Plan 65+, a step up.

Developing a plan and strategy for going from middle age to later life.

The weird thing is that despite me being almost old enough for a bus pass and state pension iv’e never quite got the idea of being middle aged and that the trajectory of my health and fitness is all downhill from here. Despite a tendency to be overweight, which is one of my big problems right now, iv’e also had many times when iv’e been functionally fit enough to do quite extreme things – hiking at speed over distance and with load carried over the mountains of the high Sierra mountains of California (Yosemite) comes to mind. My peak fitness in terms of strength, speed and endurance all came quite late in life when I took physical training seriously in my 50’s, I know now that certain functions, like explosive power for instance, would have already been declining but for the rest of it I did quite well.

A lot changed a few years ago when I was basically ‘grinding metal’ with one knee and ended up having a partial knee replacement ; following that it took a long time to regain functional fitness and muscle mass and what I ended up with as a result was severe spasmodic back pain which took a couple of years to resolve. That pretty well destroyed my ability to undertake the kind of hard physical exercise, such as ‘rucking’, that was in a way the peak of my functional fitness.

For the last year at the least iv’e been aware that iv’e packed on the weight and done nothing about it until just recently. What tipped the balance wasn’t the scales but just the sight of myself in a video clip – truly horrible – so I decided to use this pause in the boatbuilding project to take some serious remedial action in the ways that I already know. It also made me realize that none of us get away with anything and that I need a whole new plan and strategy for this stage of my life ; for example that I need to be a lot lighter and fitter for my sail and oar project and for my long term (such as it my be) health.

I don’t expect that what worked in the past would work today ; I know that I can’t, for instance, put aside several days of long travel and gym sessions every week like I did in my 50’s. I don’t even have access to those gyms any more so I need a completely different approach and it might just be comprised of really simple actions – like walking and body weight exercise for instance. If something is lacking in the world of exercise blogs, books and trainers then it’s anything about physical training as an older person ; in that regard i’m lucky in that at least I did the learning under the supervision of a personal trainer and then free weights trainer.

For the first week I took the radical action of mostly-fasting for the whole week, the only solid food I had was the occasional slice of toast. Even medium term, fasting is a useful tool but has some potentially serious drawbacks such as the loss of muscle mass…it’s actually less of a problem with true fasting than with most conventional restrictive ‘diet’s’….which we know now are mostly ineffective. I also kicked off a walking programme again, just easy stuff around the local lanes and trails…..easy except that all of the landscape around here is usefully ‘lumpy’ and even going out of the front door has hills in both directions.

My aim in week 1 was just to achieve some time and distance for 5 out of seven days, I didn’t record either time or distance but I reckon to have done about 9 or 10 hours walking ‘work’ which is a big step up from nothing. Twice I did thru-hikes to the nearest town and that hike has some quite hard hills to deal with because I had to cross the river valley of the Tamar first….and both sides have a steep slog. I was definitely in dietary ketosis all week and I don’t think my body liked me very much…..there again though we’re not exactly on speaking terms at the moment !.

This week, week 2, iv’e gone from longer walks most days to shorter sessions every other day but with sets of body weight exercises when I get in – so far all that has been is sets of 10 press-ups and my best tally so far was 6 sets of 10 today. If I have a target for that then it’s 100 in a day but spread out over the day rather than trying to do intensive sets yet.

Also this week I spent a hot afternoon outside in the sun making myself a step-up/plyometric box out of a sheet of plywood and scrap timber, I want to talk about that a bit in terms of what I have learnt this week from Dr Peter Attia’s work on health, fitness and aging. It’s been a valuable week because iv’e chosen to take this stage of my health and fitness life as seriously as anything I did in the past -like when I was aiming for peak fitness in my 50’s.

It’s a strange time….unlike a lot of my adult life, which feels basically the same in terms of health and fitness this ‘time of life’ or life epoch feels very different because a lot of what I have to do now is to do with prevention. Some of this obvious, to get my body weight down such that i’m much less susceptible to the known problems of obesity and at the same time work on the problem of declining muscle strength and overall balance which also have a huge impact on brain function and ultimately healthy longevity.

Right now I am working on several health related posts in parallel, one upcoming post will be in the form of a long term strategy for what to eat and what not to eat. Obviously i’m working hard on fitness right now and in a couple of months I should see visible progress with both my overall shape and hip/waist ratio and have a better idea of where my priorities lay. Because iv’e watched this video several times and still keep going back to it I thought I should link it here as on the one side we have Peter Attia’s work on longevity and on the other we have behavioral psychologist Dr Jordan Peterson’s thoughts about making effective plans.