Ever since I was a kid growing up in Newark I centered on sports. It started with playing all kinds of running games, then punch ball, then stick ball, then varsity sports in high school (football, swimming and track) and college (freestyle, butterfly and individual medley swimming), then County touch football leagues, then Wing Chun martial arts, and now three softball leagues – 70 and older, 50 and older and 20 and older – racewalking, stand-up paddling, weight and cardio training, hiking, teaching women’s self defense classes and of course, still swimming. The problem – I ain’t no spring chicken anymore (just turned 80 and can’t do it like I used to.
Recently, there was an article in a newspaper that was reprinted from the Chicago Tribune and written by a Julie Deardorff that really got my attention. It talked about how tweaking workouts to fit age will improve one’s health.
So, if that article never made it to your newspaper and you are getting older and still working out, this article is a keeper.
“In her late 20s, Lori Popkewitz Alper loved the intense workouts at her Boston gym. But as her life and her changed so did her fitness repertoire.
During pregnancy, Alper found yoga. Soon she was pushing a jog stroller or hauling children in a double-wide bike trailer. Now 47, Alper has returned to some of the high-impact routines of her youth, but her approach has matured.
Workout programs are like 401(k)s – they need to be rebalanced over the decades, said fitness expert Tom Holland.
Four basic-yet-effective exercises – a squat, pushup, bicep curl and abdominal crunch – should remain in your program as long as you can perform them correctly.
You may have to modify them slightly as you age, not going as far on a squat for example, but you keep them in as long as you can.
As the body ages, it naturally begins to fall apart with some functions breaking down faster than others.
After age 20, the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use decreases by 1 percent a year in healthy men and women.
By the time you hit 30, muscular strength begins to head south. But the majority of the decrease occurs after age 50, when it falls at the rate of 15 percent per decade. Bone mineral density also decreases with age; in women the rate accelerates after menopause.
Experts say the ideal combination of exercise should include a combination of aerobic, strengthening and flexibility exercises.
Balance exercises are also vital in helping prevent falls, which can lead to fractures. Though higher-intensity training programs are effective, less rigorous ones can be just as effective, as long as they are done consistently.
Some fitness professionals stress functional fitness and de-emphasize cardio. They feel that older folks still need to get up and down of the floor, to be able to chase after grandkids and play a round of golf or tennis without having to recover for several days.
Aging is not for sissies. You need to face it head on and pay attention to your limitations, keep up your strength, keep trying new things and have a good attitude. So, tweaking your workout can keep you active. Here’s how to reduce the risk:
If you’re a runner, train like a triathlete. If you only run, you’ll be forced by injury to switch to swimming and biking to rehabilitate overuse injuries. Swimming is beneficial because your posture and body weight is horizontal to gravity, so you work many muscles that receive little attention when running or can become weak and prone to injuries, such as hamstrings, abdominals, and low back. Also, swimming provides a top-notch cardio challenge for heart health, which is important since heart disease risk increases markedly as we age.
If you’re a swimmer, add gravity. Be sure to incorporate strength training, walking or anything weight bearing to help prevent the loss of bone density. Also, spend an equal amount of time on your back to help balance out the curves of the spine. Adding some backstroke into the mix will stretch your pectoral muscles and work the muscles between your shoulder blades that help stabilize your spine and maintain your posture all day long.
If you’re a cyclist, run. Cycling mainly involves the quadriceps muscles while running is primarily a hamstring activity. When either of these muscles is too strong, injury occurs. Combining biking and running keeps these muscle groups balanced. Also try the stationary rower, which doesn’t put vertical pressure on the knees.
If you’re a bodybuilder, try yoga. Improving your flexibility provides a static challenge to the muscles versus the dynamic ‘pump, pump, pump’, rep after rep you’ve experienced with a long-term routine of bodybuilding.
If you’re a tennis player, balance the other side. Do resistance training in the form of dumbbells, bands and tubing to balance the strength on each side of the body. If you are right-handed, most of the joints and muscles on the right side of the body will be better developed than those on the left side. With free weights, each arm has to independently hoist the weight such as shoulder presses with the left side versus the right side.”
If you don’t work out, get your okole (Hawaii pidgen for butt) moving. Don’t worry about weights and just get up and walk or try something fun. Start with a form of cardio, such as walking, spinning or using a cardio machine. Adopt a good core-building activity, such as Pilates.
You can also purchase exercise DVDs, which are ridiculously inexpensive. And, if you press play enough, they really work.”
For me, I stretch for at least a half hour before I play ball. At home, I do push-ups on my knees and use the 6-5-4-3-2-1 / 1-2-3-4-5-6 routine. This is doing 6 push-ups and waiting 30 seconds before doing 5, etc. I also do angles instead of just straight forward and back. For abs, I use a wheel that has side grips. I do 10 to 15 out and backs every other day. Then at least once a week I swim about 300 to 400 yards. Somehow I manage to fit in hiking, racewalking, stand-up paddling and an occasional women’s self defense class. And I sleep like there’s no tomorrow.
I have found that adhering to a plant-based diet, free of anything that had a face or a mother, dairy products and eggs, keeps me feeling light and energetic, despite weighing 185 pounds. And because of the sulfur crystals, I never have joint pain.
Aloha!
Sources:
Just to put things in perspective, after I graduated from Weequahic High School and before going to Seton Hall University, I had a part-time job working for a butcher. I was the delivery guy and occasionally had to go to the slaughterhouse to pick up products for the store. Needless to say, I had no consciousness nor awareness, as change never came then despite the horrors I witnessed on an almost daily basis.
After graduating with a degree in accounting from Seton Hall, I eventually got married and moved to a town called Livingston. Livingston was basically a yuppie community where everyone was judged by the neighborhood they lived in and their income. To say it was a "plastic" community would be an understatement.
Livingston and the shallowness finally got to me. I told my wife I was fed up and wanted to move. She made it clear she had to be near her friends and New York City. I finally got my act together and split for Colorado.
I was living with a lady in Aspen at the end of 1974, when one day she said, " let's become vegetarians". I have no idea what possessed me to say it, but I said, "okay"! At that point I went to the freezer and took out about $100 worth of frozen, dead body parts and gave them to a welfare mother who lived behind us. Well, everything was great for about a week or so, and then the chick split with another guy.
So here I was, a vegetarian for a couple weeks, not really knowing what to do, how to cook, or basically how to prepare anything. For about a month, I was getting by on carrot sticks, celery sticks, and yogurt. Fortunately, when I went vegan in 1990, it was a simple and natural progression. Anyway, as I walked around Aspen town, I noticed a little vegetarian restaurant called, "The Little Kitchen".
Let me back up just a little bit. It was April of 1975, the snow was melting and the runoff of Ajax Mountain filled the streets full of knee-deep mud. Now, Aspen was great to ski in, but was a bummer to walk in when the snow was melting.
I was ready to call it quits and I needed a warmer place. I'll elaborate on that in a minute.
But right now, back to "The Little Kitchen". Knowing that I was going to leave Aspen and basically a new vegetarian, I needed help. So, I cruised into the restaurant and told them my plight and asked them if they would teach me how to cook. I told them in return I would wash dishes and empty their trash. They then asked me what I did for a living and I told them I was an accountant.
The owner said to me, "Let's make a deal. You do our tax return and we'll feed you as well". So for the next couple of weeks I was doing their tax return, washing their dishes, emptying the trash, and learning as much as I could.
But, like I said, the mud was getting to me. So I picked up a travel book written by a guy named Foder. The name of the book was, "Hawaii". Looking through the book I noticed that in Lahaina, on Maui, there was a little vegetarian restaurant called," Mr. Natural's". I decided right then and there that I would go to Lahaina and work at "Mr. Natural's." To make a long story short, that's exactly what happened.
So, I'm working at "Mr. Natural's" and learning everything I can about my new dietary lifestyle - it was great. Every afternoon we would close for lunch at about 1 PM and go to the Sheraton Hotel in Ka'anapali and play volleyball, while somebody stayed behind to prepare dinner.
Since I was the new guy, and didn't really know how to cook, I never thought that I would be asked to stay behind to cook dinner. Well, one afternoon, that's exactly what happened; it was my turn. That posed a problem for me because I was at the point where I finally knew how to boil water.
I was desperate, clueless and basically up the creek without a paddle. Fortunately, there was a friend of mine sitting in the gazebo at the restaurant and I asked him if he knew how to cook. He said the only thing he knew how to cook was enchiladas. He said that his enchiladas were bean-less and dairy-less. I told him that I had no idea what an enchilada was or what he was talking about, but I needed him to show me because it was my turn to do the evening meal.
Well, the guys came back from playing volleyball and I'm asked what was for dinner. I told them enchiladas; the owner wasn't thrilled. I told him that mine were bean-less and dairy-less. When he tried the enchilada he said it was incredible. Being the humble guy that I was, I smiled and said, "You expected anything less"? It apparently was so good that it was the only item on the menu that we served twice a week. In fact, after about a week, we were selling five dozen every night we had them on the menu and people would walk around Lahaina broadcasting, 'enchilada's at "Natural's" tonight'. I never had to cook anything else.
A year later the restaurant closed, and somehow I gravitated to a little health food store in Wailuku. I never told anyone I was an accountant and basically relegated myself to being the truck driver. The guys who were running the health food store had friends in similar businesses and farms on many of the islands. I told them that if they could organize and form one company they could probably lock in the State. That's when they found out I was an accountant and "Down to Earth" was born. "Down to Earth" became the largest natural food store chain in the islands, and I was their Chief Financial Officer and co-manager of their biggest store for 13 years.
In 1981, I started to do a weekly radio show to try and expose people to a vegetarian diet and get them away from killing innocent creatures. I still do that show today. I pay for my own airtime and have no sponsors to not compromise my honesty. One bit of a hassle was the fact that I was forced to get a Masters Degree in Nutrition to shut up all the MD's that would call in asking for my credentials.
My doing this radio show enabled me, through endless research, to see the corruption that existed within the big food industries, the big pharmaceutical companies, the biotech industries and the government agencies. This information, unconscionable as it is, enabled me to realize how broken our health system is. This will be covered more in depth in the Introduction and throughout the book and when you finish the book you will see this clearly and it will hopefully inspire you to make changes.
I left Down to Earth in 1989, got nationally certified as a sports injury massage therapist and started traveling the world with a bunch of guys that were making a martial arts movie. After doing that for about four years I finally made it back to Honolulu and got a job as a massage therapist at the Honolulu Club, one of Hawaii's premier fitness clubs. It was there I met the love of my life who I have been with since 1998. She made me an offer I couldn't refuse. She said," If you want to be with me you've got to stop working on naked women". So, I went back into accounting and was the Chief Financial Officer of a large construction company for many years.
Going back to my Newark days when I was an infant, I had no idea what a "chicken" or "egg" or "fish" or "pig" or "cow" was. My dietary blueprint was thrust upon me by my parents as theirs was thrust upon them by their parents. It was by the grace of God that I was able to put things in their proper perspective and improve my health and elevate my consciousness.
The road that I started walking down in 1975 has finally led me to the point of writing my book, “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”. Hopefully, the information contained herein will be enlightening, motivating, and inspiring to encourage you to make different choices. Doing what we do out of conditioning is not always the best course to follow. I am hoping that by the grace of the many friends and personalities I have encountered along my path, you will have a better perspective of what road is the best road for you to travel on, not only for your health but your consciousness as well.
Last but not least: after being vaccinated as a kid I developed asthma, which plagued me all of my life. In 2007 I got exposed to the organic sulfur crystals, which got rid of my asthma in 3 days and has not come back in over 10 years. That, being the tip of the iceberg, has helped people reverse stage 4 cancers, autism, joint pain, blood pressure problems, migraine headaches, erectile dysfunction, gingivitis, and more. Also, because of the detoxification effects by the release of oxygen that permeates and heals all the cells in the body, it removes parasites, radiation, fluoride, free radicals, and all the other crap that is thrust upon us in the environment by Big Business.
For more, please view www.healthtalkhawaii.com and www.asanediet.com.
Namaste!
