everything

I'm not old, but I'm getting old. I'm 38, and as the years go by, and having spent the last 7 of them with children, I feel my age a bit more all the time.

I've always been a fit person, for the most part, but it has been harder and harder to keep that going in the last few years. I've got my excuses, like everyone else, but I'm more interested in fixing it now.

The problem with using my own past experience to guide me, is that I was, once upon a time, a pretty decent athlete. This means that my intuitions about how to restart exercising are completely wrong for my current age. The way I would approach exercise in my 20s now does nothing but accelerate me straight into an injury. I've spent the last 5 years or so learning and relearning this lesson, the hard way.

I've decided to take a completely different approach, which is inspired by Alan Couzens (website, though I think he's more active on Twitter these days), as well as Jerry Teixiera (Twitter), and even a little Peter Attia (not going to link him because I don't endorse most of what he talks about).

Attia has a useful construct of thinking about the person you want to be at age 90 or 100, applying the usual loss of lean mass and Vo2 max that occurs per decade as we age, and working backwards to where you need to be at 40 and 50 to get to those advanced ages while still being able to function. Function here is defined as being able to carry your own groceries in from the house up a flight of stairs, being able to get up off the floor without assistance, and being able to play with your grandkids or great grandkids without strain.

I think this is a very useful framework. I've chosen a couple of people in Alan Couzens and Jerry Teixiera who I think model good ideas and behaviors around the two main dimensions of this kind of readiness for aging, which are muscle mass / strength, and endurance / Vo2 Max (aerobic) capabilities.

Alan's ideas about endurance stem from his work with Ironman triathletes, but as he ages I think he is moderating his views a bit to apply more to us regular joes. It's apparent from the literature that keeping your Vo2 Max score above 50 or so results in a huge decrease in mortality. He advocates that the best way to keep this high is to work on your low end aerobic system, the one worked in zones 1 and 2 in the 5 zone model of aerobic exercise, which allows you to work out more without as much fatigue or injury. He doesn't advocate for only this system being worked, but just that you should mostly work this low zone, and only work the higher zones at a very low ratio. And for people who don't have the requisite fitness yet, maybe not even at all.

This is starkly at odds with the way most people approach fitness, which is to do short, high intensity workouts to maximize their short term adaptations. While these workouts do achieve their goal, they don't build lasting adaptations to our aerobic systems.

I am lucky enough to have a long history of aerobic work, which places me at a 47 Vo2 Max right now without much input for the past few months, and only sporadic work over the last few years. I would like to get that up closer to 55 or so over the next year, which will take a lot of dedicated work.

The other half of the equation is strength and muscle mass, which JT uses bodyweight strength exercises to approach. If you look at the guy, he has a lot of muscle mass, and is very strong, and he largely achieves this through bodyweight exercises, with some use of pull up bars and rings. This appeals to me because I hate going to the gym, and I want to be able to workout anywhere, anytime.

I've gone ahead and purchased his four day workout program, which splits a full body workout into 2 days of upper body, and 2 days of lower body, which ideally is done in a week, though he does say that if you only get to 3 of the 4 every week, it'll still work pretty well. I know I personally struggle a lot with delayed onset muscle soreness, which puts me in a bad mood and makes me not want to exercise at all. Knowing this, I will probably either only do 3 per week, or just do some kind of plan where I only work upper body if that part is not sore, and same for lower body. This might reduce my workouts per week, but I'm not concerned with that metric really.

There are some other elements to fitness like flexibility, but I've come to the belief that flexibility is best built through strength workouts that go to our end ranges anyway, so I will be trying to use the exercises I do for strength to increase my flexibility at the same time.

In any case, I've got to start somewhere. For now, I've started doing daily morning walks where I do some light calisthenics. I've just let my fatigue guide me. If I feel like my body is fresh, I do more than I did the day before. If I feel fatigued, I just do less. Just doing this, I've slowly built up to about 8,000 steps in the morning, and many days about 20-25 stories of vertical climbing (I walk up next to a mountain that I walk up partially if I feel good). In time I will add in running to this, but always keeping my heart rate in the aerobic zone.

As I get older, I've got to accept my own limitations, and only exercise to my personal capacity. It's not easy to realize that I can't just pick up a training program from Lydiard or whoever, and execute it anymore, but at the same time, it's also a more relaxed, natural approach to exercise than I've ever had before. It suits my more contemplative nature as I've mellowed out from the competitive person I was when I was younger.