Many of us Baby Boomers can compare ourselves to clocks that are going backwards or forwards. That is, we are haunted by abandonment and demons from our past, and have subsequently aged long before our time.

You can never beat the eroding effects of time on the body, but you can slow them down. You can never forget negative emotional experiences from the past, but you can always work on them to reduce the impact they will have on your future.

As a 58 year old Baby Boomer, I have become very aware of the passage of time and the after effect it has on my emotions and my body and the way it can make me feel about myself, especially in the last ten years.

I have noticed a reduction in my once excellent eyesight; I was once a sharpshooter with the Dutch Royal Marine Corps.

I have noticed my decrease in stamina and strength; I was once an elite soldier as a Royal Marines SBS (Special Boat Service) Combat Swimmer/Frogman or Navy SEAL.

I have noticed how easy it has become to gain weight: before I could eat and drink whatever I wanted without thinking or worrying about how I would look or feel.

I’ve noticed how easy it is to remember past failures and regrets and then allow yourself to spiral down the cracks of depression, resulting in what’s called male menopause or life change syndrome, if you want to go there.

So regular exercise can be compared to making a regular contribution to a million dollar pension plan. The more you put in early in life or even now, the more you’ll have later on. The more exercise you exercise now, the more time and energy you’ll have later to enjoy your hard-earned pension plan income.
The more you focus on the positivity of your contribution, the less chance you have of getting caught in the tentacles of the consequences of depression.

Sadly, most of us will completely ignore the age-defying and quality-of-life benefits of exercise in our lives. Instead, in our younger years, all our efforts are focused on one thing; earn the money to meet the immediate needs and pleasures of life and/or build a good retirement savings fund for later, our retirement time, and many of us do it at the expense of our health and family, our greatest treasures.

However, when it comes time for our retirement, we realize we have to spend our hard-earned money on drugs, heart bypass surgery, and medical bills, and live the rest of our lives in pain, misery, inconvenience. and often alone in a nursing home. , having aged long before our time and lost our longed-for freedom and happiness in retirement due to neglecting to care for our bodies, minds, and families along the way.

We may have the money now, but we can no longer enjoy it because we are sick, alone, and stuck in memories of the past. A sad and true state of affairs for many of us and my Father was one of its victims.

However, it is never too late to make a change. No matter how far off you consider yourself, you can make the changes that can rescue you from despair, sickness, and unhappiness. You may be an aging Baby Boomer like me, but the body is a very resilient, miraculous creation and when given the right nutrition and the right exercise in combination with the right programming of the mind, you can pretty much achieve anything you want.

The failure rate in the SAS, SBS and Navy SEAL Special Forces courses is between 70 and 90%. However, all the young people who volunteer to do the course are physically and mentally healthy and very enthusiastic when they start the course. Why then do so many fail? They tell us that it is all a matter of mind over body. If you don’t care, then it doesn’t matter, they say. The same principle applies in life. Most of us start the journey of life with big plans, goals and dreams of what we can achieve, but many of us fail primarily due to our own emotional, often incorrect, interpretations of our experiences along the way (our mind). and the consequent abandonment of the body (matter).

I have always made exercise an important part of my life and have done so by implementing the short bursts or small dose approach to exercise, which I remembered from my training days at SBS.
I have benefited from these exercises when feeling stressed as an Accountant in my busy practice; I have benefited when I feel lethargic due to long work hours or when I feel unhappy due to some of life’s challenges.

You see, the benefit of exercise is cumulative and has a direct effect on your health, mood, and even memory. So you don’t need to spend hours in the gym every week; you don’t need to walk miles around the block. Five minutes here, ten minutes there; as long as you get at least 30 minutes of aerobic and resistance exercise a day; As long as you can get your heart rate up and work those muscles, you can stay in reasonable shape as you age and I’ve proven that to myself.

Muscle is your body’s biggest fat burning engine and the combination of muscular exercise with deep aerobic breathing and a sensible diet will literally allow you to hold on to your younger looking physique or shape for many years to come.

Steven Blair, PED, Director of Epidemiology at the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas, USA, once said:
Repeated short bouts of exercise have the same physiological or metabolic effect on a weight loss program as a single long workout with the same caloric expenditure; and the multiple short session approach to increasing energy expenditure may be easier to incorporate into a person’s daily schedule than freeing up a long block of time for exercise. (Blair, SN Ask The Expert: Fat Burn and Exercise. Weight Control Digest 1(3) (March/April 1991):47.

Just like passing a SAS/SBS ​​Special Forces or Navy SEAL training course is a matter of the mind, so is exercise, weight loss, and aging. Therefore, it is very important that you open your mind and learn to do the daily one- to two-minute bursts of mind-body techniques on a regular basis so that you can overcome self-sabotaging thoughts that prevent you from exercising and allow you to be a victim. from cravings or any other type of negative thought pattern that accumulates over time.

I found the combination of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) with my own Special Forces Provocation and Short Burst exercise approach to be a great way to not only shake off immediate or long-standing negative thought patterns, but also to lessen the erosive effects of time on the body and mind.

And the great benefit of this approach is that anyone can do it, no matter how old you are or what feeling you have.

Wind up that mind-body spring of life daily so that you can keep that spring in your step.

Bring Mind-Body exercise into your life. Only you can do it.