Improve Your Life Quality Using Longevity Guide Fitness Factors

This longevity guide for fitness factors is offered as a preventive advisory to help you better manage your healthcare and wellness affairs. The cornerstone of our consumer directed healthcare and fitness culture is that no one will mind your business better than you will, if you know how. Our purpose is to show you how.

It would be terrific if we could invoke Woody Allen's longevity rule that says “I don’t want to know when I’ll die. Just tell me where, so I can avoid the place.”

It’s not that simple, so this idea requires four things that we hope are true for most of us most of the time.

1. That you can achieve a quality, fulfilling life that you enjoy so that you want to continue it and to improve it. The basis is a positive attitude. Not always present, but always available if we seek it.

2. That you are sufficiently motivated to maintain your quality of life so that you will expend the effort to achieve it and exercise the discipline to maintain it.

3. Avoid conduct that detracts from long life. Rejecting the attractive but harmful often requires more discipline than doing the tedious.

4. If you wander from your intended regimen, exercise self-control to get back on the right track. Return to good habits as soon as you can.

The Longevity Game

A creative and fun way to help you take charge of your fitness issues can be found in “longevity games” that predict human lifespan. They seek to make individual lifespan projections based on heredity, environment and personal conduct factors that affect us. They point the way to the things we should do, the things we should avoid and the things which we can not control that affect our health and our life spans.

Because it incorporates vital “fixed factors” that we can not control, we favor “The Longevity Game”, as published by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company. We do not represent or have any association with Northwestern Mutual. To see and play Northwestern Mutual’s game, go to Longevity Game.

Northwestern’s game uses an average life expectancy of 76 years as its baseline. Lifestyle factors allow you to add to or subtract from that baseline to estimate your own life-expectancy. We cite this game primarily as a reference point to discuss the lifestyle factors that you should or should not use in seeking to improve the quality and length of your life.

Exercise: Long-duration, high-intensity aerobic exercises have long been considered the best approach for weight loss, for body-enhancement and for improving cardio-pulmonary health. Recent research has indicated that such long-duration exercises that emphasize hundreds or even thousands of repetitions in an endurance pattern lead to overuse injuries that interrupt program participation.

Endurance exercises are also less effective for health goals than high-intensity, short-duration exercises that emphasize short recovery intervals between high exertion routines. Studies show that alternating high exertion and recovery routines for short durations can have positive cardio-pulmonary results.

Recent exercise developments indicate that burning fat, building muscle and developing better cardio-pulmonary health with improved body appearance can be achieved with three weekly workouts of 20 to 30 minutes each. Rather than increasing the duration of workouts, seek to increase intensity over a shorter period of time, with mini-rest intervals.

If you run or jog, don’t increase your distance but reduce the time to complete your normal course in not more than 30 minutes. Replace a long steady pace with intervals of 80 percent plus of maximum effort, interrupted by intervals of lesser effort, say 20 percent, to recover.

For example, run hard for a minute, then jog or walk for a minute, then run hard again, then jog or walk again, and repeat for a maximum of ten cycles. Start slowly and build up your heart rate and lung capacity until maybe you can run hard for one-and-a-half to two minutes, but jog or walk for only thirty seconds to recover before repeating the high intensity phase. Could you work out for longer than 30 minutes? Sure, but not necessary for optimizing fitness.

A great benefit of this routine is that you can do all the stretching and the work your body needs in 30 minutes a session, 90 minutes a week. Be smart. Don’t over-extend yourself, if you’re not in good physical shape. Start low and slow and build up over a few weeks.

To strengthen and tone muscle and to improve body shape and flexibility, use the same short duration approach (repetitive cycles of high intensity followed by low intensity) with body weight resistance and stretching exercises. If you use an exercise machine of any type, start slowly for the first couple of minutes, then go into your high-intensity / low-intensity sequences.

To restore and build lung capacity, exercise to the point that you have to pant to catch your breath. Go to the recovery interval, then repeat the high intensity.

Stretch at the beginning and at the end of every workout. Before a workout, use dynamic stretching, which repeatedly moves into and out of a stretch position until tight muscles loosen up. Replicate the motions you will use during your workout routine, moving slowly with only hesitation stops at each movement extremity. If preparing to run, you would slowly swing each leg alternatively in a running motion, gradually increasing the range of motion for, say, ten repetitions.

After a workout, use static stretching to lengthen and sedate shortened, tightened muscles which were used during that workout. For example, after running, stretch calf and hamstring muscles of each leg until you feel the stretch tension. Hold tension for 30 to 60 seconds.

Anti-Aging Fitness: As we age, three major reasons that we decline physically are reduced lung capacity, increased body fat and reduced flexibility. The short duration, alternating high intensity / recovery phases of workouts have major health benefits in these areas of need.

First, it helps maintain higher lung capacity. Second, it stimulates the body to burn fat calories for some time after the workout, thus helping control weight and maintain a better body mass index. The stretching components before and after the exercise routines help address the flexibility issue.

Another major benefit is that this program can be achieved at home with three weekly sessions of not more than 30 minutes each, including the warm up and stretching components. Anybody can find time for that if they want. The results are that you will feel better and look better. It will help you be more confident and stay actively involved in living your life.

To achieve better overall body fitness, you could vary each weekly workout. For example, on Monday, you stretch and run or walk. On Wednesday, you stretch and do a weight / resistance routine. On Saturday, you stretch and do maybe a stair step or an aerobic exercise routine. Mix it as you want, just get your heart rate up.

Housework: Could you turn housework into a workout? Well, maybe, if you replicate the high-intensity / low-intensity exercise sequences that will push your heart and breathing rates to necessary high counts. And, if you devise a range of housework motion routines that tone your body as well as exercise routines will. But, since you only need three 30-minute sessions per week for this plan, wouldn’t it be easier just to try an exercise plan regularly?

Yoga: How about yoga? Yoga is beneficial for stress-relief, muscle tone and maintaining flexibility. We doubt that it will push your heart and breathing rates to the high limits that most benefit you. Include yoga sessions in your fitness program if you like as your third weekly routine, better yet as a fourth weekly routine.

Longevity Benefits: A Harvard School of Public Health study indicated that people who were sedentary and overweight increased their risk of premature death by 142 percent, while those who exercised some, but less than 30 minutes a day, decreased risk of early death by 55 percent.

For longevity, if you exercise three or more times per week, you can add three years. If you do not exercise at least three times weekly, subtract three years. Those thirty minute workouts three days a week could make a difference of feeling better for six years longer.

For ideas on Longevity Fixed Factors, go to Fixed Factors.

For ideas on Longevity Variable Factors, go to Variable Factors.

For ideas on Longevity Diet Factors, go to Diet Factors.

For ideas on Longevity Nutritional Factors, go to Nutritional Factors.

For ideas on Longevity Life Quality Factors, go to Life Quality Factors.

If you have questions or need additional information, go to our Contact Us Page.

WARNING: NEVER CANCEL YOUR CURRENT INSURANCE UNTIL REPLACEMENT COVERAGE IS APPROVED AND IN PLACE.

To get a Fitness Proposal and health plan quote, go to the appropriate Health Plan Quote for individuals, for families, or for groups.