When you are young and have a presumably long life ahead of you, life is a broad panorama of time and opportunity. You plan for your future, build your family, perhaps a career. Life stretches out before you, full of time and promise.
You age. Life looks shorter now. You may even have a mid-life crisis and try to recapture your youth. You are past your prime and are starting to feel it. You start looking forward to retirement. But you’re still fairly strong, and still have many good years left. You feel the winds of change…
Yesterday, When I Was Young…
At some age, though, you start to wonder how much longer you will last. Perhaps some “age-related” disease has already crept in. You get reminders of your age, such as Medicare and senior discounts at theaters. You reminisce about being younger, faster, stronger, and healthier.
We are all time bound. If you are in pain today, it doesn’t matter much to you how many years were pain free and how many good years are behind you: today is where you live. If you are not healthy, it doesn’t much matter how you felt yesterday because today is lousy. Plus, if you are unhealthy, the future doesn’t look so bright.
So here’s the question that you will eventually have to answer: how long can you live in health so you can enjoy your latter years? When you were young, such questions likely didn’t occupy your thoughts; now they are increasingly important. But you also figure that you have no control over your mortality, or so little control that you sweep the question under the rug, thinking you can do little to change the outcome anyway. If you think that way, you are simply wrong: at any age, you can improve your longevity through exercise.
Step up to a longer life
Exercise causes what is called “remodeling”, meaning that as cells turn over (that is, die off and get replaced), your body is building improved facilities to handle even more exercise. With strengthening exercises, muscles are redeveloped stronger, bone gets stronger, and angiogenesis, the development of new blood vessels, increases to improve blood supply. Aerobic exercise still strengthens to a lesser degree, but adds additional benefits to your cardiovascular system, including lung capacity. When you stress your muscles through exercise, you are causing them to tear down and rebuild stronger, and aerobic exercise stress causes your cardiovascular system to build up stronger. The principle is the same: challenge your body, and it will shift its remodeling process to meet that challenge better in the future.
As you improve your cardiovascular system, you reap the benefits even when you are sedentary. Because your body is more able to provide oxygen to all your cells efficiently, they are able to function better. A perfect example is someone with a desk job who finds time to exercise, who is now thinking more clearly, feeling less tired, and more likely to be a high performer while sitting at that desk. But more importantly, the exercising person is making a strong defense against diseases of all sorts. That’s because the circulatory system is providing vital nutrients and taking away cellular toxins more effectively 24 hours a day. That translates into less inflammation as the inflaming triggers are removed more quickly. That means a less stressful environment for the cells, making them less likely to start searching their genetic code library for some way to deal with the stress — this is the downward path that leads to cancer.
In this stress-laden society, you need the benefits that exercise, especially aerobic exercise, brings. Obviously it is best to reduce your stress, but when chronic stress prevails, you need the edge that exercise provides. Exercise gives you spare capacity to better absorb the impacts of stress. Chronic stress is what will tear you down and shorten your life, both in length and quality, so anything that reduces that impact means greater longevity. So how much exercise do you need? First let’s define terms, because the answer to that question is unique to your situation.
Have you MET this before?
The exertion level of various exercises is measured in “metabolic equivalent of task” units, known simply as METs. One MET is the energy that you use to sit quietly: except for sleeping, it is the minimum energy you can expend. Many of us are good at 1 MET TV watching, although some of the more enthusiastic among us, when watching sports, can spike their METs somewhat higher especially when their favorite team is losing. Light intensity activity, such as standing in line or walking leisurely, can use between 1.6 to 3 METs. Walking briskly or raking leaves is moderate physical activity consuming between 3 to 6 METs. Vigorous physical activities, such as running or shoveling snow go above 6, while running at 6 MPH is considered a 10 MET activity, and cross-country skiing is rated at 14 METs. As you can see, METs over 10 are hard to maintain for long.
If you do any of your own health research, there is no easier topic to research than the benefits of exercise. Thousands of studies exist, and no one even hints at any downside to exercise, so long as it isn’t done beyond your capacity. Exercise is a stressor, and stressing yourself faster than your ability to repair quickly is called an injury. There are a few over-exercisers who need to get that message, but most people aren’t exercising nearly enough to concern themselves over that.
Research galore
One review study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, reviewing data from more than 20.9 million observations from 199 studies, came to this consensus conclusion: “Specifically, we found that every 1-MET increase in CRF (cardiovascular fitness), which is the amount of energy used when sitting quietly, reduced the risk of early death from any cause and heart failure by 11-17% and 18%, respectively.” Reduction in mortality is the same as increasing longevity. This study spanned all age groups and covered any type of exercise generating METs — which is all exercise, but especially aerobics. The common factor: effective exercise involves “huffing and puffing” — those are clues you are challenging your body well. Thus, you can improve longevity no matter where you are in life.
This study didn’t say how many multiple METs you could pile on, getting the 11-17% improvement with each. Exercise can’t be maintained indefinitely, and there is potential for over exercising if you go to extremes, so what is the best mortality risk reduction you can achieve? This question is answered in a study published in Circulation, where researchers analyzed data from 116,221 adults. They used the “2018 physical guidelines for Americans” exercise levels (a minimum of 150 to 300 min/wk of moderate physical activity (MPA), 75 to 150 min/wk of vigorous physical activity (VPA), or an equivalent combination of both). Exceeding those minimums showed further increases in longevity. The study notes that “any combination of medium to high levels” of vigorous (75 to 300 minutes per week) and moderate physical activity (150 to 600 minutes per week) “can provide nearly the maximum mortality reduction,” which is about 35% to 42%.
What’s it worth?
If you are able to achieve a 10% increase in life span because of your higher longevity, that would mean that instead of living the average lifespan of 75 years, you would live, on average, to 82.5. A 20% increase would mean your average would be 90. True, the process isn’t linear, so exercise alone might not get you over 100, but add in an excellent diet, hydration, proper sleep, and low stress — that you could very well get you there and beyond. And you could enjoy those extra years as a vigorous and active person instead of languishing in some care facility. If you are young, you might not be so excited about living another 5, 10, or 15 years, but eventually it will matter to you.
When you are already 70, it matters a lot. Changing your life expectancy from 75 to 80, for instance, means you are getting a doubling of your remaining lifespan, and increasing it to 90 means a quadrupling of your remaining lifespan. What’s that worth to you?
Dr. Nemec’s Review
- The more you move, the longer you live.
- The more intensely you move the longer you live.
- The more you sit, the shorter you live.
- One motto states, “sitting is the new smoking.”
The key here is remodeling. The brain cells as well as the muscle cells are adaptable. This means if you stress them within limits, they rebuild stronger to adapt to the stress. This does not just happen in brain and muscle cells. It happens in all of the hundred trillion cells in the body.
The key is the stress has to be just the right amount — not too much and not too little. Too much stress and the cells break down and are damaged. Too little stress and the cells do not adapt because they weren’t pushed hard enough.
What’s the right amount of stress in the exercise?
When is cardiovascular the right amount of stress? It is when you are huffing and puffing. That means you’re in oxygen debt. That means you pushed your exercise to a good limit: once you enter oxygen debt, you have done sufficient exercise — this means the length of time isn’t as important as the intensity of the exercise. You can run for an hour at a certain pace and not be huffing and puffing, yet when you run faster in a 100 yard sprint, you’re totally out of breath. That means you have hit the oxygen debt in a much shorter period of time — in as little as 10 to 15 seconds — yet you have a better effect than from the one hour jog.
Busy life, more intense exercise
The less time you have, the quicker you must move, with more intensity in the exercise, to get the full benefit — just like a sprinter versus a long distance runner. Would you rather spend 15 seconds or an hour exercising? Ideally if you were going to be doing the sprinting, you would do three sets: so you do the 15 second exercise, then walk back and do it again, walk back and do it a third time.
This can be modified to an inside exercise bike, a stepper machine, even running up and down the stairs. You just need to get to the oxygen debt phase for the exercise to be cardiovascularly beneficial.
As both of the studies showed, the more cardiovascularly and aerobically fit you are, the longer you live. Many people save money for their retirements, and they have investments made so they can take it easy in life. Remember, this is counterintuitive: you do not want to sit back on the seashore and sip piña coladas. If you want to move to the seashore, then you better be doing those hundred yard sprints or something equivalent every day.
Retirement???
What does that word mean? Some of the definitions include:
- Ceasing to work
- Withdrawal from one’s position or occupation or from active working life
- To withdraw from action or danger: retreat; to withdraw especially for privacy; to fall back: recede; and to withdraw from one’s position or occupation.
Retirement is for people who didn’t like what they did for work. So you can retire from one thing and start something new. Now it’s time to find something that you love to do and do it the rest of your life.
The best physical investment you could ever make for your retirement is to do aerobic/cardiovascular and strength training every day of your life. This will not only extend your life, but it will give you greater function in every way: mentally, emotionally, and physically. Remember, an inflamed brain is not only a mentally and emotionally unstable brain, but also produces a stressed and inflammatory body.
The self absorbed retired life
Be aware! Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.
Here’s a story of a man that made an abundance of money. He said to himself, “I’ll put the money in a retirement account so I can draw the interest. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”
But God said to him, “Your time has come, you will now leave this place and sadly you have invested poorly because you failed to live in the moment and to be a vessel that I could flow through to others with the light of Love and Truth. Who then will benefit from your money?”
Life is extremely brief — each moment is extremely precious. Do not waste the moment! To live it fully only means one thing: it means that you are the light of your world for that moment you emanated the Love of your Father in heaven. You brought heaven to earth in that moment.
Any other life is no life; a life that is self indulged and self satisfying is a life of darkness without Love. Live in the light of Love of your Father in heaven and let that light shine from within your heart to everyone that’s in your moment. They will see something they’ve never seen before. They will hear something they have never heard before and they will experience something they’ve never experienced before: eternal life, the actual life of the Father in the here and now!
Here are the ways we can help you in your health journey:
- Outpatient Comprehensive Teaching and Treatment Program-has the most benefit of teaching, treatment, live classes and personalized coaching. This program has the most contact with Dr. Nemec with 3- 6 month programs that can be turned into a regular checking and support program for life. This is our core program that has helped so many restore their health and maintain that restoration for years.
- Inpatient Comprehensive Teaching and Treatment Program-is our four-week intensive inpatient program for those that are not in driving distance, usually over 4 hour drive. This is the program that is an intensive jumpstart with treatment, teaching, live classes and coaching designed for all our international patients along with those in the US that do not live in Illinois. This program is very effective especially when combined with our new membership program support.
- Stay at Home Program-is offered to continental US patients who cannot come to Revolution New Medicine but still want a more personal, customized plan to restore their health. This program also includes our Learn Membership Program.
- Membership Program is our newest program offered for those that want to work on their health at a high level and want access to the teaching at Revolution New Medicine along with the Forums: both Dr. Nemec’s posts and other members posting. And also, to have the chance to get personalized questions answered on the conference calls which are all archived in case you miss the call. The Membership Program has 3 levels to choose from: Learn, Overcome and Master. The difference is at the Overcome and Master levels you received one on one calls with Dr. Nemec personalizing your program for your areas of focus.
