The 2 big factors are level of activity and kids. They will drain the life out of you.
Like being in the trades. You trade your physical wellbeing for wages.
Ah yes. The Brendan Carr effect.
Im 42 and im just happy i have Head full of thick, long, black hair without a single grey. And I look more attractive than I ever did. I hated looking younger when I was in my 20s and 30s but I love it now. I don’t think I have a wrinkle more than i did in high school.
Im poor as shit and hate my job, but I have my hair!
Wow, you’re the complete opposite of my partner. She’s 23 and has about 20% gray hair. Apparently runs in the family because her uncle was fully gray by his college graduation.
I love gray hair! Looks so beautiful
I know right! I think her silver streaks are so cool.
Your 40s are where your life situations and choices seem to catch up to you
In your 20s people largely look young and energetic, regardless of whether they exercise, how they eat, whether they smoke, etc.
By the 40s, the smokers look terrible, the people with poor diet and exercise aren’t no longer getting away with it as their metabolism slows, etc. These are the years where you start to see the trajectories diverge.
By the 60s, I see people who are as spry as they ever were, and people who are resigned to the end being near.
Millennial: “Socialism is my retirement plan!”
[proceeds to participate in no direct action whatsoever]
This arguably applies to a lot of adult ages. When you’re in your 20s, a lot of that is also true. Some of your friend group look like like they’d reminisce about The War, whereas the others appear younger than the iPhone 3G.
Mid-forties are a decision point. It’s when you decide to either get healthy, and stay healthy the rest of your life, or… you don’t.
Your body starts falling apart faster if you don’t maintain it. Unlike the years before, the health losses are forever.
Fair warning.
Your body starts falling apart faster if you don’t maintain it.
There’s a corollary here that I don’t see anyone talking about. If you set a good plan to maintain your body fitness from say your mid 30s on, one day you’ll be doing that same reasonable workout routine and then you hurt yourself because its too much. Yesterday it was fine, the prior 15 years it had been fine, but now its not, and you have an injury you need 3 to 6 months to recover from. You think its a fluke and, once healed, you go back to your fitness routine and you injury yourself in a different way. Another 3 to 6 months of recovery.
There appears to be a need to modify or abandon parts of your fitness routine as you get older, but there’s no guidebook on what to stop doing and when, nor what to be doing instead.
My guess is as you get older, those support muscles that help keep everything in place also need work. Also, bad form habits are more likely to rear their head as time goes on.
So the people who didn’t perfect their form, the ones who use tricks to lift what they do (like a curl you can only complete if you start out my building up momentum on the lower part to get through the upper part), the ones who only work their major muscles, those are most likely to get hurt.
Though there’s also wear and tear on your non-muscle infra, like your bones, joints, tendons, and cartilege. If you keep pushing for heavier weights, you put more and more strain on those. They can improve somewhat with training but they aren’t like muscles where straining them to the point of failure and tearing encourages the body to build more and age doesn’t help there either, especially if you develop arthritis or something that further weakens that support infra.
Starting to lift was the best decision I ever made at 40
Same but cycling. Stumbling into a workout that I look forward to was game changing.
Seriously! I have the best physique I’ve ever had and look five years younger. It costs me three hours a week and a little effort.
Care to share your workout regime?
I have a real problem of keeping it up for more than 2 weeks…
3 hours a week sounds manageable though
Not who you asked but I think the absolute best bang for your buck would be a simple barbell program. 531 for Beginners you could run this program for a year and It will completely change your physique. To make a dead simple I would install the boostcamp app and use it to track your sets/reps/progress, it has instructions for the exercises which are easy to learn
Thank you very much for the input
I’ve never seen myself much as a weight pusher.
I do have some weights somewhere, but I always was a proponent of just using your body weight.
And although a part of the motivation comes from looking good naked again, it’s not so much about that - and that’s what I’ve always associated with weight lifting.But I’ll look into it.
Trying something new is always additional motivation anyway and my prejudice here is very probably wrong anyway.So thanks for that, will read into it :-)
No worries I’m always happy to help someone get started. I have always been skinny 165lb runner and cyclist. But I wanted to try lifting a barbell and a few years later I’m sitting at 220lbs with a powerlifting gym in my basement feeling better than I did in my 20s.
In this thread already some people mention weight lifting as being helpful
So, I’ll look into it
But I don’t really want to build up mass.
I always liked being skinny, but defined and with strength/endurance.I want the body to be able to do what I like.
So, going skiing or surfing and everything else.I always find those mountains of muscles some bodybuilders move around strange, because they don’t seem to be really functional for sport and reduce the ability to move, when they get extreme.
I’m thinking of getting back into fighting sports.
Did Hapkido for some time in my 20s and really liked it. But my joints are aching by just holding the phone to long.
So doing some painful levering on them during training doesn’t sound so wise…
I’m currently trying to get them better with some elastic band exercises and try to build up on that, by extending the movement to also include the shoulders.But obviously, this is more of a health exercise, than a real sport thing
I researched the shit out of various programs and you’ll quickly learn there’s a lot of advice, opinion, and lore in the world of lifting. What I concluded was that all I needed were dumbbells, a barbell (optional), access to a leg press, lat pulldown, and a seated row machines. All staples at any gym. For a home gym you can replace most of these machines with dumbbell alternates.
The last two work muscles you just can’t access as efficiently with free weights.
I started with whatever felt easy enough. My beginner dumbbell press weight was 20lbs, double fly was 5lbs, as examples.
I usually do these in 3 sets of 8 repetitions taking a one minute break between sets.
Monday – Legs + Abs
Squat (Quads/Glutes) 45+10 Weighted Lunges (Quads) 30+0 Weighted Hip Thrust (Glutes) 60+10 Leg Press (115+10) Declined Overhead Weighted Sit-up (Abs) 10+15 Standing Calf Raises (Calves) 135+25 Dumbbell Romanian Deadlift (Hamstrings/Glutes) 35+5
Wednesday – Push (Chest/Shoulders/Triceps + Abs)
Dumbbell Bench Press (Chest) 45-5 Dumbbell Overhead Press (Shoulders) 25-5 Dumbbell Fly 20-5 Dumbbell Lateral Raise (Shoulders) 15-5 Hanging Leg/Knee Raise (Abs) body weight Incline Dumbbell Press (Chest) 40-5 Dumbbell Overhead Triceps Extension (Triceps) 40-5
Friday – Pull (Back/Biceps)
Lat Pulldown (Back) 100-15 Seated Row (Back) 100-15 Hanging Leg/Knee Raise (Abs) body weight Dumbbell Curl (Biceps) 30-5 Dumbbell Bent Over Row (Back) 45-5 Dumbbell Romanian Deadlift (Hamstrings/Glutes) 45-5 Hammer Curl (Biceps/Forearms) 25-5
If I didn’t know what an exercise was, I looked it up here.
https://fitbod.me/exercises/dumbbells
The numbers are the weight I will attempt first. The +/- means if too easy, add the weight on the third set. If too hard, remove the weight after attempting the new weight.
I try to always hit failure. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I only get five reps.
I don’t like all the silly programs 5/3/1 Faster, Stronger, Harder, or what not. I do these and occasionally try new lifts. That’s it.
You can do 2 sets of 6 reps at higher weights and get similar results as long as you hit failure, get enough protein, and sleep at least six hours.
Thank you very much!
Saved your comment and will probably build up some kind of similar training for my pre surfing workout, so I don’t look like an absolute idiot, who can’t even manage to get out to the waves ;-)You’re (at least?) the second one recommending weight lifting and barbells.
So I guess, there is something to itWill need to make some room in the apartment for it, as I’m not the biggest fan of going to the gym
Until it broke, I had such a thing to do pull ups at the door frame
Which was great to get rid of stress.
So I just did some pull ups during work, when I needed to get rid of the adrenaline - else I’ll just end completely tensed up in the eveningWe have a room full of stuff we don’t use and call it our storage room.
It’s a waste of space anyway. Maybe I can combine that 2 things and clean out the room, to make a little gym and reading room :-)Oh! Then get a good pair of adjustable dumbbells and a simple adjustable bench. That’ll take very little space. Replace that pull-up bar and you’re done. You can get the Power Block for about $300.
Just swap out any exercise I stated that needs gym equipment with a similar exercise using dumbbells. Reducing the reps from 3x8 to 2x6 will cut down the workout time significantly and yield almost identical results (if you reach failure.)
When I’m traveling I do this:
3x8 Walking lunges 25 lbs +5 3x8 Dumbbell Rows 25 lbs +5 3x8 Chest Press 25 lbs +0 3x8 Dumbbell Shoulder Press 20 lbs +0 3x8 Dumbbell Biceps Curls 25 lbs +0 3x8 Dumbbell Triceps Extensions 25 lbs +0
For an easy full body workout that only requires dumbbells.
Comment saved again, thank you
Will have quite some research to-do tomorrow, to get all the input of you guys sorted out.And, as now mentioned multiple times already in this thread, I’ll get rid of our fucking “storage room” of mostly trash and make some place for a little gym out of it.
Thank you so much for all your input!
All of you have really motivated me to actually do something about it :-)
I really, really wish I could get back into it. I had some severe back injuries and now I have days where I can barely stand. Physical therapy helped a bit, but they have said that some risky (and very expensive) spine surgery is my best bet to get back to semi normal.
What are you looking at, disc replacement?
From what I understand, yes. I am not really onboard with that plan so I am just trying to continue doing what I can of the exercises that my physical therapist gave me and hope that it can alleviate a bit of the pain and periods of immobility.
That’s rough. I’m not sure what you can/can’t do safely, but in my amateur opinion building up your posterior chain is the best thing you can do to stabilize your back, especially if you sit a lot
Yeah, I’m in my very early 40’s now and after being really skinny for all my life, I’m suddenly getting a beer belly
Having some emotional hardships in the last 2 years didn’t help with that either.
So, my first step will be to stop drinking and smoking daily, and start to do some sport, with surfing on holidays being the motivation.But every time, I’m getting back from a (usually demanding) business trip, I can’t do anything, but lay flat.
Like many times, I’m now suffering with a fever and some sinusitis since a week as I got back home.Every fucking time, I’ve build up some physical condition, I’m getting sick with something and seemingly lose everything I’ve won.
This is really frustrating and I’m not sure, how I can break that cycle.
Obviously food (besides stopping to drink and smoke) has a major impact.
But as my wife is a vegetarian, everything I’m cooking is usually vegetarian and healthy already.
On business trips though, they aren’t those romantic business trips with good food, wine and just networking.
I’m working in industry warehouses and all the restaurants around are usually rather shit.I usually don’t have lunch, as it makes me too tired in the afternoon. So I tried to have something like Soylent (in my case, I stuck with Plenny + milk and fresh fruits instead of just water) and that felt better.
But it gets quite boring after a few months.I think, finding a goal, like being able to surf and not just die breathless on the board, is the way to go for me.
But every time, I start for such a regime, I’m getting sick and it feels like everything was for nothing, because all the condition I’ve build up is seemingly lost again…Would be very much open for suggestions, because I can’t really find a way out, but I have to.
I’m getting more and more unhappy with myself.I don’t know if it’s at all possible for you and depends on where you live and work, but I try to integrate “little sports” in my daily life. I try to cycle and walk to places as much as possible, instead of bus or tram. Try to use staircases instead of elevators. Etc. It can be small things, but easier to keep up than a real sporty regime.
Yeah, that’s a good thing!
By bike I’m much faster at the warehouse with by test station and during summer I do that.
Only in winter and with rain, I use the car.And you’re right, that already seems to make a difference.
Regarding your hint with the stairs:
Doing that already.
In hotels I’m using the stairs to train myself a bit and at home in only in the first floor (well, 1,5 because if the entrance stairs to the house)It sounds childish, but since if got a SmartWatch, it motivates me, that I can see the daily/weekly statistics of how many stairs I took.
Gamification really seems to work ;-)If gamification works for you, maybe give walkscape.app a chance. Looks cool, but my phone was too crappy
That’s nice of you, but walking isn’t a problem
I’m often doing 18000 steps and more at work
It’s more about doing real training exercises over a longer period of time
You’re aware of all the changes you need to make, or at least you have a strong intuition. All of my lasting adaptations have been built on tiny increments gained over time, and only from a place of love. Be kind to yourself. Also, if you’re not already looking at it, strongly consider your sleep hygiene. Good, consistent sleep is the base of the pyramid. No lasting change, especially when it comes to one’s physical condition, can be sustained if your sleep is shit.
Thanks for the kind words :-)
Sleep is probably an issue as well, yes …
I’m often on business trips and my work schedule isn’t set in stone.
If a customer needs help, I’ll be up at night.
On business trips, I don’t have any free day and work through - and with often changed times, as I can’t change anything during production, but can only monitor.
So I need to do the changes at night and if I change anything on the weekend, I need to be there at Monday morning (5-6) to monitor the production start.I think, changing the stuff I do in my free time, could help me to handle this work life better.
I’ll start with little things now, as soon as I’ve got finally rid of this fucking flu…
45 no kids drinking gin tonics on a rooftop bar in Malaga atm
- Eating cereal for lunch.
GL mate, I feel bad for showing off.
Lots of love <3
Whether that sucks or not kinda depends on the cereal.
45, with 11 and 15 year old kids, currently hoping the Excedrin Migraine I took kicks in soon
GL man, your building something for the future, which is something I’ll not have.
Migraine is no joke, though.
your building something for the future
Yeah a migraine!
Weirdly accurate. Early 40’s and about to get a divorce and start over. Losing the house I’ve been in for 12 years and will likely see my children much less. I’m excited and petrified of whats to come.
I got divorced 10 years ago and since I decided to be child free I was able to travel a lot. Now I bought a new house and am just vibbing to be an old lady lol
The journey is shit but the destination is worth it. Keep your kids in mind with everything you do and you’ll always be ahead.
Sorry but, isn’t the destination… Death? If so, I agree completely ❤️
I was specifically referring to the divorce journey, with the destination being more or less settled after it’s finalized.
Your interpretation definitely works though 😆
Damn, hang in there. That’s a lot to go through, but i imagine you’re probably getting out of a bad situation by the sound of things. Try to keep focused on the good parts, and cherish the time with your children all the more. Hopefully you can get established somewhere soon and begin anew. The end of some things will be the beginnings of others. You might just be starting a hot new era 🙌
It’s going to be 1 or 2 shit years, according to my divorce lawyer, and that was the case with me, but you’ll find yourself again. As another commenter said, try to keep contact with your kids as much as you can. Fight for them if you can.
Already felt like I lived too long. Not sure I can do this another 40
I’m 40 and still feel like 250 would be the perfect age for me to go out, but I’ll take whatever I can get.
I have the opposite problem. In my early 40s and still have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. Hell, I’m still not ready to have* kids!
Point I’m making is that there’s not nearly enough time given to us to live our short lives. Especially once you factor in the age of the universe (or even just Earth itself). Humanity as a whole has been a brief flash in the pan; if earth’s entire history was condensed down to one hour, you could literally blink and miss out on all of human evolution. That’s how little time we’re given.
I’m nearing 60 and I feel like I must be about 110. Not physically, because I’m in great shape, bike 25-50 miles a day, work out, keep myself thin. But I’ve done so many different things in my life, different careers, lived lots of different places, that it feels like I’ve lived many lifetimes already. And since I grew up in the era of three TV channels, I think I’m already living in science fiction. People talk about their lives going by in a flash, but I kind of think that’s a consequence of just doing the same things day after day.
I’m mainly thankful that I don’t have any kids to worry about and that it’s possible I’ll be dead before the climate shit really hits the fan. Being killed by robots is looking very realistic, unfortunately.
I love this for you. I feel like I ended up at 40 rather fucking fast, if you ask me. That said, I’ve done the math, and a large chunk of my time since high school has been a B.Sc. working and a M.Sc. throw in getting married and having kids and poof.
I haven’t done a lot of things but some pretty cool ones. I would like to do more but I’m busy with kids and mentoring young professionals and a bit of volunteer work.
I need people to need me less lol.
I’m old enough to remember selling Tupperware as a viable economy.
By the way, Tupperware is crap now. They deserve to go bankrupt. When a friend started selling Tupperware, I saw stuff that my mother still uses and I remember seeing at home when I was a kid. Now, we bought some stuff that two years later I had to throw away. It’s super shitty now. Not worth the money.
Enshittification!!!
MAKE. IT. SHITTY!
How does one enshittify shit? That’s like a riddle
I remember when you could make a living out of it…
I feel like Tupperware, Amway, and Mary Kay were the Ubers of 1980.
You forgot Avon.
All those old jobs are gone as a means of living. Al Bundy sold shoes. Door to door sales used to be viable
Me too, thanks
It was strange being first time parents at that age, while meeting younger couples who were becoming grandparents
A big part of the reason we didn’t have a third kid was the “advanced maternal age” classification, and scary increases in potential genetic issues when the mother hits 40
My brother had his kids at 41 and 43. He loves it except for the fact that everyone assumes he’s their grandfather.
I was fine with that part, but now my peers are all talking about retirement while I still have two in college
After high school or college the training wheels are completely off and the guard rails imposed by parents and schools are essentially gone. You’re no longer surrounded by people of similar socioeconomic backgrounds and especially age.
Nobody’s telling you that the “successful relationship” assignment is due by 30, “marriage” by 32, “kid(s)” by 35, etc.
You’re on your own. You don’t have to conform socially anymore, you can get away with ignoring rules. Maybe it works and you become a trendsetter, or maybe you end up in a tent under a bridge. A lot of what happens is luck, good or bad, and a lot of that luck is going to come from how well off your family was when you were young. You’re far more likely to be exposed to other people’s randomness, too, and that can push you up the ladder quickly or wreck you.
There’s variables that you can control and even more that are outside your control once the guard rails are gone that will make your life very different from your peers.
A lot of what happens is luck
I agree with this, there will always be a level of good and bad luck that is out of our control. However each of us has the ability to increase our footprint of good luck or reduce our footprint for bad luck (never to zero bad luck though). If the good luck of a job of a lifetime is available to you but requires you know how to speak French, then that is only good luck if you spent time earlier in your life learning to speak French. In this case, learning French in the past increased amount of good luck you could harvest in life.
Alternatively, if you have an asshole friend that likes committing petty crimes or picking fights, you increase your footprint for bad luck by hanging out with them. That drunk guy at the other end of the bar would have simply been a forgotten thought a couple of days later, but your asshole friend antagonized that guy and you ended up with bad luck getting sucker punched instead that night because of your asshole friend. In this case, choosing to hang out with asshole friend increased the amount of bad luck foisted upon you in life.
I agree, conditionally about the good luck.
Some people are going to have far less resources to expose themselves to good luck that can actually benefit them in way that can change their outlook. Unfortunately, “luck” for most of us is how much money we have and the social standing that money offers to expose us to lucky situations. So for some it may not always be “bad” luck, it’s just that opportunities to improve one’s situation just don’t appear often enough to be taken advantage of correctly.
And yes, surrounding yourself deliberately with other people that attract negative outcomes is absolutely a controllable factor.
Some people are going to have far less resources to expose themselves to good luck that can actually benefit them in way that can change their outlook.
I agree completely. That is the part that is out of our control that I referenced.
Unfortunately, “luck” for most of us is how much money we have and the social standing that money offers to expose us to lucky situations.
I could agree or disagree with you on this depending on how we are defining things here. If a person comes from money and social standing, goes to ivy league school law school, and is offered a great job at a prestigious law firm right out of school I wouldn’t call that luck, I’d call that systemic. I’d probably even say it was a forgone conclusion that someone in that situation got the job. The “lucky situation” here for this person wouldn’t be getting the job, it would be born into money/society.
For any of the rest of us, crawling through law school to ending up in a chance meeting to get offered that same job, the job offer would be the “lucky situation”.
Overall, I agree with your premise even if we put the definitions in different places.
it’s just that opportunities to improve one’s situation just don’t appear often enough to be taken advantage of correctly.
This goes to the heart of my main point. Each of us can positively affect the number of opportunities open to us that may be lucky with our own actions. You can’t plan for luck, but you can learn all kinds of things which, in some strange way in the future, make you eligible to take advantage of a lucky opportunity.
I can give you an example from my own life. When I was younger I poor and trying to cram as much video onto a writeable CD. I dived into learning video compressions methods so I could be cheap and save on CDs, putting more on each. Years later I at an employer, the company has a problem because they need video sent from a rural location back to the main office for analysis by engineers in a very short amount of time and the rural local only had a very very slow satellite internet connection (this was way before Starlink existed). I saw what they problem was. The video files were too big for the slow connection. I asked if they were willing to take a massive hit to quality to get the video files transferred. They were happy to! I gather the software and wrote a solution that they could use at the rural site to compress the videos before transferring using almost identical approaches to my writable CD compression methods. I got promoted an a $10k raise because of it.
Had I not tried to be cheap on CDs, I would have not have learned nor been lucky enough to take advantage and get that promotion.
Am 43, can confirm.
- Eating a bowl of cereal for lunch.
As a 44 year old, I remember my aunt throwing Tupperware parties.
Also yes to all the branches of lifestyles. I’m single and enjoying my freetime consuming media. Meanwhile a mutual friend of a friend I know has 3 kids, a wife and pets, and a weekend timeshare out near the beach.
It’s p wild.
40s and 60s were found to be the ages that saw the fastest aging
Yeah, 44 for me, and I hear it happens again ~65. There should be a PSA.
