Review and summary: Younger Next year

Although the first edition was written in 2004, many of the key ideas in Younger Next Year for fighting aging hold up well. In short, Chris Crowly and Henry S. Lodge implore us to:

1. Do an hour of Zone 2 cardio four times per week

2. Strength train 2-3 times a week

3. Invest in human relationships

4. Care about something, anything, anyone

The book is written conversationally and lightheartedly. At times, that comes at the expense of brevity, and I found myself skimming over some long stories and anecdotes.

A few ideas, however, don’t hold up. One chapter extols the virtues of moderate drinking, going so far as to say “the science is settled” on the topic.

Spoiler alert: the science was not settled. It now seems pretty clear the optimal amount of alcohol is zero. And while moderate drinking isn’t fatal, it isn’t helpful, either.

Booze snafus aside, the philosophies in the book give you a better chance for a strong “last third,” as the authors calls the latter stages of life. Lift. Get cardio. Care about people and purpose.

Solid advice for any stage of life, really. And if you’re currently in midlife, the time to set up a strong foundation for the “Golden Years” is right now. This book can help.

Notes and Kindle Highlights from Younger Next Year

There are tides in our lives that carry us forward or back. When you’re a kid, the tide is behind you and you go forward, no matter what you do. Stronger, more coordinated, better focused . . . better able to understand and cope. But at some point the tide inside your body goes slack and the free ride is over. And then, in an instant, it turns against you.

the tide is not that strong. It looks strong, because it’s so steady, so remorseless. Yet it’s manageable, in the sense that you can turn its relentless power to your own purposes.

You should exercise hard almost every day of your life—say, six days a week. And do strength training. Lift weights, two of those six days. Exercise is the great key to aging.

And you have to care about something. Goals. Charities . . . people . . . family . . . job . . . hobbies.

Some 70 percent of premature death and aging is lifestyle-related.

So how do we keep ourselves from decaying? By changing the signals we send to our bodies. The keys to overriding the decay code are daily exercise, emotional commitment, reasonable nutrition, and a real engagement with living.

Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life.

Here is this wack-a-doo tide, right inside your own precious body, that wants you to get old and fat and sick and stupid.

Biologically, there is no such thing as retirement, or even aging. There is only growth or decay, and your body looks to you to choose between them.

muscles control the chemistry of growth throughout your whole body.

One: Decay triggers growth. And two: Exercise turns on inflammation, which automatically turns on repair.

Cytokine-6, or C-6 for short, is the master chemical for inflammation (decay), and cytokine-10, or C-10, is the master chemical for repair and growth.

Do serious aerobic exercise four days a week for the rest of your life.

You become more fit with harder exercise, but you gain more endurance and general healthiness with prolonged light exercise.

Animals in nature never move out of their low aerobic zone unless they’re hunting, being hunted, or playing (rehearsal for the first two).

you should do low aerobic exercise a couple of days a week to build your base, and then go out and play hard on the high-aerobic fields the other days. Tell your body it’s springtime.

Consistency trumps intensity every time.

Sailing ships, becalmed and threatened, sometimes had to resort to kedging

The captain would have a light anchor (a kedge) loaded into a longboat and rowed half a mile or so away. The longboat crew would set the anchor, and everyone back on the big boat would pull like demons on the line, literally hauling the ship to the anchor. Then they’d do it again, until they got where they had to go.

kedging: climbing out of the ordinary, setting a desperate goal and working like crazy to get there. To save yourself.

what we have in mind is stuff like booking an adventure trip—skiing, hiking, or whatever—that’s beyond your ability and training hard for months to get in shape to handle

Or buying a piece of gear that’s way too good for you and working into it.

serious strength training, with weights, two days a week for the rest of your life.

In the normal course (and please remember that the “normal course” is no longer your friend), you lose 0.3 to 0.5 percent of your bone mass every year after age forty.

the tide is sucking the bone out of your bones at the rate of perhaps one percent every couple of years.

(My trainer says two days is for maintenance, three days is for getting stronger.)

we aren’t aware of nerve decay as we get older, but it’s the main reason our joints wear out, our muscles get sloppy, and our ability to be physically alert and powerful begins to fade. And it is reversible with strength training.

Lifting weights until you can’t lift them anymore . . . that really turns on C-10.

Your muscles have strength cells and endurance cells, and they are different.

Muscle endurance cells are known as slow-twitch. They have more mitochondria, more endurance, and less power.

Muscle strength cells are known as fast-twitch: fewer mitochondria, less endurance, and much more power.

Aerobic exercise saves your life; strength training makes it worth living.

some foods—especially carbs and sugars—spike short, intense cycles of renewed hunger. You feel hungrier, sooner, after a plate of French fries than after a bowl of spinach.

The message from thousands of studies, over decades of medical research, is clear: Never go on a diet again.

As you know by now, this whole book has one core message—either you grow or you decay.

Good nutrition happens in the supermarket, not in the kitchen.

Harry’s Sixth Rule. Harry’s Sixth Rule reads, in its entirety: Care.

Harry’s Seventh Rule: Connect and commit. It means rededicating yourself to family, friends, companions.

One of the great keys to caring about your own life is to watch it.

keep a simple log in which you write down, every stinking day, these three things: 1) what I ate, 2) what I did for exercise (or didn’t), and 3) what I did with my life—sexually, socially, morally . . . whatever lights your fire.

You can think of it as the emotional brain, but its real name is the limbic brain.

Just as sure as there is a biological tide that sets against you at fifty, there’s a weird social tide that sets against you almost simultaneously, stupid though that may be. So, you can be proud of any success you have—including

including the serious joy of just trying.

Exercise—especially intense aerobic exercise, but strength training, too—radically boosts what I think of as the basic executive attributes: energy, optimism, decisiveness, interest, resistance to stress, and resistance to depression. And intelligence.

Cognitive skills refer to those brain processes that allow us to think, reason, read, focus our attention, and acquire new data or information. Psychomotor skills, by contrast, refer to physical aptitudes that can be measured outside the brain, such as the speed of eye-hand coordination and the steadiness and strength of motor skills.

neurons in an area of the brain known as the substantia nigra are particularly prone to degeneration with advancing age, which is why we see Parkinson’s disease go from a prevalence of one person per 100,000 in the fifty-and-under age group and then soar to a staggering rate of nearly 1,200 per 100,000 people from fifty to the ripe old age of ninety.

Similarly, we find that neurons in the hippocampus, the area of the brain dedicated to memory storage and recall, are particularly sensitive to “neuronal drop-out”

What do superagers do that we don’t?

they think.

we are talking about pursuing new lines of intellectual interest, learning new languages, undertaking a new career where you must study loads of new information, resupplying your intellectual toolbox, or undertaking a whole new line of research.

Exercise for life is the single most important factor in maintaining your brain fitness. Period.

a good exercise routine can lower your risk of dementia by more than half!

Leading an intellectually challenging lifestyle seems to sustain neuronal health even well into advanced old age.

“This is not the time to retire. It is the time to rewire!”

you have to help your brain find sleep so your brain (and the rest of you, too) can remain healthy.

Most of what we call aging is decay, and decay is optional;

career paths for the young are actually superhighways, carefully marked with huge, legible signs: go to college. take this exit to procter & gamble. become a useful cog in the American economy. But, he says, the paths of retirement are back roads or country lanes, with no signs to tell you where to go.

It’s clear from research over the past thirty years that being happy is largely a choice. It’s a decision you make in your limbic brain, with very little regard to external circumstances and with virtually no regard to money. Deciding to be happy may be the most serious commitment you can make for the Next Third.