Older Bolder Life

Stronger | Leaner | Sharper | Longer - From Older Bolder Fitness

goals

Health and Fitness Expectations after 40: Managing the Timeline Game

By

Last week I introduced a series to come focusing on managing expectations, in particular expectations that those of us working to maximize our health and fitness after our 40th birthdays create for ourselves.

Given what we know about athletic performance, I’m thinking here of the old rule of thumb that your VO2max (think of VO2max as a measure of your body’s ability to utilize oxygen) declines by about 10% every decade post age 30, we probably should really be talking about expectations we create for ourselves post age thirty. (And this old study shows that the traditional 10% per decade decline doesn’t hold true for fit people actively exercising, even in their 7th decade).

And of course, the absolute crux of the timeline expectation game is damned simple – the time it’s going to take you to get from your starting point to your fitness, or weight, or metabolic health target depends on a host of factors unique to you, and critically where – relative to your targets – you’re starting from.

An Embarrassing Example from my Own Experience

When I first made the decision now just about three years ago to do what ever it might take to reclaim my health and fitness, I was a physical and metabolic disaster. In a full blow metabolic syndrome (I could have been a poster boy), I had just finished a round of treatment for renal cancer, had developed an idiopathic thrombocytopenia (low platelet count), weighed 412 pounds, and had so many aches and pains I could hardly walk through a store without the aid of a cart, and on the worst days, needed help tying my shoes.

A mentor helped me take the first steps in terms of revamping my diet and beginning at the most basic level in terms of rebuilding my fitness, and drilled into me the importance of setting attainable and rational short and intermediate term goals (incentives, and success, are huge helps). He also challenged me to set “reach for the stars”, seemingly at the time almost crazy goals as well; we can talk about structuring goals in detail sometime in detail – the psychology is fascinating – for sake of this story let’s just say I did set some seemingly unreachable long term goals (most of which I’ve now surpassed at the almost two year mark).

My mentor, wise friend that he is, hammered into me week after week that part of the process is indeed expecting life to get better (fitness to improve, weight to drop, etc), but he cautioned every single time that trying to pair my fitness and weight loss goals with a timeline I’d pulled out of thin air was a fool’s errand. He (correctly) harped on the principle that our expectations (especially when it comes to timelines) need to be tempered and tied to our reality unfolding day by day.

For Every Year a Couch Potato a Month in Recovery?

My mentor repetitively hounded me with another rule of thumb that he swears he learned from Dr. Phil Maffetone (I’ve yet to find it expressly stated on his site or any of his books), basically saying that after 40 (arguably 30 or 35 as well), for every year you’ve spent not exercising and overweight, you’ll spend at least a month of consistent fitness and healthy eating to reverse and overcome the damage and deconditioning done on your way back to a healthy baseline.

To be perfectly honest, I despise most rule of thumb discussions in health and fitness in general, as there’s simply too much variability in human physiology and experience to make them conform meaningfully to an individual’s reality.

That said, I’ve used this principle in advising clients and patients for years now – for every year a couch potato you’ll spend a month eating healthy and exercising consistently to restore a healthy baseline – and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t ring ring true more often than not. And note I’m talking about a healthy baseline here – becoming a masters cyclist or runner might take a little longer.

The Bottom Line: Play to Win the Long Game

In particular for those of us over 40, restoring optimal health and fitness after a period of…let’s say any time living with less than optimal nutrition and shunning exercise…is going to be a long game; accepting that reality will make the process immensely more rewarding, enjoyable, and sustainable.

Amazingly I still have people contact me for help in “easily dropping 50 pounds in three months”; most of the time we don’t mesh and work together – unrealistic expectations at the start are a huge hurdle to overcome. (Can somebody drop 50 pounds in three months? While possible, it’s sure as hell not probable, but it depends on where you’re starting from and how you want to get there; I dropped 50 pounds in four months myself at one point in my journey. )

By 40, most of us have accumulated at least a few dings and bruises, we don’t recover as quickly from aggressive workouts or injury, we often have very demanding work and family responsibilities, and we’ve often accumulated some damned harmful and deeply ingrained habits too. These things won’t prevent you from coming back, but they’ll impact your approach, and the timeline.

Have a long way to go to rebuild your health and fitness? It can be done; embrace the longer journey, savor the victories along the way, and build a lifestyle to take you into later years, remaining active, vital, and engaged.

Begin Your Health and Wellness Journey with the End in Mind

By

A Very Short ‘Begin with the End in Mind’ Backstory

Several years ago, a physician friend, business partner, and mentor who possessed the gift of speaking very directly and candidly without crushing one’s spirit, began to challenge me about longer term goal setting.

The immediate context at the time happened to be non-health related (it was multifamily real estate in fact) though the principle translates beautifully to the health and wellness world.

My friend’s challenge was simple: never begin any journey in life (whether a literal journey or adventure, a major lifestyle or health adjustment, business project, etc.) without carefully considering what your goals might be, what the endpoint is, and what happens next (real estate guys call that your exit strategy).

Beginning Your Health and Wellness Journey with the End in Mind

By far and away the most common reason people have approached me in the past several years is a desire to shed excess pounds. Losing weight is one of the most commonly tagged New Year’s resolutions of the past 30 years, and perhaps the least successfully accomplished.

Getting started with a major lifestyle change to improve your health is pretty danged daunting, particularly if you’re truly engaged and serious about it. Fascinatingly, when I chat with folks about why they want to use a health coach to facilitate this transition, most often, they reply with very non-specific answers, almost always including “I just need to lose some weight”.

Hells bells, that was my own somewhat mis-focused intent over three years ago when starting my own recovery; I had no idea what my goals really were, what it would take to actually get there, or even if I could possibly drop enough pounds to make a real difference. No way could I have imagined dropping 170 pounds thus far, with more to go…

Simple Suggestions for Beginning with the End in Mind

First, think (or dream) big, respecting that for those of us over 40 (or perhaps even 30), charting big goals most often demands a longer time line. That’s ok, most of us can do more to improve our health than one might guess at first blush, and time becomes much less critical when you’re making steady gains along the way.

Make today’s decisions today; right now you only have to choose to eat the next meal on plan, take your next walk, or jump into that next workout. Other challenges down the road will come in due time, just make the decision to engage in the moment presently.

Craft a set of meaningful goals. At the start of the new year, I reminded readers about using SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Even better, set short, intermediate, and longer-term goals, and be prepared to adjust them along the way.

Dive in and get started. Now and again people I interact with, especially those who have a long road ahead to restore their health, get devastatingly discouraged looking at how far they have to go, and quit, or even worse, decide it’s not even worth trying.

And don’t forget to mind your focus. At least for now, we have this quote on the landing page of our main Older Bolder Fitness site –

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new. – Socrates

Hone in with laser-like sharpness on the good changes you’re building into your routine – better food, more movement, targeted strengthening, less exposure to toxins and harmful behaviors, better sleep, better sex, and more.

Begin your journey with the end in mind; we’re here to help you along the way any time you have a question or need additional insight, encouragement, or a push.

Inspirational Quotes of the Day Tuesday 8 January: Goals

By

Some inspirational thoughts and quotes about goals from a wide range of sources. If you’ve not laid out your goals for 2019, there’s still time to lay them out and get rolling…

A goal without a plan is just a wish. – Antonine de Saint-Exupery

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. – CS Lewis

Picture yourself in your mind’s eye as having already achieved your goal. See yourself doing the things you will be doing when you’ve reached your goal. – Earl Nightingale

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help a man with the wrong mental attitude. – Thomas Jefferson

The problem with not having a goal is that you can spend you life running up and down the field and never score. – Bill Copeland

A goal properly set is halfway reached. – Zig Ziglar

The tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. – Benjamin Mays

A goal should scare you a little, and excite you a lot. – Dr. Joe Vitale

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment. – Jim Rohn

A goal is a dream with a deadline. – Napoleon Hill

Three Reasons You Should COMMIT and Not Resolve This New Year

By

For nearly twenty five years as a physician (and now as a wellness and health coach) I found it fascinating to query patients in my practice about their “resolutions” for the New Year.

Though it was not uncommon to hear something along the lines of “I’m too tired/weak/pained/sick to even think about making resolutions”, the most common responses could easily have been pulled right off the most popular New Year’s Resolutions of All Times List – such as get in shape, lose weight, stop smoking, get more sleep, watch less tv, drink less, get a raise, buy a new car, get married (or divorced), and so on…

As an aside, it’s reported that over 92% of us who make a resolution don’t complete it over the next twelve months; in fact, it’s reported that over 80% of resolutions have failed by the second week of February. I’m not sure how you’d ever complete hard research to confirm these data points, but intuitively (and as an observer of human behavior now for almost four decades), I’d believe it.

And while I typically wouldn’t ask the next obvious question – how many of those resolutions were on last year’s list? – my own experience from younger years had already provided the answer. Most of us never truly engage with and act consistently upon our New Year’s resolutions, and those issues impacting our lives negatively never get addressed in a meaningful, lasting, and consistent way.

Over the past decade we’ve (as a family) worked through a process to look at the New Year though a somewhat different lens – committing to specific goals; here’s three reasons you should too.

Commitment Reflects Your Deeper Motivation (Get the Why Right)

There’s no question that defining the why behind your desire to change helps cement your commitment to the process. I’m suspicious that many if not most of the resolutions that will be bandied about this week are things that people think they “should” do, when they really should be committing to things they will do for a specific reason(s).

A mentor and friend used to say often that we do what we do because we believe what we believe. What we truly believe, for instance about our health, drives everyday decisions about what we eat, how we move, how we challenge and condition our bodies and minds, and manage our physiology over the long haul.

A simple example – not understanding the why behind the disastrous, accumulating over the years damage that unfettered consumption of highly processed grains and sugars produces leads to ever-expanding waistlines and festering metabolic damage that eventually erupts in catastrophe.

Defining the why’s – the true beliefs or reasons behind your behaviors (or intended behaviors) – allows you drill down to the heart of the issue, and yields deeply motivated eventual success.

It’s ok to have some fun with this; one of my most successful client couples dropped over 200 pounds and became more fit than ever before because they wanted to improve their sex life. (It worked by the way; incentives are important.)

Commitment Implies SMART Goals

You’ve no doubt seen it before, but setting SMART goals can be an absolute game changer as you look at what you’d like to get done this next year. Here’s a quick refresher on the SMART goal process; you need to make goals –

Specific. Drill down and be as specific as you possibly can; split hairs and break big goals into component parts if needed.

Measurable. I love the sense of accomplishment that attaining a goal milestone brings; it doesn’t have to be a huge, life-changing milestone either. Set thoughtful (and meaningful) measurement markers along the way and cherish the victories as they roll by. Success begets more success.

Attainable. Be brutally honest with yourself here, think big but set goals with targets you can reach. A great example here is clients that want to lose over 100 pounds; for most of us, that’s a tall order for one year, but a piece of cake to do in two…

Relevant. One way to look at this is consider time lines, we all have short, intermediate, and longer term goals, create a balanced mix of all three time frames to align your progress this next year with the overall direction your life is taking.

Time-bound. Even if your goals are somewhat open-ended, or you’re not absolutely convinced your time-line projections will work (i.e. weight loss), define a set of deadlines that drive you with a sense of urgency and purpose. Dates can be wiggled.

Commitment Works for the Long Haul

Let’s face it, there will be days when you don’t feel like working hard to take another step toward achieving your goal(s), days you just don’t feel it, days where the first mile, not to mention the extra mile, simply looks too long, and you’ve lost sight of the longer term results and outcomes. Take heart, you’re not alone; we all have those days.

Commitment, however, isn’t based on how you feel. (Sorry, but it’s not, and may those who are attempting to define feelings are the absolute arbiter and driver of behavior should be condemned forever to the depths of perdition.)

Commitment, among other things, means completion. It means results. It means change. Commitment isn’t in any way dependent on feelings.

We’ve been conditioned to expect instantaneous results when we want something these days. The most valuable things in life, health and wellness treasures in particular, but material things as well, most often come about after our commitment over time to something – whether you want to define that as a lifestyle, a process, or specific goals is up to you.

It’s time to commit to be the best version of yourself you can be this year.