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The New Year's Two Week Resolution

You join the local health club with high hopes that this is going to be the year you get in the best shape of your life. You sign for a year to get the special rate, and the automatic bank draft begins. You faithfully go each week for the first couple of weeks or maybe even the first couple of months. Eventually your attendance becomes sporadic. You miss a couple of weeks and then you miss a couple of months. Eventually you return with the intention of really buckling down. For most that never happens.

Finally you admit defeat so you try to cancel, and that becomes a hassle and expensive because there is a processing fee. You realize that there are just a few months left, and you rationalize that it is not worth the hassle of trying to terminate the contract. You ride it out cringing when you look at your monthly credit card bill and see the card charged for the service you did not use.

”I Don’t Like Running, Hopping, Skipping, Trashing About, Or Picking Up Heavy Weights.”

That’s what my barber told me. He said,” I just don’t understand it”. He has little free time and hates to exercise, but he does strength train once a week. He said, “It is the perfect workout for me; once or twice a week works”.

In order to achieve results strength training you must work the muscles intensely. Muscles adapt and become stronger as a form of self-protection when they are exposed to more demanding work than they are equipped to handle. Demanding work, work intensely, more than they are equipped to handle – who wants to do that? No wonder my barber said what he did, “I just don’t understand it”.

A solution: Instead of seeing how much strength training your body can withstand see what is the least of exercise that will produce the most results. Yes, it will be a difficult workout (You work up to it slowly.), but it will not take long and you need not do it that often.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus

By Francis P. Church, first published in The New York Sun in 1897. [See The People’s Almanac, pp. 1358–9.]

We take pleasure in answering thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:

Dear Editor—

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Best method for reversing the the aging process

Our bodies undergo many changes that can be reversed with proper strength training. Wearing glasses, dying one’s hair, or applying creams for age marks have their place, but nothing compares to the long list of benefits from high intensity interval training for strength:

1. Base Metabolic Rate (metabolism) decreases. Those who are stronger can have the metabolism they had when they were twenty years younger. More muscle requires more calories.