A Major Health Crisis

I wanted to learn about muscle strength and its impact on my health. It was then that I began the long journey to understanding the central role that skeletal muscle plays in our own health and in our risk of disease. At the time, these attributes were understood to be important components of physical fitness and performance in sports. However, my mentor drew my attention to the implications of skeletal muscle performance and capacity, which have even greater biomedical and societal implications. Through the work of many collaborators, we now understand that a regular program of structured physical activity can prevent the onset of major mobility disability in older adults. Fred is an excellent skier, and I was totally amazed at the terrain we were able to cover in those 3 perfect days. I am grateful to Fred and Steven for reaching out to me and helping us in the research community to spread the word about sarcopenia and what we can do to effectively prevent and treat this latent condition. I was sitting in a bar, waiting to meet a friend, when I heard the door swing open. I turned my head and caught sight of the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. She was lean, athletic, and, although she wore not a bit of makeup, her skin was radiant. Despite my confidence, it was clear that she wanted no part of me. Hopeful and never one to quit, the next night I returned to the same bar around the same time.

Its Getting To Be A Habit

As I had hoped, she did too, and this time she spoke to me. She even accepted an invitation to dinner the following week. During that dinner, we talked for hours. When I met Jana, the woman who would become my wife of over 30 years, I wanted to impress her. I decided a good way to accomplish this was to go to the gym with her. However, the visit did not go as I had planned. You’re wasting your time. She said I had to join a real gym and get a real trainer. I did as I was told. With Jana pushing me, and my trainer driving me hard, I began lifting heavier and heavier weights. And as my workout changed, my body changed with it. Over time, although I was gaining weight on the scale, friends kept asking if I was losing weight.

The End Will Come

As I built muscle mass, my body grew stronger and tighter. During the 15 years that followed, I watched my dad as he aged. His muscles deteriorated and his strength waned. I saw depression overtake him as he realized that he had wasted a big chunk of his life. I vowed that I would not squander the last 30 years of my life and, instead, would make them better and better. None of those my age who I have worked and played with over a long career are still competing at the hard things of life. I am winning more at golf than ever in my long life. I am still an active trial lawyer who has the power and life force to work harder and longer than ever before in my life. I have stuck to my wife’s advice about resistance training and still do it with increasing weight to this day. As the years passed, I saw more and more how right she had been and I continued to jack up the intensity of my workouts. I began to see that I was still changing, evolving, and becoming increasingly different from my peers, both physically and mentally. Much of the information was not easily understood by novices like me, but I gradually learned how to tease out the hard science.

No Expectations

I was stunned by what I discovered. Muscle mass and strength are critical to physical and mental health, and both add to the enjoyment of life. Hundreds of studies, Nobel Prize–winning research, and fascinating angles were becoming increasingly clear and accessible to me. I couldn’t soak up enough on the topic. Medical science confirmed everything Jana had taught me years ago. It was a noble idea, but I needed more answers first. I was well into my 60s when my skiing buddies suddenly stopped joining me. They had tons of excuses, ranging from being too busy to having too much work. But I was still going strong, challenging myself more and more. While they were slowing down, I was taking more difficult runs. It started to sink in that they might have been getting too frail to tackle the slopes with the same vitality we’d all once shared. They may have chalked up their slowdown to the natural aging process. But I knew that my strength training had had a positive impact on my overall health, and I wanted to learn more. I focused my search on strength training and on muscle deterioration as a consequence of age. I wanted to learn all I could. I made it my job to soak up anything I could find on aging and the notion of wasting away as the years unfolded. It’s just what happens when people get older. Still, he agreed we should investigate further, and together we sought out more information, more research, and more experts. The results of our initial findings were disappointing. However, we refused to accept that answer. If I could stay strong and vibrant, couldn’t everyone? I wasn’t special in any way. I simply made the time to do resistance training. Along the way, I met Steven Droullard, an expert in attention mechanics as they relate to my aging paradox and my quest to understand why some people remained strong and gained strength while others walked off into aging with the acceptance that with each day, they would become weaker and weaker. Steven, though 20 years my junior, was recovering from a major health crisis at the time. At my urging, Steven also hit the gym, slowly building up his strength and improving his health.