On another forum the topic of health applied to martial arts came up, that some people did martial arts for just that purpose. I am sceptical of many of the benefits associated with Tai Chi. Yet I was both surprised and saddened to read of the death this year of T.T.Liang....he had taken up Tai Chi when suffering from severe health problems in middle age, he studied primarily with Chen Man Ching, but knew many other forms as well..................he was 102 when he expired
Chen however was only 74, the age at which ( last year ) the great Morihito Saito of Aikdo passed on. Looking through the various martial arts......hard and soft you can find varying degrees of longevity but on the whole they do seem to survive a tad longer than more sedentary folk
Anybody know the best one to do to be 300.
I would like to achieve immortality, not through my work, but through not dying ( Woody Allen)
Be careful what you wish for; your wish might be granted.
You don't really want to live a very long life. What you want is to live a quality existence while you are alive. We health researchers actually quantify that when looking for the impact of a therapy. The unit is QALY, or Quality-Adjusted Life Years. In other words, if I put you through chemotherapy and you live one more year but that year is spent puking your guts out from the treatment vs. having a happy life for one month and then meeting your maker in your sleep, we might actually call that a wash in terms of QALYs.
I think it's not necessarily the martial art per se, but rather the way you practice the martial art. There will be folks out there who might train in taiji and enter MMA tournaments, only to die of a brain clot at age 30. Someone else may practice shotokan as a lifestyle (like Funakoshi) and live a wonderful life well into the 90s.
We have some Uechika that like to get out of their comfort zones and enter full contact matches. Others use their performance in the sytem as a barometer of how well their diet and training regimens are working - and nothing more. The latter individual may live a longer, healthier life. The former individual will be your classic James Dean - live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse behind.
Don't forget that genetics play an important role here. Some folks can live unhealthy lives and managed decent longevity. Others die young of congenital illnesses.
Well said Bill........Quality is better than quantity
but I would really love both .....I've been surfing the net recently for my own amusement, and found quite a lot of really ancient Senseis....and especially T.T.Liang.........but I do agree with you many of my family are Publicans,innkeepers....call it what you will ........and despite years of abuse they all live into their 90's.........hope I got the same genes................Better to burn out .....than fade away( the Kagan,,,,,,Highlander)
But I would like to Buuuuuuuurn at a respectable age
I would like to paraphrase Mr. Glasheen (somewhat inaccurately, to make my point!) by saying that if practicing MA extends not the number of years of your life, but the physical wherewithall to enjoy all the years you are given, then that is reason enough.
So many only enjoy the first 40 "healthy" years, then all their bad habits catch up with them...or they just peter out from lack of energy and give up while poor posture, poor eating and poor attitude waste them away.
I believe, both from personal experience and from living examples, that MA practice can offer (not guarantee) the enjoyment of physical and mental capacities above the norm into advancing years.
It may not extend the number, but extend the percentage of fit and able useful years.
Personally, I would prefer 70 good of 80 total years than 40 good and 40 waiting for the end.
NM
N.B. to similar news articles which always appear shortly after the holidays in hopes of catching a few who may tend to fall from the perch of their New Year's resolution before they gorge themselves in the falure to put the money where the mouth is. I, for one, whole-heartedly feel the gravity of the weighty issue.
Thanks for bringing this up. This illustrates an important issue.
BMI (Body Mass Index) is a reasonable way for a lazy doctor to assess the weight status of 95% of people that come in the front door. To compute it, you need height, weight, and frame size (the latter often measured by the size of your arm at the point of the elbow). It does not take body composition into account.
For an athlete - and particularly someone that trains with weights - this is a crappy measure. The reason why we have all these stats that correlate BMI to risk of disease and mortality is because that's all that the lazy researchers wanted to (or perhaps could) measure. IMNSHO, BMI is highly correlated with the principle factor, but it isn't likely the one.
What probably is a much BETTER measure is percent body fat. Fat and lipid status are known from a first principles point of view to drive all kinds of bad things like narrowing of arteries, insensitivity to insulin (type II diabetes), various cancers, and what not.
Most people who have high BMIs are fat. But not all people with high BMIs are fat, and not all people that are fat have high BMIs. The key confounding issues here are muscle and bone.
If you have healthy bones (you do resistance training and you get plenty of vitamin D, vitamin K, calcium, and magnesium), then you are going to weigh more. If you are on the verge of osteoporosis, you will weigh less.
If your body composition is such that you have a lot of muscle, then you will weigh more. Muscle actually weighs much more than fat on a volume basis (it has higher density). And there is nothing per se unhealthy about large amounts of muscle. Someone on anabolic steroids may be unhealthy because of the steroids, but it isn't the muscle they get that would make them unhealthy.
If you have a dedicated athlete in the gym that lifts weights, eats right, and presumabley doesn't take drugs, (s)he will weigh more. The bones will be dense and they will have more muscle mass. Sometimes these folks have high BMIs, but are perfectly healthy.
On the flip side, a crash dieter that does no exercise may have fat but no muscle. They may also be demineralizing their bones from the lack of exercise and poor diet. They may be at risk for a number of health problems in spite of a reasonable BMI score.
I am one of those people that have a borderline high BMI because I lift weights. I actually have a health insurance premium incentive that takes BMI into consideration. So what they do with someone like me as a secondary check is take a waist to hip measurement. If that ratio is not too large (you don't have a fat gut and/or you have good, healthy butt muscles), then you are fine. As it turns out, my BMI is high but my waist to hip ratio is stellar. So they send me on my way with a gold star.
FWIW.
I wouldn't normally mention this except for the fact that folks who read these web pages aren't exactly your average couch potatoes.
I'm considering lipo in a few months when I retire. One can have diamonds made from the ashes of the deceased, why not from fatty ashes of the degreased?
The lipo thing is thought of as bad mostly because: 1) ANY surgical procedure is risky, 2) it is usually done for vanity, and 3) many in society (true or not) believe weight management is strictly a matter of personal discipline.
Recently though some studies have come out that show health benefits to lipo similar to what one would expect if having lost weight the "natural" way (e.g. stop eating so much and exercise). It's odd to think that the mere presence of the fat vs. its removal would have that kind of effect, but it seems to be the case.
But one must remember that the best solution to all this is a lifestyle change. That ensures that the weight won't come back. Lipo can be useful for those that have done all the right things and would like to remove fat deposits that seem to stay due to genetic predisposition.
Lipo can be useful for those that have done all the right things and would like to remove fat deposits that seem to stay due to genetic predisposition.
Yup! That reads about right!!
1)
Yup! Active discussions w/physician for some time now.
2)
Nope! Remove pressure from hips and load from heart ASAP.
3)
I will lob an opinion that the discipline aspect is true for a high percentage. "Stop eating so much and exercise" advice belongs to that group.
Recently though.... Safer methods of sucking fat are becoming available. Two examples are having it done in stages and using ultrasound to melt it into a more liquid form for easier removal.
Disappointed in the salon guy's "article." BMI isn't good because BMI isn't perfect... diet and exercise are "lame," people on diets are invariably unhappy, yadda yadda. Of course lipids and family history also powerfully affect cardiac risk, but how does that make obesity good?
He'd point out that correlating fat and mortality doesn't prove fat kills, as kill may actually fat (right??) or things that make you sick enough to die may make you fat first. He'd point out we can correlate fat and heart attack and not know which caused the other, if either. But what's the more plasuible explanation? We see kids getting fat and THEN getting sick as adults.
Hospitals are CHOCK full of overweight people. Many more of them have diabetes. When they get intubated we have to crank the ventilator way up to hold back their bellies. They can get infections and sores in the depths of their folds. They're harder to clean when they stool. They require more physical therapy and rehab and get more complications because they can hardly move sometimes. They can have awful skin breakdown and ulcers and get recurrent infections. More wound infections with surgery, more problems with simple procedures like placement of lines because they have no identifiable anatomic landmarks, and they need more lines rather than IV's because their veins are hidden. Some sites (groin) we can't even use because of the risk of infections in skin folds. I've had patients who couldn't have cat scans or cardiac cath at community hospitals because they don't fit, and once I had a patient need a ventilator because he got too heavy to breathe. He lost tons of weight in the ICU over more than a month and he was still unweighable. I've got people in clinic with chronic knee pain due to weight who want that fixed on free care, but still want to eat two large pizzas for dinner. Is there a pill for that, doc? Despite the fat advocate rhetoric, these people SUFFER from their problem.
Then family of these immobile people, or the people themselves, say they don't know how he/she or they got this way. How DOES an immobile person get more and more obese? Someone brings too much food.
It's much easier for some people rather than others to keep off weight to begin with, and to lose it. But if we as a culture ate a sane diet, we wouldn't have anything near this epidemic. Genetics play a role but obesity is skyrocketing, and the genes that control fat aren't changing. It's lifestyle. Believe it or not, I was a chubby kid, didn't like it, so I ate better, lost weight, exercised. Now I've 6'3 and 165-170. I've switched to all diet sodas, lots of fruit and veggies, stretch when I can, some karate, take the stairs, fat free nutrasweeted icecream when I have it. I'm busy but I still cook most of my own food, so anyone who wants to can do it, and I'm NOT miserable and like what I eat. I also notice I rapidly feel better coming off a period of poor diet and exercise into activity and healthy diet. I've also had acquaintances from school lose 50# through working out and one came up to me and had to argue me into admitting I knew him, he'd changed so much (275-->175#)
It's just a smoking equivalent. Not all people who smoke get cancer or emphysema, but we don't hear the ones who do claiming it was their genetic predisposition when they know it was the habit that got them. And it's hard to quit smoking, but it's also as simple as not lighting up. Do I have a freakout when I meet smokers or overweight people in the hospital? Not in the slightest. I actually feel a ton of sympathy for what they sometimes go through. I think fast food companies, junk food people, our culture of inactivity, and tobacco corporations certainly share responsbility. But that responsibility is shared by the smoker or overweight person.
Addendum: Fat is the topic but the same could be said about dozens of manageable or preventable medical problems. I certainly don't mean that overweight people who suffer health consequences have any more responsibility for their problems than anyone else in the health system with a comparable risk factor they don't address.
Last edited by IJ on Fri Jan 10, 2003 1:14 am, edited 1 time in total.
I know you may have been joking, Allen, so understand I am just going with the flow here.
What's frustrating for physicians like Ian and health services researchers like myself is that people are experiencing classically age-related problems (type II diabetes, cancer, heart disease, gall bladder disease, osteoarthritis, etc.) earlier and earlier. This means a diminished quality of life at a time when people should be enjoying the fruits of their labor. That's fine for the rest of us, except that this places an unfair burden on our health care system. Insurance premiums are skyrocketing PARTLY because we're got double digit inflation in the treatment of all these diseases - in pre-retirement folk.
The whole idea of insurance is pooled risk. But part of the concept of pooled risk is for each of us to do our fair shair to manage risk while all of us throw our money into the pool. It isn't fair to the rest of society for folks to eat high fat, high sugar, high volume diets and use up precious resources like Ian. We should be saving him for people with unavoidable health problems (like yours, Allen).
But on this whole resource thing, a funny thing happens wrt smoking and GOVERNMENT expenses. It turns out that it's cheaper for the government (which pays Medicare and social security) for Joe Smith to smoke. Uncle Sam makes a net profit when Joe dies 7 years earlier than he should.
So you see, the tobacco industry could advertise that they are performing their patriotic duty. Yea, that'll happen...
to be 300.
.....I've been surfing the net recently for my own amusement, and found quite a lot of really ancient Senseis....and especially T.T.Liang.........but I do agree with you many of my family are Publicans,innkeepers....call it what you will 
........and despite years of abuse they all live into their 90's.........hope I got the same genes................Better to burn out .....than fade away( the Kagan,,,,,,Highlander) 
