Strength Training - 30 minutes Once a week
Sarcopenia is the gradual loss of muscle mass, strength, and function. We all experience it. It is a natural process that we cannot avoid. By age 80 some individuals may have lost up to 50% of their muscle mass if they do not engage in strength training to add muscle back.
I want to be able to get up out of a chair by myself when I am 95, which means I have to do some kind of workout each week. But I hate working out.
NET is my best attempt to reconcile my loathing for pure work outs and my ability to get out of a chair when I am 95. The NET workout is only 30 minutes and only once a week. It is the easiest and most productive way I have found to build strength.
It is a very intense workout. I work my muscles to the point of failure for all ten machines I work on and at the end, my muscles are so tired they are shaking and difficult to control. By going to failure, my body signals that it needs to build more muscle. My ten machines cover most of the muscles in my body. In 30 minutes, I have built strength and can forget about it for 7 days. Lovely!
By concentrating my work out via NET, I only need a few minutes of will power each week. When I am doing the training, I have a personal trainer pushing me so I can’t cheat. Really, all the self-discipline I need is enough to get myself in the door, and then my trainer manages it from there. Below is their website.
https://www.newelementtraining.com/
I have been doing it for 5 years now, and I know it makes a difference. They have a free trial so you can check it out and learn about it.
One of my neighbors is Philip Shepherd, who literally wrote the book on this:. He sent me a write up so I could also add a reference to the book here:
The NET workout is based on a book by Philip Shepherd and Andrei Yakovenko called Deep Fitness: The Mindful, Science-based, Strength-Training Method to Transform Your Well-Being in Just 30 Minutes a Week. The book was a best-seller on both Amazon and The Wall Street Journal, and it updates widespread myths about fitness that date back to the 1960s. What research in the last 20 years has shown is that muscle acts like a hormone factory. When a muscle works it creates myokines, messenger molecules that permeate the body and promote health in every tissue and organ, from mental acuity to bone mineralization to capillarization and beyond. The stronger a muscle is, and the more intensely it works, the more myokines it produces. So muscle, it turns out, is the foundation of metabolic health. And Deep Fitness shows how you can strengthen that foundation in just 30 minutes a day – either on machines in a gym like NET, or at home using body weight and resistance bands.
You can learn more at https://embodiedpresent.com/pages/deep-fitness-book