If you are getting older, or will at some point get older, you owe it to yourself to read this. (Yes, that means everyone should read this...)
[B]arbell training signals for survival and for growth. It forces muscles to grow stronger and more flexible, tendons and ligaments to become thicker, bones to start sopping up calcium and lay down new matrix, kinesthetic perception to get with the program, and endocrine systems to get off their ass...
I’m not talking about a panacea here. Barbell training won’t bring back your cartilage, improve your eyesight or shrink your prostate. Like the neuron or the lymphocyte talked off the ledge by a peptide growth factor, the individual who trains with a barbell cannot stave off death and disease forever. And training won’t work for everybody—many individuals will be too debilitated or too moribund to train. Many more simply won’t be willing—staying strong comes with a price, and that price is hard work...
[T]he preponderance of the scientific evidence, flawed as it is, strongly indicates that we can change the trajectory of decline. We can recover functional years that would otherwise have been lost. There is much talk in the aging studies community about “compression of morbidity,” a shortening of the dysfunctional phase of the death process. Instead of slowly getting weaker and sicker and circling the drain in a protracted, painful descent that can take hellish years or even decades, we can squeeze our dying into a tiny sliver of our life cycle. Instead of slowly dwindling into an atrophic puddle of sick fat, our death can be like a failed last rep at the end of a final set of heavy squats. We can remain strong and vital well into our last years, before succumbing rapidly to whatever kills us. Strong to the end. That, my friends, is Big Medicine.
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