Health Library
Free to read. No account, no paywall. Training, nutrition, hormones, and the longevity treatments everyone’s selling — what they are, what the evidence shows, and what it doesn’t.
58 articles
TrainingI want you to try something. Sit down on the floor, cross-legged. Now stand up without using your hands, your knees, or the furniture.
TrainingI ask new clients to write down everything they ate yesterday. Not to judge it — to count the protein.
TrainingIf I could get every client over 45 to take one supplement, it'd be this one, and it costs about fifteen dollars a month.
TrainingThere's a fitness number that tracks with how long people live better than almost anything else we measure, and hardly anyone over 45 knows theirs.
TrainingA hip fracture at 75 is not a broken bone. It's a life event.
TrainingThe two things that end training careers after 45 are injuries and quitting, and they're usually the same event.
TrainingFour out of five people get significant back pain at some point, and the bracket where it lands hardest is exactly the one reading this.
Training"My doctor told me to stop squatting because of my knees." I hear this constantly and it's usually a misunderstanding of something more specific that got said.
TrainingThe shoulder is the most mobile joint you own, and it paid for that mobility with stability.
TrainingA woman told me she'd stopped jumping. Not stopped training — stopped jumping, specifically.
TrainingPain on the outside of your hip. Worse lying on that side at night. Worse climbing stairs, getting out of the car, standing on one leg to put trousers on.
TrainingA woman in her early fifties told me her shoulder went first. Then her hip. Then plantar fasciitis in one foot, then the other.
TrainingYou know the one. The first ten steps out of bed feel like standing on a stone.
TrainingLet me take something off your conscience first. Your posture is probably not why your neck hurts.
TrainingTwo things to clear up before anything useful can be said. Crunches will not remove the fat over your abdomen.
TrainingEveryone who gets hurt coming back gets hurt in the first six weeks, and almost always for the same reason: they felt good.
TrainingA hand dynamometer costs about thirty dollars.
TrainingMost home gyms are bought in the wrong order.
TrainingMost people over 45 don't fail at training because their program was suboptimal. They fail because they built a program for a life they don't have.
TrainingThe guy who taught me the most about training after 50 was a 63-year-old who surfed four mornings a week and couldn't get off the floor without putting a hand down.
LifestylePeople will spend six hundred dollars a month on supplements to raise their testosterone and won't go to bed an hour earlier.
LifestyleA client came to me plateaued. Training six days a week, eating clean, getting nowhere and feeling worse each month.
LifestyleThis is the module people skip, so I'll keep it short and honest and let you do what you want with it.
LifestyleSomeone shows me a lab report at the gym about once a month, points at a number highlighted in red, and asks what it means.
LifestyleThe recovery industry has gotten very good at selling you things, and the honest ranking doesn't match the price list.
LifestyleThe supplement industry in the US is enormous and it is not regulated the way most people assume.
LifestyleHigh blood pressure has no symptoms. That's the entire problem with it.
LifestyleThe weight showing up around your middle in your late forties isn't the same as the weight you carried at 25, and that's not a figure of speech.
LifestyleAsk people over 50 what they're most afraid of and it usually isn't a heart attack.
LifestyleThis is the module men skip and it might be the most important one in the library, so I'm going to be direct and get it over with.
LifestyleA client of mine did everything right for twelve weeks. Trained four days, ate properly, slept.
LifestyleGut health became a marketing category somewhere around 2015 and it's been downhill since. There's real science underneath it.
LifestyleThe fittest 60-year-old I know is not the most talented person I've trained. He's not especially strong for his size and he's never done anything dramatic.
LifestyleFasting is the most popular eating strategy of the last decade and the one I've watched backfire most often in people over 45.
LifestyleBy 55, a lot of people are on at least one prescription.
LifestyleHere's something that doesn't get said plainly: caffeine is a genuinely effective performance drug, it's the most widely used one on earth, and almost everyone…
LifestyleTraining in Hawaii is a different job from training in a temperate climate, and the electrolyte industry has done a very good job of making something simple…
LifestyleThis is the least fun module in the library and probably the most valuable, so I'll keep it tight.
LifestyleWe live at a latitude where the UV index hits levels the mainland sees a few weeks a year, and it does it most of the year.
LifestyleThirty years of public argument, two tribes, enormous quantities of book sales, and the honest answer is boring.
LifestyleTwo people lose twenty pounds. One is stronger, leaner and holding it a year later.
LifestyleLiving here means training in heat and humidity most of the year.
LifestyleLiving on an island means when you travel, you travel. Five hours minimum to anywhere, usually more, usually with a time change that isn't polite.
Longevity techI spent an afternoon reading the actual service menus of wellness and longevity centers in Austin, because Austin has become one of the densest concentrations of…
Longevity techHyperbaric oxygen is the most interesting thing on the longevity menu, and it's also the one where you're most likely to pay for something quite different from…
Longevity techThe infusion menu is where longevity clinics make a lot of their money, and it's the category where the gap between how it feels and what it does is widest.
Longevity techA friend of mine flew to Panama and spent twenty-six thousand dollars on a stem cell treatment for his knees.
Longevity techThis is the part of the longevity industry I'm most enthusiastic about, and it's the part people skip because it isn't as fun as a cryo chamber.
Longevity techEverything in the previous few modules happens at a clinic.
Longevity techRed light is on the menu at every wellness center in America now, and it's the category where I most often get asked "is this real or is it nonsense?" The answer…
HormonesSomething changes in your mid-forties and nobody hands you a manual. You're sleeping the same hours and waking up tired.
HormonesThe ad finds you somewhere around your second bad month. Tired, thick around the middle, nothing in the tank.
HormonesA woman came to me at 54 convinced she'd missed her window. She'd read that after menopause you can't really build muscle anymore, so what was the point.
HormonesWalk into a longevity clinic in Austin, Scottsdale or Miami and you'll get handed a menu with words on it nobody has ever explained to you.
HormonesYou're 52, you've been training hard for two years, and you follow a guy your age online who looks like a comic book character.
HormonesIf you've heard of one longevity molecule, it's this one.
HormonesMore of my clients are on one of these than aren't, some weeks. And the conversation I keep having isn't about whether to take it.
HormonesThere's a short list of prescription drugs that the longevity world has adopted off-label, and if you spend any time in this space you'll hear all of them.