Is Your Health Practice Working for You?

Here’s a Helpful Test (and Other Ideas) to Get Started or Kick It Up a Notch

Do you have a set of health practices aimed at keeping you as mobile, healthy, and energetic as possible as you get older? If you don’t—or your current health practices have room for improvement—I strongly encourage you to sit down right now and start making a plan. Think about specific ways to build your mobility, balance, and strength. For me, there is simply too much evidence, both research as well as my own experience and observation, that indicates what happens when you do not actively work, every day, at your health in order to stay active and healthy in later life. But if you want to commit to a set of health practices or kick it up a notch, where do you start?

Here’s a great place to start. The New York Times recently ran a fascinating article titled “Are You Aging Well? Try These Simple Tests to Find Out.” The article listed a number of tests you can try, including grip strength, balance, walking speed, and the challenging Brazilian sit-stand test. In the sit-stand test, you lower yourself to the floor and then try to stand up, all without using your hands, knees, or elbows for support.

You can read the article or do a Google search to learn the specifics about these tests, but the shorthand point is that they are all indicators of overall mobility, balance, and strength—and you can work to improve them. Each test offers mobility, balance, and strength metrics that researchers link to predictors of mortality and, alternatively, longevity. The takeaway here is that your ability to move, balance, and carry are more than just “fitness markers,” they are intrinsically linked to the bigger issues of healthspan and lifespan. And I would add Heart Rate Variability and VO2 Max to those metrics.

What about other types of tests? You might have seen ads for “biological age” tests. I’d be wary of most of these, especially the ones that charge money. The science behind methylation and telomere tests, while somewhat correlated with longevity, can be gimmicky at best—and misleadingly comforting, or alarming, at worst. Plus they only measure biology and not the more feeling-based “quality and contentment with life” issues. Here are a few simple “metrics” to check in with yourself about how ready you are to live a good later life.

Three Common Sense “Metrics” to Predict Your Later-Life Health

First, think about what your future might look like. Have you had a heart-to-heart talk with yourself about how you’d like to spend your later years? What kinds of activities do you still want to be able to do? How alert and mentally focused do you want to be? If you want your later life to have as much quality time as possible, you’ve got to treat it like a project and train for it. Otherwise, you will be spending more time being sedentary and visiting the doctor’s office than you might like.

As much as we’d like to think otherwise, the aging process can be demanding and needs effort to slow it down and keep the life forces within you at their optimal levels. One simple “metric” is asking yourself, “How compromised by age are my regular enjoyable activities?” A health practice can help minimize those compromises and help ensure you can continue to pursue the activities you enjoy. For me, the experience of being healthy and alive, even at 76 years old, is simply too precious to not want many more quality days enjoying my favorite activities and being with people I like and love. I am fortunate that I saw the writing on the wall almost 20 years ago and have been at it ever since. Go back and read some of the other articles on this site to see what I’ve learned and what I do.

Second, consider how easily you get sick or injured. How often do you catch colds or the flu and how intense are these episodes? How many times have you been to a doctor or hospital for nonroutine testing? Have you fallen, or do you lose your balance easily? If the answer is “regularly” to any of these questions, it is an indication that: 

1.    your immune system, the heart of your life force, is not as strong as it could be, or

2.    your mobility and strength are subpar, or 

3.    any condition you had to treat is an indicator of a general weakness in one of many interlinked systems of your body, whether it is cardiovascular, digestive, immune, or something else.

Many of these issues are preventable or fixable with preventive health practices.

Third, comparing ourselves to others is a very human and natural way to establish something of a metric. I would bet that you already know how well you are aging, simply by your ability to move, balance, and carry your grandchildren or the groceries. Plus, when an older person passes you walking on the sidewalk or takes the stairs two at a time (or walks up an escalator) or has noticeable muscles or is thinner than you, you surely notice the difference. They are indicating what is possible in a healthier older person. How do you react when comparing yourself to others? This is not about envy or competition; it is about paying attention to the possibilities for better health and mobility. If you let this sink in and don’t avoid the effort it takes to increase your mobility, balance, and strength—and, in turn, decrease your risk of disease—you might find some motivation to boost your health practices, no matter how much or how little you’re doing now.

What About Super Agers? What’s Their Super Power?

A lot has been written about super agers, people who are in good health and stay active into their 80s, 90s, and beyond. Research into the so-called Blue Zones offer a version of these stories. Researchers study the lifestyles, genes, locations, attitudes, diets, activity levels, and many other factors of super agers and people who live in the Blue Zones to see if there is some secret sauce to their “fountain-of-youth” later lives. The realities are probably so complex that I’m not sure researchers will ever have a single, clear answer, other than the shared traits that these people are active, eat nutritious foods, enjoy getting up and being alive every day, and make it their business to stay at it.

My two favorite super agers are Olga Kotelko, a late-blooming track and field athlete, and B.K.S. Iyengar, whose yoga methods I am studying and practicing. Both lived into their mid-90s, fit and healthy virtually until the day they died, and with no or little medical care along the way. Both had active, purposeful, enjoyable lives, and both had an everyday practice that was not only focused on staying healthy but deeply meaningful to them.

So, going back to the beginning of this article, how do you know if your health practice is working? One of the ways is to learn from others who have succeeded beyond the norms and pushed the limits of what’s possible. If you want to compare yourself to see how you are doing, compare yourself to them. They are the trailblazers who have left a path for us to follow. It doesn’t have to be Olga Kotelko or B.K.S. Iyengar, there are many other exemplary agers who have lived well into their 80’s and 90’s or beyond.  Once you know what’s possible, tap into your internal motivation (your “why”), and determine the best way to stay committed to your health practices every single day.