In today’s feature article I’m going to teach you a simple 15-minute exercise you can do anywhere, without any tools or machines.
And the best part is, it’s the most effective exercise I know to prevent heart disease and other age related disease.
Do this exercise three or four times a week and after a month, I promise you to look and feel ten years younger.
Using this exercise actually contradicts to what most doctors recommend. But it’s much more effective too.
Before I teach you this simple exercise, lets look at what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends regarding physical activity.
They recommend what are called low intensity exercises. The rule of thumb is that while doing the exercise you can “talk but not sing” (this guidance is useless for me since I can’t even sing standing still).
What they mean is slow walking, biking less than 10 miles/hour, playing doubles tennis or something like that. Relaxed physical activity that gets your heart pumping a little but won’t get you tired.
And this is far from being nonsense. The CDC bases this guidance on several studies including a recent one that found people who did low intensity exercises were up to 25% less likely to develop coronary artery disease than those who did no physical activities.
With low intensity exercises like these, time is essential. Those who exercised only for 150 minutes per week only had 14% less risk of coronary artery disease. To get up to 25% you need to do low intensity exercises for 700 minutes per week, which is about an hour and a half per day.
The problem is that low intensity exercises like these don’t take on the fundamental aspect of aging. That is as we age, our metabolism tends to slow down and we produce less growth hormones.
Our metabolism rate is the body’s mechanism of converting food into energy. With healthy metabolism you can burn food and fat quickly, old and damaged cells get replaced, you have healthy and good blood flow and you feel strong and healthy.
Children who’re growing have an extremely high metabolism. As we grow older, it naturally slows down. That’s one of the reason you may have been able to eat endlessly when you were younger without gaining weight but as you grew older you experienced that just a small indulgence converts directly into fat.
So when doing exercises, you want to focus on boosting your metabolism.
The other thing that happens as we grow older is a decrease and weakening of muscles. This begins in the early 40s and really picks up in the 50s and 60s. This is true for both the skeletal muscles as well as the heart.
Our muscles play a big role in boosting our metabolism, so that makes it even more important to keep healthy muscle structure.
So how do you build or maintain different muscle types? Resistance training.
A bulked-up body builder gets that way by using extremely heavy weights. He may only work out two or three times a week and only push the heaviest weight up a few times. That’s how he builds muscle mass.
Compare that to a marathon runner who looks like he’s nothing but the skin and bone. Of course he has strong legs but they’re often quite thin. Running a marathon maybe healthy, but it doesn’t build muscles.
Now I don’t want to make you into a body builder (unless that’s your desire) but I highly recommend doing some kind of resistance training in addition to the exercise I’m about to teach you to maintain a healthy muscle structure and metabolism.
So now we’ve covered two types of training. Low intensity training like most doctors recommend (as with distance running) and restraining training (professional level body builder).
But there is a third type of training that in a way combines the benefits from both and adds on it. It’s called high intensity training. On a professional level this would include athletes like sprinters.
If you look at the physics of a sprinter, you’ll notice they’re much more muscular than a marathon runner. Not only the legs but the whole body is in pretty good fit coordination. This is because it take tremendous strength for the sprinter to push himself from the starting line and give it all for a hundred meters or so. Then it’s over.
By stimulating any one type of muscle, you automatically release growth hormones that increase and strengthen every muscle in the body. Growth hormones, of course, also help burn fat, improve cell health and pretty much everything else to reverse aging.
That’s why I present the case that training more like a sprinter than a marathon runner or a body builder is the healthiest way for people of any age.
Your heart is like any other muscle. Working on it with low intensity exercises will do the minimum to make it stronger or healthier. It’s still beneficial but it doesn’t produce maximum results. Adding a little intensity into the training, even if it’s not done for as long of a time, will make it stronger and fitter (like the sprinter’s legs vs. the marathon runner.)
Note: Please don’t take me wrong. I have the utmost respect for people and professionals running the marathon. Especially when I see elderly persons who are still doing it. I’m only speaking from a specific health point of view here. Best health comes from combining both low and high intensity exercises with resistance training.
So without further introduction, I present the best exercise for reversing aging:
Instead of going for an hour or hour and a half slow walk, do this exercise for only 15 minutes:
1) Start out with moderate walking for two minutes to warm up. Just enough for your breathing to increase.
2) Now take two minutes of walking or running so hard that after the two minutes you feel that you couldn’t keep up that speed much longer.
3) Now walk very slowly for about four minutes. Your heart rate and breathing should recover but you keep moving so that you won’t cool down.
4) Now repeat number 2 (fast pace), then again number 3 (slow down) and then finish with number 2 (fast pace) again. And you’re done.
If you have any problem walking, you can do this exercise with any type of physical activity such as rowing or biking. The important part is to do three sessions of the highly intense activity and slow down in-between.
Do this exercise for 15 minutes three to four times a week and you’ll benefit much more than doing two hours per day slow walking.
You don’t have to push yourself to the limit the first time you do this exercise. Especially if you have previous heart problems. Feel how far you can push yourself without risking going overboard.
The exercise helps to lower blood pressure, improve cholesterol, metabolism, increase growth hormone productions and lose weight. You’ll experience improvement in any kind of inflammatory disease such as type 2 diabetes and arthritis.
It works by pushing your heart hard and then giving it a break three times in a row.
Interestingly, the blood pressure exercises I developed and have helped thousands of people to drop their blood pressure down to normal work in exactly the opposite direction. They work to give your heart and nerves what I call a “Focused Break”
The “Focused Break” lets your system kind of “reboot” so that the lower blood pressure becomes the norm.
Unlike the exercise I taught you today, the blood pressure exercises are completely effortless. You can do them right away no matter what kind of physical shape you’re in. And you won’t even break a sweat.
You can learn more about our blood pressure exercises here…
Thats alright if you can walk and then run but not all can run
I could not agree more as far as ageing is concerned as I have been doing it for years.It has also helped keep medication at the prescribed level.
As Carol Zwicker says, "Not all can run". I'm very late 70's and have had a serious spinal injury which puts me out of the frame for such excercise – no matter how 'I wish'. However, a healthy mind-set and positive thinking works wonders and, I might add, a keen sense of humour and being able to take things lightheartedly – acceptance!!!
Good point that not all can run. But the main point of this exercise is the low-intensity – high-intensity change-up. You can do this however fits your physical situation… swimming, biking, rowing, power-walking etc.
– Christian
Sounds good. It's the way science is working these days. Brief intensity then time out. The one I saw recently on television was great intensity for 20 seconds then relax. Three times that takes only12 minutes
I got into the habit of taking a 30 minute walk at work every lunchtime, and I thought that would protect me. But my blood pressure rose. I experimented, and found that during my walk, my pulse rate never got much above 90. So I started in the evening walking fast up short hills, then relaxing on the way down. I found I could get my pulse up to 130 over a local 2 miles circuit. After a couple or years of this, a lot of muscle build-up, and some weight loss, and my pulse never gets above 115 over the same circuit. So I stopped walking, and on alternate days I do isometric hand grip exercises and arm exercises with weights, while watching TV, for 15 minutes. On the next day I crouch and then stand 10 times, and repeat this 3 or 4 times. My BP is now routinely below 128/82, but does rise from time to time with virus infections, or periods when I have missed my exercises. I am a lot more muscular now, and can work up ladders and on easy roofs again, whilst 14 months ago I could barely do 10 squats a day, and needed a 3 day recovery afterwards. Walking should just be the start, but that need not mean that you have to exercise for long periods or with excessive effort.
Strangely I do something similar when swimming. I swim in the slow lane because I am not very good at it. I do several lengths of leisurely breast stroke then a length of crawl. My crawl is my fastest stroke and it is quite good. I follow that with a length of breast stroke then rest. By this time I am panting. I wait a while, maybe 4 minutes then start the slow breast stroke again for about a dozen lengths and do another crawl. I can only manage two crawl lengths in a session but working up I hope to get to three or four.
I'm addicted to walking and occasionally doing a shorter walk/run. I also do 2-3 shorter Nordic Poles type walk (using exerstrider poles). I go slower but use more energy. Anyhow, to Christian's described routine, I'd just add a few minutes of slow walk to cool down and get the hear t rate back to normal. I'm 74 and my once high bp now stays below 130/80 resting, usually closer to 120/70, and heart rate is about 60 bpm. I also do a focused break type exercise and recommend that you check it out.