Rethinking Health #3 - How to Reconcile Performance-Based Goals with Long-term Health
Q: How do you balance chasing fitness performance and goal setting with longevity and long-term health?
Welcome back to Rethinking Health. My name is Ben Williamson and I’m a venture capitalist, recovering corporate attorney, co-founder of a health and fitness facility, an eternal knowledge seeker with a growth mindset, and a connoisseur of all-things health. Rethinking Health is my mission to discuss health, venture capital, innovation, and start-ups within the context of redefining and pursuing preventative population health. If you want to catch up on past posts, you can do that here: intro, #1, and #2.
My goal when I started writing here was to write something every month. Welp, you may or may not have realized that I missed last month. Sure I have plenty of moderately good and valid excuses (and frankly no one holding me accountable to the arbitrary monthly schedule) but it really comes down to the following: if you wait for the perfect topic or the perfect amount of free time, you'll never write a damn thing. What's that phrase? "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good." Sometimes you have to just do it. To be clear, you can extrapolate this out to everything in life, including working out and health. This month's post is a bit of a change up as it’s a general health and fitness topic that comes to us in the form of a reader question:
Q: How do you balance chasing fitness performance and goal setting with longevity and long-term health?
The undertone to this question was that my friend is struggling with motivation and knows a performance goal would help, but was trying to reconcile running a marathon (or something like it) with longevity. To be completely honest, this is a question I think about a lot. I think about it a lot because I constantly pursue performance while trying to reconcile overall health and longevity and the two "alternatives" in the question seem to be contradictory, or at least often at odds with one another. And maybe sometimes they are - but one of my core contentions in life is that all successful people have a unique ability to hold (and act on) two competing ideas in their head at once. But I also think it's mostly true that the "alternatives" in the question aren't actually as inconsistent as they might seem. Let's try to explain with my five answers to the question:
Consistency is undeniably super important for longevity. Consistency is also hard. Most people try to rely on motivation to workout, but it turns out that motivation is complete bullshit. It's fleeting and though it can work really well in those short-term acute moments, it's useless in the long term. When you open the front door at 4:30am to go for a run and it's pouring rain outside, motivation is no where to be found. Instead, there are three main things that I believe DRIVE long-term action and behavior (like working out consistently): identity, discipline, and concrete/hyper-specific goals. Identity and discipline are enough for some people, but I think those cases are extremely unique. Most people also need the latter; Setting concrete/hyper-specific goals often act as the longer term catalyst that motivation fails to do. So even if your setting a goal is borne out of ego and the desire to achieve certain performance, it also serves to cause consistency, which is perhaps the most critical input for longevity.
Notwithstanding #1 above, it's not enough to just go through the motions and workout consistently but with low intensity to achieve all around health (and longevity) - I contend longevity is a result of fitness. While it may be an unpopular source to some, I have never found a better definition for fitness than CrossFit's definition of fitness. CrossFit makes use of three different standards or models for evaluating and guiding fitness. Collectively, these three standards define fitness. The first is based on the 10 general physical skills widely recognized by exercise physiologists: cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance and accuracy. The second standard, or model, is based on the performance of athletic tasks: fitness is about performing well at any and every task imaginable, even unfamiliar tasks and tasks combined in infinitely varying combinations. The third standard is based on the energy systems that drive all human action (phosphagen/phosphocreatin pathway, the glycolytic/lactate pathway and the oxidative/aerobic pathway) and requires we have competency and training in each of these three pathways. There is another aspect to the CrossFit’s definition of fitness that is of great interest and immense value. Nearly every measurable value of health can be placed on a continuum that ranges from sickness to wellness to fitness. Simply going through the motions (60% effort in sessions) and inconsistency does not improve fitness and it could even decrease overall health and longevity. So as with answer #1: setting a performance goal that inspires intensity and facilitates the above frameworks, can increase fitness and thus, increase longevity and long-term health. But implied in the above framework is that in order to increase fitness, we should set performance goals that help us become more well-rounded. In other words, instead of running a marathon every year (which arguably wouldn’t increase fitness or be healthy), switch it up with different goals periodically.
Muscle mass is critical for longevity. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is a Functional Medicine physician specializing in muscle-centric medicine. The concept of this medicine focuses on the largest organ in the body, skeletal muscle, as the key to longevity. She leverages evidence-based medicine with emerging cutting-edge science to restore metabolism, balanced hormones, [and] optimized body composition, all with the goal of a lifetime of vitality. Dr. Lyon talks a lot about sarcopenia, which is this destruction of muscle mass. When you decrease muscle mass and strength there are tons of comorbidities that ride along with it. She also notes that there are a few really great ways to protect from sarcopenia, the first of which is resistance training. Chris Kresser, Functional Medicine practitioner, has discussed sarcopenia as "one of the most important causes of functional decline and loss of independence in older adults," and noted that studies show "more than 40 percent of men and 55 percent of women over the age of 50 have sarcopenia". Robb Wolf, who I've mentioned here once or twice (and who is also working on a book on sarcopenia with Dr. Ken Ford), has noted that muscle mass critical for longevity and perhaps the most critical asset we have to stave off aging is our lean muscle mass. Lastly, its been shown that Sarcopenia is linked to a number of poor health outcomes:1
3.5x higher risk of mortality
3x higher risk of functional decline
Greater risk of falls
Higher chance of hospitalization
“Muscle itself is a powerful endocrine organ, emitting hormonal messages that regulate metabolism, inflammation, and overall function. Muscle also provides a metabolic reservoir for support and recovery from physical trauma.”
I think the takeaway here for the question at issue is that it seems performance-based goals often include strength gaining pursuits, which we see is actually really critical for long-term health and longevity. It might also suggest that if our performance-based goals don't include strength training, maybe they ought to.
As a change up, this "answer" challenges the premise of the question. Only optimizing for longevity begs the question that longevity is a given. We all know that longevity isn't a given - in other words, you could be perfectly healthy and get hit by a car tomorrow or contract a rare cancer or disease. Maybe it makes sense to not just optimize for longevity, but to equally optimize for living to the fullest today. To do this, I believe you have to do hard shit to be prepared for anything. What I mean is that you ought to strive to be physically fit enough to do all of the fun and joyful things you stumble upon in life. If you have an unexpected opportunity to climb a mountain with your significant other, or play pick-up basketball with friends, or go for a run on the beach or on a swim with your dog, you want to be healthy or fit enough to do those things and enjoy them (i.e. not injure yourself). Lastly, optimizing for living the fullest life today might also mean being able to avoid sickness or disease. Lifestyle related illness and disease, a simple cold or flu, or even bad outcomes from a worldwide pandemic can often be avoided by being healthy and happy. The takeaway for this question? If a performance goal makes you happy, pursue it irrespective of longevity.
If you felt like answer #4 was a bit of a cop out, then you're really going to love my final answer. I believe that all that really matters in life is fulfillment. Fulfillment has been defined (by Tom Bilyeu) to mean that you feel amazing about yourself, when you’re all by yourself. You can achieve this by doing hard shit to push yourself and grow and also by acquiring skills that have utility so you can serve other people and/or a mission bigger than yourself. So if consistently working really hard towards a performance-based goal adds to your ultimate fulfillment, then it's worth it. It's just a bonus that doing hard shit also inoculates you to stress and discomfort and, as a result, prepares you to cope with any physical or mental challenges that come your way.
To be clear, you don’t NEED to set and pursue performance goals to achieve long-term health or longevity, but if motivation is failing you and identity and discipline are proving not enough, they can be a great tool to ensure you consistently get some physical fitness in. This was a nice change from more research-heavy topics and it forced me to attempt to articulate an answer that I had rationalized to myself long ago. Next month we'll be back to your regularly scheduled programming with what's sure to be controversial: "Why None of These Companies are Going to Become 'the Peloton of Weightlifting'". If you enjoyed this post, please share! If you enjoy this page, please subscribe!