How to: Ride your Bike Until Age 100
Written by Sam Warskett, Acupuncturist
Everyone wants longevity and health. Talking to alot of my patients their worst nightmare is to spend the last years of their life disabled and in pain. So why not make it a goal now to do a 30km ride on your 100th birthday? If you don’t make it to 100yrs but have lived a life of health, joy, adventure, and struggle, while riding your bike; you have lived your life well and have achieved something a lot of people don’t. So here are four things you can start today towards a long healthy life.
1. Prioritize your brain- You can’t ride a bike at any age without a healthy brain. Sleep is the primary way the brain cleans and regenerates itself, so practice sleep hygiene. Challenge your brain. Your brain loves routine and the more you practice something the more efficient your brain becomes, which sometimes is not a good thing. So keep learning, keep learning new movements and keep trying new sports or movements. Endurance sport brings oxygen to the brain but try constantly changing your environment. Get off swift, find new routes as often as possible, take up gravel riding or mountain biking to challenge your skills. Fat bike in the winter.
2. Prioritize your immune system- An imbalanced immune system can lead to a lot of problems. A weak immune system will not only lead to lots of flus and colds but can lead to cancer. An overactive immune system can lead to autoimmune disease and cancer as well. Unfortunately hard endurance exercise can repress the immune system, so rest twice as hard as you train to allow it to recover, eat enough food for the amount of activity you are doing and if you are a woman take your menstrual cycle into account when creating a training plan.
3. Prioritize your digestion- Endurance athletes are eating a lot of calories while the digestive system does not have as many resources as it does at rest. We need to be kind to it when we are not training. So breakfast should be easy to digest and warming, lunch should be your largest meal and dinner should be your smallest meal. Keep your food in season as much as possible. Drink fluids in between meals so that they don’t fill up the stomach and suppress the appetite.
4. Strength train for old age and injury- It is really nice to look hot and feel strong and powerful, but that is fleeting. What literally lasts a lifetime is doing strength training that is not only focused on your sport but also has the goal of stabilizing the joints and reducing bone density loss. As well as maintaining mobility. Having a strength routine that has some free weights, body weight exercises, mobility as well as load at the end range of the muscle will pay dividends. With this in mind if you crash while cycling you will be less likely to break something or get an overuse injury. The pay off will be that when you are 100yrs old you will be able to balance on one leg and swing the other leg over the saddle. Which is a bigger achievement then you realize.
In conclusion if you are experiencing fatigue, unexplained weight gain or loss, you get bloated after eating, you bonk easily on rides or during the day, you get dizzy easily or experience blood pressure issues, have troubles sleeping enough, are always getting colds or injure easily, or don’t recover well from your rides. Book a free discovery visit with me. As an acupuncturist, and cyclist, I can use various forms of treatment and nutrition to allow your body to function at its best, give you the tools to help prevent colds and flus, tweak your nutrition, deal with injury as well as make you more resilient to many forms of stress. Start working towards being youthful, resilient and performing at any age.