Why Exercise is Not Optional for Baby Boomers

I'm going to start where most who write about exercise for popular magazines will not start — with a discussion of our genetic limitations.

The best place to start this discussion is with the recent discovery of the myostatin deletion and the Belgian Blues.

What We Can Learn About Exercise From Belgian Blue Cattle

Often, advances in one science come from discoveries made in other fields. So it is in this case that involves the discovery of a key genetic factor influencing muscular potential.

Becoming stronger is about projecting how we feel about ourselves.

Scientists in agriculture have discovered a genetic factor which has profound implications for the field of exercise science. This is the story of the Belgian Blue cows.

Due this genetic factor, Belgian Blues lack a protein that regulates muscular growth. T his mutation is called “double muscling” and it causes the cows to look like the bovine equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Relationship Between Muscle Development and Genetics

What is even more interesting is that a similar myostatin deletion has been discovered in Flex Wheeler, and other top-ranked professional bodybuilders.

Anyone can see that genetics plays a role here.

Now we have concrete evidence of at least one genetic factor involved in how muscular (and lean) some of us have the potential to become.

Champion bodybuilder Flex Wheeler and a Belgian Blue bull. We know that genetics plays a role in muscle development, both in humans and animals.

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When we see the words “results may vary” in muscle magazine supplement ads, we can now understand what a colossal understatement that is!

Many may take this to be a cause for depression or an excuse for inactivity. After all, if becoming muscular and lean is in our genes, what could we do? Should we bother to exercise at all?

My answer is a resounding yes! Later in this article I will go into the reasons why you should.

For now let me point out how flawed this thinking is by reference to a conversation I once had with a friend and colleague.

My friend and I argued about the implications of the fact that genetics plays a large role in determining an individual’s intellectual capacity or I.Q.

My point was that even if one accepts that genetics imposes definite limitations on what we are capable of intellectually, as we attempt to maximize our unknown potential throughout our lifetimes, we don’t know what those boundaries are, except in hindsight.

Within the boundaries imposed by the facts of our genetic reality there is freedom: freedom for us to strive to be our best and that makes all the difference.

That said, I’m not an existentialist. I don’t equate freedom with total freedom from the constraints of reality – freedom to recreate ourselves independent and in defiance of the facts of reality.

I agree, with Francis Bacon that “nature to be commanded must be obeyed.”

Just as we can emphasize the importance of volitionally adhering to the facts of reality, so we can emphasize that doing so gives us great freedom and power in commanding nature.

So it is with our nature, whether it be our physical nature or our spiritual nature, our consciousness.

Becoming Strong: It’s More Than Just a Physical Transformation

I will focus on the imperative to alter our physical selves, specifically by making ourselves stronger.

The transformation made possible by becoming stronger is not merely physical.

Becoming stronger is about projecting how we feel about ourselves — projecting the heroic sense of life within each of us through the shape and functional capabilities of our bodies.

Applying the knowledge and discipline it takes to exercise correctly is about externalizing our spiritual selves — it’s about projecting our ideals outward.

The time to start is always now. You’ll be surprised at what you’re capable of.

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Beware of Fitness Fairy Tales and Bias

Fitness magazines are trying to sell you a dream — the dream of a well-muscled, chiseled physique via supplementation. They have become mere supplement catalogs with hackneyed exercise advice thrown in as filler.

Whatever the supplement of the month may be — exotic protein powders, creatine, HMB, growth hormone, testosterone, bull semen, etc. — the idea is the same. They are selling the idea that your exercise goals can be reached effortlessly if you invest in and consume enough of this stuff.

This can never be the case, for there is no effect without a cause and the most fundamental cause of radical physical improvement is hard work, performed consistently. That’s right, it takes hard work to create the body of your dreams but I doubt that comes as a surprise to my dear, discerning reader.

Research periodicals publish work by academic exercise physiologists, a group whose bias is, in general, toward focusing on research devoted to so called “aerobic” exercise. I’ll explain later why I place “aerobic” exercise in scare quotes.

Those who populate our exercise physiology departments tend to favor endurance type activities and are generally suspicious of the benefits of resistance training and of the muscular jocks who espouse the virtues of this type of exercise.

The reasons why this is so involve a bit of historical serendipity that would take us a bit far afield here.

One cause, however, is cultural. By this I mean the emphasis that our culture places on the internal qualities of a person. They say you cannot judge a book by its cover and to look for the good inside everyone.

Similarly, most voices in exercise physiology claim that what really counts is “good health” by which they mean good internal indicators of health, such as a healthy cholesterol level, a healthy blood pressure, a strong heart, etc.

There is no effect without a cause.

While it is true that you can’t always judge a book by its cover, I submit that this is a false dichotomy, yet another variant of the popular dichotomy between mind and body.

There is no conflict between having strong shapely muscles and having a healthy cardiovascular system. In fact, having strong muscles is the best way to assure a healthy cardiovascular system. I’ll come back to this point later.

Nor can you place too much confidence in the advice doled out by the big, muscular guys who strut around in your gym. You have to be aware of the selection bias at work here.

These individuals gravitate toward weight training because they experience immediate success with it. It’s a positive feedback loop. The truth is, and this relates to the point I made about genetics at the outset, these guys would have grown large muscles even if you’d thrown tomatoes at them.

Their training advice simply does not apply to the average trainee. Nor does the advice of most of these self-styled bodybuilding experts who have columns in the muscle magazines.

Most of these well-muscled jocks recommend an amount of training that could only be tolerated if you took steroids, which are synthetic hormones that radically improve your ability to recover from exercise, and that is precisely why many of them experiment with such drugs.

If you want to know how to change any important fitness parameter for the better—whether its strength, muscularity, leanness — its best to look at a methodology that works with people of average genetic endowment and whose efforts are not aided by pharmaceutical means.

Why exercise is not an optional value

Exercise is not important. It is essential. Most people, however, do not realize this, because the time factor of the cause-effect relationship between lack of exercise and the resulting severe decline in functional ability is so great.

To further elaborate on this point, Arthur Jones, the inventor of Nautilus exercise equipment, once used the following example during a Nautilus seminar:

“If I were to grab you by the throat, and choke off your air supply, it would immediately become apparent to you that oxygen is absolutely essential for life. If I were to lock you in a room with no water, after several hours, the degree of thirst you would experience would indicate to you that water is a requirement for life. If I were to lock you in that room with water, but no food, it would take a little longer, a matter of a couple of days, before you would be ravenously hungry, and there would be no question in your mind that food was absolutely essential for life. However, it often takes years before one’s body begins to show the harm done by a lack of proper exercise.”

How to Prevent Loss of Muscle Mass

If nothing is done to prevent it, we gradually lose muscle tissue as we age, becoming weaker, and less flexible as a result. Loss of muscle mass due to aging is called sarcopenia.

There are several problems associated with this, the most obvious being a decrease in metabolism resulting in increased body fat, which is a primary risk factor for heart disease and several other serious conditions such as diabetes.

Not so obvious though, are the effects of a lack of exercise on one’s bones.

Let’s take a look at osteoporosis then at preventions for both sarcopenia and osteoporosis.

Osteoporosis: How to Reduce Your Risk

We often hear about elderly people falling and breaking their hips, an injury which often turns out to be fatal. It is often assumed that these people break their hips as a result of having fallen.

In a large number of cases, however, the opposite is true: they suffer a fall because their hip breaks.

Each year, an average of 80,000 men suffer a hip fracture and one-third of these men die within a year. The cause: osteoporosis.

Studies show that strength training can yield bone density increases as high as 1% per week.

Osteoporosis, or porous bone, is a described by the National Institutes of Health as a “disease characterized by low bone mass and structural deterioration of bone tissue, leading to bone fragility and an increased susceptibility to fractures of the hip, spine, and wrist.”

According to the National Osteoporosis Foundation, some 54 million Americans are affected by low bone density.

The Benefits of Strength Training

What can be done about it? Exercise.

What kind of exercise? Strength training is the only safe and productive means of effectively addressing this disease.

Some studies have shown increases in bone density as high as 1% per week with strength training.

I cannot emphasize enough that only strength training counts as an effective exercise intervention in this context.

Nothing else qualifies, and many of the activities that have been recommended as exercise by the so-called “experts” in this field will do absolutely nothing to help anyone, and will in most cases do quite a bit to hurt people.

According to Dr. Michael Pollock, aerobics has led to “an epidemic of joint and spine injury.”

Even Michael Pollock, PhD, a former member of Kenneth Cooper’s Aerobics Clinic, and past president of the American College of Sports Medicine said “[A]ll the aerobics activity and interest promoted within the fitness industry since the late 1960’s has not fostered any long-term vascular health. Instead, it has caused an epidemic of joint and spine injury.”

While properly performed strength training can be of tremendous potential benefit to anyone who performs it, one would be far worse off performing activities such as aerobics, plyometrics, and various ballistic training protocols, than if they had never exercised at all.

Not only are these activities not an effective means of stimulating any meaningful improvements in any factor of functional ability, they are downright dangerous.

Often, the injuries and degenerative joint conditions which result from such activities will force a person to become much less active earlier in life, and/or prevent them from being able to properly strength train, accelerating their loss of muscular strength and functional ability.

If as a result of such activities one’s mobility begins to decrease earlier in life, then that activity has effectively shortened that person’s lifespan. Loss of mobility is the first step towards loss of all other factors of functional ability, and eventually death.

Start Now: It Only Takes 90 Minutes a Week

There are many people out there who do not exercise, because there is always something else to do, or they can’t or won’t think much further ahead than the immediate present.

They rationalize for this by saying things like, “I would, but I just don’t have the time” or, “but I can’t afford a personal trainer/gym membership/home gym.” This is unfortunate.

As I stated earlier, the amount of training time necessary to dramatically improve one’s physical condition is far less than what most people have been led to believe, ninety minutes a week.

Invest in a Fitness 401k

Can’t afford it? The cost of not exercising can be far greater than a lifetime of the most expensive strength coaching.

The Cost of Not Acting

Heart surgeries can cost well over $200,000, and one must often spend as much as $5000 per year on medication afterwards for the rest of their life.

If, due to lack of exercise, your mobility prematurely decreases to the point where you can’t care for yourself, you may end up spending over $3,000 per month for the last 5 to 10 years of your life wasting away in a nursing home.

So, would you rather spend $500 per year on a gym membership and make the effort to stay in shape?

Or end up spending upwards of $30,000 per year (or wasting taxpayer’s money) to stay in a nursing home and have somebody else dress, feed, and bathe you because you’re too weak to do so yourself.

Frankly, you — and I — can’t afford not to exercise

Mobility and Thriving

The most important thing a person has, second to their ability to reason, is their ability to move.

If you can’t move, you can’t do anything but lie there and wait to die. If you value your life, then proper exercise should be one of your highest priorities.

Regarding your muscles and the functional vitality they make possible, the stark choice confronting each of us is: “Use it or lose it.”

You Can Start Today

Feel free to book a phone appointment with me, Francisco Villalobos, the owner of Inner Strength Fitness.

I’d love to discuss your fitness goals and the Inner Strength Fitness program with you.