The Five Rules I'm Betting My Health On

I've been thinking a lot about longevity.

How much is too much? I've been on my own journey since November. It started with getting my cholesterol in order, and it turned into a pile of data about me. Countless blood tests, blood pressure, scans. I even had Claude build me an app so it all lived in one place. Think Whoop, but for health records.

So what does longevity actually mean? To me it's that I can get on the ground with my kids, crawl around, throw them. And more importantly that I can do the same with my grandkids. We age, the aches are coming, but if there is something I can do today to hold them off, I'll do it.

Here are my core principles.

1. Train for the decades, not the season.
Every session is a deposit into the body I want at 85, not the one I want in August. That means training toward hard standards for the back half of life: carry heavy things, get off the floor unassisted, hold a 35 lb ruck for an hour. If a workout makes me impressive this year but broken in ten, it is not longevity work. It is ego work.

2. Go truly easy or truly hard. Live nowhere in between.
The gray zone is where fitness goes to stall. Most of my cardio sits in a conversational Zone 2, easy enough to talk in full sentences, and a small slice is genuinely hard intervals. When I let the easy days creep into moderate, I show up to the hard day already tired, and the hard day is the one doing the work. That work protects my VO2 max, which is one of the strongest predictors of all-cause mortality we have.

3. Muscle and bone are the retirement account. The scale is not.
I stopped optimizing for weight and started optimizing for lean mass and bone density. I set a hard lean-mass floor and refuse to drop below it, no matter what body fat says. Losing weight is easy. Losing weight while holding muscle and protecting bone is the actual skill, and it is the one that decides whether I am independent at 80.

4. If you are not measuring it, you are guessing.
DEXA for body composition, bloodwork on a schedule, HRV and resting heart rate daily. I felt great and looked lean while carrying an ApoB of 144, a cardiovascular risk number I could not see, feel, or lift my way out of. No mirror was going to tell me that. Test, do not assume.

5. The foundation is boring: sobriety, sleep, consistency.
Sober since September 2022, and it is the single change that improved more markers than any training block ever has. Deep sleep, HRV, resting heart rate, liver enzymes, all of it. With two kids under two I do not get perfect weeks, so I stopped chasing them. Showing up at 80 percent for ten years beats a heroic six weeks.

This is evolving as I go, and there is more to share. More on that in later letters.

Train this week

Five ways to put those principles to work. Pick one. You do not need all five this week.

1. Pick one "age 85" test and train it this month.
Do not overhaul your program. Pick a single capability you want to still have in forty years and put it in your week. Three easy ones to start with: carry a heavy object 100 feet in each hand, get from the floor to standing without using your hands, hang from a bar for 60 seconds. Test it today, write the number down, retest in four weeks. A benchmark you can fail is worth more than a workout you can post.

2. Do the talk test on your easy days.
Next easy run, walk, or bike, say a full sentence out loud. If you cannot get it out comfortably, you are going too hard, and that catches more people than you would guess. Slow down until it feels almost embarrassing. Then keep one day a week genuinely hard: 4 to 6 rounds of 3 minutes hard with 3 minutes easy between. Hard means the top of what you can repeat, not a sprint you cannot hold past the first round. Easy easy, hard hard.

3. Lift heavy twice a week, no exceptions.
Two full-body sessions beat five sessions you cannot sustain. Cover a push, a pull, a hinge, a squat, and a carry. Work in the 5 to 10 rep range with real weight, and add a little every few weeks. If you are doing only cardio, you are training half the problem.

4. Get the numbers your annual physical skips.
Ask your doctor for ApoB and Lp(a) at your next visit. A standard lipid panel can look fine while ApoB is high, and ApoB tracks heart risk more closely than the LDL number most panels report. Lp(a) is largely genetic, so one test is usually enough for life. If you can swing it, add a DEXA scan for a real body composition baseline.

5. Protect the sleep window before you optimize anything else.
Set a fixed wake time and work backward eight hours. That is eight hours in bed, not eight asleep. Last drink a few hours before bed, phone out of the room, room cool and dark. If alcohol is in the picture, try 30 days without it and watch your resting heart rate. Mine dropped further than any supplement, workout, or gadget has moved it since.

Tell me what you thought of this week's standard, whether you held it, started it and quit, or there's something else on your mind. Just hit reply.

Session of the week

As some of you know, I decided I am doing HYROX in Anaheim, Dec 3 to 6. Registration is not open yet, but I will sign up when it is.

So this week's session was a compromised HYROX session.

6 Rounds
1000m Run
15 Wall Balls (Men: 20 lb / Women: 14 lb)

I hope you have been running, because by Round 3 it will get you. Do your Zone 2.

Instagram receipt: https://www.instagram.com/p/DbbEUBwPelD/

Record yours and tag me @thewholedadproject

Worth your time

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones. What I am reading right now, and it is not a training book.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1668075091

Stick To The Plan. Nine minutes, and the line at the beginning is this week's closing thought. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVYPto2k9-Y

Closing thought

From the video above: to achieve your dreams you must apply discipline, but more important, you must apply consistency.

It all counts.

Tony.