So one of the pillars of strength training is eccentric strength, which is breaks. So you know, you're going to hurt yourself 10 times more likely, I'm making that number up by the way, I don't know if it's 10 times, but experientially it seems to be, you are 10 times more likely to hurt yourself stepping off something than stepping onto something, right?

Stepping down versus stepping up. Because when you step up onto something, you are concentrically controlling the muscle. When you step down, you have to apply the brakes and that's where most people falter. Much harder to walk downhill than uphill. Uphill is taxing your cardiovascular system, but if you slow down enough, you're fine.

But a lot of people don't have the ability to slow themselves down when they're walking downhill. And so when an older person steps off a curb and can't fully stop themselves, and that results in a fall. So you know, I like doing things like a broad jump. Broad jumps are a fun little test set I like to do every once in a while.

I always want to make sure I can broad jump six feet, that's kind of my arbitrary number that I've chosen. And the reason is, on the takeoff, that's a very explosive movement, but the landing is just as important. If I can't stick that landing, it means I don't have the brakes.

So those are kind of some of the tests I want to be able to do to make sure that I'm utilizing that system. Because I do think, you know, look, I've watched my mom. My mom fell, gosh, probably been about four months ago, just fell in a typical way that people fall.

By the way, it could have happened to anybody. It's not like, you know, my mom walks around and moves around just fine. But on this particular day, she just tripped on a uneven stone and fell and landed and broke her hand. And she's really lucky she didn't break her hip.

And I told her that because my mom was, you know, probably in her mid-70s. And I said, look, you know, if that was your femur, I'd give you a 30% chance of dying in the next year. I mean, it's just an... those are such difficult to recover from injuries.

Because first of all, you're dealing with the immobility of, you know, the hospitalization and immobility that follows that. And the amount of muscle loss that occurs could easily be, you know, four or five pounds of lean tissue lost, that for most people that age becomes almost impossible to get back.

And that says nothing about sort of the acute causes of death, like a fat embolism that results from a broken femur, a blood clot from laying in bed. Those things are also catastrophic. But what happens is a lot of these patients just never get back to the same level of mobility.

And you know, now I think in many ways, we're kind of pivoting from what kills you to what ruins your quality of life. And we've spent so much time talking about what kills you, but I think you might as well be dead in some ways if you can't do the things you want to do.

And if playing with your grandkids, or gardening, or playing golf, or going for a walk with your spouse, or think of any of the things that we all do today and take for granted, if you can't do those things, I don't know, you sort of lose the reason to be around.

And oftentimes, the inability to do those things is associated with pain, which is psychologically and obviously physiologically so distressing. You mentioned the four pillars of health. Maybe just list those off for people. Of lifting? Well, the four pillars of longevity through physical. Oh, yeah, sort of the exercise pieces of them.

Yeah. Health, health, health, stability, aerobic efficiency, and aerobic peak output. So aerobic peak would be like VO2 max. And zone two. In my analogy, your zone two is how wide the base of your pyramid is. And your VO2 max is how tall the peak of the pyramid is. So the best pyramid has a wide base and a high peak.

So you could have a reasonably wide base and a shallow peak. If you just did zone two training, you're going to get a reasonable peak, but it's not going to be that high. You have to do some of that specific training. If you just focus on high intensity, you might drive up that VO2 max, but you're actually going to have a relatively wide, narrow aerobic base.

So you think about just maximizing the area of that triangle, widest, tallest. Stability and strength. Stability of course encompasses everything we're talking about in terms of reactivity. You know, I dedicate a chapter in the book to this concept because it is so foreign to most people and for understandable reasons.

It's just, it's not sexy. It's not, it's the hardest one to train. It's the hardest one to understand, but it's so important because it's the thing that I think differentiates people who age well and people who don't age well. And I should perhaps throw in there, please correct me if I'm wrong, but also most of the machines that are in typical commercial gyms that allow people who are not very experienced to start doing some resistance training don't really tap into the stability factor terribly much.

So while there's value to leg extensions and leg curls and, you know, chest presses and shoulder presses done with machines, certainly for a number of reasons and can often be safer than free weights, especially for people who are approaching it at a later time or new to the whole thing, they don't really lend themselves to real life stability.

Walking down, as you mentioned, walking downstairs in the absence of a handrail or movements in kind of odd planes, you know, having to step aside to avoid a bicycle at an angle as opposed to just moving, you know, linearly. Yeah. And by the way, a lot of things that don't involve machines still don't give you that, right?

If you're doing a deadlift, you have to be stable to lift a heavy weight like you would a deadlift without hurting yourself. That requires an unbelievable capacity to harness intra-abdominal pressure and to be connected. You know, if you're going to lift 500 pounds off the ground, you're stable. But that still doesn't prepare you for what you just described.

So stability is multifaceted and it involves doing a lot of things. You know, today, for example, I finished my... Yesterday was a cardio zone two day, so I did my cardio zone two and, you know, had an extra 10 minutes before I needed to kind of get moving. And so all I did was step ups for 10 minutes.

I just did single leg, very slow step up and insanely slow step downs off a box in a gym. So two second up, four second down, two second up, four second down with, you know, and I would do them with ipsilateral loads, contralateral loads, all sorts of different things.

And, you know, basically that's just a stability game for me. It's like I'm building that concentric strength in a movement where it's easy to cheat. But can I do it without cheating? It's terrific. And it's terrific that you covered all of that in the book. Thank you.