Hence exercise is not only necessary for good health and fitness but also for developing a good attitude and a stress free life. The question is how much exercise does one need to do. Be clear about your goals, stay focused. A proper understanding of your goals, allows you to attain them with just the minimum required effort. (See – ‘Exercising’).

The exercise component of this regimen is a triumph of economy of effort over excess. The Pareto principle shows that 80 percent of the effect comes from just 20 percent of the effort and in most cases 2 to 3 percent effort gets you over 95 percent of the effect.

This tiny effort is the key to rapid body re-design and performance enhancement, and is enough for the 90 percent of the people who are not in the incremental gain status of competitive athletes and body builders, and can thus experience near unbelievable gains in a short-time.

“Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.” Dalai

Lama.

First understand the Minimum Effective Dose (MED) for anything. As Ferriss puts it – “To boil water, the MED is 100^oC at standard air pressure. Boiled is boiled. Higher temperature will not make it more boiled. Higher temperature just consumes more resources that could be used for something else more productive”. Doing more is a waste of effort and time.

Then, in the context of body redesign, keep in mind the two fundamental MED’s

1. To remove stored fat – do the least necessary to trigger a fat loss cascade of specific hormones.
2. To add muscle in small or larger quantities – do the least necessary to trigger local (specific muscles) and systematic (hormonal) growth mechanism.

This takes surprisingly little. Don’t complicate things. For example: to activate local growth of say shoulder muscles might require only 80 seconds of tension using 20-25 kg weight once every 7 days. 80 seconds is crucial as most of the existing ATP stored in the muscles needs to be used up before the muscles get affected as required.

For Senior Citizens, a minimum cardio vascular workout could be an act as little as lifting your two year old grandchild, or more safely an equivalent weight, in a smooth move from a half squatting position to over head once a day and / or walking up a flight of as few as 7 steps, 5 to 6 times a day.

As the adage goes – ‘use it or lose it’. This is not only applicable to your muscle tone and fitness, but also holds for a proper sense of balance (See – ‘Exercising’).

Other things for fat loss could be things like – 10 minutes of 10⁰C to 15⁰C water immersion or shower, or 200 mg of Allicin extract before bed.

Calories in and calories out is attractive in its simplicity but it doesn’t work as expected, what really counts is how much of such calories get into your blood stream. The body is not a machine, it is an open thermodynamic system, an organism that self regulates and repairs itself to a great extent and reacts specifically to temperature, the nature and timing of the food and supplement intake, and exercise and to the many hormones, enzymes and amino acids released by the micro flora within its gut.

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