It's Never Too Late

AstroFit
by William J. Evans, Ph.D., Gerald Secor Couzens

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From the time that people first began studying humans in motion, the prevailing belief was that as we aged we automatically became enfeebled. The prevailing opinion was that those who remained strong simply had better genes. "Survival of the fittest" determined who would be self-sufficient and who would eventually need a cane, a walker, a wheelchair, or a hospital bed. My groundbreaking research, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 1990, debunked that myth and just about every other previously held idea regarding strength training and aging.

In a series of weight-training studies I conducted with sixty-, seventy-, eighty-, and ninety-year-old men and women, strength gains of up to 175 percent were observed in a matter of weeks, many participants increasing the size of their muscles by 15 percent with just a few basic strength exercises. With those bigger, stronger muscles, some of them were able to get out of their wheelchairs or put down their crutches and canes, performing ordinary tasks that once had been daunting and moving around unassisted as they had years before. Many of these people were surprised to find that the simple act of building muscle with light — ten- and fifteen-pound — weights was enough to transform their overall quality of life.

The only way to head off physical decline is with E-Centric resistance training, which gives us the power to continue to perform our daily activities right into our seventies, eighties, and beyond. Building new muscle keeps us active and vital. It's muscle that keeps us from becoming "old."

Jodie Gets Her Strength Back

Building upon my study findings, I've spent the past decade delving even further into the most efficient methods of maintaining and increasing muscle at any age. I've been able to take men and women and make their bodies, for all intents and purposes, years younger.

To determine how strong people are, I time them as they walk up a flight of stairs. Jodie, who was seventy-eight years old and had diabetes and hypertension, was out of breath almost immediately and didn't have the strength to go up the full flight of stairs. She shrugged her shoulders and said, "See. I told you: I'm old. Now you know what I mean."

I told Jodie not to give up. I had a surprise in store for her if only she would come back to my lab every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the next three months and perform seven simple E-Centric strength-training exercises. She agreed, and she never missed a training session in the next twelve weeks. After getting used to the special E-Centric movement on the weight machines, she dutifully raised and lowered the weights as I had instructed her.

On the ninetieth day, I took Jodie over to the stairs once again. She had completed thirty-six training sessions, and I wanted to show her how far she had progressed since her first workout. Taking out my stopwatch, I told her to go to the top of the stairs as fast as she could. Not only did she go up the full flight of stairs, but she went up as rapidly as someone thirty years younger.

Jodie had never thought it would be possible to regain the strength and vitality she had lost over the past decades. Happily, hers is not an isolated story. I see it all of the time with my test subjects of all ages who begin to lift weights. Think what Jodie's life would have been like if she had started this program in her twenties, thirties, forties, or even fifties!

Aerobic Exercise or Weight Training?

Although walking, biking, and swimming are all healthful aerobic activities that enhance the function of your heart and lungs, by far the best way to prevent or reverse muscle loss is through regular E-Centric strength-training sessions. Both types of exercise are good for you, but in different ways.

In a recent study, Danish investigators examined three groups of competitive athletes, all in their sixties and seventies. These test subjects trained and competed regularly as runners, swimmers, and weight lifters. As a control group, the investigators age-matched a group of sedentary older men and another group of active men who were twenty-four years of age, on average.

The remarkable finding of this study was that the men who had been swimming or running for most of their lives were no stronger than older men in the control group who were completely sedentary. These older endurance athletes certainly had much less body fat than their sedentary counterparts, but their muscle mass was just as minuscule as that of the sedentary seventy-year-olds. The older weight lifters, however, were much stronger than the older endurance athletes, and their muscle mass and strength were similar to that of the twenty-four-year-old men. Muscle biopsies revealed that the molecular structure of the muscles of the older weight lifters was similar to that of the young men. By contrast, the muscle composition of the swimmers and runners was similar to that of the inactive control group.

Aerobic exercise is definitely part of the AstroFit program. It's important to incorporate aerobic activity into your exercise week in order to maximize your cardiovascular fitness. However, the focus of this book is rebuilding muscle so you can maintain your strength and health for as long as possible. As you follow my AstroFit program over the next three months, you're guaranteed to add muscle no matter how old you are — effectively reversing the aging process.

If you already perform some type of aerobic exercise, you will be surprised to find that the strong muscles you get from AstroFit will enhance your ability to run, dance, cycle, and swim. In addition, your body's metabolic furnaces start to roar after each good weight-training workout. No aerobic exercise, no matter how great you feel afterward, will continue to burn calories once you're done.

The bottom line: You can run, bike, swim, or walk all that you want, which is great for cardiovascular fitness. But when it comes to building powerful, fat-burning, age-extending muscle, you have to lift weights E-Centrically to achieve the most benefit. Even regular weight training doesn't give the same results as AstroFit.

Women and E-Centric Training

E-Centric training is as important for women as it is for men. Unfortunately, the fear of developing oversized muscles like a male bodybuilder has kept many women away from weight training.

The development of muscle mass is a function of a woman's genetic inheritance as well as her training program. The circulating levels of testosterone — one of the primary hormones responsible for large gains in muscle tissue, as well as the development of the male secondary sex characteristics — are ten to thirty times greater in men than women. Therefore, it's extremely difficult for a woman to develop the size of muscles typically seen in men at comparable training levels.

My advice for women is to get rid of the notion that you will look like a bodybuilder once you start lifting weights. Women naturally have less bone and muscle than men, putting them at higher risk of osteoporosis and greater risk of disability as they age.

So what are you waiting for? If you want control over your body and spirit, a stronger, more powerful, self-confident woman is just a few E-Centric sessions away!

Suzanne Takes Her Fitness to the Next Level

A perfect example of a true believer is Suzanne, a test subject in one of my Mars studies. Suzanne ran three miles regularly and considered herself to be in excellent physical shape. At five feet, eight inches and 125 pounds she was thin, but the biggest muscles she had on her body were her hamstrings (located on the backs of the thighs). These helped power her along on her runs around Little Rock. Other than that, Suzanne had no significant musculature and barely any strength. When I tested her body fat percentage, it was 24 percent, which was too high for someone who put so much time into running.

A few weeks into the study, Suzanne realized she was nowhere near her true physical potential. Excited by the many positive changes she saw in herself — such as more energy, increased metabolism, and greater muscle definition — that came from her E-Centric workouts, she was not prepared to lose ground by going back to her aerobic-based workouts once the study ended.

In my laboratory, we have a special piece of equipment called the Space Yo Yo. It's a machine designed for E-Centric strength training in Earth's gravity or in microgravity. Suzanne had been training with the Yo Yo, but now needed a home workout using dumbbells that would provide the same muscle-building effectiveness.

I put together a program, and Suzanne bought a set of dumbbells. Over the next three months she trained E-Centrically three times a week. She started out with five-pound dumbbells, but she gradually moved up in poundage to keep pace with her tremendous strength gains. By the twelfth week, Suzanne was hoisting twenty-pound weights for some exercises and said that she'd never been so strong in her life. Her appetite had increased significantly, and she began consuming more low-fat, protein-based foods. Since she was developing metabolically active lean tissue, her body fat percentage started dropping to a more healthful level. As Suzanne's case illustrates so well, my AstroFit program enhances the whole person, producing a leaner, stronger, and more metabolically efficient body in the process. Most of Suzanne's clothing had to be taken in by a tailor, but this was a price she was happy to pay.

Fast, Tangible Results

With any type of aerobic exercise, you eventually make changes in how you look and feel, but you won't have much more muscular strength — plus it takes a while to realize any significant transformation. One of the interesting aspects of E-Centric training is that half of all the strength gains you make will come in the first three months, which means that you will be making significant increases in strength very quickly. This, of course, leads to immediate gratification and the motivation to continue the AstroFit program.

I've based the AstroFit program on three E-Centric workouts per week. Each one takes half an hour. This structure allows you to hit new benchmarks for strength, fat loss, and increases in muscle mass every four weeks. The program takes only three months or less to yield significant results. As an added bonus, it's extremely inexpensive.

In this book I provide you with my laboratory-based exercise and nutrition plan that's guaranteed to give you the means to slow or even reverse many of the most prominent aspects of aging. AstroFit works for the elite astronaut corps, and it will work even for sedentary people who have not seen the inside of a gym since their high school phys ed classes. Put in the time, and you'll reap the rewards quickly. At your very first workout, you will feel the changes in your muscles, and you'll see visible results six to nine workouts later.

Copyright © 2002 by William J. Evans and Gerald Secor Couzens

About the Author

William J. Evans, Ph.D., a pioneer in the field of age reversal for more than twenty years, has worked as an expert adviser to NASA on nutrition and exercise since 1988, and is the former head of the Nutrition, Physical Fitness, and Rapid Rehabilitation Team of the National Space Biomedical Institution. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with his wife and three children.

Gerald Secor Couzens is the managing editor of the Johns Hopkins Prostate Bulletin and a contributing writer for both the Johns Hopkins Health After 50 newsletter and the John Hopkins White Papers medical series. He lives in New York City with his wife and four children.