#46 — Forestalling Age with Fitness with Dr. Stephen Black

Sponsor: RePowerU -- a free fitness practices assessment (a 10-minute questionnaire) http://rockymountainhpc.com/dr.-black.html Dr. Stephen Black is the CEO and Owner of Rocky Mountain Human Performance Center.  He is an acknowledged leader in the field of sports medicine, rehabilitation, fitness, and sports performance. Dr. Black has worked extensively with professional and amateur athletes in many sports, leveraging his holistic and integrative approach to improve performance. Dr. Black is himself a long-time, high-level athlete, who knows personally as well as professionally the challenges and opportunities available to us all for slowing the effects of aging with individualized programming for higher fitness and superior performance.   Dr. Black’s philosophy is to proactively addressing imbalances, deficiencies, and poor movement patterns to help older athletes become healthier and stronger while having fun.  Show Notes:  not a transcript but a summary of the key points discussed with links to other material mentioned. Key Points Summary: Age: Chronological vs. physiological age:  create a gap in your favorStart Early:  the earlier you start in athletic, the better your health as you get older (don’t wait!)Be Proactive:  avoiding health problems has a much bigger payoff than solving health problems after they arrive.Consistency & Moderation:  for the older athlete, consistency is key to derive the benefits of healthy behaviors, and moderation is important as we shift to prioritizing health over performance.Patience:  progress toward health and fitness is a journey, not a destination.47 foods:  stay within your food selections to find consistencyProtein: 1.5-2.2 grams of protein per kilo of body weight for an active person working out 1-3+ hours per day.  And, err on the side of too much to compensate for worsening digestion and signaling in our bodies as we get older.  Eat protein with carbs (1-to-3 ratio of protein to carbs)Weight-bearing Resistance Exercise:  older athletes must get some weight-bearing resistance exercise to retain muscle mass and maintain bone health.Recovery:  Use a 1-to-3 ratio.  For every 1 dose of high intensity, 3 does of recovery.  Dose = time exercising.  “I’m as good once as I ever was”.  But get the recovery to avoid injury and/or catastrophe. Q: Connection between Health and fitness today as well as between health and fitness into the distant future. Consider two sides of that questions:  chronologic age vs. physiological age. One thing is the younger a person started participating in athletic activity, the greater their health as chronological age progresses.  Exceptions can occur due to lifestyle changes and accidents.  But putting deposits into the fitness bank helps delay aging. Q:  One of the key questions is, for each person, what are the interventions that will make the most impact for the least investment, least effort?  I assume it will be a unique conclusion for each person, as everyone is different genetically, and has had a unique life to date, but also each person has attempted in his or her own way to compensate for the impact of aging on