Hidden Healing
Hidden Healing
The fountain of youth was a mystical destination when I was growing up (the adventures of Ponce Deleon). Supposedly if you drank from the waters, you would reverse aging. This mythical goal is in the limelight again with Peter Attia’s book Outlive in addition to a growing faction of doctors diving into longevity medicine.
Personally I have a muscle-centric slant on medical advice and I test and implement novel ideas/data to my lifestyle before presenting it to my patient population. I turned 60 last year and was blessed with a grandson so unfortunately the idea of mortality popped into my thought process. Average American male death occurs around 73 (and for women 79!) So if I choose to live an “average life” I have about 12 years left of independence (assuming I don’t develop cognitive decline or life altering heart failure). I want to be blessed with a great grandchild and be able to hold him/her with an intact memory of the birth of my own children. I believe having an optimized musculoskeletal system provides independence, allows for glucose and cholesterol disposal, provides an infinite source of hormone production and prevents age related injuries (hip fracture/osteoporosis/obesity/arthritis).
A challenge for my population is adapting this mindset when entering late life. No question > half my patients over 40yrs old have no time to exercise, take care of their kids and also become caregivers for their aging parents ( the sandwich generation) and then are trying to retire only to find out starting impactful exercise late in life is difficult to impossible due to lack of hormones and energy…not that mention the delayed onset muscle soreness associated with starting a routine hurts and takes forever to recover (adding to the frustration of feeling old). Taken from “bro-science”, there are ways to hack your introduction to exercise. One would be optimizing your healing time before you begin the journey.
Fix sleep to the point of maximal REM and Slow Wave Sleep. Get rid of inflammatory nutrition habits (no sugar is not a necessity and there is no such thing as sugar deficient) have a go-to static stretching routine to deploy when muscle talk back to you. Adding healing herbals like turmeric/Cbd/ essential oils. Using cold immersion/IF sauna/fasting to retrain the metabolism. Eliminating high stress relationships and developing a practice of calm/peace/nature exposure. Optimizing hormones and peptides to your advantage “temporarily” to shorten your break in period.
The problem comes in knowing which data to trust and applying it to self. Since the tobacco industry developed the concept of causing confusion and doubt with too much information…Dr Google has been a confusing landscape of 3 million hits to any inquiry you can come up with. With all that confusion, the default is usually falling back to what you implemented in the past assuming it will work “this time” because you are wiser! NOPE. What failed before as unsustainable will fail again and faster since your older. This editorial isn’t to evaporate your hopes but more to help you embrace the use of coaches, trainers, therapist, nutritionists and doctors to get your summit faster with less effort.
If you are in your 40’s to 50’s, you are probably at the heaviest weight ever with the weakest endurance/strength. I will sometimes hear the phrase “I don’t want to kill myself” when patients give excuses of why they cannot maintain an older athlete lifestyle. The truth is by stopping or downplaying the value of maximal effort during exercise creation…you are actually killing your selves. If you think I’m absolutes…your lifestyle is either supportive of longevity or accelerating disease. I see older guys in the gym trying their best but sometimes I want to go over and give my 2 cents regarding how to change the exercise movements to get the most out of it. But most guys don’t want to hear that. Gals are usually not in the resistance areas of the gym as there are sometimes meatheads that act inappropriately dropping Fbombs with every sentence. (Dicks!)
I don’t blame some newbies shying away from the mirrors for fear is criticism.
Combine that members-only-phenomenon with the devaluation of hiring coaches and paying for health…most people 2 weeks after new years will tap out and put their membership on hold cause they flared up their arthritis or got hurt. Medical insurance doesn’t pay for health/it pays for disease management. Going to the best gyms can cost as much as a 2nd mortgage. Hiring a life coach is frowned upon if not covered by medical insurance and worse the doctors that are supposed to guide you when disease approaches, typically have no training in nutrition exercise or mindfulness.
So are you on your own? Yes and no. If you are one of my patients…I always am chasing youth and even if it didn’t resonate with my own health, I would still want to design a personal program to apply change/initiate feeling good/and using data to show progress. (Just relying on a scale or dress size is so archaic …with DEXA scans, fat impedance devices, wearable watches that calculate sleep to heart rate to some with zone training there are a plethora of different things available to motivate and guide. Luckily there are a few social influencers that actually know what they’re talking about! This age of information and AI can speed up your journey to optimize but all journeys begin with the first step.
Find your motivation, hold it close to your heart, find a community of healthy (check out my DrRic Hiking Excursion group as we are growing with all age groups and big Bucketlist rewards). Commit to ritualistic sleep, food prepping, weekly exercise volume goals and reversal of disease. You may not notice change on your own till 12-18 months but don’t do this alone! Find your community and get younger together.
-DrRic
