A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

[chenda]

So, at least some higher intensity work is critical...Weight training and running also promote bone health, which guards against injury in old people.

I agree although both can be done in a low impact way e.g. interval running, fast swimming etc

[jacob]

I agree although both can be done in a low impact way e.g. interval running, fast swimming etc

High impact or load bearing exercise/activities lead to higher bone density which is a very desirable kind of capital in older people or in anyone really. Reserve the low impact preference for those whose joints or bones are compromised through either abuse, lack of use, or being too heavy to pound ground. High VO2max activities like cycling or swimming do very little for bone density.

[chenda]

High impact or load bearing exercise/activities lead to higher bone density which is a very desirable kind of capital in older people or in anyone really. Reserve the low impact preference for those whose joints or bones are compromised through either abuse, lack of use, or being too heavy to pound ground. High VO2max activities like cycling or swimming do very little for bone density.

By high impact I mean activities which put excessive stress on the joints which can cause long term damage, like through grappling. Load bearing is absolutely desirable for bone density (like carrying shopping) Injuries also build up over time and take longer to heal.

[Ego]

@jacob +1 The pounding from running causes denser bones in the legs and hips. These are bones that when broken later in life signal the beginning of the end.

A few years ago, we were at a street fair with a mobile clinic offering a bone density testing scan for free. When Mrs. Ego stuck her heel into the machine, the nurse thought there was a mistake so she moved over to another machine. When it showed the same result, she looked confused and checked the chart, then said, "You have the bone density of a young man."

[IlliniDave]

Reading the above, it strikes me that a major goal should be "keep making friends; don't be a lonely old grouch". Friends will help keep you safe on the water. Friends will be an audience for your stories. Friends will help keep you mentally sharp. Loneliness kills.

That's certainly a related thing. Not being able nor inclined to do anything, nor to have an evolving/dynamic conversation, puts a damper on that. In my dad's case he's fortunate to still have a small group of friends who he went to grade school and high school with. He can hang out with them and reminisce, but meeting new friends and being able to build a rapport in the present is nearly impossible in his condition.

And there's synergy. It isn't a stretch to speculate that a person would be more apt to get out and do things if he had a few partners in crime, so to speak. Maybe on a subconscious level my goal not to become trapped in old storyland is related to a human need for some degree of companionship, and recognizing that in the absence of longstanding connections, the ability to interact with the world over time in a coherent fashion is, to use Jacob's term, capital that we tend to take for granted until we need it.

[IlliniDave]

... The common variable shared between those who are active in their 70s+ and likewise completely absent in those who are not is that the former have 1) Been doing what they were planning to do for a long time already; and 2) they keep going even if the body hurts or otherwise protests out of a strong belief that if they stop, they'll never get started again. ...

I agree with all of the post this was extracted from, and although it may not always be obvious, it (the whole post) has essentially been the through line of this journal for about the last 2.5 years, if not longer.

I suppose on some level I hope that maintaining some capacity in a generic sense will allow me some flexibility in the future to develop new interests that might have an amount of physical or mental demand--strength and stamina training, and I even count my obsession on biohacking and healthspan as a regimen for the same mentally. Doing something is better than doing nothing, physical/mental capacity is somewhat fungible, but insofar as specific activity goals exist, the sooner they get woven into a lifestyle the better. Unfortunately I'm paying the price for some earlier lifestyle choices. I'd argue I'm not quite a senior yet, lol, but close. At least I didn't wait so long I'm trapped in a tiny world due to complete atrophy of my meat suit and OS.

[IlliniDave]

...However, when I observe those who are over 90 and still fairly mobile and sharp, the number one thing they have in common, with a bullet, is that they were born with two XX chromosomes. ...

There's a reason in all my planning I've never spent any time doing detailed planning beyond the calendar year I turn 80, including this most recent exercise, lol. If I happen to make it beyond 2044, my plan will be 1) express gratitude that still have some life in me and 2) assess the situation and make the best of the situation going forward. In part, that's why healthspan is a term I repeat over and over. I expect my overall physical competence and possibly my mental competence to be substantially lower at that juncture, but hopefully not exhausted. In 10-15 years I should have a better sense my personal trajectory. Even the most robust and resilient guys I've known have had to tap out of even lite versions of rugged outdoorsmanship within a year or two of their 80th birthday if not sooner. I'm not counting on all my amateur biohacking and fitness pursuits to change that calculus for me, just hoping I can extend the lite version a few more years than if I sat around watching TV the other 8 months of the year.

[IlliniDave]

It's notable retirees tend to move to bungalows rather than town houses, which results in leg muscles atrophying.

Legs definitely benefit from stairs. And aversion to stairs can often preceded my dwindling core strength and declining neural functioning as pertains to balance, and even degrading posture. That combination seemed to be the driver why my dad has essentially stopped going up and down stairs in his house. He got to the point he had/has to descend them backwards. He's a little stooped so facing down while going down is a balance problem and both his physical and neural balance mechanisms aren't up for the task any longer. That's why I put an emphasis on hiking overland rather relying entirely on paved trails. Regularly demanding all the small movements and firing to stay upright on on even ground helps stave off atrophy.

To another thing you brought up, I've heard it repeated often enough I accept it as true without reviewing all the research and data that the highest injury rate in any athletic/fitness activity occurs in runners, primarily knees and feet, iirc. I suspect that's driven by people who take up running relatively late in life, and of course many people run for decades without any injury. There are some posture/stride and footwear considerations that can allegedly lower the risks.

Joint strain is something I can attest to first hand. It's why I use bands for resistance training rather than traditional weights. Not a ton of shock impact in weightlifting, but a lot of force on joints when they are in their most compromised positions in the weaker portions of any given range of motion. I intersperse jogging and walking occasionally, but I don't think I log anywhere near the miles to make a repetitive stress injury likely. I wouldn't shy away from an amount of running in the future, I think the key is if a person is in midlife or beyond and doesn't have a history of regular running, approach it in moderation and par attention to your body and be cautious about pushing through discomfort. Doubly so if a person happens to be carrying more weight than their frame is built to handle.

[jacob]

You might enjoy this report: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4348610/

[Ego]

I've heard it repeated often enough I accept it as true without reviewing all the research and data that the highest injury rate in any athletic/fitness activity occurs in runners, primarily knees and feet, iirc.

In my mind this comes down to managing risks. While the risk of a relatively minor injury is higher with running, the increased bone density and improved agility of older runners makes hip features much less likely. Since 1 in 3 over age 50 who fracture their hips are dead within 12.months of the fracture, it seems like a good trade-off.

We are back to trail running and I am enjoying rebuilding the necessary agility.

[IlliniDave]

Attia (an MD with a practice specializing in this) frequently mentions VO2 Max as the best predictor of lifespan and extender of healthspan. His data comes from this massive study. So, at least some higher intensity work is critical. ...

Weight training and running also promote bone health, which guards against injury in old people.

I've heard it asserted by people with a lot of expertise in the longevity realm that if you gauge an older person's strength and VO2 max, that's all that's needed to assess their all-cause mortality standing to about as accurate a degree as is possible. Meaning, all the internal biomarkers don't make a difference on the same magnitude as those things do. I think to an extent that's partly because there is correlation between "athletic" physical conditioning and overall health, i.e., high capacity in VO2 max and strength is indicative of a healthy metabolism which in turn is indicative of pretty good general health.

Right now there's more established evidence surrounding VO2 max and all cause mortality/lifespan because it's been studied a lot more, but the evidence is growing for strength as well (or maybe more the negative in the sense of sarcopenia/lack of muscle mass being linked to higher all cause mortality pretty strongly). A person can't optimize for muscle mass and VO2 max simultaneously because on some level they begin to work against each other, although when balanced they work together. One can improve strength by various training modalities primarily considered cardiovascular training, and one can improve VO2 max though strength training. But beyond a certain point an attempt to absolutely maximize one will be at the expense of the other. My intuition is that there is probably a sweet spot where you van say a VO2 max of at least X combined with strength/lean mass of at least Y stacks the odds highest in your favor. I don't think that has been identified yet, so it's a topic I intend to pay attention to. One challenge is that with strength/muscle mass, how to measure it is unclear, and there's still some discussion regarding whether relative muscle strength or muscle mass is the most important parameter. IN other words, how do you quantify Y.

My approach so far has been to rotate the emphasis between modalities. I'm finishing up on a year of putting strength/lean mass first, but I'll be rotating to a regimen that gives primacy to VO2 max over the coming months. Most likely I won't get there in earnest until the fall, just because the logistics of the hideout makes strength training much more convenient.

I've been eyeing a grossly spendy REHIT bike that if their backing research/studies aren't fraudulent, offers the promise of strong VO2max gains/unit time which might be a path to better solution to maintaining/improving VO2 max without blunting the effects of strength training as much as say an traditional zone 2 approach might. It's very similar in theory to what I was trying to do with the rower, but apparently the bike can ramp up the intensity of stress on the body much faster than the rower can, and it also uses AI to tailor sessions to the individual user both over time and on a given day using heart rate feedback. So on a day when you're body is performing well, the session is more intense, and the converse if it's an off day. The goal is to deliver a certain level of stress to the cardiovascular system, rather than simply achieving a certain power output (or however you'd want to characterize performance). I'm just not sure how much I'd want to pay for that level of convenience/precision.

[jacob]

In my mind this comes down to managing risks.

Well, there's that ... some sports/activities are inherently more dangerous than others in terms of accidents. Also, some sports allow more "stupid" than others. I dealt with elbow pain for a couple of years because "karate me" figured that I could use a downward elbow strike instead of a hammer to knock a piece of wood in place. Stupid happens.

I suspect a bigger problem is if someone can't distinguish between pain resulting from discomfort and pain resulting from injury. This is found on both ends of the spectrum. Motivated athletes might well try to train through injuries and eventually suffer the consequences. There are even ads for OTC painkillers showing a happy weekend warrior engaging in sports despite their knee pain. I suspect this is a big reason why some professionals, semi-professionals, and soldiers end up as physical wrecks. This is not really the fault of the sport but the fault of the culture around the particular sport.

On the flip side are the couch potatoes who are allergic to sweat and think any kind of discomfort is an injury. They usually go way easier than warranted and thus never really get anywhere. Yet if pushed by a coach/friend they may also easily exceed their low capability and develop an actual injury due to their [near total] lack of conditioning. (This is another good reason to drag all children through some level of sports while they're still relatively robust. At least they'll know what athletic performance feels like.)

[IlliniDave]

In my mind this comes down to managing risks. While the risk of a relatively minor injury is higher with running, the increased bone density and improved agility of older runners makes hip features much less likely. Since 1 in 3 over age 50 who fracture their hips are dead within 12.months of the fracture, it seems like a good trade-off.

We are back to trail running and I am enjoying rebuilding the necessary agility.

Yep, I'm certainly not advocating against running, but as natural as it is, it's essentially a skill that most people rarely exercise, and I think the statistics are driven by out of shape people, possibly markedly overweight, who don't give much thought to stride and footwear, then when their body protests they try to "run through" the discomfort. My dad ran for decades and never really had a significant injury. But he started slow, and did something almost shockingly out of character and paid for high quality running shoes that fit him properly when at a certain point his feet started bothering him a little. This is a guy who tended a vineyard in work boots that by the end were mostly duct tape because he didn't want to shell out $40 for a new pair since "the soles are still good" (they weren't, but they didn't have holes yet).

[7Wannabe5]

Avoiding risks is taking risks, it's just a matter of where the risk resides and the specific consequences it's manifestation entails.

Absolutely. For example, I think the reason my stories tend towards "odd comic mishap" is that I generally tend towards taking "silly risks" rather than "stupid risks", although there is certainly bound to be some "eye of the beholder" in splitting the difference between "silly" and "stupid." And there would certainly be other categories such as "serious."

[Ego]

Right now there's more established evidence surrounding VO2 max and all cause mortality/lifespan because it's been studied a lot more, but the evidence is growing for strength as well (or maybe more the negative in the sense of sarcopenia/lack of muscle mass being linked to higher all cause mortality pretty strongly). A person can't optimize for muscle mass and VO2 max simultaneously because on some level they begin to work against each other, although when balanced they work together. .... But beyond a certain point an attempt to absolutely maximize one will be at the expense of the other. My intuition is that there is probably a sweet spot where you van say a VO2 max of at least X combined with strength/lean mass of at least Y stacks the odds highest in your favor.

Interesting. I hadn't thought of optimizing them as mutually exclusive. It makes sense. If one can get the skeletal and joint benefits from weight training and get the Vo2 max benefits from a bike, that would definitely be best.

I've been eyeing a grossly spendy REHIT bike that if their backing research/studies aren't fraudulent, offers the promise of strong VO2max gains/unit time which might be a path to better solution to maintaining/improving VO2 max without blunting the effects of strength training as much as say an traditional zone 2 approach might.

I am skeptical that the gains can be had from such short (2 X 20 seconds) once weekly workout. From what I've seen the Carol bike suggests workouts of that duration, but I could be wrong. I believe their biggest selling point is that they use AI to determine optimal resistance, then the bike automatically adjusts. IMO this is a tiny value add for the $2,595 plus $20 a month. It is easy to figure out the correct level of resistance necessary to go all out. If I were looking to create the ERE version of the Carol bike, I would use one of the free AIs to suggest the workout duration and would reproduce it on one of the cheap Amazon Peloton clones or a second-hand trainer.

[Ego]

Motivated athletes might well try to train through injuries and eventually suffer the consequences.

I agree. This is a very important factor. I have never in my life raced a full marathon or more and have limited my distances to 10-14k since my last half-marathon in 2007. My typical run is somewhere between 8k - 10k. IMO, the trend toward ultras is a recipe for joint damage in later life. I also stopped cycling on the road because of the risks as my only permanent injury (thumb that does not bend) and broken bone (wrist) were the result of crashes.

[jacob]

Interesting. I hadn't thought of optimizing them as mutually exclusive. It makes sense. If one can get the skeletal and joint benefits from weight training and get the Vo2 max benefits from a bike, that would definitely be best.

Dude, HIIT! Especially on the Tabatha protocol. Also see the section about density training and "overhead pounds" in the ERE book.

(In particular, the kind of program that uses full body/compound movements. This also prevents people from becoming "muscle group"-specialists.)

[chenda]

Joint strain is something I can attest to first hand. It's why I use bands for resistance training rather than traditional weights. Not a ton of shock impact in weightlifting, but a lot of force on joints when they are in their most compromised positions in the weaker portions of any given range of motion. I intersperse jogging and walking occasionally, but I don't think I log anywhere near the miles to make a repetitive stress injury likely. I wouldn't shy away from an amount of running in the future, I think the key is if a person is in midlife or beyond and doesn't have a history of regular running, approach it in moderation and par attention to your body and be cautious about pushing through discomfort. Doubly so if a person happens to be carrying more weight than their frame is built to handle.

I think this is absolutely key.

I also think good posture is very important to minimise injuries and maintain long term mobility. Improving ones posture can be surprisingly difficult, especially as it can be linked to mental well being. It has to be trained for and practiced regularly. Regular massage can also be invaluable for the prevention and treatment of injuries.

[zbigi]

Similarly I think calisthenics is better than lifting weights for the same reasons.

I've messed up my shoulder with calisthenics while never had a problem over years of weight lifting. I would say it may be easier to hurt oneself with calisthenics, because with weight lifting you can finely adapt the weight to your current capabilities, while with calisthenics your body weights what it weights, so the only form of adaptation is basically switching to another exercise.

[IlliniDave]

Interesting. I hadn't thought of optimizing them as mutually exclusive. It makes sense. If one can get the skeletal and joint benefits from weight training and get the Vo2 max benefits from a bike, that would definitely be best.



I am skeptical that the gains can be had from such short (2 X 20 seconds) once weekly workout. From what I've seen the Carol bike suggests workouts of that duration, but I could be wrong. I believe their biggest selling point is that they use AI to determine optimal resistance, then the bike automatically adjusts. IMO this is a tiny value add for the $2,595 plus $20 a month. It is easy to figure out the correct level of resistance necessary to go all out. If I were looking to create the ERE version of the Carol bike, I would use one of the free AIs to suggest the workout duration and would reproduce it on one of the cheap Amazon Peloton clones or a second-hand trainer.

Yeah, the easiest way to visualize is to picture an Olympic sprinter and an Olympic marathoner standing side by side. They're both training for running, but one is essentially training to run powerfully for a short distance and the other to run steadily for a very long distance. Our bodies are actually clever in self-designing for the demands they sense. And a continuous demand for power requires weight (muscle) and the continuous demand for distance requires efficiency which lugging around any more muscle than the minimum required for the locomotion is inefficient.There are happy mediums many people get to, but at a certain point they limit each other. I've heard PhD-types who specialize in body building emphasize never doing Zone 2 stuff in close proximity to strength work. The hormonal response to the Zone 2 will apparently negate the muscle/strength gains the strength work would achieve in the absence of the Zone 2 with claims that it's a proven fact.

The "science" behind REHIIT is essentially that your body only needs a brief signal that "I need to increase capacity" to initiate the processes and so it seeks to activate that pathway by applying the signal as little as possible to get the desired adaptation. The more signal it gets, the stronger the body's stress response, which interferes with the adaptation. Apparently a short burst of 100% intensity, followed by a return to "baseline" then a second burst followed by a return to baseline/warm down is what they've determined is the optimal point on the curve is. I've always heard repeating that 2 or maybe 3 days a week, but maybe they've measured improvement testing people only one day a week. I was skeptical too but I tried it on my rower and got somewhat more than 10% improvement using Concept2's VO2 max calculator for a 2K row over 3 months or thereabouts. I actually had to extend it to 40-60 seconds sprint time instead of 20 to even get my heart rate to increase, and even then I'd top out well below what my peak heart rate should be. So the extent of my "cardio training" was 4 minutes of hard rowing per week and a once per month 2K row to get a measurement for the calculator. Granted he's got a product to sell, but I heard an interview with the delevoper where he said rowers just don't cut it. IIRC he said the only other thing that really provides the same optimal stimulus is sprinting that he's tested.

There are a lot of other options if one is dead set on avoiding a spendy piece of custom-designed machinery. The calculus on my part is that

-the more efficient the process is, the more likely I am to stick to it.
-the more certain I am that there's evidence behind what I'm doing rather than wondering how much my guesswork is costing me relative to a known solution to a problem, again, the more likely I am to stick with it.
-VO2 max may well be the one capacity that most significantly underpins all of my goals for the out years.

weighed against

-It's spendy
-There might be a certain amount of satisfaction in McGyvering an alternate.

So as I put that together, there's plenty of things to get creative satisfaction from that motivate me more than not spending money, and I have a superabundance of money and a dearth of VO2 max compared to what I'd like. So the option remains an option. I may wind up going back to what I was doing with the rower for next October-May and see where that gets me, I'm confident it will have some efficacy. I've got 4 months to weigh the decision.

I'm pretty sold on REHIIT though. Keeping the stress from cardio-oriented training low is a good thing in itself, and should allow me to keep up a strength regimen that allows me to continue to improve there. What I'm doing with the bands isn't all that different from REHIIT--one set of a given movement to failure, then on to the next movement, also to try to keep the stimulus/stress ratio high.