Men’s Health in the Modern Age - How to Handle It Properly

Physical and emotional health are both pieces of a much bigger pie called wellness or wellbeing. Today, men’s health has declined due to the modern ways of life, but there are a number of ways to handle it if you have the right knowledge and willingness to try out new things.

The first step on the road to wellness is becoming acutely aware of oneself. Be actively engaged with each of the multiple aspects of your life, then grab a hold of it and steer it towards what you imagine would be an improved lifestyle.

It sounds easy when phrased by words but rarely anyone can manage to pull it off. The key is to not give up.

There are several crucial aspects to why all men should consider improving their health. These aspects range from the chemical, biological, all the way up to the socio-economical, and even across the whole circle of people that surround the afflicted man, especially his partner and children.

Most men just ignore small issues, and some ignore serious problems thinking they’ll go away on their own, or at least not get worse. That’s the first mistake. Don’t be afraid to go to the doctor!

Pain is your ally, it’s a sign that something’s not right. Don’t act like you can handle it yourself - a small issue can turn serious in the blink of an eye. Fix problems on time. The doctors are there to help, believe it or not.

You don’t have to accept declining motivation, mood, and an ever-decreasing libido - and those issues might be attributed to the normal aging process, but you can’t know where you stand without a professional checkup.

If you notice that your erectile function isn’t what it used to be, your primary course of action shouldn’t be limited to over-the-counter meds.

Getting to the root cause of your problem should be your first priority. Before we list out the top men’s health tips, you should consider doing a thorough check on these, if you notice something’s off with your health:

1. Thyroid

2. Leaky gut

3. Side effects to medications

4. Elevated cortisol levels

5. Testosterone levels

These issues can have long-term negative effects on your well-being, not to mention productivity and financial stability.

Low testosterone doesn’t just exert its effects on sexual function - it can also be at the base of other secondary symptoms: fatigue, weight gain, sleep apnea, and a plethora of other seemingly small and unrelated problems.

But there’s always a way out! If you seek out help on time, you can prevent disease and regain a sense of wellness and vitality. Some of the conditions can even be reversed, and aren’t necessarily a part of the normal aging process.

A holistic approach to solving your life’s problems will make you more resilient to the difficulties that life keeps pummeling you with. For a man to live a healthy life, it’s much more difficult to solve problems sequentially, and easier to do with an all-encompassing approach. Then, you’ll see how compounding benefits in one sphere of life spill over to other spheres.

To start off, we can list several things you can do that can most certainly help kick off a wholesome transformation. There are no medical professionals, nor successful people that will counter this advice, and if you stumble upon any, don’t listen to them if you value your life.

These points are literally the lowest common denominators that everyone and their grandmother agree upon. By themselves, these steps will improve your life significantly.

Step one for every man would be less sitting! It does kill you, whether you know it or not.

And there’s no expert to contradict this claim. Sadly, there’s no cure for it, either. Our jobs have become more sedentary on a whole, and on a global level.

A Johns Hopkins study has found that physically active jobs now make up less than 20% of the U.S. workforce, down from roughly half of jobs in 1960.

We can’t emphasize this enough - it has to become a routine! You can’t just skip days or weeks and delay action.

Start with baby steps and work upwards. Establish a routine schedule first, then once you’re used to exercising, you can start thinking about increasing intensity.

The specific exercises you do aren’t going to be mentioned here, but walking, running, swimming and yoga are good places to start researching what best suits your lifestyle. Just get the blood flowing and don’t forget - it’s not exercise if you don’t break a sweat!

As far as food goes, this will be more of a list of what not to ingest, because those are the things every nutritionist agrees upon, whether they’re in the omnivore, carnivore or vegan camp:

1. Reducing alcohol intake would be the #1 advice

2. Cut out processed foods as much as possible.

3. Reduce simple sugars (glucose) as much as possible

4. Don’t eat late at night - make breakfast or lunch your primary meals.

On a grand scale, epigenetics is what can make or break humanity’s future. Scientists have known for a while that a person’s lifestyle can definitely alter the expression of certain genetic pathways.

Our cells do have error-corrective mechanisms ready to defend us from the unspeakable damage that the environment can unleash on our DNA, but you’re gambling with statistics, your personal health, and your children’s health.

That’s a bad idea, by even the lowest of standards. The best course of action is to take your life into your own hands and do whatever it takes to protect your reproductive health.

Reproductive health is not something you should gamble with, especially considering trends like declining sperm motility with age, and particularly in the western world (North America and Western Europe). Since both men and women have completely shifted the age at which they have kids, that means more room for problems to occur.

What many in our practice have been asking, aside from reproductive potential, regards the senescence of muscle tissue.

Aging is ruthless to all your body tissue, but your muscle bears the brunt of the punishment.

With women, there’s a large chance that the bones will suffer from aging due to osteopenia and osteoporosis. But with men, it’s the muscles that suffer. Especially if you feel you’re old enough that you can’t exercise anymore as you could before - then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - a feedback loop:

You exercise less because you’re getting old. Then your muscles don’t get the exercise they’re used to, and you get weaker, leading you to have less energy for exercise.

This can be regulated by certain hormonal therapy regimes, but the main takeaway is that no matter how you feel - unless a doctor is telling you that you need to lay off the exercise, keep it up. Reduce the tempo if needed but don’t succumb into the “I’m getting old” mindset.

Take extra care with your diet, reduce alcohol intake, and always stretch your muscles after workouts to prevent injuries.

The importance of men’s sexual and reproductive health in general cannot be overstated.

This is where GAINSWave comes to the rescue. The likelihood of sexual dysfunction, including erectile dysfunction, painful intercourse, delayed or absent orgasms, and decreased libido—only increases as you age.

But before we talk about the solution, let’s quickly examine the causes of sexual dysfunction and what can you do if you start to see some symptoms?

ED has a vast array of causes but the majority of afflicted men suffer from a vascular issue - something negatively impacts their blood flow in the penile region. This leads to poor oxygen delivery to the muscles that need it most during sexual intercourse.

Compounded with stress and shame of poor performance, this can be devastating to a man’s libido overall, which is why many try to take care of the issue immediately (with meds) and without much thought about the side-effects.

The stats are worrying, with around 40% of men being affected by some level of ED at age 40!

Pills are not the only answer. We won’t name any names here, but pharma companies have made a fortune on selling solutions that keep you spending more money on them, or go back to having the same old problems. That’s an illusory choice between two options, neither of which solves your problem at its core and may even cause more issues on a different front.

For us, that’s no solution to be proud of.

It was long thought that vascular issues can only be treated through lifestyle changes and with meds (chemically). But shockwave therapy (ESWT - extracorporeal shock wave therapy) has proven itself as a very effective and long-lasting method.

It also doesn’t cause other unwanted side effects and doesn’t interfere with other medication you might be taking, nor does it require you to change your job to a less sedentiary one.

It basically boils down to applying acoustic waves (non-invasive and low intensity) or shock waves that help stimulate our body’s natural ability to regenerate old tissue and form new blood vessels (angiogenesis) as well as nerve tissue (neurogenesis).

GAINSWave has been popularized in Europe and is now available in the US with FDA approval for use as a safe treatment for ED.

The same shock wave treatment mechanism, known since the 80’s, has previously been used in successful treatments of kidney stones - a procedure called lithotripsy.