Fitness | Your Key to Eternal Youth

Hi, I'm Nadege, your new anti-aging eternal youth consultant.   I'm here to engage you in a series of conversations that revolve around feeling and looking as youthful as possible for the rest of your glorious days.

The topic of anti-aging truly interests me and I plan on sharing as much as possible as I learn more about it.  Basically, my methodology to eternal youth is this:  learn what the body is missing as it ages and add whatever's missing back in.  Pretty simple right?  Our body is in constant transition from birth until death.  The early days of the transition, our body goes through the building phase. Then somewhere in our thirties, it enters the decline. Things change.  Perhaps if we reincorporate some of "what's missing" back into your bodies/lives, then we can promote youthful vitality once again.

Since it's Fit Friday.  I'll start with the physical.  Typically, when I share images of amazingly fit women, I'm encouraging you to think of your goal to have the body you desire by summer.  But today, I'd like you to have a longer term vision in mind.  Think about the type of person you want to become as you age.  If you lose your breath when climbing a few flight of stairs now, imagine how hard it will be for your to move around as you get older.

I don't know about you, but I want to be physically able to do anything I want at any age so I'm ready to put in the work now.  When I think about a youthful body, two things immediately come to mind--  MUSCLE TONE + FLEXIBILITY.   In fact, those were the first two changes I noticed in my body once I entered my thirties.  Fat just seemed to creep in where I once maintained muscle.  And suddenly, I could feel slight tension my back when I bent over to pick things up.  I'm not saying that I'm old, but I am very aware that these changes were a peek into what my future holds if I don't do anything about it.

As your eternal youth consultant, I advise you to incorporate movement in your daily life that improves muscle tone and flexibility.  Daily exercise is more important than you realize. It goes beyond fitting into the perfect pair of skinny jeans.  Exercise keeps muscle on your body.  You need muscle tone for energy, strength, and a youthful appearance.  If you do nothing about it, you will loose 50% of your muscle tone between the ages of 20 and 90.  If you're a woman over the age of 40, you might be losing 1% of your muscle mass each year.  Lack of physical activity only accelerates the loss of muscle.  When you give up any form of physical exercise, you're practically allowing the inevitable loss of muscle to take place.  Even if you're in your twenties, I want you  to think about how to stay active.  By the time you're 30, regular exercise is a habit and you would have prevented some of the muscle loss before it occurs.

@chynnyco

Next let's talk about your flexibility.  As I child my body could do pretty much anything.  Backbends, splits, weird contortions.  Nowadays, I feel a slight bit of strain when I bend over to pick something up. What happened?!  The level of flexibility I once had is now fleeing.  Stiffness leads to pain and injuries.  We lead stressful lives, the stress builds in our muscles making the stiffness even worse.  That's why I'm going back to the simple practice of doing yoga stretches each morning.  Once upon a time, I did these daily.  My flexibility went from non-existent to pretty darn good.  In fact, I even took a 1 hour yoga class at the gym and was able to keep up with the class.  I made the decision one day after feeling stiff from just getting out of the bed. I went straight to the computer and searched yoga stretching videos on Youtube.  Weeks later, my body adapted and much of the lost flexibility returned to me.  Stiffness takes away your mobility. Don't let that happen to you. Try comfortably bending to grab your ankles, touch our toes or even the floor. Do you feel strain in your back, shoulders or the back of your thighs?  You can change that.

I'll end our conversation here.  I just want to leave you with two focuses to incorporate in your routine.  If you add ways to improve your muscle tone and flexibility into your daily life, you are well on your way to eternal youth.  Think about how children are in a constant state of movement and compare that to the elderly who live a sedentary life.  Are you more like the child who's always running around or the older person that sits in the same place for most of the day?

Chose who you want to be.