Terry Mclaren Functional Physio

29/08/2026

True ❤️🙏

I am 63 now, and after three decades as an orthopedic surgeon, I have examined thousands of people in their eighties. Some arrive frail and afraid, others walk in straighter and more confident than patients half their age. They’re still skiing, still gardening, still picking up grandchildren without a second thought. The gap between those two groups is not luck, and it is rarely genetics alone. The same patterns keep showing up in those who are thriving. Here is what they have in common. The most important reasons are lower down in the list… and the ones you might least expect.

1. They never stopped moving. The strongest 80-year-olds in my office did not start exercising at 79. They simply never quit. There may have been a busy stretch, an injury, a hard year, but movement always came back, because it was part of who they were rather than a program they were on. Perhaps they were dancers, farmers, or a postal worker who enjoyed walking on his lunch break. The body honors that kind of consistency. Decades of regular, ordinary movement leave a margin of strength and capacity that a frightened sedentary body simply does not have.

2. They kept lifting something heavy. Almost none of them would call themselves weightlifters, but the ones who stayed strong kept asking their muscles to work against real resistance. Carrying, climbing, hauling, digging, or actual strength training, the form mattered less than the fact that they kept loading their muscles and bones well into later life. The people who guarded both are the ones still standing tall.

3. They protected their ability to balance. Falls are the event that ends independence for so many older adults, and the ones who age well treat balance as a skill worth keeping. They walk on uneven ground instead of avoiding it; they dance, they run, they garden seriously… they do not surrender their stability to fear and a recliner. Balance fades quietly when you stop challenging it; don’t give it the opportunity to fade.

4. They stayed connected to other people. The thriving 80-year-olds are almost never isolated. They might still have a spouse, they certainly have a circle of friends, a community, and a reason to leave the house and be among others. Loneliness is not just sad, it is physically corrosive, and I watch it accelerate decline all the time… especially after the death of a spouse. The people who kept their relationships alive across the decades arrive in my office with something the isolated ones have lost.

5. They have a reason to get up in the morning. Having a sense of purpose is crucial. Purpose is not a soft concept at any age. Purpose drives meaning. The patients who age best are aimed at something, a project, a person, a role, a craft, a cause. They are needed, or they are building, or they are caring for someone. That sense of mattering pulls them through the hard mornings and keeps them from quietly folding in on themselves. When I ask what they are looking forward to, they have an answer. And that matters far more than you could ever imagine. Think… what’s getting you out of bed in the morning. There should be a serious, immediate answer.

6. They take problems seriously early. When something starts to go wrong, a sore hip, a stumble, a new weakness, the ones who do well do not wait and hope. They address it while it is still small and hopefully reversible. They intuitively understand what I have learned from watching thousands of patients: that a fall leads to a fracture, a fracture leads to bed rest, bed rest leads to weakness, and weakness leads to the next fall.

7. They made peace with getting older without surrendering to it. The strongest 80-year-olds hold a particular balance. They are realistic about their age; they do not pretend to be 40, yet they refuse to use age as an excuse to stop. They modify, they adapt, they keep going. They know the difference between an honest limitation and a self-imposed one, and they spend their energy on what's still within their control. That mindset is its own kind of medicine.

None of this requires perfect genes or a perfect life. It requires pointing yourself in the right direction and staying that way long enough for it to matter. The 80-year-olds I admire most were not born different. They made a thousand small choices, over decades, that compounded in their favor. You are making those same choices right now, whether you notice them or not. It is never too late, nor too early, to begin. Your future self will thank you.

24/08/2026

Interesting 🧐

Peter Thiel has spent years and millions of dollars trying to defeat aging. “There are all these people who say that death is natural, it’s just part of life, and I think that nothing can be further from the truth,” he told Business Insider in 2012.

Nature disagrees. 3.5 billion years of evolution point the same way: death isn’t a glitch. It’s the trade-off for everything else a body has to do.

Biochemist Nick Lane, Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan, and molecular-clock discoverer Steve Horvath have each spent careers probing why we age, and they keep running into the same wall. Some of the genetic machinery that builds a body in youth can become harmful later. Boost pathways that promote growth and tissue repair, and you can also increase cancer risk. Mute inflammation, and you can leave the body vulnerable to infection.

Again and again, attempts to intervene in aging collide with biology’s oldest bargains.

“Life persists. Individual bodies do not.”

https://nautil.us/is-immortality-possible-1283865

18/08/2026

True 😎

10/08/2026

Get up more often 👍

There is a widely held assumption that a workout settles the account. Train for an hour, and the rest of the day is metabolically neutral. This trial tested it directly, and the assumption did not survive.

The reason it fails is that sitting is not simply the absence of exercise. It is its own signal. Skeletal muscle takes up glucose during contraction through a pathway that does not require insulin, so movement lowers blood sugar within minutes rather than requiring weeks of training. Sustained inactivity works in the opposite direction and on a different clock. Work in both animals and humans has shown that a single day of reduced muscle activity suppresses lipoprotein lipase, the enzyme that clears fat from the blood, and that this suppression is not reversed by vigorous exercise performed elsewhere in the day. The two exposures act partly independently.

A 2026 trial put that to the test in the environment where it matters. Sixteen sedentary adults with raised blood lipids, average age 48, completed three two-day conditions at their own desks rather than in a laboratory. Condition one was prolonged sitting. Condition two was prolonged sitting plus a single 60-minute moderate cycling session on the second day. Condition three was the identical cycling session, but with the desk hours interrupted by 30 minutes of standing in every hour. Activity was measured objectively, standardised test meals were provided, and glucose, insulin and triglycerides were tracked over six hours afterwards.

Adding the standing breaks lowered the post-meal insulin response more than the exercise alone did. The workout was the same in both. Only the hours in between differed.

Only one of three markers moved. Glucose and triglycerides did not separate the two active conditions. That matters, because a lower insulin response with unchanged glucose means the body cleared the same amount of sugar using less insulin, which is a marker of better insulin sensitivity rather than better glucose control. It is a plausible and meaningful difference, but it is one outcome out of three, in sixteen people. A finding that appears on a single marker in a small sample is the kind that sometimes does not replicate.

This is an acute experiment, not evidence about disease. Two days per condition and a single meal test tell you what happens to postprandial metabolism on one afternoon. They do not tell you what happens to cardiovascular risk over a decade. The longer-term evidence on breaking up sitting is largely observational, and observational data cannot separate the effect of frequent movement from the characteristics of people who move frequently.

What is unusually strong here is the design. This was conducted in free-living desk-based work rather than in a laboratory, so participants were doing their actual jobs. Most sitting research puts people in a controlled room and prompts them to move on a schedule, which answers a physiological question but not a practical one. And because each participant completed all three conditions, every person served as their own comparison.

Both active conditions improved on sitting alone, and the hour of cycling is doing real work. The point is that it is not sufficient on its own to neutralise eight hours of stillness, and that the two behaviours are worth treating as separate targets rather than as one that substitutes for the other. Someone who trains hard and then sits unbroken from nine until six has addressed one of them.

Vanherle et al., Scand J Med Sci Sports 2026;36(7):e70336 · PMID 42400437
Bey and Hamilton, J Physiol 2003;551(2):673 · PMID 12815182
Dunstan et al., Diabetes Care 2012;35(5):976 · PMID 22374636
Healy et al., Diabetes Care 2008;31(4):661 · PMID 18252901

05/08/2026

Prehab. Worth it 👍

Click Now 👉

05/08/2026

Good to know 👍

Side planks are surprisingly challenging for the Glutes, especially when you lift the top left!! 🍑🔥

04/08/2026

Worth a read 🙏

28/07/2026

Excellent 🙏

28/07/2026

Very interesting 🧐

In 1979, psychologist Ellen Langer invited a group of older men to spend a week in a monastery refurbished to resemble 1959. They discussed the news, watched black-and-white television, and listened to Nat King Cole. They were not merely reminiscing, but living as though they had returned to an earlier time.

By the end of the week, the men showed improvements on several measures, including memory, vision, hearing, and physical strength. People who knew nothing about the experiment also judged them to look younger in photographs taken afterward.

The study was small and had important limitations. But subsequent research has found associations between feeling younger and measures such as grip strength, walking speed, lung capacity, inflammation, cognitive decline, and dementia. These findings do not establish that feeling younger causes better health.

Science writer and 2019–20 MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow Anil Ananthaswamy examines the evidence that how old we feel and what we believe aging permits, may influence how we behave and ultimately how we age.

Illustration by James Yang.

https://nautil.us/why-you-cant-help-but-act-your-age-236186