Top 5 Anti-Aging Exercises
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There are some exercises that get called such things as “The King of Exercises!”, but how well-earned is that title and could it be that actually a mix of the top few is best?
The Exercises
While you don’t have to do all 5, your body will thank you if you are able to:
- Plank: strengthens most of the body, and can reduce back pain while improving posture.
- Squats: another core-strengthening exercise, this time with an emphasis on the lower body, which makes for strong foundations (including strong ankles, knees, and hips). Improves circulation also, and what’s good for circulation is good for the organs, including the brain!
- Push-ups: promotes very functional strength and fitness; great for alternating with planks, as despite their similar appearance, they work the abs and back more, respectively.
- Lunges: these are great for lower body strength and stability, and doing these greatly reduces the risk of falling.
- Glute Bridges: this nicely rounds off one’s core strength, increasing stability and improving posture, as well as reducing lower back pain too.
If the benefits of these seem to overlap a little, it’s because they do! But each does some things that the others don’t, so put together, they make for a very well-balanced workout.
For advice on how to do each of them, plus more about the muscles being used and the benefits, enjoy:
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Your Brain Is Always Listening – by Dr. Daniel Amen
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There are a lot of books on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), so what makes this one different?
While many CBT books have a focus (as this one also does) on controlling Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs), this one stands out in two ways:
Firstly: Dr. Amen, a medical doctor and psychiatrist, looks not just as the thoughts and feelings side of things… but also the neurological underpinnings. This makes a difference because it gives a much more tangible handle on some of the problems that we might face.
We wouldn’t tell someone with Type 1 Diabetes that they are “just blaming their pancreas” for blood sugar woes. So what’s with the notion of “this person is just blaming their brain”? Why would be harder on ourselves (or others) for having amygdalae that are a little out of whack, or a sluggish prefrontal cortex, or an overactive anterior cingulate gyrus?
So, Dr. Amen’s understanding and insights help us look at how we can give those bits of brain what they need to perk them up or calm them down.
Secondly, rather than picture-perfect easily-solved neat-and-tidy made-up scenarios as illustrations, he uses real (messy, human) case studies.
This means that we get to see how the methods advised work in the case of, for example, a business executive who has a trauma response to public speaking, because at the age of 12 he had to stand in court and argue for why his father should not receive the death penalty.
Bottom line: if these methods can ease situations like that, maybe we can apply them usefully in our own lives, too.
Click here to check out Your Brain Is Always Listening, and take control of yours!
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The Minimum Method – by Joey Thurman
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Trying to squeeze out an extra 0.5% from every effort in life can be exhausting, especially with diminishing marginal returns when it comes to linear increases in effort.
Surely there must be a sweet spot of getting the best returns on the least effort and call it a day?
That’s what this book is about. Thurman examines and explains how to get “the most for least” in various important areas of health, including diet, exercise, sleep, breathwork, recovery, and a chapter specifically on brain health, though of course all the aforementioned things do affect brain health too.
An interesting feature of the book is that at the end of each chapter, he’ll give different advice for different levels of experience/commitment, so that essentially there’s an easy/medium/hard way to proceed each time.
The style is light and personal, without much hard science. The advice given is nonetheless consistent with prevailing scientific consensus, and there are still occasional scientific references throughout, with links to appropriate studies. Mostly though, the focus is on being practical.
Bottom line: if you’ve been looking for a “most for least” way of going about health, this is a fine option.
Click here to check out The Minimum Method, and enjoy benefits disproportionate to your effort!
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Healthy Mind In A Healthy Body
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The 8-minute piece of music “Weightless” by Marconi was created scientifically to lower the heart rate and relax the listener. How did they do it? You can read the British Academy of Sound Therapy’s explanation of the methodology here, but important results of the study were:
- “Weightless” was able to induce greater relaxation levels than a massage (increase of 6%).
- “Weightless” also induced an 11% increase in relaxation over all other relaxing music tracks in the study.
- “Weightless” was also subjectively rated as more relaxing than any other music by all the participants.
Try it for yourself!
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Isn’t that better? Whenever you’re ready, read on…
Today we’re going to share a technique for dealing with difficult emotions. The technique is used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and it’s called RAIN:
- Recognizing: ask yourself “what is it that I’m feeling?”, and put a name to it. It could be anger, despair, fear, frustration, anxiety, overwhelm etc.
- Accepting: “OK, so, I’m feeling ________”. There’s no point in denying it, or being defensive about it, these things won’t help you. For now, just accept it.
- Investigating: “Why am I feeling ________?” Maybe there is an obvious reason, maybe you need to dig for a reason—or dig deeper for the real reason. Most bad feelings are driven by some sort of fear or insecurity, so that can be a good avenue for examination. Important: your feelings may be rational or irrational. That’s fine. This is a time for investigating, not judging.
- Non-Identification: not making whatever it is you’re feeling into a part of you. Once you get too attached to “I am jealous”, “I am angry”, “I am sad” etc, it can be difficult to manage something that has become a part of your personality; you’ll defend your jealousy, anger, sadness etc rather than tackle it.
As a CBT tool, this is something you can do for yourself at any time. It won’t magically solve your problems, but it can stop you from spiralling into a state of crisis, and get you back on a more useful track.
As a DBT tool, to give this its full strength, ideally now you will communicate what you’re feeling, to somebody you trust, perhaps a partner or friend, for instance.
Humans are fundamentally social creatures, and we achieve our greatest strengths when we support each other—and that also means sometimes seeking and accepting support!
Do you have a good technique you’d like to share? Reply to this email and let us know!
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The #1 Foot Health Secret Everyone Over 50 Should Know
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Our favorite over-50s specialist physio Will Harlow is here to keep us on our toes:
Mobility requires mobilization
As we age, our toes are inclined to become stiffer. Stiff toes lead to balance issues and increased risk of falling.
A study cited in the video showed that two weeks of toe mobilization improved foot-ground contact by 30% in older adults, enhancing balance and reducing falls.
Here’s the routine:
- Toe flexion:
- Apply moisturizer or oil to your hands.
- Pull your toes downwards, then let them return their normal position.
- Repeat for one minute per foot.
- Toe extension:
- Rub hands from the heel under the toes.
- Push your toes upwards, then let them return to their normal position.
- Repeat for one minute per foot.
- Foot rotation:
- Hold both sides of your foot and twist it in one direction, then the other.
- This helps loosen foot joints and improve flexibility.
- Perform for one minute in each direction per foot.
For more on each of these plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Steps For Keeping Your Feet A Healthy Foundation
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- Toe flexion:
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Rutin For Your Circulation & More
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Rutin is a bioflavonoid so potent it’s also been called “vitamin P”, and it’s found most abundantly in buckwheat, as well appearing in citrus and some stone fruits (apricots, plums, etc) as well as figs and apples—it’s also found in asparagus, and green and black tea.
So, what does it do?
Quite a lot: The Pharmacological Potential of Rutin
There’s much more there than we have room to cover here, but we’ll pick out a few salient properties to focus on.
First, a word of warning
A lot of the extant science for rutin is in non-human animals. Sometimes, what works for non-human animals doesn’t work for humans; we saw a clear example of this here:
Conjugated Linoleic Acid For Weight Loss?
…in which CLA worked for weight loss in mice, hamsters, chickens, and pigs, but stubbornly not humans.
The state of affairs with the science for rutin isn’t nearly that bad and there are human studies showing efficacy, and indeed, rutin is given to (human) patients with capillary fragility, varicose veins, bruising, or hemorrhoids, for example:
So, we’ll try to give you humans-only sources so far as we can today!
Improving blood flow
Rutin does improve various blood metrics, including various kinds of blood pressure (diastolic, systolic, mean arterial, pulse) and heart rate. At least, it did in humans with type 2 diabetes, and we may reasonably assume these results may be extrapolated to humans without type 2 (or any other) diabetes:
As you may gather from the title, it did also significantly improve serum antioxidant levels, and quality of life (which latter was categorized as: emotional limitations, energy and freshness, mental health, social performance, and general health).
We couldn’t find studies for cardioprotective effects in humans (and of course those couldn’t be RCTs, they’d have to be observational studies, because no ethics board allows inducing heart attacks in humans for the sake of science), but here’s a study using rats (with and without diabetes), showing proof of principle at least:
Anti-Alzheimer’s potential
As ever, a good general rule of thumb is “what’s good for the blood is good for the brain”, and that’s true in this case too.
The title says it all, here:
In case that is not clear: everything in that title after the word “inhibits” is bad for the brain and is implicated in Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis and progression; in other words, rutin is good against all those bad, Alzheimer’s-favoring things.
Other neuroprotective activity
You may remember from the above-linked research that it helps protect against damage caused by Advanced Glycation End-products (AGEs) (the golden-brown stuff that appears as a result of dry-cooking proteins and fats); it also helps against damage caused by acrylamide (the golden-brown stuff that appears as a result of dry-cooking starches).
Note: in both cases “dry-cooking” includes cooking with oil; it simply means “without water”.
Again, this was a rat study, because no ethics board would have let the researchers fry human brains for science.
Want to try some?
As well as simply enjoying the fruits and vegetables that contain it, it is possible to take a rutin supplement.
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
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The Fiber Effect – by Nichole Dandrea-Russert
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The author, a registered dietician-nutritionist (RDN), brings to this work her decades of professional experience specializing in heart disease, diabetes, sports nutrition, and women’s health—and it shows.
The main premise is, of course “eat more fiber”, but she also talks us through what happens if we don’t, and how very many people (including 95% of Americans) suffer the consequences of a fiber-deficient diet, usually without even knowing that that’s the reason.
This book details the many different kinds of fiber (which is one of the reasons for consuming a wide variety of plants, not just one or two star-performers), what they do, what we need to prioritize for what, and more.
The recipes, of which there are 40 (enough to furnish us with a 14-day meal plan, which she does) are plant-based and varied.
The style is energetic and friendly, with plenty of (well-referenced) scientific information, but little-to-no jargon.
Bottom line: if you’d like to improve your fiber intake, then this book can help you supercharge that!
Click here to check out The Fiber Effect, and feel the difference!
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