Reclaim your vitality and redefine what’s possible for your future through a practical approach to healthy aging. Best-selling author, competitive Master’s rower, health coach, and Navy veteran David Emerson Frost joins the conversation to share his bold message: decline is optional, a philosophy forged after a life-altering wake-up call about his own heart health. David dives into the startling 13.5-year health span gap in America, urging listeners to move beyond simply living longer to living better. He unveils his game-changing, science-backed framework, the “Seven S’s”—Strength, Stamina, Stretching, Stability, Sustenance, Stress, and Sleep—detailing how adopting little-by-little habits rooted in “progress, not perfection” can extend your strong-span by an attainable 7 to 12 vital years, empowering you to take responsibility for your future and the well-being of those you love.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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The 7 S’s Framework: A Science-Backed Guide To Healthy Aging And Extending Your Health Span With David Emerson Frost
The Science, Stories, And Strategies Of Living Fully Alive
Our guest is someone whose work aligns perfectly with our mission here at Shell Point because he believes, as we do, that aging is inevitable, but decline is optional. David Frost is a bestselling author. He’s a competitive Masters rower, a health coach, a Navy veteran, and one of the most passionate advocates for healthy aging that you’ll ever meet.
He has written two powerful books, KABOOMER: Thriving and Striving Into Your 90s, and STRONG TO SAVE. He has a brand new manuscript on the way called BURDEN? Or BANISH!, where he doesn’t just talk about personal wellness, but he tackles a big issue facing America, which is how our health choices will affect our families, our caregivers, and our society.
David’s message is bold. We can add 7 to 12 extra years of vibrant, healthy living, not through magic, but through what he calls The 7 S’s, which are Strength, Stamina, Stretching, Stability, Sustenance, Stress not, and Sleep. What makes this conversation especially powerful is that David isn’t speaking theoretically. Despite being a fit and active athlete, he got a life-altering message from his cardiologist, which was, “You have the arteries of a 92-year-old.” That wake-up call didn’t slow him down. It clarified his mission.
David is here to help us understand the difference between lifespan and health span, why small habits matter more than we think, and how each of us can take responsibility, not only for our own future, but for the well-being of the people that we love. This is an inspiring, practical, and deeply human conversation we’re having. Whether you’re in your 40s or 80s, this episode is going to give you hope, clarity, and a game plan. Let’s dive into my conversation with David Frost.
Dave, thank you so much for being here with us on the show. It’s such a privilege to get to know you a little bit here. I’m excited to learn from you myself and the audience to learn from you. Thanks for joining us.
My pleasure. Life is about learning, isn’t it? If you stop learning, you might as well check out. Let’s see if we can share a few experiences and things that might help your audience.
The Phoenix Moment: When “Decline Is Optional” Became A Mission
That sounds great. I’m excited to dive into your story and your framework and unpack all the amazing work that you’ve done. You’ve had a fascinating career path from a Navy officer to a competitive Masters rower, a wellness coach, and a bestselling author. I love your motto. Aging is inevitable, but decline is optional. Can you share? When did that become more than a phrase for you? When did that become your mission?
People could do mental gymnastics to guess how young I am. In September of 2001, when I was age 49, it turned out I had a pretty severe herniation of my L5-S1 disc. For those folks who have had lumbar issues or are facing spinal fusion or cleanup, or laminectomy kinds of things, they know it isn’t fun. In the sense of making lemonade out of every lemon that you’re handed, this was a great case for me to use my Phoenix moment rising from the ashes, documenting my journey back from major surgery to things that I love to do, like competitive rowing and helping others.
As a personal fitness coach and personal trainer, I always show people how to do things, and I don’t ask folks to do anything that I don’t do myself, which isn’t right. September of 2001 was my Phoenix moment when I decided that perhaps I could step back from Corporate America and form a limited liability company called Well Past Forty to try to champion my lessons, so that other people can learn from them and perhaps make their second-half performances better.
In Generation X in their 40s and 50s, or even Baby Boomers like me, we still have a lot of years left if we do it right. It’s not a question just of the years, but how are those years? The old thing about thriving and striving sounds like a platitude, but I argue it’s a mantra that we can enable with the right habits. My mission in life is to tell folks, “Do you want 7 to 12 extra vital years? Let’s get started.”
It’s never too late, but it’s better to be late than later. September 2001, as a long-winded answer, was the genesis of my mission to try to extend my reach with written words instead of one-on-one or one-on-few training sessions with individuals, buddies, small group fitness, and that kind of thing. If my message is powerful, we’d like it to get to more people.
The Big Kahuna: Why Small Habits Matter More Than We Think
Let’s make that happen. That sounds good to me. What were some of the personal experiences on that journey that convinced you that we can dramatically change our health trajectory even later in life?
We could start with fully alive, the theme of your show. A man in full or a woman in full, and the definition of alive or the root word of alive means you’re not dead. If you’re breathing and you don’t have special needs that prohibit you from getting up from a chair, a great Coach and a Cofounder of the Nike shoe company, Bill Bowerman, said, “If you can get up from a chair, you’re an athlete.”
I believe in my journeys that people have said, “I can’t,” or, “It’s too hard,” or, “I don’t know how to do it,” or, “I’m besieged by too much information about quick fixes. Can you help me?” The answer is yes. Let’s take a deep breath. Let’s try to separate fact from hearsay and make steady progress by doing the old thing about establishing minimum successes, and then build on those. That’s my way of looking at it.
Life is about learning, isn’t it? If you stop learning, you might as well check out.
We are in an information-rich society, for sure. We’re in a marketing society, for sure. There are many reasons why folks say, “It’s aging. I don’t want to be like my mom and dad, but I’m turning out that way, and that’s not so bad.” I believe enough research in my own sweat-based practices to argue that we can do better with little habits. It’s my mission. In fact, not to be cutesy, but I came up with an acronym, the Big KAHUNA. The Big KAHUNA means that we can keep America’s health spans unevaded by adopting simple sweat-based science-backed habits to make our lives better day by day.
You could say 2001 was the genesis. Yet, if I went back a little further, there are two dates that I remember. One chubby little Boy Scout was told he had to do a pull-up to earn a merit badge. I had to appreciate strength. I’m a mesomorph. I don’t lose weight easily. Those of us with pretty stocky frames can put on weight. I had to do a mile run in pre-high school football camp, and I had a real struggle with that. It’s not only strength. It’s stamina. Those are two of my seven building blocks.
I have a physical bank or a physical portfolio of the seven S’s to try to make it easy for my pea brain to remember them. I mentioned 2 of the 7, which are Strength and Stamina. If we go through them, they are Strength, Stability, Stamina, Stretching, Stress not, Sustenance, meaning clean anti-inflammatory eating, and restorative Sleep. Those seven S’s, I believe, establish a pretty healthy portfolio of things that we can almost always do better.
Some folks may have special needs or requirements where they’re not able to tackle one of those things, like mobility or stretching. Yet, I do find that many folks say, “Strength is so hard.” I say, “Let’s talk about that. We’re not going to ask you to develop bolder shoulders. We’re asking you to carry out your activities of daily life, like play with the grandkids, lift a suitcase up into the bin without asking for help on a crowded airplane, now that we have air travel again, hopefully, and those kinds of things.”
Functional strength is not going to the gym. It’s moving heavy stuff and using life to be active, be mobile, and live better. Those seven S’s are my framework that I try to practice, I try to espouse to others, and I try to say it’s a pretty good recipe. If you want to have a good dinner, you probably want to follow a recipe. You don’t want to wing it. Not to get overboard with what we call periodization or progress for everybody’s individual journey toward excellence or being good or better than your peers, but we do want a recipe. I argue the recipe starts with small, successful habits that almost all of us can do.
Functional strength isn’t going to the gym. It’s moving heavy stuff and being active to be mobile and look better.
Thanks for sharing that. I’d love to dive into those seven S’s and that framework a little deeper. With your background, a mixture of being a competitive rower and having that discipline, do you see that playing into your own practice of those seven S’s?
Yeah. My books, my professional articles, and hopefully, the way I live are experiential and by example. This month, for me, is Planksgiving month. We’re supposed to do social media. I try to do a different type of plank to try to encourage others who are able to find me on the very crowded Instagram or Facebook space to hear about a quadrupod plank, a tabletop plank, or what a Navy SEAL does for his endurance with a plank. I’m told it is eleven minutes for a push-up plank, which is daunting. When you think about the crazy world record for a forearm plank, it is something like five hours.
We don’t have to get carried away with excess. We want progress, not perfection, which is key. That’s a very practical reminder. We want progress, not perfection. It is those little things in those seven S’s. I hope that’s a comprehensive cookbook or recipe. It is the little improvements that make a difference. Of those seven S’s, they have different time spans related to them. It takes 8 to 12 weeks until you’re about age 80 to improve your functional strength. I didn’t say gym strength. I said functional strength. It’s important stuff like a grip. Can you open that jar of olives for your martini?
People need to appreciate. I call it dolce vita. I appreciate the volume, the intensity, the tempo, and the adaptations you need to look at on your own journey and as you age. I certainly don’t do 39 pull-ups as I did when I was in college. I could, but it would take a lot of sets. It’s not one set. I’m not interested in the Guinness Book of Records. I’m interested in whole body exercises that make a difference for me, for the grandkids, for my activities in my daily life, plus trying to tell folks as an almost 73-year-old person. I’m not Jack LaLanne, but everybody who is committed without special needs can make improvements. Life-long learning is a big part of that recipe.
7 To 12 Extra Vital Years: Closing The Health Span Gap
That’s great. I love the Big Hairy Audacious Goal, the BHAG, that you have to change America’s health span by 7 to 12 years. That’s the big goal. To extend America’s health span, not just change it, by 7 to 12 years. We have about a thirteen-and-a-half-year health span gap.
We want progress, not perfection.
Isn’t that extraordinary, in arguably the richest country? Maybe some would say the Middle Eastern oil countries are richer per capita. In this extraordinary society of ours, we are able to live longer, but we’re not living better. Why do we live longer? People have stopped smoking. Yay. We figured out how to try to suppress the opioid crisis. Yay. Cancer’s on the rise. Boo.
In spite of all the things we hear from Dr. Topol, Dr. Ornish, and Dr. Attia, people are still unknowingly waiting too long to address our number one killer, which is heart disease. By doing those seven S’s, you’re probably going to change the trajectory of aging. As you mentioned earlier, thank you for that. We have to get older, but we don’t have to act old or perform old. The ways to do it are little changes every day.
How do you see that being achievable, but also urgently necessary? Doing the seven S’s is the framework. If we do those things, you believe that we could extend our health span by 7 to 12 years.
There are a number of very credible studies. I don’t have a lot of degrees with initials after my name. I’m a layman. I do love to dive into research and tell you how the watch works, not tell you what time it is. It is possible that the way you live your life can change the trajectory to offset the terrible things. One author, Peter Attiah, talked about the four deadly horsemen, which are heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Fourth might have been cancer. I’m drawing a blank on number four.
To a large extent, most of those are either preventable or you can defer them. For the guys, I believe it to be true that all of us are going to develop some degree of prostate cancer. Yet, we’re probably going to die from something else, hopefully, because we’re getting better at, if not prevention, treating that one male cancer.
The 7 to 12 years is based on the types of things we know from centenarians, Dan Buettner’s studies of the Blue Zones. It’s not running ultra marathons or climbing Mount Everest or Denali that helps you live to 100. Genes count, but it’s very interesting. Maybe some of your readers are not aware that until you’re in your 80s, it’s not your genes that drive your health span, strong span, or wind span, as I call them. Nurture yourself. It’s not nature. Those folks who tend to live longer are blessed with some combination of genetic makeup that helps them live longer.
The documented record for the modern lifespan was a lady, a French woman. She drank red wine. She smoked. Her name was Jeanne Calmet. She had a deal with her landlord that her landlord could move into her apartment when she passed away. She outlived her landlord and died at the age of 122. She ate, but she didn’t take medications. After the age of 80, she had something else going for her. She didn’t work out a lot, so there is that genetic compound.
I argue, “Let’s get to our 80s and then roll the dice with genetics. Let’s not play Russian roulette. Let’s play with a loaded deck that is favorable.” If we do it right, 7 to 12 years are very attainable. How do we measure that? There are studies that can check the age of your organs, even with a little device. I’m not advertising for a Finnish company that puts out the Oura ring. It does not give a precise or accurate estimate of your heart age, yet it can monitor the trend and do a pretty good job at that. By heart age, we mean the stiffness of those thousands of miles of arteries and capillaries in your body.
Technology can help us monitor things, and yet technology can’t do the work for us. Grab a clean water bottle, not PABA. Get some clean water, hydrate well, and move. If you can push stuff, that’s even better than just moving with body weight, but you can do pretty well with body weight also. Seven to twelve years sounds ambitious. It sounds audacious. Yet, science says it’s doable. If you circle back with me in fifteen years, we’ll see how I’m doing in my mid-80s. We’ll see if I’m still lifting weights, bicycling long distances, and competing as a Masters rower.
The attitude is a big part of what I call mind-body awareness. You could have a tremendous body, but if you don’t have the aptitude or the willingness to challenge yourself and impose new demands on your body, our bodies are programmed to respond to extra demands. That’s why we have these progressions, what we call periodizations or little programs, to help you judiciously put more demands on the volume, intensity, and tempo, and help you adapt in either strength moves, stability moves, or stamina moves that will help you progress. We don’t know the human limits and longevity, but we’re learning that we do know we can improve the limits of health span by doing important things.
Those folks that tend to live longer are blessed with some combination in their genetic makeup that helps them live longer.
The American diet is our number one problem for inflammation and oxidation, which is slowly killing us. Inflammation is the cause of those four diseases in many cases, which are diabetes, heart disease, cancer, metabolic syndrome, and other things. How do we offset inflammation? Appropriate exercise, appropriate diet, lots of rest, and not stressing.
I say heart diseases are the number one killer, but what is often the case for many of us, for atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease, is inflammation. Some of us have genetic kryptonites. I do. Luckily, I found it. I can adapt to address the fact that for 73 years, I have a genetic component in my lipids that promotes inflammation. It’s called lipoprotein (a).
It is great in America with education. We can find smoking guns, kryptonites, and root causes. Since I have kryptonite and a propensity to have inflammation that affects my coronary arteries, with a smart approach and with sweat, hopefully, I can do pretty well. I want to encourage other people to do pretty well. I don’t want people to say, “Yes, but.” I want people to say, “Yes, and.”
Almost everyone, if they live long enough, will find a kryptonite. What are we going to do about it? Throw the towel, give up, or press on and prudently go about your journey? If I miss the mark and only get 5 extra years, that’s 2,000 extra sunrises and sunsets to hopefully do something well on this crazy planet. It’s a worthy cause.
Gen X, Baby Boomers, and maybe even Gen Z are too busy with life to think about their own portfolio, but I certainly hope that people do take a moment to think about how important their physical portfolio is. I know we’re worried about our fiscal portfolios in good times and bad. Is our money going to be around? If we don’t watch it, our health care system is not going to be affordable.
Pills First, Action Second? Supplements, Heart Health, And DNA Kryptonites
We can keep people alive with polypharmacy, but do we need to? In some cases, the answer is probably not. If we start people on healthy habits, they may not need a statin, a blood pressure reduction, or another drug. I have nothing against polypharmacy. I’m thankful that we had penicillin. I’m thankful that we had COVID vaccines. Yet, I don’t like the idea of pills first and physical action second.
Seven to twelve is doable. How do we get there? If we think about a number, let’s say 15% improvement in key functions, can you better your chances? I can’t predict whether the number is 12 years, 13 years, 6 years, 5 years, or whatever. That’s not my job. My job is to try to change the trajectory of where you’re headed until genetics takes over.
Grip Strength, Inflammation, And The Four Deadly Horsemen
If I could give an example, it’s well-documented that grip strength is a biomarker for longevity. How many people think about improving their grip strength by a number like 15%? If you have an uber-strong grip, it may be hard to improve by 15%. Joe Sixpack or someone who hasn’t focused on things that improve your forearm and grip strength, they can certainly improve by 15%. Why wouldn’t people take the opportunity to improve something with a 15% appreciation, not depreciation? Grip strength can hang around even though you age. We want you to age. We don’t want you to check out early. Grip strength, being a biomarker, is one example of a little thing in a range that can help you.
I mentioned that inflammation is seriously deadly. How do we try to decrease our bodily inflammation? Let’s not eat ultra-processed food. Let’s try to figure out how to get restorative sleep. By all means, let’s figure out how to have the happy hormones flowing, not the stress hormone, cortisol. Chronic stress is a killer. With chronic stress, we think about hypertension and the elasticity of our arteries going away.
There are practical, doable ways to address inflammation to help gain some of those 7 to 12 vital years for your health span. What’s an example? Maybe some of your older readers remember Satchel Paige as a model of good living and an extraordinary baseball pitcher. He said, “Don’t look back. Somebody may be gaining on you in a race.” He also shared the importance of not eating stuff that inflames your gut. If your gut is misbehaving, it probably means you’re not consuming the right macronutrients, micronutrients, and hydration to help you live longer and better.
Ultra-processed food is convenient. I know people are busy. It may take a little extra time to plan ahead and cook up a big pot of farro or quinoa to help you eat more plant-based food than stopping off at a certain fast food store with arches or whatever. Even processed foods generally are inferior to whole foods, the old farm-to-table or whatever. I would hope that it may cost people a little more money.
Let’s think about it. I mentioned a physical portfolio compared to your fiscal portfolio. I would argue that probably almost every one of your readers is interested in how your portfolio is doing. During COVID, our US government came up with a way of analyzing what you and I are each worth. By that, the government said, “We’ll invest about $10 million to save 1 person,” or words to that effect.
You are a $10 million portfolio. I am a $10 million portfolio. Am I going to decrement that, or am I going to try to grow that, extend that, and make it last? If you think about things that way, maybe folks can say, “Unless you win the lottery, you’re not going to get rich overnight.” Yet, your riches can accumulate by investing in adding to the principal.
The time value of money or the time value of exercise are the types of things that I think may help people’s mindsets to shift from, “Yes, but,” to, “Yes, and I think I can make small improvements on my grip strength, cutting down my ultra processed foods, and taking a fifteen-minute walk after dinner,” which is extraordinarily good for one’s constitution.
As men get older, a 15-minute walk is 1 of the 3 ingredients for both prostate health and avoiding bladder problems as we age. If you want to know the other 2, how you hydrate is number 1, and number 2, believe it or not, is a gentle walk after your meals. Number three is partnered intimacy. None of those things is bad. Hydration is good. A walk in nature is good. Partnered intimacy sounds pretty good, too. Those are the three simple yet hard rules to improve your prostate health and improve your ability to sleep through the night.
Restorative sleep is critical. If the guys with their benign prostate enlargement are getting up 1 to 5 times a night, that’s messing with your sleep. Sleep is so important for your happy hormones. If you don’t sleep, you’re not building serotonin, which is your mood. If you wake up groggy and grouchy, it’s probably because you didn’t have a good night’s sleep. All kinds of good reasons to move, to be happy, and to say, “Yes, I can,” not, “No, I can’t.”
Sleep is so important for your happy hormones; if you don’t sleep, you’re not building serotonin, which is your mood.
A Day In The Life: The Foundation Of Functional Strength and Sarcopenia
I was going to go back and say, “Let’s walk through the seven S’s,” but you’ve covered a lot of those. They’re all intertwined. I would love to hear how this plays out in your own life. In a day in the life of Dave, how do you incorporate the seven S’s every day? What are some of the things you’re doing as a 73-year-old to implement those seven S’s?
This is in no particular order. They’re all important. I’ll try to share why I believe they’re all important, and I hope it is comprehensive. I think it is. Let’s talk about Strength. Strength is the foundation of all we do. If we can’t functionally move our joints, it’s not a quality life. You do the best you can if you’re paralyzed or whatever. For most able-bodied people, strength is offsetting a terrible thing called sarcopenia. At about the age of 30, that’s the loss of flesh. It’s a terrible ratio of about 1% of skeletal muscle loss per year after the age of 30.
At the age of 30, if people are saying, “I’m getting older. I’m working longer. I’m commuting longer. I’ve got to spend time with the kids, my elders, or whatever,” you’re going to lose muscle mass. When you lose muscle mass, you lose your ability to move your joints. That’s what skeletal muscles do. Move your skeleton. That is life. That’s being fully alive. Motion is one of the functions of a mammal. If we’re not moving, life isn’t good.
Strength is the foundation of almost everything else we do. What I mean by strength is not bicep curls at the gym. It means grip. It means hanging from a bar. It means if you see a stable chair, do tricep dips. What are the largest muscles in your body by weight? Your gluteals. Glute max, medial, and minimum. Those ham hocks are so vital to everything we do. What do we Americans do? We sit too much. I’m sitting right now. I should be standing. You can’t see me working my lower body, but I’m trying to keep things moving with my lower body. I’m certainly going to get up after we conclude our chat.
The glutes are tremendously important. They’re in the key part of our bodies. They’re in the Lumbopelvic-Hip Complex, which needs to be strong if we’re going to live well. LPHC is a fancy name for many muscle groups. It takes, I believe, twenty muscles to move our hip to make that ball and socket move. It’s wonderful if we have hip replacements, but it’d be better and cheaper if we didn’t have to do hip replacements as we get older.
Strength is very important. You don’t need expensive weights. You don’t need a fancy gym. If you use the gym, yay. Body weight exercises are okay, but it’s better to move more than body weight occasionally. For Dave Frost, at my age, I only do resistance training two times a week. I bet you could do it three times a week. If you’re not getting sore after your strength training, you’re not offsetting sarcopenia.
This is crazy, but we have to create micro tears in our skeletal muscles so that our bodies respond. They sense and respond with little cytokines, not storms like COVID, but they respond. You rebuild, refresh, and restore with rest, hydration, and protein. You’re ready to go. For you, in 2 days, and for me, in 3 days. Strength, for me, is like a religion. Monday, Friday, Tuesday, Saturday, Wednesday, Sunday.
If you’re traveling, you can do strength exercises in your airplane seat. Most of our strength moves are called isotonic. That is moving joints. Isometric could be you’re contracting your muscles, but you’re not moving your joints. The key is to contract and extend your muscles with an isometric. It’s mostly contracting here in this grip, anyway, and you can still do things.
There are horse feathers that people have viable excuses for skipping strength moves, twice a week for me, and three times a week probably for your age. It’s vitally important. Someone is like, “I ride the bicycle all the time.” You’re not working all the muscles in your body. You’re moving through the air. You’re not resisting all that much unless you’re climbing a hill.
I’ve done enough bike-riding to know it’s good for you. You see nature. You can get your heart rate up and certainly can work your lower body, but you’re not working your whole body. That’s one reason I’m a big advocate of rowing. It’s because you use almost every muscle in your body for both strength and endurance in rowing.
Strength is vitally important. If anyone doubts me, I try to give cases. If you see a picture of a shrunken person who can’t sit up straight at the age of 65 and they don’t have osteoporosis, it probably means they have let their skeletal muscles go to hell. Pardon the expression. That’s bad, and it’s preventable. We do strength to offset sarcopenia. It’s not enough to walk unless you walk with weights. Stamina is tremendously important. Without strength, our hearts are not at their peak as we get older, so strength is vital.
Stamina is tremendously important, and yet, without strength, our hearts are not at their peak as we get older.
Stability, Stretching, And Building Your VO2 Max
Stability is like our accident insurance. I believe the statistic is 1 out of every 3 of us over the age of 65 falls. Many of those visits to the emergency room don’t end up well. Major bruises, sprains, or broken bones. Little good happens when you fall. It’s a true statement that we may trip and stumble as much as little kids do, but you don’t see little kids fall because they have better reactions. What we do is stability.
I challenge anyone, when you’re done tuning in to this wonderful show, to stand on 1 leg with your eyes closed for 30 seconds. If you can do that, you have a pretty good spatial awareness, even without eyesight. It’s a fancy word called proprioception. Stability is accident insurance. We don’t want added expenses of hip replacements or plaster casts because we tripped and fell, and if we didn’t have skeletal muscle to cushion the blow. Broken bones are terrible for older people. A lot of that is preventable. Some people can’t offset osteoporosis or osteopenia, but we can all do better by practicing our spatial awareness, our proprioception. Doing unilateral exercises for strength is important. That’s stability.
I call Stretching your flexible account in your physical portfolio. For most of us, our muscles have far more stretch and contraction than we give them credit for. When we sit, it’s terrible. Get this fancy term. Dormant Butt Syndrome, DBS, because America sits too much. Get up and walk around. Don’t sit. Sitting is evil. Stretching is extraordinarily important. I advocate dynamic stretching before your stamina and resistance work. In its cool-down, you do static stretching.
Dynamic means you go through motions. Static means you hold a pose for 20 to 30 seconds. Some say a dynamic warmup is doing the exercise without doing the exercise, but it is conditioning yourself, raising your body temperature, and getting your muscles, connective tissue, and joints ready to do the work, be it stamina or resistance strength work. That’s Strength. You can make marked improvements in strength into your 80s in as short as 8 weeks. In two months, that’s pretty impressive.
Stamina is the bedrock of all we do. In my physical bank, I call Stamina the foundation. Strength is at the cornerstone, but Stamina is the foundation. After all, if our cardiovascular system stops, we drop, and we’re done. How do we keep our cardio-respiratory system moving? The answer is by moving often enough at the right volume, intensity, and tempo, and adapting, as you get better, that dolce vita to improve.
To make notable improvements in stamina, it can take months. With appropriate exercise, you build more mitochondria in your skeletal muscles, and you can create new capillary routes for extra capacity. Stamina is wonderful. It used to be said that a Tour de France, an extraordinary elite bicyclist, would train 600 to 700 miles every week up to race time. With more knowledge, diet, and new techniques, they found out that with a little bit more intensity, they can drop back on an extraordinary volume. No matter how fast you race, 600 miles takes a long time. You have other things to do in your life, even if you’re a professional athlete.
We’re becoming more knowledgeable about how to reach peak performance, but I’m not as interested in peak performance as I am in progress. I would love all your readers to know how to make a big difference in stamina. It could be walking two flights of stairs. If you did it and you’re winded, how long does it take to walk those stairs at the same speed and not be winded? It’s going to take a while. That’s a reality check. Yet, it’s still a worthy effort.
We mentioned Strength, Stability, Stretching, and Stamina. There’s restorative Sleep. In fact, in my first book, I called it mimicking Morpheus. Morpheus is a little Greek nymph who was related to dreams. In fact, it’s interesting that the word morphine comes from Morpheus. If you can almost imagine a morphine-like, deep restorative sleep that includes a long period of deep sleep and a long period of rapid eye movement.
Unless you have a disorder, rapid eye movement is the period when your body is paralyzed. This is when your brain flushes itself. This is when the dreaming happens, and great things happen. This is when the serotonin is developing in your gut. If people are not sleeping well, they cannot perform at their best, plain and simple, no matter how much caffeine or ergogenic you take.
Mimicking Morpheus: The Critical Role Of Restorative Sleep And Stress
What is appropriate sleep? For most adults, it is 7 to 9 hours. Believe it or not, for me, after the last couple of years, the device says, “It looks like the ideal time you wake up without an alarm is 6 hours and 37 minutes.” For Dave Frost, at my age and my point in life, I need 6 hours and 37 minutes of restorative sleep to do my best.
Sleep is not overrated. In any way, shape, or form, it is vital. This is the one case where I say even if you have to take a prescription drug, think about perhaps doing it because sleep is a marvelous way to spend 1/3 of your life. It’s not time wasted. Those who say they get by on limited sleep, I say, “What’s your lifestyle?” It doesn’t sound very exciting. It probably needs a lot of caffeine or stimulants to be able to function on less than what your body needs. That’s Sleep.
Sleep is not overrated in any way, shape, or form. It is vital.
There’s Stress. Avoiding chronic stress. We all want stress. Exercise induces stress, but that’s called eustress. Chronic stress is over a period of weeks, where your bodily functions are working too hard. Your blood pressure might increase. Your sleep decreases. Your diet and your gut may not work well. Your physical performance probably is not at its best if you are being stressed by the environment, your social interactions, or over-training. It’s good to monitor. Before I wore a fitness device, do you know how did I know I was overtraining? My wife would say, “You’re getting snippy. Go take a nap.” I say, “Thank you, coach.” Now, we can measure heart rate variability and resilience if you’re ready to work hard the next day.
Let me get back to a day in the life. Let’s say today is not a strength day. Yesterday was my strength day. What am I going to do for my stamina? I’m going to dynamically stretch. I’m going to do some mindful breathing. I’m going to give myself a big hug because that’s good for shoulder mobility. Even if it’s not a strength day, I’ll try to dead hang for 60 to 90 seconds, which is good for your grip strength, shoulder mobility, lengthening your spine, helping you stand tall, and also a little bit of mental. Sometimes, you say, “This is tough, but I can hang on.” The mind is a wonderful fake muscle to help you do things.
For me, I love to swim. I don’t do open ocean swimming. I’m nearsighted. Frankly, I don’t like open ocean swimming, although in San Diego, I could do it. I have no problem doing lap swimming. I find it very relaxing. What are my main stamina exercises in addition to my walking after meals? They’re bicycling, either on stationary bikes or safely riding on the road, and indoor rowing or being on the water and rowing.
How much stamina exercise do I shoot for? Nominally, 60 to 75 minutes. As a rule of thumb, we need 45 minutes of low intensity. That’s a conversational exercise to improve our capacity, building more capillaries, building more mitochondria in our skeletal muscles, working on the elasticity of our arteries, and making sure our heart is still a very good pump, a muscle.
It’s interesting that our heart has more mitochondria in its cells than our skeletal muscles do. We want to honor that. Our heart responds to appropriate exercise. Once a week, I try to stress my body with high-intensity stamina work. If I’m rowing, that also has a strength element, but let’s call it stamina work. I do want to get my heart rate up, hold it for a period of time, and perhaps even do intervals to challenge my cardiovascular system.
For instance, this was a stamina day. I did my dynamic stretching. I did my planks. I did my dead hang, and then I hopped on the ergometer. I did my warm-up with the indoor rower. Norwegians have a regimen which helps you build what they call the VO2 max that I mentioned earlier, which is your oxygen capacity to get nutrients to your cells to endure at higher intensity. After a good warm-up, you go almost as hard as you can for four minutes.
Norwegian 4×4.
There you go. With three minutes’ rest. You’re done in 25 minutes, and then you cool down and do your static stretching. In less than an hour, you’ve worked to improve your vital capacity. The Norwegians have incredible studies that say that’s one of your best measures of longevity. You know the Norwegian 4×4. It’s a wonderful way to challenge your system. That was a little bit of stretching and my endurance work.
Will I stand on a wobbly disc? Yes. Will I do things to always remember the importance of the other supporting functions, like stretching and stability? Yes. Am I avoiding stress? If it’s tax time or you got a big deliverable at work, your stress will rise, and that’s okay, but we don’t want to make it chronic. We want enough sleep and hydration to offset stress if this is a stressful day. I’m mellow. I get to travel back to my alma mater. The air traffic control hassle is over, so our flight will leave on time. I have no reason to stress. My wife still talks to me, and life is good. I claim I have no chronic stress. That’s a good thing.
Restorative Sleep. A key, if you are a social drinker, is to try to sip early. No alcohol after 6 PM because most folks will have sleep interruptions or lessened sleep with alcohol. Some people say it’s manageable, or some people are in denial. I know of no scientific or practical reason to increase your alcohol consumption. We covered Strength, Stability, Stamina, and Stretching.
I’ll let you know how my sleep is. I try to get, if all goes well, a cool room. It’s very important not to have a hot bedroom. I try to get an hour of rapid eye movement phase, and I try to get at least an hour of deep sleep to get a good sleep score. My resilience goes up. My heart rate variability goes up. Probably, my heart rate is lower. I’m ready to do something, whether it’s a strength day or a stability day.
Do I take a day off each week? I do. It’s healthy to take a day off to miss your workout. Would I still stretch and do a walk after meals? Yes. Would I perhaps do some eyes-closed stability work? Yes. As far as a significant stamina day or a significant resistance strength day, I say take one day off a week. Some people may differ, but that’s the regimen that seems to work for me.
Anti-inflammatory Sustenance. We already mentioned the absolute evil nature of ultra-processed foods. Jack LaLanne, who died several years ago, had a great epitaph. It’s better to wear out than rust out. He also said, related to anti-inflammatory eating, “If man made it, don’t eat it.” Complex foods are always better than supplements. Getting your macros and micros from food you can trust, to me, is way better than ultra-processed foods and a bunch of supplements.
Complex foods are always better than supplements, and getting your macros and micros from food you can trust is way better than ultra-processed foods.
Do I take supplements? Yes, I do. As an older guy, I take CoQ10 Ubiquinol related to heart and muscle health. I certainly take magnesium. I believe it to be true that the vast majority of Americans are deficient in the right magnesium compounds, and I would argue that folks who take multivitamins do not get all the types of magnesium that your body needs for your brain, heart, and muscles. There are seven different magnesium compounds that you get from Whole Foods. Not the store Whole Foods, but from unprocessed Whole Foods, which is the best way to go.
As a personal trainer, I would say I love to help people get healthier and stronger, but the best way to a six-pack abdomen is the refrigerator door. What do you put in the refrigerator? It’s not how many crunches or planks you do. It’s what you are eating. What causes inflammation? White fat and ultra-processed food.
It’s terrible in America. Are we getting better? I hope so. Statins are the most prescribed drug on the planet. Does it help with anti-inflammation? Yes. With exercise and healthy fats from salmon and olive oil, you’re getting high-density lipoproteins, which are neutral or positive. What do we do? We eat ultra-processed food. What does that do? It causes inflammation and raises bad cholesterol levels.
In fact, I’m writing a book about heart health because I found my own kryptonite. Heart disease begins as early as age twenty. By heart disease, I mean things are not perfect. That’s what dis-ease is. It doesn’t mean you’re going to die if you have the start of heart disease at age twenty, but our bodies are amazing at hiding bad things happening.
What’s the first sign of heart issues with most people? Angina or an event, whether it be a stroke or a heart attack. They’re like, “I felt fine.” If you have some discomfort in exercise, that’s a good time to find a heart problem, not when you’re at rest or sleeping. Our bodies are amazing at hiding lurking symptoms that are growing and someday are going to get you. It’s better to be aware of those and deal with them early. Hence, my argument and motion that an anti-inflammatory diet is the way to counter both inflammation and oxidation that are harmful to our bodies.
Anti-Inflammatory Eating: The “Refrigerator Door” Diet and Intermittent Fasting
What is your typical diet? Do you have certain foods that you like to eat?
The answer is I don’t do time-restricted eating every day, but I’m trying to experiment so I can share my male 70-something experiences with others. Everyone’s lifestyle diet is different. Some people have success with a sixteen-hour fast or time-restricted eating. I’ve tried eighteen hours several times a week. It’s not so much for the loss of white fat. Also, I find my brain seems to work better because my brain is tapping ketones rather than sugar for fuel.
Unless I have my day with a heavy strength workout or a hard endurance workout, I do pretty well with an eighteen-hour fast several times a week. Once a week, I try to do a 24-hour fast, dinner-to-dinner. By fast, I mean I’ll drink coffee, tea, and water. Some say a fast is not drinking water. I say, “That’s crazy because you need to hydrate. What do you call it? Time-restricted eating, caloric restriction, or fasting. Our evolution has been feast or fast. You catch the antelope, and you have a big dinner. You don’t catch an antelope, and you don’t eat for a while. That’s the way our bodies seem to thrive and get back to homeostasis.
I grew up where breakfast was the most important meal of the day. I grew up in middle America. We were a farming family. People are like, “They had pie for breakfast. They worked hard.” I don’t know that I would fast if I were doing manual labor every day. I’ve tried intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating, and I found it to be favorable for me. Have I lost a lot of white fat? No, I’m a mesomorph. I do have white fat. We all do. We need a little fat, but I do it for reasons like discipline, mental clarity, and caloric restriction.
As you get older, it’s harder to lose weight. There are days when I don’t eat breakfast, even though I love breakfast. As a rule of thumb, on a day when I’m not fasting, I drink two glasses of water before I drink coffee or have any fruit or breakfast. It is important to hydrate early for males for prostate and urinary tract health, but also because you’ve been sleeping and saying goodbye to moisture for 7 to 9 hours if you had a good night of sleep. Start with two glasses of water, whether it be clean water or filtered water. If you’re going to do your vitamins, there are some you should take with food, and some you can take with water.
I don’t count calories, but I always try to know on a workable level that I’m getting at least 30 to 35 grams of protein, 5 grams of fiber, and color in all my meals. Bacon, once in a while, is a real treat. I wouldn’t make a big deal of it because it’s a lot of saturated fat. It’s tasty, it’s protein, and it helps guys with their testosterone levels and all that kind of stuff. If I have eggs, I put some kale or some sausage with them for color. The old thing about eating vitamins or eating the rainbow is important. Every meal should have color. It shouldn’t be bland.
I argue it’s better to skip a meal than have a meal replacement bar. Often, if you look at what the label says for a meal replacement bar, it’s processed, number one. Number two, it’s too much sugar and fat. You might get twenty grams of protein. If it isn’t processed correctly, those twenty grams may end up in your urine. They may not get absorbed. It’s not what you eat. It’s what you absorb. The best way to absorb things is with whole foods, not meal replacement, things like protein bars.
It’s not what you eat; it’s what you absorb.
Can you drink a meal with a well-researched liquid supplement? Probably. In one type of milk that has the lactose reduced, the protein is increased. I’ll drink a low-fat chocolate milk after a workout to replenish. I have no problem with that. How did our forebears eat? They didn’t eat a lot of sugar. Until farming came along and Madison Avenue came along, sugar didn’t exist. Complex carbohydrates, protein, and the rainbow are in every meal.
The old thing about if you eat breakfast, make that a good meal. Make that lunch, a medium meal, and dinner. It’s a small meal, not a big evening meal, unless it’s a holiday. If your body is digesting a big meal, it’s not helping you sleep well. I have two days. One is a time-restricted eating day, and the other is prudent macros, micros, and hydration. Everyone’s different.
More folks are taking, for good cause, generally, one of these GLP-1 diabetes or obesity-limiting drugs, mostly by injection. If folks are doing it for medical reasons, yay. It’s interesting. With technology, there are elite athletes who are taking Monjaro or Wegovy. They’re taking microdoses of those to improve their physical performance. I don’t care for that because it’s not natural. I try to be as natural as I can, and I try to encourage other people to be the same.
That’s a long-winded answer to a day in the life of Dave. Do I skip meals? Yes, when I’m intentionally doing time-restricted eating. For most folks, when they skip meals, their hormones, the ghrelin and the leptin, get out of whack. You think you’re hungrier than you are, and you end up overeating. That’s not healthy. You want to honor your gut.
One of the reasons I do believe in intermittent fasting is that our guts need at least sixteen hours with no food to heal their inner linings. You hear about the gut leakage and so on. One way to offset that is to occasionally fast. I don’t know how many days you need to do it, maybe a week or whatever. The rule of thumb is that if you fast for at least sixteen hours, your small intestine will get healthier. Our gut microbiome is so critical to our overall well-being. Some call our gut our second brain.
Our vagus nerve, the longest nerve system in our body, does a lot of talking between the central nervous system and the gut. If we are not absorbing the power bar, the absorption can be as low as 10%. Pick a number. Pay $3 of what you think is a good protein bar with 24 grams of protein. If you only absorb two of those grams and all the extra sugar and fat are processed, that’s not a protein bar. That’s a waste of money. We’re not the healthiest nation because convenience food, inflammation, and processing have made us that way, so let’s fix it.
Strong To Save: The Mission Behind The Books And The Wake-Up Call
There you go. This is fantastic. There are so many nuggets in here. You’ve shared so many helpful tools, tips, and tactics for us all. We can implement a lot of these things. I love that there’s a framework to follow, the seven S’s. That makes it stick and helps us to follow along. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for the amazing work that you’ve done. You are a wealth of wisdom, experience, and knowledge. I know you have a few books, and then you’re working on another one that’s about to come out. Could you share where people can find your books? Where can we connect with you? When is your new book coming out?
Thanks. As a personal trainer, I realize that if my messages are good, I’d want to extend them to other people. I love this. They’re tenets or nuggets that you can share with other people that help them change their lives for the better. That’s why I wrote books. I put things down so that they don’t always have to call me. They can look at chapters so-and-so for strength or whatever, and then call me.
The first book I wrote launched in the middle of COVID. It was called KABOOMER: Thriving and Striving into Your 90s. It’s available wherever good books are sold, both on the shelves and at that bookstore named after a river in South America. It’s available. The idea is lifestyle over polypharmacy. That’s the entering argument. That was KABOOMER.
My ideal reader is a Baby Boomer. What about people mid-career who are halfway through their lives? It’s even more important for them to start early. I started to realize that everyone suffers from sarcopenia, but if you change the trajectory, you need to make conscious efforts to improve your functional strength. The second book was released in January 2024, STRONG TO SAVE: Your GenX Imperative to Die Harder and Later. My dear wife said, “You can’t put die in a subtitle.” I said, “If you read the intro, you’ll see why dying harder and later is a very good thing.”
You want to be late to your own funeral. That’s my goal. It’s going to happen, but I’m not rushing to it. Book number two is STRONG TO SAVE. It focuses a little bit more on resistance and strength training. Almost everybody can find ways, whether it’s lifting a five-pound bag of sugar or doing more sit-to-rise tests and checks to keep their quads, glutes, and balance going for them. That was book number two.
Why it was important for me to write to Gen X is that those folks are at halftime. In America, we love second-half performance. The first half of a game is good, but the really good stuff happens later. I want people to have the tools to have a great second-half performance. Make your next years your best years. Those are generational, but I write experientially and practically. It was so long ago that I was younger than a current Gen X and I said, “Writing for Gen Y or Gen Z doesn’t fit my experiential and practical way.”
When you find out you have an inflammatory marker called lipoprotein (a), and you see a cardiologist and get a coronary artery scan for calcification, and the doctor calls right away and says, “Don’t be alarmed, but you have the coronary arteries of a 92-year-old,” that’s a wake-up call. I wasn’t alarmed, but it made me realize if I had that problem as a pretty active guy, competitive rower, and former marathoner, maybe there are other people who could not wait until the age of 71 to find out that they’ve got a smoking gun or a kryptonite for coronary health, which is our number one killer.
BURDEN? Or BANISH!, hopefully, will be released in 2026. It’s for everybody. That’s book number three. It is wherever books are sold. If you have any Military readers, I’d be happy to send a copy for free to thank them for their service. We had Veterans Day. As a veteran myself, I know that folks went through a lot doing things for our country. If I can say thank you with a copy of a book, I’d be happy to do it.
That sounds good. Thanks so much. Well Past Forty is your company. Is there a website that you have?
Thank you. It’s a long story. It used to be WellPastForty.com. The website is now WellPastForty.org. That’s my landing page for books.
This has been fascinating. Thank you so much for being with us and sharing all this wisdom, knowledge, and expertise. It’s fun to learn from you. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. I appreciate the work you’re doing.
It is certainly my pleasure. Thanks to all your readers who are interested in staying alive.
As you said, we’ll have to have you back in a few years’ time to see how things are progressing.
I look forward to it. Good Lord willing, we’ll do it.
Thanks so much.
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Final Thoughts: Putting The Seven S’s Into Practice
What a fascinating episode with Dave Frost from WellPastForty.org. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I hope you’ll take some things and put them into practice, as I hope to do as well. He’s one of those people who’s walking the walk. He’s not just talking the talk, but he’s actually doing it and living it out. At age 73, he’s practicing what he preaches. Those seven S’s that we talked about are Strength, Stamina, Stretching, Stability, Sustenance, Stress not, and then Sleep.
Check out his books. He has a lot of great information in those books. He takes a deep dive into those seven S’s in KABOOMERS and then STRONG TO SAVE. His new book, which will be out soon, is titled BURDEN? Or BANISH! That’s about fighting that coronary disease as well. There are many good nuggets. I hope that you enjoyed it. Thanks so much for tuning in. We’ll see you back here next time.