Anti-Aging Remedies

The male is an animal that is genetically, environmentally, and perhaps even spiritually conditioned to exert himself physically for his livelihood. Yet it still doesn't take much for this same animal to get out of shape physically and mentally. And when our human male starts letting himself go, there can be many consequences...most bad. He starts to take losses in terms of increased disability, not to mention susceptibility to illness. He also begins to feel bad about himself. Being out of shape causes him stress and internal turmoil that, like a domino effect, contribute to further physical problems. And as he lets his body slide, maybe, if he's lucky, he realizes somewhere deep inside that letting himself go is fundamentally wrong.

Midlife is especially a critical time for us males (grunt, grunt!). We have long ago left behind those years when we thought we could do just about anything we wanted with our bodies and survive unscathed. We've started to feel our years. We now suffer aches and pains after exercising. We may have begun to notice a decline in our physical performance. So that we may also begin to look ahead to the rest of our life possibly with dread, thus producing even more stress.

More damned reality: "Muscle strength usually decreases 20 percent between the ages of 22 and 65; bone mass and, worse yet, flexibility, also decreases with age".

So what else is new that we didn't know already?

Now for some happy news: Midlife can also be a time of opportunity. We still retain enough of our physical strength and stamina that if we take action now, we can preserve our performance, restore our sense of well-being, and still prepare ourselves physically and mentally for some great years.

It all comes down to culturethe environment, society, and era in which we live. The fact is that in North America, as well as other so-called advanced Western societies, we can live in a culture of inactivity. We've heard a lot of reasons for this phenomenon: the movement of work from outside to inside, from body to brain, from physical activity to physical passivity. Commensurately, our time for recreation and leisure has increased, leading to more time sitting than standing or moving about. The human culture has traditionally viewed leisure as a passive activity a break from an often backbreaking day of work. Ironically, the day's toils are, for most men, now largely physically passive, and leisure time can provide the only opportunity for physical activity.