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The analogy I would use would be like, if you've ever had to push a car that died.
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Right?
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You put it in neutral.
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Getting it started and getting that car moving is the hardest.
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Or, like, getting anything to move initially is difficult versus once it's going, it's easier
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to keep it up.
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What happens is usually it's that time range where guys start having kids.
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They settle down with a family, maybe work, career.
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And so the physical training, the athleticism stuff kind of goes away.
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And now they're feeling the repercussions of that.
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Welcome to Health Decoded, your number one source for real health information with your
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host, doctor Alessi and Matt Tack.
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Doctor.
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Alessi and Matt Tack, host of your show, the Health Decoded.
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And I got Doctor.
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Alessi here right now.
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We're gonna do a little bit of Q and A.
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And the topic is actually gonna be talking about how to maintain your level of athleticism
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really past 35, but ultimately past 40.
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So we see that there's a really a tapering off event that happens really after 35
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Yeah.
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Where guys kind of, like, go back to that thinking or that way of thinking that they
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can't perform in their twenties anymore, and they kinda give up on things.
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What have you seen in working with a number of men that are aging into their thirties.
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They were former athletes and they say, I'm a former athlete.
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What is the dialogue that you have typically with them?
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They're coming into the clinic, and then what are some of the things that they're
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experiencing of why they think that way?
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Yeah.
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I mean, I feel like the biggest thing is the analogy I would use would be like, if you've
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ever had to push a car that died, right, you put it in neutral, getting it started and
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getting that car moving is the hardest.
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Or, like, getting anything to move initially is difficult versus once it's going, it's easier
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to keep it up.
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What happens is usually it's that time range where guys start having kids.
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They settle down with a family, maybe work, career.
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And so the physical training, the athleticism stuff kind of goes away.
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Well, maybe they were a college athlete, but they didn't continue afterwards.
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They stopped doing that kind of thing.
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Maybe they hit the gym a couple days a week, but they're not pushing it to that level
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anymore.
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And now they're feeling the repercussions of that.
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If you were a college athlete, or if you were an athlete at any point, you felt mostly great
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because your energy level needed to to be that.
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Your body had to demand that.
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So it's not that age is a determinant for that.
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It's life and lifestyle.
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I think the other thing is external pressures of other people saying, oh, like, you can't do
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that anymore.
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You're not in your twenties.
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Right?
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Mhmm.
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Which we know is complete crap.
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Like, there's athletes who perform like LeBron James.
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He's performing at a extremely high level in a at a an old age.
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Right?
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Now I do think you need to modify what you do a bit.
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Right?
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I don't think you do the exact same things you were doing.
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Volume probably changes.
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I think recovery and warm up is much more important as you get older.
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Right?
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Tissue has especially if you've had maybe some old injuries, you've had some knee things.
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Right?
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Some ankles, I've had some injuries.
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So you have to be more diligent about that kind of thing because recovery is gonna be be
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longer.
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But, you know, I think across the board, that's the main thing I see is like guys stopping,
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right, versus the momentum killer, you know?
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So what does it look like to get back on track?
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You don't just go right back into full sprinting, full athletics.
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Like, you probably should condition yourself in a way, especially if you've let yourself get
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pretty out of shape.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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No, that's important.
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I mean, that's part of, like, really my story.
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There was a gap in time.
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Obviously, I was still training at a high level, I would say, but it was really the
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degradation in terms of my mindset of I wasn't doing the appropriate things even outside of
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the training to help and assist with the recovery angle.
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And so my body couldn't recover.
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You say that common theme of the overtraining.
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I probably was the over trainer, and was still in excellent shape, but at the same time, I
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wasn't training in the right way that I should at 35 and 40 as what I was at 26.
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Right.
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And so for me, my thing was I wasn't taking any nutraceuticals, I wasn't taking any peptides, I
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wasn't on hormone replacement therapy or hormone optimization therapy as you would say
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it.
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Raw dogging
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it man.
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I was just raw dogging it with protein and food, right?
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And there's so many other things that go in the process of when you become educated in that.
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So there's this element of mindset though too that kind of shifts along with that.
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So when there's like a gap in training cycles of, hey I used to train this way and now
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because I can't train that way I'm just not going to train at all.
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And so that's been a big thing.
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I think that you've seen ultimately, what are the best ways for a guy like post 35 going into
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40 or even beyond 40 to train?
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Yeah.
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I mean, the word functional is in our brand.
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Right?
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And I think that's because it makes sense.
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Right?
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Like, how does your body need to function on a daily basis?
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You and I, though we're we're similar in ways, we have different goals.
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Right?
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I play a sport that's different than the sport you play.
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I play lacrosse.
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I'm not jumping as much.
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So, you know, I'm not gonna probably train jumping as much as you would.
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You probably playing basketball need that ability to land from, you know, grabbing a
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rebound, hitting a layup or whatever, and your knees cushion and all that.
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Right?
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So golf, another one.
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A lot of guys play golf, yet they sit all day long.
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So now they've got this stiff rigid spine.
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No wonder their back hurts after a round of golf because they're rotating it.
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Yeah.
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Overswinging likely.
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Right?
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Trying to crush the drive.
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So it just it depends on the demands that you're trying to do.
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If your job is physical, you're somebody who's maybe in a in a manual type labor position,
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construction, the guys we see that are are truck drivers.
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Right?
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Like, they're sitting and loading.
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So there's a very complicated.
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Right?
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So it's all about capacity.
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So it all comes down to, like, what is the functional capacity your body needs?
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If that's to be standing on your feet all day long, you gotta work on that.
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If that's endurance, work on that.
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If it's strength, right?
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Like it just depends on the goals.
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So, however, I do think there's a level of mobility that everyone should have.
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And so I think the biggest shift I'll use personally from my experience, and I think you
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as well, would be like adding in some level of mobility type work.
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Not weighted, not lifting, just taking the body through ranges of motion, but more like moving,
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like kinetic, not just like static stretching like we all did when we were kids.
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But being able to get through into different positions, that way, functionally, what does
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that look like?
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Me getting on the floor with my kids and playing trains, right, at the end of the day
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after I've been on my feet all day.
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I can still do that and not get up and blow out a disc.
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Right?
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So, you know, it's very goal dependent, but I think across the board, if I could say in
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general would be like that, it'd be like mobility.
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Yeah.
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And putting that in practicality, you know, one of the major things that I've incorporated into
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my functional movement workouts is a lot of band work.
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So a lot of core rotation.
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So maybe it's not just mobility, it is part of the mobility with a level of little resistance.
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But there's a lot of you know, I posted something the other day that was associated to
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the sport you're playing.
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So if you enjoy playing golf or you enjoy playing basketball, some of the things that I
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do is that I'm, you know, working again on my type two muscle fibers.
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And so a lot of, like, just toe tapping.
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So what you were saying, my toes have to be ready for me to come down if I choose to play
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basketball at your 40.
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Your Achilles, your calves, all that.
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All that.
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The other thing to that too that I'll let me interrupt you real quick is tendon strength.
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Right?
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100%.
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When you're young and you're in twenties and you're an athlete, you don't even think about
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tendon strength.
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I mean, unless you've had a major injury, but your tendons are lubricated.
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They're they're really snappy.
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Right?
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They can absorb force.
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That goes away as you get older too.
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Right?
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I wouldn't say either of us are old.
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I don't consider old anything under 60 anymore.
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Right?
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Like, I think there's like Yeah.
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A level to that.
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But tendon strength is massive.
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So doing things like static holds under weight, under load, bands are great for that.
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And then the other one is the negative portion of an exercise.
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I've seen you do it where you do the rotational part with the band strong and powerfully, and
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then you slowly come back.
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That's building resilience.
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And so for golfers, any golfer we see in the clinic who has back issues, low back stuff,
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we're working on that eccentric.
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That's how they can swing through and then slow down and not over swing and, you know, pull
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something to, like, strain something, herniate a disc, or whatever.
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So it's massive for injury prevention and resilience, realistically.
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Yeah.
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That's so good because there's so many people that do sit down majority of the day.
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You know, I sit down for quite often, but that twenty minutes or thirty minutes I might have
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for a workout.
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My most important piece of that is going to be the functional movement side.
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That's going to attribute to maybe some hobby that I dedicate a couple hours a week to.
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So those are those are some big things and they're not honestly that hard.
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Like I did the other day that I started incorporating in is pogo stick jumps.
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Yeah.
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And so those really helped me just like elevate and then come down softer, elevate and come
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down softer, but you don't have to get rid of that, right?
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The moment the moment you stop doing those things, right, is the moment you're going to
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get that degradation.
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So I might not have the highest vertical that I did when I was twenties, but I still can jump
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up and down.
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Yeah.
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And you want to maintain that for as long as possible.
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To familiarize what pogo sticks are, it's literally just jumping up and down in place and
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just trying to ease the soft of coming down on your toes.
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So there's less impact and less force to your body.
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So it's really toes driven.
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But there's this element that we don't have to accept things that you can't perform at a high
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level.
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And one of the things that I've really put in that I would like you to build onto is you
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talked about tendon strength, and tendons are so important for the simple fact that those
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hold the lean muscle mass on your skeletal structure.
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And it can't just go with working out because I've done that.
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I've just worked out, I've done the resistance training and my tendons weren't that strong,
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but now at 40, I think my testins are my testins my tendons are a lot stronger because I
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incorporate peptides.
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Talk about nutraceuticals and peptides that supplement a workout, and this can be a whole
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another podcast, but
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Yeah.
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How important that is as well.
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Yeah.
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That's the building blocks of your your tissue.
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Right?
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So, you know, tendons, people don't think the correlation between vitamin c status and tendon
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health.
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Vitamin c is actually one of the most important things for collagen production and how well
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your body's gonna lay that down.
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The other thing outside of what you're, you know, putting into your body, I think is like
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fascial work.
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You know, if you're constantly like tight and built up and you're not doing like any type of
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fascial release, massage therapy, foam rolling, eventually, you start overloading the tendon as
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well.
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So the muscle fibers need to glide, they need to contract and relax, and the tendon is what
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anchors it to the bone.
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So now if you have a tight muscle that's not doing as much of that, that that cross bridge,
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contract and and relax motion, the next thing down is gonna be that tendon, and that's the
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force.
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Right?
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And so that's where people will then develop some kind of chronic tendon strain.
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Every time I stand up, my knee.
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Right?
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I got a jumper's knee, but I never jump.
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Right?
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Yeah.
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I get it from standing up or going up and down the stairs.
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That's because it's, you know, possibly an issue with that.
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Or again, like I said, vitamin status, lubrication, hydration status, it's all very
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important as well.
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The peptides are cool because the peptides basically just turn on and off the different
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receptors that tell the body to enhance or, you know, whatever with these systems.
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So it's not like a a peptide's not like a vitamin where it's putting something in, it's
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turning on and off different signals.
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So it's signaling molecules.
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That's why they're so cool.
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And so it, you know, it works on a cellular level, but for tendon strength, you know,
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getting inflammation levels down around a chronically kind of inflamed area is gonna be
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dramatically important.
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You saw that.
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I've seen that.
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Yeah.
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When, you know, when you're on a, like, even like a micro dose or a low dose of like a BPC
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peptide for a while, you're like,
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I don't have that, like, creak.
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Yeah.
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How about creaky right now?
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100%.
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You don't feel that
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way?
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I know that with push ups that I do every day.
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Yeah.
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I like usually had creaks in my elbows and my shoulders, and I don't have that.
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Mhmm.
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Yeah.
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And then they're like warmth.
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Right?
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Warming things up.
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So, you know, getting some if it's a sleeve or you you warm up the tissue, most guys don't
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warm up.
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Go to the gym, they do treadmill for a couple minutes, and then they start lifting.
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Yeah.
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And then they don't cool down either.
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Yeah.
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Just go right back to work or something.
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So, you know, I think it's not everybody has to play sports.
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Not everybody has to be an athlete, but you should take care of your body like one.
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Right?
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For longevity.
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Right?
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I think life is is athletic.
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Right?
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Like, you have to move, and you're never gonna not squat on the toilet again.
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Yeah.
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You're never gonna not, like, hopefully, pick up your kid again.
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Right?
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So it's like being able to do these things requires a level of functional athleticism.
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So I think guys who train like athletes have better longevity.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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That's really good.
00:13:30
So as you know, we own a clinic called Ascend Functional Health.
00:13:34
We actually have a MENS Ascend functional evaluation where you can come in and you can
00:13:40
actually get a full diagnostic check on all this stuff, and then you can come out with a
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roadmap.
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But how you choose that roadmap is completely up to you, but you can gain your re athleticism
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later in life like I did.
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And I definitely am appreciative of that because I really do feel completely different
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than I did three years ago, and I'll share my story sometime on that.
00:14:03
But if you wanna check that out, make sure you go to our website and get a men's send a
00:14:09
functional evaluation, and we'll see you on the other side.
00:14:14
Live beyond limits.
00:14:15
Live beyond limits, baby.
00:14:16
Thank
00:14:18
you for tuning in to Health Decoded, where we break down the truth about all things health
00:14:22
and empower you to take charge of your well-being.
00:14:26
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00:14:33
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00:14:38
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00:14:42
Until next time, curious, stay empowered, and remember your health is in your hands.