You don’t have to kill yourself to live longer!
Exercise is life! In order to be considered alive we must move. The biological definition of life is anything that can move and react to it’s environment, gain and utilize energy and reproduce cells, is alive. Healthy aging is about living a vigorous life. It is not natural to live our lives motionless in front of a TV set or computer, yet that seems to be how most of us live these days and then we wonder why life has lost much of it’s flavor. It wont be long before medical science can pack our bodies in cotton and fulfill all our biological requirements with drugs and machines keeping us alive in intensive care without our having to do anything at all, but even biologically that’s not living!
After securing liberty through military technology, our best scientific minds are now heavily researching the other two goals of our nation, life and the pursuit of happiness. A preponderance of that research is finding that a key ingredient to healthy aging is exercise, so why has that become such a dirty word in our society?
Enjoyable Physical Activity verses Boring
Studies in other societies may provide the answer to this question. In China for example you can go out to Tianamen Square in Beijing at 5:30 on any morning, and depending on the weather find anywhere from one to two million people doing their Tai-Chi exercises. Are the Chinese better People than Americans? Are they more disciplined or better educated, that they do their exercise and we do not? No they are not. It’s really very simple, they have learned that exercise is fun. The type of exercise they do is designed to be enjoyable where we have cultivated the attitude that exercise is hard work, that it hurts, we even use exercise as a form of punishment with gym teachers making students run laps when they misbehave or drill Sargent’s making marines do push ups. We even design exercise equipment to be boring by putting newspaper racks on treadmills. When we pass someone walking on the street as we drive two blocks to Seven Eleven we automatically think their car must be broken down or that poor soul is too poor to have a car. It doesn’t even occur to us that they may be exercising unless they have jogging shorts on.
My grandmother lived well into her eighties (we are not sure exactly how old she was because she would never tell) without ever exercising a day in her life, so why bother? Because she spent the last twenty years of that life in frail health. We may be living longer these days but that doesn’t mean we are living well.
Add 20 Years of Healthy Living to your Life and a Trillion Dollars to Our Economy
According to Dr. Walter Boritz former head of the American Geriatric Society, we can slow down the rate of aging by one half, by exercising properly. Setting back the onset of disability by as much as 20 years. For each hour we exercise we add an hour to our lives, and more importantly, we can add many functional, enjoyable years to our lives. The average person can expect to spend the last ten years of their lives frail and dependent upon others and society, and the last one year completely dependent, Exercise can prevent this for the greatest majority of us who choose to get out there and do it.
The American Aging Association estimates that for each year of functional lifespan we add to the population’s average we add about 1.25 Trillion to the economy. Exercise alone has been shown to add two years to life expectancy even if begun after the age of 60 and as much as twenty years of healthier lifespan.
For sedentary older adults simply walking can improve fitness levels by 10-30%. setting back the date of dependency by 10-20 years. Even small changes in fitness can result in substantial improvements in activities of daily life in formerly sedentary individuals. This applies to 92%of older adults in the U.S. who according to the Centers for Disease Control do no meaningful exercise whatsoever.
One thing I’ve learned since becoming involved with the Tai-Chi Project way back when Jacqui and I were at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center is that exercise can be enjoyable. That people can get the health benefits they want and have fun at the same time. We had a contest among our program participants to see who could do their Tai-Chi in the most exotic location. Several went together to do their Tai-Chi exercises in Washington Park under the moonlight. One went on vacation to Norway and did it at midnight on the Arctic Circle with the sun coming up over the horizon another played Tai-Chi on the White Cliffs of Dover in England. Our top winner did hers at 4:30 in the morning under a full moon in front of the Taj Mahal in India. All reported that it was an experience they would remember for the rest of their lives and that is what exercise is all about, the rest of our lives. Living a long life and a strong life and enjoying the process along the way, you don’t have to kill yourself to live longer.
To find out more information on any of our programs I’ve mentioned please call
(303) 744 -7676. or see Taichidenver.com.