The new four stages of life 🙂

1. 0-25 -- Wet behind the ears!
2. 25-50 -- Grunt! -- Career and Family.
3. 50-75 -- Is that all there is?
4. 75-100 -- Golden Years -- Bucket List

This website is devoted to the 50+ to help prepare for, and enjoy, the Golden Years.  We are not going to say a word about saving and investment.  There is plenty of advice floating around to cover that.  Our focus is on maintaining and enhancing all aspects of your physical and mental health.

Motivation and openness to try lifestyle changes that will increase health and contentment are not enough.  There is so much conflicting advice and guidance on the web, in books, videos, seminars, you name it.  Our goal is to cut through the nonsense and confusion with a program that is simple to understand and follow, and which gets results.

I'm 77 and I have spent much of the last twenty years researching and evaluating different health strategies.  The Buteyko-Plus™ Program is the result. These strategies are ones that I use on a daily basis and for which I thank for my own excellent health.  

The program rests on six pillars: Correct Breathing; Exercise; Nutrition and Weight Control; Rest and Sleep; Mental and Emotional Health; and Health Maintenance Activities.

To create a website and online community that will support the exploration and diffusion of knowledge and practices to improve physical, mental and emotional health, to provide a forum for the free exchange of health-related ideas and experiences, and to extend great health as far as possible into old age.

The story started around 20 years ago when I was in my mid-fifties.  I was at a low point in my life.  My twenty-year marriage had come to an end, I was living alone, trying to finish a PhD dissertation while continuing to work full-time.  It was going nowhere.  None of my medications for asthma, allergies and depression were helping much, and I was 30 pounds overweight and in fairly constant pain in my back and legs.  Thomas Hobbes summed it up well - the future was looking "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".

Then things started to change.  During my 90-minute commute to my work at a medical research outfit I listened to books on CD from the local library, and the choices were getting slimmer.  One day I picked up "Breathing Free" ¹ by Theresa Hale, one of the first books out in English on the Buteyko Breathing treatment for asthma, developed and used extensively in the then U.S.S.R.

The book claimed that you could decrease the severity and frequency of asthma attacks by changing breathing patterns alone.  I did the breathing exercises and after a few months of trial and error (I don't recommend this approach), I was largely free of my asthma and congestion, needing medication very infrequently.

About the same time I met and started a new relationship with a young woman, Gail, now my wife.  This gave me a strong incentive to put effort into improving other aspects of my health.  Gail was (and is) a neuromuscular massage therapist specializing in pain management, with a strong interest in nutrition and holistic healing. 

We went to England and took a course to become trainers in the Buteyko Breathing Method, and, while working primarily as a university lecturer and information technology consultant, I have been teaching Buteyko off-and-on, ever since.

With both my Buteyko clients and Gail's massage clients it has become clear that while our respective modalities are often effective, much greater health gains could be achieved, and a broader range of conditions helped, if a holistic approach, including exercise, diet and various other lifestyle changes, is taken.

This has become something of an obsession with me, and research and personal investigation and experiment in these areas have led to the development of the Buteyko-Plus™ Program.  I'm not a medical professional but my training and experience as a social scientist as well as several years working in pharmaceutical research have provided me with the interest and ability to read and evaluate medical and clinical study literature, as well as a healthy skepticism of published results.

¹Hale, T. (2000). Breathing Free: The Revolutionary 5-Day Program to Heal Asthma, Emphysema, Bronchitis, and Other Respiratory Ailments. New York: Random House.