Chapter 4

  From

“Seven Secrets of Anti-Aging”

By John P. Lenhart MD, DC

     Probably the most important secret of anti-aging is physical activity. Physical activity, along with caloric restrictions, requires the greatest amount of self-control and self-discipline. Since I am a specialist in rehabilitation, this is a topic dear to my heart. I have produced twenty-eight specific rehabilitative exercise videos to restore joint mobility and strengthen surrounding muscles.

     I also lecture internationally to physicians interested in alternative medicine and the anti-aging course at the American College for Advancement of Medicine. Most of these physicians do not fully realize the importance of physical activity in anti-aging. During my lecture, I ask everyone to stand in place and walk for the entire hour. I try to maintain a fairly steady pace and I count out the cadence for the doctors to walk in place. Periodically during my lecture, I look out to the audience to see how they are doing. I urge them on to keep up the pace.

     After fifteen minutes, and even more so after thirty minutes, a percentage of my audience stops exercising or greatly slows down. Mind you, these are physicians interested in anti-aging. That’s why they’re taking the course. How can doctors, proponents to be pioneers in alternative medicine and preventative medicine, be in such poor shape? Have they merely substituted pill pushing from big, mega-billion-dollar drug companies to vitamin pushing, or are they truly serious in making a change in themselves and their patients.

     I’m happy to say there are many in the audience who are vigorous in their exercise efforts, some even jumping up and down from one leg to the other, raising their knees high to get the full benefit of the exercise. They continue that marathon effort throughout the entire hour. Obviously there are some physicians who want to set good examples for their patients. 

     We live in a society of instant fixes. We want everything now. We want youth now. We want fun now. We want money now. We want sex now. We want self-gratification and self-indulgence now. Well, I hate to break the bad news to you, but it just does not work that way.

     You can't cheat nature. The rules of nature have been laid down over millions of years. You must be physically active to maintain joint function, muscle tone, mental acuity, hormonal function, and crucial metabolic pathways, including blood sugar transfer from our blood to our cells. If you cheat nature, you cheat yourself.

     Movement is life. Every atom in the universe has movement. Even steel atoms have movement. Cells have movement. Nerve and muscle cells have movement. A brain wave pattern involves movements. Our thoughts involve movements, with transfer of chemical messages from one cell to another. The basic law of motion is universal. Without movement, there is death.

     One of the great baseball players of the twentieth century thought that life was like a bar of soap. You gradually wear it out until there is nothing left. In his time frame, it made sense.

     But, in the twenty-first century, it does not make sense because we know a lot more about human physiology. We know a lot more about nerve transmission and mental acuity. We know you can take a feeble, frail, nursing home patient in his nineties and within two months, rehabilitate his muscle strength and increase it by 174%. We know that. The baseball player didn't.

     No matter how old you are, you can always improve your muscular performance significantly. Muscle cells do not just wear away like a bar of soap. They can be rebuilt, re-toned, re-strengthened. Your muscular strength and tone are directly related to your ability to be active when you are older. Why did the eighty-eight-year-old ball player at the Kids 'n Kubs baseball field walk with a brisk pace, pick up a bat, and walk back to the dugout just like a forty year old? Because he maintained his muscle tone and activity level. He was continuously active when he got older. In other words, he put in effort.

     You have got to plan ahead. What you put in is exactly what you get out. There are no shortcuts. I know how hard it is to get out there and exercise three times a week. But I’ll help you. At the end of this chapter, I’ll give you the Lenhart Physical Activity Formula for Anti-Aging, derived after considerable research and analysis of hundreds of research articles, as well as personal experience through observation of patients and neighbors.

     Sixty percent of the U.S. population is obese. Probably a greater percentage is inactive. Let's look at those statistics in economic terms. How many hundreds of billions of dollars have been made by the fast food industry to put on those wasted pounds? How many more billions were made by the biochemical industry to invent and process food so that it stays fresh forever, looks good, and tastes good? These chemists make a lot of money inventing chemicals to artificially fertilize the soil and kill all the pests in it, chemicals to grow food rapidly, and chemicals to preserve food and maintain its texture.

     As a matter of fact, they are engineering pesticides to be built into the fertilizer so spraying of crops will not be necessary. Soon they will produce genetically altered beef and chicken with feed that produces huge quantities of hormones. The animals will grow faster and slaughterhouses will become more profitable.

     Let's continue the economic aspect of your behavior further. Due to your poor lifestyle habits, the medical industry will get larger and larger. Baby boomers grew up on fast food, additives, chemicals, comfortable couches, easy chairs, high-fat and high-sugar munchies. As they age, drug companies and hospitals will make lots of money because those Boomers will need continual medical care.

     Drug companies will compete at breakneck speed to create new magic pills to fight these diseases we have because of our poor lifestyles. The government will be near bankruptcy because of the high costs of Medicare and Medicaid to supply all the services to those who didn’t take care of their bodies and minds and didn’t plan ahead.

     If you don't use it, you lose it.

     If you sit back, relax, and do not put any effort into a preventive anti-aging health care program, you will suffer the consequences in the later stages of life.

     Increasing your physical activity is the absolute cheapest, most efficient, most effective way to increase your life substantially, and at the same time, decrease all the diseases that plague us substantially in our older age. Physical activity done on a consistent, regular basis is, just by itself, the best anti-aging treatment available even without adding all the other possibilities mentioned in this book. The more of the Seven Secrets you undertake, however, the greater you increase your odds for a healthier, disease-free, mentally alert retirement.

     About twelve years ago, I moved into a neighborhood in which one neighbor was a very elderly gentleman; at least, he looked very elderly. He was seventy-three-years-old, frail, pale, and walked real slow. I saw him start to go on short walks up and down the block on a daily basis. Eventually he started bike riding and increased his distance progressively.

     Over the years as I watched this gentleman, I saw this old, frail person turn into a vigorous, strong, youthful individual. By the time he was eighty-five, he was walking at about a 3.5 mph pace in the morning and evening. If you saw him from the rear, not knowing how old he was, you would swear that he walked and looked like a forty-year-old. His legs had good muscle tone. He has a spring to his walk. He walked deliberately with a cadence and arm swing that one sees in younger people.¹

     Before this gentleman started his walking program, he was very, very ill and near death. The persistent, continuous physical activity that he made himself do not only caused him to recover, but it also caused him to grow biologically younger. It increased his stamina and kept him from developing many age-related diseases.

     One day I asked him what else he did to keep himself so young and fit and he said he lifted weights on a regular basis to keep up his muscle tone. 

     I have since observed other individuals following a similar protocol of continued physical activity who were able to stay young well into their eighties and nineties. Dancing is another excellent means of maintaining physical activity into old age.

     I noticed this with my uncle who went dancing twice a week. He died in his nineties. He did not even follow any other anti-aging programs, as outlined in this book. All he did was increase his physical activity by dancing well into old age.

     Why is maintaining physical activity so important? It is important because it preserves and strengthens your muscles, joints, ligaments, tendons, and bones. At the same time, it conditions your cardiovascular system and increases waste elimination, which ties into the first chapter of this book, Detoxification. By pumping your muscles, you are forcing excretion of waste products that have accumulated. Increased cardiovascular stress due to the exercise conditions and strengthens your heart.

     You may be asking at this time, "What does exercise have to do with conditioning your bones." To tell you the truth, most doctors don't know either. Only the physicians who have studied radiology realize there is direct correlation of both growth and strength, which is directly proportional to the stress placed on the bone.

     There is a law in radiology and bone growth called the Wolff's Law, stating that the bone will directly remodel itself based upon the force applied to it. In other words, putting it in laymen's terminology, the bone gets stronger only if it is stressed. If you do not put stress on the bone, it becomes soft, weak, brittle, and subject to breaks.

     What is one of the most common disabilities that occurs to older individuals? Hip fractures and other bone fractures. When people age, they don’t stress their bones enough to make them strong. Any type of small trauma can cause the bone to break. When the bones break, people become immobilized. Then begins a downward cycle.

     Immobility leads to muscle wasting. Muscle wasting leads to incapacitation. Incapacitation leads to further degeneration, loss of the ability to perform activities of daily living, and eventually, death.

     How many people have you known who broke bones at an elderly age, never recovered, and rapidly thereafter, ended up dying?

     Did you know that one week of bed rest causes you to lose twenty percent of your muscle mass. Every subsequent week of bed rest causes you to lose another twenty percent of the residual muscle mass. It does not take a mental genius to figure out how weak you can become in a very short period of time by not moving or stressing your muscles.

     If you don't believe me, look at the astronauts. What happens after they return from space missions? Do they have to be helped out of their space vehicles? We’ve seen it many times. They come out frail, weak, and unsteady on their feet. That’s because they didn’t have the opportunity to stress their bones and muscles adequately enough in space.

     It all goes back to the same rule. If you don't use it, you lose it — rapidly.

     Let's get back to the bed rest patients. How long do you think it would take for them to regain their muscle strength? If they lose twenty percent of their muscle mass with one week of bed rest, in order to regain that, it would take maximum contraction of the muscles on a daily basis for one week to regain only ten percent of the muscle mass they lost. Now, they have to do this for every muscle group that has been weakened. That’s a heck of a lot of work to regain ten percent.

     Think of it: You lose twenty percent of your muscle mass with one week of bed rest, but you can regain only ten percent of your muscle mass at maximum work of every muscle group. That doesn’t seem fair does it, but that’s the way biology works.

     You must continue to use your muscles, ligaments, and tendons and put stress on your bones to maintain function and prevent disability.

     In this chapter, I will get into some of the basic research data to back up some of my statements. If you look at the Kids 'n Kubs 1998 world champion baseball team in St. Petersburg, whose members were all over eighty, you’ll see that they have maintained a joyful, physical-activity-filled retirement. They have continuously moved their bodies, stressed their joints, ligaments, and tendons and constantly maintained muscle tone, which preserved the joints, bones, and overall health.

     Going back to my rehabilitation literature, let's go over what happens to your body with inactivity. Let's see how many diseases you will recognize simply due to immobility. By explaining to you the body's responses to immobility, you will be able to determine the beneficial effect of physical activity almost immediately because the effects of immobility and inactivity are just about the same as the effects of aging.

     Your central nervous system, which is the electrical system for your body, reacts to immobilization by decreasing your sensations. It decreases your ability to move. Your motions change, as well as your behavior, and you start to lose intellectual ability. In other words, you cannot think as clearly.

     Your muscular system, which makes all your bones move and gives you propulsion, allows you to stand, breathe, sit, and walk, not only loses up to twenty percent of its initial strength during one week of bed rest, but with immobilization, the endurance decreases, the muscles atrophy, and you lose coordination.

     What about your bones? I mentioned before that bones react to the stresses placed upon them. With immobilization, you get osteoporosis. You’ve heard of that. Osteoporosis is thinning of the bone, which leads to fractures, which leads to disability, which eventually leads to death.

     You also get fibrosis. This means you get scar tissues forming at your joints causing them to eventually fuse so you cannot move. Well, that's a bummer. If you can't move, you're in a dying state because the reverse of dying is movement.

     Then there’s your cardiovascular system, your heart and circulation. With immobility, you get increased heart rate. You get low blood pressure when you stand up or sit up, causing you to pass out. You also get blood clots. Blood clots lead to inability to breathe and suffocation, or, if they go to the brain, you get a stroke.

     All that happens because you are not moving. You also get what is called a decreased cardiac reserve. The heart just cannot pump as well to get the blood to the vital organs and muscles.

     What about your breathing? What happens to your breathing if you get immobilized? Well, you can’t breathe as well. You cannot take in as much air because of what is known as a restrictive impairment. You’re not getting as much oxygen because there is less oxygen going across your membranes and you need oxygen to live. One of the worse things that happens is you can’t cough as much. So, what's the big deal?

     Well, just think about it. We have to cough to get junk out of our lungs. If we accidentally aspirate something or if we have a cold or if we just have mucous building up in our lungs, we have to be able to cough to move it out. If you cannot cough, you’ll get a major infection, and you die because the lungs fill up with fluid. That increased fluid is a great opportunity for bacteria to set in and give you pneumonia and fever, which can lead to death; or worse, a virus gets in there and you get viral pneumonia, which we cannot treat with antibiotics. Unless you have great resistance, which you don't because you are immobilized and not moving, you will most likely die. All because you are not moving, which is something that is preventable for the most part.

     How about your digestive system? You lose your appetite and become constipated. What about your kidneys? You end up peeing more. You end up losing some of your sodium, which is very important for your body. You end up losing calcium. That explains why you become osteoporotic; calcium is taken out of your bone. You end up getting kidney stones, which are extremely painful.

     What about your skin? The skin starts to atrophy. Atrophy is a wearing away or thinning of the skin and you end up getting bed sores. Bed sores lead to big ulcers, which lead to infections — it is a really messy situation.

     What I have described to you is how the systems in the body break down just by immobilization and inactivity. If you look at older, frail, immobile individuals, you will see the same symptoms I described. It is a cascade of events. One thing leads to another, to another, until eventually someone dies.

     Let me give you an example, about the oldest man in Japan. He lives in Okinawa, an island noted for high nutrient foods, low calorie, restricted diets. He reached 112-years-old. He did agricultural work until he was eighty-five. That means he was doing hard, physical labor to keep his muscles and joints moving.

     He remained active after he stopped doing farm work. He was a Type A personality, very active mentally and physically. His blood tests were normal. He was able to take care of himself completely until he was 108-years-old when something happened to him and he had to go to a hospital. Well, guess what happened?

     Once he got to the hospital, he lost control of his life, his individuality and movements. What happens in a hospital? Immobilization. He deteriorated rapidly. He went from normal to dementia in three years.     This is a good example of what immobility does to you in a very rapid succession, especially if you are older.

     What about immobility of the brain? The Use It or Lose It principle holds true in all the systems of our body. Your ability to think clearly and make decisions rapidly is based upon the number of connections you have in your brain called dendrites. Dendrites are like small branches in an oak tree that fan out and give the tree its shape. Those things talk to each other.

     Let's assume you have a dense forest with a lot of these trees with the branches intermingling because they are so tightly packed. The more of these branches you have, the more they are going to intermingle.

     Let's say you have a small monkey jumping from one branch to another, and a bigger monkey is chasing him. The more of these little branches intertwined between the trees, the faster he’ll be able to run away and make a connection from one tree to the next and elude his predator and the faster will be his forward progress. Therefore, his forward progress will be unimpeded.

     However, if the trees had few branches and they were further apart, this little monkey would have great difficulty jumping from one tree to the next because there would be fewer branches available for him to grab. His progress would be slowed and he will have a greater chance of being caught by the larger monkey and possibly eaten. Your brain gets eaten if you don’t have those dendrites.

     There was a study done on rats placed into a playpen for an hour a day where the objects varied every day. They got to run around and constantly explore new environments. It was a very intellectually stimulating experience for the rats. Plus, a physically charged experience because they had to crawl up and down and around all these objects.

     Another group of rats didn’t get the exercise and were not put into this mentally challenging environment for an hour a day.

     At the end of the experiment, the rats were sacrificed and their brains studied. Guess what they found?

     The brains that were physically and mentally challenged had a large number of connectors (dendrites), like the sprouting branches of a tree, which are evident in very young people because they still have to learn a lot of new things. The rats not physically and mentally stimulated had considerably fewer connectors, few branches to make connections. That’s similar to older people who are not mentally challenged.

     You see, people used to think, just like the old bar of soap I mentioned before, that generally, your brain just wears out, deteriorates, and shrinks in size. If you take MRI's of people's brains, you will see atrophy in older individuals. There is a lot more fluid and a lot less gray matter, which is the stuff that does the thinking. However, it does not have to be that way.

     There is a group of researchers studying nuns in Mankato, Minnesota. They live in a convent and routinely live past their nineties. These nuns were progressive educators, so they donated their brains to science after they died, a noble cause.

     It was discovered that the college educated ones lived longer and because the religious order believed that an idle mind is the devil's playground, the nuns constantly did brain exercises — crossword puzzles, playing Jeopardy on television, constantly stimulating their minds to think. On autopsy, they found the nuns all had extensive brain dendrite formation at the time of death due to the intellectual stimulation. In other words, they were mentally young. The researchers noted that the ones who stayed mentally active did not suffer from dementia as much as those who didn’t. 

     Newer research is also finding that people who have lost some of their intellectual capacity can regain it by constantly stimulating their brains. They can actually grow new dendrites, not just keep the ones they have, which is a very, very encouraging finding. You can grow intellectually younger just by stressing your brain and making it work, constantly teaching it new things. It is the old Use It or Lose It philosophy.

     The more I started thinking about this, the more I started thinking about my own life, how I am constantly changing and learning new things. There must be some kind of hidden signal telling me that it is time for me to become intellectually challenged again. Once I have learned one topic and used it for a while, I tend to move on to another field of medicine or business or computer science that stimulates my intellect. I also like working on several things at the same time with different intellectually stimulating capacities. Every different thing you do stimulates a different part of your brain.

     Going back to the Darwinian theory of evolution — Darwin was the guy that did all of his research in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador where he discovered different birds developed in different ways and became highly specialized in food gathering and that is why they survived. He had a group of finches that were divergent; they could eat different types of seed and survive in different environments. Others could eat only one type of seed. If that plant became extinct, that species also became extinct.

     Your brain works in the same way. It has to have a large variety of stimuli to keep it going and keep it growing. If you develop only one certain aspect of your brain, the other aspects tend to wither away because they’re not being used and not being stimulated.

     You become one-sided and, as your spouse may think, boring. I hate to say this, but people who only talk about one thing, know one thing, work at one thing are not as interesting as people who know a lot about a lot of different things and can hold a variety of conversations on an intellectual level. A quest for knowledge is one of the most enduring qualities a human can have. That is what differentiates him or her from other mammalian creatures, such as apes.

     Let's summarize this subject by reminding you that the more connectors you have, the better is your ability to make connections. It holds true in the business world just as much as in your brain. The second part to this is that intellectual stimulation can cause dendrites to branch out, creating networks of new connections. Use It or Lose It.

     Muscles. What do muscles do? It seems obvious. They hold up your skeleton, protect your organs, and provide movement to the bony part. They must be used constantly to maintain performance and keep you alive. If you don’t believe me, look at people suffering from muscular dystrophy. You've seen the telethons on television about muscular dystrophy, but you probably never fully realized what that disease does. It slowly destroys your muscles until they wear out. When the muscles wear out, you can’t even sit in a wheelchair. After awhile, you can’t breathe, and you die. That is how important your muscles are. Your heart is a big muscle.

     Bones. Bones provide a framework, something to attach things to, such as does your house foundation and outside walls. They provide structure. They hold things up. They are attachment points for muscles. They facilitate movements through joints. They allow the joints to move in and out or in circles or whatever different joints in your body do, or talk, as I’m doing right now dictating this book. However, in order for those bones to work properly and not break and fall apart, they need stress to maintain their mineral content and the honeycomb patterns inside the bones that give it strength.

     Bones have a honeycomb structure inside them that is kind of a grid like, as used on the Eiffel Tower in Paris, a grid work of iron put together that reinforces one piece to the next and gives it strength. Bones do the same thing. If you don’t stress these bones, if you don’t move the bones and constantly use the bones, they lose that grid work.

     When you lose some of that grid work, what happens to the structure? It weakens. Just think if you took half the supporting structures out of the Eiffel Tower and a big wind came along. Do you think the Tower would stay standing or do you think it would collapse? The same thing happens to your bones.

     You have to use them. You have to stress them in order for them to keep on building new bone and creating new supporting structure, called the trabeculae.

     Bone is constantly reinforcing itself by any stress put on it to make sure it is the strongest to bear that weight. So, fat people gradually get stronger bones because they have more weight to carry. However, there is a down side to it: The bone joints cannot bear the weight as easily so they wear out.

     Bone joints are made of cartilage and cartilage does not rebuild itself as easily as bones do to accommodate the stress placed upon it. Large people develop bad knees and bad joints because too much stress is placed upon those joints. However, if these joints are used constantly and lubricated through motion, there is less chance of them wearing out and greater chance of new layers of cartilage forming over the joint.

     There was a study done of a one-year walking program for women. What they found was that over that one year they had an increase of calcium in the top of the hip joint. However, there was no increase in calcium inside the wrist bones. Since women are prone to hip fractures, it showed that walking increased the strength of their hips. However, because the stress was only placed upon the hip joints and not the wrists joints. The extra bone deposits were placed where the stress was placed — in the hips.

     So, what are the benefits of healthy bones, muscles, and ligaments? You get movement without impediment or disease. You get movement without pain. Isn't that wonderful? You prevent bone damage. You prevent muscular or ligament destruction. You gain power, speed, mobility, freedom, and a greater quality of life. You prevent debilitation and death. Use It or Lose It.

     You may be saying, "That's fine, but I'm ninety. I didn't know about all your data. I didn't read this book till now."

     I have good news for you. A group of ninety-year-olds sitting around in a nursing home with nothing to do agreed to participate in a strengthening program. They did eight weeks of high intensity resistance training. The age group was eighty-seven to ninety-six. They trained one muscle group, the quadriceps, which is in the front of your thigh. In just eight weeks, they found increased strength of 174%. ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FOUR PERCENT IN JUST EIGHT WEEKS. By strengthening that one muscle group their walking speed increased by 48%. These were eighty-seven to ninety-six year-olds! They were able to rebuild their muscle mass and regain strength by 174%. To me, that is remarkable. It tells me that Use It or Lose It' does not necessarily mean lose it forever. You can regain it.

     Remember, movement is life. If you regain your muscle strength, you regain movement, you regain freedom, and you regain your quality of life.

     Take a look at John Glenn, a seventy-seven year old astronaut. That's right, at seventy-seven years old, he returned to space. NASA scientists said he handled the rigors of space every bit as well as astronauts half his age. He suffered no more bone mass loss or muscle loss than the younger astronauts. His heart rate before, during, and after the flight was actually better than the average of twelve younger male astronauts. Isn't that amazing? The message is clear.

    At seventy-seven you can do as well as a forty-year-old astronaut.

    Glenn walked several miles a day, which I believe is the main reason he did so well. He also does some weight training and eats a balanced diet. Dr. David Williams, director of NASA's Life Science Division and a former shuttle astronaut himself, stated that Glenn challenged the widespread notion that all seniors are frail individuals. 

     John Glenn did just as well as his younger counterparts. He spent four nights in a wired-up sleep suit. He provided seventeen blood samples and wore a small data recorder for twenty-four hours to monitor his heart rate. He also swallowed a capsule holding a radio transmitter and temperature sensor. How much more evidence do you need to see that at just about any age you can become young again through physical activity. Glenn conditioned himself to the status of a young person. If he lost any functions, he regained them. 

     An interesting finding was that like all other astronauts, Glenn experienced some balance problems once he returned to earth, but he recovered just as quickly as the other astronauts, which surprised the scientists. Many elderly people have difficulty with balance.

     You are never too old to start. Exercise improves circulation and cardiovascular life. It also builds and remodels bone and builds new muscle.

     There is a study that measured the effects of physical activity and calcium intake on the bone mass of healthy women of different ages. Guess what they found?

     If they took calcium alone, it had no effect on their bone mineral density. However, the people who exercised had a five percent increase in the bone mineral density in the exercised bones. Remember, I mentioned that you have to put stress on the bone in order for it to grow. However, there was no increase in bone mineral density in the non-weight bearing bones — the bones that were not exercised.

     The older you are, the more benefits your bones have from exercise. Exercise of weight bearing bones builds mineral content, size, and strength.

     Another important component of physical activity is that exercise decreases diabetes and reduces the risk of non-insulin-dependent diabetes. There are a number of studies showing the benefits of exercise on reducing the risk of diabetes.

     With Diabetes you have a higher blood sugar level. Normally there is a decline in insulin sensitivity associated with aging, inactivity, and obesity. If you lose weight, as the previous chapter discussed, and increase your physical activity, you will increase your insulin sensitivity and decrease your risk of diabetes. Diabetes is a chronic condition that greatly accelerates aging and often leads to premature death.

     There was a study done in Finland with 898 men. The men were subjected to moderately intense physical activity at high levels of cardio-respiratory fitness. It was found that after four years the more active individuals had a reduced risk of non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus of forty-four percent. That is very significant. That is reducing your chance of diabetes almost in half just by increasing your physical activity. If you lose weight, you do even better.

     They also took the overweight, high blood pressure people in this group who had a positive family history of diabetes and who were engaged in moderate-to-intense physical activity at least forty minutes a week. They reduced their risk of non-insulin-dependent diabetes by fifty-four percent compared to men who did not participate in such activities. What this is telling you is that the fatter you are, the more out of shape you are, and the more risk you have, the greater you will benefit from exercise. It is never too late to start a physically active program.

     Another interesting thing that happens when you are physically active is you increase your growth hormone level. There was another study that measured the hormone levels, as well as the mineral levels and cardiovascular levels of endurance-trained postmenopausal women and sedentary women.

     The endurance-trained postmenopausal women (probably greater than forty-five to fifty) had lower body fat, lower weight, and higher aerobic capacity. When normalized for weight, the bone mineral density was higher in the spine. The interesting part is the growth hormone level was increased.

     Growth hormone is something I will talk about in a future chapter. It has been associated with youth. The theory is, the greater your growth hormone level, the more youthful characteristics you will have, such as greater lean body mass, less fat, more endurance, and a more youthful appearance. Exercise naturally increases your growth hormone level.

     "Well, that's fine, but I've abused my body for all these years. This isn't going to do me any good." You are wrong!

     The more you abused your body in the past, the greater your benefits. It has been proven over and over again in numerous studies that people in terrible shape can greatly benefit from physical activity. As a matter of fact, they have the most to gain because they are the closest to the grave.

     Some of the major impact studies I consider important were done at Harvard University, Harvard Alumni Health Study, Cooper Clinic in Dallas, Texas, a very well known aerobic and cardiovascular clinic, The Honolulu Heart Program, and in Finland, where they studied twins.

     In the Harvard study, they took 17,321 men and studied them for approximately twenty-five years. They concluded that the men who were vigorously active had about fifteen to twenty-five percent less chance of dying. Physical activity also decreased coronary artery disease, decreased high blood pressure, decreased non-insulin-dependent diabetes, decreased colon cancer, and increased life. One of the findings was that only vigorous activity had the remarkable difference in prolonging life. You had to expend about 1500 calories a week. Of the 17,321 men studied, there were 259 deaths of vigorously active individuals and 380 deaths from the non-vigorously active individuals. That’s a big difference. There was a direct relationship between total physical activity and mortality. What does that mean?

     That means, the more active they were to a certain limit, the less chance there was of them dying. One hundred twenty-one more people died who were less active. That is almost one-third more deaths just because they were not engaged in physical activity.

     At the Cooper Clinic in Dallas, Texas, they wanted to know if people who were initially in very poor condition could benefit from physical activity. They studied 9,777 men, ages twenty-two to eighty, with a five-year follow-up. They found, as expected, people who were fit in the beginning and end had the lowest death rate. However, the people who were unfit and became fit during the five-year follow-up study had a forty-four percent reduction of the risk of death. This included all causes of death.

     This should hit you between the eyes like a sledgehammer. If you can decrease your chance of dying by forty-four percent, which is almost half, for all causes of death, wouldn't you jump on it?

     I would go out and buy a treadmill and start walking every day, or just get a good pair of sneakers and start walking in a safe neighborhood. How much more proof do you need to get off your butt and get going? Are you going to spend all your money when you get older on doctors, hospitals, and nursing homes? It is your choice.

     Remember, exercise pumps out toxins. It prolongs life, and walking prolongs life.

     Let's get into the walking aspect. There was a study done in Honolulu of retired men by the Honolulu Heart Program. They took 707 non-smoking retired men from ages sixty-one to eighty-one, and did a twelve-year follow-up. They recorded the distance these people walked. What they found is the more miles a person walked per day, the less was the chance of dying.

     The men who walked less than one mile a day died two times faster than those that walked two miles a day. Their death rate was 40.5% versus 23.8% for the ones who walked two miles a day. What does that tell you?

     Based upon this study and other studies I have reviewed and lectured on, the magic number is two miles a day or more. Guess what else they found?

     The most common cause of death in the sixty-one to eighty-one year old age group was cancer. The death rate for the people who walked less than one mile a day of cancer alone was 13.4%. For those who walked more than two miles a day, the death rate from cancer was 5.3%. That means those who walked less than one mile a day had twice the chance of dying from cancer than those who walked two miles or more per day. What a difference just one mile makes. Isn't that amazing?

     That extra mile must trigger very important protective mechanisms in the body that keep your chemistry at balance, keep your body from going haywire, pumping out the toxins, increasing your cardiovascular fitness, increasing the oxygenation and nutrition to your cells.

     Whenever I have a chance to learn from my patients about aging and longevity, I jump at the chance. Recently, I had a hair stylist who came in as a patient. I found out that she worked as a hair stylist in several adult living facilities, which I thought was quite a niche market for a beautician. I asked her about her observations of her older clients, questions primarily about their health, alertness, and what type of clients they made.

     One interesting observation she told me was that the hundred-year-olds she does hair for are more active, walk better, and have a much better attitude about life than the seventy-five- to eighty-year-olds. She also said their minds and memories are better.

     Another thing that came out is that the hundred-year-olds were more resilient. They could overcome setbacks better and were much more pleasant to deal with than the sickly seventy-five- to eighty-year-olds.

     She said that the younger ones who were sickly, less active, and not as alert mentally always worried about things. They talked about negative things all the time, worrying that they’d break their hip someday. Don't you know, they do break their hips. The ones who are sick always talk about being sick. The optimistic patients never seem to get as ill. The older patients seem to live for the moment. They enjoy life and they overcome obstacles through a positive mental attitude and an active lifestyle.

     That is an interesting observation because it mirrors exactly what I have been finding in my research and my own observations. The more active you are, the less time you have to worry. The less you worry, the less chances you will have of developing a physical ailment that can greatly debilitate you and lead you to an earlier grave.

     There is no reason to constantly worry about your physical state because you can do something about it.

     There was another study done at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas, this one involving 25,000 men and 7,000 women. Researchers wanted to determine how people benefit from physical activity regardless of the shape they were in when they started. The study lasted nineteen years. Low, moderate, and high fitness levels were established for smokers, people with high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and other health conditions.

     They found: 1. That low fitness was an important precursor to mortality, meaning the less fit you were, the greater your chance of getting ill; and 2. That the protective effect of fitness held for smokers as well as nonsmokers, those with and without elevated cholesterol, and unhealthy and healthy persons.

     Everyone benefited from increased physical activity. People with low cardio-respiratory fitness benefited, as did moderate and high cardio-respiratory fitness, as determined by smokers and nonsmokers.

     Every category improved with fitness. Those with normal blood pressure, moderately high blood pressure, and high blood pressure all systematically improved after an exercise program. The same thing was true for people who were generally ill all the time.

     Remember my neighbor I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, how I first met him when he was in his seventies? When I moved out of the neighborhood, he was well into his eighties and was in better shape than he’d been in his early seventies. The same observation I had on this one subject was observed at the Cooper Clinic with 32,000 subjects, which is the same observation my hair stylist patient noticed in her adult living facility centurions.

     By the way, did you know exercise also decreases breast cancer by twenty to thirty-three percent? There are a couple of studies done about three years apart, one in Norway and another in the United States, which came up with these conclusions.

     No matter what you say, some people will also be skeptical. You know why — because they don’t want to put in the effort. They think they are doomed. They think it is in their genes. They say, "Whatever happens, happens. I was destined to have cardiovascular disease...or cancer...or diabetes...." They just give up.

     I knew there would be objections to my findings, so I dug deep in the literature and found a study done in Finland, which was titled, Relationship of Leisure Time, Physical Activity, and Mortality the Finnish Twin Cohort Study. They knew that physical activity and fitness were believed to reduce premature mortality. What they did not know was if genetic factors modified this effect. (The, 'It's in your genes' hypothesis.) They went on to study twins. Twins are pretty much the same. They have the same parents, the same environment, the same food. Identical twins have the exact same genes because they come from the same egg.

     In this study done between 1977 and 1994, they took 7,925 healthy men and 7,977 healthy women from ages twenty-five to sixty-four. They classified them into conditioning exercisers and sedentary people. The conditioning exercisers walked vigorously for thirty minutes at least six times a month. The other group had no leisure physical activity. (I consider thirty minutes six times per month nothing.) However, they considered that conditioning. Even with that minimal amount of effort, about one-and-a-half days a week of walking thirty minutes, the results of the twins where one died during the studied period showed the odds ratio for death was sixty-six percent for occasional exercisers and forty-four percent for conditioning exercisers.

     That means the people who walked vigorously at least thirty minutes at least six times a month had a twenty-one percent less chance of dying than the occasional exercisers; and, this was in twin pairs just walking thirty minutes six times a month.

     When all the results from all the twins were compared, adjusted for age and sex, you had a seventy-one percent chance of dying as often as a sedentary exerciser if you were an occasional exerciser, and a fifty-seven percent chance of dying as often as a sedentary person if you were a conditioning exerciser. You had a twenty-nine percent less chance of dying if you exercised occasionally and forty-three percent less chance of dying if you exercised vigorously. To me, those are remarkable figures.

     Based upon the twins studied, if you exercise vigorously only six times a month for thirty minutes by walking, you reduce your death rate by more than forty percent. The overall conclusion of this study was that familial factors did not explain the mortality differences by physical activity found in an individual-based analysis. Occasional and conditioning twin exercisers had reduced risk of death compared to sedentary twins.

     I think you should re-read that last line several times until it sinks in. One interesting finding in this study when I reviewed the raw data was that women seemed to do better than the men. If you took the sedentary women and let's assume they had a 100% chance of dying at the end of the study, the conditioning women had a twenty-four percent chance of dying. That means they reduced their chance of death by seventy-six percent just by walking vigorously thirty or more minutes six times a month. It's amazing. Absolutely amazing.

  So wake up. The only thing that is keeping you from increasing your life span is you.

     There have been other studies done that measure the benefits of lifestyle activity where they measured how active you were during the day. As expected, people who were more physically active during the day did better in their blood pressure, as well as in their body fat. What they are trying to show you is that it is not always necessary to have a structured physical activity program to get beneficial results from physical activity. However, the people in that group alone who did have a structured program had greater improvement in the cardio-respiratory fitness than those who were just more physically active in the daytime. So, you will get more benefit out of a structured program that you do on a regular basis.

               Movement is life.

              If you don't move, you die.

              It is as simple as that.

     You get progressive decomposition if you don't move due to lack of muscle and joint stress, which eventually leads to rapid death.

     These statements above are extremely important because they wrap up in a nutshell exactly what happens to you if you are not physically active. If you do not have good muscle strength and coordination, you will trip and fall more and will not recover as easily

     If your bones are weak because they have not been stressed, you break them more often, which will lead to further disability, bed rest, which can lead to pneumonia and eventual death, or you will have a greater chance of developing colon cancer, heart disease, and as shown in the Honolulu study, a fifty percent greater chance of developing all cancer just by not being physically active.

     "Okay, okay. I've had enough data. Now tell me what to do." Here it is.

     What are your options? There are different types of exercise: 1) cardiovascular/aerobic exercise; 2) strength building or bulking exercise like weightlifting with free weights or machines; 3) load-bearing, such as walking, biking, or running; 4) rowing, which combines a lot of different type of movements; 5) you can be engaged in sexercise. (Did you know there was a study that men who have more orgasms live longer? I'm not making this up; it was an actual study.) Another form of exercise I think is really good is tennis. 6) Golf-walking is a good form of exercise as long as you don't ride the cart. A golf swing, however, is not the best thing for your low back. 7) Skiing, such as cross-country and down hill is a good form of exercise. 8) Swimming has been a favorite exercise of mine for a number of reasons. It promotes range of motion throughout all your joints and it helps in resurfacing your joints as they become arthritic. 9) Dancing is one of my favorite exercises because it reduces stress and promotes joint movement. At the same time you are moving and having fun, you are building up new bone, strengthening your bones at the same time, reducing the risk of fractures. It can be a great social experience and you can do it well into your nineties. I saw an article recently about a ninety-eight-year-old woman in Naples, Florida, who still dances several times a week. She had an interesting motto: "Smile awhile and while you smile, another smiles. Soon there are miles and miles of smiles. And life is worthwhile because you smile."

     You should move as much as you can and reduce the stress on your joints by weight maintenance. Caloric restriction is one of the better ways to do it. That alone will increase your life.

     You should exercise your mind and body at the same time that you eat less. If you do that, you’ll live longer and know that you are living. If you stress your body through exercise, give it proper nutrients, and reduce your caloric intake, you’ll have a better balance in the body's chemical reactions. Your body and mind will give you much better service.

     Remember the studies I quoted with the rats who were mentally stimulated and the nuns who were mentally stimulated well into their nineties and had brains of young people, and the ninety-year-olds who increased their muscle strength by 174%. All of this is possible. And don’t forget our astronaut who performed as well as forty-year-olds after his space flight.

     Everything is possible if you get moving. What did Jack LaLane, the old guru of exercise, say? When he wrote his book at the age of eighty-three, he said, "Old age is always twenty years away." He also stated, "There ain't no fountain of youth. What you put into your body is exactly what you get out of it." How true that is.

     And it is true in everything. What you put into your life, you get out. How you make your bed is exactly how you will sleep on it. What you sow is exactly what you will reap.

     Now for the finale: The Lenhart exercise program for longevity. I came up with this formula after reviewing hundreds of articles on physical activity from the lectures I give to physicians who take the anti-aging seminars. If you follow these examples, you will greatly, greatly increase your chance of living longer and healthier, as well as knowing that you are living by staying mentally alert and continuously stay excited about life.

     1.   Pump iron for 15-minutes a day to discomfort. That means, lifting various types of weights to stress your muscles.

     2.   Change the muscle group each time you weight train. That means, change the muscles you are exercising. If you are doing certain upper body exercises one day, you do different upper body exercises the next day or lower body exercises. It is not that difficult with free weights to cover most of the muscle groups in the body.

     3.   Walk three miles in forty-five minutes or to a good sweat. Why is that important? You have to walk to a pace that actually stresses your body to a certain extent. You have to sweat a little but not a lot. Just so you are slightly clammy. Sweating helps release toxins through the pores in your skin. It also builds up your cardiovascular fitness by increasing your heart rate and increasing your oxygenation.

     4.   Use comfortable shock-absorbing walking shoes to reduce the ground reactive forces on your joints. One of the major problems people have with jogging or running is that they destroy their knees or ankles. I strongly recommend walking with cushioned shoes to reduce joint stress that can eventually lead to osteoarthritis. I do not feel it is necessary to run to exhaustion and destroy your joints at the same time. All that is really necessary is to walk at a good pace to the point of sweating.

     5.   Smile and think happy thoughts while you are exercising. It is very important to have a good mental attitude and positive mindset most of the time, based upon my observations and the observations of others, and of the people who live to be very old. The ones who have the best mental attitude seem to do the best later in life.

     6.   Constantly stimulate your mind by learning new things and making your mind work. Your mental stimulation should also be varied, a diversity of interests and not limited to one thing.

     7.   Do the above exercise combinations at least three times per week.

     Exercise is work, but the rewards are well worth it.

 You will not only add years to your life, but you will add quality of life to your years.

Read the "Secrets of Anti-Aging" Conclusion