Longevity for the Rest of Us
Floors Before Flex: the honest, start-where-you-are program for people with a job, a family, and a life
Chapter 1: The Book the Rest of Us Have Been Waiting For
One morning at about 38 years old I stood in my closet and had a realization. I’d been telling myself I was “fine,” I feel “fine,” everything is “fine.” But I wasn’t who I expected to be at 38, and the divergence wasn’t what you might assume. My problem wasn’t with my career. I was a high-flying consultant, a successful road warrior. None of it had to do with my family. I was a happily married husband and father of two, with the house in the suburbs, and the trappings to go with it.
The divergence was simple: at 38, “fine” had come to mean I can move around without pain. It’s a low bar, but for anyone who’s lived with a debilitating back injury or any chronic pain, it’s THE bar. I was fine, but I was also old, fat, and out of shape when I should have been in my prime.
At my job, they handed me the tough problems and I sorted them out. I ran the room in complex, senior level conversations where I brought experience beyond my years, and a knack for innovative solutions that would turbocharge my career for years to come. That, of course, came at a cost I was only just beginning to realize. I solved the problems I was paid to solve with skill, but I was slowly accumulating my own problems.
At home, I was the reliable breadwinner and anchor, but often absent, something I wouldn’t appreciate until much later. After the work week on the road, I’d swoop home to weekends packed with events with the family, then socializing till the late hours with my wife and friends. People liked to be around me, and I made the most of every weekend.
While that sounds great, it wasn’t an easy path to 38, just one I managed like everything else. I worked long hours, sacrificed time and connection with my family, and along the way dealt with some major challenges. The one that anchors this book starts in a gym.
At 31 I severely herniated a disc in my lower back (L4-L5) at what I would say was a relative high point for health and fitness for me. An unfortunate but seemingly mundane back injury in the gym led to a few months of compensation in my otherwise busy life. After all, I managed through challenges for a living and a sore back wasn’t going to stop me, but then, right as I thought it was fully healed, a herniation.
Funny how these things play out: the morning of the herniation I left my house for a run and about 100 yards down the road my back just didn’t feel up to it. A low, bass-like throbbing and pain that said, “no run today,” so I listened. That same night, what are the odds, with maybe a touch of that soreness still present, I went to bed and was jolted awake at 3 a.m. to the blaring of my burglar alarm. I flew out of bed in the way only a fit 31-year-old does and collapsed to the floor as my right calf was struck with the most pain I’d ever felt in my life. The oddest part about it, for someone who’d never had a disc issue, is that the pain was absolutely in my right calf, but somehow, I knew without a doubt I’d injured my back. I’ll save the full story for later, but suffice it to say I spent a lot of time on that floor for the first few days and it made an impression.
The herniation was severe, and the orthopedist gave me my choices: surgery now, then physical therapy, or physical therapy and surgery later if needed. I chose the harder path, not so much because I was brave or confident, but because I feared that if I let them open my back now, if I took the faster route, it would be a long downward path littered with back problems. I spent weeks in physical therapy, then months continuing to make progress, and ultimately years building back up to my new baseline. That choice led me down a path of doing everything to support my back, in the course of my already busy life, and nothing to support the rest of me.
At 38 the result of that singular focus presented as a 230-pound old man, with a mostly functional back, who one morning realized he was pulling on his first pair of 40” pants and was out of breath from the effort. The herniation was not my low point. The weeks on the road were not my low point. The missed back-to-school nights were not my low point. That pair of 40” pants coming up over my waist, with me out of breath from the maneuvering necessary to step into them one early morning before work, was my low point. I was heavier than I should have been, I had little muscle to speak of, I felt old, and somewhere along the way, despite optimizing my career, my income, my calendar, and my back, I had let myself quietly fall apart without noticing.
I tell you this here, at the beginning, because I want you to understand I didn’t start my journey from high on a mountaintop or by retiring from professional sports; I started in middle age, roughly where you might find yourself right now, and I worked my way up.
You have read the books. You haven’t progressed. Here is why.
If you’re reading my words, I’m sure you’ve read others, probably one of the big longevity books from one of the major influencers or sages of our age. Maybe you finished it, maybe you didn’t, maybe you loved every word, but as you approached the end, you wondered: is this really for me? This isn’t my life. I’m not an influencer, celebrity doctor, famous author, or billionaire biohacker with nothing to do but spend money on longevity and biohacking. The best of these books are brilliant; they bring amazing insights into what will be possible in the future, but most of these books are written from the top. These books reproduce a pattern; they start with a baseline few can achieve. Once the baseline is established, they assume time you can’t allocate and tests you can’t get, and when you fail to achieve the results, you believe the problem is you.
The fault is not yours. It is a standard, set by elite people whose life is longevity, and it’s handed to the rest of us to mimic.
I believe this book is different and I hope, as you progress, you will agree. My hope is I can give you the tools and the ability to apply them in the life you live today, not a different life that someone else wrote for you.
So, you might ask, why listen to me? It’s a good question and I want to share here, early in my book, why you might choose to do just that. I’ve spent more than 30 years solving complex technology problems in the healthcare space and more than 17 years solving my own problems with health and wellness. Along the way, I’ve studied, researched, tried, failed, tried again, sometimes succeeded, and ultimately coached a number of individuals looking to make their own transformations. Somewhere in that journey, actually more than once, I thought, why isn’t this all written down somewhere for me to follow? This book, along with my website and social presence, is my attempt to bring the things I’ve learned and the things I’ve coached to a broader audience. My private coaching clients, a small number of people who compensate me appropriately for my focused and limited time, get my personal attention and guidance, but they do not get a better method or a secret protocol. This is my practice: this book, my website, and my writings, all in the open at low or no cost, and I hope you find it helpful.
There is another thing almost no one in this space will say out loud, and I want to be transparent and outspoken. A lot of what gets shared in the space of longevity and wellness is communicated as if it’s settled science. Much of it isn’t settled at all. Many of the concepts that are communicated as “the path” or “the method” are simply the path or method that worked for that individual or a select group of their clients. What I try to present here are the tools, the tools I use, with my clients, to build their own path or method. Not my path imprinted on you, but my coaching tools that you can apply to your unique challenges, your unique situation, your unique life, and ultimately establish your own path to longevity.
I believe much of this industry works by generating anxiety, manufactured FOMO that sells the next product, or clinic, or retreat. I start with the floors in my practice, and you’ll hear me say this more than once as we proceed: it’s the basics, the floors, the simple behaviors, that make 80% of the difference. Optimization can be thought of as a ladder: if the shiny new offerings sit at the top, you’re never going to reach them if the base isn’t firmly planted on the floor and every rung leading up to them isn’t secure.
The seventeen years the transformation actually took
I’ve shared my low point and the decision that something had to change. Now, I want to tell you how I climbed out of that hole. I wish I could say it was an epiphany and everything got right into line, but that would be selling the same fairy tale I told you my book wouldn’t propagate. It took me about 17 years, and it wasn’t a straight path; however, looking back at the journey, I’ve been able to reconstruct the logical steps it required. I started doing the obvious things first: I ate less, I exercised more, and I made a bet with 3 other guys at work all finding themselves in a similar place. A friendly wager to work for a year to get healthy, track our efforts, and reassemble to declare the “winner.” One of the guys in that group bought me my first book on fitness, Body for Life by Bill Phillips, which turned out to be much more about building habits than just fitness and approached things in a way that worked well for me. That first year was just a step, but over the many years between 2009 and 2022, I got my eating more in line and my body moving again. Then, along the way on a business trip in Chicago, a colleague invited me to a spin class for some morning exercise and a cyclist was born.
By 2022 I was genuinely fit. The previous summer, having never ridden a full 100 miles before, I packed up my bike and headed to Denver to ride the Triple Bypass, a stunningly beautiful and technically challenging 110-mile bike ride from Evergreen to Vail in Colorado across 3 mountain passes, including the Continental Divide. The Sunday after that ride, in a lovely beer garden in Breckenridge, Colorado, sharing a beer with my friend Rob, a fellow rider, we signed up for an epic endurance ride, the 1,000-mile Ride Across Britain. So, in September 2022 I joined 8 friends and spent 9 days cycling across the United Kingdom from Land’s End, England, to John o’ Groats, Scotland.
This is where those other books I’ve mentioned might plant their flag and say something motivational like “I rode 1,000 miles and so can you.” I’m not going to say that. Nine of us made that ride together: one of us had ridden parts of it before, another a 600-mile ride in Europe, most of us just a century or two, and one friend bought her first bike since childhood and started riding in January 2022, after signing up to go with us the previous fall. To get there we gave up weekends, we squeezed rides in around work, we spent evenings and early mornings our families would have enjoyed. It was a real accomplishment, and I am proud of it. It also wasn’t something most people could do or would even want to do. Most importantly, it is not the price of admission to a longer, stronger life.
If you never ride past the end of your block or the park in your neighborhood, this book still works for you. In fact, it was written for you. That ride was my flex, a term I use regularly in my practice, and I spent 13 years building up to it.
The most important part of that story is not what I accomplished; it’s the fact that somehow, I managed to accomplish it while still broken. I hadn’t yet put words to it, but I was fit on just one part of one dimension of what I now consider my pillars of longevity. I had the aerobic capacity of a diesel engine and could ride a bike for miles, never particularly fast, but point me in a direction and I could ride for miles. I enjoyed riding my bike, I enjoyed the peaceful tranquility of a ride across the countryside on a spring morning, I enjoyed the ritual. However, I let the rest of me lag. I wasn’t particularly muscular even though I could pedal for hours. My diet was full of processed foods and excess carbs and in no way dialed in, and I drank far too much, far too often. In addition, my mind wasn’t even at the show; I spent no time at all thinking about me or my family’s emotional and mental health. I was a serious go-getter, going and getting at whatever I chose to focus on and at this time it was cycling.
I was fit and unfit at the same time. I was powerful in one dimension and slowly falling apart in three others. I wasn’t healthy; I was the poster child for imbalance with good cardio.
That’s the lesson the bike taught me, and now it’s the heart of this book and my philosophy on wellness and longevity: no amount of training makes up for poor sleep, poor nutrition, too much alcohol, and no mental balance. I learned you can’t out-train a night out, you can’t out-ride junk food eaten to excess, and you can’t cover up a deficit in one area with extra work in another. I’m the proof as I rode the 1,000 miles in 9 days, but underneath I wasn’t much healthier and was still slowly running my body into the ground.
What the science says about exactly this case is even more interesting. If you look at the evidence, and we’ll be doing a lot of that in this book, you’ll find meaningful data that even while I was excelling on the bike, I might have been wearing away my body. The longevity benefits of aerobic exercise climb amazingly fast when you go from no activity to some activity and then flatten. They plateau long before my 100-mile or 1,000-mile rides. Past a certain point the extra miles weren’t buying me more years or better health at all. They were buying me a hobby, which is good in its own right, but they quite possibly brought a quiet cost, a little more wear and tear on my arteries and on my heart’s wiring than the average person carries. Not the kind of thing you see quickly, but one that builds up slowly over the years.
I’m not worried, and I’m not telling you this to scare you. The point to take away from all this is that you don’t need to ride 1,000 miles, or even 100 miles, to make a difference. If you do choose to embark on an adventure on your bike, do it because you love it. Effort isn’t the same as health, but they can both be good for different reasons. The point for right now is this: I had taken one thing I was genuinely good at and pushed it past the point where it was doing my longevity any good, and I called it health because it was hard.
Allow me to close out the “17-year” journey and then we’ll move on. I arrived in Britain in September of 2022 nervous, intimidated, and oddly confident. I knew I could pedal, so now I just needed to pedal a lot. I’d also taken the first step, without really knowing it, toward a broader view of my health. In late 2021, after that day in the beer garden, I heard the story of a professional triathlete in his 40s, who had a heart attack on the bike and survived. At 50, I was struck with the thought that I had no idea if I was really healthy; maybe deep down I knew I was neglecting much of my health even while pedaling the miles away. I had an executive physical and was “cleared” to ride, but it would be the start of a slow realization that I should be doing more.
After that ride, and we all somehow managed to finish every mile of it, my real journey would begin. These stories will come out as the narrative continues, but over the years between then and now, I would start investing in building more muscle, finally come to terms with my alcohol excess, ride with a friend across the Swiss Alps, face the Ride Across Britain again in 2024 and suffer the worst relapse of my herniated disc during that ride, begin the journey of prioritizing my mental and emotional health, and ultimately, find my way to the bodybuilding stage.
Now, as I write this book, I’ve chosen my next bodybuilding stage, about 7 months from the moment I put these words to paper and committed to my cycling friends that I’ll ride next summer’s Triple Bypass about 2 ½ months later. A considered “and,” not an “or”: I will do what’s necessary to present well at the bodybuilding show, addressing my weaknesses from last time, but not go out of my way to show up as a mass monster, costing myself my aerobic capacity for the ride to come.
As we continue through this work, I hope to give you the tools, techniques, and learnings that took me 17 years to aggregate and the knowledge necessary to adapt them for your particular situation. Whether your goal is to ride your bike around the block with your grandkids or take on a major personal challenge, this book will help you get there.
The whole idea, in one image
As I envisioned my practice, I looked for a symbol, something to ground my thinking and my coaching, something to help lead the way and make the path clear. I couldn’t help but think of the cairn, the stacked pile of stones left along trails to guide hikers on their way. The stones work together to create a recognizable form, a marker with intention.
Picture a four-stone cairn with each stone representing one of four pillars, all doing their part. Each stone a part of your journey: Meals, Movement, Mind, and Molecules. What you eat. How you move. How you sleep, recover, handle stress, and carry your own mind. And the supplements, hormones, and medicines you may or may not choose to leverage on your journey. Molecules is the pillar I hold to the strictest evidence of the four because it’s the one where hype does the most damage.
A cairn only stands if every stone carries its load; pull one out and the form collapses. That’s my entire argument for this book in one image, and it’s the thing I got wrong on that 1,000-mile ride. I was riding on one pillar, not as a fully balanced person. I’ve learned since that you can’t truly advance the person without advancing all the pillars.
In my practice, I don’t have an order or ranking for the pillars; they are all critical and balance requires addressing them together. That said, in working with my clients, I often find that we stabilize their meals first. Generally, we can achieve rapid results by addressing a bad diet and everyone I work with has some idea what a good diet entails. It’s pretty easy to recognize less-than-healthy food, regardless of your starting point. This approach is not a prioritization, but a result of many client interactions and what people find easiest to tackle first. Despite this reality, I hold firm that you can’t outrun a bad diet, out-exercise the lack of quality sleep, or out-supplement living a stress-filled life.
At the center of my practice and everything I coach is balance across the pillars and for that reason I’ve named my practice Balanced Longevity™. I know the word “balanced” can be overused (“work-life balance” and “a balanced diet” are just a few examples); however, in the context of my four pillars and the art of balancing what work is done, I truly believe when we work to advance the whole human we achieve the most profound results. Ultimately, our objective is a good diet plus a strong exercise program plus mental resiliency plus the right supplements, medications, and molecules for the individual I’m coaching. Once an individual has achieved a degree of balance, then the opportunity to choose some flex is available.
For now, remember balance is the thing that lets the system carry weight. If you have balance, you can push hard for a season, a race, a cut, or a training deadline, and not fall apart. If you lose that balance, that push will start to wear away at the rest of you and eventually the outcome is inevitable. All push and no recovery will break anyone down over time no matter how strong. This was the state I found myself in riding across Britain in 2022.
It is also worth pointing out that while never pushing, never testing yourself, and never taking on a personal challenge is certainly feasible, it may leave you wondering what’s truly possible. Balance isn’t the opposite of intensity. Balance is what gives you the tools and the ability to stretch when you choose to test your limits.
Floors before flex, and the evidence out loud
These are the principles I’ll use to keep my book honest and approachable at the same time. These principles will appear throughout and they will help you understand how my philosophy works and why I coach the way I do.
The first is floors before flex.
Every part of your health has a floor, the non-negotiables you’ll establish that most of our longevity results come from. The things you do every day or every week that keep you on the right track. We also have many flexes, those are things we do to fine-tune the edges, the things we add when the floors are solid. When we talk about floors, I want you thinking about things like: eating enough high-quality protein at each meal, walking every day, multiple times, getting enough quality sleep, and getting your alcohol consumption under control, whatever that means for you. On the other hand, when we have the opportunity to flex, we might choose to complete a 72-hour fast, introduce carb cycling into our diet plan, add an off-label medication, with the help of our doctor, to support our health in less obvious ways, or, for some, bike 100 miles in the mountains or 1,000 miles across a country.
Always start with building your floors and remember, any coach or any book that tries to sell you the flexes before your floors are solid is selling you the wrong thing, and if you look carefully, they often have a financial interest in that “thing.”
This matters more than you might appreciate at this point and it’s what’s different from the other books in this space. You are never required or expected to reach the top in any particular area. My whole system is built so you can start where you are, even if that’s literally on the floor, like I was when I herniated that disc or pulled on those pants. Do what I did back when I was 38: start doing something today, pick a small intervention, something that doesn’t cost a thing, and from there you can start building your floors. Doing the floors well beats doing the flex badly, every single time. I’m living proof of the opposite: I once had a spectacular ability to flex in my Movement pillar, but it was bolted onto three broken floors in the other pillars, and I promise you the floors are what actually carry you.
The second idea is simple: anything I present to you as evidence or a fact will be graded openly. When I tell you a fact is proven, I will tell you what makes it so and how convincing that evidence is compared to standards I hold throughout. I will also share many promising but unproven ideas, frontier moves I personally believe in, but where I’m ahead of the data or extrapolating from limited evidence. These will be flagged in the spot where they are shared, ensuring you know which is which. Generally, I find this space is lacking in coaches and experts willing to make that distinction, to take a belief, even one they hold strongly, and say the evidence doesn’t yet support it or the support is limited.
I’ll show you exactly how I use this methodology with my coaching clients in the next chapter. I’ll frame my work as the tiers you climb from floor to flex and the grades those moves carry from proven to theoretical. For now, just know my framework. Floors before flex, and always honest about the evidence.
Who I wrote this for
This book isn’t for someone looking to be in the headlines or someone who’s prepared to spend millions on their journey. Although, if you do think you need to spend millions, you might want to read it before you waste all that money. This book is for the person I was, and the people I know, and the people like us slowly realizing we’re somehow less capable and less robust than we used to be and we don’t know when it changed.
This book is for the executive who feels invincible every day at the office but who’s wrecked by Saturday. You can achieve all your objectives during the week, take 20 meetings a day, and still get it done, but the body underneath it all is tired, too heavy, not as strong as you’d like to be or should be, not sleeping through the night, and your “fine” is starting to mean “no pain yet.”
Maybe you’re the weekend warrior who’s losing ground; you play in the same league or on the same court or ride the same rides you’ve always done but they’re not the same. Now, your recovery lags, the minor insults linger, and the gap between your abilities now and your abilities then is quietly widening. This book is also for you.
Maybe you’re the traveling road warrior. You know the 3 drinks on the plane, followed by the team dinner, and the late-night socializing aren’t leading in the right direction, but it’s the job. Those relationships are important; it’s what’s required to have a productive team or a strong client relationship. Saying no all the time isn’t realistic. This book is also for you.
This was me too, for years. Covid helped me start to change that behavior, at least the road-warrior part.
What many of you reading this have in common is that hunch, the inkling, the feeling, that you can do more, and be stronger and fitter than your current path shows, and a suspicion that conventional medicine is not aligned with your objectives. Conventional medicine is built mostly to treat us when we become sick, to “slow the progression” of the inevitable, not to help us be our best. You’re right on both counts, and what you don’t need is another expert telling you what you must do to achieve your goals. Like everything else you’ve accomplished in your life and your career, you need to be shown the path, provided with the tools, and given the guidance to wield them correctly. You need the map of your journey provided by someone who started about where you are standing and knows the way.
Earned, not borrowed
I owe you one more thing before we start this journey, because you should know exactly what you’re getting and exactly who is showing you the way.
I’ve written this book in the first person on purpose; this is my lived practice both in my own life and with the people I coach. These are the tools I use and not a marketing presentation used to sell you another product. The things I describe in this book are the same protocols I run in my own life and with my clients, the labs are the ones I find accessible and valuable, and the choices are shared in the open and with their supporting evidence. I want you to be able to take what I’ve learned and apply it directly to your body and your life. There are lines I won’t cross with myself and my clients, and the most important one is simple. I will never knowingly introduce anything that might cause irreversible harm for a benefit that’s just a maybe.
So, now you know who I am, something of how I got here, and a bit about my rebuild from a herniated disc to a self-realization in my late 30s, to the ride across a country and a stage with other bodybuilders. My journey was clumsy at first, somewhat better later, and still evolving as I learn along the way. I’m now a coach and hopeful I can share my tools and techniques with you through this book. It’s worth saying out loud and up front: I am not your doctor (I’m not a doctor at all) and all this works best with a modern practitioner on your team. What I’ll give you through the rest of this work are my tools, how I think about them, the floors I believe are essential, and my candid take on the flex you may never need. If, when you’re done, you have the ability to draw a map from where you are today to where you’d like to be, then our time together was worth it. Toss out the books that tell you what you must do and learn how to design your own path.
Key Takeaways
- Most longevity books are written from the top down, by people whose entire focus is on longevity. Often, it is how they pay their bills and proving their paradigm is the goal. You didn’t fail those longevity books; they failed you. This one starts where you are and gives you the tools.
- Fit and healthy aren’t the same thing. I rode a thousand miles across Britain while three of my four pillars lagged, and most of those miles weren’t buying me any more health. That doesn’t mean the ride wasn’t worth it, but you have to go in with your eyes open.
- Your health rests on four pillars: Meals, Movement, Mind, and Molecules. Like the stones of a cairn, none ranks first, and the whole thing only stands when each pillar carries its load.
- Floors before flex. My way of reminding you that the basics you can start tonight, mostly for free, make most of the difference. Flex is optional, and you earn it once your floors are solid.
- The evidence I quote is always graded: what’s proven is marked proven, and what I believe ahead of the data is marked that way. I’m not your doctor, and this works best with a good practitioner on your team.
Chapter 2 teaches the two tools promised here. The tiers, T1 to T4, show you how to climb from floor to flex, and the grades, A to E, show you how sure the evidence really is, so you can read the rest of this book with your eyes open.