Bessie Jo Tillman MD - Dr. Jos Fit in 15 Minutes per Week: : A Doctor Recommended, Scientifically Proven Way to Efficiently Optimize Your Health and Fitness

Could This Be True? In just 15 minutes per week you could:

Increase your glucose storage capacity (help reverse Type 2 diabetes)

Increase your muscle mass

Lose fat faster

Strengthen your heart, even after a heart attack

Increase your lung volume

Raise HDL cholesterol (the good guy)

Add years of healthy living to your life

Boost your immune system

Its got to be hype! I know that was my first response to hearing that all of those wondrous results in transforming my body to a high level of fitness could occur with only 15 minutes per week of effort. It does sound absolutely unbelievable.

But do you know what? Its true and its not such a new concept. But if its been around for such a long time why didnt I know about it sooner? Probably because there just hasnt been much media attention to it. So its been very much underutilized. That left me and maybe you also stuck in the old paradigm.

Back in the early 1980s when I first became interested in wellness and prevention of disease I travelled to Dallas, Texas to Dr. Coopers Aerobics Clinic to participate in a seminar on exercise and how to measure fitness levels. It was a great course and even introduced me to healthy nutrition.

Dr. Cooper brought the benefits of exercise into the public awareness and published his book in 1968. My copy is still sitting on my book shelf. He helped a lot of people improve their health. His exercise physiology research center scientifically measured the healthy improvements in the physiology of folks who participated in various exercise programs for many years.

Dr. Cooper followed many athletes who participated in the long endurance exercises like running and biking, those who did marathons and Iron Man events.

In these endurance exercises, the long slow type, you never have to stop and catch your breath. I remember the adage, run just fast enough to still be able to talk. This type of exercise creates endurance and efficiency, but something else was happening that was not healthy.

By the late 1980-90s Dr. Cooper realized that these types of slower, more prolonged exercise were causing more harm than good. People were dropping dead of heart attacks and getting cancer more frequently than the general public.

What went wrong?

Dr. Cooper continued to look at those problems and revised his recommendations. Then along came Dr. Al Sears with new research.

Dr. Sears expected long distance runners to have a large lung capacity. Was he ever surprised when he discovered that they had smaller lung capacity.

They also had less muscle mass. Just look at their physique. Most long distance runners have lean, slim bodies.

Dr. Sears also found that their tissues were assaulted with more free radical damage and that they had greater risk of joint or other injury from overuse.

Why was this so?

According to Dr. Doug McGuff, MD (more about him later) endurance exercise is not natural. Watch children and animals. They run seconds to a minute or two. Then stop and plop down or investigate whatever attracts their attention at the moment.

Just try to go on a walk with a kid or a dog-or both. They are definitely not goal oriented and you feel like you will never get to your destination.

Turns out that we should take a lesson from the kids and animals because steady state (endurance) exercise trains plasticity out of your system. It makes you less adaptable. This connotation of plasticity means ability to adapt. Long endurance exercise causes shrinkage: smaller muscles, smaller heart and smaller lungs. Whats worse, it wipes out your hearts and lungs reserve capacity.

Your heart and lungs use their reserve capacity to deal with stress. When faced with a threatening situation where you may need to run or fight:

Your heart has the ability to pump more blood.

Your lungs can move more air to increase oxygenation.

You can deal better with lifting, going upstairs or running.

Seems odd that long distance running or other endurance type of exercises actually decreases your hearts ability to pump blood fast in a threatening situation where you need to sprint, but thats what the current research reveals.

Extreme athletes with their strong determination push themselves and their hearts to the stress point when they run 50 miles or more, repeat marathons too frequently or participate in other extreme sports activities like Ironman Triathlons and very long distance bicycle races. Driving their hearts in this repeated stress mode may cause heart damage.

After athletes complete an extreme running event their blood contains markers associated with heart damage. If the athlete rests enough between events their bodies eliminate these markers within a week. But if they stress their hearts too frequently their hearts may develop thicker heart walls or scars that then decrease the amount of blood the heart can pump with each contraction.

With these changes in the heart anatomy they also increase their risk for heart rhythm problems, especially in a small percentage who have an enlarged heart before they start this extreme sport activity or if they have hardening of the heart arteries.

Most of us have no desire to push ourselves that hard so our moderate forms of exercise actually strengthen the heart. Now we can keep our hearts functioning well in just 15 minutes per week by engaging in the right kind of exercise.

Isnt it just terrific to know that we can keep our hearts, lungs, muscles and the rest of our bodies fit in such a short amount of time? Now we have no room for excuses not to engage in this health promoting exercise form.

That time-efficient, high-fitness-level exercise involves High Intensity Training and specifically the SuperSlow technique of strengthening your muscles. In SuperSlow exercise participants lift a weight slowly through the range of motion, about 10 seconds up and 10 seconds down using superb form.