Physical health is the foundation everything else rests on. You need it to practice sports, play with your kids, and move through life without pain. Without it, all the other forms of wealth — financial, social, mental — are harder to build and harder to enjoy.
Most people understand this in theory but fail to act on it. They don’t invest in their bodies consistently, and they don’t start early enough.
Start Early, Think Long
Parents should be teaching the fundamentals of eating and moving well to their children. I don’t see this happening often enough, especially on the nutrition side.
In your teens and twenties, your body is in its prime and it’s easy to feel invincible. But that window closes. Our bodies start losing muscle in our early forties and the decline continues into old age. The only proven way to slow that process is to lift weights. Start young if you can, learn proper technique, and be patient with how your body adapts to load.
Middle-aged athletes face a particular kind of skepticism from sedentary peers. The assumptions tend to be the same: midlife crisis, vanity, trying to hold onto youth. What those critics miss is that we’re not training to recapture the past — we’re training to lead healthy, active lives for decades ahead. Research shows that the training you do in your 40s and 50s can add years to your life and life to your years. And the type of exercise matters: vigorous exercise has outsized longevity benefits compared to moderate activity alone.
What Are You Training For?
It’s worth asking yourself that question directly. For anyone just starting out, the answer might be losing weight or building a base level of fitness, and that’s fine. But once those goals are met, the question becomes more important.
A few years ago, I had the chance to speak with some retired elite athletes about their careers. What struck me was how many of them described lasting physical damage from their playing years — injuries that never fully healed, chronic pain that now limits everyday activity. These weren’t fringe cases. A meaningful percentage of top junior athletes in many sports never reach the professional level precisely because they sustain career-ending injuries in their late teens or early twenties, during periods of intense training load on still-developing bodies.
That changed how I think about sport. The goal isn’t performance at any cost. It’s staying healthy, strong, and mobile for as long as possible.
Train Across Sports, Not Just One
If you play sport, don’t limit yourself to just one. Practice several complementary ones. It keeps your body more balanced, reduces overuse injuries, and frankly keeps training more interesting.
My own experience with padel taught me how easy it is to obsess over improvement in a single sport and overtrain the same movement patterns. Pushing too hard in one direction eventually leads to physical and mental breakdown. The athletes I’ve spoken with who are still active and pain-free in their fifties and sixties are almost always the ones who diversified their movement, prioritized recovery, and stopped treating every training session like a competition.
The frame I keep coming back to: you want to move well in your sixties, seventies, and eighties — not just now. That means not burning through your body in your forties.
Recovery Matters as Much as Training
One area I’ve come to take much more seriously is recovery. It’s easy to focus entirely on the training itself and neglect the other half of the equation. Proper sleep is non-negotiable — it’s when your body actually repairs and adapts. I’ve also found cold water immersion to be a valuable recovery tool, particularly after sport sessions where the goal is reducing inflammation rather than building muscle.
Eat Well, Ignore Most Diets
Throughout your life, eat healthily. The Mediterranean diet works best for me. In practice, that means a balanced mix of whole foods, plenty of vegetables, good protein sources, and healthy fats.
You can ignore most named diets, including veganism, vegetarianism, and meat-only approaches, unless you have a specific medical reason to follow one. The tribalism around food is a distraction. A balanced, varied diet beats any extreme approach for most people over the long run. If you want to optimize your nutrition seriously, work with a qualified nutritionist. It’s one of the better investments you can make in your health.
Resources Worth Your Time
Over the past few years I’ve been going deeper into the science of preventive medicine and longevity. If you’re interested in the same, these are the sources I keep coming back to:
- The Drive — Peter Attia. Attia is a physician focused on longevity. He interviews leading scientists and doctors on nutrition, exercise, sleep, and lifespan. Probably the most rigorous podcast on this topic.
- Huberman Lab — Andrew Huberman. A Stanford neuroscientist who covers brain, nervous system, and performance science with practical protocols you can actually use.
- Found My Fitness — Rhonda Patrick. Biomedical scientist focused on nutrition, longevity research, and the mechanisms behind lifestyle choices. Very research-dense.
- Live Long and Master Aging — Peter Bowes. Journalist-hosted conversations with aging and longevity experts. Accessible and practical.
- High Intensity Health — Mike Mutzel. Covers nutrition, fitness, and metabolic health through expert interviews. Good for diving into specific topics.
Related
Hi Jean,
I don’t agree with your advice, ”You can ignore practically all diets, including veganism, vegetarianism, and meat-only diets.”
Current best-practice nutritional research in many cases recommends a plant-based diet. I don’t see eating plant-based as a ”diet”, in the narrow sense of the word, but rather as an intellectual, health and ethical lifestyle choice.
Without getting into detail, I concede that the health aspect on its own may still warrant debate. You will have heard about the ”Blue Zones” where admittedly small quantities of meat are also consumed. I’m not expert enough. However, you can’t approach this in isolation.
Climate considerations change everything. The environment just won’t sustain the level of planetary degradation caused significantly by animal husbandry. If emerging societies emulate the already rich ones, they are going to want their pound of flesh too. It’s an inefficient process and our finite natural resources won’t countenance it. The same concerns are appropriate to the overfishing of our marine environment.
I don’t personally see any scope for debate in the ethical aspects of say, factory-scale meat and chicken production or the dairy industry. Already there are alternative products which render dairy consumption unnecessary. The argument for free-range, grain-fed meat is not large-scale physically possible and to me smacks of economic elitism.
I enjoy my meat as much as the next carnivore, and I’ve forgone it very late in my life. The ethical aspects disturbed me for many decades, but climate change considerations have made it an unavoidable existential decision too.
Although I firmly believe that a traditional plant-based diet is a major component of a healthy lifestyle, I’m pleased to see that enormous strides are being made in meat cloning and other similar breakthroughs. They will hopefully be free of current additives or drugs and add some meaty spice to my mainly plant-based diet. Best of all, I won’t have to worry about ethical animal considerations or my guilt towards the future generation of children and grandchildren .
I enjoy your newsletters. By the way, I’m a South African living in Malta! But that’s another whole story.
Hi Ian,
Thanks for your comments, I appreciate you sharing your views. I’ve had a look at your training video on the web, well done for staying fit!
In the part about diets, what I meant is that the typical Mediterranean diet, which is really just a balanced way of eating, works very well, so I would stick to that. I’ve looked into several diets and have friends who have gone very deep into those rabbit holes. The only conclusion I got is that specific diets are hard to maintain but can be useful to treat certain ailments and conditions. There is also the question of allergies and intolerances where it would make a lot of sense to see what works best for one’s particular body.
I agree that we should be working to make the planet more sustainable, but me switching to say being vegetarianism will not solve that. It will just make my life very difficult and make me miserable, and won’t improve my overall health. If it works for others and they’re happy about then that’s great, but for me the Mediterranean diet is what makes me happy and keeps me healthy and fit.
Climate change is a very interesting topic that I might delve into at some point here on the blog, but my basic premise is that trying to force and shame people into changing their current practices won’t work and this technique has historically had a very low impact on improving the prospects of world climate. What we need to focus on is better planning and technologies that deliver cleaner energy and more sustainable food. I understand people are very emotional on the subject but thinking in first principles brings me to this conclusion.