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Update, Jan. 13: This isn’t in the audio version but, having just done a 45-second jump rope “micro set” after a work-from-home bathroom break — geesh… — I realize this post should have included the importance of raising your heart rate at least once a day. Getting your pulse racing, even a little bit, feels healthy and productive (so long as you’re fit enough to do it safely) and doing it a little bit often leads to doing it just a little bit more.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:
I’m Paul von Zielbauer from AGING with STRENGTH.…with a few brief thoughts on how to make 2025 a great year to build not just physical strength but also enduring mental, emotional, spiritual, nutritional and community strength. I have some ideas, born of my own curiosity and years of trial and error, but feel it’s important to once again point out that I’m not an expert or guru. To the contrary, I’m a reporter and investigator of the experts and the so-called gurus, in service of isolating worthy information to share with you and exposing what is turning out to be a rather large amount of b.s. and unsupported conclusions from not only people who should know better but also the institutions that give them fancy titles and, often, tenure.
In this brief AGING with STRENGTH audiocast, I focus specifically on physical strength and a few key routines and habits that, through the trial and error I mentioned, have been real difference-makers in helping me not only improve athletic and physical performance but also minimize small recurring injuries and pain that is familiar to anyone over, say, 45 who’s still pushing their physical limits.
In subsequent audio notes this month, I’ll give this same treatment to each of the other pillars of aging — mental strength, emotional strength, nutritional strength, spiritual strength and community strength — in a way that is specific, personal and suitably ambitious without being obnoxious.
Because let’s face it: We all want to be strong in the ways that most matter to us, but we’re not really interested in thousand-dollar supplements in a bid to live forever, like tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who’s bringing his “Don’t Die Summit” to Los Angeles later this month. (I wish I were making that up, but I’m not.) And we all hopefully see through the charade by now of pitchmen like Andrew Huberman, Stanford’s in-house “Neuroscientist Gone Wild,” who in between paid YouTube product promotions now calls aging a disease that can be reversed.
No, we’re just trying to age with strength and resilience — aren’t we? — in each of these vital areas of our lives. And if we can also lower our biological ages by a few years or so, just through a more mindful focus on doing what makes us feel and become stronger, well, that’s even better. Maybe I’d even celebrate that win with some of Bryan Johnson’s $500 THC-infused retinol…guaranteed to make you sleep as soundly as his 18-year-old blood boy.
Improving physical strength in 2025
Jocularity aside, here are some ideas for becoming physically stronger over the next 51 weeks of 2025 — again, not handed down to you by an expert, but offered up by a deeply curious crash-test dummy of sorts who believes in improvement through improvisation, experimentation and a willingness to fail forward, as they say in tech. I hope that some of these ideas will be helpful, either as a regimen to try yourself, or try a variation of, or as a provocation that perhaps gets you to think differently about what’s possible for you to achieve.
If there’s one thing I learned over the years, personally and as a social entrepreneur, it’s that we are each are capable of achieving so much more than we think we can.
So let’s get to aging with more physical strength in 2025.
I’ll start by saying that, to age optimally, regular strength training in some form is simply non-negotiable. Working out, with weights or some kind of resistance, just has so many indisputable benefits that go beyond maintaining and building muscle mass. It improves your mood, lowers stress, boosts confidence, improves brain health, reduces inflammation and risk of injuries and can even mitigate the damage from moderate drinking. But even if none of that is compelling to you, the fact that strength training slows and reverses biological aging should be. Who doesn’t want to look stronger, tighter and younger in jeans and a t-shirt?
At my local Santa Monica YMCA weight room several years ago, there was an older guy who clearly looked, if not ripped, then noticeably fit for his advanced age. Which I assumed from the fluid way he carried himself and how he worked out was around 72 to 75 — pretty old for a gym rat. One day a high school kid, who obviously had also noticed this guy’s physique, asked how old he was. Eighty-eight, he told the kid.
There’s just something about regularly lifting even light weights that keeps the human machine running young, at the cellular level.
In 2025, my goal is to get both stronger and faster, and leaner and more flexible. I’m not looking for bigger muscles but rather to increase neuromuscular efficiency, which develops by training the nervous system to control muscle fibers. Neuromuscular training, which I’ll link to in the transcript, has been shown to improve various aspects of athletic performance, including agility, balance, muscular strength, power and cardiorespiratory endurance, not to mention better joint stability and reduced risk of injuries in athletes. I equate neuromuscular efficiency to what is often called “old man strength” or “old woman strength,” because it’s about increasing physical power through movement, not just mechanical muscle strength.
I don’t know about you, but I sit on my ass, staring at screens, way more than I’d prefer, and I often recall my osteopathic doctor’s admonition, after putting my sacroiliac joint back in proper position, that “bodies are meant to move.”
More than anything, commit in 2025 to being a chronic mover. There’s a smart fitness-related YouTube channel, called Mover’s Odyssey, that I recommend, and in fact one of its more recent videos is on neuromuscular efficiency. The channel explores many unconventional forms of achieving strength through movement, and it’s smartly narrated and quite creatively illustrated — no humans on any of their videos, refreshingly; only visually engaging animated sketches. So, check out Mover’s Odyssey, if you are so moved.
So, my 2025 physical goals are focused on maintaining durable core strength that enables three main athletic or personal pursuits:
staying quick and aerobically fit on the tennis court
surfing and being able to paddle for at least an hour in the ocean without losing shoulder strength
and being able to hold a semi-automatic rifle on target for a good two hours of shooting at my local outdoor range, for which proper technique involves core strength and breath work.
To address all three of these goals, I’ve started jumping rope, for lower-body and ankle strength and the aerobic endurance required for tennis. It’s a complete core workout, especially with a weighted rope that also builds shoulder strength and mobility. And you can carry a rope anywhere.
On the advice of my coach, Tiana Rockwell, of Grass Valley, Calif., I also started combining bar squats, with about 75% of my body weight, with immediate follow-on sets of box jumping. I follow three supersets of that with some relatively easy deadlifts or, alternatively, kettlebell swings. Nothing is worth doing without learning proper technique, obviously. I’m a big fan of using lighter weights at higher reps. That combination keeps my core and lower half strong and balanced, and keeps away the lower back pain that had plagued me for years.
None of this happens, of course, without properly warming up using a foam roller, which I’ll talk about, somewhat rapturously, in a moment. However you decide to regularly put your muscles to work, even with the lightest weights imaginable, the act of developing a routine of core-focused strength training — combined with the incredibly important habit of stretching before bedtime and after waking each morning — is as winning a combination for people over 50 as any I’ve come across.
But even if going to gyms and lifting weights and jumping rope aren’t for you, swimming is a full-body workout, and bodyweight exercises, like squats and lunges, increase physical strength, give you a lasting burn, and allow you to work out at home or in your office, two minutes at a time. More than a few professional hockey players in their mid-30s train only with bodyweight now. You don’t need big weights or to be in a ratty gym to grow strong.
One thing I’m trying to incorporate more in my day, as someone who works from home, are micro sets: 10 or 15 reps of whatever exercise I choose, on the way to the kitchen or bathroom. I place dumbells, a jump rope, a weighted ball, in common areas, so that when my Apple Watch tells me it’s time to stand up, doing a 30-second micro set becomes almost impossible to avoid, and they act like compound interest in building physical strength.
Gaining strength is only half the equation, though. It’s nice to have big muscles, but if you can’t touch your toes or stand on one foot for 30 seconds, are you in balance?
Flexibility, stretching and foam rolling
Strength without flexibility is not a winning strategy, especially after 50. My relentless focus on being maximally flexible is born of great personal pain — mainly through the hell of debilitating lower back spasms and overtaxed quadratus lumborum. So I’ve learned to make a routine out of daily stretching and fascia manipulation, in the form of…foam rolling!
If you haven’t discovered the miracle work that a $24 foam roller provides, pause this audiocast and buy one online immediately. A foam roller is the closest thing to an in-house chiropractor you can buy, and if used regularly, it will change your life for the better. The fascial system is a continuous, three-dimensional network of primarily collagen that permeates the entire body and accounts for about 20% of your bodyweight. Keeping it agile and well oiled is another non-negotiable facet of aging with physical strength, in my book.
I know there are people out there who don’t have athletically or age-induced back problems, or tendinitis or bursitis; people whose hips or shoulders don’t ever crackle or pop, who don’t wake up stiff; who can’t understand why early-onset arthritis, nerve damage, floating scar tissue and detailed discussions of NSAIDs have become constant fodder for their friends’ happy-hour bitchfests.
But I also know there are a lot of people like me, and you. And for us and those like us, a foam roller is worth its weight in pharmaceutical-grade naproxen sodium. Using it in combination with regular, morning and night stretching routines keeps hamstrings loose and my lower back and QL quiet, which means a lot.
So that’s my 2025 physical strength regimen, as succinct as I could make it. I also recommend checking out Gwendolyn Bounds’ substack, called Not Too Late, which has a series of smart posts on making and sticking to exercise routines that work for you.
Next time, I’ll get into the effect that alcohol and drinking has on aging with strength, in pretty much every sense of the word. Until then, let’s make 2025 as sane as possible under the circumstances, and by all means, let’s keep moving forward.
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