There are 2 kinds of people. Those that are aging. and those that are decaying.
That’s what I’ve learned in 10 years of education in the health and fitness field. When I read this rabbi’s prayer, I knew I had found my mantra: “Let me not die while I’m still alive.”
Indeed, how can we be alive in the best possible way?
Everything came together when I began studying the neurology of our brains.
That’s where nearly all fitness programs fall short: they ignore the totality of the brain’s role in our lives.
The brain is a predictive system aimed at one thing: And honestly, that’s why I’m in the business of aging, not decaying. To make predictions and decisions, the brain uses the 3 systems of perception or, if you will, data input-vision, balance, and movement.
How important is this process? In short, it’s everything! When the brain can’t predict accurately because input is corrupt or it doesn’t match the expectation, it stops us from doing things. It freezes muscles, or sends us messages in the form of pain, weakness, fatigue, nausea, vertigo, migraines, dizziness, tension, inflexibility-ever had any of these?
Sometimes the brain can’t predict because joints are jammed maybe from an overload of exercise. Or it could be a broken balance system or even the loss of some aspect of vision.
Turns out, we do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains-and vision takes up the largest amount of real estate in our brains-it’s THAT important to our predictive ability, i.e., our survival. Eyesight isn’t what’s seen. It understands what is seen. And because our vision controls up to 70% of our postural activities, if any aspect of eyesight is unclear, it affects movement somewhere, somehow.
The good news is we can improve all of these systems and we can also train their integration. This makes the brain’s output, and therefore the body’s output, clear and strong.
Which is how I avoid dying while I’m still alive. It turns out, aging or decaying is a choice.