Episode 67 Strength in the Longevity Era: Training for One-Hundred-Year Bodies

Something has shifted in the way scientists and physicians and researchers talk about aging, and if you have not been following it closely, the shift is significant enough that it deserves your attention. For most of human history, the question of how long a person would live was largely answered by accident, infection, and starvation. Life expectancy was short not because bodies wore out at forty but because the world was extremely efficient at ending lives before they had a chance to. Once you removed the major killers — infectious disease, childhood mortality, war, famine — the body turned out to be considerably more durable than anyone had expected. We are now in an era where the major killers in the developed world are largely chronic — heart disease, type two diabetes, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, metabolic dysfunction. And here is the thing that makes this era different from any that preceded it: we now understand, with reasonable precision, how lifestyle and training choices influence the trajectory of each of these conditions. We can measure it. We can model it. We can see, in longitudinal data that spans decades and hundreds of thousands of people, that the choices made by a forty-year-old body have profound consequences for the body that same person will inhabit at seventy, eighty, or ninety. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices