A few months ago I celebrated my 73rd birthday and I decided to give myself a birthday present:A new body!
Over the last decade or so, I have noticed that I have lost a considerable amount of muscle mass on my body.
Plus, a different kind of mass seems to have settled around my gut in an unflattering pot belly. Yuck!
So I decided to become a body builder. I bought myself a pass to the local Rec. Center and began working out in earnest. I've been a member of various workout facilities before and have always kept up on my yoga, but it's been decades since I really pumped iron with free weights. I dove into a new workout regimen, which includes 2 hours of aerobic activity and free weights, along with my usual yoga routine. After 3 months, I'm starting to notice a difference.
Unfortunately, there are some days when I can hardly walk! Ouch!
3 Forms of Natural Support for the Born-Again Body Builder
Back in my college days I could bench press 25% more than my own body weight. These days, I'm doing well if I can press the bar, which weighs 45 pounds, with a couple of 10 pound weights on each end. I'm going slow, but the years have not been kind to this body, especially since I used to be a professional ballet dancer. I wrecked my knees doing that, which explains why I am practically lame on some days. Other days, I wake up and everything hurts.
But I'm not giving up. What I am doing, though, is supporting my body with an array of natural supplements and healing techniques. These approaches work great whether you are a born-again body builder like me, or you your body just hurts for whatever reason. I do three things to support my body:
Feed it, support it, and unkink it!
#1: Feeding My Body
Increasing muscle mass, which is what most body builders do, involves a certain amount of tearing of the muscle tissue, which the body then rebuilds and thickens. Thus you end up with more muscle mass. That sounds good to me. Unfortunately, this process doesn't work unless you provide your body with the right nutrients to rebuild muscle. To ensure my body has the right building blocks to do so, I feed it with:
- AFA blue green algae
- coeznyme Q10
The AFA blue-green algae is a nutrient-rich supplement, which means I don't have to swallow tons of pills (4 capsules a day does it for me) or drink nutritional smoothies, which I hate. The coenzyme Q10 is necessary to support muscle rebuilding on a cellular level, and is especially beneficial to the heart muscle. Coenzyme Q10 also supports my energy level, which I definitely need on some days when I feel tired.
#2: Supporting My Body
When my body says "ouch!" I reach for the antioxidants. Heavy exercise can actually produce a high level of free radicals in the body, and that's what causes the aches and pains, and can eventually leading to chronic health conditions. To counteract this, I take concentrated wheat sprouts, one of the most powerful antioxidants around. Specifically, highly concentrated wheat sprouts contain super-oxide dismutase, also known as SOD.
SOD goes around the body and neutralizes free radicals, specifically the superoxide free radical, and other destructive antioxidants. In fact, SOD is such an important first line of defense that whenever we are stressed, our brains immediately signal our bodies to produce more SOD to deal with all the free radicals. SOD basically protects the body from free radicals on all levels, from the cellular level to organ systems.
So when the aches and pains of body building catch up with me, I pop 10-15 capsules of concentrated wheat sprouts to get all the SOD my body is screaming for. I go with capsules because I'm too lazy to germinate and juice wheat sprouts myself, and it would take way too much wheat sprout juice to get the amount of SOD I need,
#3: Unkinking My Body
Working out sometimes produces some serious kinks and cramps in muscles that haven't been used in a long time. To unkink them, I use castor oil packs, an old-time Edgar Cayce approach. Basically, I soak a wool flannel pad in castor oil, warm it slightly, and slap it over the kinked area. A heating pad goes over the wool flannel, and a towel gets wrapped around the whole mess. Then I sit in blissful relaxation for about an hour-and-a-half. After that, I scrub the whole area with baking soda to transform the released toxins into harmless salts, which my body pushes out through the lymph system.
Get the full instructions on how to use castor oil packs here.
Castor oil is said to get rid of anything in the body that doesn't belong, from adhesions to bone spurs. I use it religiously and it keeps me going in my new, somewhat crazy, but very fun body building endeavor.
So there you have it. A 73-year-old born-again body builder, having the time of his life, aching all over, but getting it done with a little help from some natural solutions. These natural solutions apply to anyone who has aches or pains.
Try them out ... you'll be surprised how effortless they are. After all, how hard can it be to pop a few pills and sit on your heiney wrapped in castor oil?
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ggvic/ / CC BY 2.0
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