HOW YOUR FITNESS LEVEL CAN EXTEND YOUR LIFE SPAN.

Maybe somewhere deep inside you lurks the crazy thought that we all have in our irrational moments. That is: Can't this whole disease threat thing just go away? Cant a society that put men on the moon and explore space come up with some kind of high-tech anti-illness potion so that we can go on about our business?
     Hang on, we have one for you. Behold our magic pill, guaranteed to significantly reduce your risk of disease. It's fun to take. It makes you feel good. It's 100 percent natural. It's cheap and available.

     Okay, we exaggerate a little---but only a little. It's not guaranteed (nothing in medicine is). It's not a pill. And it's not magic. But fitness through exercise is a proven risk-reducer. Go down the list of killers and exercise combats most of them.

     In short, a regular fitness program should be the cornerstone of your anti-disease strategy, experts say

Working out Disease

     "The numbers clearly show that active people who are physically active have less disease," says Kerry Stewart, Ed.D., a clinical exercise physiologist and director of cardiac rehabilitation and prevention at John Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore. "Particularly heart disease."

      Since heart disease is the number one killer of people, that's insignificant piece of information. Exercise works it's wonder directly and indirectly. Directly, according to Dr. Stewart, it improves things like heart function and body metabolism. Indirectly, it works on the risk factors of disease. For example, exercise lowers high blood pressure, decreases your percentage of  body fat, and improves your ratio of "good " cholesterol to "bad" cholesterol. All of those things are major factors in heart disease.

      

But fitness fights more than just heart disease. It's the treatment of choice for diabetes as well as your best bet to avoid it. And only recently has exercise's cancer-fighting value come to light, most notably (for men) as a risk-reducer for colon cancer and prostate cancer.

       Exercise not only keeps you alive but also makes your life worth living. "Most of what people think of as' growing  older' isn't," says Walter M. Bortz II, M.D., clinical associate professor of medicine at Stanford University School  of Medicine. It's disuse. They don't understand the power of  regular exercise.

The Aerobic Answer

       Exercises that jacks up your heart rate up for an extended period of time is aerobic exercise. That means running, cycling, swimming, rowing, skiing, football or anything else that gets you huffing and puffing enough to feel it but not so much that you can't keep it up. 

       All those good things that exercise does to help you avoid heart disease come mostly from aerobic workout.  That's eminently logical when you bear in mind that what aerobic exercise does is strengthen  your heart (hey, it's a muscle, too) and improve your lung capacity, thus helping the flow of oxygen through your bloodstream.

       Aerobic exercise is also the principal player in diabetes prevention. Regular aerobic type exercise will allow you to metabolize your blood sugar without requiring as much insulin. That's important for both heart disease and diabetes prevention.

  

   Do as you please

The kind of aerobic exercise that works best is whatever kind you'll do. So your wisest choice, according to physical therapist Mark Taranta, director of the Physical Therapy Practice in Philadelphia, is to go with what you like. "Do something you're familiar with or enjoyed in the past," he advises. "Don't go out and buy a big piece of equipment like a treadmill if you've never tried it before. You might hate it.