Get Fit at 40 (Fitter Than A 20-Year-Old In 6 Months?)

I have a new goal and it's one that I would like you all to join in with if you're up for it it's not to see how fit I can get in the space of 10 weeks it's not to run a fast half marathon nor to do my best at a grand Fondo or spor Eve there is no fixed date for this goal in fact the end goal is the end the end of life and pushing that as far into the distance as I possibly can how by learning about the changes we can all make to push our end of lives further into the distance be that exercise or food or sleep or just general lifestyle changes that should make a difference and allow us to live the longest healthiest lives we can how much difference can these things make well over the course of this series for the next 6 months or so my aim is to find out what difference they can make there are a number of key markers that doctors and physiologists can look at with which they can make a pretty ACC estimate of how long you're going to live so in no particular order they are V2 Max a maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during high-intensity exercise muscle mass so the total weight of muscle in your body leg strength which will enable mobility in old age and prevent unnecessary fools balance which relates in many ways to General strength and finally grip strength bit of a weird one that but lots of studies are shown a strong correlation between grip strength and more fality and some doctors even say it's a better indication of life expectancy than blood pressure anyway it's time for me to find out through a series of tests where I lie in all of these key markers before I get on to those tests though I'm going to give you a very brief snapshot of where I'm at now and how I got here so I was an active child participating in a multitude of sports but I ended up focusing on cycling where I was fortunate enough to have a professional career uh that career ended when I was 32 and since then my relationship with exercise has been sporadic I would say if I'm being generous so I've dabbled with some running a bit of cycling and the Very occasional strength session but there have been very long periods where I've done little to no exercise at all I just had no goals to aim for basically however what I have been very consistent at doing without any goal or purpose is drinking quite heavily and burning the candle at both ends and being completely honest with you all and I've never actually mentioned this in public before I also smoked quite heavily between 2012 and 2020 I did eventually manage to quit thankfully but since then I've been on nicotine replacement which I'd also like to quit in the very near future now the point of giving you this background is really just to show that I have my own vices despite my early years spent as a clean living full-time athlete now some of you watching this will never have smoked in your life or never drunk alcohol in your lives but maybe you struggle with getting things right with food or sleep or motivation or anything in between the point is that most of us have something that we would genuinely like to change for the better now don't get me wrong I don't think I'm in a really bad place not at all I've just arrived at a time in my own personal life where I would like to do better I assure you though that this series is not going to be about living like a monk or becoming perfect it's about making a number of fairly small and simple changes in lifestyle that should add up and I guess compound over the coming years and decades hopefully to make a really big difference so wherever you're at in life I would absolutely love it if you came on this journey with me and if you know anyone that's looking to make some changes in their own life right now why not share this video with them uh sometimes you just need a really small nudge a small bit of encouragement to set you along the right path and along your way oh just one last thing I'm 43 now to some of you watching this that is going to sound very old to others it's going to sound very young either way I'm not as fit as I used to be and I feel the need to do something about it all right time now to find out where I'm personally at physiologically I've arrived at the Manchester Institute of Health and performance which is operated by neld Health who are the UK's largest healthc care charity they're nonprofit and their aim is to build a healthier a which seems perfect for this series of videos I'm going to meet a guy called Connor who will be putting me through my Paces few tests to find out where I'm at what I most need to improve and we'll have those Baseline figures then so I can see how much I do improve over the next 6 months or so it's going to be painful but [Music] interesting so first things first a blood test and a urine test the results of which I will get at a later date uh both there just to find out if there's any major problems that I need to address I'd now like to introduce you to Connor who's going to be conducting a lot of the rest of the tests for the rest of today the first of which is a dexa scan yeah so a DEA scan is kind of the gold standard measurement for body composition so we get a really good measurement of your body fat uh visceral fat we can even do things like your bone density and things like that too um does it measure overall muscle mass yep yeah yeah does the works you're not going to get a much more gold standard test than this for body comp so it's a really simple test you just basally take your clothes off lie down on the bed for 5 minutes and we let a small amount of x-rays just scan your whole body easiest part of the day then by the soundes relax difference between visceral fat and body fat is um they're used for slightly different things um so your body fat can be used as like an overall like measurement of your of your health whereas we know your visceral fat tends to have a slightly higher risk with most diseases um so you can use that in combination with like other body composition measurements like your BMI like your waist size to give you kind of more overall structure of your health and general disease risk [Music] brief interlude uh time to introduce a sponsor of this series before I do that though I just want to say how important our partners are to us in what we do here at gcn without them there is simply no way that we can make all the freeo view content that we do but I really want to emphasize to all of you we only ever work with great companies who make products that we really want to use so on that note this series is sponsored by whoop uh who make this Fitness tracking and fitness coaching wearable device I have personally used mine non-stop for over two years now and it really has been quite enlightening in a number of ways particularly I will say in highlighted to me how much alcohol affects my sleep and pretty much every other parameter of recovery like many people I feel like the lights literally and met orally go out when I go to bed after an evening of drinking but the reality is that my heart rate at rest is about 10 beats per minute higher than it normally would be my breathing rate is significantly higher and the quality of my sleep is significantly lower heart rate variability also plummet that hasn't stopped me drinking completely I still love going out with mates but it certainly made me cut down a bit and much more aware of what it's doing to me so I'm going to be using my whooop to track everything that I'm doing over the next few few months and indeed monitor any positive changes that occur I will also be speaking to an expert from whoop in one of the next episodes see what they make of my data from the last couple of years where I've been wearing it but in the meantime back to the tests yeah so your body fat percentage total sits at 19.1% is it really Christ it will like the reference ranges for how healthy that is depends on your age um but we'd expect from for most people um especially like the younger people for their body fat to be below 22% yeah um so yours is yeah definitely within a healthy range for for someone of your age in gender which is great so we're just going to do your waist size next which is a really really simple measure but actually really important for your health I'm sort of not liking the sound of this because whilst I haven't put much weight on over the last 12 years where I have put it on is just around there yeah so I think it's a blessing and a curse like you say some people find it scary because okay well if my wa side is elevated then all these other things are also going to increase but you can apply the reverse logic as well so by making a few very very very small changes to things like your waist size or your blood sugars or your blood pressure then all of a sudden you can reduce your risk of quite a lot of disease and quite quickly too okay fair enough [Music] we can have a look now at like your um Force plate data we're going to do an ikd as well it's kind a mental buildup isn't it [Music] yeah hey [Music] just doing a few minutes warm up on the bike and a couple of the machines here because the next test I'm going to do I have maximal force test or maximum strength test there's a real risk I might pull something even with a warmup but hopefully less likely all right Dan so what we're going to do here is an isometric midd pool uh your task is to basically drive through the the floor with as much Force as possible and allows us to have a look at your lower limb Force production capabilities so when I say 3 2 1 go you're going to rip the bar up drive down through the floor and you're going to have the maximum Force production for about 5 Seconds okay okay I'm already nervous nice pull drive drive drive drive drive drive up up up up up up up up up up up up up and relax yes much better [Music] [Music] [Music] so next time we're going to be doing an ISO kinetic dynamometer um it allows us to look at your maximum Force production in your quads and your hamstrings in both the right and the left leg so you're going to be kicking and pulling as hard as you possibly can but now you're nice and secure in this chair and we're going to measure your Force production when you're doing in the flexion and extension y we can have a look at the data and see how the limbs differ in both the quads um and the hamstrings and then we can have a look at your total Force production relative to your body weight as well which is a really really useful measure as to how well you can produce force and how many reps so you're going to be doing a warm-up set of five reps where you're going to start off at 50% and then just work slowly up to 100 and then when we do the working set five reps all out Push Pull as hard as you possibly can okay all right happy I think so yeah so if you just extend up as far as it's comfortable for you set and then if you pull your heel all the way back to the chair yeah two one down let's go ki ki ki kick kick pull pull pull pull pull nice good start push all the way pull pull pull on Max eff here down come on kick kick kick kick kick come on two more two more two more on go on down keep it up keep it up push push push push push on down last one pull pull pull pull pull pull pull yes good effort we'd expect people's deficits to be within like 10% um on your quads your deficit is is 5% okay and your flexion is 4% okay so yeah your your hands and quads are very very symmetrical but if anything the overall production could be improved a little bit but there're still really good values okay well hopefully that'll improve over the next 6 months that's the AIM [Music] we want you to start at a Cadence around 85 to 90 um you might find yours a little bit higher than that that's absolutely fine we'll figure out what's kind of comfortable for you in the first couple of minutes once we found that Cadence just hold it hold it hold it hold it um every 15 seconds um the wattage is going to go up by by 5 wats sorry yeah that is right the right way around and then so it's basically 20 watts every minute um and we just keep going until you can't go anymore or until we see that W the the Cadence Dro by 10 I think it'll probably be around 80 absolutely fine whatever's comfortable for you and then we once we found that in the first couple of minutes we just ask you to hold it okay all right we'll start the test now that's you cycling 75 Watts for a minute yeah that Cadence seems to be sitting around 80 so that's absolutely fine okay so just 15 seconds left of the warmup see cycling at 80 WS now going to feel a slight bit more resistance com through the pedals in three 2 1 so that's increased by another five that's 95 that's 100 so that's 20 watts in 1 minute okay Cadence is sitting really nice there around 82 83 really nice down that's 9 minutes really good stuff really good down I can see it's getting tough but that Cadence is still holding so let's just keep pushing through really nice and down up up up up up come on let's get that Cadence up up up up come on Dan come on Dan drive drive drive come on as much as you can push now push push push push push go on down last little bit come on go on down drive drive drive drive drive come on push push push come on down last little bit come on keep working keep working keep working come on down up up up up up up up up up up up up and stop there really good stuff mate well done really good work mate well done thank you God it just bite so quickly at the end you forget yes the nature you're you're not to be honest you actually hit your max a long time ago um like your aerobic capacity at that end point there you were working anerobic which is fine it's why you can carry on but on the bike we just let you go until you can't go anymore because it's good for you to give it a go but yeah you can see like we're looking for this crossover and we want this like V2 here to Plateau out you can see it did quite a while ago and even your re value so we normally say you've reached Max when you're an re over 1.15 and you did that in minute 9 what's re R3 so your re R is your air exchange ratio it's basically the contribution of like fats versus carbohydrates you're using so n value over 1.15 implies that you're using purely carbohydrates and no fats um so we have some termination criteria um for like saying you've hit V Max we want this V2 to Plateau we want re value over 1.15 and we want like your blood lactate and your heart rate to be near Max as well so without me even going into the data I can probably say quite confidently here we have hit your V2 Max we'll need to actually just dive into the numbers in the Exel spreadsheets figure out what that is um but we'll get that into the report for you brilliant thanks Conor I think no problem at all yeah good job really good job so I haven't done one for 13 years now I'll be doing two in the space of six or seven months lovely uh it's so final one I've showered I've sort of recovered uh V2 Max results yeah looking very good so your V2 max value for a male of your age comes in at 52.2 milliliters per kilogram per minute which puts you in the excellent category which is the highest there is um so given the sort of relationship between like Fitness and disease um and along with all the other metrics we saw today it put you feel like a really really good place and what sort of room for improvement is it I think my last V2 Max test obviously during my time was a full-time athlete and it was low 70 somewhere so obviously it's going to fallen from there given I haven't done huge amounts of excise for the last few years what would you imagine there is in terms of buffering room at the top end yeah your your V2 Max the absolute value will unfortunately reduce with your age um but in relative terms you still are able to improve that I would say um your result comes in at 52.2 the excellent range starts at 51 the lower range of that so although it's still is in the excellent range if you wanted to improve it further by just doing some more General exercise then I'm sure you'll be able to increase that a little bit more okay good to know well I would trying to do that for the next 6 months and breathe now I'm not going to go through the results of those tests in great detail right now I'll save that for episode two but as a brief summary I'm not in a bad place and I think much of that is probably due to the foundations that I had from being a full-time athlete through to my early 30s however in the 12 years since then well I've now got four times as much body fats as I had when I retired and my V2 Max has gone down by 20 points so there are already things that I want to improve on things I want to slow down in terms of my aging maybe even stop maybe even reverse you never know now if you're watching this video on a cycling channel the likelihood is you're already exercising more than the average person the population but maybe you're not working enough on your overall strength or your muscle mass or your sleep's not very good whatever it might be there are always things that we can work on to give ourselves a better chance at Living longer and more importantly than that at Living a really happy life I'll finish episode one by answering a question that I think a few of you might be asking which is why now why not 5 years ago or even as soon as I stopped my cycling career it's a good question I think that a i quite enjoyed rebelling against the life that I used to live it was nice not to have to think about performance 247 or everything that I was putting into my body every day I had no fitness goals had no reason to think about Fitness I TI that part of my life off and B I've come to a realization the average male life expectancy here in the UK is 82 if I die then it means I've already lived over half my life I think I'd quite like to do everything I can to ensure I still have more than half of my life to come the other thing is I've been reading and listening to so much about what we can all do from a mental and physical standpoint to ensure that we do set ourselves up for later in life and it's those sorts of things are we going through in future episodes at the end of the day though it doesn't matter when you start it's never too late it's also never too early the important thing is just starting so here I am starting and I really hope hope as many of you as possible will join in with me I'll see you all in episode two

Channel: Global Cycling Network

Views: 536,357

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Id: YIEjavvzCfU

Length: 20min 4sec (1204 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2024