Five Reasons Old People (and Everyone Else) Should Work Out Harder

My surgeon gave me the go-ahead on Tuesday to resume full-fledged exercising. That means lifting heavy, hard sprinting, and submission wrestling. I’m eager to get back into it. And for good reasons.

Most people my age have abandoned vigorous exercise – i.e., sprinting, and heavy strength training – in favor of less strenuous activities such as yoga, Pilates, and walking. I get it. I feel like I’ve done my life’s quota of heavy squats and 50-yard dashes. And isn’t it dangerous to exercise too hard? Isn’t that how oldsters get strokes and heart attacks?

The short answer is no. There are certainly circumstances and situations when hard exercise is dangerous. But they are exceptions. Not the rule. The literature I’ve read on exercising for old people – and I’ve been reading it for at least 20 years – has shown that exercising is good and that exercising hard is even better.

Three reasons:

* Sprinting and other demanding cardiovascular exercise improves blood flow, reduces blood pressure, and improves heart health.

* Strong legs reduce the likelihood of falling. And falling, for old and frail people, is the number one way to die.

* Vigorous exercise has also been shown to improve mood. (Almost invariably, my best mood every day is after I’ve spent an hour wrestling.)

But that’s not all. Recently, I read a study that gave me an even better reason to work hard on strength training. It found that strength training, more than any other type of exercise, has the most impact on longevity. People that keep a fair amount of muscle on their bodies live years longer than those that don’t.

And if those four reasons aren’t enough, here’s a surprising fifth: Exercising hard is an antidote to cognitive decline. Mild exercise doesn’t do it. Pushing yourself in the gym will.

Check out this link to read Peter Attia’s summary of all this research.

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Trump Is Still Head of the Republican Party 

A new poll shows that 47% of likely GOP voters would vote Trump if the election were held today. Only 28% would vote DeSantis. Nellie Bowles, writing in Common Sense, had this to say about it:

“For anyone hoping the calm, buttoned-up Florida Governor Ron DeSantis takes over as the more civilized head of the Republican party, it’s not looking likely. At least not without Donald Trump’s gracious exit and selfless blessing. And if there’s one thing we all know Trump is great at, it’s gracious, selfless acts.  We are all doomed to have Biden versus Trump for a thousand years. When they’re 500-year-old mummies, they will still run against each other. Candidates who are mummies or, otherly-living persons, are no less capable than you or me. To suggest otherwise is frankly ableist.”

Diesel Fuel Levels Are Crazy Low 

The US is down to 25 days of diesel supply, according to the Energy Information Administration. That’s the lowest it’s been for October since records have been kept (1993). Diesel is the fuel used by freight trains and long-haul truckers to transport most of the goods/food consumed in the US. The good news for Democrats: If the supply chain stops, it will happen after the mid-term elections. Get the details here.

 

America’s “Rattiest” Cities

Each fall, rodents invade an estimated 21 million homes in the US. Since the pandemic, according to Orkin, the pest control company, it’s only gotten worse. “Rodent infestations are among the top pest issues of the fall and winter seasons,” said Ben Hottel, an Orkin entomologist. “Not only are mice and rats a nuisance, but they are known to spread a variety of dangerous diseases.”

On Oct. 17, Orkin released its yearly list of the “50 Rattiest Cities.” Not surprisingly, the top spots went to America’s most woke cities: Chicago, New York, LA, Washington DC, and San Francisco.

Click here to see where your favorite city ranks.

 

The Bamboozle Game 

Whatever your political bias is, you must admit it. This guy Hawley is very good at highlighting the hypocrisy in presidential appointees. Watch him in action here.

 

The Economic Forecast for 2023: Gloomier and Gloomier 

A major survey of US economists found that, on average, they put the probability of a recession in the next 12 months at 63%. That’s up from 49% in July’s survey. Click here to find out why they’ve changed their expectations. 

 

San Francisco’s Mayor Apologizes for Telling the Truth

In a predictably ironic development in race-based politics, the mayor of San Francisco, who is Black, has been accused of racism for saying out loud something that every city denizen knows to be true: The city’s open-air drug market is dominated by Honduran drug dealers. Click here for the whole story.
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Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End 

By Atul Gawande

282 pages

First published Oct. 7, 2014

 Someone must have recommended it. And I must have asked Gio to order it for me. It appeared on my desk last Monday.

I wondered whether it was suggested as something I should read after writing about my stroke. I couldn’t remember. But I liked the look of the book. The size, the thickness, the cover design. And I liked the title.  Being Mortal promises a philosophical treatment of one of the deepest questions we can ask ourselves. And the subtitle – What Matters in the End– promises a big and useful answer. An idea that could change or advance my view of death.

It didn’t take me many pages to realize that the author had a somewhat different objective in writing the book. For him, the question is about geriatric medicine: What should our goals be in terms of providing health care to the old and dying?

Doctors, Gawande says, are too often uncomfortable dealing with their dying patients’ understandable anxieties. They choose, instead, to give them treatments that don’t improve the quality of their remaining years and can make things worse.

One of his most provocative arguments is that hard-won health and safety reporting requirements for elder care facilities might satisfy family members but ignore what really matters to the patients. Despite the popularity of the term “assisted living,” he says, “we have no good metrics for a place’s success in assisting people to live.” And as he points out, a “safe” life isn’t what most people really want.

Although, Gawande identifies no perfect solutions to the problems he presents, the presentation is important and stirring. If nothing else, reading this book will help you better prepare for your own or your loved ones’ final days.

Critical Reception 

* “In his newest and best book, Gawande has provided us with a moving and clear-eyed look at aging and the harms we do in turning it into a medical problem, rather than a human one.” (The New York Review of Books)

* “Gawande’s book is so impressive that one can believe that it may well [change the medical profession].” (Diana Athill, Financial Times/UK)

* “A needed call to action, a cautionary tale of what can go wrong, and often does, when a society fails to engage in a sustained discussion about aging and dying.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Click here to watch a video review of Being Mortal.

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Just in Time for Halloween: “The 50 Scariest Books of All Time” 

I saw the headline on the Book Riot website, and wondered if The Haunting of Hill House – which I reviewed last week – was included. It was. Fifth on the list. The list also included a sprinkling of the usual suspects, such as Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery, as well as some other scary (though not in the Halloween sense) titles. 1984 by George Orwell and Night by Elie Wiesel, for example, were in the top five, along with The Haunting.

It’s worth it to peruse the list. You’ll find not just scary books you’ve never heard of, but books about such things as Chernobyl, the Ebola virus, and the forgotten massacre of hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians in WWII. Click here to take a look.

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Here’s another example of why visual artists should not be allowed to use words.

This is an installation on the façade of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. It is by someone named Katharina Cibulka. According to the dumbos that write for ArtNews, it is part of an ongoing project titled “SOLANGE” (German for “as long as”) in which Cibulka has “transformed public construction sites into textual displays that draw on feminism.”

What is dumber? Cibulka’s statement or the explanation?

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From CA:

“The video you posted in your Oct. 21 blog showing attempts to engage college students in meaningful debate was a perfect example of the subject of the book The Coddling of the American Mind. And here’s a quote I found online that sums it up: ‘We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that stupid people won’t be offended.’”

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The conservancy that I’m developing in West Delray Beach, FL, has one of the largest and best-curated palm tree collections in the world, as well as a growing collection of outdoor sculptures, a traditionally styled Japanese tea house, a stock of African cycads, and dozens of other exotic plants and trees.

This is one of the palms:

Ivory Crownshaft Palm

Binomial name: Pinanga dicksonii

The Ivory Crownshaft is a clustering species of palm from southern India. It is a slender tree with pinnate leaves, golden to pale yellow crownshafts, and bright pink inflorescence. (The inflorescence is the complete flower head of a plant, including stems, stalks, bracts, and flowers.)

For more information about Paradise Palms, click here.

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“Thanks for validating my beliefs of the liberal arts education system [in the Oct. 21 issue]! But the purpose of my message is to say I was expecting a definition of ‘autodidact’ and not the lowly ‘feisty.’ However, what I have learned is that I am in fact a complete autodidact and much of my knowledge, and thirst for knowledge, has come from you. Thank you for that!” – TM

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Feeling Low…

 

I’ve been feeling low. My numbers (on my mood scale) have dropped from the 7.5 to 8.5 range to 6.5 to 7.5. That’s the difference between “Ready-to-go!” and “Why-should-I-bother?”

Because I track my moods so closely, I am not worried about this lingering malaise. I know from experience that I will get past it eventually. And in the short term, I can boost myself from 6.5 to 7.0 in a single day by doing the same things that have worked in the past.

Although I believe that severe depression is almost never “caused” by an individual event, moderate drops in mood can be. In my case, there is some residual psychological detritus from feeling close to death. And then, while I was pulling myself up from that, I had to deal with the news that two friends of mine had died.

 Margie ran our English language program at FunLimón, the community center that my family established in Nicaragua, across the street from Rancho Santana. She was in her late 80s when, about two months ago, she had a stroke, from which she eventually died.

 Margie was an astonishingly vibrant and accomplished woman. She was a mother and a nurse and a teacher, but she was also an adventurer, a pioneer, and a ball-busting business partner. (I did a deal with her once. That was enough!) She was also a wonderfully giving person, who spent her last 15 years living in Nicaragua – teaching, befriending, helping, and caring for the locals. At her funeral, half the town showed up.

 Two years ago, I had the idea to make a small-scale documentary film about the lives of some of our eldest residents of Rancho Santana. We spent a year interviewing and filming them. Margie was one. (When the movie is finished, I’ll give you a link to it.)

 And then, just yesterday, I received word that my good friend Joselito had died.

 Joselito was another amazingly accomplished and astonishingly loving and giving person. He passed from esophageal cancer, which he’d been battling for about a year.

 I’d known Joselito for about 25 years. He was one of the first Nicaraguans I met outside of my Nicaraguan partners. He was a singer and guitar player whose repertoire of Spanish love songs was endless. For 25 years, he would travel every weekend for four or five hours to get from his home to the Ranch. And he would spend two or three days playing and singing for our guests, performing at small functions, and selling off-brand cigars on the side.

 Joselito had a beautiful voice and a unique way of playing the guitar (as I’ve been told by guitar players). He wrote songs for and about people, including one about me, one about Rancho Santana, and two love songs for Number Three Son’s girlfriends, the second of whom became his wife. About 10 years ago, I arranged for Joselito to travel to New York City with me, so that Number Two Son could produce an album of some of his best songs and covers. Number Two Son had arranged for some of the finest Latin musicians to accompany Joselito, including Tito Puente’s drummer. The record came out very well. (I have copies for sale if you want one.) But that weekend, itself, watching Joselito charm everyone around him in the Big Apple, was an experience I will never forget.

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