Industry Figure Tom Chappell

My favorite of the half-dozen or so books on health, nutrition, and exercise that I’ve read recently is Younger Next Year.

Its chapters mostly alternate between its two authors: on the one hand, Henry Lodge M.D., a board-certified internist, and on on the other, Chris Crowley, one of his star 70-year-old patients. Harry gives you the science; Chris tells you what it’s like on the front lines.

It paints a wonderful, optimistic look at how really well old age can go: Chris is still incredibly active, riding cycling centuries, downhill skiing, and rowing, and doesn’t expect to slow down too much at all for a while, yet.

How does he do it? There are seven guidelines, but the three most important are:

Exercise hard, six days a week.   Stop eating crap.   Connect and commit.

They do a particularly good job in explaining why we have to exercise, which I’ll synopsize here, but will certainly not do justice: because by using a muscle, stressing a bone, flexing a joint, stressing a tendon, you’re talking directly to your body, in the language that it understands, and what you’re saying is, “I’m using these cells; it would be worth your while to repair and improve these systems. Do not erase.”

Otherwise, your body, seeing that you are sitting around, gets the message that “There’s no point in me spending any energy walking around foraging or hunting, and it’s not because I’ve got a lot of food stored up, because as you know, this is Africa, and agriculture and refrigerators haven’t been invented yet, and all the food spoils super-quickly, so any long-term idleness like this is likely from a famine; at any event, as you can see, I’m not using those expensive muscles and other mobility systems; it’d be prudent to go ahead and tear them down for parts to make some cheap storage fat. Make it so.”

And not just one kind of exercise, either: your voluntary muscles come in two flavors: slow-twitch muscle fibers, for endurance, and fast-twitch fibers, for strength. They are physically different; even the nerve cells that control them specialize, connecting exclusively to one type or another. So if you only run, or only lift weights, then you’re missing a significant fraction of your muscle fibers; they’re not getting exercised, and have thereby been given permission to wither.

Strength training in particular is often neglected, leading to decreased strength, balance, and joint health.

As Harry says:

Strength training is critical to the rest of your life, and you can start at any age. Sedentary seventy-year-old men double their leg strength with three months of weight training. Sadly, men do strength training even less than aerobic exercise. Only 10 percent of Americans over sixty-five even claim to be doing any form of regular strength training.

That’s appalling. It should be clear by now that everyone — certainly everyone over fifty — shoul d be doing real strength training two days a week. You can do a quick routine in half an hour, or spend an hour or more if you get into it, but don’t skip it.

Aerobic exercise saves your life; strength training makes it worth living.

The authors are actively hostile to engaging in extreme diets to lose weight. One of the chapters written by Chris is titled, “Don’t You Lose a Goddamn Pound!” On the other hand, as he points out, if you stop eating crap, and maybe eat a little less, and exercise more, then it’s true, you might end up losing 40 pounds, after all.

“The price of fitness is eternal vigilance.”

    

Yes, there’s a version of the book for the ladies; it probably has less swearing, or something. My sister Jan says that she really enjoyed it, and loaned it to a friend who said she also loved it and read it in just a day.