Gym? What’s a Gym?

“How’s your grip strength??!!”  “Did you get enough Zone 2 cardio this week!!??” “You sure you’re getting enough __________ (sleep/magnesium/sunlight/cold exposure)?”

Advice and recommendations in the area of longevity, whether from your own research or social media, or even from friends and family, can make it sound like if you’re not doing 18,000 steps daily, downing fistfuls of supplements, eating 100% organic and/or vegan/carnivore/Paleo as well as going to the gym  – ideally one that’s 75 miles away by bicycle  –  to ‘lift heavy’ 4 days a week you’re going to expire any second. 

But then, confoundingly, the existence of groups of people around the world – exemplified by the now famous “Blue Zones” and a handful of lesser known but fascinating examples  (like Bapan, one of China’s “Longevity” villages) seems to fly in the face of mainstream healthspan advice.

The flourishing of these groups of centenarians, who have never entered a gym or taken a supplement (at least in capsule form), pushes hard against the often overwhelming and confident voices arguing for modern training, nutrition and lifestyle requirements. 

So, what’s going on with these super old timers? 

Is it the air, or water? Or perhaps all the vegetables or fish? Or do they spend their lives awash in healing magnetic fields? And if they don’t have to dedicate every day to all manner of special practices to live past one hundred years, why do we?  

We owe it to ourselves – and to science – to deal with this apparent paradox.. 

It’s axiomatic that a long and healthy life – which can also pit us against some genetic Russian Roulette – is founded on a myriad of factors layered onto our genetic makeup: lifestyle ‘levers’ we can pull on to gain benefit in the areas of nutrition, sleep, movement amount and quality, toxin exposure and detox ability, social environment and so on. 

In this ‘lever’ analogy, there are big levers and smaller ones.  Sleep, for example, is a big lever. Whether or not you take ashwaghanda is a smaller lever.

Throughout their lives, Blue Zone and other centenarian citizens pull on many significant health span levers simultaneously including the purity of their air and water, the simple, close-to-the-source foods they consume and the movement involved to produce, harvest and prepare it, as well as strong communities and dozens of other factors. 

By contrast, few of us walk a kilometer to our gardens to spend hours weeding before returning home to eat the (organic) array of merely a few hours-old fruits and vegetables. Fewer still arise and sleep to the rhythm of the sun. Our modern, industrial, developed world doesn’t offer exposure or even access to most or many of these health-giving, life-extending lifestyle inputs. 

So here’s the key hypothesis: When we in the so-called modern world have access to an important lever, we should make a serious effort to work it into our lives. Exercise is one one of those big levers.

A growing amount of research into the benefits of exercise points overwhelmingly to the necessity of including a range of movement into our daily developed world lives. Pulling hard on this big lever can compensate for the absence of other smaller inputs available to the old timers we’ve been talking about.

Sleep is another no-cost, high stakes lever that is ostensibly accessible to most of us. Shift workers, new parents and those with hard-coded genetic abnormalities definitely have challenges in getting solid rest time, but in most of these circumstances, making sleep Job 1 and throwing all the modern research and remedies at it can make significant improvements to sleep quality. 

Nutrition too is a big, impactful lever.  While eating a broad-spectrum, nutrient dense diet has its challenges in a modern, urban setting there is some low hanging fruit (pun intended!) here that can yield surprising results. 

For most of us, some experimentation in the area of nutritional inputs with things like ‘no sugar’ challenges, dropping gluten or dairy for two weeks, etc. can bring to light a detrimental impact of including them in your diet. In my case, for example, I had (quite happily, I thought) consumed all manner of dairy products my entire life, but a thirty day ‘Reboot’ exposed a negative response to dairy that brings on eczema flareups. 

Everyone has a range of responses to food inputs (or ‘software’) from helpful to harmful. Nurturing your curiosity with thoughtful experimentation in this area can move the wellness needle in ways that can be surprising, even astonishing. You can turn nutrition into a very big lever. 

So just because supercentenarian Okagi Hayashi (born 1909, still alive as of this writing) has never done a dead lift or chin up, can you ignore calls for the critical importance of including some form/s of exercise into your weekly routine? It’s not advisable.

But we can all be aware that a healthy life comes from identifying and pulling as fully as we can on all the lifestyle levers we have available.