Physical (and mental) fitness begin slowly going downhill after age 30-35 and accelerate thereafter. Deconditioning by avoiding strenuous exertion makes it worse. I am a skeptic about mental exercise, but not about the role of exercise in slowing natural physical decline.
How To Prevent Muscle Loss And Why You Should Care begins:
A variety of social forces extradited muscle from respectable mainstream health. Muscularity once suggested physical labor and therefore a lower class station. More recently body builders hijacked the mesomorphic, minting steroid-fueled Rodin caricatures that were anything but a model of health.
Muscle also has been perceived as anti-intellectual. In the organ kingdom, it is the antithesis of the exalted brain, as in brain or brawn. It is our brain that distinguishes us from the great apes. Even within the muscle category one finds a hierarchy. Cardiac muscle appeared to carry none of skeletal muscle’s stigma. Academics might have jogged, meatheads pumped iron...
Skeletal muscles, and the bones to which they attach (muscle stress is what keeps bones strong), undergo continual alteration and renovation. They are both adaptive: they respond to lack of stress by weakening or atrophying, and to stress by becoming more robust. This occurs regardless of age. Those 80 year-old women I see lifting weights in the gym are doing a smart thing. Weights are good for females.
There is also growing evidence that regular intense physical exertion is good for maintaining mental functioning. It's definitely good for mental health.
It is a general term for all of these things: looking good naked, and having well-developed strength/musculature, cardiovascular endurance, and athleticism (agility+speed+power). I pretty much follow the Maggie's program of a combination of weig
Tracked: Sep 28, 16:21