Great post, but live to be 110? Um…where did you get that one?
[quote]ZEB wrote:
Great post, but live to be 110? Um…where did you get that one?[/quote]
Some googling on life extention, and telomerase repair will give you a lot of info.
Here’s a good article:
http://www.sciencewatch.com/
may-june2000/sw_may-june2000_page8.htm
Also, the book cited by danweltmann earlier in this thread is a good reference, although a bit speculative.
Basically, you can beat the current male life expectancy by a good thirty years, if you are currently 50, and watch yourself.
I think the current in the US is abvout 74 for males. factor in that this is an average which includes all the drunks and fat fucks, and you should be able to beat that easily. Further, most causes of death are lifestyle related. If your life is healthy, you should make it to 80 just by not being a dumfuck.
Once there, you can take advantage of this: The rate of technological advancement is accelerating. In other words, Moore’s law applies not just to the change, but ot the rate of change.
Want evidence of this?
Think for a moment of life in the US as 25 year jumps. How different was 1950 from 1925? Now compare 1975 to 1950. Finally, 2000 against 1975? Holy shit!
Want to take a wild guess at 2025?
Add to the general rate of progress that fact that there are enormous financial incentives for those that can provide medical, biochemical and genetic products and therapies for my generation, and that nano-tech is finally coming into its own, and I think the chances that I will live to 110 are very good indeed.
Unless I kill myself in an accident or something, I should be fine.
[quote]hankr wrote:
Once there, you can take advantage of this: The rate of technological advancement is accelerating. In other words, Moore’s law applies not just to the change, but ot the rate of change.
Want evidence of this?
Think for a moment of life in the US as 25 year jumps. How different was 1950 from 1925? Now compare 1975 to 1950. Finally, 2000 against 1975? Holy shit!
Want to take a wild guess at 2025? [/quote]
To tell you the truth I’m not all that confident in science being able to extend lifespan into the 100’s.
I know they love to talk big about all of the advances that we’re “going to have” to extend life.
But…
they can’t even regrow hair yet for heaven sakes.
I advise everyone to eat natural, keep training and lower your stress level. You probably will not make 100 but there is a good chance you’ll hit 90…if you really want to.
[quote]ZEB wrote:
hankr wrote:
Once there, you can take advantage of this: The rate of technological advancement is accelerating. In other words, Moore’s law applies not just to the change, but ot the rate of change.
Want evidence of this?
Think for a moment of life in the US as 25 year jumps. How different was 1950 from 1925? Now compare 1975 to 1950. Finally, 2000 against 1975? Holy shit!
Want to take a wild guess at 2025?
To tell you the truth I’m not all that confident in science being able to extend lifespan into the 100’s.
I know they love to talk big about all of the advances that we’re “going to have” to extend life.
But…
they can’t even regrow hair yet for heaven sakes.
I advise everyone to eat natural, keep training and lower your stress level. You probably will not make 100 but there is a good chance you’ll hit 90…if you really want to.[/quote]
My great-grandmother lived well into her hundred and fifth year. Her daughter (my grandmother) made it past her ninety-sixth birthday. My grandmother’s son (my father) died a month shy of his eighty-ninth birthday.
Do I see a trend here despite medical and technological advances? I believe I do.
Oley
I just turned 55 and I am getting a lot of good info here.
Maybe a new forum could be created specifically for us babyboomers who are over 55.
I am lifting 3 days per week with biking and cardio in between.
My summer workout has included a lot of outdoor biking(with running 100s on soccer fields)during cooler part of day. Here in the south the temperatures have been over 90 for days and days with high humidity.
In the summer I just like to get away from the crowded conditions in the weight room at our YMCA. Getting away from crowds of people in the weight room once and a while is refreshing. The sunshine and fresh air(I wonder about that in a crowed room full of sweating people) make me feel better.
Gardening and lawn work have helped me get used to the heat also. After a workout I get out and move around in the yard watering my tomatoes, flowers, grass etc while I cool down and stretch. I will get stiff and feel bad if I workout and then plop down under the AC watching TV.
I am enjoying getting started in more serious lifting.
Thanks for the stories and discussion for us older athletes.
Mannyboy
[quote]ZEB wrote:
To tell you the truth I’m not all that confident in science being able to extend lifespan into the 100’s.
I know they love to talk big about all of the advances that we’re “going to have” to extend life.
But…
they can’t even regrow hair yet for heaven sakes.
I advise everyone to eat natural, keep training and lower your stress level. You probably will not make 100 but there is a good chance you’ll hit 90…if you really want to.[/quote]
Good advice. Science is not as advanced as you think. It still takes about 10 to 12 years for a new drug to get from the discovery phase to market, and most research funding is still distributed to “cure” not “prevention”.
As for myself, as long as I can still lift and play my guitar (not at the same time, of course), I can be a happy old lady. If not, that will be the day that I die.
Just a note to those that don’t buy into living to 110. There doesn’t seem to be any resistance to the idea of living to 90 or so just by eating right and staying in shape. (See the last few posts) Why does an extra 20 years seem so out of reach?
In 1900 the US average life expectancy was 49. In 2000 it was 77. That’s almost a 60% increase in one century.
I really do believe that we are on the threshhold of an explosion in knowledge vis a vis health maintenance and life extention. There will be a further convergence of 3 fields that are already related:
nanotechnology
genetics
gerontology
What if I am wrong? Well, at 50, my best course of action is to maintain my body in the best shape possible for a long as possible, in order to take advantage of as many advances as possible. Even if I am wrong, certainly I will see SOME significant advances in my lifetime. And if I am right - I may only be halfway done.
thanks for the post.
I certainly do not expect nor do I want to live a long life if I am feeble in body or mind or both. I am 52 and am happy to have come this far considering my past of living hard and fast. I am a person of extremes, and must actively force myself to practice moderation in all I do, because I would like to be around for my future (hopefully!) grandchildren. I guess Type A personalities were never meant to live long. Accidents and injuries or overdose or some other consequence of risky behaviour will claim us before old age will.
[quote]Avoids Roids wrote:
61 here and 49 years lifting. Good and relevant post mate. However, don’t let your adversity to machines be influenced by your ego or what some other guy says. Machines are inherently safer, though not necessarily better. Safety should always be the number one priority, especially as we age and our connective tissues tend to harden and sometimes do unexplainable things. You don’t want that to happen during an overhead movement, even with a mere 15 rep ‘sissy’ weight up over your noggin.[/quote]
Why are you doing 15 reps??, I as well am 53 in 12 days been lifting for 39 years. Rotate between 3/4 reps and 8/10. and no machines please 
I do a week cycle of 15’s to help maintain the health of my joints and connective tissues. In 49 years of lifting I have never had a lifting related injury and some of that I attribute to taking care of my joints. I then do 2 weeks of 10 reps and then 3 to 4 weeks of 5 reps followed by a week off. Sometimes I will also do a week of 5 rep negatives using my 2 rep max.
As for machines, I use them as a safety device. How can I work out if I get injured? I work out at home now and don’t have a training partner but like to go heavy. It is better for me to compromise my results a little bit because of ROM restrictions then get injured and not be able to train. The argument that machines are more dangerous than free weights is only valid if someone is using 100% proper form and staying far away from failure. Even squats can be performed on a smith machine with safety IF you know how to properly use the equipment. If you don’t, then I agree that free weight box squats with at least one spotter, for example, would be a safer alternative.
Besides, at a mere 53 you are just a youngster and are still immortal! Keep lifting.
Excellent post.
Couldn’t agree more with listening to your body.
The years have taught me - when something hurts - stop immediately! The injury can worsen over days sometimes and stopping quickly to recover instead of pushing on pays big dividends on a regular basis.
Living hard has damaged me enough & pain is a regular companion, I don’t welcome more.
I wanted to say thanks. I’m 20, and I still really appreciated this article. Great stuff. It’s easy to let things slide at my age sometimes, whether it’s diet or something like not drinking enough water, but it really does pay off to keep on top of it.
Great original post, i’m 45 and agree with you 100%, my training partner is 27 and he just keeps going, injured or not, i try to tell him, but to no avail. when i’m hurting or fatigued i don’t train and he looks at me like i’m weird, i just say I’ve been training almost as long as you’ve been alive, so i do know!!
Well all I can say is…I agree completely. I have the photos here to prove that being over 50 can still make the 20 somethings jealous. I have to take it easy, but can still outlift most of the kids at the gym.
Charlie
I am currently 38, for a couple more weeks, and plan on living a long time. Most people here are either interested in moving large amounts of weight, or having large amounts of muscle. While both are nice goals, mine are to slow the aging process as much as possible.
A somewhat known twin study showed that aging is ~78% (if my memory serves me right,) environmental. In other words how we age is mostly determined by how we live.
Michael Roizen M.D. has written some interesting books about this subject, although he has been seduced by that harlot SOY.
Calorie restriction (undernutrition without malnutrition,) has been studied very extensively, and it is shown that animals can extend their lives equivalent to the amount of reduction in calories. 10% below normal means a 10% longer life. This works up to ~ 30 - 40%. I doubt this lifestyle choice would appeal to most T-Men.
Resveratrol has been shown to have similar effects, at least in yeast, and some other lower forms of life, so I am stoked that Biotest came out with a pharmaceutical grade resveratrol supplement. Beyond that, short term calorie restriction has been researched, so I would believe following a plan similar to what Berardi proposed in a recent article makes a lot of sense.
I believe I have enough information to extend my life to at least 120 years, and I do believe over the next 81 years that science will make some advances, so I have no doubt it would be much longer.
Telemore research is interesting because telemores are your bodies time bomb. Every division of a cell causes a telemore at the end of DNA strands to be lost, and when the last one is lost, the cell quits dividing, and actually starts pumping toxins into the body. Fetuses have an enzyme that rebuilds the telemore so that they can keep dividing until the baby is born without artificially aging the child.
You also do not lose telemores when you are healing, and cancer will not lose telemores either, giving it the ability to grow out of control.
The last I knew, the enzyme was found not to cause cancer in adult cells. (In vitro.)
Now longevity does not mean living longer in a nursing home, but living longer outside the nursing home, and looking, and feeling younger while doing it.
I think it is important to remember that there are two different goals here:
-
Life extention, by which I mean simply increasing the span between your birth and death, regardless of what kind of life it is, and
-
Compression of morbidity, which is having all of the stuff we associate with aging and old age occur as late as possible in life.
Life extention alone is accomplished every day in ways that you and I would not like to see applied to us. Any of us who have relatives in nursing homes have seen many poor individuals lying motionless and unaware, all of their daily living functions taken care of by some nurse. For me at least, life extention without morbidity compression is not only not a goal, but something to be avoided.
Morbidity compression makes much more sense, regardless of the length of your life. We try to push all of the unfortunate aspects of aging out as close to death as possible. Fortunately, a lot of what we associate with aging in the US is simply the result of bad life choices. If you lay around on your fat ass for the first 60 years of your life, it stands to reason that the last 10-20 years are not going to be pleasant.
I won’t go into the all too familiar list of diseases caused by poor diet and exercise habits here, but instead will give you an example from my own experience.
Just yesterday I was in a grocery store, and saw an older woman struggling to move the basket of a “seated shopping device” into position. I helped her with it, and she went on her way. She was grossly overweight, and clearly could not have negotiated the store on foot.
She looked about 60. 60!!!
In 5 years or so, her poor relatives or some nurse will be rolling her fat ass to one side so they can clean the shit out her crack. Truly a horrible way to spend your last years - maybe your last two decades. And all self inflicted. This idiot will be a great example of life extention - if she is “lucky” - without modbidity compression.
There is no excuse for this. With proper training programs and diet, there is no reason that the vast majority of us cannot be hale and hearty, hitting the gym well into our 80’s and beyond. I am striving for an active and productive life right up to the point where something huge finally breaks and I drop.
In addition to the medical issues there are also other benefits for both men and women. With the majority of people treating their bodies like garbage disposals, those of us who don’t stand out in comparison.
The point - Aging to some extent is a choice. You choose your appearance. You choose your overall level of health.
Life extention and mobidity compression are two sides of the same coin.
By striving for these two goals in concert, we can all have not just longer lives, but longer lives worth living.
[quote]ZEB wrote:
To tell you the truth I’m not all that confident in science being able to extend lifespan into the 100’s.
[/quote]
Both sides of my family died well into their 90s. My paternal grandma died at 103 and my maternal grandma at 101. Both their parents lived to almost 100 (98 and 96, I believe) and that’s generally the way the family history goes.
Not counting a bit of lead poisoning (war and pissed off wives in the old country.) All the old people in my family were hard workers and quite physically active almost all the way to the end of their lives.
Bah, just becomes a liability in bar fights anyway seeing as one of the (dis)advantages of getting old is that you no longer care what other people think and you start telling them that.
[quote]
You probably will not make 100 but there is a good chance you’ll hit 90…if you really want to.[/quote]
I’m looking forward to slowing down at 90 and putting up my feet once in a while.
BTW, I come from a hard-working farming background. My parents were the first to ever break away from the farm and intended their kids to never have to do back-breaking labor. I can see where the lack of physical labor is shortening their lifespans and I don’t see either of them making it to 90. It’s astounding how lack of activity will override good genetics in short order.
For me the physical changes have not been as big as my mental changes. In my twenties exercise was always a rush to get somewhere. Results were the big thing. I still like results, but I don’t worry about it too much. I know that if I work hard and do the right thing then good things will happen.
I cringe at the younger people here who are looking for magic diets to transform themselves overnight and I wonder where they are going to be twenty years from now.
Anybody who is over fifty and has been working out for twenty or thirty years is from a rare breed. If you did any exercise at all before 1970 you were considered to be really odd. So congratulations to all the old farts still working out:) You were ahead of your time!
Results and thoughts
I have some time to kill before the gym this AM, and I was going over my logs. I actually have been doing the stuff I posted on this thread, with some modifications, and I am very pleased with the results.
Part of the reason for the original post was that I had just gotten back to training seriously after a very long layoff where I really let myself get tragically out of shape. The post was a way of reminding myself of why I had to do this, as well as focusing my thoughts on how I would. About 2 weeks into my “comeback” I put it up for comment.
Here’s an update - there have been some changes, mostly positive:
“Weights:
My workouts take longer for a given number of sets. I need a more extensive warmup than I used to. In my 30s I could just walk into the gym and grab a bar. That is out of the question now, both due to old injuries, and to the fact that I seem a little stiffer upon rising (I work out first thing in the AM).”
No longer true. I do either a brief yoga routine, or some stuff from the UB warm-up DVD and grab the bar. I am no longer stiff at all in the AM.
“I also take longer rests between sets when I am lifting heavy. I am in the gym longer.”
No longer true. W/outs are 45 min lifting, 20 min on Stairmaster right after. Rest periods are never longer than 60s, even when I am doing 5x5. Sometimes I skip them between sets of a superset.
“Cardio:
Aside from my warmups before lifting, I think the best time to do it is in the evening, after dinner.”
Once I started on the Stairmaster (the real one, not the pedal type crap) I never looked back. Cardio is right after the weights.
“Drugs / Alcohol:
Please. You’re 50. Don’t be a dumb fuck.”
This is kind of funny. I now smoke a little weed to help me sleep on bad nights, and once in a while for fun. I guess this makes me a dumb fuck.
“Diet:
Carbohydrates:
I am definitely more sensitive to carb intake than I was in my 30s.”
Still true. I can swing my weight drastically with a couple of pasta dinners and a dessert.
“Protein:
I shoot for at least 1 gm per lb / bw. I make extensive use of shakes to make sure I get enough.”
Couldn’t do it without the shakes. Still don’t always get it in.
“Total calorie intake:
10 kcal / lb BW seems to maintain my weight, unless I am doing a lot of energy work.”
I no longer count calories. It is at the point where I can just track protein and carbs loosely throughout the day in my head.
Results:
I am with in striking distance of my goal: 6 pack @ 190lbs. Although it looks like bw will have to be closer to 180.
I am 5’11" with a fairly wide hip girdle. Think Clint Eastwood for body type. Even fat I looked solid, and carry fat all over the body.
All measurements taken with a Myotape in the Am. Muscles are cold, but flexed.
In each case, the first figure is 14 july 06, and the second is this AM:
Weight: 236 / 197.5
Chest: 46 / 42.5
Waist 46 1/8 / 38 1/2
L quad 27 / 24
R quad 27 / 24
L calf 17 /16
R calf 17 1/2 / 16 1/2
L bicep 15 1/2 / 15 1/2
R bicep 15 3/4 / 15 1/4
Neck 16 1/2 / 16
Thoughts:
What a drastic swing in appearance. I literally look like a different person.
The huge swing in waist size was not a surprise. The chest was. I guess this shows how delusional we can be. I was proud of my “Big Chest”, which was actually man boobs lol. Oh well.
Gratified that as the fat came off of my arms, I was able to keep the size up.
The waist measurement is a little misleading. I have a fair amount of fat on my lower back still, and take the measurement at the navel. It doesn’t look nearly as bad as the number indicates. My top abs can just be seen if I flex them, and am in the right light, and delusional I’m wearing 34 waist jeans now.
The future:
On to the 6 pack. Fat loss has really slowed down in recent weeks, so I will make the following changes:
Drop almost all carbs except Surge pre/post w/out and fresh veggies.
Add in some low intensity cardio in the PM. This will be easy as I have a Lifecycle at home.
If 2 weeks of this doesn’t spur further fat loss, I will have to start counting calories again - but I think it will work fine.
Just a quick note on some other changes. I use androgel, and last time I had my T levels checked I was at 892 total. I really believe that as my fat levels have dropped, my T has risen. I am getting levels checked again this month, and will not be surprised if I am over 1000. I am as horny as a 3 balled tom cat.
Other people:
“Why are you dieting? You don’t need to lose weight.” Always from a younger, pudgy man. Woman seem to get it more readily.
Last weekend from a female friend I see maybe once every 60-90 days: “51? I would have thought you were about 40.” That one was nice. I do look younger without the flab.
The wife: Not really thrilled, unfortunately. I get the feeling that she felt “safer” when I was heavy. Not true, but that is another subject entirely. Just want to note that you can do this without a support system.
Actually strike that - I do have one here on this site. All my workout and nutrition stuff is Cosgrove/Berardi, although I have to note that I am a terrible cheater, and progress would have been much faster if it was otherwise. I would guess compliance at about 80%.
I will post again when I hit my goal, and include pics.