How to Live Forever (or at least stay healthy for a really long time)

You are going to die.

For most of us, physical development through life looks something like this:

That’s a call to action, the most important one you’ll get.

At some point, most of us notice we’re not spring chickens anymore. We get a bit less worried about looking jacked and a bit more interested in feeling good and making the most of the decades we have left. Accepting that you won’t live forever takes a while.

And once you accept it, you start wanting to do something about it.

Short of magic elixirs and divine intervention, there are realistic, common-sense things you can do now to protect your body from common injuries and build or keep the strength and mobility you’ll need to stay active into your later years.

Applying Longevity Research to Your “Fitness” Routine

Imagine your future self traveled back in time to give you some advice. Besides a few hot stock tips, what would you want to hear?

We’re not here to help with your estate plan or decide who gets your Pokemon collection (though that’s not a bad idea). We’re here to remind you of something you already know: your physical capability decides a lot about how long you’ll be around, and even more about how much you get to enjoy that time.

Scientists and doctors also want to live long, healthy lives, so there’s a lot of research on this.

This article covers the most useful and best-supported findings, and our recommendations for applying them so you stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible.

More importantly, we’ll point you at specific actions and habits you can build into your regular routine. Knowing isn’t the same as doing, and long-term health isn’t something you can put off for later.

You’ll be dead later, so now is the time to invest in your future quality of life.

Let’s start with the obvious.

Exercising and Eating Well are Non-Negotiable

Every doctor on the planet will recommend “plenty of vigorous exercise” and “nutritious food.”

That’s based on a vast pool of data over many generations, but it’s pretty vague.

Rule #1: Do Your Cardio!

Yes, “cardio sucks” and “running is dumb.” So is dying younger than you need to.

Being a responsible adult means doing some things because you need to, even when you don’t want to. It shouldn’t be so terrible you hate every second, but it doesn’t have to be fun, either.

Luckily, for the majority of health benefits, you don’t have to do very much at all.

Some fitnessers sneer at government and health-organization guidelines for not OPTIMIZING YOUR FULL POTENTIAL, but those guidelines are based on decades of objective mortality and morbidity data.

📑 Guidelines
📑 Retrospective Study
📑 Longitudinal Study

Higher baseline CRF is associated with lower HF mortality risk in men, regardless of the number of HF risk factors present. Men should be counseled on physical activity with the goal of achieving at least a moderate level of CRF, thereby presumably decreasing their risk of HF mortality.

• 150 minutes a week of moderate aerobic exercise, or 75 minutes of vigorous, produces large reductions in disease risk and gains in longevity.
• “Vigorous” is what most people reading this already consider exercise.
• “Moderate” is a brisk walk.

That puts you ahead of most adults with 20 minutes of aerobic activity a day. You don’t need a special routine, and it doesn’t have to be the same thing every day (though it can be, if you don’t mind).

The data is clear. Don’t miss out on this simple way to improve your health by making it more complicated than it needs to be.

Our advice: get out and do something you won’t mind doing for 20 to 30 minutes at moderate exertion a few times a week.

👉 How to make walking an enjoyable habit
🎙️ Getting your cardio efficiently

You’re busy. Everybody is. This is important, so keep it simple and get it done.

Rule #2: Food is important, and you should eat some.

Which brings us to diet and nutrition.

It’s incredibly important. It’s also ridiculous to think we have any chance of changing your mind about the foods you must eat and must never eat, the percentages of carbohydrate and protein, or when you should eat them.

There are dozens of ways to put food in your mouth that are all fine and healthy, and we don’t want to argue about it.

👉 Basic nutrition guidelines

Developing Your Physical Attributes for Longevity and Quality of Life

With the obvious stuff out of the way, we can look at more specific factors: attributes you can train to prepare your body for active aging.

As usual, we look at these through the lens of strength, mobility, and motor control:

• Strength: hips, grip and hands, lower limbs, core, power and speed
• Flexibility and Mobility: total-body range for getting into and out of positions, plus joint-specific range for ease of activity and movement options
• Motor Control: balance, coordination, fall prevention, cognitive benefits

We’ll get deeper into each one below.

Getting Strong and Staying Strong

Being strong makes a lot of things easier. It’s nice to know you’re less likely to hurt yourself the next time you have to move furniture, or do any of the other unending chores. And as we’ve said before, strength is about more than lifting the most weight. That’s especially true when it comes to aging well.

It’s hard to argue against being strong EVERYWHERE, but if you want the most benefit for your time, it helps to have some focus.

What should you be working on?

Lower-Body Strength

Strong hips and legs help you move yourself around. That’s obvious, but once you drop below a certain threshold of lower-body strength, very basic activities become much harder.

The question isn’t whether you can squat 300 pounds. Can you get up off a low couch? Do you need the handrail to climb a few flights of stairs?

Easy enough right now for most of us. How easy will it be in 40 years?

📑 Sit to Rise Test

It turns out the ability to sit down and stand up without your hands correlates with a long, active life.

That doesn’t mean sitting and standing will prevent death. It does suggest that keeping the leg strength to lift yourself off the floor makes it less likely you’ll end up confined to a bed or unable to care for yourself.

👉 What the sit-to-rise test tells you and how to improve your result

Sitting and standing is also an interesting movement challenge in its own right. How many different ways can you find?

Power and Grip Strength

Power (the ability to produce force quickly) is also important to maintain as we age. Without training, it starts dropping off right before middle age, with wide-ranging effects.

In the lower body, less power means slower reactions when you trip. In the upper body, it means less chance of bracing before your face hits the ground. Not fun to think about, but it’s common.

You’ve probably also heard that grip strength correlates with longevity.

📑 Handgrip strength is inversely associated with fatal cardiovascular and all-cause mortality events

This doesn’t mean hand grippers will get you to 120. Grip is more likely a proxy for overall upper-body strength and power. And a stronger grip throughout life makes things easier to do, which is the primary theme here.

👉 How to build a capable, resilient grip

What can we do now, and keep doing, that will make our lives easier as we age?

That’s the million-dollar question.

Luckily, we don’t need to become professional fitnessers to get significant benefits from a little focused, consistent work.

📑 Both low-volume, high-load AND low-load, high-frequency training improve strength and ability

Accumulating evidence suggests that minimal doses of RT, characterised by lower session volumes than in traditional RT guidelines, together with either (1) higher training intensities/loads performed at lower frequencies (i.e. low-volume, high-load RT) or (2) lower training intensities/loads performed at higher frequencies and with minimal-to-no equipment (i.e. resistance ‘exercise snacking’), can improve strength and functional ability in younger and older adults.

Keeping the Goal the Goal

It’s easy to read that strength correlates with a long life and leap to assuming you need to get as strong as humanly possible. If strong is good, more strong has to be better, right?

It doesn’t work that way, and that’s good news.

Remember what your goals are here. Most of us aren’t looking to be champion weightlifters, and there is absolutely a “strong enough.”

Ask yourself:

• What does “strong enough” look like for you?
• How are you feeling through your day?
• Do you feel limited by your strength?
• Do you feel good about what you’re able to do, and how you handle the occasional harder effort as well as normal tasks?

Your answers will tell you if you’re on the right track.

Nothing wrong with wanting to be stronger, but “more” is not a goal. Spend a bit of time figuring out what you need and it’ll save you a lot of trouble.

Maintaining Mobility for Function and Health

Another no-brainer: life’s better when you can handle normal physical tasks easily.

• Maneuver yourself under the sink to fix that loose fitting.
• Reach the top shelf in the cabinet.
• Reach into the back seat of your car without your shoulders cramping.

Getting up off the floor, in and out of bed, the couch, the car. These are basic things, and they’re what we need to do every day.

You don’t miss them until they’re gone.

As with strength, it helps to have some focus about which areas need a good enough level of mobility.

What’s good enough, and where should you focus?

Hips, Shoulders, and Spine

We covered the leg and hip strength to get up and down. That ties directly to mobility: hip and leg flexibility correlates with how easily you get up off the ground.

Makes sense once you think about it.

📑 Getting up off the floor, flexibility matters

Although seemingly simple tasks, the actions of sitting and rising from the floor are also partially dependent on flexibility in male and female subjects of a wide age range. Future studies should explore the potential benefit of regular flexibility exercises for these actions.

In the upper body, shoulder mobility and the spinal motions of twisting, bending forward, and bending back are fundamental movements you do all day without thinking about them.

Once again, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

📑 Flexibility loss over time is joint specific

Starting at 30 and 40 years, respectively, for male and female participants, the relative contribution of each composite joint score to FLX dramatically changed. Shoulder contribution to FLX male’s score went from 13.9% at 28 years of age to only 5.2% at 85 years of age. In general, proportionally, shoulder and trunk became less flexible, while elbow and knee mobility was preserved to a greater extent. Our findings indicated that age-related loss of mobility is rather joint-specific, which could be related to distinct routine usage patterns of the major body joints along life.

The ranges you don’t train are the ones most likely to cause problems later.

Obvious, but it’s hard to see what isn’t there.

The best way to avoid blind spots in your physical capability is to cover a broad spectrum of movement patterns and ranges of motion in your regular routine from the start.

Motor Control, Safety, and Cognition

Motor control and skill acquisition are complicated topics. For healthy longevity, the major benefits come down to falls and cognition.

Learning to Fall Safely

As capable adults, we don’t think about falling until it’s too late. Falls are a major issue as we age because our bodies are more fragile and we recover more slowly, and every day in bed is a day we aren’t moving.

Most martial arts teach falling techniques to new students so they can practice safely. Here are the basics:

Reasons to take falls seriously:

• Falls account for over 8 million hospital emergency room visits, the leading cause of visits (21.3%).
• Slips and falls account for over 1 million visits, or 12% of total falls.
• Fractures are the most serious consequence of falls and occur in 5% of all people who fall.
• Half of all accidental deaths in the home are caused by a fall.
• Most fall injuries in the home happen at ground level, not from a height.
• Each year in the United States, one in three people over 65 will fall. Half of them are repeat fallers.

📑 Source

Two more:

📑 Safe landing strategies during a fall

Squatting was an efficient strategy to reduce impact in backward falling (g=1.77), while elbow flexion with outstretched arms was effective in forward falling (g=.82). Also, in sideways falling strategies, martial arts rolling (g=2.70) and forward rotation (g=.82) were the most efficient strategies to reduce impact load.

📑 Balance is task specific and training should include a variety of types

Our systematic review and meta-analysis showed exclusively small-sized correlations between types of balance performance across the lifespan. This indicates that balance performance seems to be task-specific rather than a “general ability.” Further, our results suggest that for assessment/training purposes a test battery/multiple exercises should be used that include static/dynamic steady-state, proactive, and reactive types of balance.

Cognitive Benefits of Exercise

When we polled our clients about their concerns around aging, the biggest fear was cognitive decline: losing mental ability and becoming a burden on their families.

There are a lot of strategies people try to keep their minds sharp.

“Brain games” have been in the news for years, spawning apps and activities that promise to stave off dementia. Physical activity, particularly balance, coordination, and skill training, is at least as good, if not better, than playing Wordle.

The present theoretical perspective paper aims to convey several key messages: (1) brain development is critically affected by lifestyle; (2) physical training allows one to develop and maintain brain structures during ageing, and may be one of the keys for good quality of life as an older person; (3) diverse stimuli are a key factor in maintaining brain structures; (4) motion, relation, and passion are key elements for contrasting the loss of the grey and white matter of the brain.

📑 Source

📑 Balance training improves memory and spatial cognition in healthy adults

These results suggest that balance training is capable of improving particularly memory and spatial cognition.

📑 Differential cognitive effects of cycling versus stretching/coordination training in middle-aged adults

Significant improvements in memory were observed in both the cycling and the stretching/coordination group as compared with the sedentary control group. The improvement in episodic memory correlated positively with the increase in cardiovascular fitness. The stretching/coordination training particularly improved selective attention as compared with the cycling training.

This is one of many reasons we emphasize locomotor movement in most of our programs. It’s part of cognitive development in infants, and it helps retain cognitive ability in adults.

There’s no good reason not to make it a staple of your training.

Knowing that falls and mental decline are the major concerns for healthy aging, any longevity-focused training should prioritize exercises that protect your ability to deal with falls and that stimulate your brain.

Longevity-Focused Workout Example

That’s a lot of information, especially if you read the citations.

Part of the challenge of acting on this stuff, even the obvious parts, is that there’s so much to fit in. Too many disconnected pieces to make a cohesive routine. So you have to prioritize and choose carefully.

This routine is a solid example of how you can cover a lot of ground with a few well-chosen movements:

It only takes a few minutes. Work it into your regular training two or three times a week as extra insurance against pain and physical decline.

Remember: you don’t have to do everything. Pick the things you can, and do those consistently.

Proactive Training for Longevity

I’ve had a half-joke for a few years that I don’t need to live forever. I just need to make it to The Singularity.

At a practical level, this is the concept Ryan, Andy, and I all follow in our own training: stay healthy enough to keep doing the things we enjoy for as long as we can.

We’ve built it into our programs, and you should build it into your life.

Basic recommendations for longevity:

1. Take regular walks and eat good food
2. Develop your leg strength and mobility, and check it with the sit-to-rise test
3. Strengthen your connective tissues and bones
4. Build your grip strength and shoulder mobility
5. Practice balance, agility, and falling safely

Hit each of those a little bit each week and you’re stacking the deck in favor of a long, active life.

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