The Big Day Approaches

When I was a young child, too young to know any better, I remember having the arrogance to tell anyone who made the mistake of asking that when I grew up I was going to be a doctor, teacher and a writer.

They would pat me on the head and say, “Isn’t that cute.”

The contractors are just starting to build out the second floor of my new Sears Center. They delivered the first of the materials by crane in the early morning…

It was like wanting to be an astronaut or a professional baseball player. It didn’t seem to anyone like that was even a possibility.

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But that’s actually somehow come true. Sometimes, when I look back on it, I think I kind of “Forrest Gump-ed” my way through the process. But maybe my original intent helped to guide me without really understanding it.

Not to put too fine a point on it but even as a young child I had the gall to tell people , “I want to be a different kind of doctor. I’m going to make people healthy like daddy, instead of just treating sick people.”

To my way of thinking, some people seemed to have more health than others, like my dad. He was kind of a local strong man, and used to do feats of strength like ripping phone books in half. He was very virile in an animal magnetism kind of way.

That’s what I wanted to give people, that gift of good, radiant health.

Now here I am more than 20 years later, and some people would say that I’ve accomplished something close to that childhood dream. But I’m not done yet.

Because this will be a major focus of my new Sears Center … how can we help you get healthier? How can we measure it, quantify it, and improve it so you can take care of yourself the best way you can?

One of the ways we’ll help you have that good health is with a measurement I’ve devised that I call AQ.

It makes measuring your health much easier because it’s like IQ. Where IQ is brain intelligence, AQ is body intelligence. And in the same way you can become wiser, your body can become smarter, too.

For example, let’s say you go to your doctor and have your lungpower tested. You might learn that your FEV1 (forced exhalation volume) is 3.45. Or, you might get a VO2 max number (the rate at which your lungs can get oxygen to your body) of 26.5.

Well, are those numbers good or bad?

Who knows? You have to be a doctor to know.

The walls are starting to take shape and when my new Sears Center is open, we’ll have the space to do even more research on improving your Age Quotient (AQ).

That’s where AQ comes in. It’s more useful, and we can use it to help your body function better, like a much younger person’s.

Once we know your AQ, simple tweaks to what you eat, what supplements you take and how you exert yourself can help continually improve your AQ so you get better with age.

I’ve already been doing this in my practice.

We’ve looked back at our PACE Study Group, where we measured people doing PACE over a 6-8 month period and noted their improvements. And now we’ve gone back and converted their measurements to AQ.

Overall, the people in the PACE Study Group improved their adipose (body fat) AQ from 78 to 148. And people’s pulmonary (lung) AQ went from as low as 79 up to 181.

These results are remarkable, and I’m going to have the study peer reviewed and published.

Your lung or pulmonary AQ is very important because the stronger your lungs are, the longer you’ll live.1

To help those in the PACE Study Group improve their lung AQ, one of the workouts I had them do was the “triple step.” You can use it right now to improve your own AQ and make yourself younger. The Triple Step works your whole body to really get your lungs pumping and making them younger and stronger.

It’s like a standing sit-up but with the rest of your body moving too. All you have to do is:

  1. Stand with your feet shoulder width apart and your hands by your sides.
  1. Raise your arms, with elbows at a 90 degree angle, fists pointing upwards.
  1. Raise your left knee to your right elbow
  1. As you lower your leg, take two hop steps to the left.
  1. Stop and raise your right knee to your left elbow – and as you lower your leg, take two hop steps to the right.
  1. Repeat until you are slightly out of breath.

Then rest and recover, and do another set. Three sets is best for increasing your lungpower and lung AQ, but remember to increase the challenge just a little bit with each set. Increase the height of your hops. Raise your arms faster. Anything to get a bit more intensity.

Then focus on that extra intensity instead of the number of repetitions. Numbers are convenient ways to measure how much work you’re doing, but they don’t tell the whole story. You’re using them as a way to improve your AQ to help you get healthier.

P.S. – When you join my group of Confidential Cures newsletter subscribers, you receive as a free gift my exclusive report Are Your Lungs Dying? which has over 20 pages of new, effective P.A.C.E. workouts that will increase your body’s AQ, starting today.


1. Schunemann, Holger J., MD, PhD et al, “Pulmonary Function Is a Long-term Predictor of Mortality in the General Population,” Chest Sept. 2000; 118( 3): 656-66.