Welcome to Senior Fitness.com! Your #1 source for lifetime fitness information; vital strategies for promoting senior health, life-long strength, vigor and independence.
Learn how to slow and reverse Age-related Functional Decline. We bring you the latest strategies to optimize senior health and fitness into advanced age. The time to start is now; the place to start is here.
Begin by reading How to best use this site: Take the tour. Then act on the knowledge; you can improve health and fitness at any age by using the strategies on these pages.
The Latest Word on Senior Fitness
News Roundup - Recent health news worth talking about
Exercise - The primary driver for reversing age-related functional decline.
Aerobics - to maintain and recover your heart/lung/vascular fitness.
Weight Training - to trigger your anabolic, or muscle-building process; muscle you need to look good and move well, be stronger than you look and dissolve fat 24 hours a day.
Yoga, Pilates, Stretching & Balance - Building poise, posture, flexibility, strength, endurance, balance and grace, while connecting with the spirit within - speed and power aren't the whole story.
Thinking and Attitude - One person's junk is another's treasure; it's all a matter of thinking and attitude. Exercise can be an extremely pleasurable experience; you just have to get your brain to think so.
Hypnosis for Change - Ancient and mysterious; a powerful modern tool for change. Do you wish to be somehow different, better than you were yesterday? Then make hypnosis a part of your strategy of improvement.
Neuro Linguistic Programming - NLP - Strategies and tools for rapid mental and behavioral change that serve your goals.
Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) - Rapid emotional and physical healing by melding acupressure meridian stimulation with linguistic suggestion
Disease and Healing Protocols - Life Extension Foundation's comprehensive review of common diseases and their alternative protocols for healing and resolving the root causes.
Hormone Management - Hormones drive most bodily functions; learn how to manipulate your hormones to stimulate the fat-burning, anti-aging hormones while suppressing those that make you fat, sick, tired and old before your time.
Hormone Strategies for Men - The hormones that make you a male are also protective of your health and well-being. Managing proper hormone levels and balance is a critical part of successful aging.
Hormone Strategies for Women - The hormones that make you a woman impact health and aging in varied ways. Managing the balance and cyclic nature of feminine hormones is a life-long challenge, but one worth mastering.
Joint Health - Nothing works to make you fit if your joints give out; you can keep them healthy if you feed them the right nutrients and prevent needless damage.
Sexual Fitness - A broad look at sexual fitness - for both women and men.
(Nothing erotic, sordid or graphic - just technology and strategies for staying sexually alive and youthful.)
Weight Loss - Weight Management - The real issue is fat loss and fat management; your health, longevity and self esteem are dependent on managing the fat content of your body - the mirror, not the scale, tells the truth!
Byron J Richards and Wellness Resources - If you really want to understand weight gain and health disasters associated with obesity, you need to be listening to Byron J. Richards at Wellness Resources.
It is a good thing to have a reality check and establish a baseline for the starting point of any venture, and that goes for health improvement efforts especially. So when I hired my new endocrinologist, I was excited to define what I was actually working to fix. My 2-Hr Glucose Tolerance results showed clear Insulin Resistance and for a guy who has dealt with hypoglycemia for 40 years by eating every 3-4 hours, that is not surprising. If you were just looking at the blood sugar readings, they were in normal range (the 1- hour reference range is undefined, so normal is a bit vague). Fasting was 94, 1 hr = 188, 2-hr = 127 mg/dL. The good news is that over the last 6 months my fasting level on three consecutive test have dropped from 105 to 100 and now to 94, so my cells are more willing to clear glucose from the blood. I believe this is a result of the Leptin Diet and following the 5 rules of leptin management. The insulin readings for those same samples tell the story. Fasting was under 2 uIU/mL, 1- hr = 34 and 2-hr = 72. Ideally the 1-hr should be the greatest and the 2-hr back down as glucose level falls.
Hypoglycemia manifest as a delay in the sensor system – blood glucose spikes with a big sugar input and the pancreas fails to get excited at first and puts out insufficient insulin. As glucose level rises it finally gets the message and overdoes the correction, usually driving glucose levels below safe levels at the 3-4 hr time frame, and you get all shaky and want to pass out. Insulin resistance complicates the picture: the 1-hr value, for normal insulin sensitivity, should have been enough to keep glucose below 140 mg/mL, but the cells don’t respond well enough and glucose goes too high, forcing the insulin to rise too high as well. Sustained high blood sugar paired with high insulin = type-2 diabetes. The strategy of eating every 3-4 hours will keep blood sugar more level, but GIVES you Insulin Resistance (IR) over time. Now they tell me! The better approach is to get big inputs of carbs and sugars out of your life. Eat lots of low-glycemic vegetables, avoid refined grains, starches and sugar-filled anything, including sufficient healthy fats to slow the absorption of sugars through the intestines.
Insulin resistance is reversible – plain and simple, but the longer we have the condition, the more aging damage high glucose and high insulin levels inflict on us. This is one reason why caloric restriction works to allow any animal to live 30% longer typically. Insulin Resistance/Metabolic Syndrome wears us out early. The drug strategies used today to ‘treat’ the problem cannot reverse the condition, but eating correctly can – that is the take-home message. It may take months or years to reverse, but it can be done.
IR mostly concerns three types of tissue: white fat cells, muscle cells and liver cells. If you carry plenty of muscle and it is frequently active, its insulin sensitivity should be high. However, age is a factor; old cells simply have fewer and less sensitive receptors, so the sooner we correct the diet and eating patterns, the better our chance for aging optimally. If we carry lots of body fat, then the big swingers are the fat cells. Fat cells are stressed by chronically elevated insulin because they can’t release their stored fat for fuel use – they are locked in store-only mode. The result is high inflammation in fat cells and high levels of inflammatory chemical signals affecting all other tissues (such as arterial walls or the brain), which cause most of the diseases of aging so prevalent today. If we are lean, well muscled but triglycerides are elevated, the problem is IR of the liver. The cure is the same: eat no more than 3 times a day, eat smaller meals with no simple carbs (this is the reason for plenty of fibrous vegetables and far less grains, especially refined/processed grain products), no snacks between meals (no caloric drinks), and nothing eaten after dinner (no caloric drinks either). This and 7-8 hours of quality sleep will cure IR in most people.
The other significant outcome for my tests shows that my thyroid is stressed; TSH is 7.4 (increased with each of my last three tests) but T4 and T3 are progressively lower. He ordered Armour thyroid 30 mg/day to give it a break. The reason – processes slow down and glandular outputs decrease with age. The first strategy is to supply nutrients that feed the processes, but when that stops working well, then supplement the hormones as needed to keep youthful function as long as possible. But be mindful of the ultimate outcome; sooner or later we fold our tents and die. It is nature’s way to get us off the planet and make room for our kids. So seek the truest values from living but be comfortable with the approaching end; it is to be embraced as part of having had the gift of life.
Estrone is relevant to health and disease states because of its conversion to estrone sulfate, a long-lived derivative. Estrone sulfate acts as a reservoir that can be converted as needed to the more active estradiol.
Estrone is the only one of the three estrogens which is present in any quantity in post-menopausal women.
