What would you do if you could reverse the aging process? How much time and money would you be willing to invest to be five, or even ten years younger? The answer, for many of us, seems to be tens of thousands of dollars each year. The anti aging industry is a billion dollar a year industry, even in spite of the fact that there is little conclusive evidence to support many of the claims made by the manufacturers of all the different creams, potions and supplements.

Yet, there is a way.  And it has been at the edge of our awareness for quite some time. How many times have you heard someone say, ‘He jumped over that fence like a man half his age.’ or, ‘Since she lost that weight she looks ten years younger.’

The truth is that while our bodies aging process cannot be halted, there are factors that can speed up or slow down this natural phenomenon. Most of these are related to how we take care of our bodies; how much exercise we get, our diet and nutrition programs and how well we are able to cope with stress.

While we have instinctively known these things, we have never been able to measure them quantitatively until recently.  Now, thanks to the American College of Sports Medicine and Polar Fitness we can tell exactly how well a body is aging based on its level of fitness and health. This technology is called the Polar Body Age Program and has been a tremendous success since introduced at Surfside Wellness Centre two years ago.

In short, it works like this; there is an optimal level of fitness and health which we consider to have a body age of eighteen. This is based on optimal levels of strength, flexibility, cardiovascular endurance, body fat, nutritional habits and stress.
All of these factors are measured and then fed into a software program which calculates the individual’s theoretical body age. While this is amazing in and of itself, the main benefit of the program is its ability to give specific instructions on how to improve one’s body age, e.g. reducing your skin cancer risk will reduce your body age by two years, improving your flexibility from poor to fair will reduce your body age by 2 years. The body age is the perfect tool whatever your fitness goals may be.