The 7 Biggest Health Mistakes People Over 40 Keep Making: And what to do instead

Something happened after I turned 40. I didn't recover as quickly. I started noticing some of my joints hurt sometimes. Things were just different. Let me ask you, did you experience that yourself? And I started realizing after 40, for myself included in this, most people don't fail their health. They aim at the wrong targets. I felt like I should still be hitting the same numbers that I was when I was 25 years old, when the reality is my biology has changed. And what I see in most patients I work with over 40 is they eat less and lose muscle. They do more cardio and get weaker. They chase a number on the scale while the number that actually predicts their future goes completely ignored. Or sometimes I see people that are fitness fanatics and they're trying to deadlift and squat 500 pounds while destroying their joints. They're actually aging themselves more quickly. And so here's what I discovered for myself, who's 45, and even thinking about my dad, who's 75. The playbook for your health that worked at 25 quietly stops working. And maybe nobody sent you the memo. So I'm here to give you that memo today. In a study of nearly 140,000 people across 17 countries, one simple measurement predicted death better than blood pressure. And it wasn't cholesterol and it wasn't weight. It's something you can test at home this week for free. And most doctors never check it. So today, I'm going to walk you through 5 things. What actually changes in your body at 40? The 7 mistakes almost everyone is making. How to find out where you stand, how to truly know if you're healthy or not and moving towards longevity. Number 4, the fixes that matter most. What are those things you can do, the supplements you can take, the foods, the activities that will make you younger and actually help you hit your targets? And And finally, what I'm personally doing and what I recommend others who are 40 years or older, what they should start doing to have the right game plan for making the second half the strongest half of your life. And I want to encourage you to stay to the end because the biggest mistake on the list isn't about food or exercise at all. Welcome to the Dr. Axe Show. All right, so typically for most people, somewhere in your 30s, your body quietly rewrote all the rules, right? It stopped building muscle as easily. It takes way longer to recover. And anything you do wrong, you feel it the next day. It's less forgiving. The late nights, the skipped workouts, the drive-through weeks, same effort, different results. That's not weakness. And it's not your imagination. It's biology. And here's the part almost nobody says. Every one of those changes responds to training, food, and sleep. The rules changed. The game is still winnable. You know, when I was 41, I was diagnosed with this spinal infection that got into my bone, an abscess by my spinal cord, and I nearly died. And after laying in bed for an entire year and starting to walk again, you know, one of the things that entered my mind was, how am I ever going to recover from this? Am I going to be able to go and throw my 2-year-old daughter in the air in the pool again? Am I going to be able to do triathlons like I used to? Am I going to be able to lift weights? Am I going to be able to play tennis or pickleball or water ski or snow ski? All of those things entered my mind because I love doing those things and I wanted to be doing those things when I was not only in my 40s, but 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond. And I want to say now I'm recovered and in many ways I'm stronger than I was before. I'm playing pickleball and tennis. I'm snow skiing. I'm water skiing. I'm not only throwing my 2-year-old daughter in the air in the pool, I'm throwing my 6-year-old daughter in the air in the pool as well. And I'm more confident now than ever. I will be in my 70s and 80s having incredible health. I can tell you, I have a dad right now that's 76 years old who was water skiing. I was with him a few weeks ago. He was doing something called trick skiing on one foot, his foot in the other rope. Doing 360s while water skiing. And my mom at 74 years old was up slalom skiing. So the reality is this, for you listening, no matter how bad your health is, how broken you are, here's the reality. Your body can heal and you can also be in your 70s and 80s and experience phenomenal health. But in order to do that, you have to have a strategy. Here's the reality. The average person loses 3 to 8% of their muscle Every decade after 30. That 3 to 8%, that's the average rate of muscle loss for adults who don't fight it and don't have a strategy. And it can accelerate even more after 60. Researchers call this sarcopenia, and I call it the drift. It's silent, it's slow, and by the time most people notice it, they've been typically drifting for 20 years. Again, this happens all the time. I can tell you, you have kids, you get busy with work, and then all of a sudden, 10 years has passed by, and you've lost 10% of your muscle mass and you don't even recognize yourself. And here's the reality for most of you is if you have a strategy, you can completely reverse that. You can put on muscle, you can look younger, you can feel incredible. Now, I want to share with you this study that came out and you maybe have seen this, but this is a number that predicts your future. And this was a study done on nearly 140,000 adults across 17 countries. They found for every about 10 to 11 pounds you drop in grip strength, you have a 16% higher risk of death. Now, here's the good news. The more that you're doing things to where it's naturally going to increase your grip strength, like weight training and resistance training, eating more protein, just being more physically active, it can reverse mortality and help you live longer. So I want to say this. It's not about you going and just, you know, getting one of those grippers. I remember my dad used to have one of these and I loved it as a kid. He had one because my dad was big into strength training and And would use this thing to increase his grip strength regularly. Now, you can get one of those and that's good for you, or you can hang on a bar and that's good for you as well. Overall, it's more about how physically fit you are, I believe, than anything else. Now, I want to share with you the 7 biggest mistakes I see people making over 40 years old when it comes to their health. Here's mistake number 1, all cardio, no strength training. Listen, walking is wonderful and you should keep doing it. But after 40, cardio alone cannot stop this drift. Only progressive resistance training does that. Muscle responds to one signal, load it, and then load it a little bit more. This is the highest leverage 90 minutes of your entire week, and it's the one that most people over 40 years old skip entirely. Here's the fix. 2 to 3 strength sessions a week. Compounding movements, heavier over time, your grip fixes itself as a side effect. Your grip strength is going to get stronger. If you take 2 days a week for 45 minutes, we talked about 90 minutes, at least 2 days a week, 45 minutes, you could do a push day and a pull day. You could do a lower body day and an upper body day, but do at least 2 strength sessions a week is absolutely one of the top things you could do to improve your longevity. And listen, I don't think it matters that much whether you're using machines or bands or free weights. Overall, just get stronger. And then the second mistake has to do with the most important thing you want to pair with strength training. And that is eat more protein. Mistake number 2 is this. You're still eating a breakfast like you were when you were 20 years old, right? Beguiling cream cheese and coffee. Special K cereal with skim milk. After 40, it's kind of like your muscles. I can tell you, your muscles become hard of hearing. It feels like it's so much harder to put on muscle, and that's why you need to eat even more protein. The same protein makes a weaker building signal because your body has less anabolic hormones working for it. So the breakfast that worked back then, I mean, I felt like when I was, when I was in my 20s, I could eat almost anything and put on muscle and see results and recover. But now, I need to be more conscious with my diet than I ever have in my life if I want to see results. So here's the easy fix. Raise the volume. Get real protein every meal, starting with breakfast. Again, I think the ideal is 1, okay? 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight. So for myself, around 170, what I try and do, or at least close to that, I try and get 40 grams of protein 4 times a day. And if you can combine that with resistance training, it is one of the greatest things you could ever do for your longevity. The number 3 big mistakes I see anyone over 40 making is treating bad sleep as a fact of aging. Somewhere along the way, sleeping badly became something people over 40 joke about instead of fix. Okay? And here's how I typically have experienced it. And by the way, I've experienced some of this in my own life. And that is, I used to sleep like a rock. I would go to bed, and I would not wake up at all. I would literally, you know, when I tried to go to bed, I would go to— I would fall asleep. And then I would wake up the next morning when my alarm went off or the sun woke me up. And then we had kids. And then all of a sudden, it was like, okay, 3 AM, sometimes I would wake up or 5 AM and not be able to fall back asleep. And what I found from working with thousands and thousands of people with hormonal issues is that typically, That's cortisol. Cortisol gets too high. You don't have enough downtime. And think about it, you had your schedule before, and before you only had to manage yourself. You had a lot of downtime likely before you had kids. Even when you're married, you still, you both had a lot of downtime. Now you're bringing kids to practice. Maybe you're even taking care of grandkids now, and your schedule's packed full and you are so busy. So cortisol goes up. So now melatonin doesn't rise enough, and so you can't sleep as well. Here's the fix. A fixed wake-up time, 7 days a week, getting your room dark, getting it cold, no alcohol before bedtime. And then also, 2 hours before bed, stop watching things, start listening to things, talking to things, you know, reading a book, giving your body time to wind down. Having a wind-down routine is critically important. Like, I'll just share for myself. Let me share with you our wind-down routine typically in our family. Okay? We try and do an early dinner. Maybe that ends around 6. Chelsea and I might watch one show, let's say 45 minutes or an hour, from 6 to 7. And then at 7 o'clock, everybody goes, you know, we get the kids in the bath, we take our shower, come out. Let's say that's around 7:20. And then I'll listen to an audiobook. The girls will play toys. Chelsea and I might talk. And then at 8 PM, we get the girls in bed. And then I typically go to bed around 9 PM. And that's what works for me. But figure it out for yourself. What is going to help you? Sleep more deeply and through the night. But a few things that make a big impact are light, right? So getting early sunlight, waking up at the same time in the morning, going to bed at a good hour, make sure your room is dark and cold, and not having blue light exposure in the evening. The number 4 mistake I see people making after 40 is not being active enough. So this really is not about weight. It's not about steps. It's about your overall fitness level. And this one, it's not about your weight. We covered weight training already. It's not about just taking steps. Walking is great. It's about your overall fitness level. Like, could you go out and play pickleball? Could you get up on a water ski? Could you go snow skiing? Now, listen, some of those things you might be like, well, I never learned to do those things, so not. But like, what are some of those things you could do when you're younger in terms of activities? Can you still do those today? Can you golf? Can you play tennis? It's just being active. If you needed to, could you go out there and play tag with your kid or grandkid? Now, listen, sometimes we have injuries that keep us from doing certain things, but overall, The longer we can stay active in doing the things that we did when we were younger, the better. In a study done on 122,000 adults, the least fit people carried a 5 times greater risk of death than the fittest. This is a bigger gap than smoking. So overall, being fit enough to go out there and be active is crucial to your long-term health. Mistake number 5 I see Millions of people making that are over 40 years old is this: they're chasing the scale instead of muscle. If you want to be as healthy as possible, you're not just trying to lose weight, you're trying to build muscle, you're trying to be more physically fit. And if your single best strategy for changing your body composition is doing an injection of a GLP-1, that's not going to get you there. After 40, aggressive dieting or using GLP-1s without strength training Sheds muscle along with the fat. And muscle is exactly what you can't afford to lose. Muscle is your metabolic engine. It has a huge impact on your blood sugar and your insulin. If you lose it over time, you are becoming more and more metabolically weak. You become more dependent on something like a GLP-1, which you'd never want to stay on long-term. If you add muscle, you're more metabolically active, so your body is burning more fat naturally. And you're healthier because you're overcoming any type of insulin resistance. Here's the fix. Stop focusing on the scale. Ask the mirror. Stop asking the scale. Or listen, if you use a scale, check body fat percentage and total muscle. That's much more important than overall weight. I mean, I'll say this, you know, in looking at blood markers, if somebody is still looking at and focused on total cholesterol and LDL alone and they're not looking at new markers like ApoB and others, They're living in the past. The same is true if you're only looking at the scale. You are looking at an outdated marker. You're much better off looking at a mirror. If you want to use a type of scale, look at total muscle or phase angle or body fat percentage. It's a much better predictor of your overall health. The number 6 mistake I see people making over 40 is flying blind on your blood work. Most people over 40 get labs once a year and they hear the word normal. And file it away. But here's the thing, normal is not the same as optimal, and the standard panels skip some of the most predictive markers. Let me give you an example of this. Fasting insulin rises years before your blood sugar. That's an incredibly, incredibly important marker. ApoB counts the particles that actually drive plaque. So if you want to truly know if you're at risk of heart disease or stroke or heart attack, ApoB is a far superior marker to total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol. High sensitivity C-reactive protein, what an amazing predictive marker for inflammation, looking at how inflamed your cells are. So here's the fix. Get blood work done and markers that matter. You know, right now where I'm sending people for blood work, you think you can go to cellrx.com. That's cellrx.com, like your cellular health cell. C-E-L-L-R-X.com, CellRx.com. And it's a great place where you can get the right lab markers done. And when you get blood work done there, you actually know if you're in the functional medicine optimal range or the sick range or the normal range, but you actually know for certain. But again, I think so many people could have avoided heart attacks, strokes, other severe diagnoses, or of course, reversed them. If they had the right markers in front of them that were interpreted properly. Okay, number 7 mistake I see so many people doing over 40 is they're trying to do it alone. This is the one I mentioned at the very opening. This is the mistake that isn't about food or exercise. After 40, friendships thin out of their own careers, kids, sometimes moving. And by the way, the data says that that drift is as dangerous as some of the physical kinds we've talked about. Loneliness, lack of camaraderie. I can tell you one of the things that fills me up, and I do wanna say I am focused on spending time with God. I'm focused on spending time with my family, but getting together with some of my closest guy friends once a week, or Chelsea and I have a couple other couples that we spend deep and meaningful time with. It is so invigorating and life-giving to me. I had a period of my time where I moved to Puerto Rico for a time, and I felt the lack of friendships when I moved away from Nashville. And so I know what that feels like. And I also know what it feels like to have a purpose-driven community. You know, I have a men's group I meet with once a month where we typically, I meet with at least one of the guys or we all get together oftentimes even weekly and we read a book of the month together. We go out to dinner together, we spur one on together. And these are my best friends and it's iron sharpens iron and it's so life-giving to me. But to have those types of relationships, oftentimes you have to go out and make those happen. You gotta invite people over and set up those experiences and pursue other people like you were when you were dating. Another great thing to do together is work out together. Now, so here's the fix. Put people on the calendar like you would a workout or going to work. A weekly table, a weekly dinner or breakfast, a small group, you know, a church, a growth group, a church community. Scheduled, not spontaneous. Because here's what I found for myself. I mean, the spontaneous stuff, it happens a lot less than it did a decade ago because I have so many other things going on that if it's not scheduled, Most of the time it doesn't happen. And this is so key over 40 because across 148 studies on over 300,000 people, stronger social relationships meant a 50% higher odds of survival. But the other reality is, you know, when I'm working out with others, I tend to work out harder. When I have discussions around a book I read, I learn more. Community is key to longevity. And the same goes, by the way, statistically, if you look at the studies around workouts, And being more physically fit, if you have a workout partner or someone you're meeting up with, even if it's just a day a week, you stick with it more often, you enjoy it more, and you're healthier because of it. All right, so here are some home tests I want you to try this week when it comes to your physical fitness. Number 1, what's your grip strength? Now you can buy something called a dynamometer for under $30, okay? And just see, hey, where's your grip strength at? Number 2, see how many chair stands you could do. This is where you sit down on a chair, Then stand up. You kind of want to sit back, use your butt, and stand up. Do that for 30 seconds and see how you feel. Number 3, do a dead hang, right? Time yourself. How long can you hang from a pull-up bar? Number 4, walk 1 mile. You know, see how long it takes you. See how out of breath you get. And number 5, try doing something you did when you were younger. Here's the key. Don't hurt yourself. How are you still at shooting a basketball? Can you balance on 1 leg? That's, that's the one I challenge you to do. Okay. Balance on one leg, see if you can balance on each leg for 1 minute each. See where you're at. All right. And then ask your doctor for these or visit CellRx or somewhere to get the right type of blood markers. Number 1, ApoB. I think this blood marker is incredibly important if you want to know if you have any risk at all of heart disease. This is the single best marker you could test for, ApoB. Number 2, fasting insulin. Number 3, high-sensitivity CRP. Number 4, A1C levels. Number 5, looking at some nutrients, specifically vitamin D, also doing a hormone panel. Those are some of the most important markers and things I would look for. And by the way, there's a great panel there at CellRx if you want to get any of those done, and you can check that out in the show notes. Now, I also want to mention I created 2 guides for you. This is worth over $100, but you can get it for free if you go to the show notes. It's the Top 25 Blood Markers Guide. In addition— I created a longevity guide that walks you through everything from the top foods and supplements and everything you need to know about how to look younger, feel younger, and actually physically be younger, reverse organ age and cellular age. So again, you can get those for free in the show notes. All right, so I want to go into a little more detail in these fixes that matter. So we talked about the problems, the mistakes we're making. I want to dive a little deeper into what exactly you should do. Okay, number one fix we talked about. Lift 2 to 3 days a week. The top movements are compound movements. That's where you're using a lot of your larger muscle groups. So squats, hip hinges, things where you're pushing like push-ups or chest press, pulls like rows or pull-ups, carries. Start really light and just work your way up over time. 90 minutes total a week at least. All right? So maybe that's 30 minutes, 3 days a week, or 45 minutes, 2 days a week. That's the dose that's going to get you the results. Fix number 2, just anchor every meal with protein. You know, some great options for breakfast could be eggs, Greek yogurt, leftover meat from the night before, a clean protein shake from plant protein or grass-fed A2 whey. And focus on getting high protein in your meals at least 3 times a day. Number 3, fix your sleep. Remember, same wake-up time, get some light early in the morning, have a wind-down routine. And get better sleep. Number 4, increase your physical fitness, that cardiovascular health. Now listen, a great way, if you want to stick to walking, then walk hills or do some sort of interval, you know, get some sort of weighted vest where there's a little bit of added weight, but do something to where you are getting a little bit out of breath and pushing that. And then, or one thing I love, cause you can do this in community, play pickleball or tennis or do some sort of physical activity that's actually fun as a group. And number 5, Put people on your calendar. Just think about it. I want you to take a moment and think about, think about what your current community is like and what you want it to be. One of the greatest places to find community is by serving at your local church. That's where I was able to connect with so many people over the years and really build a great community. And then also just pursuing those relationships, inviting them to breakfast, doing couples date nights. While it honestly does take a little bit of work, it's absolutely worth it. You know, all of this reminds me of a Bible verse that my mom shared with me after she went through cancer. And it's Psalms 90:12, and it's one of my favorite Bible verses. And it's this: God, teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. After my mom was diagnosed with cancer, she actually said that she was grateful for it because it literally taught her to number her days. My mom started thinking, my, my life here on earth is temporary. I experienced that same thing when I was in bed for the year with a spinal infection, is I didn't know what was gonna happen. And I wanted to make the most of every opportunity. But here's the reality. If you don't take care of your physical health, you cannot maximize your day. And we are called to honor God with our bodies. So if you remember one thing from today, remember this: the second half can be the strong half, but it has to be built on purpose because after 40, nothing stays by accident. Your body will still meet you wherever you start. Our job is stewardship. Number your days and spend them building something that lasts. And I want to encourage you, if you really want to take action with this, go and download those 2 guides I created for you, the Longevity Guide and the Bloodwork Guide. Those are free. Again, over $100 worth of content value you get for free there in the show notes. I don't encourage you download it and actually read through and look through it. I think it's going to give you immense value. And then I want to encourage you subscribe. It's the number one thing you can do to support the show and allow me to continue to put out content like this and bring on a lot of amazing guests. You know, I had Gary Brecka on recently. I had Michael W. Smith and so many others. So thank you for subscribing. And then also do this for me. Think about one person who's over 40 who could really benefit from hearing this and send it their way. Just share it with them. And I want you to know that I am praying for you and your longevity and your health. Thanks so much for tuning in here to the Dr. Axe Show. I'll see you on the next episode.