The Life Plan (36 page)

In 2010, I was able to increase my own muscle mass by seven pounds through resistance training. This number is actually pretty staggering, because until very recently, the scientific community believed that men were destined to only lose muscle mass and strength as they age.

Resistance training improves both muscular strength and endurance and helps you not only prevent muscle loss that occurs with the aging process, but also creates new gains in muscle size and strength. After an intense workout, your body repairs the damaged muscle with a combination of sleep, rest, and nutrition, thus increasing your caloric needs over the next several days. Train hard often enough, and your body will be conditioned to constantly burn calories, day and night. And since all that repaired muscle is now bigger muscle—which takes more kilocalories to maintain—your basal metabolic rate increases. Basically, the more muscle you have, the more kilocalories you burn, even when you’re asleep.

Aggressive resistance training is the first line of defense against sarcopenia. Although both aerobic and strength training are necessary for overall fitness, muscle and strength loss can be stopped and reversed only with resistance exercise.

As muscle mass decreases, resting metabolic rate (RMR), muscle strength, and activity levels also decrease. As our RMR declines, our calorie requirements also decline. Most people, however, don’t reduce their caloric intake, and their body fat gradually increases each year. The increased body fat—and the accompanying increase in abdominal obesity and hidden visceral fat—promotes many serious disease states, including insulin resistance and dyslipidemia (high cholesterol, low HDL, high triglycerides, and high LDL), which damages blood vessels and causes heart disease and heart attack, the number-one killer of American men.

Strength training also helps maintain and even increase bone density, further reducing the risk of fractures. In fact, high-intensity strength training is the only type of exercise that will prevent and actually treat osteoporosis and other degenerative bone diseases.

Here is a quick list of other health issues that strength training improves:

As you crank out your reps and sets, you are transforming old, defective, damaged, and mutated mitochondria that I described in

Chapter 4

into new, healthy, vibrant, wild-type mitochondria capable of producing huge quantities of ATP, which not only will energize you, but also will make you stronger and feel younger.

The combination of strength training, cardiovascular training, and exercises that involve quick controlled moves (like martial arts) work synergistically as a protective factor for cognitive decline and dementia.

Regular resistance training plays a key role in the prevention of the accumulation of abdominal fat and the subsequent development of insulin resistance, the major cause of type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Balance and coordination are also improved with weight lifting by increasing strength, muscle size, muscle endurance, and joint range of motion, thereby reducing your chance of falling, fractures, and debilitation.

Muscle mass and strength are important for all types of physical activity, including sex. You need to have a lean, fit, strong, flexible body to guarantee outstanding sexual performance.

I have had to deal with back pain, as have literally hundreds of my patients. Lower back pain affects 90 percent of all American men at some point, and is the fifth-most-common reason for all physician visits. Eighty-five percent of all back pain is localized to the lower back. Most men do recover from episodes of lower back pain, but a small percentage don’t and go on to develop chronic problems, especially if they resume full activities too quickly and reinjure the same area.

There are two kinds of back pain: acute and chronic. Acute pain usually does not last longer than three months and is best treated by your doctor with analgesics (pain medicines) and a continuation of normal activities as tolerated. An exercise program can be resumed gradually but must be performed very carefully to avoid aggravating the injury.

Chronic low back pain (pain that persists longer than three months) must be evaluated by a physician to exclude serious underlying diseases, such as cancer, osteoporosis, rheumatologic disease (a very serious form of arthritis), infection, or a herniated disc. Most cases of chronic low back pain (85 to 90 percent) are caused by simple strains and sprains of muscles, ligaments, or tendons located in the lumbosacral area.

While all forms of exercise have been shown to benefit people with chronic low back pain, an intense, integrated approach like the Life Plan has been proven to be the most effective. This strategy not only improves endurance and activity tolerance but also increases the strength and flexibility of your back muscles. In addition, it promotes weight loss (obesity is a major cause of acute and chronic back pain) and provides beneficial psychological effects.

In a study published last year in the
Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
, Dr. B. W. Nelson and colleagues set out to determine if back-pain patients recommended for spinal surgery could avoid their surgery through an aggressive strengthening program. After following a 10-week intensive back-strengthening regimen, 57 of the 60 patients no longer required surgery and were virtually pain free. There are well over 100 other studies that have shown that cardiovascular and strength-training exercises can alleviate chronic back pain by strengthening and increasing the flexibility of back muscles.

It is critically important to see your doctor before you start a resistance training program, especially if you suffer frequently from back pain. Once you get the green light from your doctor, focus on exercises that strengthen the muscles that support your back, which include the abdominal and low back muscles. Be sure to conduct your exercises in a slow and controlled manner, and always use perfect form with each exercise.

It may not be the body fat you see, but the fat you don’t that is doing you the greatest harm. Visceral fat lurks under the abdominal muscle inside your abdominal cavity and can snake its way around internal organs. Studies show the more visceral fat you have, the more at risk you are of developing Metabolic Syndrome, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, some cancers, and Alzheimer’s.

In fact, a 2006 study published in the online edition of
Obesity
compared visceral, subcutaneous, and liver fat levels in Texas men and found that “visceral fat alone independently predicted risk of mortality after adjustment for the other fat measures.” However, we do know that men who exercise tended to lose more visceral fat than those who merely dieted to lose weight.