Skip to main content

Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You're 80 and Beyond by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge

Excellent book, readable, amusing even, with excellent advice on several levels.


Notes:

Aging vs decay: normal biological process vs optional biological process.

Choosing a "springtime" state of health vs winter/hibernation state.


Growth or decay, no middle ground... kind of like investing, you're either at new highs or in drawdown.

The need for struggle, privation, fasting, eustress, etc.


First Rule: exercise 6 days a week for the rest of your life.

Exercise as a "master signaler"


Second Rule: do serious aerobic exercise 4 days a week for the rest of your life.

The concept of "kedging": doing something really hard or way outside your comfort zone. Salience, growth opportunity... "BOOH" (breaking out of homeostasis) too.


Third rule: weight training, two days a week for the rest of your life.

Power is a function of strength as well as neural coordination.

Fall risk is massively reduced by weight training.

Coordinated strength sports: skiing, tennis

Proprioception

Yoga


On mindset: not getting grumpy, on staying "modern" in dress and demeanor, in your metaperception and meta-proprioception.


Fourth Rule: spend less than you make.


Fifth Rule: quit eating crap

Your body was not designed for overabundance or idleness. Our modern diet is outside our body's design parameters.

Alcohol: "You get another shot in retirement at being an alcoholic."

"In retirement, normal eating will make you fat; normal drinking will make you drunk."


Sixth Rule: Care

"Teddy doesn't care" On caring/having something to care about.

Keep a log. "Keep a log or lose your command."


Seventh Rule: Connect and commit.

Limbic brain and its play/love/connect and work together circuitry.

Humans as pack animals.

Limbic resonance

"Default to yes" and also organize stuff for others.


"I believe I am going to have an interesting life. I'm not going to pass my last years in idleness, petulance and anxiety."


"Exercise is absolutely the most important message of this book. Movement *is* life... most of what we call aging is decay, and decay is optional."


Metaphor about career paths for the young as superhighways: carefully marked, with huge, legible signs, while the paths of retirement are more like back roads, country lanes, with no signs to tell you where to go.


Levels of fitness:

1: 45 minutes of long, slow aerobic exercise at 60-65% of max heart rate without discomfort

2: 45 minutes at 60-65% of max heart rate four days a week with 2 days a week of weight training

3: 1-2 days at 60-65% of max heart rate and 1-2 days at 70-85% of max, plus interval training at 85-100% of max, plus 2 days weight training. Can combine aerobics and weights on single days. Add in a extra long workout at least one day a month.


Reading List:

Precision Heart Training -- Edmund Burke

Serious Training for Endurance Athletes -- Rob Sleamaker and Ray Browning

Long Distance -- Bill McKibben

Why We Run -- Bernd Heinrich

Successful Aging -- John W. Rowe and Robert L. Kahn

Never Cry Wolf -- Farley Mowat

How the Mind Works -- Steven Pinker

More Posts

Good Thinking: The Foundations of Probability and its Applications by Irving J. Good

This collection of scientific papers is a challenging but useful discussion on statistical methods, probability, randomness, logic and decision-making. Much of the book centers around Bayesian statistical methods and when and why to use them, as well as "philosophy of science"-type discussions on when a scientist should--or sometimes must--apply subjective judgments to scientific problems. It will help enormously if you've had a semester or two of statistics to really get at the meat of this book. If not, scroll down a few paragraphs for a short list of layperson-friendly books that address many of these subjects more accessibly. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] Author Irving Good worked with Alan Turing at ...
Read more

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Tedious, weak, and worst of all  "riddled" with errors  and oversights. Do not read. I recommend instead  Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction  by J. Allan Hobson  for information about the REM/dreaming stage of sleep, as well as  Restful Sleep  by Deepak Chopra  for readers interested in practical help for improving sleep quality. Unlike Why We Sleep , both of these books are short, direct, readable and clear. Sadly, I also have to spend a brief few sentences  on Alexey Guzey's devastating criticisms of this book . Alexey's entire post is very much worth reading, but if you want to see just one glaring example of atrocious academic ethics, you can start with a chart Matthew Walker uses in Chapter 6 to prove a linear relationship between sleep loss and sports injury-- except that he cuts off the part of the chart that disproves his argument . This is childish middle school stuff, way beneath the line of a Berkeley and Harvard professor, a...
Read more

Ghost Boy by Martin Pistorius

Read this book and you'll never complain, ever, about anything. Imagine being trapped in a vegetative body but with full cognition and awareness. You can hear, see and understand everything, but you can't move or do anything. Everyone around you--your family, your caregivers, everyone--thinks you're a literal vegetable. And some of those around you will act like it, having insulting conversations about you while you're right there. Some caregivers--not all of them, mercifully--will handle you like a slab of meat. Occasionally you'll be rolled over to a performative "activity" in which a caregiver drags your fingerpainted hand across a paper, so your care facility can show your family you aren't spending all day staring at the wall. But yet you do spend most of your time staring at the wall, or worse, watching Barney . You will come to hate Barney with all your soul. Imagine living like this. For years . Until one caregiver really looks at you, really...
Read more