I'm 63 - This is what I wish I understood about health when I was 30

When you're 30, you rarely think much about how your body will function when you're 60.

I didn't do that anyway. I trained, worked, lived and was busy with life. My body worked. It recovered quickly and I probably took a lot of it for granted.

Today I am 63. I have been exercising most of my adult life and have worked with fitness and health for over 40 years.

And if I were to sit down with my 30-year-old self, there are a few things I would like to say. Not because I did everything wrong. On the contrary. But There are things I understand today that I wish I had understood back then.

1. Muscles are about much more than how you look

When I was younger, strength training was largely about building a nice, strong body. Today, I see muscles in a completely different way.

Muscles are capital we build for the future.

They help us maintain strength, function and independence as we age. They make it easier to get up, carry things, climb stairs and continue doing the things we enjoy.

In addition, muscle tissue plays an important role in metabolism and blood sugar regulation, among other things. The muscle mass you build and, above all, maintain throughout your life can be extremely valuable later on. If I was 30 today, so I wasn't just training for the summer. I was training for my 70, 80, and 90 year old self.

2. Fitness isn't just something you do to burn calories

As a young person, it's easy to see cardio training as a way to maintain weight or become more fit. But Fitness is about something much bigger. The heart, lungs and blood circulation should ideally function for many more decades.

Being able to walk fast, run, cycle, swim or otherwise regularly get your heart rate up is therefore an investment that goes far beyond calorie consumption.

Today I think less about how many calories a walk burns and more about what it does for the body over time.

3. Recovery is part of training

When you're young , you can get away with a lot. You can train hard, sleep too little and still feel pretty good the next day. That doesn't mean it's optimal. Over the years, I've come to understand that training and recovery are two sides of the same coin.

Training gives the body a signal. But The adaptation happens afterwards. It is when we eat, sleep and recover that the body gets the opportunity to repair and rebuild itself. Therefore, more is not always better. Better is better.

4. Sleep is not a luxury

I think a lot of ambitious people see sleep as the part of the day you can borrow time from. Work another hour. Watch another episode. Answer a few more emails. But The body sends the invoice.

Sleep affects recovery, hunger, concentration, mood, performance and a wide range of biological processes.

I would tell my younger self: Take care of your sleep. You don't lose eight hours. You invest them in the sixteen hours you're awake.

5. You don't have to be perfect

This is perhaps one of the most important things.

• Health is rarely determined by what you do on a single day.

• It is built by what you do over and over again.

• You don't have to eat perfectly every day.

• You don't have to train perfectly every week.

• You don't have to say no to dinners, vacations, wine, or desserts for the rest of your life.

  
  

But your basic habits need to be good. What you do 80–90 percent of the time matters a lot more than what you do occasionally.

6. Alcohol costs more than you think

When you're younger, you might think mostly about the day after. With Over the years, it has become clearer that alcohol can also affect sleep, recovery, energy and training quality.

I'm not saying everyone has to stop drinking alcohol. But I think many people would benefit from being more aware of how much and how often they drink and why. The body doesn't care that the glass was part of a nice dinner. It still has to handle the alcohol.

7. Stress isn't always visible but the body notices it

I've been an entrepreneur for most of my adult life. I know how easy it is to get used to a fast pace. Man can almost begin to consider stress as the normal state.

But the body doesn't make a perfect distinction between the stress of training, lack of sleep, work, worry, and everything else we put into life. Everything has to be recovered from. That's why I've gotten better at something I perhaps didn't value as highly as a 30-year-old:

To do nothing.

• When I am active, I am active.

• When I rest, I really try to rest.

  
  

8. Libra tells very little

I think we've made body weight the main issue when we talk about health for far too long. But Two people can weigh exactly the same and have completely different bodies and completely different health. Muscle mass, abdominal fat, fitness, strength, blood pressure, blood values, balance and how the body actually works tell us a lot that the bathroom scale can never show.

The question should therefore not only be:

What do I weigh?

Without:

What is the body made of – and what can it do?

9. Don't start taking care of your body when it starts to break down.

This is what I would really like to say to my 30-year-old self.

• Don't wait.

• Don't wait for high blood pressure.

• Don't wait for bad blood values.

• Don't wait until your back protests, your fitness disappears or you discover that you are no longer as strong.

Preventive health is quite thankless. You rarely get to know what problems you avoided. But That doesn't make it any less valuable.

10. Health is actually freedom

This is perhaps the biggest change in my thinking. When I was younger, I associated a lot of training with performance and appearance.

Today I increasingly associate health with freedom .

• The freedom to travel.

• The freedom to exercise.

• The freedom to go wherever I want.

• The freedom to carry my own bags.

• The freedom to continue working if I want.

• The freedom to play, experience, discover and be independent.

That's why I train today. Not to try to be 30 again. But to be as strong, healthy and functional a 63-year-old as possible – and to give my future self the best possible conditions.

If I could say one thing to my 30 year old self...

I would say: Take care of your body before you have to.

You will use it every day for the rest of your life.

You can change your residence.

You can change cars.

You can change jobs.

You can earn new money.

But the body you've been given will hopefully carry you for many decades to come. Treat it accordingly. Because one day you'll understand that a strong and functioning body isn't just about health.

It's about the opportunity to continue living the life you want to live.

All the best, Kennet Båth