AGING with STRENGTH

Five simple principles about eating, food and alcohol to maximize your healthspan.

1 | Nutritional accountability. The first principle is sharing your eating and nutrition habits with people whose opinions you value. There’s strength in accountability, and that absolutely applies to what you put into your body.

2 | Eating habits. Are you willing to challenge some of the habits you’ve formed around how you eat and prepare food? If you are, then make a point of acknowledging that changing those habits will be a pain in the ass and will feel awkward. But also understand what is animating you to want to eat healthier foods, or conversely, what is keeping you away from them. I’ll mention some examples of each of those in a minute.

3 | Experimentation. What’s the one food or dish that you know you should add to your eating routine but for whatever reason, you haven’t — maybe because you don’t know how to prepare it; or think it won’t turn out well; or won’t taste that good; or is too trendy? For the hell of it, just once, buy it, make it, eat it. See what happens.

4 | For women over 50: Do you have a nutrition plan that will help manage the effects and impact of perimenopause and menopause? I may be out of my lane on this, but there’s plenty of evidence that food and diet can have a positive role in managing menopausal symptoms.

5 | For men over 50: Do you have nutrition goals — at all? — and are you still eating the same kinds of crap you ate 20, 30 years ago? A slowing metabolism demands eating-habit changes to avoid turning into a pear-shaped geezer who, when he dies, leaves a decade or more on the table. Real men know their way around a kitchen and meal plans. Which I say in semi-jest. But only semi.

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I’m Paul von Zielbauer from AGING with STRENGTH.…with a few brief thoughts on how to make 2025 a great year to build not just physical strength but also enduring mental, emotional, spiritual, nutritional and community strength. I have some ideas, born of my own curiosity and years of trial and error, but feel it’s important to once again point out that I’m not an expert or guru. To the contrary, I’m a reporter and investigator of the experts and the so-called gurus, in service of isolating worthy information to share with you and exposing what is turning out to be a rather large amount of b.s. and unsupported conclusions from not only people who should know better but also the institutions that give them fancy titles and, often, tenure.

In this brief AGING with STRENGTH audiocast, I focus specifically on physical strength and a few key routines and habits that, through the trial and error I mentioned, have been real difference-makers in helping me not only improve athletic and physical performance but also minimize small recurring injuries and pain that is familiar to anyone over, say, 45 who’s still pushing their physical limits.

In subsequent audio notes this month, I’ll give this same treatment to each of the other pillars of aging — mental strength, emotional strength, nutritional strength, spiritual strength and community strength — in a way that is specific, personal and suitably ambitious without being obnoxious.

Because let’s face it: We all want to be strong in the ways that most matter to us, but we’re not really interested in thousand-dollar supplements in a bid to live forever, like tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who’s bringing his “Don’t Die Summit” to Los Angeles later this month. (I wish I were making that up, but I’m not.) And we all hopefully see through the charade by now of pitchmen like Andrew Huberman, Stanford’s in-house “Neuroscientist Gone Wild”, who in between his paid YouTube product promotions now calls aging a disease that can be reversed.

No, we’re just trying to age with strength and resilience — aren’t we? — in each of these vital areas of our lives. And if we can also lower our biological ages by a few years or so, just through a more mindful focus on doing what makes us feel and become stronger, well, that’s even better. Maybe I’d even celebrate that win with some of Bryan Johnson’s $500 THC-infused retinol…guaranteed to make you sleep as soundly as his 18-year-old blood boy.

Improving physical strength in 2025

Jocularity aside, here are some ideas for becoming physically stronger over the next 51 weeks of 2025 — again, not handed down to you by an expert, but offered up by a deeply curious crash-test dummy of sorts who believes in improvement through improvisation, experimentation and a willingness to fail forward, as they say in tech. I hope that some of these ideas will be helpful, either as a regimen to try yourself, or try a variation of, or as a provocation that perhaps gets you to think differently about what’s possible for you to achieve.

If there’s one thing I learned over the years, personally and as a social entrepreneur, it’s that we are each are capable of achieving so much more than we think we can.

So let’s get to aging with more physical strength in 2025.

I’ll start by saying that, to age optimally, regular strength training in some form is simply non-negotiable. Working out, with weights or some kind of resistance, just has so many indisputable benefits that go beyond maintaining and building muscle mass. It improves your mood, lowers stress, boosts confidence, improves brain health, reduces inflammation and risk of injuries and can even mitigate the damage from moderate drinking. But even if none of that is compelling to you, the fact that strength training slows and reverses biological aging should be. Who doesn’t want to look stronger, tighter and younger in jeans and a t-shirt?

At my local Santa Monica YMCA weight room several years ago, there was an older guy who clearly looked, if not ripped, then noticeably fit for his advanced age. Which I assumed from the fluid way he carried himself and worked out was around 72 to 75 — pretty old for a gym rat. One day a high school kid, who obviously had also noticed this man’s physique, asked how old he was. Eighty-eight, he told the kid.

There’s just something about regularly lifting even light weights that keeps the human machine running young, at the cellular level. And there’s plenty of credible science to support that assertion.

In 2025, my goal is to get both stronger and faster, and leaner and more flexible. I’m not looking for bigger muscles but rather to increase neuromuscular efficiency, which develops by training the nervous system to control muscle fibers. Neuromuscular training, which I’ll link to in the transcript, has been shown to improve various aspects of athletic performance, including agility, balance, muscular strength, power and cardiorespiratory endurance, not to mention better joint stability and reduced risk of injuries in athletes. I equate neuromuscular efficiency to what is often called “old man strength” or “old woman strength,” because it’s about increasing physical power through movement, not just mechanical muscle strength.

I don’t know about you, but I sit on my ass, staring at screens, way more than I’d prefer, and I often recall my osteopathic doctor’s admonition, after putting my sacroiliac joint back in proper position, that “bodies are meant to move.”

More than anything, commit in 2025 to being a chronic mover. There’s a smart fitness-related YouTube channel, called Mover’s Odyssey, that I recommend, and in fact one of its more recent videos is on neuromuscular efficiency. The channel explores many unconventional forms of achieving strength through movement, and it’s smartly narrated and quite creatively illustrated — no humans on any of their videos, refreshingly; only visually engaging animated sketches. So, check out Mover’s Odyssey, if you are so moved.

So, my 2025 physical goals are focused on maintaining durable core strength that enables three main athletic or personal pursuits:

* staying quick and aerobically fit on the tennis court

* surfing and being able to paddle for at least an hour in the ocean without losing shoulder strength

* and being able to hold a semi-automatic rifle on target for a good two hours of shooting at my local outdoor range, for which proper technique involves core strength and breath work.

To address all three of these goals, I’ve started jumping rope, for lower-body and ankle strength and the aerobic endurance required for tennis. It’s a complete core workout, especially with a weighted rope that also builds shoulder strength and mobility. And you can carry a rope anywhere.

On the advice of my coach, Tiana Rockwell, I also started combining bar squats, with about 75% of my body weight, with immediate follow-on sets of box jumping. I follow three supersets of that with some relatively easy deadlifts or, alternatively, kettlebell swings. Nothing is worth doing without learning proper technique, obviously. I’m a big fan of using lighter weights at higher reps. That combination keeps my core and lower half strong and balanced, and keeps away the lower back pain that had plagued me for years.

None of this happens, of course, without properly warming up using a foam roller, which I’ll talk about, somewhat rapturously, in a moment. However you decide to regularly put your muscles to work, even with the lightest weights imaginable, the act of developing a routine of core-focused strength training — combined with the incredibly important habit of stretching before bedtime and after waking each morning — is as winning a combination for people over 50 as any I’ve come across.

But even if going to gyms and lifting weights and jumping rope aren’t for you, swimming is a full-body workout, and bodyweight exercises, like squats and lunges, increase physical strength, give you a lasting burn, and allow you to work out at home or in your office, two minutes at a time. More than a few professional hockey players in their mid-30s train only with bodyweight. You don’t need big weights or to be in a ratty gym to grow strong.

One thing I’m trying to incorporate more in my day, as someone who works from home, are micro sets: 10 or 15 reps of whatever exercise I choose, on the way to the kitchen or bathroom. I place dumbells, a jump rope, a weighted ball, in common areas, so that when my Apple Watch tells me it’s time to stand up, doing a 30-second micro set becomes too easy to avoid, and they act like compound interest in building physical strength.

Gaining strength is only half the equation. It’s nice to have big muscles, but if you can’t touch your toes or stand on one foot for 30 seconds, are you in balance?

Flexibility, stretching and foam rolling

Strength without flexibility is not a winning strategy, especially after 50. My relentless focus on being maximally flexible is born of great personal pain — mainly through the hell of debilitating lower back spasms and overtaxed quadratus lumborum. So I’ve learned to make a routine out of daily stretching and fascia manipulation, in the form of…foam rolling!

If you haven’t discovered the miracle work that a $24 foam roller provides, pause this audiocast and buy one online immediately. A foam roller is the closest thing to an in-house chiropractor you can buy, and if used regularly, it will change your life for the better. The fascial system is a continuous, three-dimensional network of primarily collagen that permeates the entire body and accounts for about 20% of your bodyweight. Keeping it agile and well oiled is another non-negotiable facet of aging with physical strength, in my book.

I know there are people out there who don’t have athletically or age-induced back problems, or tendinitis or bursitis; people whose hips or shoulders don’t ever crackle or pop, who don’t wake up stiff; who can’t understand why early-onset arthritis, nerve damage, floating scar tissue and detailed discussions of NSAIDs have become constant fodder for their friends’ happy-hour bitchfests.

But I also know there are a lot of people like me, and you. And for us and those like us, a foam roller is worth its weight in pharmaceutical-grade naproxen sodium. Using it in combination with regular, morning and night stretching routines keeps hamstrings loose and my lower back and QL quiet, which means a lot.

So that’s my 2025 physical strength regimen, as succinct as I could make it. I also recommend checking out Gwendolyn Bounds’ substack, called Not Too Late, which has a series of smart posts on making and sticking to exercise routines that work for you.

Next time, I’ll get into the effect that alcohol and drinking has on aging with strength, in pretty much every sense of the word. Until then, let’s make 2025 as sane as possible under the circumstances, and by all means, let’s keep moving forward.

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I talk with history-making polar explorer and mountaineer Alison Levine, who's such a badass they named a beer after her. Alison was team captain of the first American Women’s Everest Expedition and is one of about only 20 people to achieve “the Adventure Grand Slam.” But almost equally dramatic is her lifelong journey being the "parent" of her father, a bi-polar FBI agent who got on the wrong side of J. Edgar Hoover.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.agingwithstrength.com/subscribe

Transcript:

This is Paul von Zielbauer from Aging with Strength with a quick audio addendum, on this Thanksgiving eve, to my post yesterday on intermittent fasting, which I have found, through personal experience and by talking with many people who practice it in midlife and beyond, to have myriad benefits to daily well being. But not everyone thinks so, and some experts are on record saying intermittent fasting, or I.F. for short, works for losing some flab weight but not much else. One of my readers pointed out a recent WSJ article with almost that exact headline.

So, where do I, a journalist who’s not a nutritionist, not a doctor, not a clinician of any kind, get off cautiously recommending I.F. to people in their 50s and up? And also, how the hell does anyone, including yours truly, really know if I.F., as some research that I linked to in my article yesterday indicates, helps slow the pace of biological aging, or reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s, or makes muscle tissue stronger even if it reduces its mass in the process? (These are all findings indicated in research I linked to in the post yesterday, among others.)

Well, the answer is that I don’t really know — and neither do any of the “health and wellness” YouTube carnival barkers on the scale of Andrew Huberman and charlatans like him who profess categorical certainty about the efficacy of fasting and other experiments with nutrition, strength, eating and food. But I’ve talked to enough thoughtful people who practice I.F., about what they believe it does for them, and I’ve read the abstracts of enough credible research that isn’t bogged down by obvious conflicts of interest among the researchers, to believe that intermittent fasting done right can help wean us off the industrialized, ultra-processed food conveyor belt that so many Americans are on, or are susceptible to being on, because with every other daily stressor, it’s easier to just keep eating habitually, which for many of us includes snacking after dinner.

Of course, I realize the irony of saying this the day before we stuff our pie holes with way too much food for Thanksgiving. Good luck with that, by the way.

But if there’s one single thing that I.F. has given me, in my own experience fasting from 7pm to 10am almost every day, it’s the ability to not eat after dinner. And that alone creates knock-on benefits — for better sleep, better digestion, a less maniacal need for caffeine, a more durable daytime energy and ability to focus and the ability to simply remain food disciplined — that are lot harder to achieve, in my opinion, without intermittent fasting.

Are there longitudinal studies proving I.F. helps slow your rate of biological aging? No. Is there research on more than a couple thousand people from diverse ethnic, gender and socio-economic backgrounds that are dispositive about I.F. lowering your chances of getting cancer or dementia or Type 2 diabetes? No.

But when it comes to intermittent fasting, I’m encouraged by how it more closely resembles how humans evolved to nourish themselves and endure periods of involuntary fast. Physiologically, it feels natural to stop eating after dinner (once you get used to not eating after dinner, which takes some discipline.) At a genetic level amost, it just feels right to not wake up and immediately eat, then sit for three hours at a desk and then eat again, and continue the pattern of eating and “sedentarianism.”

I’ll continue investigating the research on I.F., and if you have thoughts or questions, please put them into a comment on the Aging with Strength substack. Until then, Happy Thanksgiving and thanks for listening.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.agingwithstrength.com/subscribe