If You Want To Improve Your Heart – Focus On Your Lungs

Very few doctors recognize that your lungs are the key to your health and living longer. Oxygen is the cure for nearly every major disease. Maintaining and growing your lungpower is the key to your heart health, your brain function, and every other system in your body.

Breath is life. How well and deeply you breathe is related to how well and long you’ll live.

Did you know that lung power is the number-one predictor of how long you’ll live? The better your lungs work, the less likely you are to die of any illness or disease. Increasing lungpower is especially good at healing heart disease.1

You will hear many workout “gurus” out there advising that you do 30 to 45 minutes of cardio every day. This is very bad advice. Cardio does not increase your lung power. In fact, it diminishes it and that weakens your heart as well.

Some fitness “experts” are now advocating “extreme” workouts, but usually those are just another name for cardio.

Recently, the HIIT program or High Intensity Interval Training has become popular, but it’s simply not feasible for people who are not already in good shape.

I designed my P.A.C.E. program to help get anyone at any fitness level to the point where they can benefit from intense workouts. It stands for Progressively Accelerating Cardiopulmonary Exertion.

Note the word Progressively. No matter where you start, you progress safely with this workout. You get more benefit with incremental increases in intensity than you do from an all-out extreme workout.

If you are not in great shape, you start slow. Little by little you increase your challenge and your exertion. This makes your lungs work harder. Eventually, they start working years younger than your calendar age.

In my practice, I always measure my patient’s lungpower… their VO2 Max. It typically declines with age, but it doesn’t have to. Most doctors don’t believe you can improve this measurement, but I do it every day.

VO2 Max measures the amount of oxygen your lungs can use while you’re exercising at your maximum capacity. The more oxygen you can get to your body, the younger your body acts.

Endurance exercise, like Cardio, does not increase your lung power. In fact, research has proven over and over that your risk of death increases with endurance training and decreases with intensity and high exertion training.

It’s a little known fact, but improving lung power and VO2 Max improves your health at any age!

You may enjoy a related article about the importance of lung power at: http://www.alsearsmd.com/2014/05/olympic-oxygen/

FOOTNOTES:
1. "Current Validated Living Supercentenarians." Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group. grg.org. May 6, 2014. Retrieved May 6, 2014.
2. Finkel T, Holbrook NJ. “Oxidants, oxidative stress and the biology of aging.” Nature 2000;408:239–47.
3. Parzonko A, Naruszewicz M. “Silymarin inhibits endothelial progenitor cells' senescence and protects against the antiproliferative activity of rapamycin: preliminary study.” J Cardiovasc Pharmacol. 2010;56(6):610-8.