the effects of BCAAs on skeletal muscle atrophy. BCAA intake preserves muscle fiber size and improved physical endurance and motor coordination in middle-aged mice. Accordingly, an amino acid mixture with BCAA composition has been found to improve sarcopenia, i.e., the aging-associated loss of muscle mass, an effect possibly due to the recovery of the altered Akt/mTOR signaling in muscles of aged rats. BCAA supplementation increased the average lifespan of male mice.

A variety of amino acid mixtures have been used to restore the protein content of defective tissues, especially of skeletal muscles, in aged subjects. Dillon et al. reported that 3-month supplementation with essential amino acids increases IGF-1 muscle levels and lean body mass in aged women, without affecting kidney function. The acute anabolic response to this supplementation (increased muscle protein fractional synthesis rate) was maintained over time, suggesting the possibility to improve skeletal muscle trophism in long-term treatment.

Various BCAA dietary supplements have been reported to reduce sarcopenia in elderly subjects. In a randomized trial involving 41 subjects with sarcopenia aged 66 to 84 years, intake of the BCAA formula increased muscle mass, reduced tumor necrosis factor-α, and improved insulin sensitivity.

Most importantly, leucine-enriched balanced amino acid supplements are now considered as part of the nutritional recommendations for the management of sarcopenia.

Old man walks on hands, does turtle freeze on a bottle