Keeping your eye on the time; it’s precious, don’t let it run down the drain. Photo by Cpl Belinda Mepham, Army Newspaper

A step in time

Time is finite – from the day you are born the account which controls the amount of time you will spend on this planet is opened.

In many ways time is like money – once it is spent it is gone. However, unlike money you cannot earn more and it does not roll over.

Every day you are granted approximately 1440 minutes.

What you do not utilise you lose from your time account, gone, permanently and forever – no refund.

What this means is time is a precious commodity.

With this in mind would why you purposely decrease the time you have?

Would you take your next pay and burn it – not give it away but destroy it?

Yet this is commonly the case.

Physical training has been proven to promote health and fitness, including cardiorespiratory function and musculo-skeletal – the things that help prevent injury and illness – which eats into your time account.

Why then do many people neglect their bodies?

I’ll start tomorrow – you have just wasted 1440 minutes that will never be regained.

How precious is a minute?

Ask someone who just missed the bus on an important morning.

How precious is a second?

Ask someone who just avoided a car accident.

How precious is a millisecond? Ask the winner of the silver medal at the Olympics in the 100m.

With all these factors in mind, why wait until the New Year or your birthday to start your resolution?

Why waste all that unrecoverable time? Start now.

Following this article on time I thought I would discuss an e-mail I have been sent (several times) claiming that the heart only has a finite amount of beats and thus exercising, by increasing your heart rate, actually decreases your life expectancy.

Let us examine this further.

Maximal HR = 220 – age, for arguments sake let’s say you are 20 – plus several years’ experience. Thus maximal heart rate = 200 beats per minute.

Now let us say that you are able to train every day for an hour at maximal heart rate.

This means that considering the average resting heart rate is around 76 beats a minute, each week your heart beats an extra 52,080 times, thus decreasing your life expectancy by 11.4 hours each week.

But wait, there’s more. If your fitness training decreases your resting heart rate by six beats a minute, over a 23-hour period (excluding the hour training a day) this would save you 65,520 beats a week – adding 2.6 hours.

This includes modifying the original equation to a resting heart rate of 70 beats per minute of life to your heart a week.

This equates to gaining an extra day of life every nine and a half weeks. What if, as can happen, your resting heart rate drops by 20 or more beats per minute following continuous training adaptation?

How much more life can your heart gain?

Time waits for no one – seize the moment and appreciate all those to follow.

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