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San Francisco, Paris, Philadelphia Season's Greetings and Best Wishes for a Happy New Year!

San Francisco, 11/02/14 - Functional Age vs. Subjective Age: Your Fitness Age is the One that Really Counts as new research on the concept of fitness age shows that you’re more in control than you think of the way your body keeps track of time. The good news is that unlike your actual age, your fitness age can decrease. -By Phil Mora (@orsusvirtum)

Many people would agree that we benefit from the increased experience that getting older brings. However, with each passing year, the aging of the body creates its own difficulties in everyday life. There are the inevitable aches, strains, and pains of our aging bones, joints, and muscles not to mention changes in appearance that make it more difficult to feel accepted in a youth-oriented society.

The one truth about aging is that it’s intimately linked with the passage of time. We may be able to alter the clock by setting it forward or backward an hour depending on the season, but we can’t set it back for more than that, much less days, months, or years. No one has figured out how to alter the body’s pace-setter cells that mysteriously link the body’s aging with the number of times the earth revolves around the sun.  

Just as the average person may bemoan the basic fact that aging and time are completely tied together, scientists who study the aging process find their job made far more difficult by this age-time conundrum. Are the changes we think due to aging actually due to social and historical changes? Consider aging within the Baby Boomers versus aging within Gen X-ers. The Baby Boomers had few of the benefits of improved social attitudes toward healthy eating and fitness that characterize the younger generation as they approach midlife. The Baby Boomers also went through different historical periods that affected their social and political attitudes. Because we can’t pluck people out of their own generation and watch them grow older in a different one, we’ll never know how much any individual, much less an entire age cohort, is showing changes intrinsic to aging separate from those related to these cultural factors.

Average people probably doesn’t fret too much about the limitations of research on aging, but they should. Most of what we read about aging in the popular press ignores the possibility that cultural shifts rather than true age-related changes account for a study’s findings. Do people actually become less well able to remember as they get older? Or is it only that older people now had poorer education when they were young and so never had learning skills as solid as their younger counterparts do now? Even if we follow the same people from youth to old age, we don’t know whether they change as a result of aging or as a result of the historical era in which they lived.

Clearly, then, we need a way to separate age from time. Such a feat would also have tremendous potential benefits for health. What if you didn’t have to lose your physical prowess and health as you got older? If you could slow down the biological time bomb counting down within your body, imagine how much better you would feel.

For decades, scientists who study aging have proposed swapping functional age for chronological age as a way out of the age-time quandary. We’ve also thought about asking people to tell us how old they “feel,” or subjective age. This wasn’t a bad idea, but it was not particularly scientific or reliable. Let’s say you’re 28 but you’re coming down with the flu, so you like you’re 48. When you get together you’re your high school pals, though, you feel 18. For a measure of age to perform as an adequate substitute, it has to provide a mood- and illness-resistant estimate.

A biological measure of functional age would seem to have more credibility, but it’s not very practical. Taking all the measurements that you’d need to estimate someone’s functional biological age becomes an expensive and time-consuming operation. In addition to measuring such obvious factors as blood pressure, heart rate, muscle mass, lung expiratory volume, kidney excretion rates, and so on.

To get biological age, you would also need to put people on a treadmill and get their heart and lungs to crank out their maximum capacity- so called “aerobic power.” Even this would not be a complete measure of functional age, but with an average decline of 1% per year after the age of 30 in the ordinary (sedentary) person, you’d have some sort of quantitative index that isn’t completely mixed up with historical era.

Norwegian medical researchers may finally have cracked the code. In a 24-year follow-up study of 37,000 adults, Bjarne M. Nes and his colleagues used a measure of cardiorespiratory fitness based not on actual exercise capacity as measured by aerobic power but instead on the far simpler method of asking people a series of questions, including their age, Body Mass Index (BMI), resting heart rate, and answers to these 3 questions:

How often do you exercise? (5-point scale from never to almost every day)

How hard do you usually push yourself? (3-point scale from not at all to push yourself to exhaustion)

How long do you exercise? (4-point scale from less than 15 to 60 minutes or more)

The cardiorespiratory fitness measure was particularly useful in predicting death from cardiovascular disease among people less than 60 years old. They calculated the odds of dying from cardiovascular disease as well as any cause at all on the basis of 1 standardized unit of fitness defined as a “MET” (metabolic unit) which equals the energy (oxygen) used by the body at rest. The harder your body works during the activity, the more oxygen is consumed. Each MET increase in cardiorespiratory fitness was reduced with as much as a 22% decrease in cardiovascular disease death and 10% less for all causes of death.  

In addition to showing that your risk of death is reduced proportionately to the extent that you exercise, the study’s findings allowed the authors to develop a test of fitness age.

The study’s findings show that if we think of age not as years since birth but years prior to death, it’s clear that you can literally become “younger” (have more years left to live) by maintaining this level of fitness. The expression “add more life to your years rather than years to your life” couldn’t be more appropriate.

Although cardiorespiratory fitness was the main focus of this study, physical exercise has other benefits that can keep your brain “younger” as well. Dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease is, at this point in time, not thought to be preventable. In contrast, vascular disease, which is related to cardiorespiratory fitness, can be preventable through exercise. There are also benefits of exercise to your mood, metabolism, and sexual health.

Of course, exercise can’t prevent everything wrong from happening to you, and there in fact can be risks associated with exercise not properly conducted. You can exercise to the point of damaging your joints, you might become obsessed with it, and you might even suffer more pronounced tooth decay than you otherwise would.

By the same token, leading a sedentary existence can make it even more difficult for you to exercise, starting a vicious downward cycle. Once you start to incorporate a reasonable amount of exercise into your lifestyle, though, it can set up a pattern of reinforcement especially if you notice that your mental outlook starts to lift and you start to feel more alert and energetic.

Once you think of your age as a needle you can move down the scale, you can conceive of your own life in a new and more controllable light. Age can truly become, for you, “just a number,” defined by you, and not just the calendar.

[EDITED: Read More Here > Thank You Psychology Today]

Phil Mora

Hughes Creative

VP, Digital Marketing

Phil Mora (@orsusvirtum) is an Executive Director and VP, Digital Marketing at Hughes Creative, a startup headquartered in San Francisco (hughescreative.net). Obsessed with creativity, fitness, wellness, work-hacking, finance and high-tech, Phil is a thinker, a designer, a doer, a creative, a hacker, and a leader. Find out more about phil at toppgun.net and philmora.com

San Francisco, California

Motivational quotes are much more than just words. They can be effective mantras for propelling you toward getting fit -- and staying that way. So make room on your bulletin board, clear off the fridge magnets and post these quotes wherever they're bound to inspire you every day. -By Philippe Mora (@philippemora)

1. “Stop comparing yourself to others and start competing with yourself.”

It’s easy to covet your friend’s size 4 little black dress or your buddy’s ripped physique, but certified personal trainer Zuzka Light says fitness envy is futile. She uses the above quote as motivation for her clients to identify and exceed their own personal bests. “Everybody is different, and every body is different,” says Light, who has trained celebrities like actress Tia Mowry from the show Sister, Sister. “Beating your personal record and reaching your own goals is a lot more rewarding than comparing yourself to other people.” Need inspiration? Light recommends challenging yourself to give up sugary drinks for two weeks in favor of lemon-infused water, or trying to run a 10-minute mile if your best time to date is 12 minutes. It’s all about identifying your self-imposed limits ─ and pushing past them.

2. “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Catherine Basu, founder of Fit Armadillo in Houston, Texas, calls on Thomas Edison’s wisdom to provide a much-needed dose of determination when training weight loss clients and runners. “When clients don’t see results on the scale right away, they can become discouraged,” says Basu. “It’s the small changes that make a difference over time.” She adds that it often takes anywhere from four to eight weeks for clients to start to feel a physical difference ─ and as long as six months before they acquire the proper habits for ongoing well-being. For those who have hit plateaus or feel frustrated that they haven’t seen results, Basu recommends incorporating interval training one to two times weekly or varying your routine to include new forms of exercise.

3. “A little bit of something is better than a whole lot of nothing.”

Each year, The Walking Connection hosts a World Wide Walk, which has attracted participants from all 50 U.S. states, all Canadian provinces and 37 different countries. It’s part of co-founder Jo Ann Taylor’s commitment to getting people moving ─ a practice she has modeled by walking every single day for the last four years. Taylor points out that the keys are consistency and starting small. “Someone can be initially motivated to start a fitness program, but unless it becomes a habit, it doesn’t have the sticking power,” she says. “Incremental exercise, such as a goal of walking for a minimum of 10 minutes each day, feels obtainable.”

4. “Falling down is an accident. Staying down is a choice.”

Of all of the motivational quotes on the walls at I Can Move Again (ICMA) in Provo, Utah, this particular quote resonates most with clients, according to owner Jack Mahoney. The wellness and fitness center caters to those who suffer from afflictions ranging from arthritis to fibromyalgia to lupus. “These folks have to work hard just to do the simplest things in life … but they are choosing to get up,” says Mahoney. The power of such motivational quotes was recently put to the test with a study of six different arthritis patients taking part in an ICMA-designed program for 12 weeks. The program paired exercise with elements of mindfulness, meditation, visualization and music containing subliminal affirmations. At its conclusion, the participants experienced improvements in 86 of 96 tested measurements of physical, social and emotional health.

5. "Don’t talk. Don’t think. Just do it … now!”

Getting over the mental block can be half the battle when trying to start a new fitness routine. “For those who don’t already ‘do,’ there is often a physical, mental and/or emotional resistance point,” says performance expert Chris Weiler, who coined the above quote for his clients. “As such, many of these people spend a lot of time in the thinking, planning and ‘knowing they should’ stages, but often fail to take meaningful action long enough to effect behavioral changes.” To develop lasting habits, Weiler advocates taking one “small, actionable step” each day toward your stated fitness objective or goal. Reinforce the action by taking a minute to write down the action step over and over until you fill one page. Then, “Get up and do it!” encourages Weiler

6. “One hour from now, do you want to be sweaty ─ or sorry?”

Xen Strength Yoga’s Danielle Diamond typically works with her private training clients twice a week for one hour, but when they’re not together, Diamond leaves them with the above quote to motivate them to keep moving ─ and posing ─ in her absence. “I tell them to ask themselves if they’ve ever felt bad after they pushed themselves to work out,” says Diamond. “[The answer is always] ‘Of course not.’ But they always feel bad an hour later if they’ve wasted time on Facebook instead of on their yoga mat.” Making the choice to move can certainly be empowering. In a 2014 survey conducted by Harris Interactive, 54 percent of people who successfully completed a fitness program became happier.

7. “It doesn’t matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”

Confucius’ wisdom can be applied to just about any area of life ─ and fitness is no exception. “We live in a world addicted to instant results,” says personal trainer Maria Brilaki, founder of the website Fitness Reloaded. “Combined with all-or-nothing thinking, we believe that if we don't do 30 or 60 minutes of exercise a day, then it's pointless. [But] Confucius advises that we don’t have to go fast. It’s OK to go slow; what matters is that we don’t give up. That’s how real progress happens.” To that end, Brilaki believes that daily, small steps are crucial to maintaining momentum ─ whether it’s taking the stairs rather than the elevator or exercising just five minutes a day. Figure out your realistic starting points and see what’s possible from there.

8. “Abs are made in the kitchen.”

As a national-level fitness competitor, Kristin Shaffer has found that the key to successful weight loss is clean, consistent eating habits. “Many people, women in particular, hold on to the false belief that they can out-exercise a bad diet, but this is simply not true,” says Shaffer, who is also the founder of online community sites Figure & Bikini and FAB University. To adopt the right approach to eating, Shaffer encourages people to spend a few hours each week preparing meals in advance and portioning them into individual containers. “You just grab your containers full of healthy treats and go,” says Shaffer. “That’s my kind of fast food.”

9. “Eat more, move less.”

Why should you adopt the inverse of the mantra “Eat less, move more?” Julie Fredrickson, co-founder of Minimum Viable Fitness, believes the old wisdom is not realistic or effective for those with busy mobile lifestyles. “We’ve found that the traditional mantra is actually precisely the opposite of what works well when you are always overloaded with more things to do,” says Fredrickson. Instead, she advises clients to focus on high return-on-investment exercises such as compound lifts, and to fuel their bodies with more high-protein foods and fibrous vegetables, rather than simply curbing food intake. The result? A more sustainable fitness and nutrition routine.

10. “Summer bodies are earned in the winter.”

Though venturing into the snowy landscape may seem like a daunting task, working out in the cold can produce a hot body ─ and possibly even improve your performance. A study published in “Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise” determined that as temperatures increased, runners’ performance slowed down. Getting outside for some brisk cold-weather exercise may also help your body burn more energy and avoid weight gain.

[Read More Here > Thank You LiveStrong]

Philippe Mora

Hughes Creative LLC

Managing Director

Philippe Mora is a co-Founder of Hughes Ventures (twitter @hughesventures) and a Managing Partner at Hughes Creative (hughescreative.net), a business consulting firm based in San Francisco and Philadelphia. Obsessed with Technology, Sports, Fitness and Wellness, Philippe is an entrepreneur, a startup advisor and a speaker.

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