Younger Next Year: The Exercise Program – by Chris Crowley & Dr. Henry Lodge

10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

We previously reviewed the same authors’ original “Younger Next Year”, and now here’s the more specific book about exercise for increasing healthspan and reversing markers of biological aging, going into much more detail in that regard.

How much more? Well, it’s a very hand-holding book in the sense that it walks the reader through everything step-by-step, tells not only what kind of exercise and how much, but also how to do, what things to do to prepare, how to avoid not erring in various ways, what metrics to keep an eye on to ensure you are making progress, and more.

There are also whole sections on specific common age-related issues including osteoporosis and arthritis, as well as how to train around injuries (especially of the kind that basically aren’t likely to ever fully go away).

As with the previous book, there’s a blend of motivational pep talk and science—this book is heavily weighted towards the former. It has, however, enough science to keep it on the right track throughout. Hence the two authors! Crowley for motivational pep and training tips, and Dr. Lodge for the science.

Bottom line: if you’d like to be biologically younger next year, that exercise will be an important component of that, and this book is really quite comprehensive for its relative brevity (weighing in at 176 pages).

Click here to check out Younger Next Year: The Exercise Program, and make that progress!

Don’t Forget…

Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

Recommended

  • Unfuck Your Brain – by Dr. Faith Harper
  • Antibiotics? Think Thrice
    Antibiotics: Often unnecessary, potentially gut-damaging, and surprisingly ineffective for many coughs—rethink before you pop that pill!

Learn to Age Gracefully

Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Resistance Is Useful!

    At 10almonds we talk a lot about the importance of regular moderate exercise (e.g. walking, gardening, housework, etc), and with good reason: getting in those minutes (at least 150 minutes per week, so, a little over 20 minutes per day, or 25 minutes per day with one day off) is the exericise most consistently linked to better general health outcomes and reduced mortality risk.

    We also often come back to mobility, because at the end of the day, being able to reach for something from a kitchen cabinet without doing oneself an injury is generally more important in life than being able to leg-press a car.

    Today though, we’re going to talk about resistance training.

    What is resistance training?

    It can be weight-lifting, or it can be bodyweight exercises. In those cases, what you’re resisting is gravity. It can also be exercises with resistance bands or machines. In all cases, it’s about building and/or maintaining strength.

    Why does it matter?

    Let’s say you’re not an athlete, soldier, or laborer, and the heaviest thing you have to pick up is a bag of groceries. Strength still matters, for two main reasons:

    • Muscle strength correlates to bone strength. You can’t build (or maintain) strong muscles on weak bones, so if you take care of your muscles, then your body will keep your bones strong too.
      • That’s assuming you have a good diet as well—but today’s not about that. If you’d like to know more about eating for bone health though, do check out this previous article about that!
    • Muscle strength correlates to balance and stability. You can’t keep yourself from falling over if you are physically frail.

    Both of those things matter, because falls and fractures often have terrible health outcomes (e.g., slower recovery and more complications) the older we get. So, we want to:

    • Ideally, not fall in the first place
    • If we do fall, have robust bones

    See also: Effects of Resistance Exercise on Bone Health

    How much should we do?

    Let’s go to the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research on this one:

    ❝There is strong evidence to support the benefits of resistance exercise for countering many age-related processes of sarcopenia, muscle weakness, mobility loss, chronic disease, disability, and even premature mortality.

    In addition, this Position Statement provides specific evidence-based practice recommendations to aid in the implementation of resistance exercise programs for healthy older adults and those with special considerations.

    While there are instances where low-intensity, low-volume programs are appropriate (i.e., beginning programs for individuals with frailty or CVDs), the greatest benefits are possible with progression to moderate to higher intensity programs.❞

    ~ Fragala et al

    Read the statement in full:

    Resistance Training for Older Adults: Position Statement From the National Strength and Conditioning Association

    There’s a lot of science there and it’s well worth reading if you have the time. It’s particularly good at delineating how much is not enough vs how much is too much, and the extent to which we should (or shouldn’t) train to exhaustion.

    If you don’t fancy that, though, and/or just want to start with something accessible and work your way up, the below is a very good (and also evidence-based) start-up plan:

    Healthline’s Exercise Plan For Seniors—For Strength, Balance, & Flexibility

    (it has a weekly planner, step-by-step guides to the exercises, and very clear illustrative animations of each)

    Share This Post

  • How Useful Are Our Dreams

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    What’s In A Dream?

    We were recently asked:

    ❝I have a question or a suggestion for coverage in your “Psychology Sunday”. Dreams: their relevance, meanings ( if any) interpretations? I just wondered what the modern psychological opinions are about dreams in general.❞

    ~ 10almonds subscriber

    There are two main schools of thought, and one main effort to reconcile those two. The third one hasn’t quite caught on so far as to be considered a “school of thought” yet though.

    The Top-Down Model (Psychoanalysts)

    Psychoanalysts broadly follow the theories of Freud, or at least evolved from there. Freud was demonstrably wrong about very many things. Most of his theories have been debunked and ditched—hence the charitable “or at least evolved from there” phrasing when it comes to modern psychoanalytic schools of thought. Perhaps another day, we’ll go into all the ways Freud went wrong. However, for today, one thing he wasn’t bad at…

    According to Freud, our dreams reveal our subconscious desires and fears, sometimes directly and sometimes dressed in metaphor.

    Examples of literal representations might be:

    • sex dreams (revealing our subconscious desires; perhaps consciously we had not thought about that person that way, or had not considered that sex act desirable)
    • getting killed and dying (revealing our subconscious fear of death, not something most people give a lot of conscious thought to most of the time)

    Examples of metaphorical representations might be:

    • dreams of childhood (revealing our subconscious desires to feel safe and nurtured, or perhaps something else depending on the nature of the dream; maybe a return to innocence, or a clean slate)
    • dreams of being pursued (revealing our subconscious fear of bad consequences of our actions/inactions, for example, responsibilities to which we have not attended, debts are a good example for many people; or social contact where the ball was left in our court and we dropped it, that kind of thing)

    One can read all kinds of guides to dream symbology, and learn such arcane lore as “if you dream of your teeth crumbling, you have financial worries”, but the truth is that “this thing means that other thing” symbolic equations are not only highly personal, but also incredibly culture-bound.

    For example:

    • To one person, bees could be a symbol of feeling plagued by uncountable small threats; to another, they could be a symbol of abundance, or of teamwork
    • One culture’s “crow as an omen of death” is another culture’s “crow as a symbol of wisdom”
      • For that matter, in some cultures, white means purity; in others, it means death.

    Even such classically Freudian things as dreaming of one’s mother and/or father (in whatever context) will be strongly informed by one’s own waking-world relationship (or lack thereof) with same. Even in Freud’s own psychoanalysis, the “mother” for the sake of such analysis was the person who nurtured, and the “father” was the person who drew the nurturer’s attention away, so they could be switched gender roles, or even different people entirely than one’s parents.

    The only real way to know what, if anything, your dreams are trying to tell you, is to ask yourself. You can do that…

    The idea with lucid dreaming is that since any dream character is a facet of your subconscious generated by your own mind, by talking to that character you can ask questions directly of your subconscious (the popular 2010 movie “Inception” was actually quite accurate in this regard, by the way).

    To read more about how to do this kind of self-therapy through lucid dreaming, you might want to check out this book we reviewed previously; it is the go-to book of lucid dreaming enthusiasts, and will honestly give you everything you need in one go:

    Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life – by Dr. Stephen LaBerge

    The Bottom-Up Model (Neuroscientists)

    This will take a lot less writing, because it’s practically a null hypothesis (i.e., the simplest default assumption before considering any additional evidence that might support or refute it; usually some variant of “nothing unusual going on here”).

    The Bottom-Up model holds that our brains run regular maintenance cycles during REM sleep (a biological equivalent of defragging a computer), and the brain interprets these pieces of information flying by and, because of the mind’s tendency to look for patterns, fills in the rest (much like how modern generative AI can “expand” a source image to create more of the same and fill in the blanks), resulting in the often narratively wacky, but ultimately random, vivid hallucinations that we call dreams.

    The Hybrid Model (per Cartwright, 2012)

    This is really just one woman’s vision, but it’s an incredibly compelling one, that takes the Bottom-Up model and asks “what if we did all that bio-stuff, and then our subconscious mind influenced the interpretation of the random patterns, to create dreams that are subjectively meaningful, and thus do indeed represent our subconscious?

    It’s best explained in her own words, though, so it’s time for another book recommendation (we’ve reviewed this one before, too):

    The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives – by Dr. Rosalind Cartwright

    Enjoy!

    Share This Post

  • How to Read a Book – by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Are you a cover-to-cover person, or a dip-in-and-out person?

    Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren have made a science out of getting the most from reading books.

    They help you find what you’re looking for (Maybe you want to find a better understanding of PCOS… maybe you want to find the definition of “heuristics”… maybe you want to find a new business strategy… maybe you want to find a romantic escape… maybe you want to find a deeper appreciation of 19th century poetry, maybe you want to find… etc).

    They then help you retain what you read, and make sure that you don’t miss a trick.

    Whether you read books so often that optimizing this is of huge value for you, or so rarely that when you do, you want to make it count, this book could make a real difference to your reading experience forever after.

    Pick Up Today’s Book On Amazon!

    Share This Post

Related Posts

  • Unfuck Your Brain – by Dr. Faith Harper
  • Antihistamines for Runny Nose?

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

    Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

    In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

    As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

    So, no question/request too big or small 😎

    ❝Do you have any articles about using Anti-Histamines? My nose seems to be running a lot. I don’t have a cold or any allergies that I know of. I tried a Nasal spray Astepro, but it doesn’t do much.?❞

    Just for you, we wrote such an article yesterday in response to this question!

    The Astepro that you tried, by the way, is a brand name of the azelastine we mentioned near the end, before we got to talking about systemic corticosteroids such as beclometasone dipropionate—this latter might help you if antihistamines haven’t, and if your doctor advises there’s no contraindication (for most people it is safe for there are exceptions, such as if you are immunocompromised and/or currently fighting some infection).

    You can find more details on all this in yesterday’s article, which in case you missed it, can be found at:

    Antihistamines’ Generation Gap: Are You Ready For Allergy Season?

    Enjoy!

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • Anti-Inflammatory Diet 101 (What to Eat to Fight Inflammation)

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Chronic inflammation is a cause and/or exacerbating factor in very many diseases. Arthritis, diabetes, and heart disease are probably top of the list, but there are lots more where they came from. And, it’s good to avoid those things. So, how to eat to avoid inflammation?

    Let food be thy medicine

    The key things to keep in mind, the “guiding principles” are to prioritize whole, minimally-processed foods, and enjoy foods with plenty of antioxidants. Getting a healthy balance of omega fatty acids is also important, which for most people means getting more omega-3 and less omega-6.

    Shopping list (foods to prioritize) includes:

    • fruits and vegetables in a variety of colors (e.g. berries, leafy greens, beats)
    • whole grains, going for the most fiber-rich options (e.g. quinoa, brown rice, oats)
    • healthy fats (e.g. avocados, nuts, seeds)
    • fatty fish (e.g. salmon, mackerel, sardines) ← don’t worry about this if you’re vegetarian/vegan though, as the previous category can already cover it
    • herbs and spices (e.g. turmeric, garlic, ginger)

    Noping list (foods to avoid) includes:

    • refined carbohydrates
    • highly processed and/or fried foods
    • red meats and/or processed meats (yes, that does mean that organic grass-fed farmers’ pinky-promise-certified holistically-raised beef is also off the menu)
    • dairy products, especially if unfermented

    For more information on each of these, plus advice on transitioning away from an inflammatory diet, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • Life Extension Multivitamins vs Centrum Multivitamins – Which is Healthier

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Our Verdict

    When comparing Life Extension Multivitamins to Centrum Multivitamins, we picked the Life Extension.

    Why?

    The clue here was on the label: “two per day”. It’s not so that they can sell extra filler! It’s because they couldn’t fit it all into one.

    While the Centrum Multivitamins is a (respectably) run-of-the-mill multivitamin (and multimineral) containing reasonable quantities of most vitamins and minerals that people supplement, the Life Extension product has the same plus more:

    • More of the vitamins and minerals; i.e. more of them are hitting 100%+ of the RDA
    • More beneficial supplements, including:
      • Inositol, Alpha lipoic acid, Bio-Quercetin phytosome, phosphatidylcholine complex, Marigold extract, Apigenin, Lycopene, and more that we won’t list here because it starts to get complicated if we do.

    We’ll have to write some main features on some of those that we haven’t written about before, but suffice it to say, they’re all good things.

    Main take-away for today: sometimes more is better; it just necessitates then reading the label to check.

    Want to get some Life Extension Multivitamins (and/or perhaps just read the label on the back)? Here they are on Amazon

    PS: it bears mentioning, since we are sometimes running brands against each other head-to-head in this section: nothing you see here is an advertisement/sponsor unless it’s clearly marked as such. We haven’t, for example, been paid by Life Extension or any agent of theirs, to write the above. It’s just our own research and conclusion.

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails: