Once you reach my age, you think about death in the following ways:

• How old will my kids be when I die? (While hoping that’s well into their adulthood.)

• Are my or my wife’s parents going to have serious health complications and need at-home care?

• What will my final years look like?

If you’re younger, then you most likely exercise for vanity. That was why I did it in my 20’s and 30’s. Your perspective changes.

Then what?

Peter Attia seeks to answer those questions in Outlive:The Science and Art of Longevity (amazon affiliate link).

It’s a great book and you should read it, because it’s very hard to find a comprehensive book on health and longevity. Get Serious by Dr. Brett Osborn was the previous book I’d recommend for an all-in-one treatment of health. A lot has happened since Get Serious launched.

Once you begin to think about an outcome, you look at risk. This is how you always think about big life problems / challenges.

You have two hurdles here. The first one is what will kill you (lifespan). The second one is what will make your life harder or miserable (healthspan).

The four big killers are cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease (Alzheimer’s / dementia / Parkinson’s), and metabolic syndrome (sarcopenia, type II diabetes, being obese and then getting sick, having a cytokine storm that your body can’t fight off).

Or you don’t have enough muscle mass to catch yourself from a fall.

If I want to live to be 80 or 90 and not confined to a Lazy-B recliner, what do I need to do?

Peter Attia’s model goes a bit beyond this. He wants to live to be 100, and during these last decades of his life, wants to be able to perform various life tasks that we all take for granted:

• Bend over to pick your grandkid up

• Get up from a sitting position on the floor (while playing with grandchildren) without using both arms

• Take a hike

• Carry groceries

• Have sex

• Etc

If you’re in your 20’s or 30’s, you’re rolling your eyes going OK BOOMER. And sure, that’s fair. I give 0 second thoughts to that stuff.

Today, anyway.

I have multiple gym memberships because sometimes I don’t have time to drive to the bigger gym. At the YMCA, you see a lot of older people exercising, which is great. You’ll notice that most of the men have really skinny legs. It never clicked before.

Sarcopenia is the muscle loss associated with aging. If you remain natty, some degree of muscle loss will happen. If you don’t keep training legs hard, you’ll have stick legs.

Maybe that seems obvious to some of you. For me it was less so as old people in American culture are largely invisible. We don’t give much thought to their lives. Not because we’re malicious. We have our own stuff going on.

You’ll also notice that an older person usually doesn’t get up from a chair like they are doin