A no-bullshit look into the most effective ways to age with physical, emotional, mental, nutritional and spiritual strength, from a former New York Times journalist, a girl dad, surfer, sport shooter and writer.
Update, June 29, 2025: Turns out that simply talking about the goal of drinking less helps effectuate actually drinking less. Since I first recorded this conversation with Wendy Bounds, and certainly in the several weeks since publishing it, I drink noticeably less, which is to say less often, than at anytime since the pandemic.
Original post: Earlier this year, I began talking with Gwendolyn Bounds, who is just a terrific explorer, journalist, author and human, after being introduced (remotely, as we live on separate coasts) by a mutual friend. Over the course of a couple phone conversations to explore our respective interests in all the ways to be better in this world, we quickly learned that we were both on individual quests to drink less.
As we talked about our very different alcohol origin stories and strategies for winding down our respective drinking habits over time, we stumbled upon two ideas:
* An unvarnished, candid and unselfconscious conversation about drinking less is something we should record, not because we know more or better but because our struggles and strategies may be helpful to others also trying to drink less.
* Though Wendy and I have yet to meet in person, having a “non-drinking buddy,” as she aptly calls me in this recorded conversation, is a good thing.
There’s a third idea, and it’s mine only.
But first, in case you missed it:
It’s that Wendy has been rather more successful and with setting her “drinking less” goals and achieving them than I have. We’ve each developed some tactics and mindsets that mitigate the urge to drink once the clock strikes a certain hour (and even that hour is different for her and me).
* the Cheetos Protocol: If don’t want to consume it, don’t keep it in the house
* put out visual cues that remind you why you don’t want to drink
* sip your drink more slowly and parsimoniously
And many others.
For me, drinking has never been a problem, but it had become a very cozy, enjoyable and, honestly, lazy habit. One that exists at cross purposes to what I want to achieve in aging withstrength for the remainder of this one life.
Wendy, now a New Yorker, is originally from the South. I grew up in the steamy and frozen Midwest (those are my only two memories) but have now lived in California for almost as long. You will not be surprised to learn how differently our drinking was and remains today. But on the idea that we can never have too many non-drinking buddies, I hope you’ll listen to our 33-minute conversation and tell us what you think — about anything — in the comments.
AGING with STRENGTH only recently learned how to properly pronounce Sláinte. But the favorite foreign word for cheers remains the Hungarian: Egészségedre.
Why do I find this topic so difficult to write about? I’ve been so slow putting together a post — almost two weeks! Dude, what is the problem? You gotta be better….
That’s a small sample of my weekly, internal negative self-talk, a habit that I know is not exclusive to me. Which is why I decided to write about the profound need in our society for self-forgiveness.
Doesn’t matter if you’re in Indiana, Indonesia, Iceland or the Republic of Congo (AGING with STRENGTH subscribers now span all 50 states and 82 countries, by the way, including Iceland and Congo). Almost all of us very much need to build more self-forgiveness into our lives.
And before I get into it, I’m pretty sure some people reading this are already thinking, “Nope.” This subject doesn’t apply to them and, maybe, that self-forgiveness is just whinging; a solution in search of a problem; namby-pamby fodder for emotional snowflakes.
On which I respectfully call b******t. This topic is a pathway to greater strength, not weakness, and I’ll explain why. Not everyone needs a psychoanalytic intervention here, but almost every person I know, and who you know, I’m guessing, could benefit from taking a minute to consider how minor acts of self-forgiveness — some people prefer the term self-compassion — can make them stronger in life’s all-important second half.
Speaking of stronger, in case you missed the latest #WorkoutWednesday:
Actually, I don’t need to guess. In planning out this post, I asked 11 women and men whose opinions I value what they thought of self-forgiveness and its place in their lives. Here’s what they said.
Whatever the name you give it, self-forgiveness is indisputably one of the most powerful and effective tools in the “healthy aging” toolbox. And yet, for me and many others over 45 (in my case, more than a decade over), it’s also a really hard habit to build.
It’s hard because it requires digging into rather uncomfortable, inconvenient truths about how we think about ourselves. Here’s one about me that I realized only this week: The great value that I’ve always placed on humility, and the Stoic notion of not celebrating oneself, often interferes with my ability to absolve myself for mistakes, small or large.
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Fascia stretch therapy: a portal to longevity
Season 1 · Episode 7
Thursday, April 17, 2025 • Duration 29:54
My interview with Sydney-based Erica Koo, a Level 3 fascia stretch therapist and former competitive powerlifter, explores how Fascial Stretch Therapy (FST) can make life better for people with significant mileage on their bodies, hearts and minds.
Erica and I discuss FST’s significance in pain relief, mobility and overall health, the role of fascia in the body, its connection to movement, and how FST can benefit people over 40.
Erica also shares her personal journey (see timeline below, if you’d rather jump to that fascinating part of our conversation) from a complete non-athlete to becoming a competitive powerlifter, lyra (aerial hoop) performer and FST therapist… who’s now on the road to also completing her psychology training. (Her latest athletic obsession is sprinting….clearly, Erica doesn’t do anything halfway.)
Takeaways:
* Fascial Stretch Therapy (FST) is crucial for pain relief and mobility
* Fascia is a web-like connective tissue that affects movement
* Aging increases the need for fascia care due to accumulated stress
* FST works by addressing the fascial connections throughout the body
* Therapists assess the body as a roadmap of experiences and pain
* Immediate relief can often be felt after the first session of FST
* Resistance training is essential for maintaining health as we age
* FST is a collaborative process that prioritizes client safety
* Psychological benefits accompany physical relief in therapy
* Holistic health involves 5 pillars: exercise, nutrition, hydration, sleep, community
Erica Koo/fascia stretch therapy video timeline:
01:01 Introduction to FST: What is it & why you should care about your body’s fascia
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Andy Walshe, human performance expert
Season 1 · Episode 6
Sunday, March 23, 2025 • Duration 33:23
Andy Walshe is a globally recognized leader in the field ofelite human performance for individuals, teams and large organizations in sport, culture, the military and business. Andy is a founding member of Liminal Collective, whose members include some of the most accomplished human performers (artistic as well as athletic) on the planet. Their quest is to answer a fundamental question: How do the best of the best operate, and what can we learn from them?
Show Notes:
1:50 — The 5-minute breath-holding exercise, the “threat of running out of air” and why it’s an effective training tool.
3:56 — The definition of “human performance.”
4:33 — Applying human performance principles to people 50 and older.
5:20 — Andy’s patented human performance framework (with visuals).
6:15 — “You are an N of 1, a unique individual….”
7:30 — How to create a human performance framework for yourself (what you want to achieve + your restrictions + what works for you).
9:10 — The “I saw an elite athlete do it!” trap and how to avoid it.
10:15 — Defining characteristics of the highest performers: The ability to adjust in the moment; bringing oneself back to baseline; “inter-receptiveness” (being able to register how you’re feeling and respond to that), and more.
12:30 — Why the breath-hold exercise is so effective: Recognizing your triggers and practicing handling them in the moment.
14:00 — Training Tier 1 military special operations teams to do comedy improv (the value in )
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Athletic pain and performance after 50
Season 1 · Episode 5
Sunday, March 9, 2025 • Duration 12:04
Here's some strategies for dealing with midlife athletic injuries and the frustrating, sometimes demoralizing limitations they impose on us. One of the most challenging aspects of hitting my fifties (and maybe you can relate to this) is reconciling the inevitable decline in physical strength and performance with my expectations — unreasonable as they are — that I should be able to just keep doing pretty much what I did last week, last year or 15 years ago.
Not to mention the particular personal psychology that whispers, convincingly, that physical strength and ability are standards that must be upheld. As if they were virtues that, like all actual virtues, don’t ever change.
And the pernicious feeling that if I can’t maintain my athletic standards, well, then, who am I, really?
Of course, these thoughts and feelings are rarely overt; they’re more like emotional microplastics polluting my subconscious. But like all toxins, they tend to accumulate over time, to the point where they can influence my self-perception and, thus, my behavior. And here’s the problem with that: If you’re in a state of continual dissonance between what you want your body to be able to do and what it can actually pull off, you’re all but asking for an injury.
Or, more to the point of this post, a nonstop series of injuries.
Because athletes in their 50s are like the Tom Hanks character in, “Cast Away.” Remember that movie, from 2000? A guy stranded on an island invisible to the outside world. He survives on pure improvisation, lives in a cave gnawing on fish bones, staring at the wall wondering WTF. And then he becomes emotionally dependent on a volleyball and cries when it goes away.
Sound familiar, athletes? If “Cast Away” isn’t an analog to life after 50 I’m not sure what is.
At least we have access to ibuprofen and CBD gummies.
The consequences of “ignore & override” for older athletes
At this point in my audiocasts, I usually offer a disclaimer that I’m speaking but as a journalist and curious explorer. But on this topic…. My guess is that many of you are, too.
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Nutritional strength & drinking less in 2025
Season 1 · Episode 4
Tuesday, January 21, 2025 • Duration 08:46
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 |Forwomen 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.
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.
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Podcast E2: Polar explorer Alison Levine
Season 1 · Episode 2
Monday, December 16, 2024 • Duration 19:30
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.
Intermittent fasting: a brief audio addendum re the knowns and unknowns
Season 1 · Episode 1
Wednesday, November 27, 2024 • Duration 04:05
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.
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A naturopathic doctor's longevity advice
Wednesday, July 30, 2025 • Duration 35:24
Dr. Renee Young, a Yale-trained naturopath is a medical-investigative force of nature who, at 50, is practicing the detailed and complex longevity gospel she preaches to her patients.
In this 35-minute fast-moving interview, Dr. Young describes offers a portrait of what your life would be like if she had a say in keeping you healthy, fit and well for as many years as possible — even if you think you’re perfectly healthy already.
01:25 — What’s a naturopath? How is naturopathy different than what your PCP does?
03:10 — What a naturopath offers that your insurance-provided doctor can’t.
04:30 — “One of the questions always in my mind is, ‘What will this person meet their demise from?’”
05:24 — Component’s of Dr. Young’s “executive wellness” check.
06:10 — The NutrEval comprehensive metabolic/nutritional test, and why Dr. Young recommends it.
06:56 — Polygenic risk scores and genetic testing.
07:55 — Paul’s recent NutrEval results: negative and positive surprises and what they show about how much insurance-provided annual blood/urine tests don’t tell you about your health.
11:10 — Medicine’s marketing problem.
12:26 — “How much healthcare do you want to consume?”
18:00 — The curious doctor.
19:05 — How to keep up with the explosion of longevity information and misinformation nowadays.
20:10 — “Ask yourself hard questions.”
21:15 — The Big Three aging processes to know and understand.
23:32 — Investigating your own healthcare.
25:55 — Next-level diagnostic tests.
27:00 — The five pillars of aging.
28:07 — Wellness as a series of rituals: yearly, monthly, weekly and daily.
30:38 — Intermittent fasting! (One of Dr. Young’s favorite topics.)
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It’s so easy to just continue to be too hard on yourself.
Self-forgiveness for greater healthspan and longevity
It’s time we began confronting this behavior that works so strongly against our long-term health and our mental and emotional prosperity. Most of us need to show more self-forgiveness, self-compassion.
As we age into the second half of life — which should be a very active, radiant, creative and bold second half — we have to develop strength in several forms. Building muscles is nice, and necessary, but right up there with with physical strength is the parallel requirement to also grow emotionally stronger. It’s a non-negotiable need of older adulthood.
Two kinds of self-forgiveness, defined
Self-forgiveness is the process of acknowledging and then releasing negative emotions like guilt, shame or regret from past mistakes or bad behavior and adopting a more compassionate and understanding attitude toward oneself.
And here I’d like to distinguish between what I think are at least two very different kinds of necessary self-forgiveness. Call them Tier 1 and Tier 2:
* Tier 1 self-forgiveness addresses either profound, deep-rooted feelings like inadequacy, unlovability or trauma that go back to childhood, or more contemporary shame and guilt for something we’ve done to someone else.
* Tier 2 self-forgiveness is much more mundane, common and — speaking for myself here — embarrassingly dumb. This is the kind of self-forgiveness that I’m least good at, because the causes of it are routine daily mistakes or flubs that I have the bad habit of getting down on myself about:
* for dropping a spoonful of yogurt on the kitchen floor
* for failing to call into a meeting that I forgot to put on my calendar
* for not waking up early to write…again
I should be able to forgive myself for these small failures, and yet I find myself in an almost daily routine of loitering in the mental sewage of these small mistakes. (What’s that about?) Maybe this is unique to me. I’d be interested if any of you experience anything similar.
And that leads to one of the great insights I had while researching self-forgiveness, which is that it arises from the cognitive dissonance we experience when our actions don’t reflect our beliefs, such as:
“Spilling food, or missing a meeting, or sleeping in is unacceptable.”
Or, if we’re talking about the more deep-rooted, childhood-based feelings of blame:
“Not staying in shape, or failing to make my partner happy, or losing my job is unacceptable.”
But for anyone in midlife or older, unacceptable behavior would include not addressing the inability to create a path to absolve yourself for your failures. Megan Feldman Bettencourt, who wrote a book on forgiveness, says your health and well-being are at stake.
“Guilt and self-blame result in a stress response,” she told me in an interview. “What that means is stress chemicals flooding our brain and over time making us at risk for anxiety and depression” as well as physical illnesses like high blood pressure. “Stress is toxic,” she said. “When you’re continuously beating yourself up about something or even talking to yourself with critical language, the impact is similar to being abused by someone who’s being critical of us.”
How to get better at self-forgiveness
So how can we be better at self-compassion and forgiveness? I’ll briefly suggest two ways, one of which is ridiculously simple; the other is for those of you who want a more detailed, research-based prescription.
The ‘Quick Start Guide to Self-Forgiveness’
One of the epiphanies of self-forgiveness I learned this week is that all it requires is treating ourselves with the same compassion and grace that we would give to a friend or family member. Put another way: instead of hammering your shortcomings in an infinite loop, reboot! by consciously holding yourself to the lower, more reasonable standard that you’d expect anyone else who isn’t you to meet.
That’s the Quick Start Guide to Self-Forgiveness. I think that’s a good way to address my particular Tier 2 issues with those minor, daily screw-ups around which I’ve developed a negative talk track.
And if you take only one thing away from this post, I hope its this incredibly important need to treat ourselves as humanely as we would our best friend.
Actions that build self-compassion
If you’d prefer a more in-depth approach to developing long-term self-compassion, here are four actions that Ms. Feldman Bettencourt recommends practicing regularly:
* Admit your major failures. If you’ve wronged someone else, acknowledge that to them, apologize and explain why it won’t happen again. You won’t forgive yourself until you ask the other person to.
* Be kind to yourself. Treat yourself with the respect you would give a loved one.
* Recognize what you’ve done well. Take the time and words, if only spoken to yourself, to celebrate your achievements.
* Practice regular self-care through what makes you feel well: exercise, time in nature, getting a massage or watching the big playoff game; whatever brings you joy.
Aging with emotional strength is harder than it seems. But it’s worth the effort. I’ll leave you with these six very good questions we should all be asking ourselves, courtesy of Helen Marie on Substack:
What kind of life am I quietly dreaming of?
What are the small joys that are holding me together?
22:00 The wide range of physical & neuro issues that Erica treats with FST
28:10 The 5 pillars of healthy living: exercise, nutrition, hydration, sleep, community
“With fascia stretch therapy, the more you move the joint, the more it does let go. And in doing so, you're able to create freedom in the joint and the muscle” — Erica Koo (aka “Stretch”)
(SKIMMABLE) INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
Paul
Erica Koo, thanks for being on AGING with STRENGTH.
Erica
Thank you so much for having me, I'm super excited.
Paul
Yeah, this is going to be an interesting conversation because I don't know jack about fascia stretch therapy — FST as it's called.
So could you tell us what FST, fascial stretch therapy, is and why we should care about it?
Erica (01:08)
It's a form of assistive stretching that allows us to work deep in the joints and stretch the move the body in ways that the client themselves may not be able to. In doing so, what we're aiming to do is relieve pain, restore joint integrity and also improve overall long-term mobility as well.
How I would explain it to clients when they walk in is that fascia is a web like connective tissue that is all across the body. There is nowhere in our body that fascia does not exist. But the function is it helps hold our body together, but also helps coordinate smooth movements when we're walking, running, especially when we're training things like that.
It's very flexible. It's meant to stretch and adapt when you move, but it can become quite stiff or tight if you have things like poor posture, if there's lack of movement or injury. And with massage, when people come in and they go, my shoulder's really painful. A massage therapist would just look at the shoulder and go, okay, well, we'll release the bicep, release the shoulder, neck, off you go. A physio would look at it and look at it in terms of a diagnosis. So they'll probably go through multiple assessments to be able to see what's the range of movement like, where's the pain, what sort of movements are triggering that, has there been an acute event to have caused that pain.
With fascia stretch therapy, when someone presents with pain, I look at how that structure is fascially connected to different areas of the body. So for example, there's multiple different fascial nets across the body and you wanna think of fascia as a web like I mentioned before.
And this fascia connects anatomically separate structures together across the body. So there's one called the superficial back net, for example, and it's just a big slab of fascia that runs from the top of the cranium all the way down to the neck, back, lower back, hamstring, calves, and down to the plantar fascia as well. They've done cadavers on this too. So if you are interested, you can sort of Google superficial back net and it should come up with like this big structure. So I look at, okay, well, I can, yes, stretch the shoulder if your shoulder is painful.
But what other things, for example, cause internal rotation of the shoulder? What other things can lead to that sort of shoulder pain? So I look at an assessment that way. And then for my practice, I genuinely try to move away from pain, initially. So if someone's come in with a chronic issue that they've had for, let's say 10 years, which is not unusual for clients coming in to see me, I don't want to necessarily make them force through pain that they have been forcing through for 10 years.
And I feel like that's where the magic of fascia structure comes comes in is that we can start down regulating the nervous system by working on and stretching structures that that shoulder is connected to and then work our way closer to the area of pain. Once the person is feeling a lot less of that.
You mentioned foam rolling actually and how foam rolling relieves your back pain. When we look at how foam rolling works is essentially it, it inhibits the part in your brain that interprets the pain signals as threatening. That's why you get a relief in mobility, relief in overall pain, and then it helps you move better and actually get a lot more out of your training. So we're working very similarly with that process. If I'm looking at, what can I work on first? So is it bicep? Is it just the shoulder joint moving it around? it, is it okay? Is the body letting me move the shoulder around without pain? Okay, well then that maybe I can progress a little bit deeper into the structures.
Paul
Is this important for just young athletic people or, know, obviously my audience and this audience here at aging with strength is 45 and up, generally speaking. Why should they be interested in what you're saying to them right now?
Erica (05:00)
Because fascia exists regardless of age and it is crucial for smooth movement and health overall. And one of the common things I hear from people who are 40 and over is, oh, you I feel so stiff and I think that's just a part of aging. I always ask the question, okay, well, let's think about it this way. How much stress have you been under across the 40, 50 years that you have been alive?
When did you start, when did your career start taking off? Did you start a family? Did you have any big stresses in your life? know, mortgage, moving house, moving, changing careers, things like that. And when did you stop moving the way that you did in your twenties and thirties, if you were training in the first place? So as we go through the different stages of our life, you also encounter different stresses. There's almost an accumulation of stresses and experiences, if you will.
There becomes less time behaviorally to engage in the self-care methods that you may have done or that you could have gotten away not doing in your 20s and 30s. So I think as people age into their 40s and 50s, there's an increased need to take care of their fascia because they might just just might not be getting the same opportunities with increased stress compared to when they were younger.
Paul
So what is…sorry, you may have answered this, but what is fascia? What's it made of? What does it feel like?
Erica (06:33)
Very….So how I would feel it when I'm looking at the person on the table, we have a movement called traction, which is essentially where I kind of pull the joint away from the body to see how it responds. And depending on that pull, I can feel where the tightness is coming from, whether I'm pulling on the leg and I'm tractioning the leg, do they have more tightness in the calf or is it coming from the hip? And then based on that, I work on what needs to be done first.
And then even with fascia, you have the superficial layers on top and then the deep layers at the bottom. So fascia is like a connective tissue. when you, for example, look at images of what fascia is like under the microscope, it essentially looks like interweaving spider webs. So it's that thick layer that connects all together. And that's how it is able to stretch and able to produce force and absorb force as well.
Paul
Is it really a function of the more you massage, I'm using massage to mean any kind of manipulation or the more that you knead it like dough, the more supple it gets, is it that simple?
Erica (07:43)
Massage works a lot in isolation. So it will directly target, let's say the deltoid or the pec muscle and work until it releases or the muscle let's go. FST or fascia stretch therapy looks at, how do we use movement to create throughout the entire limb? So any, everything encompassing the wrist, bicep, shoulder. So instead of working in isolation, we're looking at, how do we move it around the body in the way that it should be moved?
And with fascia stretch therapy, the more you move the joint, the more it does let go. And in doing so, you're able to create freedom in the joint and the muscle.
Paul
Okay, so why do people need fascial stretch therapists? Like what do you do that I can't do at home with my trusty foam roller or my friend who twists my arm backwards or whatever? What's the secret sauce?
Erica (08:36)
I think if…so, most people who come to facial stretch therapists is for a specific goal. Mostly pain relief. Some people come in for lasting improvements in mobility, especially if they're athletes, but pain relief is definitely the biggest motivator. And we need a trained person to do it because firstly, you may not necessarily know what you need. Just because you know that you have the pain doesn't necessarily mean that that area that is painful is necessarily the one that needs to be treated. If we compare massage and FST, I talked about how massage works a lot in isolation of the muscle, but if you have lower back pain or if someone comes in with shoulder pain, just releasing through that shoulder joint might not be necessarily enough. Because the way that these structures are connected, if you look at fascia as like a piece of clothing, so let's say like we've got a fabric here, piece of clothing that covers everything.
We have tightness or injury that pulls the entire structure that way. So see how it then impacts other parts of the body. So what fascial stretch therapy does is it allows us to restore that across so that it's overall more flexible and reactive to the stimulus that it needs to be. So first thing is that people might not necessarily know what to do or how to work in the area that is painful. The other thing is certain techniques require certain angles and pressure that you cannot necessarily do by yourself.
Paul
I see.
Erica(10:01)
And then third is a therapist will be able to get your joints or your limb into positions that you may not be able to achieve by yourself.
Paul
When someone comes in saying, you know, my lower back is painful or another part, I imagine you don't go just to the lower back, but you're kind of trying to figure out where this is coming from and how do you do that?
Erica(10:24)
I try to get a very comprehensive history. I also have a psychology background actually. So I'm training to become a sports psychologist. And in my nine years of being a PT and fascia stretch therapy, what I've deeply understood is that you can't separate the mind from the body. And when a client comes in, the body is like a roadmap. It's a roadmap of things that they cannot necessarily verbalize. And the pain that they're coming with and the conditions that they're coming with may actually be a reflection of the things that they have been through. So a very...
Paul
Sorry, can you say that again? Just say the road map part. I just want to catch that again.
Erica (10:56)
Yeah, sure. So people's bodies are like a roadmap, a roadmap of experiences and things that they have been through that they may not necessarily be able to articulate. So the pain and the conditions that they come in with can sometimes be a reflection of some of the things that they have been through. So
what I have seen clinically is that people coming in with lower back pain or knee pain, normally there is other things happening further up the body or further down the body, two or three joints, sorry, one or two joints up or down each way.
Paul
How quickly do your patients find relief?
Erica
So most of them, I would say need at least four to six sessions to be able to see lasting change. But it's a little bit like training. You're not going to do one training session and then expect that to suddenly make miraculous results. Most clients, however, do experience immediate relief on their first or second session. I find the second session to be quite magical. First session is always about building trust. you know, letting the client's body know that it's a safe space, what the treatment entails, and having them, their body understand me as well as in how I work as a therapist….
Paul
You're not going to hurt them too much.
Erica
No…well, that's it. And if you're coming in with a chronic issue and you've been in pain for 10 years, that area is going to be very protective. It's not necessarily going to let you do the things that you would want to do. And in those cases, the priority is to try and reduce the brain from thinking, there's a lot of threat there. I need to be producing these pain signals because I'm still injured or it's perceiving that that area needs to be protected in some way. One of the things I always tell my clients is that pain itself is not necessarily an indicator of how severe an injury is.
The people I find the hardest to stretch are people who've never trained before and they have very little muscle tissue because you can really feel it. It just feels like joint on joint. And I think with older people, particularly people who have not trained or do not do any movement, most difficult to get changed within, let's say the average of four to six sessions….
Paul
So it sounds like you're dealing with the body's own willingness and familiarity with manipulation of any kind, like physical manipulation. People who, like I could be a broken 58-year-old athlete — which I am (broken, that is) — but because I'm used to stretching and used to sort of trying new things, I might be a little bit more amenable than someone who's never come into be manipulated physically in any way. Is that right?
Erica (13:37)
Yes. Or even just because you train and you've been an athlete before and because you have like layers of muscle tissue, that's going to be easier to treat and it's going to be overall more responsive. You're also going to be overall more resilient to whatever manipulations we do and also gain a lot more out of them. Yeah.
Paul
Interesting.
So, you know, I'm wondering what you, Erica, see or what you notice in terms of like, my question is geared toward what can people do to remain vigorously, physically healthy for as long as possible. Do you find that the people that you interpret as being that have
Certain kind of background or have developed certain habits. I'm just wondering if you've gleaned anything from your your practice
Erica
Very interesting question. Look, I used to think that, well, as long as you do find something that you enjoy, then you can stick with it, then that's probably the best option. I think after now having worked on people for several years, my opinion on that has changed. I think everyone needs minimum two to three days a week, some form of resistance training.
And then added to that, you want to add in some sort of cardiovascular or aerobic work, maybe twice a week. And then walking would be a non-negotiable. So I do think maybe that's on the extreme end. I don't know. But I think if we're looking at overall health, I think that's really crucial because in terms of resistance training, we need it for things like brain density, overall muscle health, joint health, and also just longevity too. So the older you get, the more brittle your bones get as well. So it's like you're more susceptible to things like falls and injury. Being able to recover from that, being able to have some sort of muscle and some sort of resilience is really important. If you have a basis of that sort of training, you're also going to be more adherent to rehab, more open to overcoming some level of discomfort to be able to adhere to the rehab in order to get better.
Paul
Let's talk about you a little bit because you're a pretty interesting person in terms of your training, your background. You're a power lifter, if I understand, definitely an athlete. Can you tell us a little bit about where you come from, athletically, and your training background and how you became a FST therapist?
Erica (16:05)
Yeah, I actually came from a very non-athletic background. So I hated sports and hated any sort of physical activity when I was a child. I only really got into resistance training maybe in my early twenties. That was mainly motivated by weight loss. So I was never really a big person. However, I came from a Korean culture where being skinny is considered beautiful, like being the thinnest version of yourself, it's basically beautiful. So it was initially motivated by that.
So I started weightlifting and resistance training. And then there came a point where I realized if I didn't fuel myself to be able to lift these weights, nothing was going to change and I wasn't actually going to get better. That was also when Instagram was sort of taking off and social media and the rise of I guess more women getting into the gym and starting to lift weights. And at the time I was also really interested in things like starting strength, Mark Rippetoe and Elliot Hulse and those are the sorts of videos I was consuming because I fell in love with strength training.
And then that eventually led into my powerlifting career, which was great in terms of my strength, but also not so great in terms of my health because I was also very into that anything above five reps is cardio. I was like [inaudible] basically. So I was like, “Well, I'm powerlifter, so I don't need to do any cardio.…”
Paul
(laughs)
Erica(17:12)
That wasn't very good for my health, either. Blood pressure and things like that really quickly impacted my sleep. I was overreaching very, very often.
Yeah, I could squat really well, but I could not, you know, go hiking without feeling quite tired or feeling as if it was quite difficult. So it kind of moved from that. So I've gone through a bit of a journey in terms of being very extreme. So extreme weight loss, extreme restricting of food to only focusing on strength and powerlifting and, you know, building muscle. And then it's taken a few years to find my middle ground. So from competitive powerlifting, I moved on to weightlifting and sprinting now is my great, great joy at the moment. Really enjoying learning how to do that. I also delved in circus for a while, which is the stuff that you see in Cirque du Soleil. So like the aerial hoop did a few performances after I learned that as well.
There was an element of perfection that I was always chasing. And I was like, well, I don't want to put myself in situations where I'm going to be made to feel like I'm not good enough. So when I started doing the fitness related things, I tried to flip that narrative and go: What can I do that will put me as a complete beginner and allow myself to experience getting really good at something that I wasn't good at before?
So that's why I started weightlifting. That's why I also started the Lyra. And that's also why I took up sprinting recently as well.
Paul
Sorry. Lyra…what is that?
Erica
Lyra is the aerial troop that you see in Cirque du Soleil.
Paul
Can you tell us a little bit about your formal training, your academic or therapy training?
Erica
Yeah. I did my cert three and four, which are the, like, which are the fitness courses that you do in order to become a personal trainer. Um, so I've been a strength coach for about nine years now. Uh, I did my facial stretch therapy course level one in 2019. And then I've been back to Canada and Arizona twice after that, to be able to certify level two and level three,
Paul
You seem to be at the front end of the vanguard of a therapeutic evolution. Do you feel that way?
Erica (19:12)
I do think there is something really special about fascia stretch therapy itself. Like the prioritization of client safety, there's lots of therapist values that they preach prior to just teaching us the techniques. and they emphasize that importance of, being able to build the trust, being able to assess comprehensively, being able to assess for clients needs and really asking them what they want. And then making it a very collaborative process throughout the treatment session.
And that's also something that's very much in line with what I've learned in my psychology as well, which isthe value of collaboration with the client, building psychological safety, all of those things. So I think that's why I chose fashion stretch therapy over other fashion manipulation techniques.
Paul
if you have to travel internationally just to get certified I'm wondering: How easy it is for anyone to find people like you, around where they live?
Erica
Yeah, there'll be a lot more in America than there are here. For sure. Yeah, fascia stretch therapy, Stretch to Win, they have a directory of therapists and you will be more likely to find someone over in California, over in the US than you would be in Australia.
Paul
So if I understand right, fascia stretch therapy is a specific kind of therapy and it's different than other kinds of fascia manipulation. Is that right?
Erica (20:43)
Yeah, look, there's always going to be parallels because we're working with the fascia and we're working with, let's say, like the nervous system and the brain because when we're treating them, we do work with those things as well. But I think quite a lot of different techniques and the way we approach in our treatments would be quite different.
Paul
Do people come to you because they they've encountered a problem or because they're not yet encountered one and they they want to sort of just feel better than they already feel?
Erica
Both. There's two, I guess, two main groups I work with, which is like people with chronic conditions. So I've had clients who've had a stroke, suffered a stroke. That's why they come for the treatment because it helps their mobility and also provides them a bit of relief. Chronic conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple sclerosis.
And also just chronic pain that they cannot explain.
And then the other group that I normally work with are like athletes. So people who come in, they'll initially come in with an injury or some sort of pain complaint and then they continue to use that as a form of like a preventative, I guess, yeah, and keep them in the best shape possible.
Paul
What about, you know, people who've had, whether they're athletes or not, you know, like some kind of joint surgery, I'm thinking shoulder, you mentioned knee….
Erica(22:05)
I've worked with clients who've come in with double mastectomies and also double incisions. Scar tissue takes about six months to a year to completely settle. So in that time, it continues to change.
So the priority is the aftercare is, okay, well, can we keep promoting blood flow and keep that tissue moving while it's healing? The clients who've come in after the mastectomies, it's been a couple of years, close to like a decade. And even they experience a lot of relief when we do some scar tissue specific work. So actual massage of the scar tissue. But then also remember I spoke about anatomically separate structures being fascially connected.
If we're able to stretch their shoulder joint, if we're able to stretch their bicep, all of that again, promotes more mobility and relief through the areas that they have the scar tissue in as well. In terms of things like hip replacement and shoulder joint replacements, ACLs, all of that, it does have an impact on their mobility in terms of, it also depends on the aftercare. Like I think with people who are a bit older, they came from a stage where, all right, you've just survived a double knee replacement. No worries, off you go. You can function. It doesn't matter if you can't ride the bike or
You can't do your marathons that you used to love doing that was a huge part of your identity. You can just go off and do that now. For people like that, I do find there's a lot more residual pain because they've kind of learned to work around their surgery. Some of them end up just stopping their physical activity completely because they just never had any sort of guidance in terms of how to ease back into it. So for them, it's two things. So firstly is treatment to relieve whatever pain, restore mobility, do what we can.
And then second is helping them train their way back into whatever it was that they were doing. you have the treatment, but I believe no physical therapy is complete without some sort of training. And you could call it rehabilitation, “prehabilitation,” whatever you'd like to call it, but some form of strength work. So let's see if someone's come in because they've had a double knee replacement, you'd be looking at things like, is there, can we strengthen their hamstrings, hamstrings, glutes, calves, footwork, things like that after treatment.
Paul
Yeah, you know, as you're talking, I'm thinking, wow, like I've had shoulder surgery for a tendon. I've had three arthroscopies on my knee, not to make it about me, but in all of them, I don't believe I ever left with any plan from the healthcare system to be like, here's what you need to do after surgery in order to make sure that you don't get a ton of scar tissue or frozen shoulder or whatever it may be. They just sort of [say], like you said, “You've had surgery. Thank you very much. Please pay your bill on the way out, and we'll see you in the next life.”
And I don't know what... Is it like that in Australia also?
Erica (24:45)
I think it's changing because I know a lot of good physios and a lot of good, I guess, like surgeons who are more aware of this stuff now. So what they'll do is after the person's surgery, they'll go, we recommend that you go and get some scar massage done. We recommend that you go and train. Issue is you can't just leave the person with a recommendation. You need an actual referral network. And I think that's where it falls through.
Awareness is never enough, you have to do something with the awareness.
But I think where it falls short is, okay, you're living now. You had a life prior to your injury. It doesn't really matter if you can't get back to that because you're walking.
Oh, you used to do marathons? Well, yeah, you probably can't do that now. Oh, you used to do powerlifting? Probably can't do that now. There's no exploration into, yeah, look, you may have a hard time getting back into it, but these are the methods that you can use to try and get yourself stronger and not exploring that possibility and not providing that aftercare to bridge the gap between, I guess, function and livelihood or people's lives don't just stop as function.
Paul
What do your clients get out of the treatments they receive from you that are not about physical relief? Do you find that there is associated psychological or wellness or dopamine, just sort of a well-being effect also?
Erica (26:12)
Yeah, definitely. So I guess I've seen a few things. So firstly is I have a few clients who are neurodivergent. So they have quite strong ADHD and normally they find that they can't wind down always super hyperactive, can't sit still. FST is probably the one time where they start falling asleep on the table and then they walk out feeling like all their physical tension is gone.
Because there is physical tension associated with things like restlessness and anxiety and ADHD as well. So for my severely ADHD clients, they do find that. For people who don't necessarily, aren't necessarily neurodivergent, all of them do experience a sense of calmness. And you want to think of it as a feedback to and from the brain. So you have your body signaling, hey, this is tight, this is painful, we can't move this back to the brain.
Brain interprets it as threatening signals and go, okay, well, let's not move that joint. Let's keep producing pain signals so that you don't move it. When we're able to calm that down, people feel a lot better and they feel calmer. They feel less wired in their head. The other thing is also if you've been in pain for that long and your brain has been monitoring that for a very long time, you're always also going to be on edge. So FST also helps calm that down as well.
Paul
Great, I love that, thank you. I'm going to ask you about, do some show and tell. What's your opinion of these things? [holds up a Hyperice vibrating therapy “gun”]
Erica (27:48)
(Laughs) Yeah sure. Look, if it makes you feel better, it makes you feel good and helps you train better, then I'm all for it.
I do think there are some limitations though, in terms of it's not really going to elicit long-term change that you're looking for. And if you're having to use it multiple times a day, throughout the entire week, then I think you might need to search for it: Well, why is it that I need to use it so much?
I think I would definitely agree in terms of the treatment is only one part of a person's health. You want to look at several pillars. So you've got things like exercise/movement, you've got nutrition, you've got hydration and you've got sleep and social connections. Let's say five, five pillars of health. If one falls, you're probably going to be okay. Normally what happens is with most people, if their exercise or their physical activity falls due to an injury, their nutrition and their hydration both fail and then their sleep starts to go. That's when problems start to happen.
So you can't mask away big issues with treatments. and I always tell people as well, there's, there's a reason why you're in this much pain. Some things are acute and we can probably treat them away. But if you're consistently getting back into, let's say you're sitting for 10 hours a day, really stressful job, under like a really horrendous boss, it's probably going to come back.
Paul
Erica, thank you very much for spending your time talking with me about fascia stretch therapy.
I think you've alighted on a lot of interesting points for people who are athletes, for people who are not athletes and certainly people who are in midlife or older who may or may not understand how important fascia is in one's body and attending to it because it sounds like there's a lot of psychological and emotional benefits of this kind of physical stretch therapy, not just the immediate physical results.
training elite performers in “non-traditional environments.”
17:45 — The importance of not dwelling on failures and moving forward quickly. “The Roger Federer Effect” and the “threat vs. challenge mindset”: I made a mistake. What did I learn?
21:05 — The value of seeking out coaching in some form or another.
22:35 — Using AI as a coach, and the technology advances just around the corner. Uploading “your own version of yourself.”
24:18 — Red-light therapy: useful or waste of money?
25:13 — Andy’s “70-20-10 Rule” for human performance training.
29:17 — The trap of relying on shortcuts, tech toys and supplements.
30:43 — Andy’s take on alcohol and drinking.
31:40 — Finding the Keith Richards prototypes. Andy: “That’s research I could get behind.”
Or, if you’re not yet, because you haven’t yet hit the 50-something athletic injury wall that no one ever bothered to tell you is approaching, I’m here, now, warning you about the negative surprises that many midlife athletes confront.
Or, as the case may be, simply ignore.
I wrote a post in October that examined the consequences of continuing to fight through athletic pain. And in the months since then, I’ve become a living lesson of what happens when ignore & override becomes your rule instead of the exception.
A brief summary of my 50-something injuries
So let me quickly run through what I’m dealing with, so I can get to the strategies for managing the nonstop injuries after age 50 with credibility.
* My right shoulder now has 2 partial tears that make upper-body training tough. They wake me up, every night. I probably need surgery, because it feels a lot like my left shoulder 8 years ago, when a surgeon stapled together a full tendon tear.
* But now, in both shoulders, I also have severe tendinitis of the long head biceps tendon, which connects the biceps to the shoulder. This is a direct result of my ignore & override habit, after too many rounds of hitting 200 tennis serves at a time.
I was in too much of a hurry to be really good at tennis, and got a repetitive stress injury as a result.
Consequences!
So, now I focus more on lower body and core strength training, for stronger legs, quads, glutes, hip flexors, lower back and pelvic strength. As you get older, you want to be stronger from the ground up. And these are big muscle groups that burn a lot of calories.
* Oh, yeah: As if on cue, last week my right knee took on fluid, for reasons I have yet to pin down. Going too heavy on the box jumping? Or the stair workout? Tennis drills against the pitiless ball machine? Whatever.
Using athletic stress therapy to speed recovery
Though I make light of the stress I put on my body — and maybe that’s just another variation of ignore & override — when it comes specifically to tending to athletic injuries, I’ve found that continuing to use it — playing, running or working out on whatever part is hurting — can in some cases speed up the repair process far more effectively than the RICE therapy, which is based on Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation.
Carefully stressing certain non-acute injuries, through newer therapies with acronyms like PEACE, LOVE, and MEAT works only if you know what you’re doing and have a strong and sensitive connection to your body’s nuanced pain signals.
I could do an entire post on physical stress therapy, so I won’t go deeply into it here, but it’s not for everyone.
But what if, instead of more effective therapies, we avoided taking on athletic injuries in the first place. Maybe there’s a better way to build strength and endurance and flexibility after 50 than simply by pressing on with the same workouts, the same routines, the same sports, even, that we practiced 5, 10, or 20 years ago.
Getting smarter about staying physically strong
In that previous post about the consequences of continuing to ignore & override progressively louder pain signals, I gave two examples of friends, each with great tolerances for pain, who decided to stop doing certain sports they loved, to save their bodies.
Because, yes, discontinuing what is painful may be the smart move.
The concept of slowly, slowly ratcheting down your workouts over time
But, instead of just pressing on doing the same routines and talking to a volleyball to keep from losing our minds, I’d like to introduce the idea of a controlled, almost imperceptible ratcheting down of your workouts, over years, as a way to stay healthy, remain physically strong and flexible and get off the perpetual injury train. Through more mindful, disciplined movements that recognize, instead of ignore, our changing physical abilities.
It would look something like this:
1 | A 1% per year reduction in weight/duration/distance/intensity of the training regimens or sports most likely to cause the injuries that set you back, physically and mentally.
* maybe it’s 1%, maybe 5%, maybe .05%, but it becomes something you manage, which requires forethought, attention and discipline — things that athletes tend to be good at.
* in the gym, that can look like preemptively reducing the amount of weight you're using in favor of doing more repetitions. You don’t need to go heavy to build strength or muscle.
* after my 2017 left shoulder tendon repair, I ratcheted down to 50 pound dumbbells for chest presses, from 60 pounds, and that was absolutely the right move. 60 pounds is ego; 50 pounds is disciplined, mindful.
* instead of keeping your max workout volume at 11, turn it down to 9. At first, it can feel disappointing, like you’re leaving endorphins on the table. But it’s still 9! And it creates a disciplined buffer against frequent commutes on the athletic injury train.
* I no longer hit 200 idiotic tennis serves at a time, and instead limit myself to 40 or 50. That’s lowered my daily pain score, which I’ll explain in a moment.
2 | Commit to acquiring no new injuries
* what would that require you to change in practice, at the gym, on a bike, on a running trail, in the pool, or just negotiating a darkened staircase while texting and eating a sandwich?
3 | Quantify the pain load you’re carrying, to lower it
* example: on a scale of 1 to 10 daily, my right shoulder is a 5; my knee is a 1; my left shoulder a 2, for a total pain score of 8. I want my daily number to be 4 or lower. What’s my plan to achieve that?
4 | Acknowledge the mental and emotional stress that athletic injuries create
* that daily pain score directly correlates to the energy that you require to ignore & override or, worse, unleash your transmogrified pain on someone else.
5: | Invest in high-quality, professional guidance for your specific athletic goals
* instead of training only using free YouTube videos, which I use as well, create a modest budget to spend on your personal physical performance and maintenance.
* a good physiotherapist or coach is as valuable to your enduring physical resilience as a good psychotherapist is to your emotional well being. This is a worthy investment that takes time and effort and pays major dividends.
Since I mentioned psychotherapy, which I’ve been reaping the benefits of for 20 years now, let me mention one final, really important element of what drives many of us, especially men, toward unsustainable levels of athletic stress, pain and the dead-end of ignore & override. And this is where I also speak from personal experience.
Confronting the lingering need to be dangerous
What I’m talking about here is the need to remain “dangerous.” Which continuing to keep up an increasingly painful athletic standard, almost regardless of the consequences, bestows.
This is a real need, felt by many men, especially. Here, dangerous does not mean antisocial, threatening or violent, but something much more subtle, socially acceptable and rooted in athleticism: a form of physical achievement and self-possession that tends to make people take notice in some way, small or large.
As many psychotherapists, including mine, will tell you, the reason so many men of a certain age resist dialing down our athletic habits is because to dial down would be a tacit acknowledgement of mortality. But if you can still blow away that 38 year old dude on the trail, or compete with him, entirely in your mind at the gym, you’re not average! And you’re not going to die!
As my therapist said to me recently: “There’s a limit to how strong one can be at different points in one’s life, regardless of one’s will. You need other capacities, other than just determination.”
Other capacities: like maybe self-acceptance, self-forgiveness and an appreciation of the non-athletic qualities that make you strong, attractive and worthy. Capacities like tolerance for the physical declines that are, in fact, inevitable.
We can’t will our way back to 35.
But I think we’ve all seen what happens to some people — men, mostly — who haven’t cultivated capacities other than the very traditional pathways to perceived masculinity.
I mean, I get it. There’s a reason I talk about the male need to feel dangerous with my therapist. There’s a line from the 2012 movie “Act of Valor,” about a Navy SEAL team, voiced over by an active-duty SEAL, that captures this dilemma, which is:
“Before my father died, he said the worst thing about growing old was that other men stopped seeing you as dangerous. I've always remembered that, how being dangerous was sacred, a badge of honor.”
For many older athletes, modulating if not letting go of the need to be seen as physically elite or, for men, as dangerous, as a socially acceptable form of masculine identity, remains unexamined aspects of our personalities.
But sooner or later, the time comes to work out that problem.
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.
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.
