21st Century Fitness: A Pilates-based Formula of Exercise and Nutrition for Staying Young

Beyond the traditional fitness methods developed in the last century there lies a new dimension of fitness. This next dimension is defined by its goal: to reverse the aging process and provide long lasting youth.

It was with fanfare and high hopes that we ushered in the 21^st century, thinking that we had the answers to the fitness dilemma. There was information galore: Diets, mega-gyms, and endless array of equipment, videos, classes for everyone's taste, certified personal trainers, and a new theory every second. But as the dust has settled and we take a realistic look at the results, it appears as though we have failed. The United States has the most unfit population of all industrialized nations and its senior citizens have become old long before their time. 21^st Century Fitness is a new attitude about aging. It breaks the cycle of stagnant thinking that has made most of today's fitness programs ineffective and obsolete. It is the first re-thinking of a total fitness program for all ages and lifestyles. It is an awakening to the new dimension of fitness that incorporates the best of 20^th century methods and fills in the gaps that have long been missing. It provides every detail of exercise and nutrition to answer a question that we have asked throughout the ages: how can I have the essentials of youth in my later years? The new way to think about fitness . . .

Larry Nachman was born in 1937, only a few years after Muscle Beach in Venice, California had become the focal point of fitness in the United States. Those were the days when big muscles and "the Tarzan look" were quite the rage. However, even though weight training was gaining in popularity, in many ways it was still considered avant-garde.

At age 13 Larry started pumping iron at the Youth School of Bodybuilding in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. Under the watchful eye of the owner/trainer, Roger Servin, he developed his love for fitness.

Through swimming and lifting weights, Larry discovered the principle of stretch and resistance. This two-tiered principle became an important aspect of his thinking that led him to making additions to the Pilates mat, weight resistance, and walking.

Larry moved to New York City in 1960 and made his first visit to the Pilates studio on 8th Avenue. Joseph Pilates was working with a client at one end of the room. His wife Clara, dressed in a starched nurse's uniform, greeted him with a heavy German accent and gave a quick run-down on the Pilates philosophy. He just was too cocky about his fitness knowledge then and rejected it. But he was to return to it over a decade later and refine the Pilates Method with the principles he had learned from his own experiences.

At age 35 things started to happen to Larry. No matter what he did his posture and flexibility started to erode. He tried everything - jogging, bicycling, judo, yoga, aerobics. None of these worked to stop his decline. He finally realized that he was working hard to stay unfit. He realized that he lived in a country obsessed with the illusion of fitness.

He knew that for decades the Pilates Method had been a secret of the physical elite: choreographers George Balanchine and Martha Graham, movie stars Sharon Stone and Melanie Griffith, the San Francisco Forty-Niners and Cincinnati Bengals, and ballet companies in New York, Philadelphia and Atlanta. Larry became a student of the Pilates Method. He found in it everything he had sought in a fitness regimen since the age of 13. But how one could reconcile the seemingly conflicting demands of fitness and life?

He tested, edited, rejected and refined - and in the end produced a formula that offers fast, efficient workouts that can be done anywhere, at any time, with no equipment requirements. And in less that 30 minutes a day! He named his new formula 21st Century Fitness. While it incorporates the best of 20th century methods, it goes beyond to fill in the gaps that have long been missing.