OK, now with the formalities out of the way, here's a little background on me and the movements that I choose to assemble for exercise and fitness. As I may have mentioned elsewhere I spent a great deal of my early schooling in Catholic Schools, my parents believing that the smaller student/teacher ratio was bound to provide more individual attention, and less potential for accidents. Which, once you know my full history will demonstrate just exactly how determined kids can be when their young.

      During my 6th grade year there was a family in our school who were involved in an “exchange program”, at that time what this meant was that their HS student would select a country during the summer between 9th and 10th grade, that he/she wanted to study in, and then the program searched any and all entrants from THAT country looking for a compatible student match. When one is found, phone calls and letters are exchanged, and if all seems well, that the last week of August is spent “exchanging” students. In many cases one or both parents travel with their student to meet and greet them hosting family and once everything is found satisfactory, mom packs up and goes home, at the end of the school year, there students are exchanged back. In this case not only was the host family someone we knew, but they actually lived in the same neighborhood we did. This was especially advantageous since the student being hosted was from the Austrian Olympic Fencing Team. Having just finished reading “The Clue of the Broken Sword” I was very interested so when Andreas offered lessons at school I leapt at the chance.


     OK, maybe ‘leapt’ at the chance was a bit of an overstatement, you probably understand that most OI students don’t really LEAP at stuff. In the case of exercise or ‘workouts’ a string interest and actively gathering information was something that I knew I could do. Add to that fact the idea that NAS Pcola where dad was stationed had a very active Fencing Club and you will see that this was a pretty easy sale. Until mom realized we were talking about metal swords with electric tips. But a short demonstration, without padding on, along with an hours Q/A (mostly Q from mom) set my moms nerves at ease, especially when she was told that it was likely we would b 6 weeks before we touched a foil. Thus began my FIRST team sport in school, like many, this had a bunch of students involved but in the end it almost always cam,e down to one on one. This was AWESOME, not only did I get to walk around school every day with a Fencing Foil strapped to my back, BUT we got to do some really amazing exercises. For example, it was during the first week that we were told exactly how important leg strength and durability was CRITICAL.

    

      Early in my working life I worked as a professional photographer and one of my greatest joys was performing catalog shoots for some of the larger department stores in our area. This was also right after some of the worlds most successful supermodels had come forward and started talking about how successful they were ion their business so there were many beautiful young women in need of portfolios and catalogs etc. Unfortunately what I saw develop as a side effect of this kind of sudden business was large numbers of young, beautiful women being told they needed to lose 10 or 15 pounds by next Tuesday. Since this is not biologically possible they turned to certain chemicals and supplements and prescriptions that brought with them, many many side effects. Now I know there are very serious side effects to some of these things, depression, mental confusion, identity instability and many more. But as a photographer the biggest and most detrimental side effects was the absolute dehydrating of a models skin occurring right before their eyes. This could almost always be hidden with makeup, but it left them OUT of certain water based shoots where makeup wouldn't last long enough to cover anything. Worse yet, the weight could come back very easily but the side effects were often life long.

This is why you had SO many models starting at age 12 and then throwing in the towel at 22 so they could attend college. Their skin had dried out so severely that make up couldn't cover it and their bodies natural solutions were not working. I am not a huge fan of controlling your weight JUST by altering your diets. Then one day it hit me, I wasn't explaining my point completely and I felt as though the Doctors were in the same situation. So that afternoon during one of my Doctors appointments I reminded her that I wasn't working out to lose weight. But since working out made me feel better all over it also started an entire series of thoughts inside of me that supported my changing my eating habits and being more open to new food groups that were in fact better choices for me.


     Well that solved ½ the equation, now what weren’t the doctors telling me? SO at that same appointment I just said OK Doc you've been telling me that working out isn't going to help me lose weight, but as I said, I think more about what I'm putting in my body AND how often I do so, when I’m working out. What else is there that working out will NOT due for me that it easily performed for me 2 years ago? That's when Doc explained about Puberty reversing itself. Now this is not a clinical conversation, but it runs along those same lines, so what follows may not be medically 100% on target but I think you'll understand. In my world there are certain things I don’t pay attention to, my age being one of them. SO Doc asked me how old I was, I turned to my wife and said “tell him” thats when he realized I REALLY don’t pay attention to it, but that helped him make his example all over again.


     Just like when you’re 12 or 13 (or 18, its different for everyone) and your body goes through that painfully embarrassing stage of life called puberty and your voice changes and you grow hair in places you weren’t sure you could grow hair and all these chemicals flood through your body, there is a certain age, unique to each one of us, when your body slows down on producing all these chemicals and enzymes and hormones and therefore your not as active, this your metabolism is slower. Now which of these processes comes first,. I don’t really know, whether your metabolism slows down because there is no longer any reason at age 70 for me to hunt and kill for meal times, and my wife doesn't need to generate new off spring every year, or do the hormones decrease because their not being used anymore?

Regardless it was through my Tai Chi Sensei that all this started to fall into place. Truly as we get farther into this series you will meet my sensei and her husband, and they can teach us, the OI community a great deal about living a better life. Luckily for us I have learned how to adapt a great many of their movements to our exercise program and will in fact utilize it for may of the same reasons they do, just in a different way.


     Thus we start to wind down our intro to exercise. Please understand that I have 25 years of hard ‘steel bar’ workouts with free weights and universal machines, paired with 50 years of swimming, 20 years of Tae Kwon Do and 10 years of Tai Chi currently in my toolbox and so we will definitely tough on most of these to enhance our physical and exercise regimen to help ALL of us live our best life first. I strongly encourage you to talk to your Doctor or another Health Care professional who is familiar with your situation BEFORE you start practicing these exercises. However to that end I also believe that you will find that the majority of these are things that pose very little risk if followed properly, and will show the results you're looking for in the same way,