Younger Next Year for Women: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy - Until You're 80 and Beyond

by Chris Crowley

Rancho la Puerta

My patients had had good medical care but not, I began to think, great health care.

Harry’s First Rule. It goes like this: Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life.

Harry’s Second Rule, which goes like this: Do serious aerobic exercise four days a week for the rest of your life.

Before too long, you should get up to doing forty-five minutes a day of aerobic exercise. Throughout the book, when we talk about doing a day of this or that, we mean at least forty-five minutes of actual exercise unless we say otherwise.

Consistency trumps intensity every single time.

Besides, study after study shows that we are more productive and happier—on less sleep—when we’re fit.

If you put any value at all on your quality of life, the time you spend exercising becomes a bargain. The reality is that your life is so full in these years that you can’t afford not to exercise. The only real issue is that it’s tough to keep up the motivation to exercise when life is crowded with obligations and stress. So rely on structure more than motivation. Carve out the time to exercise, make it “protected time” and guard it fiercely against intrusion.

And the best way to do that is to set long-term goals and get to work on them. The most important one is this: A year from now, you should be able to do long and slow aerobics (that’s breathing hard but still able to talk; it’s 60–65 percent of your maximum heart rate) for, say, three hours without getting exhausted. You should be able to do that in your sixties, seventies and eighties . . . and a variation of it in your nineties. That’s an all-morning bike ride or a hike at a firm but not punishing pace. You should do something like that, oh, once a month. Two hours is okay some months, but three is better; make it a real outing, a real commitment. Make it a focus of your training, while reminding yourself that this is what it’s all about.

For a second endurance goal, you should be able to do high-endurance aerobics for an hour (that’s a serious clip where you can no longer talk, other than a few panted words; it’s 70–85 percent of your maximum heart rate). If you can maintain this pace for two hours, that’s wonderful.

An hour at this clip is a lot, and it’s not easy. Reach that goal and you’ll be in super shape.

Finally and least urgently, you should be able to do real hell-for-leather sprints or some other flat-out activity at anaerobic levels (that’s everything you’ve got until you have to stop) for a minute or two. Thi...

Figure out your theoretical maximum heart rate using this simple formula: 220 minus your age. That gives a rough maximum heart rate number. Pretty soon, you’ll want something more accurate, but this is fine for now. Then just go through your normal workout and look down once in a while; see what percentage of your max you’re working at. Do not try to go to your theoretical max until you’re in really great shape, if ever.

Start where you should start and stay there until you’re really ready to move on. Consistency

trumps intensity every time.

But there’s one thing that does apply to you, no matter how fit you are, and that is the mix of different kinds of exercise we’re recommending (eventually aerobic exercise at different levels four days a week and at least two days a week of strength training). That mix is as important to everyone. If you concentrate only on one sport or activity, you inevitably ignore some muscle systems. As you get older, your body will get less and less tolerant of that kind of concentration. The systems and muscle groups that you’re ignoring will atrophy and raise hell with the rest of your body. That’s what cross-training is all about, and it’s important.

critical. If you don’t get anything else out of this book, learn about your aerobic base and the utter importance of building it up and keeping it strong. Big stuff, ladies. Big stuff for those heart attacks and strokes and lots of those nasty cancers. Building up your aerobic base is a lifesaver. And it makes you feel great.

A high-endurance day should go something like this. Warm up, of course; that never changes. Then up to 60–65 percent of your max for five or ten minutes. Then crank it up to 70–75 percent and hold at that level for five or ten minutes. Feel your way. That’s intense enough for your high-endurance work in the early stages and maybe forever. Then back down for recovery at 60–65 percent. Over time, be sure to amuse yourself with variations. Make it hard enough to be interesting, but not so hard that you’re knocked out. Eventually, you should be able to hold at 70–75 percent for twenty minutes without much strain. After a while, as you know, you should be able to hold it at 70–85 percent of max for an hour or two without flying apart. If you have trouble getting up to the 70–85 percent level, think about aerobics classes of some kind. I often find it hard to make myself go to high endurance all alone, even though

I know it’s great for me and that it will feel good. I feel a terrible temptation to dog along at 60–65 percent. But in spinning class I always get up in the high-endurance range; indeed, that’s what spinning is all about. Other types of classes do the same thing. Or consider a demanding bike ride or hike, like the hike I described taking in Colorado. Most of us don’t have a serious hiking opportunity in the backyard, but there are lots of ways to skin the high-endurance cat, and not all of them involve sucking in someone else’s exhaust and being yelled at in the gym.

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