Fitness for 'Anti-Aging'
Takeaway Points:
“Health” is an often overlooked aspect of the health and fitness industry, which tends to prioritize young fit individuals over the actual needs of older individuals training for health.
As we age, the normal process is for aging to undo a lot of our hard earned gains, but we can age gracefully by keeping up the right routine.
It’s not possible to age in reverse.
To optimize for health, you probably need to work out a lot less than you think.
I think that very often, the “health” part of health and fitness is forgotten.
The flashiest and most exciting parts of the fitness industry have always been the young and the jacked - people who are big, lean, and strong, and can show off impressive physiques, cool movements, incredible lifts, and so on. Less commonly, you get “jacked old dude can lift 500lbs” or something along those lines, but you rarely get actual, real, genuine appreciation for health for its own sake.
I’ve written previously about why this is - because the industry’s concept of “health” is a very reductive, not-very-useful mirror of the much larger reality. There is a strong tendency to believe that fitness and health are identical concepts, when the reality is very different - it is extremely possible to exercise to the point that it damages your long term health, or to be extremely healthy but not necessarily the most jacked or strongest person in the room.
Understanding The Normal Progression Of Things
The normal progression is pretty simple - over time as you age, you start to break down. You lose muscle mass and strength, and joint stability decreases. Your bones get less dense. Your lungs and heart have to work harder to get oxygen into your body. You become more susceptible to injury. You struggle to move, as your neural connections between your brain and body begin to degrade and become less sensitive.
Luckily, there’s a simple solution - exercise! You cannot completely reverse this trend by exercising, but by exercising and remaining generally active, you can basically stop the trend entirely for a long time, and significantly slow it after that. Every single one of these symptoms of aging can be offset by a good combination of lifting weights and doing cardio.
The Math of Aging
There is a well known diminishing returns effect with exercise - you get a huge benefit out of a small amount of exercise, and each additional unit of exercise after that gives you strongly diminishing returns. As a result, you can get about 80% of the benefit of exercise with just two 30 minute workouts per week, yet may need to work out for hours upon hours every week just to reach 100% of your athletic potential.
This means that there’s a sort of tradeoff here. The reality is that every person in the world could be better than they currently are. You can always be stronger, bigger, more jacked. But the cost of that additional unit of jacked-ness increases exponentially in terms of time and effort invested.
At high enough levels, there is also a considerable amount of risk. When you’re pushing yourself to your absolute limits, injury becomes more and more likely. Your ultimate limits are also strongly determined by genetic potential, and whether or not you’re willing to take PED’s.
The end result is that everyone has to do a certain calculation for themselves to determine exactly what is and isn’t worth it. Fitness is ultimately a “young person’s game” - you can really push your limits with less risk of injury, and you have all the time in the world to focus on training. After a certain age (and a much higher age than people tend to think - often not until well into your 50’s) - it’s not really possible to do what you could when you were younger, and you need to shift into a new mindset.
When this happens, the focus is no longer on “gains”. The focus is on maintenance - keeping what you have for as long as you can, so that you can age gracefully.
And I tell folks this all the time - you can imagine a hypothetical situation where you work out every single day of your life, you see zero results whatsoever, but you keep the exact same physical ability for the remainder of your life. You would easily be the most jacked 100 year old in the nursery home, and you’d live a long and happy life.
Where you fall on that scale ultimately is up to you - everyone will fall somewhere between “young/athletic goals” and “older/maintenance goals” in their own health and fitness journey. You’re the only one who can decide what’s most important in your own life.
You Can’t Age Backwards
As a small aside, you can’t age backwards. Thus far, we don’t have any real evidence that this is possible. I bring this up only because a certain influencer with a lot of money named Bryan Johnson has been making a big following recently claiming the opposite, and I’ve been reacting to a lot of his content recently.
The reality is that YES you can do things to age gracefully and manage your aging process, but NO you cannot age in reverse. Even if you’re able to get health markers to better than they were when you were younger (or better than an average young person), that doesn’t mean that age has been reversed, and the effort you had to put into improving those health markers is proof that you are no longer as young as you once were, when you could have these high health markers with minimal effort.
No health marker is a perfect proxy for aging, and nothing has been shown to reverse the normal aging process.
What Does A Real Anti-Aging Routine Look Like?
With that in mind, what does a real anti-aging routine look like?
Unfortunately, there’s no magic here. It’s the same as any generic program for maximizing your health, and as discussed above, this means not chasing “100% fitness”, instead optimizing for health by selecting a less intense option that involves considering the risk and time that would be required to be spent in the gym.
With that in mind, here’s what such a strategy would include:
2 lifting workouts per week
1 day of heavy, strength focused exercises for major movement patterns (squat, bench, deadlift, overhead, row).
1 day of moderate intensity, size focused exercises for major movement patterns.
2 higher intensity cardio sessions per week
1 workout of high intensity sprint intervals or similar
1 workout of moderate intensity, longer duration running or similar
General activity
5,000-10,000+ steps per day or equivalent
Stretching, general mobility work, and occasional core work as needed
Diet
Intake of around 0.6-0.8g/lb/day of protein in order to sustain muscle mass
High fiber intake, ideally a fruit or veggie with every meal
Managing overall calorie intake over time to ensure that your bodyweight remains consistent
Social factors
Access to health care & the financial resources necessary to support yourself in older age
Purpose in life, in the form of work/hobbies that sustain you mentally as you age
Supportive family/social support
Stable housing, access to food, political stability, etc.
Mental health support & a mindfulness practice
If you personally wanted and have a bit more time on your hands, you could do a bit more than this - working out a bit more frequently, getting in a few more steps per day, etc. - but this isn’t necessary, and there would of course be diminishing returns.
There’s no magic powders, no secret pills, no revolutionary tech. There’s just the standards that have worked for years and years. This is nothing special, it’s just the right approach that has been tried and tested over time.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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