Strategies for Looking and Feeling Your Best

A regular weight-training plan can make you feel, and look, decades younger. Recent research indicates that building muscle strength provides greater benefits to your health and vitality than previously thought. Combined with a regimen of aerobic exercise, it strengthens your heart, boosts energy levels and protects you from injuries. It'll even improve your sex life. Plus, it helps keep you looking great. Weight-training shapes and tones muscles better than aerobic conditioning, and it wards off flab. As a result, the average man who lifts weights will look even better than endurance athlete when they're both older. 

It's never too late to take up weight-training. According to Tufts University researchers, even people in their 90s were able to increase their leg strength by as much as 200 percent by working out weight-trainig equipment. It only takes one weight workout per week to maintain strength well into old age, once you've made your initial gains (which takes about 10 weeks of lifting two or three times a week).

Cutback on Protein

Your body needs protein for building everything from muscles to bones. Unfortunately, it doesn't need as much as most of us give it. "The average American eats twice the the protein he needs," says Art Mollen, D.O., medical director of the Southwest Health Institute in Phoenix and author of  The Anti-aging Diet. An excess of protein can make you feel heavy, sluggish and, over time, physically feeble.  For optimal health, eat 1 gram of protein for every 3 pounds of body weight per day, that's about 50 grams for a 150-pound man. A small portion of sirloin steak trimmed of fat contains about 35 grams, so limit yourself to one protein-based meal per day. If you have hamburger for lunch, that's fine, but have cereal or fruit for breakfast and pasta for dinner.

Drop Pounds, not Calories

We all want to cut a trim profile around the middle. A lean physique looks better, and more youthful, than a pear-shaped one. Lean men are also more active, more energetic and statistically less prone to chronic debilitating illness like diabetes and heart disease. To stay slim, however, men mistakenly tend to cut back on calories when the real villain fat is lack of exercise and too much fat. In fact, trying to keep weight off simply by cutting calories may not be a smart idea. By eating less, you risk cheating your body of important nutrients.

A healthy weight loss is to exercise more as you reach middle age and to eat more calories as well. Just be sure they're low-fat calories. As a rule of thumb, 60 to 70 percent of your diet should consist of foods high in complex carbohydrates, such as bread, pasta and beans.

Supplement Your Diet

You can protect yourself against both heart disease and  cancer by getting more of the powerhouse nutrients vitamins E and C and beta-carotene. All three can reduce your levels of free radicals, damaged molecules that cause harmful changes in the body. One theory holds that the aging process itself is the cumulative result of wear and tear from free radicals. Unlike many other nutrients, vitamin E and C and beta-carotene are safe to take in amounts higher than the Recommended Dietary Allowance. Optimal intakes for the antioxidants may be in the range of 100 to 400 international units of vitamin E, 500 to 1000 milligrams of vitamin C, and 15 to 25 milligrams of beta-carotene every day.

Exercise and Sex

What is the effect of regular exercise on sex? For most people, it acts as a mild, and quite legal, aphrodisiac. A variety of studies have shown that men and women who keep themselves trim and toned tend to have lustier sex lives, and remain sexually active later in life, compared with people who are relatively inactive. there is an outer limit to this cheerful news, however. Driven, compulsive exercise actually have lower sex drives than people who understand the meaning of moderation.

Women's Sexual Second Wind

The traditional effects of exercise have been demonstrated in both men and women. Linda DeVillers, PhD., an adjunct professor of psychology at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, was intrigued when she noticed that after a day of swimming or skiing, she felt sexually stirred up. She wonder if other women might experience a similar "sexual second wind" after exercise and polled 8.000 female readers of a fitness magazine to find out. A quarter of these women reported that they , too, felt sexually aroused immediately after working out; only 3 percent said their libidos seemed to flag.

The long-term effects of exercise have been demonstrated in both men and women. Almost a third of the women reported they had sex more often after beginning their exercise proem, 40 percent said they'd noticed an increase in their ability to be aroused, and 89 percent said exercise had given their sexual self-confident a boost.

Sexual Aerobics for Men

Another study showed similar effects in a group of 78 sedentary middle-aged men. researchers at the university of California, San Diego, rounded up these healthy but inactive men, whose mean age was 48, and put them on a vigorous, nine-month-long exercise program. Although they worked into it gradually, by the sixth month the men were doing sustained aerobic exercise (pushing their hearts up to 75 to 80 percent of their maximum aerobic capacity) for a full hour at least three times a week. A similar group of 17 middle-aged, sedentary men was put on a program of moderate walking for an hour about four times a week. Both groups kept detailed diaries about all sorts of things, including their sex lives, during the first and last months of the program.

After nine months, predictably enough, the men on the no-nonsense exercise program had increased their overall fitness levels by 30 percent. At the same time, by a variety of different measures, their night lives had also gotten considerable more entertaining. their frequency of intercourse increased by 30 percent (to 3 times a week), the frequency of orgasms increased by 26 percent, and the frequency of masturbation increased by 50 percent. At the same time, their sexual dissatisfaction or dysfunction (such as trouble achieving or maintaining an erection) noticeably decreased. In short, these newly fit middle-aged men underwent a kind of renaissance of randiness.

Walker increased their fitness levels by only 3 percent during the study,  compared with a 30 percent increase among the more strenuous exercise. (Obviously, the walker weren't breaking any speed records.) Even so, walkers reduced their anxiety as much as the exercisers, bumped up their levels of good cholesterol and reported more sexual fantasies and more desire for intercourse than before the study started. Walking may not qualify as Olympic-level training, but don't overlook its mild-mannered benefits.