Everyone Wants To Live A Long Life

Extra time is an incredible blessing, especially if it means more of all the wonderful feelings and experiences you love and treasure. Many had lost height and seemed shrunken. Fred had followed their careers and accomplishments throughout the years and had been impressed. They’d met from time to time over the years, but the difference between then and their most recent meeting was downright startling. Fred remembers standing back at one point, looking out and feeling sad. Unlike his Army buddies, Fred was taking on new challenges in his 70s, trying to capture the same enthusiasm he’d had for sports and action in his thirties. They were all once successful, talented, vibrant leaders of industry. The difference between Fred and so many others his age was stark and growing starker each year. There was a dividing line between the strong and the weak. Time had passed, and perhaps that made their obvious aging more apparent. But Fred’s energy level and lifestyle compared to theirs made it clear there was something else happening. Fred was living proof that people could age and get stronger simultaneously.

You Haven't Done Nothing

What separated them and those like Fred? Starting around 1880, after millennia of stagnation,3 our life expectancy crept up slowly. By 1950, we lived to be 68 years old on average in the United States. That’s almost unfathomable. Because we’ve been given the precious gift of time, most of us think that 39 or 40 is when life actually begins. What Causes This Increase in Life Expectancy? Cardiovascular disease, in particular, showed dramatic decreases due to better medications, surgery, and reduction in tobacco smoking. Not only that, but many corporate pensions are a thing of the past. Now we must prepare to take care of ourselves financially as we age. Personally, Fred thinks planning on retiring at 75 is more sensible. Not only are we not planning financially for this gift of added years,8 we’re also not viewing the years as potentially healthy ones. The ability to protect this gift of time is completely in our hands. Everyone wants to live long, but no one wants to suffer long. The StrongPath is rewriting what longevity looks like.

Learn To Be Still

No one fears living. What people fear is physical degeneration, indignity, disability, and suffering. Numbers like 95 or 100 years old commonly inspire visions of decrepitude, chronic disease, and suffering. These disturb and scare everyone. Everyone wants to live long, but no one wants to suffer long. The StrongPath is rewriting what longevity looks like. It maintains vigor and strength while reducing chronic disease and suffering to a minimum throughout life. Instead of fearing age or aging, embrace it. Few realize this opportunity exists as a choice. Being a centenarian can be a positive experience. Our behavior determines the path we choose. We are now living longer than ever before in history, nearly doubling our life span since the late nineteenth century due to extraordinary medical advances.

It's Too Late

The implications of those extra years of life are enormous. Unfortunately, many of us are not active enough, and we waste these later years because we do not realize that a change in our physical activity can dramatically improve the quality of these years. That needs to change and so does our view toward aging. We must embrace that gift by making those extra years healthy ones, not frail ones. This is a big reason we are so passionate about this cause. We’re tackling it as a project, because we want to turn the ship around for this country. Now that we are living longer, taking care of our strength has become critical. While we lose muscle and bone as we age, we gain fat. Body fat is not only unsightly, but it also initiates a systemic inflammatory response that can harm tissue health. While some deterioration in function and health is noticeable in certain people early on, most will not be fully aware of its impact until much later in life, as the cycle of musculoskeletal tissue loss and fat infiltration progressively increase. The result will be a dramatically increased rate of disabled, elderly people. If you don’t take action now and get up and get moving by building strength, you are letting the opportunity to enjoy your personal optimal health and strength slip through your fingers. Otherwise, long before your time, you will lose your independence, physical ability, and much of your dignity. Your strength will likely deteriorate to such a degree that you’ll slow way down. You don’t have to miss the long, strong life you can have. That’s why we’re sounding the alarm bells now. She continued by saying that because the recommendations were not always translated or interpreted by someone with a scientific or medical background, the recommendations often went unheeded. We are committed to serving as translators, bridging the research and medical communities with anyone who will listen. If you don’t take action now and get up and get moving by building strength, you are letting the opportunity to enjoy your personal optimal health and strength slip through your fingers. To us, there is nothing more important, valuable, or wonderful than being in your 80s doing all you have ever loved and still being able to improve. You will be happier in your 80s than ever before in your entire life because you will know that you saved your own life. You need to ask yourself that simple question. If your lifestyle is mostly sedentary, those years will likely be unhealthy and unhappy ones. It is called sarcopenia, and we need to understand it to combat it. Their value has been reduced to existing. Because people aren’t aging well. They are deteriorating and giving up, because they don’t believe they can age better. They’re living longer but not better. That’s why the differences between our lives and those of our longtime buddies and peers, and our relative views of life in general, were growing more profound with every passing day. We have learned from experience that frailty does not have to come with age.