My Newest Obsession

Okay, I am going to open up to you about something.

I have become obsessed with a man that is not my husband (I am also obsessed with my husband, luckily). His name is Peter Attia.

I have never met him, but I have written about him a few times recently.

Peter is a doctor and he has his own obsession (not me though). His obsession is longevity – living longer. But not just living longer, living better and healthier – being stronger and fitter by delaying the onset of decline, both in your body and in your mind. I am convinced, like Peter, that if we invest in our health early and often we don’t have to be ‘old and frail’ in our 80s – we can be strong and active and doing almost everything that we do today.

I know I wrote a few weeks back about not being able to waterski when you are 90 – well, I didn’t actually MEAN it. It turns out, you can waterski at 90, if you want to. You can actually do whatever you want, you just have to put the work in decades ahead of time.  

Peter has an amazing podcast where he interviews and discusses all aspects of health, mostly in some technical detail. He also just released a book – Outlive – which I read from cover to cover.

I want to explain a concept that is really important in financial planning through Peter Attia’s lens of fitness and longevity.

Peter talks about centenarians – that is, people who have lived to 100 years old. Some of them are doing the most extraordinary things – running marathons, cycling vast distances, lifting heavy weights. He persuades his readers to compile what he calls a centenarian decathlon – that is, a list of 10 things that they want to be doing in the last decade of their life. The goal being that last decade is the 90s or even 100s.

Things like:

·        Get up off the floor with just one arm

·        Be able to drop into a squat position and pick up a child that weighs 30 pounds

·        Be able to lift a suitcase into an overhead bin in a plane

·        Get out of a pool without a ladder

·        Climb in and out of a boat

·        Open a jar

·        Carry two ten-pound bags of groceries up three flights of stairs

·        Play a round of golf

·        Spend a day exploring a city by foot

·        Walk in the mountains for half a day

For each of these things we could work out exactly how much aerobic fitness you need to be able to do that, exactly how much anaerobic fitness you need, how much strength you need and how much balance you need.

Hopefully, if you are in your earlier decades, all of those things on the list above are a walk in the park right now. You do them without even thinking.

But, there is an inevitability to decline. We lose around 8 to 17 percent of our muscle mass per decade. Let’s say, you want to pick up a child that weighs 25 to 30 pounds when you are 80. That’s very similar to doing a squat with a 30-pound dumbbell in front of you. Easy if you are relatively fit and in your 40s, right? But, let’s take that muscle decline into account – you need to be able to do a lot more than that now – more like 50 to 55 pounds now, without hurting yourself. More difficult.

Peter does the same calculation with VO2 max, a measure of your peak aerobic cardiorespiratory fitness (if you wear a garmin or other sports watch, you can find out a good approximation of your current VO2 max).

If you want to hike a hilly trail you need a VO2 max of roughly 30 ml/kg/min. If you are only scoring 30 now, decades earlier – you can strike that hike off your list when you are older. You need to have a much much higher VO2 max now. Average for your age is going to mean you are falling far short of your centenarian decathlon.

We basically have to work backwards from what we want in the future to what we need to be doing now to get there. Peter explains it as a glide path down – and the starting point is usually higher than where people are today for them to achieve their goals later in life. You need to build up a reserve – a reserve of fitness that can be slowly run-down over time, leaving you with enough later in life that you can balance, walk, run, climb, lift, or whatever else it is you want to do.

There is such a wonderful analogy here with savings and investing.

Like the muscle mass or VO2 max there is a steady downwards glide-path to money because our money is not worth the same in 40 years’ time. If you have one million one-dollar notes in the bank or hidden under the mattress (please don’t do this) today, you will still have one million one-dollar notes in 40 years’ time. Only, just like your muscle mass it will have depleted because inflation will have eaten away at it. Inflation is so insidious that your $1m will probably only buy around $300k worth of stuff in 40 years’ time.

We can reverse the glide-path by investing – that’s precisely why we invest, to overcome the depletion of our money to inflation.

And that’s why we exercise and build muscle mass today – so that we can overcome the natural depletion that happens with age. And there is no reason why we can’t reverse that decline – Peter has many stories of people who have increased their muscle mass and VO2 max over time. I see people in the gym doing this every day (I am busy trying to do it).

Put these two things together – diversified long-term patient investing with a diversified training program designed to delay (or reverse) the natural decline in our strength and fitness over time – and you have the most productive and active decades of your life in your 70s and 80s. Health and wealth – intricately linked in every way.

If I can recommend one thing to do today for your future self – pick up a copy of Outlive. Understanding the concepts in Peter Attia’s book is the best investment you could ever make in yourself.