UK Column Radio
Avoiding Social Care By Extending Our ‘Healthspan’
In this time of collapsing social care and over reliance on pharmaceuticals, Mike speaks to David Siegel about the best strategies for maintaining our ‘health span’: the length of time we are healthy, and not just alive. Read the write-up at: https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/avoiding-social-care-by-extending-our-healthspan
- Broadcast on:
- 02 Oct 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
No, not quite. What's up? Sell my car in Carvana. It's just not quite the right time. Crazy coincidence. I just sold my car to Carvana. What? I told you about it two days ago. When you know, you know. You know? I'm even dropping it off at one of those sweet car vending machines and getting paid today. That's a good deal. Oh, great deal. Come on. What's your heart saying? You're right. When you know? You know. Sold. Whether you're looking to sell your car right now or just whenever feels right, go to Carvana.com and sell your car the convenient way. Terms and conditions apply. Hello and welcome to the UK column. Today I'm joined once again by David Siegel. But we're not talking climate today. We're talking longevity. And the first question is, what do we mean by longevity? And David, I think what I mean by longevity isn't that I live to 120. But that I live as long as I possibly can without the need for care. And I think this is increasingly important because as many will know, the social care situation in the UK is dire. Even if it were good, hi everybody. I'm in Bethesda, Maryland talking again with my friend Mike, who's also my longevity client and talking about longevity. You know, even if hospice care were good and they could make you feel comfortable, why would you want to do that when you can be strong and vibrant well into your 80s and possibly 90s? Let's just dig into that a little bit more. What do you mean by strong and vibrant? Because, of course, anybody that perhaps was when they were younger, fit and healthy and took part in sports and whatnot wants to get to be a certain age. And I suppose we're saying over 50. Perhaps we might remember our expectations from that time and attempt to replicate that. And that may not be the most sensible approach. Right, so I mean, I've got two, there's kind of three kinds of people. The people like you and me, who are former athletes, who realize that we have, if we make good use of our time, we have another 30 to 40 years of life, which is a lot and that being stronger really benefits us. So, and there's more and more research about this. The stronger you are, the better your life is going to be in your 70s and 80s. And you don't build it then, you build it now. The other one is the people who kind of been passing up those opportunities for a long time and have never been particularly strong. And maybe they were raising a family or, you know, enjoyed their hobbies, but never got, became serious athletes. And some of those people are just going to stay that way and we see a lot of those people in the nursing homes. They never were particularly fit. But others will start to learn that there is an alternative, 40 years is a long time. It's almost, you know, if you're 50, you're just over the halfway point. Today, if you can make the changes necessary, you could live a long time and be very productive and very independent. And what taught me that is this book by Peter Attia. I don't know Peter, but it's on the New York Times bestseller list. I'm sure it's on some bestseller list in the UK. And it's a technical book, but the bottom line is, do you have the book? I have the book, yes. It's a bit like Javier Vinos and Climate. I disagree with you there, because I actually find that book a lot more than us if I'm engaging than Javier's book is very technical. This actually is quite a narrative here. He's telling a story of how he's come to his conclusions and so on. It's an extremely engaging book. You're absolutely right. And some of it where he talks about your atherosclerosis and your aligning of your arteries gets pretty technical. But he actually worked with a writer. And so it kind of goes back and forth between narrative and science. And it works pretty well. Works well enough that millions of people are buying this book. And they are realizing that there is a new mindset around aging. And that is that you can take control over your destiny. You don't have to ride it out and go to more progressive care in the health care system, which is deteriorating at the same rate. And be a victim of that. You can be strong. Two myths that I want to bust that Peter Attia has busted pretty significantly is that you can build muscle after 60, 70, even 80. You can build muscle in your 80s. Plenty of experiments have shown that. And you can build bone. And so we're going to talk about those two things because building muscle, you know, there's a lot of drugs. There's a lot of, let's call them longevity miracle pills that people are talking about these days, right? That if they may, they extend life in mice. And so they're on the market. This is NMN, resveratrol. There's one called Rapa Mysen that may actually work, but we won't know for quite a long time. That certainly has downsides as well. And there's 100 other pills that people take. And then they recommend olive oil and chocolate and water. And, you know, there's a lot of sort of home cures that will help you age. But the number one thing you can do is build muscle and lose fat. Why do you say that in particular? Because it's not just building muscle. It's building bone as well. Yeah. So why do you feel that that's so important? I mean, if we just kind of tick off the top, you know, one, two, three, four things that are the most important thing, the first thing you should do is not smoke ever. Ever. Smoking contributes not just to heart disease, but to diabetes and not only cancer, but just lower quality of life in general. And people who smoke do not, you know, live shorter lives. So that's number one. Number two is actually people should think about drinking less alcohol. The ideal amount of alcohol that Peter talks about is zero. And so with my clients, I have a client right now. He drinks three or four times a week. I said, look, how hard is this going to be to just cut out half of your drinking? You know, let's call it the junk drinking. You know, and he said, no, this is not, this is not very hard at all. It would be easy to cut out half the drinking. I mean, because there's some drinking that just the junk drinking that you just do kind of to follow on with what other people are doing or to have a second glass of wine at dinner. You know, it's automatic and easy. And so let's just cut that out to start and go toward zero alcohol. Now, I don't know about you, Mike. I've never, I've never drunk my entire life. Just didn't sit well with me. What about you? Well, as you know, I have the occasional glass of wine. I do like a good wine. So drinking is a real problem and will shorten your life. And if you have a glass of wine a week, you're fine. Let's not think that red wine contributes to longevity. It doesn't. That's all nonsense. I like to tell myself that it does, but you know, what, you know, tell yourself that one glass of red wine a week is beneficial and protected and in protective. And two glasses will just kill you and you're dead. That's why you should tell yourself that. All right. Now, the next one is really inflammation. And that's going to surprise a bunch of people because you might think, well, being overweight would be number three. Actually, inflammation is probably number three. Because systematic systemic inflammation will make everything else worse. Diabetes and heart disease are the two main things. And so some people can get along with being overweight. If they don't have inflammation and they don't have diabetes, that is not necessarily a problem. One thing you can imagine is that overweight people have to have a certain amount of muscle just to carry themselves around in the same amount of, same amount of extra bone. But inflammation will contribute to diabetes. And by the way, let's just get, let's just do the, the disclaimers real quick. I'm not, I'm not a doctor. I'm not your doctor. You're actually my client. And we work together every week on this stuff. And we're building a program for you to, to build a strong, healthy and long health span, which we'll talk about in a second. But this is not medical advice. This is just infotainment for people to number one, you know, get and read this book if they can. And then I have a website with lots of information. And it's just information you're responsible for your own behavior, decisions, outcomes and results. Just at that point, I'd like to just ask you about sugar because I, anybody that's been watching the UK column for a number of years will have seen my journey. No, it has to be said, it is true that the camera puts on weight. There's no doubt about that. The camera does. And in the past, I've been in events where people have said, oh, you're slimmer than I thought. But there was a time around 2021, 2022, where I was putting, I had put on quite a lot of weight. And that all came off again as soon as I stopped eating sugar. And you've mentioned diabetes a couple of times there. For me, sugar was, it must have been like alcohol. It was a drug. It was giving me a short term. I was getting me through the next little bit of work that I had to get done and whatnot. I was just consuming way too much. I just cut it out, went cool turkey on it. And that, well, everybody has seen the result of that. But I'd be interested in saying something about sugar. I have eaten sugar my entire life. Brownies, cookies, ice cream, juices, whatever I could possibly get. I'm 65. And the reason is that I'm just an athlete. I'm doing something every day, all the time. I didn't take any breaks. I've been working out for 50 years now. And so I didn't think it was a problem either, but it contributes a lot to inflammation. And anyone who has some degree of inflammation should stop sugar now. That's probably almost everyone. Because it really does contribute to inflammation, which makes everything worse. I keep coming back to inflammation because it's really this magnifier on everything else that can make you very sick much later, including even things like cancer and Alzheimer's. So sugar is one of the big targets. I'm definitely way down on sugar since I read the book, and since I've been kind of more aware. And I think everyone should not cut down on sugar. I think you should take your sugar down as low as you can possibly get it. And it's the same with refined foods and factory-made foods. To the degree you can, you should go to fresh foods. And let's come back to diet in a little while. But I do want to take on diabetes and heart disease, because these are two of the four horsemen that can kill you later. And that's how Peter Atia thinks about it. What can kill you in your 80s that you can start to prevent now? What do you, when the day you turn 80, what do you wish you had gone back done 30 years ago to prevent that? And diabetes is definitely one. It's called metabolic disease. This is insulin resistance. It's easy to get tested. It's a fasting glucose test that doesn't cost much money. You can even just pay for it out of your own pocket, in case your health care system is sick. And you can learn to what degree you are insulin resistant. And if you are insulin resistant, I really encourage people to work with a doctor to address this as a primary motivation or a primary way to live better longer. And starting right now, the diabetes does not get better. It's a cycle. It has a positive feedback loop, and it gets worse and worse. So the first thing you have to do is cut out sugar. Second thing you do is the rule is the more insulin resistant you are, the fewer carbohydrates you should consume. So if you're particularly overweight and particularly diagnosed with as diabetic, you should have zero carbs. That is far better for people who are diabetic. If you are on the way to becoming diabetic, free diabetic, sometimes people say you should get ahead of it and stay away from carbs as much as you can, because they again can start continue this chain reaction of positive feedback. And diabetes really will lower the quality of your life. For people, just in case people don't know, what are we talking about with carbs? Pasta, obviously, are we talking about rice, potatoes, this type of stuff? Yeah, so the three main sources of calories are protein, carbohydrates, and fats. For people who are insulin resistant, fats and protein are a much better choice. Carbs are potatoes, rice, pasta, roots, fruits, especially things like juice. Juice is basically sugar. The way I explain it, Mike, is if you take a carrot and eat it, it's not that sweet. But if you grind it up, if you juice it, it turns it pretty sweet. Carrot juice is sweeter than the carrot. Let me explain it this way. So those long molecules that are the carbohydrates like wood, cellulose is a carbohydrate, but we can't digest it. But that's energy. And by the same token, wheat and the seeds and the roots. That's what most of it is. Potatoes, rice, these are seeds. Pasta and rice, these are seeds. Bakery, things that are made of dough, these are all carbohydrates. And then the sugars are the same molecules, but chopped up much smaller. They just taste sweeter, but it's the same thing. You have this range of carbohydrates everywhere from very starchy, things that have no sweetness, all the way to honey and fructose. And all of that is carbs. And you should really start to lower it. Now, let me just want to dive into the diet thing, because it's pretty simple. There are a couple important things to remember about diet as you age. Number one, most people under 40 probably get too much protein. And most people over 50 don't get enough. So each decade you go after 50, you need more protein. Just to make it as simple as I can, most people over 50 should be getting 100 to 200 grams of protein every day. Of any kind, we'll talk about that in a second, but 100 grams. Now, it's not that hard to count. Here's a drink I have every day. It gives me 30 grams of protein, and it's whey protein, which is best, especially if your body building. If you're lifting weights, you want whey protein. It's just the most effective. But in case you're vegan, which I've been vegan for 40 years, but I've changed recently just to have this stuff, there's vegetarian sources of protein. There's plenty of them. Soy is a big one, but there are many others. And you can find them online, I actually have a list of them on my website. Protein is part of the foundation of building and maintaining muscle, which is a big part of this program, and we're going to talk about that in a minute. So get your protein however you like, but get it one third of your calories should be protein. And if you're small and light, you'd get about 100 calories a day. And if you're a big person and you're really working out, you get about 200. And most of us are somewhere in between. So you and I, we should be shooting for about 130 grams of protein every day. I may have said calories before, 130, 140, 150 grams. And then as we get older, we want to move that up. So that in your 70s, you want to add another 20 grams. I'm not saying it's fun and I'm not saying it's easy, but that's just what the data shows, that the older you are, the more protein you need. Now, if you're getting roughly 30% of your calories from protein, you know, meets beans like soybeans, soy protein, nuts, have a lot of protein, and there's some other vegetable sources, peanuts and so forth. These, and a lot of eggs, the white is the protein and the eggs. Eggs are fine. Eggs don't have a, there's no cholesterol problem with eggs. There's no stigma about eggs. You can have whatever as many eggs as you like. If you're getting a third of your calories from as protein, it's going to be hard to screw up the rest because it's kind of impossible and uncomfortable to get 60% of your calories from oil, from fat. And then by the same token, it's hard to have the rest of your calories from rice and pasta and french fries and so forth. So though the other two macronutrient groups will balance themselves out, you don't have to pay that much attention to them. But of course, you could pay a lot of attention to the total amount of calories you consume. We want to consume enough calories to support us, but not to give us an excess that could cause our systems to store those calories as fat, right? So the one thing I do about it, and I don't, I'm not pushing too much on diet. I want people to just, as you and I have discussed, keep your diet. It's fine. Don't worry about your diet. Let's get in the gym and build some muscle. Let's work, but let's work on losing a bit of fat and a good way to do that is don't get full. Don't sit at the table and take the extra five or six bites at the end that you normally do on automatic because your hand seems to be doing it all by itself. Your hand is just magically putting stuff in your mouth. And even when you say I'm kind of full, your hand keeps going. Well, it's there. It's there, David. You know, you can't leave. It's on the plate. It's, you know, it's not going to eat itself. Right. Right. So don't do that. Back away from that. It's the easiest way to get fewer calories is just have a smaller meal. Put it aside. Have it later. Have it for the next meal. Put it in the fridge. If you're at the restaurant, take it home. Don't have those last five to 10 bites that are just automatic junk eating. Cut out junk sugar, cut out junk drinking and junk overeating. These things are the easiest to cut. Does that make sense? Also, I really encourage people never be full. Never be sitting at a table. You stand up from the table and go, oh, I'm full. I feel full. You don't need that. It stretches your stomach skin. It turns you into one of these people that you see when you go on a cruise. Let's back away from being full. Let's just stop. You know, two thirds of the way through your normal eating regime to stop. Put it away for later. All right. So that's most of diet. Diet is actually pretty simple and it's one of the least things I worry about. What I need people to do is lose fat and gain muscle. We're going to lose fat by drinking plenty of water and just having fewer calories. So we've discussed a little bit of that. It's okay to be hungry more often, but it's not okay to fast. Fasting will take calories out of your muscle and start to delete the gains you've made in the gym. Just before you move on, you said there. You made a comment there about water. How much water is inappropriate? Nobody knows. People just under drink, I think. I think replace whatever you normally, you know, if you're hungry, have a glass of water. It'll go away. Just think more about replacing everything else you put in your mouth with water. And it's just in general. It's just a general concept. I often think in the middle of the afternoon boy, I'd like a snack and I'd go have just a glass of water and I'm done. It's fine. If you're an athlete, you need more. Everybody knows this. So, you know, stay hydrated. Stay a little bit over hydrated. If your pee is clear, that's all you need, right? The more yellow your pee is, the more you should drink. Easy, right? Just keep these things simple. Now you've started your fitness journey with me. So I'm kind of, I think the fat is a big issue for a lot of people. I don't want to say that you can magically lose 30, 40, 50 pounds that you have gained over the last 20, 30, 40 years. Okay. And the one thing about dieting is that 6 is that 98 percent of diets work in the first six months. 90 almost all diets work. It doesn't matter what the diet is. All diets work in the first six months because people are paying attention and they're using the scale and they're encouraged and they lose 10 pounds or 15 or maybe 20 pounds. After that, 98 percent of diets fail inside of two years. Almost no one keeps it off. This is going to resonate with a lot of people watching. They've been up and down. You've been up and down a bit. Well, actually, since I came down, I've stayed down and I have not, you know, I'm not religious about it, but I am not consuming sugar. I'm just, you know, maybe occasionally the odd little thing, but it's very occasional now and I'm just not going to put that, but I'm not going to put myself back in that position. So now I'm at the point where I want to rebuild some of the strength that I used to have and I'd like to be cycling again and able to do that again at a sort of level that I'm, let's say, is appropriate, age appropriate. Let's put it that way. A lot of people sort of finish their diet and think they've done it and they don't necessarily go back to their old habits. Even people who are strong will, like you, manage to maintain their diets. The weight still comes back. Why? Because this is an endocrinology situation. This is your endocrine situation. This is your endocrine system saying it wants the weight back because it's been on for 20 years. If you, the longer you've held the weight, the harder it is to keep off. And so study after study after study shows that it's very difficult, it kind of gets increasingly difficult to keep the weight off. Now, in your case, it's a little different because you weren't carrying that weight for 20 years. You got heavy and you unloaded that by cutting sugar. That's a temporary thing. A lot of people will gain one or two pounds a year starting at about age 30. By the time they're 50, they are 20 to 40 pounds overweight. This is very common. This is not going to melt away with some magic diet in six months and stay off. This is going to be hard to keep off. And the one thing we know is that exercise really adds to your belly. Really, you can't do it. You can't keep the weight off without exercise. Okay. This is critical because so many people do go up and down and they try to, you know, different diets. And they think it's the new diet that will do it. It's not. It's just that it's really hard to keep the weight off. You have to become a professional yoga instructor. If you've lost 50 pounds and you want to keep it off, you're going to be spending a lot of time. It's harder and harder and harder to keep it off and to prevent it from coming back. But people who have 20 or 30 pounds to lose, you can do it, but you've got to get serious. Now, can we talk about exercise? Well, do you want to talk about exercise now or do you want to talk about bone density before we talk about exercise? Yes. Excellent. Yes, I do. Right now. So you, again, we have to adjust our thinking for osteoporosis and bone density because it's not what you've been told. You've been told that your bone density is maximum at age 20 or 18 or something. And then it just gets lower and lower. And it's pretty complex. And I'm qualified to talk about this because I've had osteoporosis since I was about 50 years old. I had this in my right hip for five years. This is called a nail, piece of titanium. And I've got the other one is still in. So I have broken both hips. That's a diagnosis of osteoporosis. It may have had something to do with my diet. I ate a low protein diet most of my life, but it's not clear because we don't know much about osteoporosis in men. But what we do know overall like is that you can build bone. You can really build bone in your 60s, 70s, and 80s, but you have to give your bones that stimulus that tells it to grow. There's no magic pills. Now, there are some pills and you've probably heard of them. Prolia, Boniva, Fosamax. Have you heard of any of those? I haven't personally, but others may have, yes. These are heavily marketed drugs that just to give a quick explanation, there are hormones signaling molecules in your body that say build bone. And there are other hormones that say take bone away. And this is part of the remodeling machinery that helps you do what you need to do. Build bone where it's needed, your body responds. If you're a tennis player, the bones of your right arm or your hitting arm are stronger and bigger than the other arm. Or if you're a bowler or a golfer, your bones will remodel. And if you are always doing heavy exercise, for instance, I carry groceries up many floors of stairs. So I carry very heavy weight 50, 60, up to 70 pounds on my back, up 27 floors, your bones will start to remodel. And the mechanism for that is that there's less signal saying take bone away and more signal saying add bone. I'm not going to get technical about it. These drugs reduce the signal that says take bone away. That's what they do. And they and they lead to very, very fragile bones. It's sad to see the fractures that these people have. They don't really help. Doctors are prescribing them like candy. It's a huge money-making business. And all of these, they're all called mostly the guns under the name of bisphosphonates are really bad. Unless you have to be bedridden, maybe, but they really don't provide much benefit. They provide a lot of profit. And they're far less effective than working out and stressing your bones and using your own endocrine system to build bone naturally. So that you do with weight. And I want to explain about weight. If walking all day, if staying on your feet all day helped you build enough muscle and bone to be protected in your later years, we'd know it because all of the cleaning ladies and people who work to factories and grocery store workers would all live longer and they don't. That's what doesn't work is normal body weight. You have to really stress your system, your bones, and your muscles to build those things. We have to go to weight-bearing exercise to build the bone and muscle required to be strong. So one way to think about it is in your 60s, 70s, 80s, you are losing bone and muscle. It's very hard to keep. Right? Every decade you tend to be 10% lower on these things. And the only way to be strong is to get ahead of that and to be stronger next year than you are now. To be stronger now than you were last year. Who who's watching this is stronger today than you were a year ago. Probably not very many people. Right? One year at a time we are wasting away. And that is why people in their 80s are so frail. And that is why after age 70, you have a 25% chance of falling and breaking a bone. It's usually the hip, the head of the femur, and 50% of those falls result in death within five years because you just can't recover from that when you're that age. Sorry, the additional problem is it's not just the results in death in the next five years. You are requiring care during that time. You're dependent. You're a burden. You have no way to make money. You have no... That's right. That's right. You're a victim and it just gets worse and worse and worse. I mean, those five years are the most expensive and the worst years of your life. And you can prevent it by working backwards and building the agility, balance, bone, and muscle to prevent it. So that's why you and I are working on these special exercises for longevity that are very different from what people would do in the gym. In the gym, you're looking for these big muscle groups and you kind of want this V shape, big shoulders and you want to look manly or you want to look strong. And that's really not what we're doing in helping people prepare or really build a foundation for getting older and for being stronger every year. Seriously, I want you... I think you will be stronger a year from now than you are now, right? You're going to have to keep that up. And you're going to keep that up and it's going to be no surprise that it's going to take more and more hours per week to do that as you get older. And it works. It works. If you can prioritize your schedule to be stronger each year than you were last year, you're going to be an asset in your 60s, 70s, and 80s. You're going to be the oldest person in the gym rather than the youngest person in the nursing home. That's a choice you can make, but you will have to dedicate more and more and more time to doing it because the magic pill doesn't exist. I mean, we probably shouldn't underestimate that. That's a hard choice to make for people when they're 50 and they think, "Oh, I've got 40 years in anime. Why am I worrying about this now?" It's an emergency. If you read the book, if you start to learn about this stuff, you start now. Every day you wait is a gram of muscle you lose and is much harder to get back. You've got to get on a weight loss program if you're overweight and you've got to get on a muscle building program if you want to be strong in your later years. You have to do it now. There is no magic pill. Let's go through some of this exercise step. Let's just start with some basic concepts of exercise. There's a lot of people haven't picked up a weight in 20 or 30 years and never really were into bodybuilding. Number one, the easiest way to get hurt is to overdo it, especially for former athletes like you and me. I started this grip training a couple of months ago when I was doing it all day, every day, whenever I took a walk or rode on a bus or went anywhere. I was probably doing this two hours a day and I got tennis elbow from that and I still have it. It's easy to overdo it and get hurt and that'll set you back much farther and if you just go slowly and steadily. That's what we're doing. You and I are working on putting slow, careful foundations down and don't have any pain. Any sign of pain is a sign to stop immediately and back off. Let me just ask you about that because what do you mean by pain? For example, if I've been for a long walk and at the end of the day I'm sitting on my legs or a bit icky or maybe my lower backs a bit icky. Is that pain or what do you mean by pain? Yeah, I mean the pain that you might experience when you're talking about lifting weights. I'm telling you right now, I'm telling everybody right now, walking doesn't do it. The walking people are using walkers when they're 75 and they're in a wheelchair when they're 85. Walking is not weight bearing. Each leg, your legs, your individual one leg is designed to hold your entire body weight. If you loaded into a machine that let you push your body weight, that would be nothing. That's what you do every day with one leg. You have to add more to it than that to start stressing and growing bone and so your arms don't handle your body weight and that's why pushups work because your body weight is more than your arms are used to doing. But we have to stress with weight and I want to go through some of that. The two leading indicators of how long you will live are grip strength and VO2 max. Let's break that down a second. Grip strength is a critical indicator of the length of your life. Why? Because except for people who die from cancer, people have accidents and those lead as we've shown to some terminal condition. You don't recover from accidents and so grip strength helps you. If you have grip strength, it means you've been doing the things necessary to be strong and agile. I would also say balance because tripping and going in particular going down is what causes a lot of the falls. Going down the last step, getting out of a car, going down a curb, these movement down, if you ask people in their 70s, what's really hard to do? They'll tell you walking downhill, the back of the leg muscles is very deteriorates quicker than the front than the quads. So that's where you can get out of balance. You can get it in a little trouble and then you fall over or you reach for something and you try to grab your way out but you don't have the grip strength. So that's why grip strength is really important. We work on it not just with, I'm going to stick with grip strength, not just with these but we work on it with simple things like dead hands. You know, you just hang from a bar. Have you tried that? We've talked a bit about it. Yes. Have you tried a dead hang yet? I've tried a dead hang, yes. How long did you last? I can't remember, not very long. Right. It's going to be 20 to 30 seconds at the beginning. Right. I'm up to one minute. One minute is hard and it really trains your grip. So dead hang and I'm going to give other exercises that are very helpful for training your grip naturally and then this kind of stuff, this you would do maybe twice a day just for a little extra or a little maintenance, maybe on a day when you're not in the gym. This is not the primary way you want to get grip strength. So I want, and we've talked about this, Mike, nobody, people in the UK, people in most places don't have a lot of room. They don't live in giant homes with their own home gyms. Although you can join a Facebook group showing people building amazing home gyms, that's pretty astounding to see what people do. But most of us, we don't have room for a home gym. Some of us might have a garage where we can do some stuff and a lot of other, most of us have access to a real gym, which is even better. But I'm asking for, we were, you were getting to, you know, what does it take? 30 minutes a day, weightlifting. 30 minutes every single day become a daily athlete and do 30 minutes of weightlifting, weight bearing exercise. And then three times cardio, because the second most important indicator of the length of your life is VO2 max. That is your peak performance, that is your ability to use oxygen efficiently. And when you're out of breath, if you've done a lot of cycling, probably running, I'll use running as an example, because it's a good way to calibrate. Everybody understands it. If you're 50, 60, and you can run a mile under 12 minutes, that's pretty good. But let's say you can. Let's say whoever you are, you can run a mile in X number of minutes. And that's as good as you can do. That's fine. But you can train, and I do it using half mile intervals as fast as I can go half mile. That usually takes me about five minutes. And you train doing those, and then you'll find that after a couple of weeks of that, your mile time will come down. And if you can get your mile time down, and I don't care if it's in the swimming pool, or cycling, or whatever your sport is, that's fine. Whatever your endurance sport is, if you can get your mile time down, start to work it down, that's an indicator that your VO2 max is going up. And that is the kind of thing that will help you stay healthier longer. I'm not asking people to become hardcore runners or specialists or do a lot of mileage. I'm asking people to do what we call zone three work. Zone one is walking. Zone two is working, but you're still able to talk. So if you can, if you imagine walking very fast or hiking pretty hard, how hard can you walk or hike or bike ride, still be able to talk, but you're still breaking a sweat. That's zone two. In zone two, you can't do it for more than about two hours. You can do zone two is about your pretty much out of gas after two hours. If you can keep going after two hours and do three hours, you're at your zone one. And then zone three is what you can do over two to five minutes and have the tank empty. You can't go anymore. So for me, it's for my zone two activity, it's a half mile run on a track. And I can do that just about four minutes and 40 seconds. I think four minutes and 31 seconds is my best one. And I'm always trying to take that down by a couple of seconds. And that's your, that's your zone three performance indicator. And that's the one you want to take down because that will really help your VO two max go up. And then zone one, zone four is your sprint. How, what can you do in 15 to 20 seconds? And you're completely shot, you have nothing left in 15 to 20 like, like a 200 meter dash. That's the zone four. Okay, which most people don't have to do really ever, but you need to spend some time in zone three, which is we call it the four by four. You, you do the hardest thing you can, it could be running up a hill, it could be swimming, it could be hiking as hard as you possibly can. So you're dead by the time you're at four minutes, five minutes, and then four or five minutes relaxed. Shake it off, walk around, recover, have a drink, again, four minutes as hard as you possibly can. So you're done and you know you're watching, you're looking at your watch. So you do that four times, four by four, you do four minutes on, four minutes off, four minutes on, four minutes off, you do that four times. And that's a really good zone three workout. That will increase your VO two max. And if you do that once a week, that will increase that will increase your life. And I don't care what your time is. If you're increasing it, that will increase your lifespan and health span. That's one of the biggest things you can do is start wherever you are. And I don't care if it takes you 15 minutes to run a mile. If you can get that down, you are extending your life. All right. So that's, so we've covered grip strength and VO two max, which are the two biggest indicators of life of health span. All right. Now I want to talk about some of the exercises you and I are working on. Okay. So just to stay with the grip exercises, I think it makes sense for people to have a couple things at home. You don't need a lot. Did you order the steps that we talked about? Yes, I have, yes. So I don't have those steps. Those are, those are really great. They're a step that you get from Amazon that gives you two, six, eight and 10 inches so that you can use for stepping up and down. And you can take them off and adjust them. I don't have that. I have a box. I have different boxes, but I do have this set of adjustable dumbbells. Dumbbells are fantastic. Dumbbells are one of the best investments you can make. You're going to use dumbbells for the rest of your life. And these are, these are adjustable. You adjust them this way and you can put on as much weight as you want. So, so I can adjust this and get 15 pounds and there's 15 pounds. Okay. Very cool. And then you go all the way up to 52 and a half pounds for each hand. And you say, well, that's crazy. Who's ever going to lift 52 and a half pounds? But in fact, we do this farmer carry exercise. If I'll try to show now. Or you load up with whatever you can do. Again, don't overdo it. But let's just, I'll just put 25 pounds in each hand. So, can you see me? So, we just carry the weight. Relax your shoulders, keep your spine straight up and down and just walk around and carry the weight. Now, you'll find that 25 pounds in each hand, this is 50 pounds is not much weight in the gym. And that's fine. That's where you want to start. That's great. Walk around for two, three minutes, walk forward, backward, make it smooth, have good form, develop your form nice and slow. But then in the gym, you know, the big 45 pound plates in the gym for the lifting bars. So, I just grab one of each of those. I've got 90 pounds now. And I just walk around and carry for one to two minutes. And I'll try to do that three times. This builds bone. The weight is coming down off your shoulder. It builds your spine. It builds your hips and builds your legs and your arms. So, this is an easy thing people can do. Carrying, it's called farmer carry. And then the other version of that is the suitcase carry, which is just one side. And that helps you build the muscles to keep your core, your trunk straight up and down. So, you just grab one. And again, you can get hurt doing this. So, you want to practice and have good form. Try to keep a vertical spine. That means not tons of weight here, but enough that you have to manage it. And you just walk around carrying on one side and then switch. And there are many variations of these carry exercises. I've got a bunch of them on my website. And they're very good for building bone. Ah, we didn't talk about calcium. I've got you taking calcium, don't I? And also magnesium and a couple of other bits and pieces. That's right. So, calcium and magnesium are the two supplements anyone over 50 should be taking. And I highly recommend algae cal plus. You can put a picture of it if you want. It's called algae cal plus. It has your magnesium and has boron. It has vitamin K and some vitamin D. It's really about all the vitamins you need. You don't need to take a multivitamin. Multivitamins don't really do anything. But this calcium is bioavailable. Something to do with algae, I'm not sure. It's vegetarian. And you really want to be getting about three to 500 milligrams of calcium every day. Most people should. And it's not a worry about, there's no worry about atherosclerosis and contributing to hardening of the arteries. That doesn't, dietary calcium does not contribute to heart disease. So that there's no link there. So you want to have about three to 500 milligrams. And again, I'm not your doctor. Talk to your endocrinologist about this. And they'll prescribe calcium. There are different kinds of calcium and there's different kinds of magnesium. And you can learn about those on my website. That's stuff we've have conversations about. But it's very important. Now I want to go back to some exercises. So you definitely want to be taking the calcium so that the stimulation gives you, you have bone to work with, or you have calcium to work with, calcium ions to work with to build the bone. So another important one is just biceps. And all the exercises I want you and any of my clients to do are using the super slow method. And the super slow method is to go very slowly isolates. You're only doing one thing at a time. You're not, you know, you see a lot of people in the dimmer just kind of throwing weights around. And they're doing all kinds of just stipulations, or they're doing two things at once. But in this case, I'm just going to lower this for demonstration purposes. You just want to go slowly. This is called a positive or a concentric contraction. And then whenever the weight is going down, that's called eccentric. And eccentric has been shown to build more bone, more muscle than concentric. That means you want to go slowly. And you'll notice with any exercise, there's an easy resting point where you're just kind of relying on the mechanics of your bones like right here. This is not working out. This is just resting. Okay. So we want to eliminate that. At the same time, we want to eliminate the bottom stroke. And because the weight is down, this is called the stretch. So proper form here would be to go from about this angle here, down almost all the way, but not quite. Turn around smoothly. And come back up. You don't want to do two both hands at one time. You want to really isolate. And then I can feel this already. Plenty of weight for me. And then you want to go to failure, which I'll just simulate. It was where you can't go anymore. And then resist, resist, resist, resist. Keep it as long as you can. This is a very important good, important exercise right there, where you're tearing muscle fiber and the recovery from that builds muscle. Let's say with a given weight go 10 reps for some exercise. And you go eight reps, you're just wasting your time. You're not tearing enough muscle fiber to stimulate growth. You'd have to go to nine. And then ideally, not just a 10, but to sort of fight and cheat. So one way to think about it, if you're doing push-ups, and I believe you should do push-ups very slowly. So I don't know if I can show a super slow push-up, I probably can. This is called super slow. Can you see me down here? Yes. So this is super slow. This is a push-up. You just touch, you don't rest, and you go up slowly. And in particular, you want to go very slowly down. This is eccentric right here. And you want to go super slow in here. This is where most of the work happens. Down here, and then back up. And if you, if you can do 10 of those, that's a fantastic exercise. If you do five of those, and then over the following weeks, you try to add one more, keep it slow and get to 10. And you do that twice a day. That's a fantastic exercise. You're going to build plenty of muscle in your pecs right there. You don't need a lot of fancy machinery. That is something that I haven't really seen before. It's called super slow. You can look it up. It's been around for 30 years. It's less weight and easier on your joints. And every bit as, let's say, encourages your muscle fiber. It does this stretching and the tearing of the muscle fibers to tell your muscles to grow. But it's much safer. We've been doing something similar with step ups, haven't we? Yes. And you've noticed this is not a natural thing. And it's, it's a lot harder than you think. The thing that surprised me most about it was actually the amount of balance that's required to do it. And so it is helping with balance as well. That's right. I wanted to start with balance. Number one thing to do for balance is just stand on one leg. Oh, yeah. Standing on one leg is fantastic. I actually do it all the time. I do it in the elevator. I do it waiting for a bus whenever I possibly can. And I'm still not that good at it. My kids can do it really easily. One big important tip for standing on one leg, don't do it in running shoes. Do it in a crossfit or a tennis shoe because that has more lateral support. Yeah, running shoe is not good for, for, for working on balance. So balance is really important. And the next step up from that is the step up, which is one of my favorite exercises. And I want to talk about step ups and stairs and rucking. Okay, because this is, this is stuff you can do that really builds your legs. Because again, with one leg, we're doing one more than one leg normally does. That's the key. Your legs take you all over town. That doesn't build on. You have to do more than what one leg normally does. And a step up will do that. So now this is a high step. And the step I had to buy is a two, six, eight inch, I think, maybe as a 10 or four, there were four levels on a chest. Two, six, eight, 10 inches. This is the perfect product you want to get. It's about 45, it's about 35 pounds, maybe 30, 35 pounds on Amazon. This is kind of thing you're going to use for the rest of your life. It's tremendous investment. I've just got a box that I've built for a sculpture I made. And the exercise here is, is really more of a step down than a step up. Anybody can step up. That's normal. But what we're going to do is very slowly touch and come back up. So this is a toe touch, touch and up. And you're going to find that doing this, this slowly, this slowly takes months of practice and muscle building to be able to do this at the balance at the same time. Oops. And by the way, it's fine to see. I've got more height than you need. You want to start lower, but you know, you can cheat and go a little, put a little bit of pressure and come back up. And then when you're better at it, then you're going to do a heel touch. Do you see that? Yes. And that's hard. And that kind of toe touch and heel touch, building your height up to about 10 inches, builds the back of your leg, which helps you go downhill and gives you that stability you won't have otherwise. Talk to anyone who's 70. Going down is hard because they lose the muscle in the back of the leg, the glutes and the calf muscles really deteriorate. Anybody who's 70 will tell you this. So we're going to do this every day, a couple of times a day. What does it take? Five minutes, twice a day. I'm asking for 30 minutes a day. And this is probably this kind of stuff is 10 minutes of that every single day. Yeah, look, I wanted to, because your box there is what about 10 inches high? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So when I started doing this, I was, I chose a step that I happened to have in and around the house, which was probably about six inches high. You thought that was too high to start off with, which is why we bought the thing from Amazon. I really, I really like four inches. Four inches is just the great, is just a great place to start because you can really got to build a base of balance. And the other, the other point that I wanted to make was it looks really easy, and it's really not. It's really hard. What I just did, what I just did, I couldn't, I couldn't do two months ago. Now, there's an important stretch here that I've told you about and I want to make sure people understand that one too. And I, I think we can just show them on. Yeah, we'll show them myself or yourself. So I, I do this several times a day, where you're really putting weight down on your heel, straight down. This is, uh, like what a baseball catcher does. And you're, there we go. All right, the goal is to reduce this distance here. To be able to put your butt on your heel. Can you see that? Yes. And you'll probably do it right away. Most people can't. But the goal is to get your butt on your heel comfortably. So eventually, you know, eventually you can use squats and stay there and relax and be all the way down. This is going to stretch timbers and muscles. It's going to stretch the muscles in the calf and all the muscles in the glutes here. And the muscles, sorry, around the patellar tendons that attach the patellar tendons. So below and above the knee, you want to stretch this and really work two millimeter by millimeter, reduce that distance and get down. This is going to pay huge dividends later in life. And it doesn't take much. This is again, two minutes out of every day. One minute, twice a day, working on that deep stretch. You're doing it, aren't you? I am doing it. Yes. Have you noticed, you're making a little progress? Well, hopefully. I mean, it might take a month to get a centimeter, but that's important because then you're going to go to the next centimeter. And I don't care if it takes a year, but after some period of time, you'll be down. Your butt will be down on your heels. And you want to maintain that for the rest of your life. Yeah. Very important. This is a kind of thing. You know what happens as you get older, you go the other way, you get more stiff, get less able to go down, right? Right. It's worse, right? So you want to counteract that by having good, strong, flexible knees. And then, and then another exercise right in the same category is just, is just a squat. Okay. This one is no fun. One minute doing this is a long minute. Right. We also want to try to not hunch over, but just keep it as controlled as you can. And as you can see, it's not even a right angle, but it feels like a right angle. I can go down more. And it really takes a lot. It takes exactly the muscles you want to build to be safe as you get older. Again, this is not what a bodybuilding coach would have you do in the gym. Right. But it's critical for aging. And that leads us to stairs. Stairs are a lifeline for people who want to be fit and strong as they age. And you should seek out stairs everywhere you possibly can. You live in a lot of environments that don't have many stairs, right? Well, we don't have what floor did you say the 27th floor? We certainly don't have blocks attend to be that kind of. If you look right out there, you can see the Washington Monument, the White House, the White House is right out there. I bring, we eat 150 pounds of groceries every week. And I bring them all up 27 flights of full stairs on my back. Most usually 40 to 60 pounds at a time on my back. And I recommend that you start to embrace stairs. Now, a couple of things, and then we're going to talk about rucking. Now, the first thing I want you to do, and you still haven't done it. And that's okay. But I want everybody to do is to go up four flights of stairs as fast as they possibly can and time it. It's better if you have an accomplice, someone who will time you. But if you have to put the watch in your hand and time, it's much easier if you have a stopwatch function. But see how long it takes to go up four flights of stairs. Peter Tia talks about in his book. If you want to be able to go up four flights of stairs in under three minutes when you're 90, that is elite. That is the top one or two percent of people in the country. So you need to be elite now and stay in that zone every year. As I say, get stronger every year, not weaker. And so the question I want to ask everybody is how long does it take you to go up four flights of stairs? This is four consecutive flights. You need a building that's at least four stories tall to do this. I want you to time yourself. And six months from now, I want that number to start to really to come down a bunch. If you are 50 years old and you can go up four flights of stairs in under a minute, that's okay. You can make a lot of improvement. You could certainly shoot for under 50 seconds if you're 50 years old. I am 65. I do it in 20 seconds or flights of stairs in 20 seconds. I'm a stair specialist. I train for this. I would be in the elite category and anybody in the state of Maryland, I would be in the top 10. I'm not asking for that. I'm asking, actually, and this gets to an important point, what Peter Tia says, and a bunch of other exercise people, aging people say, if you can get yourself above the median into the, say the 50, 60 percent range rather than below where everybody else. But if you can just get yourself into the top half of performance in each of several different exercises like running a mile, four flights of stairs, swimming, you know, what, a thousand meters or something. Cycling is harder to compare person to person, so that's a little different. Or rowing is a good example. I use a rowing machine at full resistance. How long does it take you to go four kilometers? If you can get yourself and grip strength and VO2 max, get yourself above the 50 percent mark, you're going to live longer than most people by far. You're going to have probably 60, 70 percent of the longevity benefit from that alone. That is such a good base. And then you can build on that. But just getting from under 50 percent to over 50 percent has huge protective value for you in your, you know, quest for healthy long life. Yeah, just to reiterate what we're really talking about here is the best quality of life for as long as possible removing the need for support and care and so on. You're going to die. The goal is to live the best, highest quality of life as long as possible, and then die as fast as possible of whatever it is. And as cheaply as possible, because you rather spend your money during your healthy years than all during the last three years of your life. Right, because, you know, I don't know what it's like in the States, but in the UK, it's increasingly common that you work all your life, you build up your asset base, and then the state comes long and steals it all in order to provide you with your end of life care. Exactly. And that's where about 50 percent of all your life's health care costs are. They're in the last three or four years. And it's no fun. So live as long and as vigorously as you can, and then, you know, die of something as quickly as possible. Now, so stairs, I really want people to embrace stairs, find the stairs that you can spend a lot of time on, and bring your groceries home every time. Don't drive to the store. If your store is less than a mile away, don't drive to the store. Bring a backpack, fill it up. I've got a video on this on my website, how I do it, and, you know, get the right, get a good pack, and then bring your groceries, hopefully, up several flights of stairs to your kitchen, and do that with everything you eat, everything you buy at the grocery store. Now, for some people, you might have to ride a bike, you might have a trike, you might have something but anything but the lazy way out, driving there, and then asking somebody else to carry your groceries up, and your luggage when you're on a trip, you know, find, take stairs instead of escalators, grab your own luggage and carry it up, stairs, be as strong as you can on stairs with weight, and that will help you build that bone that we're talking about. I'm sorry, build that extra muscle that we're talking about. All right, now I want to talk about rucking. Rucking is walking or hiking with extra weight, and I want everyone to invest in a 20-pound weight vest. I rather people get a 20-pound vest because you can take weights out of them and you can use it as 10 pounds, and then add as you go, and this just has these steel bars in it. It just has these little steel bars. And so you can adjust the weight. The nice, the important thing about a special pack for rucking for carrying extra weight is that with a backpack, all the weight's going to move around or it's going to go to the bottom, and with a rucking or a weight vest, and some of these vests are just very minimal, and they're designed for women, and they're designed for running. They hug you, they're nice and tight so that the weight is high, high on your back and high on your front so that it moves much better with you than in a backpack. When I have 60 pounds in my backpack, that whole system works really well, but if you're carrying 20 pounds, most backpacks don't have the weight placement that would be best for being able to exercise with 20 pounds. By the way, 20 pounds is a lot. So again, if you're a lightweight person, you want to start with six or seven pounds, and I want to say this to people, I'd rather see you take a three-mile walk with 15 pounds than a five-mile walk without. Walking with weight is better than walking without. Walking without is not going to extend your life. It's not expensive, there's hundreds of these products at Amazon or, you know what I mean, fitness store, get yourself a 20-pound vest that is adjustable so you can start with seven or eight pounds, go for a three-mile walk with seven or eight pounds. You'll see, it makes a difference, and then work your way up so that you're at 15. If you do start with seven-rate pounds, where do you keep that weight? Do you keep that weight as high as possible? You take the weight side from the bottom or what do you do? It's not much weight, seven-rate, so just what you just want to close. Body, ideally high and close, that's really it. But it's more important, Mike, when you get to 20 pounds. 20 pounds is a lot. Especially if you're hiking, hiking is so good, there's so much hiking going on in the UK, right? There's all these fantastic hikes to do all over the place, but if you're not doing them with weight, you're not extending your life. So try adding 10 pounds to your hike. It's going to be a shorter hike. Fine. You're going to get more out of it because you'll be building your spine muscle. Yes. Sorry, you'll be building your core muscles and your bones of your spine. So add weight to everything as much as you can and build up the weight. Now, I want to talk back in the gym. I want to talk about lightweight training because this is a thing that's being studied now. There's a lot of very good YouTube videos on it now. If I were in the gym, I'd show you more and more people. Serious bodybuilders are going to a balance of very hard weight where they do five reps max and they're dead. That's kind of a staple of many weight lifters. And then medium weight, which would be about 10 to 12 reps. And then you can't do any more. And then lightweight is around 30 reps. And that's not much weight taking the weight down. And then whatever your exercise is, and this is not a good exercise, I don't recommend, but I'm doing it because it fits in the screen, you know, it's easy to do. And the way to lift light weights, as I say to people, you don't count. Counting doesn't mean anything because 20, 30, it doesn't matter. What happens is at some point you're going to feel like, okay, I'm kind of there, I'm done. I'm not going to do any more. I'm finished. I'm going to put the weights down. Your mind tells you, I'm done. That's when you start to count. You go to the point where you're kind of tired of this and you would normally put them down. Now you start counting and now you're trying to do three to five more. And those three to five will tear the muscle fiber. Again, I always go very slowly. Those three to five will tear the muscle fiber every bit as well as those hard heavyweight guys who are doing the big macho lifts in the gym. You get as much benefit from that. It's lighter, it's easier on your joints. And trust me, the last two or three are very, very hard. And you have to push through the pain at the end of that so that you fail. One way to tell that you failed, by the way, with almost any exercise, if you're doing both arms. Let's say it's a, I really like a dumbbell chest press instead of bar with the dumbbells. With the dumbbells on the chest press, you get it much better. I'll do it this way. You get your elbows at a natural angle like this with dumbbells. Imagine I'm lying down. And with a bar, you're like this, right? Yes. This is worse. This builds muscle much less effectively. And this angle, this 45 degree angle is much better. So especially if you have someone to help you and in the gym, you can do this with lightweight dumbbell chest press like this. Again, very slow. And do it with lightweight. I'm talking about 15 pounds in each hand. I mean, much less weight than you would normally bench press. And so that after 30 of those, you're almost dead. You'll notice that one hand gives before the other one does. And that's a sign you're doing it right. That's a sign you are all the way at the limit. If you one hand is weaker, almost for almost everyone. And when that hand starts to give out, you push it as hard as you can, you bring it in and you try to do, and you don't want to overcompensate because then this will be over the strong hand, the strong arm will stay stronger, right? You just want to really power up that weaker arm. And try to match. And that last rep should really hurt. And then you're building boom. But then you're building muscle, right? And everything is like this. So I've given you several examples. And I've got videos on all this stuff where you go with lightweight, very slow, very controlled, one joint at a time, one muscle at a time, all the way until you absolutely can't. And you're really tearing muscle fibers. And then sometime later that same day, you want to reward yourself with 30 grams of whey protein, which will help. And over about two to three days, that muscle will build itself bigger than it was before. And then at that three-day point, you want to jump in and do the same thing again, so that you're constantly working your way up. And if you let it go for a week and you've lost everything you've gained, make sense? Absolutely. No, David, that's nearly an hour and a half. We've been talking. It's been a fascinating conversation and the time has gone very, very quickly. As you say, you are helping me out with this and you're helping some others out with it as well. Train for longevity, learn to get your supplements and your diet. And you're just all your little lifestyle things like balance and bone building and muscle. And you know, your attitude and your sleep and your mental health, all things that people talk about in the book. So the thing about the book is it's great. You can learn a lot from it, but it's not going to lengthen your life. This book is not going to lengthen your life. The only thing that lengthens your life is what you do. If you can do it yourself, do it. If you're motivated, I want you to do it. But if you need help, if you need a coach, if you need advice, that's what I'm here for. And there are a few other people starting and this is kind of an exploding area, longevity coaching. And it's the coaching, it's the day to day doing that matters, not getting injured in the first place, building a strong foundation, building your good habits and routines, and then managing setbacks as they inevitably will come and try to, you know, and recovery from those. And I say it's a three year program. Like you, you're going to be on a three year program so that three years from now you look back and you'll say, wow, and your friends will look at you and say, wow, it's obvious that you are doing something different and you are much stronger three years from now than you are today. And that's the beginning of your health span journey. Right. And again, we need to make the point. Of course, we're not, this is not medical advice in any way. And actually people probably need to consider their medical situation before they take this kind of thing on. And we talk about that in our conversations, don't we? Yes. I want you to work with decent doctors to get some of the medical side of this worked out. Okay. Well, that is fantastic. Have you got any final comments before we finish? I have lots of resources. It's called infinitegameoflife.com. I have many videos and I've got a supplement recommendations, products, everything you need. It's all free. And if you want to talk to me, that's up to you. But there's plenty of resources online and I've sort of a directory of good videos you can watch and learn for yourself. The point is, this is stuff that you are doing on it. This is stuff you're already doing for yourself. It's not, you're not. No. It's what you do every day that counts. Right. Absolutely. Okay. David, thank you. I find that fascinating. Thank you very much for that. And well, we'll see what people think. And no doubt, some people will be in touch. So thank you very much. Thank you, Mike. We wear our work day by day, stitch by stitch. At Dickies, we believe work is what we're made of. So whether you're gearing up for a new project or looking to add some tried and true work wear to your collection, remember that Dickies has been standing the test of time for a reason. The work where isn't just about looking good. It's about performing under pressure and lasting through the toughest jobs. 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