Category: Senior Fitness

Two weeks ago I wrote about turning 75 and the increasing rate of technological growth during my lifetime. This week I write about some of the possibilities in the arena of health and fitness for the next 20 years for you and me.

For example, are machines taking over?  I’m not talking about the machines we see in the typical gym today.  I’m talking about esoteric machines that will exercise our muscles and joints in just minutes a day — and that’s all we will ever need.  No more sweating in the gym.

I just received an email from the Bulletproof Coffee and Bulletproof Diet guy, who is now promoting a machine that will give you a week’s worth of exercise in only fifteen minutes.  All you have to do is stand on his Whole Body Vibration Plate and that’s all the exercise you need.  This 24 inch by 25 inch gadget can be yours for only $1345.50, and that’s with a discount.  Sure.

But in reality, there are machines being designed by private industry to help astronauts exercise while in space and for the bedridden in hospitals.  These are real technological advances but seem to be to be limited to muscle maintenance for now.  Machines to exercise and strengthen the bones, heart, lungs and joints may not be far behind.

Will we live to enjoy a future with all our exercise done by standing on, or being hooked up to, a machine?  Probably not.  We still need to strengthen our bones, keep our lungs functioning and our blood circulating with real exercise for now.

Just this morning, in my illustrious local newspaper, The Washington Post (notice no bold type), there is an article on how scientists are working on a way to put space travelers in a state of “hibernation” (like bears in winter), to allow long periods of isolated travel in space.  Apparently NASA is working on it and the head of the private company involved is seeking funding to allow them to study it more.  They are also trying to figure out a way to keep the body from wasting away during this hibernation period.  The writer, Eric Niller (yes, that’s with an “N”), said that the “benefits include a cut in the food and water required on their spacecraft, a reduction in waste products, smaller living quarters and less space needed for supplies, exercise and entertainment.”  Hmm, Sounds like the same thing the mayor of New York wants for his city.  Remind me not to sign up.

The point is that technology is advancing at an unprecedented pace and that areas of health and fitness are not being left out.  The concept of hibernation, or a way to put humans in some sort of state of suspended animation may become a reality in the not so distant future, and possibly even in my lifetime and yours.  But for now, I’ll just do my exercises and my stretches and eat real food to keep myself functioning as well as I can for as long as I can.  I hope you’ll do the same.

Of course the standout quote from the Washington Post article this morning is from Matteo Cerri, a scientist pondering ethical issues that hibernation might raise.  As a former military pilot, I can appreciate his concern.  His quote:

“If you are not conscious, how are we going to know what to do if something goes wrong?”

Good question.  Thanks for reading.

566 wds.

Do you remember the 2007 movie, The Bucket List  with Jack NIcholson and Morgan Freeman?  They portrayed two old men who met in a hospital, both dying of cancer, who decided to do the things that they always wanted to do and had never done.  “They go skydiving together, drive a Shelby Mustang, fly over the North Pole, eat dinner at a famous restaurant in France, visit and praise the beauty and history of Taj Mahal, India, ride motorcycles on the Great Wall of China, attend a lion safari in Africa, and visit the base of Mt. Everest in Nepal.” (Thank you Wikipedia). The movie was a joy to watch.

Do you have a “bucket list”?  A bucket list is a tabulation of all those things that you have wanted to do during your life and haven’t done yet.  They can be long term goals that you have not achieved, or they can be things that just pop up in your mind that you want to do sometime while you still can.

A bucket list falls into the category of Having a Purpose in the nine step Personal Energy Formula I talk about in my workshops on Health, Fitness and Personal Energy for Active Seniors.  Having a Purpose is one of those things that observation and research have demonstrated contribute to longevity.  Here are some criteria:

• Can be selfish or altruistic.
• Can be to save the world or travel the world.
• Can be to go someplace you have never been, or go back to a place you didn’t get enough of the first time.
• Could be to do something outrageous that you’ve never done – like skydiving at age 85, or learning to scuba dive at age 70.
• Write a song or a novel.
• Paint (Dwight Eisenhower, George W. Bush, Winston Churchill, Grandma Moses.)
• It could be anything that you have never done that you simply want to do while you’re still alive and kicking.

It doesn’t have to be a long list.  If fact the shorter the better.  Why?  Because to get the most from your bucket list, you’ll need to prioritize the things on the list and do those things first that you really want to do.  It takes time and money and you’ll want to do the things that are the most important to you, first.  Some people seem to make the list as long as possible and their joy is simply crossing things off the list rather than really enjoying doing or seeing them.  When you prioritize, you do or see those things that are really important to you.

The point is, that if there is something that you really want to do that you have never done, then by all means, figure out a way to do it while you can.  The Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman characters did it, maybe you can too.  Why not consider starting to make up your bucket list today, and start prioritizing the things on the list.  Then start doing the ones you can.  It could help you to live a longer, more enjoyable life.

Thanks for reading.

This is my last day of being 74 years old.  Tomorrow I turn 75.  Wow!  It’s hard to believe that I lived this long.  It’s interesting that most of my classmates from W-L High School, Class of ‘57 are still around too, and they are, in most cases, a year older than I am.  This is an era of people living longer.  Maybe we are the last generation to actually take care of ourselves, having been brought up with real food, and with synthetic foods just beginning to show up as we moved through our teens and into maturity.  We were starting to use “oleo margarine” with my mother having to knead the bag to combine the colors and the mixture.  “TV Dinners” were just starting to be sold.  We all ate at the dining room table, even on Sundays, when the Redskins games were on TV in the late 1950s.

I ate a lot of sugar and white bread.   But sugar wasn’t buried in everything.  It was usually real sugar and we knew when we were eating it.  We ate a lot of meat.  We had a “green grocer” who drove an old bus and came down the street weekly with fresh produce.  The milkman delivered milk a couple of times a week and you could specify “regular” or “homogenized”.  Milk bottles were glass and were picked up by the milkman to be cleaned and used again.

We were just starting to watch TV, but it wasn’t on from dawn to bedtime, and we still moved around a lot, getting a fair amount of basic exercise as a part of growing up.

I have watched so many changes and improvements in lifestyle as I have gone through those 74 years.  Technology has resulted in exponential improvements in medical care, product distribution, communications and other facets of living life.  I’ve lived through 13 Presidents, a bunch of wars and a “Police Action” in Korea where we started the “losing” trend.  I flew helicopters with the Marine Corps in Viet Nam, another losing adventure.  We now have another generation of military actions in the Middle East with an all voluntary military, who are doing a magnificent job, but limited by what many think is very poor leadership and direction from home, true of Korea and Viet Nam too.

The population of the world stands at 7.2 billion now, up from 2.2 billion at the beginning of World War II.  Because of technology, we are able to feed anyone who really wants to be fed.  While I will get arguments over this, the food supply is in place, the distribution and the logistics are improving.  We have lived through droughts and excessive moisture.  Just a few years ago we were warned of the catastrophe that was coming because of global cooling, the new ice age was just around the corner.  Today, just a few years later, suddenly the planet is warming and humans are responsible.  We are forgetting the eons that the world has been in existence and that this planet has transformed many times.  One has only to look at the difference in the ages of the ancient Appalachian mountains in the East and the relatively young Rocky Mountains in the West, to see the changes in the Earth’s make up, as it ages.

While sometimes I long for the “good old days”, I think that we are living in an incredible age.  We are living in an era of fast moving technological growth that makes living easier and usually better.  We are also learning more and more about the capabilities of the human body and mind.  We are rediscovering the power of the mind to heal and to help the body adapt.  We are learning that much of what is done with pills, can also be done with the mind, if we know what we are doing — and we are learning.

We are learning that as a people, we have the ability to live longer, healthier and productive lives, long after we pass the “retirement” age, and that people our age are capable of doing far more than the generations of the past.  Technology helps, but we seem to be developing an “attitude of longevity” that is growing in many of us.  We know the basics of what we need to do to live longer and many of us are making the effort to do it.  We are beginning to realize that we need to move our bodies and eat healthfully, and if we do, our chances of living better are significantly improved.

I’m looking forward to the rest of my life.  My wife is just a kid.  She turns 70 in June.  She looks good and  feels good and we enjoy each other.  My father was gone at age 71; my mother at 69.  My wife’s father left us at age 77 and my wife’s mother hung in there until age 91.  Our genes are all over the place.  But because of medical technology, new knowledge of the human mind, exercise and eating well (mostly), we are both active and healthy and hope to fully enjoy the next 20 or 25 years and maybe even more.

I’m a little bit older tomorrow, but also a little bit better.  I wish the best for all you older adults reading this and I hope your attitude is as positive as mine is about what lies ahead.

Thank you for reading.