Introduction to Anti-Aging
for Your Heart and Lungs

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The Institute of Medicine recommends that Americans strive for at least one hour each day - regardless of the type of exercise. I don't think they understand how exercise really works. Here's a research study that demonstrates what I mean:

Recently, Harvard researchers examined the exercise and cardiovascular health among middle-aged men. They discovered the following results:

This chart shows that the risk of heart disease for people who exercise for long durations was twice as high as those who exercise for short durations. This means that men who performed repeated short sessions of exercise reduced their heart disease risk by 50 percent more than those who performed long duration exercise.

Your reserve capacity, which is your body's ability to respond effectively to sudden demands you place on it, is crucial. It can mean the difference between a long healthy life and a fatal heart attack. Exercising for long periods of time makes the heart, lungs, and muscles smaller so that they can go longer with less energy. Although this sounds like a good idea, it's not.

The cardiovascular system becomes adept at handling a 30-, 45-, or 60-minute jog, but it loses its ability to rapidly provide you with big bursts of energy for short periods. So instead of protecting your heart, you actually become more vulnerable to a heart attack.

You can change your physical appearance, increase your energy levels, and protect your heart and lungs with a simple exercise system I've developed. And unlike traditional exercise programs, it takes on a few minutes each day.

Everywhere you turn, you're blasted with heart disease warnings. You don't want to have a heart attack so you feel compelled to follow these common recommendations. You hear that you must:

• Swear off red meat for skinless chicken breast or worse yet - tofu.
• Force yourself to go to the gym and pound out your "cardio".
• Avoid cholesterol like Howard Hughes avoiding germs.
• And, if a doctor says so, you must "protect yourself" with a drug.

You've got to follow this advice, right? Well, not so fast - you are about to read that all these recommendations have been pieces of a huge mistake.

Jogging, taking medications, and giving up the foods you love will not cure your heart. This flawed advice only takes you further from the real solution to a healthy heart. In fact, doing these things robs you of strength and vigor, accelerates heart and lung aging and creates additional health problems.

To reverse heart aging and disease and build cardiovascular vigor, you need entirely different strategies.

Transform Your Heart into a Powerhouse
You've also seen repeated prodding to "do cardio". Trouble is this kind of exercise doesn't strengthen your heart and, far from being anti-aging, this type of stress speeds up age-related loss of heart and lung capacity.

When pundits began recommending this, they didn't know that when you repeat the same movement for an extended time, your body responds by making the exertion more efficient. With prolonged relatively low-level "cardio" like jogging, you force greater efficiency by downsizing your heart and lungs because smaller can go farther with less fuel. They also didn't know that, since your heart and lung capacities shrink with age, this exercise only accelerates these negative changes of aging.

You can restore youthful heart and lung capacity with the right exercise challenge. But it doesn't mean pounding out the miles on a treadmill or spinning your wheels for an hour on an exercise bike. Instead, you need short bursts of challenges with rests in between to restore and preserve heart capacity.

The great news is that you can reverse years or even decades of decreasing heart and lung capacity by progressively increasing the challenge with those short bursts. You will learn a specific program called Progressively Accelerating Cardiopulmonary Exertion, PACE for short, to gradually challenge your heart, lungs, and blood vessels and make them as youthful and vigorous as they can be.

Hundreds of my patients at the Center for Health and Wellness have built heart capacity and functional strength by using this scientific program to recreate the challenges of a natural environment. If they can do it, so can you.

Use Your Biomarkers to Reverse Aging
Let's look at aging. True, it's part of nature's plan but many of aging's physical changes result in losses of capacities we'd rather not give up. And, many of the chemical changes occurring with age increase our risks of disease, infirmity and suffering. So aging itself involves health problems in the making.

Well... the first step to solving any problem is to expose it. Yet the routine tests your doctor has you undergo at your annual check-up don't actually tell you how well you are aging.

When you're a child, you can easily measure the physical changes, as you grow taller and gain weight. But once you become an adult, physical aging is harder to monitor because changes aren't so dramatic. But that doesn't mean they're not there. In fact, you can quantify and tract track many of these changes.

Some of these tests give you a real assessment of your cardiovascular health and strength and can detect heart problems you might not even know you have. Then, you can use this valuable information to take action - and move away from disease, toward outstanding heart and lung health, vigor, and vitality.

Effectively address the physical markers of aging and your "health span" will soar and you'll look and feel younger. You can:

• Boost your lung capacity for increased endurance and disease resistance.
• Improve your heart's pumping ability for an ageless heart.
• Strengthen muscle and bone you thought was gone forever
• Reverse the age-associated increase in fat around your middle.
• Return your strength and speed to youthful levels.

In addition, there are bio-chemical changes underneath that drive this physical aging. Manipulate what happens at the cellular level and you can affect the way you age to stay younger longer.

You can specifically test and then reverse the biomarkers of cardiovascular aging. Most doctors don't pay much attention to these markers. And as you'll discover, this is a BIG mistake if you want to hold onto a youthful cardiovascular system. You'll learn how to take control of:

• Insulin - The over-looked occult seed of heart disease.
• Homocysteine - The key indicator of "oxidative overload syndrome."
• CoQ10 - The often deficient anti-aging heart fuel.
• HDL - The good cholesterol no drug can give you.
• Testosterone - The much maligned heart fortifier.
• HGH - The natural regulator of most age-related changes.

Each of these six bio-markers undergoes a transformation as you age. Taking control of them using specific anti-aging therapies will reverse aging of your cardiopulmonary systems.

Modern Exercise Fads are Making Men Fatter
People signal for their bodies to make more fat when they exercise for endurance. It is true that with moderate exercise, the percentage of energy derived from fat is higher but surprisingly, the body burns even more fat (60 percent) while it is resting. Check out the following table, adapted from the information presented in the book Sports and Exercise Nutrition.

HOW THE BODY BURNS FUEL DURING VARIOUS LEVELS OF ACTIVITY

Source: McArdle W.D., et. al. 1999. Sports & Exercise Nutrition. New York: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Who would prescribe resting to burn fat? Yet, this table shows us that the most important changes from exercise occur after, not during, the exercise period.

As your body adapts to the demands placed upon it when you exercise, it replenishes your fat the next time you eat in preparation for the next endurance workout. In doing so, it sacrifices muscle to preserve fat. And high-intensity aerobic exercise won't keep your heart healthy the way many doctors and fitness "experts" say it will.

In fact, a study of long-distance runners showed that after a workout, the blood levels and oxidation of LDL (bad) cholesterol and triglycerides increased. According to the American Journal of Cardiology, running disrupted the balance of blood thinners and thickeners, elevating inflammatory factors and clotting levels - both signs of heart distress. These changes do not reflect a heart that's becoming stronger after exercise.

Set Your PACE - Just Ten Minutes a Day
Working with hundreds of patients at the Wellness Research Foundation, we developed a unique strategy for a highly effective exercise program that accomplishes three significant things:

• It dramatically improves your physical performance
• It transforms your body
• It strengthens the heart by building reserve capacity.

I've named this program PACE or Progressively Accelerating Cardiopulmonary Exertion. The objective of the program is to build a strong heart that can effectively handle real life demands. Over the years, I've tested and proven why the PACESM program works. I'll summarize the results here, but if you'd like more information you can find it in my book The Heart Cure.

Of course, you should use caution and always check with your doctor before starting this or any exercise program, especially if any of the following factors apply to you:

As you'll soon see, the PACE program focuses on interval training. But it also uses the following equally important principles, which work together to create a healthy heart and transform your physique.

Progressivity: Incremental Changes
Progressivity involves repeated changes that gradually work toward an ultimate goal. Exercise is much more effective when you do a little more of one activity each time you do it. But rather than exercising for longer periods, I want you to increase your intensity levels with each session. As your heart capacity increases, you should add resistance or pick up your pace gradually.

Acceleration: Achieving Your Peak
As you train your body to respond faster each time you exercise, your physical condition and heart capacity improve. Then, as your body responds more quickly, increase your pace or the resistance with each progressive workout session. This is the principle of acceleration. It is the best way to gear up for unexpected increases in cardiac demands.

When you first begin exercising, it will take several minutes to get your heart rate and breathing up. This is your low cardiopulmonary capacity, or de-conditioned phase. But as you begin moving at a faster pace, you condition yourself to meet the challenge. By starting at a comfortable exercise level, you enhance your response capacity by increasing your pace sooner in each workout as your progress. The quickness of the demand each time accelerates the development of your adaptive capacity.

Intensity: Build Your Heart Capacity
How hard you exercise refers to intensity. It goes hand-in-hand with acceleration because it involves challenging your body to go a little faster and work a little hard each time you exercise. This is how you build your heart capacity. Most people believe that exercising longer increases the cardiovascular challenge. But the key is to exercise harder, not longer.

When you walk or jog, you can pick up the pace by going faster or uphill. If you ride your bicycle, you pedal faster or add resistance, gradually and in a controlled manner. Your cardiac capacity increases, allowing you to do more work without feeling additional strain.

Duration: Short Episodes of Gradual Intensity
Exercising for shorter and shorter episodes, while gradually increasing your intensity will change the duration of your workout. With slightly shorter intervals, it gets easier to increase the intensity of each session.

It's important that you don't come to a complete stop during your rest periods. Try to keep an easy pace going for two very important reasons:

• It allows your blood to continue circulating to replenish your muscles' depleted energy.
• It removes lactic acid wastes from your muscles.

Gradually increase your progress
Your goal is to reach cardiopulmonary exertion. You can use various exercises to give your heart and lungs a challenge, depending on your fitness level. Just remember to increase the challenge gradually.

The following chart shows a beginning workout with the PACESM Program, starting with 20 minutes of exercise three times a week. Soon you will divide your 20 minutes into two 10-minute intervals.

As you continue to get into better shape, cut your exercise down to nine minutes; rest for three minutes, then workout another nine minutes. Progress as it feels comfortable for you.

The 10-Minute per Day Workout Plan

** Remember to progressively increase the intensity as you decrease the duration!

About The Author
Dr. Al Sears is fast becoming the nations leading authority on longevity and heart health. Since the release of his latest book, The Doctor's Heart Cure, he has been interviewed on over two dozen nationally syndicated radio programs with an audience of millions.

In just three years, Dr. Sears has published over 325 articles and 3 books in the fields of alternative medicine, anti-aging and nutritional supplementation - including a monthly subscription newsletter entitled Health Confidential for Men. Visit his web site at AlSearsMD.com.

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