Health span, compressed morbidity and being the grandfather
Bad news, you’ve got a last year on earth. Good news, if you’re lucky you’ll accept that “grand father dies, father dies, son dies” is the best blessing you can have (imagine a different ordering). If you’re luckier, you’ll have age appropriate health right up till that last year, or even better that last few months. If you’re even luckier you’ll have the strength to do what you want in your personal “centenarian Olympics”.
You’re going to die
First read this …
Now watch this …
Centarian Olympics
Compressed Morbidity. Ideally you’ll stay healthy till the very end. What does that mean when you’re a 100? It means you have the strength to do the functional things you’d like. So what should we call this set of activities? How about the Centenarian Olympics, containing the following activities:
- Lift my 4 year old grand kid
- Go for a 1 hour walk
- Get off the ground with 1 hand (otherwise can’t play on the floor)
- Carry 2 grocery bags
This is a great idea from Peter Attia. Those things sound awfully easy you think, except:
The Inverted Parabola of Health
Regardless of your training, your health will be parabolic, initially your training will make your health positive, then it will be neutral and then it will decline. Once you’re on the downward curve, it’ll look like the following:
\[Health(YearsPastPeak) = HealthAtPeak - \sum\_{n=PeakYear}^{PeakYear+YearsPastPeak} HealthDecline(n)\]Your body decline is inevitable, you can control 2 things. 1/ Your starting health, 2/ Your rate of decline.
Your peak health age
You want to train as hard as you can till you peak. The better your starting position the more room you have for the inevitable decline.
Your rate of decline
You can’t stop your decline but you can slow it down. Same as the plan to build your starting health