The Life Plan (28 page)

Reward yourself! Find a nonfood item that you can use as a reward. I’m sure there’s something at your local electronics store that you have your eye on.

Keep records. Write down your exercise time each day. Keep a running total for a week, month, and year. Calculate your average exercise time per day. Set some lofty goals!

For all of the Life Plan Workouts, it’s important to maintain proper breathing. Always—even when you are just walking around—breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. The nose is the primary way we breathe in clean, heated, and filtered air, so if you breathe through your mouth, you are taking in air that is not perfectly treated for your body. Breathe from your diaphragm by allowing your belly to extend, instead of your chest, on every inhalation; your belly should draw in during every exhalation.

During your cardio workouts it’s important to continue to remain relaxed. You can accomplish this by breathing deeply and slowly and avoiding shallow breaths. Concentrate on your breathing and keep it well controlled.

During martial arts or other flexibility and balance exercises, it’s critical that you not hold your breath. Breath control is one of the important skills men learn during their martial arts training.

During the resistance training workouts, never hold your breath, because this increases your blood pressure and can cause a stroke. Instead, exhale when you are performing work or producing force against the weight or external resistance. Inhale when reducing force or slowing the weight or external resistance.

Now that you understand why you’ll be exercising, look over the next three chapters to learn the program. Each of the Mighty Three has a different point of entry, depending on what your current fitness levels are: basic health, fitness, and high performance.

B
efore I started training in the martial arts, I had never given flexibility or balance much thought. I just figured that as long as I was doing cardio and lifting weights consistently, I was taking care of my body. When I got stiff in my lower back, hips, and legs, which was pretty often, I just assumed that would improve with more strength training and cardio. But as my martial arts skills progressed and I was asked to start kicking my legs above my knees, I realized just how inflexible I was, and how prone I was to falling.

Flexibility is the ability to move all the joints—your fingers, hands, wrists, elbows, knees, hips, feet, toes, neck, and spine—freely through a full range of motion and without pain. I have found that the more flexible my joints are the less joint pain I have. Flexibility is like bone density and muscle mass: It’s a “use it or lose it” situation. In order to “use it” you need to be able to comfortably twist, bend, turn, and reach. The flexibility exercises outlined in this chapter involve stretching, which teaches your body to move without restraint so that you will prevent muscular pain.

Loss of flexibility can also lead to balance problems. Tight muscles and joints—the cause of inflexibility—put undue stress on the joints and force the body into faulty movement patterns, lousy posture, and overall instability. When your body is forced to deal with muscle tightness, it sends distorted signals to your brain from your sensory nervous system, which triggers your body to compensate and recruit other muscles to perform a particular movement. For example, if your chest is tight it will cause your shoulders to round, making it impossible for your body to properly align and throwing you off balance.

All of the systems related to balance decline with aging if we let them. These include touch and pressure sensation on the bottoms of the feet, vision (both acuity and edge detection), proprioception (sensory information that provides feedback to your brain about joint position and movement), and vestibular input (the sense of body movement located in our inner ear). A loss of strength also affects balance. The muscle loss called sarcopenia, which I discussed in Chapter 4, is a major factor in the overall loss of balance and flexibility and greatly increases your risk of falls, fractures, and admission to nursing homes.

However, when you combine flexibility exercises with balance training, you create a win-win situation that will keep you from feeling old. The benefits of flexibility and balance training include:

A more youthful gait

Improved coordination

Improved posture

Improved reaction time

Improved sexual function

Increased range of motion

Reduced lower back pain

Reduced muscle soreness

Reduced risk of muscle injury