Fit At Any Age: New Frontiers

THERE’S A STORY that many people tell themselves about aging, and it goes something like this: As they get older, their physical health span declines precipitously when approaching the final decades of life. They lose speed, strength, reaction time, balance, stability, and more. These processes are subtle at first, though they accelerate with age.

By 75, most people can expect a significant reduction in both muscle mass and physical-activity level—each of which cuts into their quality of life. None of this is inevitable. As a longevity-focused physician, I see some of my patients in their 60s and 70s functioning as though they’re two decades younger, and as I wrote about in my book Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity, I’m convinced that how you prepare for getting older will determine not just how long you live but, more important, how well you live in your final years.

Yes, age-related declines will happen, but they don’t need to be so dramatic that a person spends the last decades of their life not living the way they want to live. The higher your starting point in terms of fitness, the better off you are. It’s like retiring with more versus less money, the result of good saving and sound investing. Avoiding the fate common to most does require preparation. And training. Notice I use the word training instead of exercise?

Dr. Peter Attia, MH’s guest editor.

Sure, exercise not only delays actual death but also prevents both cognitive and physical decline better than any other intervention (e.g., good sleep, excellent nutrition). But we need to move past the idea of aimless exercise to very specific training if we want to function like healthy 60-year-olds when we are 80. Why? Because nothing of great consequence happens by accident. The very best athletes in the world are very deliberate in how they train. A world-class decathlete trains very diversely and yet with great specificity. And this is the perfect model for what we should do. Except our sport is not the decathlon of track and field—it’s the decathlon of life.

We talk about this “sport” as the Centenarian Decathlon (CD), and unlike the track version, with its preset events, you get to pick the events of your own CD. Pick your grandchild out of a crib. Drive a golf ball more than 200 yards. Walk up a broken escalator with luggage. Get off the floor without assistance. Have sex. Be free of pain. This list is endless. You just have to decide what you want and how much it matters to you. Then you reverse-engineer from there to here. How strong do you need to be? How high a VO2 max do you need? What kind of balance and flexibility is required?

That’s why I created a new way to think about exercise and cofounded a performance center called 10 Squared, opening this year, to help people train for their CD.

But even perfect physical health is not enough to ensure a high quality of life. What good is a long life, a strong body, and a sharp mind if you are miserable? Unhappy? Lacking in close relationships? Alone when you need a friend? While the decline of our minds and bodies may be inevitable (though we can heavily influence the trajectories of both), the decline of our emotional health is not at all tethered to our age. In fact, it’s the only part of health span that can improve as we age. But, this, too, requires effort.

This article originally appears in the March/April issue of Men’s Health.

Subscribe

This post was originally published on this site