Older Bolder Life

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functional fitness

Reclaiming Health and Fitness After 40: Five Quick Thoughts

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A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to reconnect with a friend from residency days back in Salt Lake City in the mid-80s; we were residency mates there in the University of Utah hospital system before he headed back home to San Diego to set up his practice and later found his own company.

My friend had something of an unusual story; he was a gifted mechanical engineer who later went into medicine with a goal of designing adaptive equipment for people with profound neuromuscular disease and injury. He was a delight, one of those rare hyper-intelligent and inquisitive people we all (rarely) have occasion to meet, and was an uber-fit skier, distance runner, and surfer.

Without boring you with details, through a mutual connection in England, he’d heard of my recent health transformation, and ended up calling to chat one afternoon. We covered a lot of ground in an hour, but he was particularly interested in what I’d done to reclaim my health and lessons I’d learned along the way. He shared that he had an adult “child” in her mid 40s who desperately needed a lifestyle and fitness change, and he was at the end of his rope trying to encourage her to start. He shared, among other things, that she felt she was “too far gone” to ever make a meaningful impact.

Thinking about it on the fly as we talked, I offered him five quick thoughts about reclaiming health and fitness after 40 gleaned from my own experience.

It’s Never Too Late to Start

I am profoundly and utterly convinced that it’s never too late to jump in with both feet, start moving physically, and reshape one’s approach to nutrition. At 57 I did just that, and started from a point of metabolic and physical disaster – 412 pounds, unable to tie my own shoes some days, with so many aches, pains, and symptoms I’m embarrassed to list them all. Now, just a bit over three years later, I’ve lost nearly 200 pounds and 20+ inches at my waist, am more fit than ever, and am even training for sprint competition in Senior track and field events upcoming.

Clearly your mileage may vary, but I have clients now in their 80s who’ve made similar changes and reshaped their approach to life. It’s never too late.

Reclaiming Health and Fitness After 40 Is a Long Game

Expectations can be an interesting beast to tame, at least for most of us. We’re an impatient society, and often fall prey to tall tales and crazy promises to shed improbably amounts of excess weight and gain extraordinary levels of fitness over very short time frames (30 days wonders) by following some magic diet, taking a wonder supplement, or copying the routine of a sculpted gym barbie with an Instagram following.

Attaining optimal health, fitness, and wellness at any age is a long game, most often measured in months if not years, but particularly for those of us north of 40. It’s a lot more enjoyable journey if you embrace the long view, and don’t sweat the day to day and week to week stuff.

Reclaiming Health and Fitness After 40 Might Take Baby Steps, But Take ‘Em

Talking with my friend, we agreed that life in today’s world, at least for the majority, is astoundingly sedentary. Many sit all day at work, commute sitting, come home and eat a poorly composed meal, and then sit on the couch for the next four hours before tossing and turning at night and starting it all over again.

Thoughtfully incorporating movement into the day can make a world of difference when starting from fitness ground zero; we’ve all heard the suggestions (park at a distance and walk in, get up and walk 10 minutes every two hours, etc), and these steps are easy to incorporate into one’s day. I’m a HUGE fan of walking outdoors, still do it daily to start my day myself, even on sprint training days, and just about every one on the planet can do it with minimal investment in time and equipment.

Baby steps turn into meaningful fitness routines over time.

Reclaiming Health and Fitness After 40: Embrace the Aches and Modify

One of the things I learned with my 30+ years in medicine is that the human body, despite its astoundingly complex design, function, and capacity to repair itself, is nonetheless designed to wear and tear over time. It’s inevitable, though manifests differently and at unique times for all of us.

The point: we all have our various aches and pains, joints that have been injured or have advanced markers of degeneration (read wear and tear); some days you’re going to be more sore and achy than others. Accept that reality, and modify, modify, modify exercise and fitness to accommodate your function on a given day. Remembering that you’re playing a long game makes this strategy more sensible too.

Personally I’ve been astounded at what a difference rebuilding functional strength has made in my own “aches and pains” related to prior orthopedic injuries, and just general activity and functional tolerance. Of course, that’s in part related to the last point…

Personally Optimizing Nutrition Makes Life So Much Better

Finally, I suggested my friend gently remind his daughter that there is a far, far better way to fuel the human machine than via the SAD (standard American diet). The point I tried to convey was simple from our perspective – the food we eat now is so much tastier, interesting, and flavorful than any we’ve consumed over the years, AND is so much healthier – less inflammatory (there’s that aches and pains concept again), less atherogenic, and more physiologically sensible given the science that has evolved over the past twenty years.

Personally I think for almost everyone walking on the planet, metabolic flexibility is the holy grail of nutrition – not being in ketosis or rigidly adhering to some arbitrary set of dietary rules. There is no one size fits all nutrition plan. Metabolic flexibility is key for anyone at any age, but perhaps even more meaningful for those of over 40, busy with all that life has to offer.

The challenge, of course, is to find the nutrition plan that resonates with your own particular physiology and metabolism, and make the tweaks and adjustments that work for you. It can be done, and again, it’s never too late to start.

Enjoyed the call JS, best of luck with your daughter and I’m happy to help any way I can.

Picking the Low Hanging Fruit: Walk, and Walk Some More

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Continuing our series on picking the low hanging fruit (the simpler, foundational principles) along one’s path to restoring (or improving) your overall wellness and health, today’s installment focuses on an activity that is accessible to just about everyone on the planet and can bring immense health benefits – the simple act of walking.

As noted in prior Low Hanging Fruit posts, what follows is again primarily aimed at those who are following an approach to fitness and nutrition much more aligned with the Standard American Diet (the infamous SAD approach) and largely sedentary modern lifestyle, not necessarily those thoughtful folks who have already begun to take a hard and discerning look at the healthy – and the unhealthy – aspects of their activity and nutrition plans.

And once again, of critical note, your best fitness and conditioning plan will be one that is UNIQUE TO YOU, given, for simple example (out of many possible factors), your current body composition, your overall metabolic health, your daily activity package, your current health, wellness, and fitness objectives, your overall general health, and where you happen to be in your “recovery” journey.

The Benefits of Walking Have Been Known for Years

I’ve been writing about the benefits of walking here on the Older Bolder Life for months now, for example looking at walking and longevity here, walking as a foundational part of basic fitness here, studies looking at walking versus jogging (including specific cardiac benefit and injury rate comparisons) here, and ten ways that walking boosts brain health and function here.

There’s a host of good literature and research that’s been penned over the years covering walking; I’m working on an extensive review to post a few weeks down the road.

So How Much Do I Need to Walk to Derive Genuine Benefit?

Of course the best answer depends on your personal health and fitness specifics as they stand today, though there are some ballpark recommendations you’ll see noted again and again.

For example, the venerable American Heart Association (drawing from the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 2nd Edition published by the Dept. of Health and Human Services) recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week (or at least 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity). Using those guidelines, if one were to simply walk six days per week, that’s only 25 minutes per day.

For clients I’m coaching who are faced with the duel challenge of dropping weight AND reconditioning from a very low fitness level, I encourage an initial goal of at least 30 minutes of walking a day, 6 or 7 days per week, with an hour (or more) bringing additional benefits to the table.

Amazing, I’ve had people who have been so astoundingly sedentary they can only tolerate 15 to 20 minutes of walking a day; one is now walking 90 to 120 minutes per day, six days per week, and got there in a matter of months with consistent effort, and has become an entirely new person in the process. It can be done.

I’m a huge walking fan myself, starting off just about every day with a 45-60 minute walk on trails in a nearby park, and taking another 30-60 minute walk later in the day as well, six or seven days per week.

Lace up those walking shoes and git ‘er done.

Foundation Series: Functional Fitness Is Where It’s At

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Way back when starting my residency in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Utah (Salt Lake was a great place to live back in the mid-80s), the term functional fitness wasn’t a popular buzzword in the everyday fitness world.

Functional fitness (as a term) was really used primarily in a medical arena, most often as we worked as a team to restore injured and compromised individuals’ mobility as well as their ability to do what are loosely termed “activities of daily living” – all those things we do to manage ourselves, our households, and most often our work in a given day.

A great deal of what the members of the rehab team did in this functional training was very practical, geared toward equipping a person to perform useful tasks with greater ease, efficiency, and proficiency. (To this day I’m deeply inspired by some of the transformations in function I witnessed during those years.)

Functional Fitness is a hot topic these days it seems, and for good reason. I’m all about the functional fitness movement (no pun intended), particularly for those of us over 40 (you could really easily argue that could be 30) who are beginning to feel some of the symptoms of joint wear and tear (aching, stiffness, etc), aren’t as fit as we used to be, are a bit too sedentary, are beginning to pack on extra pounds, or are just overwhelmed with the urgent life tasks that seem to dominate some (if not most) days.

Getting a Grip on Functional Fitness

Like most involved in the wellness and health worlds today, it seems like I’m singing the praises of and talking details about functional fitness just about every day.

I like to keep things direct and simple, and define (more or less) functional fitness as movement and exercise that’s geared toward improving our body’s ability to complete often complex life tasks we face routinely, as opposed to building, for example, the biggest biceps or triceps possible, or trimming seconds off a timed run or swim.

Functional fitness implies personalization. We’re all unique in terms of our specific physical construct, metabolism, and psyche; the tasks we complete as part of our home and work days are different and unique to us, as is our play.

Why wouldn’t we optimally build out an exercise routine that is designed to peak our performance of both these daily tasks and our play?

Yet so often we try and force our bodies to grind through training routines that aren’t necessarily functionally targeted, that might isolate and build impressive individual muscles yet leave us woefully unconditioned and unprepared for various challenges we face in the real world every day.

[I’m always reminded of an interview I read years ago back in the infancy of triathlon competitions; one of the earliest heroes of the sport, Mark Allen, noted in an interview that despite his being a champion swimmer at the collegiate level, he found himself woefully unprepared early in his career to meet the challenges of cycling and running.]

Functional fitness focuses on core strength, balance and stability, functional strength, solid cardio (without overtraining), and multi-planar, multi-muscle (often arm, trunk, and leg together) movements and exercise.

There’s no magic program to simply plug into; as noted above, functional fitness implies personalization to the demands your life puts on you. At the most basic level, Mark Sisson’s 4 Essential Movements of the Primal Blueprint could be a great place to start, though we’ll be talking a great deal more about functional fitness over the next months.

It’s time to get moving, and start building up your functional capacity and reserve. Life is all about function.

Older Bolder Foundations: Optimizing Lean Body Mass, Not Weight Loss, Is Goal One

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Many of us are drawn to efforts to improve our personal health (or the health of a loved one) by the lure of weight loss; given the fact that roughly a third of Americans are obese by typical measurement standards, weight loss is an appropriate and worthy goal.

What we should be more focused upon, though, is optimizing our lean body mass, given the almost astounding benefits optimal lean body mass provides.

Granted, weight loss and optimizing lean body mass are kissing cousins and very closely intertwined, though there are subtle (and some not so subtle) differences in approach and practice between the two.

Why bother with the distinction? The answer is easy – there are some extreme approaches to weight loss (and long term food plan choices) that compromise, some significantly, lean body mass and therefore general health and well-being over the long haul. Getting and staying optimally healthy and functional is of course the objective, and the road to get there is in reality pretty conceptually simple to navigate.

It’s worth thinking a bit more about lean body mass and its benefits…

What is Lean Body Mass?

Lean body mass is term used quite frequently these days by folks from all across the health and wellness spectrum. The simplest definition for Lean Body Mass (LBM) is the weight (mass) of everything in your body minus/without the various types of body fat stored on your frame.

LBM is sometimes (incorrectly) used interchangeably with muscle mass, and while they’re correlated strongly, of course LBM includes the weight of all “the other stuff” in our bodies beside muscle tissue – our skeletal structure, skin, internal organs, nervous system, the various fluids circulating through the system. There are a number of tools that are able to more accurately measure body composition and sort out with much greater precision your muscle mass, such as DEXA scans (duel-energy X-ray absorptiometry and BIA (bioelectrical impedance analysis).

Higher Lean Body Mass Implies Enhanced Function (and Function is the Ultimate Goal)

Life is about function – engaging fully and productively with your environment – and to do so optimally implies an intact and fully functional lean body mass. In particular, engaging fully functionally with our environment implies consistent, high-level function of our musculoskeletal system (muscles and joints aren’t necessarily designed to wear to failure in our sixties), and all the organ mass that supports their mobility-centric activities (heart, gut, liver, brain and neural tissue, etc.)

Excessive fat (adipose) mass is an unwelcome traveler along for the ride, a lumpy mass of nutrient storage far, far beyond rational possible needs, dampening the actions of homeostasis-seeking hormones (i.e. insulin resistance, decreased leptin signaling), overloading joints, driving inflammation, invoking frustration, shame, and anguish, and much more.

Lean Body Mass Promotes Insulin Sensitivity

The plague of insulin resistance carries with it a host of metabolic consequences, though it’s been a well-documented and long-accepted fact that a higher lean body mass is associated with lower rates of what many term prediabetes and insulin resistance. It’s well established that increasing insulin sensitivity is good, and insulin resistance is bad; we’ll delve more into insulin resistance later.

Try a quick search engine query of “lean body mass and insulin resistance” and you’ll find a flood of studies completed over the past several decades; we’ll look in detail at several in a later post.

Higher Lean Body Mass Increases Longevity

Observational studies such as this one have demonstrated conclusively that higher muscle mass (a strong correlate of LBM) in older adults is associated with lower all-cause mortality. Lower skeletal muscle mass and abdominal obesity (implying low lean body mass) has been shown to correlate strongly with higher all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality.

Lean Body Mass Strengthens Bones

Osteoporosis, in lay terms often referred to as thinning of the bones in the body, is a bone disease that occurs when the body makes too little bone, loses too much bone, or a combination of the two. (The word osteoporosis actually means “porous bone”.) Osteoporosis in it’s worst forms leads to a plethora of fractures (femur, wrist, and spine among the more common and serious), requiring at times aggressive intervention, and inducing impressive losses in the functional realm.

Bones in our bodies constantly remodel and change in response to a variety of factors, one of the more critical being mechanical stress – the kind of stress that is delivered by weight-bearing movement and stress in particular, movement and stress that is driven by our lean body mass/muscle tissue.

Lean body mass has been shown to be much more effective in preventing bone density loss than fat mass.

Lean Body Mass Serves as a Reserve in Times of Illness and Injury Stress

Many of us, during our lifetimes, will encounter on one level or another an event or catastrophe in the form of illness or injury that serves as a serious, maybe even life-threatening stressor.

I spent the first years of my medical career caring for individuals who had suffered some of the most catastrophic, survivable insults to health imaginable – spinal cord injuries, multi-system and/or widespread orthopaedic trauma, severe burns, traumatic brain injuries, progressive neuromuscular diseases, and strokes. Despite a careful, intensive, multidisciplinary approach to care, more often than not, during these times of severe stress, some degree of lean body mass loss was noted as bodies reached for every available resource at their disposal to recover.

Breaking down muscle mass, among other healthy tissues, to support recovery in these situations isn’t optimal, but can be life saving in a crisis. And lean body mass can be rebuilt too.

Lean Body Mass Increases Metabolic Efficiency

Having a higher LBM clearly improves metabolic efficiency, though I should clarify what I mean here by metabolic efficiency (which implies a host of meanings pending context and author).

Perhaps the best example is that of a carb-dependent (CD) versus a fat-adapted (FA) marathoner. Our CD runner will burn through liver and muscle glycogen stores fairly early in their race, necessitating loading the gut with more carbs (a potentially problematic issue in and of itself), followed by an insulin spike to combat the flood of carbohydrate into the bloodstream, with the body then utilizing the glucose to generate energy, though that process is metabolically “dirty”, producing a host of oxidation by-products.

Our fat-adapted runner, hydrating with water or electrolytes, has built the much more efficient metabolic machinery to burn fats, and without any exogenous fuels, even the thinnest, fittest runners carry thousands of calories in storage with them wherever they run, pulling fats out of storage and utilizing more efficient cellular machinery (FA folks have happier and more functional mitochondria) to keep the fires stoked throughout a race event. The FA athlete, by utilizing fats which offer more than twice the calories of energy produced than glucose – roughly 9 Cal/gram in fats vs. 4 Cal/gram in glucose – has a distinct advantage.

Lean body mass can be “trained” to burn fats (and ketones) very efficiently; fat mass doesn’t.

Tomorrow’s Foundation Post will look at how excess body fat isn’t your friend.

Starting Tomorrow: Older Bolder Foundation Series

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Beginning tomorrow, and running once or twice per week through the summer (and probably into the early fall), we’ll begin posting key topics in a Foundation Series, geared to outline a core set of principles for anyone of any age to live by, but particularly geared toward those over 30 who have drifted away from a healthy, fit, and above all – optimally functional lifestyle.

I’ll never forget the first time, in a recreational setting, when a guy two years younger (I was 31 at the time ) said, “you know, once you hit 30, you begin to lose a step, and it’s all downhill from there”.

We happened to be playing frisbee golf in one of the beautiful parks in Salt Lake City at the time; despite the fact that I soundly beat him, I remember as it it were yesterday feeling pudgy and bit out of shape that day, my weight have crept up slowly during my residency as the time and stress demands of medicine and a young family slowly and inexorably pushed fitness to a back burner.

Fast forward a few years, and like so many in our busy world, I was packing on the weight and slowly deconditioning, my physiological and functional ages ‘maturing’ faster than my chronological age.

The principles upon which a much healthier life should and could be built – the critical foundation of healthy living – were beginning to evolve in earnest back then (this was the early ‘80s).

Now there’s a flood of information available, much of which has been and still is antithetical to what’s been served up as conventional and medical wisdom for several decades, new information that’s changing the very core of human potential – not just for the highest tiers of professional and recreational athletes, but for the rest of us “mere mortals” living and working everyday lives.

Tomorrow we’ll outline the first bundle of topics to cover in our upcoming foundation posts.