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