Category: Fitness & Longevity / Training
Generally I’m not a fan of social media; doomscrolling for hours watching other people's fake happiness and wealth. The root of all evil if you ask me.
That said, it did give me one positive thing: for some reason my YouTube algorithm started targeting me with 40-year-old fitfluencers claiming they were fitter at 40 than they were at 30. That triggered me and sent me on my own path toward improving my health.
Around age 35, I decided I was going to be fitter at 40 than I was at 30. The social media influence mentioned above, combined with watching friends around me start to struggle with their health, really got me going. Two friends got a hernia, another developed heart problems, another got gout, and yet another busted up his shoulder so badly he's accepted he'll be dealing with some level of pain for the rest of his life. I'm lucky enough not to have run into any of those issues yet, and I decided to do what I can to keep it that way.
Some fitfluencers who ended up in my algorithm and actually worked for me: Shane Dorian, Fetch Surf Concept, Marcus Filly, and Kiel from Hydromind and Surf with Ruben.
So I started looking for a scientific basis for what to focus on — I'll link some sources at the bottom of this article. What I found is that a great marker for longevity is grip strength. Many influencers advocate creatine these days, and there's a solid body of evidence suggesting it works with no bad side effects. Everyone is frothing over mobility too, and I've personally noticed that the older you get, the more work it takes to keep moving gracefully.
I decided to start by building habits around the following. I'd recommend reading Atomic Habits if you haven't already — it's the book that helped me make these habits stick. My first step was identifying myself as a surfer: everything I was about to do for my health was in service of a long life as a surfer.
Wherever I am, I do general strength and conditioning workouts once a week in group training. During Covid I started gathering a home gym, which I now use twice a week for paddle endurance and mobility work.
My gym currently consists of a squat rack with a pull-up bar (no barbell at the moment), kettlebells at 8, 16, and 24 kg, light dumbbells at 1 and 3 kg, a foam bench, rings for rowing and dips, and some rubber bands. I want to add battle ropes and slam balls next, for paddle endurance and rotational explosiveness work.
The goal across most workouts is:
The benefit of using weights (and pull-ups) is that you automatically work on grip strength.
There's a variety of paddle trainers out there. Personally, I think the GoSurf one is a bit pricey, but to each their own — I decided to build my own based on a Reddit thread, plus a website where someone had actually worked out the specs for the trainer discussed there: MySurfHub Paddle Trainer. On top of that, battle ropes will be killer for full-body work with a focus on core and arms.