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Musings Report 2024-3 1-20-24 What Can We Learn from the 93-Year Old with the Heart of a 40-Year Old?
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What Can We Learn from the 93-Year Old With the Heart of a 40-Year Old?
The Washington Post recently published an interesting article on exercise and aging: At 93, he's as fit as a 40-year-old. His body offers lessons on aging. The human body maintains the ability to adapt to exercise at any age, showing that it's never too late to start a fitness program.
This article confirms what has already been well-established about age and fitness:
1. Starting a fitness routine is beneficial regardless of when we start. There is no upper age limit on the health benefits of exercise. Individuals who start moderate exercise at 90 still gain muscle mass and the benefits of improved fitness.
2. Consistent moderate exercise is sufficient to build and maintain fitness. The extreme routines of elite athletes are not necessary.
3. Brief bursts of intense exercise provide additional benefits when added to moderate / easy exercise of longer duration.
4. Any amount of regular exercise is better than none; adding more increases health benefits and then plateaus. Adding more above this level yields decreasing benefits.
Let's stipulate two things about this article, and others focusing on super-senior athletes:
1. The subject is an elite athlete who happens to be a super-senior in age. It takes years of consistent effort to build up to the level of an elite athlete, at any age, and far more effort to maintain this level than is required to maintain health-positive fitness.
We're attracted to stories of ageless aging, as everyone wants to retain their youthful energy and capabilities into old age. But holding up elite athletes and super-seniors as the goal everyone should strive for is unrealistic. For most of us, having the heart of a healthy 70-year old is plenty good enough for the average 90-year old.
2. There are many other factors in maintaining health as we age that the article doesn't address, factors I'll discuss later.
Here are some insightful excerpts from the article:
"For lessons on how to age well, we could do worse than turn to Richard Morgan. At 93, the Irishman is a four-time world champion in indoor rowing, with the aerobic engine of a healthy 30- or 40-year-old and the body-fat percentage of a whippet. He’s also the subject of a new case study, published last month in the Journal of Applied Physiology, that looked at his training, diet and physiology.
Its results suggest that, in many ways, he's an exemplar of fit, healthy aging — a nonagenarian with the heart, muscles and lungs of someone less than half his age. But in other ways, he's ordinary: a onetime baker and battery maker with creaky knees who didn't take up regular exercise until he was in his 70s and who still trains mostly in his backyard shed.
If some people stay strong and fit deep into their golden years, the implication is that many of the rest of us might be able to as well, he said.
What made Morgan especially interesting to the researchers was that he hadn't begun sports or exercise training until he was 73. Retired and somewhat at loose ends then, he'd attended a rowing practice with one of his other grandsons, a competitive collegiate rower. The coach invited him to use one of the machines.
Morgan proved to be a nonagenarian powerhouse, his sinewy 165 pounds composed of about 80 percent muscle and barely 15 percent fat, a body composition that would be considered healthy for a man decades younger.
His heart rate also headed toward its peak very quickly, meaning his heart was able to rapidly supply his working muscles with oxygen and fuel. These "oxygen uptake kinetics," a key indicator of cardiovascular health, proved comparable to those of a typical, healthy 30- or 40-year-old, Daly said.
Perhaps most impressive, he developed this fitness with a simple, relatively abbreviated exercise routine, the researchers noted.
- Consistency: Every week, he rows about 30 kilometers (about 18.5 miles), averaging around 40 minutes a day.
- A mix of easy, moderate and intense training: About 70 percent of these workouts are easy, with Morgan hardly laboring. Another 20 percent are at a difficult but tolerable pace, and the final 10 at an all-out, barely sustainable intensity.
- Weight training: Two or three times a week, he also weight-trains, using adjustable dumbbells to complete about three sets of lunges and curls, repeating each move until his muscles are too tired to continue.
- A high-protein diet: He eats plenty of protein, his daily consumption regularly exceeding the usual dietary recommendation of about 60 grams of protein for someone of his weight.
Morgan's fitness and physical power at 93 suggest that "we don't have to lose" large amounts of muscle and aerobic capacity as we grow older, Jakeman said. Exercise could help us build and maintain a strong, capable body, whatever our age, he said.
Of course, Morgan probably had some genetic advantages, the scientists point out. Rowing prowess seems to run in the family.
And his race performances in recent years have been slower than they were 15, 10 or even five years ago. Exercise won't erase the effects of aging. But it may slow our bodies' losses, Morgan's example seems to tell us. It may flatten the decline."
Let's dive into the factors the article didn't mention.
The first is the highly biased media focus on super-achievers: there are endless stories of extraordinary success and achievement and essentially zero stories about the 99.9% whose attempts failed. How many stories do we read about individuals who go to Hollywood and struggle for years to break in and eventually give up? That's the real world, but it lacks inspirational punch.
In the realm of fitness, we read about super-senior weightlifters, not about seniors who hurt themselves trying to lift heavy weights. We read about the 0.1% elite athletes, not those who end up injured and actually worse off after trying to emulate elite-athlete regimes.
Many of us are impatient for results, and fitness is a long, often tedious process. Our culture emphasizes instant fixes, convenience and comfort, all of which are the opposite of what it takes to become fit. Young athletes learn this process in sports training: every team training and martial arts class starts with stretching exercises, for starting an intense effort from a cold start is a good way to get injured.
I played team sports for five years as a no-talent teen / benchwarmer (5 years basketball, 1 year football), and this experience has been very beneficial in maintaining my fitness as life interferes, my fitness declines and I have to build it back up again. Start slow and easy, be consistent, do what's sustainable, build on self-discipline and past experience.
This experience helped me when I took up martial arts at age 54.
An athlete, regardless of talent, learns to listen to their body and focus on pushing up to limits but not beyond. The beginner is prone to thinking the goal is to ignore limits or push through limits; this leads to injury. I always hear the sage advice of our Chinese master acrobat friend when I asked him about training: "slowly, slowly."
The article doesn't address the other factors that have been identified as critical influences on health, well-being and longevity:
1. Financial security
2. Supportive marriage / friendships / social networks
3. Chronic stress
4. Diet that includes whole grains, fruits and vegetables, i.e. a diet rich in fiber and variety
5. Weight
6. Agility, flexibility and balance, not just weight training
7. Risks of injury
8. Mental health / purpose
Financial insecurity erodes our well-being and physical health. So does loneliness and social isolation. There are other sources of chronic stress, too--being a caregiver, for example. Chronic stress wears us down in ways that have not been fully studied.
Fitness and diet are the inputs we control, and evidence is accumulating that our diet affects not just our weight and metabolic health but our minds, as the health of the microbiome is increasingly understood to be connected to autoimmune diseases and diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
In the Gut's 'Second Brain,' Key Agents of Health Emerge
To discuss fitness and health but not diet is a big miss. The article mentions protein but the microbiome needs a variety of real food to be healthy. Protein is part of the picture but not the only factor.
The trend in measuring "health" is to look at the muscle - fat ratio rather than weight per se, but it's worth noting that seniors that are healthy into their 90s tend to be trim and active.
We have a 101-year old neighbor, cared for by her daughter and son-in-law, and a 102-year old male (WW2 veteran) who lives alone and still drives. In chatting with him, he seems like a gent in in early 80s. Another WW2 veteran neighbor passed away last year at 99. He and his wife were disciplined about their morning walks. Each had a different route, but they walked every day.
Another major oversight of the article in my view is the absence of any mention of agility, flexibility and balance as key measures of fitness. The media tends to focus on strength as the primary measure of fitness, but maintaining balance, flexibility and agility are just as important as strength. Tai Chi, Chi Gong and yoga are highly beneficial when combined with aerobic exercises such as walking or swimming.
The article also did not discuss the heightened risks of injury as we age. It takes more time to stretch and warm up, and we have to pay attention to sore shoulders, knees, etc. Athletes have trainers to help them heal, and this process requires patience, as we have to maintain flexibility while slowly strengthening what can be strengthened and allowing injuries to heal. In my experience (I'm now 70), it can take many months for injuries to fully heal. It takes care and attention to heal while retaining our core fitness.
Lastly, there is mental health, which is tied to diet, fitness, chronic stress, purpose and the mental habits that are the equivalent of physical fitness regimes.
Traditional health systems have long taught that the mind and body are one, and the modern focus on resolving specific ailments diminishes this key understanding health.
The mind and body are one, slowly, slowly. We can all improve our health with modest effort. That's the good news.
Highlights of the Blog
National Self-Reliance Is On the Rise: China and the U.S. 1/19/24
How to Navigate Our Low-Trust, Increasingly Dysfunctional Society and Economy 1/17/24
Self-Reliance, Taoism and the Warring States 1/15/24
Gordon Long's self-reliance newsletter
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Recoated our aging asphalt driveway--maintenance, maintenance, maintenance.
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
The social housing secret: how Vienna became the world's most livable city
Are smartphones bad for us? Five world experts answer
I kept a diary of how I use my phone. The results were depressing
‘I feel I’m addicted’: readers on their relationships with their phones
I tried some hacks to make my phone less appealing. It got existential
What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation
The Ludicrous Work Product of ChatGPT (Tim Knight)
Even Insured Americans Can't Afford Medical Bills
Overweight & Obesity Statistics (NIH.gov)
The World Is Falling Apart. Blame the Flukes. (via Stuart L.)
The super-rich got that way through monopolies
Taken, Not Earned: How monopolists drive the world’s power and wealth divide
"A path is made by walking on it." Chuang Tzu
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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