Let’s not mince words. Exercise is the single most potent anti-aging “drug” ever invented. Daily
moderate exercise—and we define what we mean by that below—reduces your risk of developing diabetes, obesity, depression, cancer, and heart disease. It also may fight off the baby boomer’s greatest fear: loss of mind. (Few things generate more fear among baby boomers than Alzheimer’s disease.)
Give Your Brain a Boost
For a long time we’ve known that exercise strengthens the heart and improves cardiovascular health. Makes sense, doesn’t it? The heart is a muscle, and if you exercise it, it will get stronger, just like the biceps or the quadriceps. And the job of the heart—one of them, anyway—is to pump oxygen and nutrients to all the cells, organs, and tissues in the body so that they can function optimally.
One of those organs that need oxygen and nutrients is the brain. So it stands to reason that if you want to keep your brain healthy, vibrant, and functioning, you want to continue to supply it with everything it needs to keep things running efficiently. Coincidentally, the best way to do this is to keep your heart pumping! And not surprisingly, a lot of research has shown that exercise does in fact improve brain function. Research published from the Masley Optimal Health Center confirms that greater fitness improves executive function and brain performance.
Until recently, no one looked at whether exercise had an effect on the anatomy of the brain. Now it seems that actual physical changes in the brain—all of them positive—occur as a result of aerobic exercise. In fact, it’s now possible to say with scientific certainty that aerobic exercise makes your brain bigger!
Here’s what happened. Dr. Arthur Kramer and his colleagues at the University of Illinois took a group of sixty older people who were healthy but sedentary and looked at their brains using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Then he divided them into two groups. Half of them began a gentle, easy aerobics program, and the other half began a “toning and stretching” program.
The aerobics program started off slowly, with about fifteen minutes a day of walking. After about two months, the subjects were up to forty-five to sixty minutes of walking three days a week. (Most covered a few miles during that time frame, meaning they were walking at about four miles per hour.) The subjects kept this up for six months.
Then everyone had another MRI done, and Kramer and his team looked at the grey and white matter in the subjects’ brains. “Grey matter,” you may recall from science class, is composed of the actual neurons of the brain—the “computational units.” “White matter,” on the other hand, is made up of the axons, or interconnections between the neurons. The researchers wanted to see whether the functional improvement in the brain that had been observed in so much research on exercise and the brain was accompanied by any physical changes.
And it was. Amazingly, the subjects in the aerobics group showed an increase in volume in both the grey matter and the white matter of their brains.
The take-away from this is a pretty clear, especially for those of us interested in keeping our brains healthy and operational well into our eighties and beyond: Exercise! And the beautiful part is that it doesn’t take much exercise to do this. According to Kramer, the amount of exercise needed for the brain-building effect is pretty moderate—forty-five to sixty minutes of walking three times a week. It’s a wonderful confirmation of why moderate exercise is such an important part of your nutrition program.
Steven has published studies from his own clinic showing that the combination of a smart fat diet
and exercise—thirty to sixty minutes, five times a week—increases brain speed and executive performance by a whopping 30 percent—a pretty nice improvement in mental sharpness!
What Exercise Should I Do?
There are a lot of ways to get in shape; people are passionate about yoga, aerobics, weight training, circuit training, interval training, burst training, Pilates, kick boxing, step classes, and Crossfit, to name just a few. In fact, any one of these can provide significant benefits. Ultimately, the best exercise program for you is the exercise program that you actually do.
When Jonny started his career in the early 1990s as a trainer at Equinox, the New York–based fitness club, a woman came into the gym who, according to all the trainers on staff, was the fittest specimen of humanity they had ever seen. All the trainers were eager to find out what magical combination of cardio and weights this woman did to get in such fabulous shape, since they all hoped to copy her routine and use it with their clients. Eventually, one of the trainers approached the woman. “Would you mind telling us,” he asked shyly, “how you got in such astonishing shape?”
Her answer, said with a Texas drawl: “Ropin’ cattle.”
The point is that virtually any exercise can work as long as you do it. Our “prescription” for exercise, therefore, is going to be more general and philosophical than specific. There are tons of books, videos, and programs that will tell you exactly what exercises to do and in what order; they can take you through workouts ranging from easy to moderate to insane.
But rather than give you a specific routine, we give you a few general guidelines, which come down to two things: work your heart and work your muscles. If you make a commitment to be active every day, you’ll soon find yourself gravitating to some forms of exercise more than others, and eventually you’ll wind up with a routine that fits your lifestyle. You may even find that you stop thinking of exercise as “exercise”—it will instead be a part of your life.
Get Moving with Walking
Walking is probably the least controversial and most studied form of exercise, the one action that has copious proven benefits with just about no downside. At the very least, try to take a walk three to five days a week. It requires no investment, no special equipment, no gym, no nothing.
A significant amount of emerging research in the field of exercise argues for the benefit of short, intense workouts (interval training). This kind of workout—also known as high-intensity interval training (HIIT) or burst training—is based on the notion that you get more out of a workout if you alternate periods of intense effort with periods of “active rest.”
So, for example, if you were jogging or walking briskly on a treadmill at a comfortable speed of, say, 4, interval training would have you push it for thirty to sixty seconds to a speed of 6 and then come back down to 3 for a minute of “recovery” (i.e., active rest). A period of high intensity (treadmill speed of 6) alternating with a period of active rest (treadmill speed of 3) would constitute one “set,” and you can do up to ten sets like this in one workout—all in less than thirty minutes. Ten minutes on a treadmill alternating between “high intensity” and “low intensity” can be as effective as thirty minutes at a slow, even (and nonchallenging) pace. With this kind of training, you work out smarter, not necessarily harder. You accomplish just as much—if not more—and in less time.
You can introduce interval training into your daily walk easily, even if you’re just beginning to exercise or just starting up again after a long layoff. When you’re doing your walk at your normal
pace, try speeding it up for thirty seconds. Then slow down while you catch your breath, and then, after a bit, repeat the sequence. You’ll be pushing your fitness envelope in no time.
Use It or Lose It: Weight Training
In addition to getting moving, you’ll need to do something to preserve your muscles, and this generally means training with weights. If you don’t do some form of strength training (weights), expect to lose about 1 pound of muscle every year. Remember that muscle not only looks good, it’s also the place where you burn most of your calories. So when you lose muscle, you’re actually losing some of your body’s calorie-burning furnaces, which means you’re slowing down your metabolism.
Since there are fewer places to burn calories, the calories you’re eating are more easily stored as fat, and your body shape changes dramatically even if your weight stays stable. Muscle is your best friend in the battle of the bulge. When talking about muscle, the old adage is true: “Use it or lose it.” If you want to get (or stay) lean, you’d better use it.
We suggest you train with weights at least twice a week. It doesn’t have to be a long, drawn-out, exhausting workout. We both do our entire weight workout in fewer than thirty minutes. Jonny does a circuit of exercises, one for each major body part—chest, back, shoulders, biceps, triceps, legs, and abs—and then rests for a minute and repeats the circuit twice more. He’s in and out of the gym in about twenty-five minutes. Steven does two days of upper-body strength training and two days of trunk and lower-body strength training, alternating upper-body days with lower-body days, in workouts that last about fifteen to twenty minutes. The point here is that there are lots of ways to accomplish the same goal.
Yes, This Is Exercise, Too: The Fun Stuff
Finally, there’s the fun stuff—the stuff that doesn’t feel like exercise but is. Taking a hike.
Walking the dogs. Gardening. Playing tennis. (Interesting factoid: Tennis players have the lowest resting heart rates of any athletes. And resting heart rate is a terrific metric for general fitness. If your resting heart rate is low [under sixty beats per minute]—as it is with world-class athletes—it means your heart doesn’t have to work so hard!) Find something you like to do, and then do it.
For inspiration, it’s worth paying attention to the findings of the National Weight Control Registry, which has been tracking the activities of people who are winners at the weight-loss game.
It’s the largest prospective investigation of long-term successful weight-loss maintenance ever done.
The registry has been tracking more than ten thousand individuals who have maintained at least thirty pounds of weight loss for one year or longer, though the average member has lost an astonishing sixty pounds and has kept it off for five years!
Several behavior patterns have emerged from the findings, but one of them is of particular interest: A full 90 percent of the participants exercise about one hour a day. Women in the registry report expending an average of 2,545 calories a week in physical activity, and men report an average of 3,293 calories a week. The most common activity is walking, reported by 76 percent of the participants. An additional 20 percent lift weights, 20 percent cycle, and 18 percent do aerobics.
Exercise Recommendations
So for those of you who want to lose weight and keep it off, what are our minimal recommendations? And for those who are more ambitious, what are our optimal recommendations?
Minimally, we believe that the combination of walking, or another form of aerobic exercise, at least three to four times a week plus twice-weekly weight training is the best basic template from which to build a personal activity program. If you combine this basic level of exercise with the Smart Fat Solution eating plan, you’ll be virtually assured of getting great results—and we’re pretty sure you’ll like what you see in the mirror.
Our optimal recommendations are the following:
1. Aerobic training five to six days per week with some combination of the following:
—High-intensity interval training (HIIT) at least two to three days a week
—One to two hours of a moderate, fun activity, such as a long walk, a hike, a bicycle ride, tennis, or golf, two days a week (on non-HIIT days)
2. Strength training at least two days a week
3. Yoga, swimming, or prolonged stretching at least once a week
Our minimal recommendations will give you great results. But if you’re able to follow the optimal plan, you’ll look and feel even better. Remember, though, as we have said, the best exercise program is the one you actually do, so pick something that’s realistic for you and that you’re likely to stick with in the long term.