You’re Not Too Old—You’re Just Out of Practice

The Second Half Can Be the Best Half… If You Train for It
You’re not too old to feel strong, energized, and in control again—you might just be out of practice.

In this episode, Healthspan coach Aaron Shaw breaks down why most of the physical decline we associate with aging is actually due to disuse—not destiny. And more importantly, how to flip the script in your 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond.

If you’ve been feeling tired, heavy, or off-track… this is your reset button.
Midlife isn’t a decline—it’s a performance phase. But only if you train for it.

🎯 You’ll Learn:
• Why aging isn’t the problem—inactivity is
• How your body wants to adapt when challenged
• What it means to treat midlife like a “training block”
• The 6 simple actions to reclaim your edge (and feel like yourself again)
→ Resistance training
→ 5,000+ steps before lunch
→ Strength workouts 2x/week
→ Tracking your sleep
→ Taking on a physical challenge
→ Identifying and fixing your #1 energy leak

Most of us know what we should be doing—but we get stuck on what to do next or how to make it stick.

👉 Need a clear, realistic plan?
Reach out for a one-time consult—no long-term commitment, no sales pitch.
Just a custom, science-backed game plan to get you moving in the right direction.

See Coach Aaron behind the scenes in this daily YouTube VLOG on his own health and fitness journey. Subscribe, engage, and extend your healthspan. 

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Transcript

Let's be clear, you're not too old, but you may be out of practice. You may be out of practice in the activities and decisions to be healthy, to feel energized, to be sleeping well, to feel strong, to have good cardiac health and bone density. These things take practice and there is no reason why the second half of your life can't be the best half of your life if you train for it. So of course,

specifically talking to those of you, those of us that are 40s and beyond, 50s and beyond, 60s and beyond. And it's clear we don't bounce back like we used to. Things aren't as easy as things used to be. We probably have some aches and pains, probably some challenges sleeping, maybe a little bit of weight gain. And these things are unfortunately in our minds very common and also in our minds sometimes unavoidable.

And the reality is, well, a little bit different than that. So what I want to do today is break down a few specific things on why midlife should be viewed as an opportunity to improve the practice of our health and why really we should look at it as a, almost like a training phase. Like midlife is actually not really about a plateau or even worse, even like this decline, but it should be like this time block.

that we can look at and strategize and make a plan to actually be healthier, feel literally stronger, literally have more endurance, have better body composition, better blood sugar control. All of these things are possible when we have a plan. And I'm going to leave you with specific action items. I'm going to give you at least five. The goal is going to be to pick one of them, but I'm going to give you five specific things that you can do starting today that will help you.

reengage, reengage into the practice of being a healthy person. My name is Aaron Shaw. I am from HealthSpan Physio Coaching. I am a HealthSpan coach, performance coach, occupational therapist, strength and conditioning specialist, and an absolute nerd when it comes to all things health related. I have coaching clients where I focus on helping them extend their HealthSpan.

is the length of time within our lifespan that we are healthy, active, vibrant, feeling in control, feeling competent. And most of all my clients, I should say all of my clients are in middle age, like myself. ⁓ I'm on the other side of 50 years old now. And my clients are really looking for a way to have a sustainable, this is a key word here, sustainable lifestyle with healthy habits that really support their goals.

my clients, maybe different phases of life have maybe thrown in the towel, so to speak, and felt resigned to not feeling well and to feeling sore and kind of grouchy and gaining weight and giving into maybe not the best food choices and certainly not the best activity choices or stress management choices. But there comes a point in time where they say, wait a second, this is just not good enough.

I've got people who love me. I've got a family I want to take care of. I've got kids or I got grandkids and I want to be around and I want to be actively engaged in these things. And I want to look in the mirror, literally or figuratively in your brain, look at yourself and recognize who you are. And I think that this is not hard for this to slip away. And I speak especially from an American culture where the, the opportunity to make unhealthy life choices.

is abundant and very easy. And it is going against the grain to make choices consistently following science and real things that actually work. It's hard to make these healthy choices consistently over time, but that's what I do as a coach. I've been doing that for three decades now. And this podcast is part of my attempt to spread the word on healthspan.

and to help influence the health of as many people as possible. So let's break it down into this episode. Again, we're going to talk about being too old. And I've worked with a of clients that have really made initial contact with me and immediately put a caveat on what they're about to talk to me about. For example, hey, you know, so you're a coach and I really want to lose weight, but I got this, you know, the shoulder thing, I had a rotator cuff repair and I'm super stressed at work.

And, you know what, I'm, I'm 56 years old. So it is, I know, I know there's nothing you really do about it. That's just life. And then, you know, dot, dot, dot, that just kind of the conversation fades off into basically saying there's nothing that can be done. I'm over the hill is too late for me. I'm always going to feel unwell. I'm always going to feel like an old person. And of course, depending on the, depending on the social circumstances,

Sometimes I just have to let that go. it's a quick elevator conversation, for example, but if you really find yourself with that sort of talk track in your mind, I want to stop you and say, wait a second. Yes, you can do something about it. No, most physical decline isn't inevitable. It's optional. You have the option of being weaker. You have the option of losing bone density. You have the option of gaining weight.

of moving your body mass index out of whack, have the option of controlling your blood sugar or not. And yes, before the emails come flying in at me, yes, there are some medical conditions. Yes, absolutely. Physiology changes not favorably for us as we age. And so there are things that we are kind of fighting against or need to be aware of, but here's the cool thing. We are middle-aged.

We have wisdom. can hopefully have some humility and a little bit of patience and have some life experience where we can kind of strategize and, and put plans in the place that will help it help us realize that, these change, not all these changes are inevitable. We should not be throwing in the towel, strength, mobility, energy, mindset. All of these things can be retrained. Yes, you can retrain your brain, your perspective, your nervous system.

your metabolic system, you can retrain a lot of these things to feel younger, to literally have a lower, a lower age, if you will, than your biological age. So as I record this, I, um, 52 years old right now, and I don't feel 52. mean, 52 used to be super old and now it doesn't feel as old as what I thought it was when I was in my twenties. And certainly when I saw my parents go through this,

age, I was like, man, they're ancient. Well, things have changed and we need to remember that our body will adapt when we challenge it. And again, to reflect on the culture in America, that it is very easy in our culture not to challenge ourselves in any way or in very minimal ways, especially physical ways. I you can have somebody deliver you dinner or breakfast, lunch, dinner to your house.

You can have people deliver your groceries to you. You don't have to go shopping. You don't have to go to the store anymore. don't have to, mean, plan much of anything. You can Uber yourself to anywhere you want to go. can have, you know, endless entertainment, mind numbing entertainment, even, or should say, especially, you know, with social media, with the remote control and Netflix. it's just, in the network, out of computers all day doing stuff, plugging away.

So everything is so automated, unfortunately it's too easy. We're paying the consequences of the speed of technology and ease of life, yet our physiology, we're a millisecond away from being a caveman basically. We're still very primitive in how our physical, our physiology works. And so it's tough. But the good news is that our body can adapt.

And our body really, essentially, I want us to think that our body is always adapting. It is consistently trying to respond to the environment that we're in. this isn't, again, this isn't about running marathons. It's really about reclaiming our edge, reclaiming our sense of youth, But our body will adapt just like when we were

younger, if you think back to being a teenager or in your 20s or even younger, you're an adolescent and you're a teenager and in your 20s, you were probably more physically active. You were probably physically doing more things, maybe goofing around with your friends, wrestling, playing sports, and moving your body around more often. You had this double win of hormones of a young person, which our youth is wasted on the young, but you get the benefit of

minimal injury history probably hormones are in your favor and you're being physically active, which is this beautiful time in life where things seem to go well and there's tons of energy, but then things do change and

It puts us in a position where we don't have the playground. We don't have the habits. We tend not to keep the habits of being physically active in. And then therefore we don't read the rewards, both physically and emotionally, neurologically, psychologically of being physically active that can help us live a longer life. But we can feel strong again. We can feel capable again, but we have to practice it. You have to, we have to.

ourselves in a way that is going to be a little reminiscent of being a kid again. It is moving our body. It is moving your body in a way that you kind of lose your breath. is moving your body in a way that is physically challenging. And that brings me to this, I suppose this next part of this next point is I want us to look at midlife as a performance phase. And what do I mean by that? Well, I think in terms of

Exercise, for example, when I coach clients to exercise programs, which last days, weeks, months, and years, I break things down into phases, which are what we call training phases. So there may be an initial phase of four to six weeks where it's a preparatory phase. It's really some easy movements and kind of getting your body prepared to take on more challenges in the future, preparing the nervous system, the muscles, the tendons, the ligaments. this kind of defined beginning,

and really kind of like a defined end of a phase. And this training block is nice because it's easy for our brains to wrap our head around and say, ⁓ it begins here, it ends here. And during this block, I'm gonna do some specific things that will feed me favorably for the next training block. And the next training block in this case may be what we would call a hypertrophy phase. For the next four to six weeks after that, we're gonna do specific exercises and movements and things.

that build the size of muscles encourages encourages your body to build a little bit of muscle mass. Well, there's a, you know, there's right and wrong ways to try to do that. There's scientific ways to do that. But during this block, which has again, has a definitive beginning and end, we're going to do some specific things that will stimulate your body to change in the way that we want. And same goes for a strength training phase and a performance phase or whatever that is. All of these things have a definitive beginning.

an end and within this phase, within this block, training block, there are things to do, strategies, tactics, activities, things to be mindful of, things to try to avoid, but it's very defined. Midlife is the exact same way. So the trouble with, and I say this with, you know, very much firsthand experiences, anybody who's listening to this who's, who is in middle age, that our body tends to shift into middle age before our mind does.

And so if you're like me, it's easy for me to feel like I'm still the 15 year old Aaron Shaw kicking around playing, doing whatever, whatever I wanted, endless energy. Yep. But my body says, ⁓ no, you're not. That was many decades ago. Things are a little bit different. The brain can still think you're a teenager, but your body says, no, it's not. So because of that, it's wise to come to the realization. And if you're listening to this podcast,

especially at this point of the podcast, you've probably come to the realization like, okay, I'm to do something a little bit different here. So yes, I feel like I'm young in my mind. My body says, no, you're not. So we should look at this block of midlife like it's a season. I think about maybe training. Think of it as a season for an athlete where you need to have a plan. You need to have some recovery and you need some intention. You need to have a goal like a

purpose of what you're to do during this phase. We're talking about your sleep, your stress, your strength, because all of that matters now more than it ever has. don't have the grace of being a teenager anymore. You have to do things with absolute intention and realize that things change slowly. we feel like we may feel like life is only going by quicker day to day, moment to moment. Things do change slowly. So if there's ever a time to start.

Ideally, would have been a decade ago, second best time today.

So we will build it. So let's talk about how we can actually recapture this sense of practice, getting into practice of feeling good, healthy, vibrant, and extending our healthspan. So I'm going to give you some action items. I'm go through five action items here. And the thing to do would be to pick one, pick just one of these things to do with the mindset that I don't want to feel old. I don't want to be too old.

I don't want to shrug off and be like, Oh, it's just an old person's thing. Instead, think of it as, I'm a little bit out of practice, but how do I get back into practice? How do I get back into practice? So could feel really good. The first thing you can do, I want you to consider doing a 20 minute resistance training workout 20 minutes today. So it could be body weight squats, pushups could be dumbbell rows, simple, but just start. If you don't know where to start.

I can help you with that. Go to my YouTube channel. If you're not already watching this on YouTube, I got a couple of free little videos are about seven or eight minutes long. They just demonstrate a series of exercises to do follow along, do it for 20 minutes, set the timer. So set the timer, start moving your body, follow along, do it for 20 minutes. When the timer buzzes, stop. If you're not already doing something, please do this. Move your body, break a sweat, do something that's physically challenging.

20 minutes of resistance training. I've done other episodes on the benefits of resistance training. If there's nothing else you do for your health, do resistance training. benefits of resistance training are, are so vast and it really will help, I mean, it'll help maybe heal the wounds of bad decisions. ⁓

prior bad decisions or even current bad decisions frankly, when it comes to your health, but it is so forgiving and your body adapts to it. Just like your body will adapt to not doing resistance training by getting weaker, losing bone density, losing muscle mass, losing cardiovascular capacity, losing cognitive function. this cog, your cognitive function is related to physical activity related to resistance training. So if nothing else, please do 20 minutes of resistance training. Check out my videos on YouTube. Keep it simple.

But do it, build the habit. And of course, if you don't know where to start and you want more personalized programming, that's what I do. So reach out to me. That's easy enough. Second action item you can choose walk at least 5,000 steps before lunch daily. So this is a nice way to just kind of wake up your system. You want to build some momentum early. And I use this, this example as almost like a, a teaser, if you will. I mean, walking 5,000 steps before lunch is great.

Is it going to like vastly change who you are as a person? Well, probably not, but it's a step. If you're not already doing it, if you're not moving very much, it is certainly a step to bigger, bolder things that you could possibly be doing. So walk, get out there, get on your feet, set your alarm for 10 minutes early, earlier than you would. And sometime during your morning routine, go for a 10 minute walk. You're off to a great start. So kicking your metabolism, your

⁓ weight-bearing activity, it's great for you. It's great for your mindset. Do it outside if you can. I mean, if you have to go on a treadmill, so be it, but ideally do it outside. There are other great benefits of being out in nature. Third thing you can do, strength train twice this week. Doesn't have to be perfect, but you do have to be consistent. So twice this week, get into the gym or if you have a home gym, if you have some bands, you know, or some simple dumbbells,

twice this week.

push, pull, lift something that is heavy. And again, this kind of goes back to the 20 minute resistance workout that I said for number one. So that's one option. Number two is to pick just twice this week doing that, but twice this week, do some resistance training, strength training, builds muscle, muscles consume calories. And I to say it, but most of us are storing too many calories on our body. And those calories, which is kind of the number one reason why people reach out to me is one of the first things they talk about is

I want to lose some weight, which basically means my body is storing more calories than it needs. There's not going to be a famine. So my body thinks there is. So I'm just going to be storing. People are storing tens of thousands of extra calories. How do I get rid of it? Well, muscles consume calories, build some muscles. They need fuel. They're to be consuming those calories. So strength train twice this week. The fourth thing you can do.

is track your sleep. I know that as we age, it gets harder for many of us to sleep. It gets much harder for perimenopausal women to sleep, especially, but use a journal or definitely if you don't already do this, get a wearable device. I use the whoop. My wife used the Oura Ring. I have clients who use the Oura Ring or Apple Watch. In a sense, it kind of doesn't matter. Before you're getting into the weeds, there's some that may be a little bit better than others.

But the key is when you measure something, we can change something. When we measure the details, the data from our sleep, it gets easier to of reflect on that and be like, how can I improve these numbers? really sleep is where the magic happens. So we're talking about cognitive health improves with good high quality sleep.

heart health, hormone balance, recovering from the wear and tear of day to day activities. All these things happen when we sleep. We know how crabby we can get and what kind of, how our mood can really be if we don't sleep well. So there is a direct relationship between your quality of sleep, not just quantity. So we're not talking just duration of sleep, the bigger sure you're getting into all the stages of sleep, including deep sleep and REM sleep, that has a direct impact on your tolerance for stress, your risk for burnout.

in your career, your interpersonal relationships, your brain fog or lack thereof, all of these things are directly related to your sleep. if you are having trouble sleeping consistently, having trouble consistently sleeping well, do something about it. Be proactive about it. don't have the grace of being a teenager where you just rock and roll and rage all day and

be active and then sleep like a baby and you wake up like a brand new person with a full tank of gas. It doesn't work. It doesn't happen as we get older. Does it happen in middle age? ⁓ At least not spontaneously or certainly not frequently without some intention. the fifth thing I would say is I don't even know number on now fourth or fifth thing is take on a physical challenge. So

today, and depending upon when you're listening to this, either today or tomorrow or this weekend if you have to take on consciously a physical challenge, hike a hill, try a new exercise class, sign up for something new that is going to be a little physically vigorous, sign up for a pickleball course or lessons or club or something like that or hiking club or a walking club or a, again, a fitness class, something, a physical challenge that

Really, when you set out for it, the sign that it may be a good thing for you is that if you're a little bit hesitant, thinking like, man, I don't know I'm really cut out for this. Great. Give yourself something to grow into. Give yourself something to stimulate your body for a challenge. It has to be difficult. It has to be a little bit hard. You are choosing your discomfort, but you're choosing discomfort in doing a physically challenging thing. This discomfort is going to have a direct benefit on your physical health.

cognitive health, your emotional health. It may be uncomfortable. But what's also uncomfortable is hearing news that your blood sugar is out of control because your body doesn't have anything to do with this extra blood sugar, for example, or your bone density is lower than it should be or your lean muscle mass is lower than it should be. That's hard to live with and it's hard to, you know, it's uncomfortable to be too weak to take care of yourself.

or to decondition or so decondition that you need to ask for help when you feel like you should be able to do certain things, you know, whether that's taking care of your house or your lawn, picking up groceries, whatever that may be. set a physical challenge today. The last point I would say is to find, find your energy leak. It's like find the one thing or at least one thing, but really what do you think is the

main reason why you feel, I hate to say it, but feel old. Is it your poor sleep? Is it you're spending too much time scrolling through emails or social media stuff, just wasting your life away? it nighttime snacking? Is that your vice? But find out what is sucking the energy from you. Maybe it's a relationship. Maybe it's a coworker. Maybe it's a partner. You feel like it's just absolutely draining you. Figure out what that is. Identify it.

give it a name, acknowledge that it's this damn social media stuff that I scroll through. And I find myself, what starts off as just a minute or two when I'm getting ready to go to the bathroom and I'll pop open the phone. And next year, know, a half hour has gone by and you're walking around with your phone in your face, just getting that, you know, the chemical buzz of the addiction that is, that is designed to do basically. And it's drawing your, it's draining down your energy.

losing your attention, losing your focus, losing your mojo. Well, set a boundary, build a new habit to replace it. I love talking about habits. probably like, that's like the underlying theme with all of my coaching clients is figuring out like what, how do we create a habit that is sustainable, that replaces maybe a bad decisions or bad behaviors that we have, but habits are key. But start with finding the one thing that you feel like is a real energy suck. So again, could be sleep.

could be nutrition, could be social media, could be email, could be computers, could be listening to podcasts, but not actually following through with recommendations. I don't know. It could be anything. It could be a number of things. But the punchline here is what I want to make sure is that you realize you are not too far gone. is not too late. And right now, in a sense, you're just under trained and under trained. so I've worked with people who are in their fifties and sixties and beyond who are overweight and have

I a couple of them haven't ever physically exercised consistently ever in their life. They've had diabetes, rotator cuff repair, heart disease, knee replacement, whatever it is. And yet with intention have been able to feel better than they have in decades. So the second half of our life doesn't have to be about decline. It can really be about power. I mean, we can take the slope that it may

be starting to tilt in a downward way, energy, mental mindset, emotional mindset, resilience, durability, you may feel like you're really sliding down this hill. Well, it is possible to not just slow that decline. For so many people, it's actually very reasonable to start going back up the hill, to start to build more resilience and durability and physical capacity and emotional resilience than you have in decades. ⁓

Absolutely possible. But I mean, here's the deal. Most people, most of us know what we should be doing, but we're just not really good at sticking with it. So we don't, you know, maybe we don't know what the exact next step is or the next step to take is. Or if we do where we have a hunch of what, know, what I should be doing, but we have a hard time sticking with it. Totally get it. I'm.

a human being as well. And I recognize like I could make a list of things like what the ideal perfect things I should be doing and eating and how I should be moving all the time. I don't always stick with it, but having a plan, having a strategy, developing habits, being humble about the time it takes to change can help you realize that you are not too old. You are just out of practice. The second half of your life,

can be better than the first half of your life if you train for it, but only if you train for it. If you think you're going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly hop out of bed and feel like a million bucks like you maybe haven't in decades and just snap yourself into great eating and great movement and great nutrition and great sleep and great stress management and great at setting boundaries and all of these things, well, it's never going to happen.

So if you find yourself stuck, review these, action items, pick one of these action items. again, 20 minute workout, 5,000 steps before lunch, at least, you know, strength training twice a week, tracking your sleep, saying yes to a physical challenge, finding your energy leak. And these are all reasonable things to do, but pick one of those things and invest in yourself. Take action. If you don't know where to start and I've got my YouTube page, if you're not very on it.

We've got some specific exercises. I've done episodes on this podcast on everything from sleep to nutrition, to exercise, how to start an exercise program. It's there. But I will also say that there's a ton of information out there. And then the reality is, is there's too much information out there to sometimes feel like you even know where to start because we're all bombarded. If that is you and you don't know where to start and you just listen to this or you've listened to 10 other podcasts today or scroll social media and you realize, yeah,

You know a lot of things you should be doing. just don't know how in the hell to do it. I got your back. You can reach out to me directly through this podcast, reach out to me through my YouTube channel, reach out to me through my website, which is linked. Uh, and then show notes here. I can help you with a custom roadmap for you, or I've got some pre-made programs that are just, if you just want to plug and play, press a button and follow along for free. Great. That there's the full spectrum of service.

at your fingertips, but it does take you deciding that you're going to be the CEO of your life starting today. And you're going to say, I don't want to feel like I'm old and I don't want to ever say like, I'm too old to do X, Y, Take action. So I hope this was helpful. This episode went a little bit longer than I anticipated initially. And if you're watching this on YouTube, you may look at my background and say, oh, something's different. Yes. This is my first episode from a yet to be totally built out home studio at a new home.

So a little rough on the edges perhaps, but I'm here for you. You are worth investing in your health. are worth investing in the long game of your life, no matter where you are in this process. Again, my sweet spot is middle-aged people who wake up and realize like, shit, man, I am not a young person anymore. And I don't like the way I feel. I understand there are actions to take. Use my resources that I have available. If you have questions, reach out until next time.

Cheers.