This is a profound change in quality of life, and a lot of it has to do with a loss of this type of strength. I don't have a fraction of the explosive power I had at 25. Once you lose explosive strength, you start to lose overall strength. And once you lose that, you're going to start to lose muscle size is the very last thing. Like, what's the single most important exercise you could do if you could only do one? What did you clue as a consequence of going through the literature with regards to, say, uh, weightlifting rather than cardiovascular exercise? No metric is more highly associated with living a long life.
Just this is purely based on length of life. There's no metric anywhere in the medical literature that's more highly correlated with this than having a high v o two max. Vo two max is a measure of your peak cardiorespiratory fitness. However, the second most highly correlated metric of length of life is a composite metric of strength and muscle mass. So, in other words, people always ask me, why is it so important? I think it's important because those things are remarkable integral functions. They basically tell you they add up the work that has been done to that point.
So you don't just have a vo two max because you woke up one day and decided to do something positive. You have a high vo two max because you've been training very hard for a long period, uh, in many cases for years. Similarly, a person doesn't just wake up and have a lot of muscle mass or have a lot of great strength. Those things are the product of a lot of work, and I think that's why they are so potent. In fact, they are far more potent as predictors of a long life than all of the negative things you can imagine are predictors of a short life.
So when you look at things like smoking, type two diabetes, hypertension, and even the presence of cancer has a lesser impact on the shortness of your life than those other variables have on the length of your life. Yeah, I've read that grip strength, for example, is a good marker of propensity for longevity. Well, in everyone, but particularly in elderly people. And it isn't, as you pointed out because grip strength per se is particularly important, but because grip strength happens to be a good marker for overall what would you say, psychophysiological integrity 100%. Yeah, grip strength is one of the most potent, uh, so put it this way.
If you compare the top decile to the bottom decile in grip strength, it's a 70% difference in incidence. Death from dementia causes dementia. Not just Alzheimer's, but every form of dementia. When I was in my mid-20s, when I was 21 and 22, I weighed about 130 pounds, 135 pounds. I was six foot one, so very, very thin. And I spent about three years, four years intensely weightlifting and packed on about 35 pounds of muscle. I had to eat like a mad dog for about three years to do that. But one of the things I noticed that was really cool was that I also got to be a lot more coordinated.
I was using free weights because free weights help exercise all the little muscles and tendons. But it also seemed to me to be unbelievably useful for facilitating likely for facilitating nerve myelinization. And I thought then, think now, that that was probably a good marker that increase in coordination was probably a good marker for improved neurological function. As you age, um, it doesn't get a lot of attention, but sarcopenia, which is the loss of muscle mass, the wasting away that occurs with aging. Uh, and again, this begins rather subtly. Um, we lose what are called type two muscle fibers first.
That's the hallmark of aging. So the type of muscle fiber that's responsible for explosive power is the first one that begins to atrophy when we age. Uh, even at my age, I'm 50, I'm already experiencing that to a great extent. I don't have a fraction of the explosive power I had at 25. Um, once you lose explosive strength, you start to lose overall strength. And once you lose that, you're going to start to lose muscle size is the very last thing. So by the time a person is 75, the decline in muscle size, which is already preceding strength, uh, is significant.
Now, we can do a lot to prevent this, and I think that that's what's being captured by these statistics. The people who can delay that loss of strength and muscle mass are the ones who are going to live the longest on average. Yeah. So on the weightlifting front, we talked a little bit about what you could do simply to start working out on the cardiovascular front. And brisk walking is the simplest and most straightforwardly implementable strategy on that front. I would add one thing to that, Jordan, um, which is once a person reaches a certain level of fitness, the brisk walk may not be sufficient enough to produce enough cardiovascular stress.
Depends on where you live. But if you live in an area where you've got a lot of hills, that might not be the case. But for most people, there's a limit in human gait to how fast you can walk. And for most people, it's about 3.5 to maybe up to 4. Again, at a certain point, that's not going to be fast enough. So what we can do for that individual, rather than have them transition to running, I like to put weight on their back called rucking. So you carry a military-type backpack with plates of weight in the back, and now you, without putting additional stress on the knees, put additional stress on the cardio-respiratory system.
So I just throw that out there as additional ways to get this done. As I said, in my twenties, I worked out with free weights. And um, I have a set of adjustable free weights now. But what I found very straightforward and actually implementable is to use, I use about 2025-pound weights, depending on how often I'm doing it. And uh, I run through a set of exercises through my whole body, starting with my calves and moving upward. And I can do a whole workout routine, about two sets of 15 exercises in about 20 minutes.
And so for everyone listening, it's also very simple to use to start weightlifting, because all you need is a couple of dumbbells. Size is going to depend on your size and your strength. But you can do an awful lot with two dumbbells. You can exercise your body in all sorts of ways. So that combined with walking and you added another twist to that, that's not a bad initiation on the weightlifting front. Yeah, I think the other thing that I would say, and I think about this stuff all the time, so I have a very elaborate gym.
I do every sort of exercise you can imagine. But sometimes I like thinking and debating with people, like, what's the single most important exercise you could do if you could only do one. And for the lower body? For the lower body, I think step-ups would be so if you had just two dumbbells and a box, you can do anything right because you're going to do forward step up, backward step up, side step up. You can go heavy, you can go light. You focus on the concentric phase, which is the phase of getting up. Concentric is the phase of a muscle when it's getting shorter, but then you really get to focus on how slowly you can step down.
So my typical, I'm doing box step-ups at least twice a week. Um, I do a count of one up, three down. So taking three full seconds on that one leg to descend, and that's training, what we think of as the breaks. So when we age, this is a particular form of strength that deteriorates, which is eccentric strength, the strength that a muscle exhibits while it is getting longer. This is why so many old people fall. And the mortality of a fall when you are above the age of 65 is staggering. So depending on the series you look at, 15% to 30% of people over the age of 65 who fall and break a hip will be dead within a year of that fall.
Of those who survive, 50% of them will experience a reduction in class mobility. So means people who walk normally will walk with a cane. People who walk with a cane will walk with a walker. People who walk with a walker will be wheelchair-bound. This is a profound change in quality of life, and a lot of it has to do with a loss of this type of strength. If you think about it, people are much more likely to hurt themselves stepping off a curb when they get old than stepping onto a curb. It's these loss of breaks.
So, uh, yeah, a set of dumbbells, which you can carry around because that's really a very important piece of upper body strength is being able to carry something that's where that grip strength is coming from and being able to do step-ups, step downs, squats, all sorts of things. Uh, yeah, you don't want to let perfect be the enemy of good when it comes to initiating this type of thing. THANK YOU VERY MUCH .
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Thank you for your Massage !