Hi friends,

If you subscribe to this newsletter, odds are that you take your health seriously and realize how important it is in determining the quality of your life as you age.

But without setting specific goals on what you want to achieve, you may fall short of where you want to be.

The great Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”

If you have a general goal of being fit and living independently when you’re 80, then you need to allocate training time to the different aspects of fitness.

To be fit and functional when you’re older, you should train for strength, cardiorespiratory endurance, flexibility, and stability. Specializing in one of these domains while neglecting the others would be a mistake if your end goal is to remain fit throughout your life.

However, some may have precise training goals that only focus on one or two key aspects of fitness. Take an Olympic weightlifter for example. You wouldn’t want him to be overly flexible, as the demands of lifting 1000+ pounds on the deadlift require a relatively stiff body.

It helps to be very specific with your fitness goals because having a vague idea of what you want to be able to do when you’re 60, 70, or 80 years old isn’t going to cut it.

An example of a specific goal would be “I want to be able to lift a 20-pound suitcase into the overhead compartment of a plane to be able to travel independently when I’m 70 years old.”

Even though I’m 26 years old now, my training today can help me successfully achieve this goal down the road. After the age of 30, muscle mass and strength in humans start to decline. However, we can minimize the steepness of the decline by performing specific resistance training to increase strength and muscle mass.

Try to map out 5-10 specific goals of things that you’d like to be able to do in your later decades. Get specific and granular in the details. Then, you can start to put together a training program that keeps you on track to reach your goals.

If you have any questions on what you should be doing now to help achieve your goals, feel free to respond to this email.

Until next week,

Kevin