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.
We recommend only products and suppliers we use; Bodybuilding.com is a great store with detailed product info - Frank's favorite supplier
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.
Here it is half-way through January, the decorations are back in storage, tax season is beginning, and it seems like the last thing I have time for is writing about health and aging well. But it has been a long time since I did a Frank’s Column and the search engine stats are telling me I need to get to putting words on line. Occasionally it seems like I have said it all before and no one is listening anyway. But actually, the science keeps advancing and we are getting smarter about avoiding the so-called diseases of aging with every passing day. There were some key learnings last year in the area of optimal aging, and I think it would be good to highlight them.
To me, the most important potential advance for getting lasting health out of what time we have on earth lies in the potential benefit from preserving or restoring the length of our chromosome’s telomeres. Last year a company by the name of TA Sciences ramped up marketing of its product called TA-65. TA-65 is a patented extract of the herb Astragalus, which induces production of the enzyme telomerase, which coaxes our cellular mechanisms to repair and lengthen our telomeres. This has been done by several labs on mice, with very measurable reverse-aging in evidence.
The question has been whether this would occur in aged humans, because no human studies are more than a few years in duration. But the early adopters are clearly showing early benefits, such as increased energy, skin repair, cognitive improvement, etc, we just don’t know what the long-term effects are. The overriding fear is that we will see and increase of cancer proliferation. That outcome has yet to be proven one way or the other. I suggest watching this development closely for positive outcomes. One of the more notable MDs offering the so-called Patten Protocol is Dr Al Sears, who has stated that he is testing the Patton Protocol on himself and will be offering it to his clients. The web link to his site for this activity is http://telomeraseactivation.org. There are others offering this protocol, but this is the Cadillac of supplements, with costs running above $4k for a 6-month course of treatment, and suggestions that it be done for two years to get the full benefit.
If you don’t want/can’t spend that kind of money, what else has been shown to slow the loss or preserve the length of our telomeres? Wouldn’t you know, four of the same Six Keys to Senior Fitness that I have been harping on for the last 7 years all reduce our rate of telomere shortening. The key factors are modest eating of real foods, regular exercise, the use of supplements to make sure our nutrient status is excellent, and about 7 hours of quality sleep on a regular basis. Add to that some thinking and attitude skills to manage our stress levels, while applying an understanding of the major aging mechanisms to optimize our choices of lifestyle, and we should have the best shot at a long and disease-free life. Research continues to converge on these factors as having profound impact on our fitness lifespan. Epigenetics – the influences that lifestyle and environmental factors have on gene expression – is becoming the hottest topic in the field of gerontology. We should be paying rapt attention and applying the knowledge as it unfolds.
