A Fitness Program for 2023

Good for the Young as Well as the Older

Since my stroke three months ago, I’ve been trying to get back into my former physical shape. I want to reclaim my strength, speed, flexibility, and stamina – the things that make it possible to play Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Enjoying my favorite sport is a good reason to get fit again. But a better reason, thanks to surviving the stroke, is the recognition that achieving certain levels of physical performance health should not only extend but also enhance the quality of my life.

I’ve been reading about and reporting on fitness and longevity regularly since early 2000. In that time, there has been an unending stream of studies on those topics with a variety of findings. (As you might expect.) But of everything I’ve read, including many meta-studies, there are two objectives that matter more than any of the others.

They are not, as one might expect, those things that one notices most about aging: the diminishing flexibility, stamina, and balance. Those are important. But the studies show that the thing that matters most is strength: muscular strength, skeletal strength, and the strength of the heart and lungs.

If you are younger than 50, my approach to exercise may be similar to the one you are doing now. I exercise all the muscle groups and my lungs pretty hard. People 50 and over are typically advised to (or feel comfortable with) exercise that is less intense. When it comes to training my heart, my approach would have been considered radical for anyone over 40 and downright dangerous for anyone in his 70s. And many doctors and fitness experts that are not familiar with all the recent studies (like the one below) would have that view today. So, find someone that you trust, who is also up to date on fitness studies, to advise you personally.

My exercise routine is based on the notion that to make your body stronger – and that includes not only your muscles but your skeleton, your heart, and your lungs – you have to stress it by pushing yourself harder than you probably want to. It means lifting more weight, sprinting faster, and generally pushing yourself towards exhaustion.

This is what I do:

Although I schedule six hour and a half workouts a week, I do fewer than that at least one week a month. Four of those sessions are doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. The way I train (hard for an hour of the 90 minutes), it exercises my entire body, inside and out, and leaves me exhausted. Two days a week I do a physical fitness training. This consists of about 40 to 50 minutes of heavy and intense weightlifting, 20 minutes of intense cardiovascular exercise (usually four 5-minute bike sprints), and 20 to 30 minutes of stretching.

My goal in weightlifting is to exhaust my muscles. That means lifting like a power lifter or an Olympic lifter (hard and fast), rather than a body builder (less weight and more control). And I try to get stronger, either in terms of maximum strength or stamina.

My goal in cardiovascular exercise is to do at least three bike sprints (on an Aerodyne bike) in 30 minutes. Given the condition of my knees these days, it’s tough. (Believe me!) I don’t do a single five-minute ride at a moderate pace. I sprint as hard as I can for 15 seconds, continue at a moderate rate for 10 seconds, and repeat. I monitor my heart while I bike. My goal is to get my heart to its maximum level, which in my condition these days is about 170 beats.

If I have a good workout:

* I will have achieved a heart rate of 170 beats at least once.

* I will feel physically exhausted – like I could not climb a flight of stairs.

* I will have sweated off at least 2% of my body weight – i.e., more than four pounds.

* I will feel very good.

Unless I have business or family requirements that make it impossible, I am pretty good about finding time to exercise six times a week. But I can’t say that I achieve the goal of exercising to exhaustion every time.

In fact, it’s not unusual – and lately, it’s quite common – for me to walk into my gym with a head full of reasons why my trainer should take it easy on me. I don’t beat myself up about this impulse to shirk the work. I accept it as a natural and inevitable product of getting older. But what has been working for me is that I’ve told my trainers to agree with whatever BS I tell them and get me moving slowly at first… and then gradually push me as hard as I’ll go for the rest of the time.

If you don’t have a trainer, that will be more difficult. But you can still do it. Just start off easy and increase the pace and intensity gradually. As your body warms up, you will find that you can do more than you might believe.

Comedy Censorship: The Penultimate Step Before Totalitarianism

Over the last 10 years or so, ideas about fairness and equality have changed drastically in Europe and America. Almost all of it germinated in colleges and universities. And most of it mind-bogglingly stupid. When I hear about it, I feel afraid for my grandchildren. What kind of Orwellian world will they have to live in?

I tell myself to calm down. Not to worry. These new ideas are so contrary to the actual experience of living in the real world, that they can’t possibly last much longer. But if they do last, what then?

For someone like me, someone who is not comfortable doing and thinking what I’m told, the thought of a world where my grandkids are deprived of not just freedom of speech, but freedom of thought… that scares me.

And it’s not like it can’t happen. It has. And it has always preceded totalitarianism. Because there is nothing more effective in establishing control over a population than establishing laws that restrict speech.

The best way to do that is to convince the population that certain types of speech should be illegal. So, they begin with the most offensive forms of speech and move outward from there. First, they outlaw racist, antireligious, and xenophobic speech. Then sexist and homophobic speech. Then any speech that is dubbed “hateful,” including anything that might be offensive to fat people, to short people, to sick and disabled people, and – what we see happening now – even to pedophiles.

The final hurdle in controlling speech and thereby controlling thought is to regulate humor.

Humor has always been the refuge for speech that would otherwise be politically and socially unacceptable. That’s because political and social humor has a message that totalitarians cannot abide. The message is: Relax. Stop fuming. None of us is perfect. All of us are flawed. Our flaws are human. They unite us. Let’s poke fun at our differences and, by doing so, recognize our common humanity.

In Europe and in America, the totalitarians have made good progress in recent years in their campaign against humor. Click here and here.

And here’s a way for you to judge for yourself: Could any of these very funny bits have been included in The Office if it were produced today?

I came down with something… 

It was on my penultimate day in Nicaragua. It began with a dry cough and progressed to a wet cough. I’m fatigued. Otherwise, okay. I’m treating it by drinking liquids and resting. It feels like it will be over in a few more days.

What I haven’t done is get a COVID test. And I’m wondering why. If I had the same symptoms a year ago – even six months ago – I would have been tested. But I don’t feel the need to be tested now. I don’t feel in mortal danger. Nor do I believe I’m a danger to anyone else. When I’m with other people, I take the precautions I have always taken when sick. I bump fists and keep my distance. I stay away from old people and sick people.

Is it a cold? What is a cold? Is it the flu? Isn’t the flu a virus? And aren’t most viruses coronaviruses? I don’t know. What I have feels very much like an ordinary cold or flu. Nothing much to worry about. But is that true? Should I take a test? I don’t know. I’ll see how I feel tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m continuing my research on how we responded to the initial COVID outbreak, and on all the “facts” we were told that just weren’t true. (See “Worth Considering,” below.)

Last Saturday Was a Special Day at Rancho Santana…

It was my last day at Rancho Santana after a three-week stay. And I participated in two events that made it extra special.

In the afternoon, I attended a sixth-grade graduation ceremony at a local grammar school.

I’d been asked by a former employee of the ranch to “chaperone” her daughter. I had no idea what the duties of a chaperone would consist of, but I felt honored by the invitation and accepted.

I met the girl and her mom at the school, and we joined a procession traveling from the schoolhouse to a church about a quarter-mile up the road. At the church, I listened to two energetic sermons by two local preachers and two horrendously off-key arias sung by a woman dressed for a discotheque. We then traipsed back to the school, where I sat for another hour, listening to other speeches before the certificates of completion were distributed and more speeches were made. It was as elaborate as any college graduation I’ve ever attended.

(In Nicaragua, for some reason, first-grade and sixth-grade graduations are a big deal. And they are taken seriously. The kids are spotless in their freshly washed and ironed uniforms. And the parents – particularly the mothers – are dressed up, too.)

Afterwards, I was invited back to their house for a family party. I demurred, because I had another important event to get to: a 25th anniversary party for Rancho Santana, which would be commencing in about half an hour.

This, too, was a fancy affair. The central courtyard between the pool and clubhouse was lit up brightly and festooned with decorations. The dress code was black, white, or silver, and nearly everyone in attendance complied. Most of the women wore dresses. Some wore gowns. Most of the men wore jackets. Some wore tuxedos. There must have been 200 people there, a third of whom I’d never seen before.

About two hours into the evening, it was time for speeches. I was the last to go. After noticing the crowd getting more and more fidgety as the previous speakers droned on, I abandoned my prepared remarks and simply told everyone that the secret to Rancho Santana’s success was our policy to sell property only to good-looking people. It was the shortest speech of the evening, and many people said it was the best.

Tuesday’s essay on how the US dealt with Covid provoked a great deal of response (see below). The opinions were mixed, but reading through them this morning, I could see that some people thought I was making light of the virus. The opposite is true. The virus was a massive killer. My argument is that the government’s response to it, which was fueled by media-generated fear mongering, made it a great deal worse. What I’m doing in the follow up pieces is to tackle one element of misinformation and mismanagement at a time. Today I’m talking about the early fears about running out of ventilators.

The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

Part II: Ventilators 

Remember all the hullabaloo about ventilators? All those media stories in the early days of Covid about the “critical shortage” of ventilators?

Like this story, titled There Aren’t Enough Ventilators to Cope with the Coronavirus, published by The New York Times in early 2020?

According to this article, and dozens like it at the time, US hospitals were terribly under-equipped to handle the case loads of Covid patients, and were “desperate” because ventilators  are a “crucial tool to keep patients alive…and can be the difference between life and death for those facing the most dire respiratory effects of the coronavirus.”

(The article went on to criticize the Trump administration had failed to “develop a national strategy for accelerating the production of ventilators.”)

Also in April of 2020, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article titled Critical Supply Shortages — The Need for Ventilators and Personal Protective Equipment during the Covid-19 Pandemic that went so far as to estimate the number of ventilators needed as being “several hundred thousand to as many as a million.”

One opinion piece published in April, 2020, 2 Harvard Law professors and a UP professor of critical care said the shortage of ventilators was so severe that doctors were routinely being forced to withhold ventilation from some not-so-severe patients in order to make ventilators available for more severely sick patients, which “will probably cause them to die when they might have gone on to live long and healthy lives with the treatment.”

“Do you remember that there were a few doctors and nurses that spoke out against the excessive and improper use of ventilators because of all fear? One instance that briefly went viral, a NYC nurse accused NYC hospitals of “killing patients with ventilators” by intubating them when other, less dangerous, treatments were available?”

And then… nothing. We stopped hearing about ventilators and the critical need for ventilation. The virus was still spreading like wildfire, but the ventilator crisis seemed to have disappeared.

This story was the story in those early months of 2020. It was front page news. And it was political fodder for politicians as well.

Do you remember the fight between Governor Andrew Cuomo and Trump over the need for ventilators? Cuomo was saying that New York needed “a minimum of 30,000 to 40,000 ventilators,” to which Trump replied, ““I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be. I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You go into major hospitals sometimes, and they’ll have two ventilators. And now, all of a sudden, they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”

So there was all that. And then, suddenly, nothing more. The media stopped covering the “crisis” and politicians stopped talking about them. And Americans stopped worrying about them.

What happened? Had supply met demand?

Well, supply did increase. By thousands of units per week. But by the end of 2020 more than 140,000 ventilators were sitting unused in warehouses and hospital storage areas. And only a small fraction of the 30,000 to 40,000 ventilators that Cuomo ordered were ever used.

Why was that story never told? And why have we heard nothing about ventilation since?

It is, to me, a story of fear mongering and irrationality. And of a media that took a fixed position on a health issue rather than treating it as a question. And the reason they did that was because Trump, whom they despised, “downplayed” the need for so many more ventilators. As all those unused ventilators started piling up in warehouses all around the country, it begged the question: Why weren’t they being used?

And the reason for that was known all along. Ventilators are very imperfect medical tools. They can indeed be life saving in certain situations, but they have such a great propensity to cause damage, including killing patients that use them, that they have always been used sparingly and only with extreme care.

The big lie about ventilators was that they were not miracle machines, and they were not in critically short supply.  Instead they were being used on patients that would not have normally been candidates for them. US hospitals were using them well beyond the historical need and well beyond the use of them in other developed countries. One example: the US compared to the UK:

 In July of 2020, US hospitals had 14,000 COVID patients in ICUs on ventilators. In the UK, with 20% of the US population, the number was less 86. In January of 2021, US hospitals had 29,000 patients ventilated, compared to 3,600 in the UK. Bottom line: On a percentage basis, the US was ventilating considerably more COVID patients than any other country in the world.

The bottom line: in 2020, tens thousands of people sick with Covid were put on ventilators that should probably have been treated with other, more traditional, and safer, procedures. And because of the high probability of bad outcomes from ventilation, it’s reasonable to assume that this hysteria about them contributed to thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Here are some of the serious problems with ventilation and why they are meant to be used sparingly: (from Yale Medical School):

Infection: The breathing tube in the airway can allow bacteria to enter the lungs, which can lead to pneumonia. A ventilator can also damage the lungs, either from too much pressure or excessive oxygen levels, which can be toxic to the lungs.

Delirium and other PICS (post-ICU problems): Treating an illness with a ventilator often causes three lingering problems – loss of physical functions, loss of cognitive functions, and mental health issues.

Other post-ventilator physical problems: The lack of movement from being in a ventilator causes many persistent physical problems after the patient is discharged that require months of physical therapy.

What I Believe: About Entitlement

It’s unfortunate, but it seems to be a universal trait.

I’m talking about Homo sapiens’ ability to feel entitled to anything we become accustomed to. Whether we deserve it or not.

I noticed this in business many years ago. I’d make a deal with a group publisher that consisted of a good base salary and a bonus based on a profit percentage. Sometimes, through no fault of the publisher, profits were less than expected. So, I gifted them an unearned extra bonus as a gesture of good faith. Of course, they were grateful for that. And I thought, “Well, that’s that.” But what I discovered the next time profits were down, and I didn’t give them a bump because I felt they could have done more, they were upset. They felt like I was cheating them. They felt entitled to a bonus they were never promised and didn’t earn.

I noticed this again when raising children. If ever I relaxed on a rule – say, allowing them to play a little longer before bedtime – the next day, they would feel wronged if I insisted on going back to the scheduled bedtime.

I discovered it yet again when I sponsored a baseball team in Nicaragua. The ballplayers were very grateful for their new uniforms in year one. But when they heard that I expected them to wear the same uniforms in year two, they were outraged. They threatened to go on strike unless I gave them new ones. I didn’t. They gave in.

This happens in every sort of charitable giving, whether it’s through an institution, individual, or the state. The definition of charity is giving someone something they did not earn. When you give a panhandler a few dollars for whatever need he claims to have, it’s very clear to you that what you are doing is a voluntary act. That he is not entitled to your money. And so, you expect him to be grateful.

And when you give a panhandler a dollar bill, like I did a few months ago, and she looks at it with disgust and tears it up and throws it in your face because you gave her a five-dollar bill the previous day, that’s entitlement. And that’s bad.

I was talking about this to a friend and colleague at Rancho Santana last night, and he sent me this clip of a conversation between Conan O’Brien and Louis CK that puts it in a humorous light.

We Were Not Just Wrong. We Were Hysterically Wrong.

Part I: The Complaint

Think back to the early months of 2020. Do you remember what was happening? Do you remember what we were thinking back then? Do you remember what we were doing? When I think about those months, I can’t find a fairer word to describe our behavior than hysteria.*

Think back. Remember the early predictions of a 10% mortality rate? Do you remember how we worried about how long the virus could linger on everything from apple skins to paper bags to plastic handles?

Do you remember how we shut down our beaches because we believed that the virus could spread itself in the sea breeze? There were even discussions about whether it could survive in the ocean!

Do you remember that hospitals would not allow family members to be with their loved ones, even during their final hours of life?

Looking back on all that now, it seems certifiably crazy. But it wasn’t just a brief, initial overreaction. Have you thought about all the things that we were thinking and doing in the second half of that year and in the following 18 months? Are you aware of how many things we believed (and were told to believe by the CDC and government health officials) that turned out to be dead wrong?

We want to believe that what we did was sensible. That we always “followed the science.” We want to believe that we began with an abundance of caution (better-safe-than-sorry), and then scaled back the regulations and restrictions as we learned more.

But that’s not what happened. In retrospect, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we took part in a massively destructive and very much unscientific government-sponsored exercise in fearmongering, gaslighting, witch hunting, and mass manipulation.

And it cost us dearly. In human and financial capital. A cost that cannot be recouped.

Early in 2020, when I was writing about COVID regularly, it was obvious that some of what we were being told made no sense. On top of that list was the mortality rate. It was said to be as high as 30% before falling to 10%, where it was widely publicized, resulting in a tidal wave of fear that spread through the developed world. Today, we know that the mortality rate was much, much lower. More importantly, we know that this should have been obvious to anyone that had the slightest knowledge of logic, as I argued in those early blogs.

That initial level of fear has abated. For most of us, it’s almost entirely gone. We all know dozens of people that have contracted COVID and recovered fully.

We now have more than 30 months of experience with the virus and with our reactions to it. And we have data from hundreds of national and international studies and dozens of mega-studies. What they are telling us is that many, if not most, of the important “facts” we were told about COVID by WHO, the CDC, and the media were downright false. And many of those falsities were being promoted by health professionals that knew, or should have known, better.

The US lost tens of thousands of profitable businesses, trillions of dollars in revenue, and two years of critical schooling for our youngsters. This is a big deal. And the media should be writing about it.  What they are doing instead is gradually letting out bits and pieces of truth, hoping that the public will not realize they were bamboozled.

They want to bury the “facts” they were reporting. Or, if that can’t be done, they want to be seen as blameless. And if that can’t be done, they want to be forgiven.

Last month, The Atlantic published an essay by Emily Oster in which she acknowledges that a good deal of what the media reported was false and/or misleading. But she argues that it was done with good intentions. There’s no point in pointing fingers now, she says. We should give the media (and others involved) a sort of pandemic amnesty. “Let’s focus on the future,” she writes. “And fix the problems we still need to solve.”

Another tactic from the media that I’ve been seeing lately also admits to promoting the falsehoods, but makes light of them, as if the lockdowns and the mandates were all in good fun.

For example, this editorial from The Washington Post.

I’ve been up to my neck in business issues. And yet, it’s Thanksgiving. Surrounded by family, I should be spending most of my time with them.

J, my editor, who knew I was feeling the crunch, was kind enough to find and forward me this essay. I wrote it 15 years ago while on a trip to India, just before I decided to build a community center here in Nicaragua. Since then, our family has spent most Thanksgiving holidays here, as we are doing now. So, it seems fitting to dust off this piece and offer it to you today. I enjoyed it. I hope you will, too.