Not only are the number of your years determined by the choices you make every day but also the quality of those years. If you want to live a longer life it is important that those extra years are lived with comfort, independence and high activity as opposed to weakness, frailty and disease. Your everyday choices especially related to the level of activity in your life and food choices are of the most importance.

What are your choices on a day to day basis and what will be your consequences later? You see it's not that we age but how we age that matters. We are all going to grow old and, from all scientific accounts, eventually die but some of us will do it better than others. We each have a lot of control over how the aging process affects us. Here is the number one strategy that will help you age with more strength and greater health.

Learn to exercise harder (though not necessarily longer). Without question, the most important thing you can do to offset the aging process is proper exercise. You do not need to spend a lot of time doing it however. It has been well proven that short bouts of intense exercise are more effective than longer less intense exercise sessions. And nothing, absolutely nothing comes close to high intensity exercise for keeping your body young

Your body loses muscle tissue mass as you age. Strength training exercise will offset a great deal of that loss. Furthermore, increasing your heart rate to 90 percent of its maximum for short intervals (by doing heavy strength training or cardio interval training) has huge health benefits that are all important components to counteract aging.

Here is why high intensity exercise can counteract aging. This type of training forces your body out of its comfort zone and your heart rate is raised beyond your anaerobic threshold - a "without oxygen" process. Your body is pushed to its physical limits - and this creates a hormonal response to keep it going. The subsequent hormone production is in direct opposition to the aging process and is literally the fountain of youth.

As we all age, our bodies produce fewer hormones over time, leading to the inability to rebuild ourselves, until we eventually break down and die. Intense physical exercise counteracts this by forcing our bodies to produce more hormones than are produced naturally at a given age.

This keeps our muscles, bones, organs and systems from deteriorating as fast as they would without vigorous physical activity. The result is that, with continued forced release of "youth" hormones through proper exercise the aging process is slowed down. As with anything else, there are new skills to learn and you should build up to it, ideally under the guidance of a Fitness Professional. Such steps are a fantastic investment in your own life and its future.

You may have heard of hormone replacement therapy which is the latest way to hold off the aging process that costs many thousands of dollars on an ongoing basis. Intense exercise is the cheaper, natural way of doing the same thing and is actually more effective.

Ten to 20 minutes a day of pushing yourself to your physical limit is all it takes for this response to occur and the more you do it the easier it gets. It is also addictive due to hormone production and, out of all of the possible addictions in life, this is the one that will benefit you the most!