Taking Control of Personal Health: Part III

I recently ran across a series of short articles written by my father, Dr. Joseph Bosiljevac. He runs a Health and Longevity clinic on the Upper East Side of New York City. His major focus is for people to live actively for as many years as possible. This allows his patients to live longer lives, enabling them to work, play, travel, learn, love, and spend time doing so many activities that we all deserve to enjoy. Life is a gift, and we all want to achieve fulfillment. This is what he strives to provide.

Over the next several weeks I am going to share some excerpts of his works. This is the information that he shares with his patients over time. These articles help people to start thinking about their helath differently, and taking their lives (and destiny) into their own hands.

This article talks about maintaining muscle mass. Too often when people lose weight, they lose muscle mass also. This deteriorates the body and actually ages a person faster, a bad side affect to getting thinner. Always consider how to best keep the body in shape for long-term living.

I think you will find these interesting, useful, helpful and enjoyable.

Pushups for life

As patients get older many times they do not exercise as strenuously as their younger

days. Patients will get down to just doing a treadmill or elliptical but do not do any

resistance exercises for maintenance or to increase muscle mass. Maintaining muscle

mass is a key to longevity.

Look at the current article. https://www.studyfinds.org/men-more-than-40-push-ups-heart-disease/

There are three major areas of body muscle mass. The upper extremity is frequently the

first to lose muscle mass as patients get older. The second one to lose is muscle for

core and balance strength. The last area to lose is the lower extremities.

Many times I go back to the Paleo concept. Genetically, there have not been any

significant changes since the Paleolithic times. So maintaining lower muscle strength

has to do with survival. We need to move to survive.

How many push-ups can you do? The other thing is looking at something like a deep

squat. Can you get down into a deep squat like an Asian and get up without any help

using your hands? These are some simple measures that even go back to middle

school physical education that can measure our underlying muscle strength.

It is important to maintain the ability to achieve a high maximum heart rate--- for the

Paleo people it was for survival or to catch prey. Over 60 year old look at 150-160 beats / minute as your peak to maintain a level with active physical life and independence.

As we get older, body weight exercises are a very good way to do resistance work.

Push-ups, sit ups, and chair dips are things that can be done in a hotel room. These

should be performed to get to the maximum heart rate. So high intensity can be done

with body weight resistance training, killing two birds with one stone. Two or three times

a week for 10 or 15 minutes will help maintain muscle mass. To me, this is a key to

longevity.

I will follow shortly with comments about aerobic exercises such as a treadmill and

jogging and jogging. Not so worthwhile for us...this wears down body parts without sustaining any muscle.