@drcoreyhelton
Instagram · One Shot
@drcoreyhelton Most people picture their 80s as something that simply arrives. It is built long before that, across the decades no one is really watching. The word I use for it is reserve. Reserve is the buffer your body keeps in the background, the capacity that decides whether ordinary movement stays easy as you age. The clearest way we measure it is something called VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen your body can take in and actually use during hard effort. Think of it as the size of your engine. Here is the part that tends to surprise people. VO2 max does not fall at a steady rate. In your 20s and 30s it drifts down a few percent per decade. After 70 it can drop by more than 20 percent in a single decade. The loss speeds up at the exact stage of life when you have the least room to spare. There is also a floor. Below a certain engine size, everyday things like climbing stairs or carrying groceries start to take real effort. A fit 30 year old and a sedentary 30 year old can sit on the same downward curve and still land on opposite sides of that floor at 85. Same person, very different last decade. And the effect is not small. In large studies, people with low fitness had roughly five times the death rate of the most fit, with no point where more fitness stopped helping. None of this is about chasing a peak number or training like an athlete. It is about keeping your engine big enough that the life you want stays within reach. → I break down how that gets built, calmly and from the evidence, in a free masterclass. Comment LIVE26 and I will send you the details.
