Category — Exercise

Here I am again, talking about that ONE thing we know, beyond a doubt, has major effects on health, vitality, energy and, for lack of a better term, “youthful aging.”  Yes:  Exercise.

Tired about hearing how good exercise is for you?

Too bad.

I’ll stop writing about it as soon as studies stop revealing its awesome and widespread physical, mental, emotional and psychological powers.

Here’s the latest good news:  Regardless of your earlier (or current) exercise habits — from spotty to nonexistent — being active in mid-life significantly improves your chances of aging without cognitive or physical impairments or developing a chronic illness.

Read again, please.  Read the part that says “regardless of your current exercise habits.”  Read the part that says “significantly improves…”  Read again and RIGHT NOW schedule in that Pilates, spin, circuit, Cross-Fit, step/sculpt, water aerobics, weight-training, kickboxing, Barre3 class, that morning run (walk) (swim) with a friend.  Because according to this new report from the much-esteemed Nurses’ Health Study, a long-term, on-going survey of more than 13,500 women that has netted much important (and life changing) health data, it is NEVER too late to start benefiting from physical activity.  And the benefits are extraordinary.

A few weeks ago I told you to stop lying about your age to your gym machine.  Now I’m back to tell you the sad news that your gym machine has been lying to you.  Who (or what) can you trust these days?

I was working out at the gym this morning wearing my newly resuscitated (new batteries) heart rate monitor.  The monitor is programmed with my age (sort of…see the previous post), height, weight, gender.  I don’t usually wear the monitor.  I’m content just to be moving and sweating and working on keeping my fitness level up (and my bio age down).  I am not an obsessive counter of either calories in or calories out.

But the night before I had overindulged in blackberry cobbler topped with vanilla ice cream.  It’s the first time I’ve had dessert in probably two months.  Yes, I’m that good.  Hate me later.  So there I was eating this sweet, juicy luscious dessert I had made – and therefore knew just how caloric it was – thinking “okay, relax…you can work this off tomorrow at the gym.”  I figured, given the modest portion size I ate – and, oh yeah, the several immodest spoonfuls I inhaled while transferring the left-overs to a covered dish – I should try to burn 600 calories the next day to circumvent a 24-hour marathon of negative self-talk.

What would it take to burn those calories?  I was about to find out.  I headed to the gym, strapped on the monitor and got down to it.  There’s almost nothing as boring as hearing about other people’s workouts – unless it’s hearing about the accomplishments of other people’s children –so I’ll try to make this brief.  I started with 10 minutes of high-intensity intervals on each of 4 common gym machines.  Here’s a comparison of my calorie burn according to my monitor (touted to be highly accurate) and my calorie burn according to the gym machines’ calculations.

Row: 51 monitor (94 machine)

EFX: 53 monitor (87 machine)

Spin bike: 76 monitor (98 machine)

Stair stepper: 63 (114 machine)

Let me do the math for you. (Actually, my husband helped with this)  The machines erroneously informed me that I had burned 161.7 percent MORE calories than I’d actually burned.  That’s because machines in most gyms are calibrated for some “average” person who is not me or you, unless you are a 35-year-old, 170-lb man.

So, don’t get snookered by those inflated numbers you see on the read-outs.  Don’t feel smug when the machine tells you you’ve torched 200 calories after a mere 20 minutes.  You haven’t.

It took me 100 long, sweaty minutes to burn those 600 calories. Yes, 1 hour and 40 minutes.  Was the blackberry cobbler with ice cream worth it?  Oh yeah.

The “secret” to anti-aging – and by anti-aging I mean preserving vitality, resilience, energy and weller-than-well health – is no secret.

Actually, there are two non-secret “secrets,” two well tested, scientifically validated ways to reverse our biological clocks.  One, believe me, you don’t want to do.  It’s called CR (calorie restriction), and I don’t mean a diet.  I mean a forever and ever eating strategy that restricts caloric intake to 60 to 70 percent of what your body is calculated to need without sacrificing any nutrition.  This is very very hard to do.  It takes unremitting planning, frequent testing, precise calculating (and resigning oneself to feeling hungry all the time).  It removes the spontaneity, not to mention much of the pleasure, from eating.  (I know whereof I speak.  I thoroughly researched CR, attempted it and write about the experience in the book.

So forget that secret.

The other non-secret “secret”?  Exercise.  Physical movement.  You know, sweat.  This I also did, to the extreme, for the book.  I also wrote about the many and wondrous anti-aging effects of exercise, from regulating blood sugar and reducing stress hormones to elevating mood and lowering blood pressure, from keeping arteries supple to keeping the brain youthful. Now comes some new research that demystifies the magic of exercise.  And the news is good.

It turns out that exercise can drastically alter how genes operate — in a good way. Just sit with that statement for a moment.  Exercise alters genetic expression.  Wow.

It turns out that one way of affecting gene behavior is through a process largely driven by how you lead you life. As in diet and exercise. In a new study, sedentary men who exercised for six months not only lost weight and inches, and not only improved their blood pressure and cholesterol profiles.  Their exercise regimen altered the genetic expression of their fat cells. Their DNA was modified.  The cells most affected were those most closely identified with playing a role in fat storage, and the risk for obesity and Type 2 diabetes.  Other studies have found profound effects on the DNA of muscle cells.

Significant, wellness-promoting, disease-blasting changes deep within our cells, at DNA level.  If you needed another reason to get up and move, to integrate vigorous physical activity into your life, you couldn’t find a better one than this.

Set your phone or computer to beep at you every hour, reminding you to GET UP AND MOVE for 5 minutes.

Are you lying about your age to your gym machine?  I bet you are.

     When the treadmill or elliptical or bike asks you to enter your age so it can calculate calories burned (or other helpful info), if you are entering your chronological age – the age on your driver’s license – you’re lying.  Your chronological age is NOT the age of your body (which is the age you should use for correct calculations).  Your chronological age is often not a true indicator of the health and vitality of your heart, lungs and vascular system.  The fitter – or unfitter – you are, the bigger the gap between chronological and biological age.

      This “lie” you enter into the machine makes a difference.  It leads to miscalculations that can fool you into thinking you’re working harder than (or not as hard as) you should.  And those charts posted on the machines to help you determine your training, fat burning and aerobic heart rate?  They are based on chronological age – not your real age – so you are getting misinformation there too.  Which can mean you’re not bringing up your heart rate high enough – or you’re taking it too high. 

     So the trick is determining your bio-age and entering that instead.  In my book, Counterclockwise, I write about the 10 most common biomarkers of age – the measurements of body health and resilience that determine your true age.  Some are measurements you already know or can easily discover:  resting heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol panel.  Lean body mass (the amount of you that is not fat) is a good indicator, and is easily determined by stepping on a relatively inexpensive home-grade bioimpediance scale.  It may be that your gym or doctor’s office has one also. 

     Resting metabolic rate sometimes called basal metabolic rate is another biomarker. 

There are tests for this. Or, you can just strap on your heart monitor when you are lying in bed and ready to go to sleep, start it up, then check the moment you awake.  Take the number of calories burned when asleep and divide by the number of hours you were asleep.  That’s your BMR per hour.  Now multiple by 24.  Heart rate recovery – as I talked about in my last post – is easy to self-determine.

     Strength and flexibility tests can also be self-administered (there are lot of credible ones on the web).  For aerobic capacity and bone density, you’re going to need to go to a sports clinic. But even without these last two (spendy) tests, you can get a decent indication if your bio age is lower or higher than our chrono age by looking at the various charts you’ll find online that correlate statistics with true age.

     You’ll want to tell the gym machine the average of your true age to get a better, more accurate reading.  And you’ll want to refer to your true age on the heart rate chart.  Stop lying!

WINNER OF THE HEART RATE RECOVERY CONTEST from last week and soon-to-be recipient of a free, autographed copy of Counterclockwise is Faye for her guess of 72.  My heart rate decreased from 155 to 82 in 2 minutes (73 beats).  Check yours!

The ability to recover, to snap back, both physically and emotionally, from the stresses and strains and the sometimes more than occasion crises of life has got to be one of the cornerstones of anti-aging.

I was thinking about this today,Day 10, of boot camp, after I finished a particularly grueling cardio/weights high-intensity interval work-out and realized I felt somewhat less grueled than I did after the same session a week ago.  I was recovering faster.  Which meant my aerobic capacity was improving, and I was getting stronger, and my muscle mass was increasing…and my bio clock was ticking backward.

Recovery is a glorious thing, whether it’s from a tough work-out or a broken heart or an illness.  The ability of the body (and spirit) to mend itself is, I think, one of the wonders of life.

This past week of boot camp I’ve been monitoring the recovery rate of my heart after exercise — that is, how long it takes my heart rate to return to its normal or resting rate after I tax it.  And man, have I been taxing it.  Recovery rate is an excellent indicator of cardiovascular health, a key biomarker of aging.  It’s not just about the heart, of course, but about the flexibility of arteries, the capacity of lungs and the aerobic efficiency of the body.  Good stuff.

Easy to check if you have a heart monitor (I have a Polar watch with accompanying chest band) or if you’re at a gym with a treadmill, elliptical, stair-stepper or bike that can track heart rate.  Bring your heart rate up nice and high.  Maybe you’re working at 80 percent of capacity.  Note your heart rate at the peak.  Then stop whatever it is you’re doing. Wait 2 minutes and note your heart rate a second time.  If the beats have decreased less than 25, this is not good news.  This is not how a strong, healthy heart reacts.  It could mean that you are biologically older than your birthdate.  If, on the other hand, the rate has decreased by at least 50 beats in those 2 minutes, your cardiovascular system is in good shape.  More of a decrease, and your biological age may be considerably younger than your chronological age.

Here’s a deal for you all:  A FREE, autographed copy of Counterclockwise for the first person to guess how many beats my heart rate went down 2 minutes after today’s workout. (Just send your guess as a “comment” to this post, and I’ll email you if you win.  This offer stands until one week from today.)

Oh.  About boot camp:  It’s like summer camp with really mean counselors and no boys.  Also no Tootsie Pops from the canteen. And I love it.

     I’m back at boot camp.

     And no, I am not going to regale you with tales of hiking, biking, weight training, core work, intervals, kickboxing and other adventures in swearing and sweating (in that order).  Instead, I’m going to tell you why I am back here.

     Those of you who’ve read my new book (and if you haven’t:  Get a move on!), Counterclockwise: My Year of Hypnosis, Hormones, Dark Chocolate and Other Adventures in the World of Anti-Aging, know that I jump-started my foray into fitness – a key to reversing the biological clock – by putting myself through a serious, give-it-all-you-got boot camp experience.  It worked.  In the months that followed I developed an excellent work-out routine, teamed up with a terrific group of women (we called ourselves the Sweat Chicas), found an amazing trainer and had a lot of fun on my way to cardio-vascular and lean-body goodness.  The year I spent living the book was a year spent mindfully, a year of making many good decisions and reveling in the changes, the counter-clockwise changes, this made in me.

     Then I spent most of the following year writing the book, a year of sitting in front of a computer, of meeting deadlines, of stressing over revisions, of slowly, sometimes even without me knowing it, becoming less and less mindful about those anti-aging choices I had so carefully researched and so assiduously practiced.  And the Sweat Chicas lost our great trainer.  And one of the Sweat Chicas suffered some significant exercise-restricting injuries.  And Lizzie suddenly got very very good at making butterscotch brownies. And I ended up doing a lot of traveling.  And.  And.  And.

     I could (well, I did) beat myself up about this for a while.  Then, recently, I had occasion to sit down and read the “Thinking Young” chapter in my book (I was finding an excerpt for a magazine) and was reminded of the health, wellness and counterclockwise-promoting power of optimism.  No not rose-colored glasses, “It’s all good man” fake optimism, but optimism borne of what’s called self-efficacy.  Self-efficacy is our belief in our ability to succeed, to change for the better, to make something better happen.  Not always, not all the time, but sometimes.  People with a strong sense of self-efficacy do not think of themselves as victims and do not collapse under the weight of circumstance. They take action.  It is the optimism that suffuses the “take action” mentality — not the actual result of the action — that is healthy, that works to reverse the biological clock.

     Those of you who’ve read the book know I am not a poster child for self-compassion.  But I do rock at self-efficacy.  Which means I view challenges as something to be mastered not avoided.  Which is what brought me back here to boot camp, where I intend to kickstart myself back into those habits that need to be a part of this counterclockwise journey.

     I’ll report next Wednesday on how I do.

Last week’s post was all about trying to determine the best anti-aging exercise.  But – based on snarky comments (you know who you are) about muscle-shredding, oxygen-gasping overexertion and how lots of people don’t enjoy being drenched in sweat like I do — I think you may need some convincing about the astonishing anti-aging powers of exercise.

So…just how good is exercise for you?  Let me count the ways (based on the most recent and most credible research).

**Decreases blood pressure

**Lowers resting heart rate

**Elevates “good” cholesterol

**Lowers “bad” cholesterol

**Increases muscle mass

**Increases bone density

**Increases metabolic rate

**Decreases joint and muscle pain

**Enhances cognitive function

**Elevates mood

**Improves sleep

You want more?

An eight-decade-long investigation of 1500 Californians found that being active in midlife was the single most important predictor of good health.

Based on a review of 40 studies on the benefits of exercise, researchers found consistent evidence that regular exercise can help prevent more than 25 diseases and heath conditions.

A four-decade, 50,000-person-strong study of activity, health and longevity concluded that people who exercise “live better…look better…feel better…and live longer.”

So unless you are reading this on your iPad while huffing and puffing on the EFX machine or perusing this on your computer screen while racking up miles on your treadmill desk, here’s my message to you:  MOVE IT.

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
–Isak Dinesen

If there is one key to reversing the biological clock, one proven, nonnegotiable anti-aging strategy, it is – drumroll please — exercise.  You knew exercise was important, of course.  You knew exercise was a major component to fitness.  You knew it was the best way to get to and stay at a healthy weight.  But, if you’re like me, you didn’t know how astonishing, far-reaching, disease-preventing and age-blasting its effects were.

Given that build-up, the obvious question is: What is the best anti-aging exercise?

On my year-long counterclockwise journey I asked fitness experts, exercise physiologists, sports lab technicians, medical researchers and dozens and dozens of trainers.  I read everything I could on the subject from studies published in the top research journals to perky articles in mainstream health mags to scam-my come-ons on websites.  And I personally tried just about every form of exercise I could imagine doing.  I hiked, jogged, raced, biked, climbed, rowed, swum, spun, danced, drummed, stepped, boxed, aquaerobicized, hooped and hot yoga-ed .  I pushed enormous bags of sand across gym floors.  I zipped along on 40-mile bike rides and panted through 4-minute Tabata sessions.

Conclusions?

First, the (absolutely true) cliché you get from the experts on this subject:  The “best” exercise” is the one you stick with.  Which is to say, no form of exercise, regardless of how highly touted, “works” unless you actually do it.  That sounds silly, I know, but apparently a significant percentage of people buy gym memberships they rarely use after the first two months, and one survey I read estimated that 80 percent of us have fitness equipment in our homes that is providing exercise only when we dust it.

But second, this (seemingly) contradictory finding:  Sticking with one form of exercise is not a good fitness, turn-back-the-clock strategy.  We all know about (and some of us have experienced) over-use injuries because we’ve consistently taxed the same muscles and joints.  And we know that athletes “cross train” to keep fitness up and injuries down.  What we might not realize – what I personally didn’t realize – is how marvelously, devilishly efficient the body is.  The longer you stay on the EFX machine or the treadmill at the gym, for example, the more your body accommodates to the movement, the less energy you use, the less you tax (in a good way) your cardio-vascular system, the less anti-aging bang for your buck.

And third:  It appears from everything I’ve read – and everything I’ve put my mid-life body through – that some form of high-intensity interval training is the best way to enhance fitness and turn back the clock.  That just means short bursts of all-out effort interrupted by very short rest periods.  You can do this running, walking, cycling, swimming, rowing, boxing – just about any activity you enjoy.  You can also try Tabata (which I love), an Old School (squat, burpee, push-up, sit-up) approach to HIIT.  Or the newly touted “7-minute workout,” which is my current go-to.  Free apps for both keep you moving.

More on the astonishing – and I mean astonishing – anti-aging affects of exercise in next week’s post.

I am writing this post from Prague where, in three days of walking the streets of four different districts, I have yet to see a morbidly obese person.  The closest I came was yesterday, at a sidewalk café on a street leading to Prague Castle, when a rather chunky woman sat down at the table next to us.  She was – I am delighted to tell you – French, thus disproving the French Women Don’t Get Fat thing.  But aside from her, no one.  It was the same thing in Vienna, where I was last week.

I will also say that it is almost impossible to get a skim milk cappuccino anywhere over here.  And the stores – my favorite thing to do in a foreign country is to go grocery shopping – don’t offer shelves of “fat-free” this or “low carb” that.  The folks over here in the Old World appear not to fetishize their food like we New Worlders do.  The eat, and they enjoy it.  They eat and they don’t get fat like we do.

Maybe – the female diner I saw yesterday notwithstanding – you believe in the “French Paradox”:  The French eat rich foods and pastries and don’t get fat because they drink red wine.  Fine. But what about the Czechs who drink beer.  A lot.  Huge steins (liters!) of Pilsner Urquell.  What about the Austrians who wash down fried pork cutlets (aka schnitzel) and potatoes with tall glasses of Gosser.

Here’s my take on their “secret.”

They eat a big lunch, a multi-course, sit-down, enjoy-yourself lunch.  (Dinner is small, almost an after thought.)

They walk.

They watch a lot less TV than we do.

And did I mention they walk?

We (and by we I mean I) are obsessed with eating low fat and low glycemic index and with cutting calories and sweating at the gym.  And we’re getting fatter and fatter.  Over here, they eat all the stuff we shun, and they look fit.  The old folks walk hills and manage cobblestone streets.  Walk being the operative word.