00:00: And then finally, so what’s 100% about? 100% is about lifetime mobility, the ability to walk. Now, y’all can walk, right? So what’s the big deal? The big deal is older Americans can’t walk very well. CDC, Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, does surveys, call people up, asking questions. Age group 75 to 84 who self report that they can’t walk for five minutes, 14.5%. Another 30% say they have difficulty walking for five minutes. It means they’re functionally dependent. Somebody has to take care of them. That’s 44, 45%. Gets worse. In the 85 plus group, 34% say they can’t walk for five minutes. Another 34% say they have difficulty. So we have essentially 70% of that population functionally dependent. That is not necessary, absolutely not necessary. But we think it is.

01:07 : And the reason is, that there’s two truths that get merged into a falsehood. Truth number one is a lot of elderly people are frail and can’t walk. Second truth is that as you get older, you lose something. Merge that into a cause and effect. As you get older, you lose something, therefore, you’re frail. Nope, absolutely not. Why? Because what we lose is not from where we are, but from our peak capacity. If you go here, US Powerlifting Association, great place to look at this because we’re talking about world class athletes.

01:42 : People in their… Who are 40 to 44 in the weight group of 198 or less, which is how they do weightlifting, the bench press world record is 617. Now, bench press. Lie on your back and push the bars up. Imagine 617 pounds they could lift. Go higher. In the 70 to 74 group, the same weight is still lifting 402 pounds, but see what happens. These people are at their peak performance, and the peak performance as you get older goes down. And we get a little higher like to 80, 84, we’re down to 243.

02:18 : Alright. And they don’t yet have one for 100-year-olds. But if you take that… If you extrapolate that down, they’re probably gonna be… 180 pounds will be the record for 100-year-olds. So these people who are at their peak capacity are losing something. That peak capacity goes down. But for the rest of us where we’re nowhere near our peak capacity, we go back up.

02:42 : When I started getting fit, I also wanted to lift some weights ’cause I was so weak. The most I could bench press was 15 pounds in each hand. Talk about being weak. I wanted to get strong. Now, if you lose something as you get older, I shouldn’t be able to do that, right? But we know from lots of studies that people even the oldest, oldest can actually build muscle. Well, they build strength in their muscle, not actually build new muscle. They build strength in their muscle. And so I started at 15 pounds in each hand, and I worked my way up to the point where I can now lift about 150 pounds. I can bench press 150 pounds. I’m probably now at my peak capacity. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to lift more. So I’m gonna probably start to go down. But if I live to be 100, and can lift 100 pounds, will I be happy? You bet.

03:31 : So you see, it’s not about that I lose something. It’s that we lose something from our peak capacity. Most of us are nowhere near our peak capacity, nowhere near. So some examples. My granddad lived in central Massachusetts, had a quarter acre garden, you think a quarter acre. You put a house on a quarter acre, right? He plowed that thing by hand with one of those until he was 85. Really robust guy. And then he quit, and he wouldn’t do anything. No matter what you said, he wouldn’t do anything. When he passed away at 96, he couldn’t walk. Use it or lose it.

04:07 : Here’s somebody who used it. Constance Douglas Reeves at age 101 on the cover of this book. She’s a horse woman who taught kids to ride. Here she is on a horse at 101. She passed away a year later at 102 from injuries she sustained when she was thrown from a horse. And I just saw the other day, a little squib about someone. They were celebrating his 102nd birthday. He was playing tennis until he was 100.

04:34 : You see the thing is, the human body can walk as long as it lives, absent catastrophic illness or injury. Dan Buettner wrote a book called, “The Blue Zones.” It’s part of a project for National Geographic. Went around the world looking for places where there are lots of 100-year-olds, and he found them.  In one place, one precinct in Okinawa found 32 100-year-olds. And of those 32, 28 were walking, functionally independent. Only four were having trouble. Exact reverse of what we have here in the US, exact reverse. Only 12 or so percent really had trouble walking. The other, all could do it.

05:15 : So it’s real simple. My wife Jeannie started a walking program when she was 68. It took a long time. She averages now about 9,500 steps, but it took her about two years to get there. And that’s okay because as Confucius said, “It does not matter how fast you go, as long as you do not stop.” Say’s you take however long it takes. Her birthday is in January, good excuse to go someplace warm. One year, we went to the Villahermosa area in Mexico to visit Palenque, which is a small Mayan ruin area, very compact, lots of interesting stuff. We probably climbed over all those little pyramids all day long. By the end of the day, we did like 15,000 steps.

05:58 : And if you’re normally doing 10,000, it’s easy on a day or two to do 15 without breaking a sweat because you’re used to it. So we had climbed over and we saved the biggest pyramid for last. So here we are at the end of the day, probably now having done 13,000 steps and here she is on her 72nd birthday at the top of the largest pyramid in Palenque having climbed up there without breaking a sweat. Use it or lose it. Okay, so if you wanna be able to walk forever, you have to walk a lot now and never stop.