AGING

If you're a typical American, by age 30 you've already lost six and a half pounds of lean body mass since your prime, which occurred roughly 10 years ago. Lean body mass is composed of muscle, bone and vital organs-in short, everything that' s not fat. What's in its place? You guessed it: six and a half pound of fat. Your body chemistry has changed, too. It doesn't burn the calories it once did. Your cardiovascular system has become less efficient. You heart has already started to deteriorate, pumping fewer beats per minute. There are no outward signs, but your body's ability to control blood sugar, has started to decline, putting you on the path to diabetes in about 20 years' time. You may have thought blood pressure wasn't a problem. Wrong—hypertension is creeping up on you, particularly if you haven't been exercising correctly, putting you on another fast track to heart disease.

"We don't just wake up when we're 60 years old and find out that we have diabetes, 40 percent body fat and reduced strength," says William Evans, PhD, co- author (Irwin Rosenberg, MD, and health writer Jacqueline Thompson) of Biomarkers—The Ten Determinants of Aging You Can Control (Simon & Schuster, 1991). "Aging is a gradual and continuous process." You can do a lot about that process. It's possible for you to slow down, stop and in some cases reverse changes in what he calls biomarkers, the body's internal, biological markers that determine how old your body really is. The secret, says Evans, is incorporating a realistic exercise and nutrition program into a busy work and personal schedule—no easy tasks, as you already know. But the payoff is compelling. "The important message," he says, "is that the earlier you begin in terms of prevention, the greater the effects are ultimately going to be."

BIOMARKER ONE:

MUSCLE MASS

Evans and Rosenberg, in addition to holding faculty positions at Tufts University, work at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging in Boston. Rosenberg, who directs the center, is a physician with a special interest in nutrition and metabolism. Evans heads the center's Human Physiology Laboratory and is the exercise advisor to the Boston Bruins and the New England Patriots. Their work has led them to conclude that muscle is the key to slowing down the aging process. Not only does increased muscle mass boost your strength, but it also allows you to more easily burn body fat, increases your aerobic capacity and triggers your muscles' use of insulin—reducing your chances of developing diabetes.

Most physiologists believe you inevitably lose muscle cells as you grow older. Some studies show a loss of up to 30 percent of them between the ages of 20 and 70. You can compensate for this by increasing the size of the remaining cells through strength-building exercises.

BIOMARKER TWO:

STRENGTH Like muscle mass, strength can be regained even if you've been dormant most of felt in your teens to mid-twenties. Most of the muscle cells you lose are those that compose the fast-twitch fibers used for high intensity exercises like sprinting or lifting. Those that remain, the slow-twitch variety, are essential for endurance and low-intensity movement.

The more you exercise, the more you forestall the loss of fast-twitch fibers, though some decline is inevitable. The same is true with motor units, the nerves and muscles that together affect movement. This explains why world-class sprinters, who need tremendous bursts of power, peak in their late teens or early twenties, but world-class marathon runners, for whom endurance is the key, can still compete into their late thirties.

Overall, the amount of strength you can both regain and maintain is still point to their work with 60 and 70-year-olds whose lifting ability, on average, increased from 44 to 85 pounds.

BIOMARKER THREE:

BASAL METABOLIC RATE

Your body is constantly building and destroying tissue, releasing heat and energy, a chemical process known as metabolism. Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the measure of this process when you are at rest—when you first awaken in the morning, for example. It's an important sign of how many calories your body is consuming because even at rest, your body needs fuel.

On the average, a person's BMR declines about 2 percent per decade starting at the age of 20. And as the BMR falls, so does the number of calories you need. At 30, you probably need about 100 fewer calories a day than you did 10 years earlier. But if your eating habits haven't changed and you're not exercising as you did when you were younger, that reduced BMR, those excess calories and that lighter exercise load all add up to more fat.

Evans and Rosenberg say you compensate by building muscle, which restores your BMR by forcing your body to burn more calories. Unlike fat, muscle is active tissue that requires extra caloric fuel to maintain itself composed of 18 percent fat at the age of 25. This increases to 38 percent at age 65.

unless you're obese. The primary goal should be shedding fat by gaining muscle. If you do that, your overall weight may not change significantly. Muscle tissue more than he did when he was once covered with flab.

To change your ratio of fat to muscle, the best prescription always has been exercise and better eating habits. Diet alone may reduce the fat on your body, but you'll probably lose just as much muscle, if not more. A low-calorie diet can also rob you of nutrients, vitamins and minerals that you need to stay healthy. On the other hand, the more calories you expend through exercise, the less you'll have to restrict yourself in terms of how much you eat. As for what you eat Evans and Rosenberg say that a healthful menu consists of about 60 percent complex carbohydrates (fruits, vegetables, whole-grain breads, potatoes, rice and pasta), a maximum of 20 percent protein and no more than 25 percent fat. Of that amount, less than a third should be saturated fat, which is derived mostly from animal sources.

BIOMARKER FOUR:

AEROBIC CAPACITY

Aerobic capacity is your body's ability to process oxygen, getting it from your lungs into your blood and, through the bloodstream, to all parts of your body. To do this effectively, you need healthy lungs, a strong heart and a good vascular (blood vessel) network.

If you're the average man of 30, your aerobic capacity has already started to decline. By age 65, it could be 30 to 40 percent smaller than it was when you were 20. As time passes, Evans and Rosenberg say your heart becomes less responsive to the surge of adrenaline that occurs with exertion. This deterioration is best reflected in peak heart rate, which typically drops from 200 beats per minute for a 20-year-old to 160 for a 60-year old.

Exercise helps in two ways: It increases the density of your capillaries, raising the amount of oxygenated blood that can reach muscle cells, and it allows those muscle cells to put that oxygen to better use—converting energy stored in carbohydrates and fat into physical activity. As you grow older, muscle mass becomes more important for maintaining your aerobic capacity. Consequently, weight lifting is just as vital as walking, running or cycling.

BIOMARKER FIVE:

BLOOD-SUGAR TOLERANCE

The sugar in your blood, generated by the foods you eat, is called glucose. No matter how much or eat, your body tries to maintain a constant blood-glucose level. If you eat too additional insulin. In fact, the pancreas can burn out, requiring insulin therapy to offset diabetes. Evans and Rosenberg say a diet low in fat and high in fiber (which means more raw vegetables and whole grains), along with regular workouts, can help reverse this trend.

Building muscle is particularly important since muscle burns up glucose, transforming it into energy. Muscles also store glucose as a reserve fuel called glycogen. If your muscle cells are inadequate, the glucose is circulated back to the liver and converted into fat.

The effects of exercise can be short-lived, and nowhere is this more evident than with muscles programmed to respond to insulin and burn up glucose. One week without strength building, says Evans, and the muscles' insulin sensitivity returns to pretraining levels.

BIOMARKER SIX:

CHOLESTEROL LEVELS

Cholesterol is fatty substance that flows through the bloodstream attached to proteins. This combination of cholesterol and proteins is called lipoproteins. Not all lipoproteins are harmful. If fact, some are essential for your survival. First, the bad guys: Low-density lipoproteins (LDLs) are the kind of cholesterol that causes a waxy plaque buildup in the coronary arteries of the heart—a contributing factor to heart disease, America's number-one killer. Fortunately, LDL cholesterol isn't the only kind that flows through your blood. High-density lipoproteins (HDL' s) act as a scouring agent, cleansing the arteries of plaque buildup.

If you want to protect yourself from heart disease, you must not only lower your LDL-cholesterol level but also raise the HDL cholesterol. A diet low in fat and cholesterol will take care of the first. A steady dose of aerobic exercise will help the second, as will reducing your overall body fat, quitting smoking and limiting your alcohol consumption to no more than six to eight ounces per week.

BIOMARKER SEVEN:

Abnormally high blood pressure, called hypertension, affects about 60 million Americans and is a leading cause of strokes and heart attacks. Heredity, which you can't control, plays a big role here. But it's not the only cause of hypertension. Smoking, obesity, too little exercise and too much fat and alcohol can contribute to the problem. A common belief is that a low-salt diet is the first line of defense. But only 10 percent of the population has blood pressure that's truly salt responsive, Evans and Rosenberg report. Overall body composition, though, seems a key ingredient in everyone's blood pressure. Too much body fat will trigger blood pressure problems just as it contributes to glucose intolerance. Again, it's important to replace lot of those fats in your diet with carbohydrates.

BIOMARKER EIGHT:

BONE DENSITY

On the average, you can expect to lose about 1 percent of your bone mass each year. More important than mass, though, is bone mineral content. Deficiencies in calcium and other minerals could leave your bones brittle, more easily fractured and harder to heal. You have two types of bone in your body: cortical bone—compact, solid-looking bones found mostly in your forearms and shins; and trabecular bone—the lattice of branching, bony spicules found mostly in your spine, hips and thighs. More trabecular bone is lost with aging, although the decline is more of a problem for women than it is for men. Repeatedly placing stress on your bones through aerobic exercise like walking, running or cycling can reverse this deterioration, causing the bones to absorb more calcium from the blood and grow stronger. Bone loss also seems related to muscle loss. In their studies, Evans and Rosenberg found that weight lifting, because it maintains or increases muscle mass, is also an important way to preserve and even increase bone density.

BIOMARKER NINE:

INTERNAL TEMPERATURE

Your body comes with a built-in thermostat that keeps your internal temperature with a degree of 98.6 Fahrenheit—even if it's hot or cold outside. In hot weather, sweat acts as a cooling-off mechanism. In cold, shivering is the body's way of generating heat. Unfortunately, your ability to sweat and shiver declines with age. As your heart grows older, it pumps less blood to the skin, through which internal heat finds its escape in the form of sweat. With heat trapped inside, your internal temperature can soar to dangerous levels. The kidney's ability to control internal water balance also declines with age, increasing the risk of dehydration. Exercise compensates for your heart and kidney's reduced capacity by improving your ability to sweat and increasing the amount of water in your blood, allowing you to lose more through perspiration. Shivering is a simpler process involving the rapid contraction of muscles to generate body heat. Loss of muscle mass means a reduced ability to shiver. By building up muscle through strength training, you improve your ability to do so. Aerobic exercise and weight training, then, keep you fitter in fair weather and foul.

THE ANTI-AGING PRESCRIPTION

The real issue with Aging has to do with how much Growth Hormone your body manufactures. In your youth, the body pumps 10,000 mcgs a day of GH into your bloodstream, by the age of 35 your GH production lowers to 5,000 mcgs. By the time your 50, you're barely getting 500 mcgs.

How do you stop or reverse the aging process, by releasing more GH into your bloodstream. Resistance exercise, and not just any resistance exercise, but the type that an Evolution Fitness Program can provide will increase your body's natural release of fat burning Growth Hormone. When your body releases adrenaline it triggers the production of Endorphins which then precipitates the production of GH. Adrenaline release occurs from a correct amount intensity from exercise placed on the muscles in the body.

The Evolution Fitness Program dictates the correct type of exercise, the correct duration and frequency that benefit's the most. An exercise and nutrition program designed by Evolution Fitness will guarantee your success.