What Do You Want to Do 10-20 years from Now? Train for It Now.

I am seventy-two years old. I have been on a gym floor for fifty-eight of those seventy-two years. And lately, when I look at my own InBody scan and think about the next twenty or thirty years honestly, the question I keep returning to is not “how do I stay in shape.” It is something more specific.

What do I actually want to be able to do at 85? At 90? At 95? At 100?

Not “be healthy” — that is too vague to train for. Not “stay active” — also too vague. I want a list. Specific things. The kind of list I can take to the floor on a Tuesday morning and know whether my session was a deposit toward those things, or a wasted hour.

I want to be able to lift my own carry-on into the overhead bin without asking for help. I want to be able to get on the floor to play with my great-grandchildren and get back up without using my hands. I want to be able to ride an e-bike for thirty miles with Christi on a trail through Yellowstone. I want to be able to play a full drum set for an hour without my shoulders or legs giving out. I want to be able to hike up to the bristlecone pines in Bishop. I want to drive long road trips and be the one who carries the bags in, not the one who waits in the car.

That list is mine. Yours will be different. But the act of writing it down — physically, with a pen, on a piece of paper that lives on your desk where you can see it — is one of the most important things you can do for the next thirty years of your life.

What Bert Goodrich showed me when I was nineteen

Long before Peter Attia gave this idea a name, a 66-year-old former Mr. America taught it to me on a flat bench in Costa Mesa. I have been carrying his lesson around for more than fifty years.

In November 1972, when I was eighteen, I was working as Assistant Manager at the Jack LaLanne European Health Spa in Costa Mesa. My father was the grand opening manager. He had been seriously injured in an accident, and Bert Goodrich was brought in to run the club while my father recovered. I stayed on as Assistant Manager and became the main provider for our family until my father could get back on his feet.

Bert Goodrich was 66 years old. He had been the first Mr. America, crowned in 1939 when that competition began. He had been a competitive gymnast, an athlete, a gym owner, and a Hollywood movie stuntman. At 66, he carried himself the way most men I knew carried themselves at 40 — if those men had stayed in shape.

I was 18, six feet tall, just over 200 pounds. I had finished my Junior Olympic weightlifting career a year earlier and was now training on my lunch break with two muscle-bound regulars who could each bench-press 400 pounds. I could barely do 275. I wanted what they had — the chest, the shoulders, the bench-press number. I trained like a standard bodybuilder for about six months chasing it.

Bert watched me for a few days. One afternoon he called me away from the other two and asked, “Robert, what are you trying to accomplish with your workouts?”

I said, “To be fit and strong and healthy.”

Bert said, “You could train much smarter, train much less, and get much better results. I know I am old to you — over three times your age. But we are about the same height and the same weight. Now, I cannot bench-press 400 pounds like those guys. But I want you to watch something.”

He walked over to a flat bench. He kicked off his dress shoes. He pushed himself up into a full handstand on the bench. And then he talked to me from upside down.

“There are different kinds of strength,” he said. “This is one of them. Being able to do a handstand at sixty-six is a kind of strength.” He shifted his weight onto one arm, lifted the other hand off the bench, and balanced there one-handed, still talking. “So is this.” He set that hand back down, switched, and balanced on the other arm. Then he came back down to the bench, both hands, both feet, in complete control. No rush. No sound.

He looked at me and said: “I want you to think about the kind of strength you want. The kind of body you want. If you want the barreled chest those two have, the way they walk and the way they move, then you are going about it right. But I know you are smarter than that. You were raised around some of the finest bodybuilders in the world. Your father’s friend Steve Reeves had a shape that was almost mythological in proportion. His other friend, John Grimek, won Mr. America back-to-back and then Mr. Universe. Those men were enormously strong. But they had graceful movements. They trained hard, and so did your father. But they trained smart.”

Then he said: “I have only trained three times a week for the last ten years. Thirty to forty-five minutes a session. And you can see I still have a lot of strength. I am going to have great strength and balance and ability into my eighties. I would like you to think about how you want to be when you are my age. And maybe start by thinking about how you want to look and feel when you are thirty.”

Thirty sounded ancient to me. Sixty was unthinkable. But the question stayed with me. It is still with me, fifty-four years later.

When I opened Shape-Up in 1982, I built the gym around what Bert had shown me on that bench in Costa Mesa: that you can be in great shape training three days a week, thirty to forty-five minutes a session, if you train with intent and focus. That has been the operating philosophy of this club for forty-four years.

What Bert demonstrated in 1972 was the Centenarian Decathlon — fifty years before Peter Attia gave it a name.

Bert had no framework, no book to point at, no four pillars to teach. He just stood on his hands on a flat bench at sixty-six and told an eighteen-year-old kid to think about who he wanted to be at sixty. The rest of my life has, in many ways, been an attempt to honor what Bert taught me that afternoon. And so what I am about to walk you through — Peter Attia’s formalization of the same idea — is, for me, the modern restatement of a lesson I was lucky enough to receive in person, on a gym floor, from one of the great athletes of the twentieth century.

The Centenarian Decathlon

In his book Outlive, Dr. Peter Attia introduces a concept he calls the Centenarian Decathlon. The idea is simple to state and hard to execute. You write down ten specific physical things you want to be able to do in the last decade of your life — what Attia calls your Marginal Decade. Then you work backward from those ten items to figure out what level of strength, endurance, balance, and mobility you need to build today, knowing that the body will lose capacity year over year, and that what you build now is what you will still have in reserve at 85 or 90.

The list is not a workout plan. The list is your purpose. Your training plan is what flows from it.

This is the move from generic fitness — “I should exercise” — to specific preparation — “I am training to be able to climb in and out of my truck unassisted at 88.” The first is hard to commit to. The second is hard to skip. You have a name for what you’re defending, and the work has a meaning behind it that goes well past the mirror.

The Marginal Decade

Attia’s companion term is the Marginal Decade — the last decade of your life. For most Americans, the Marginal Decade is grim by default. Mobility is gone. Independence is gone. The world has shrunk to a single floor of the house. The Decathlon is the framework that pushes that decade out and changes its character — so that your 80s look more like the active 60s of someone who never trained.

The math forces the point. After age 50, the average untrained adult loses roughly 1.5% of their muscle mass per year. After 60, the rate often accelerates. By 80, an untrained person may have lost 30 to 40 percent of the muscle mass they had at 30. The capacity you will have at 85 cannot be bought in your 80s. It is built, or not built, in your 50s, 60s, and 70s and is managed thereafter. The Decathlon makes that math personal and visible, item by item.

What I have watched over forty-four years

In forty-four years of running Shape-Up Health Club, I have known a small number of members who are still actively training in their 80s and 90s. They are not common. But they have one thing in common with each other: they have been continuously physically active for decades. Not all of them lifted heavy. Not all of them did long aerobic sessions. But they all kept moving, with intent, year after year, without long breaks.

I will not name names, but I think of one member I have known for many years who is now in her mid-80s and still walks into the gym three days a week. She is not lifting what she lifted at 60 — nobody does — but she is lifting more than most 60-year-olds I see on our floor. Her InBody scan looks like that of a healthy 70-year-old. She lives alone in her own home. She drives herself everywhere. She cooks for herself. She mows her own front yard.

She did not get there by hoping. Somewhere around 55, she made a decision about who she wanted to be at 80, and she trained for it every week for thirty years. She never knew Peter Attia’s name. She never read Outlive. But she lived its principles for three decades before they had a name.

The Centenarian Decathlon is the formalization of what members like her did instinctively. It is the planning tool the rest of us need to follow the same trail with our eyes open.

The four pillars of training, and how each one serves the Decathlon

Attia structures all of his training prescriptions around four pillars, and each one feeds the Decathlon in a specific way. Your training plan should hit each pillar weekly.

1. Zone 2 cardio — the metabolic foundation
   Three per week of conversational-pace aerobic work or activity — about 60 to 70 percent of your max heart rate. Walking briskly, easy cycling, swimming at a relaxed pace, the recumbent bike. This is the engine that lets you recover from everything else, and the pillar that builds the mitochondrial base to walk to the trailhead, climb the stairs, carry the groceries, and keep going. Most members under-do this one or do it too hard.
2. VO2 max — the peak engine
   Short, hard interval work, once or twice a week. I prefer members work up to 8 METs average for at least 5 minutes and maybe work up to 10 minutes. This will improve your VO2 max, which is statistically one of the strongest predictors of all-cause mortality we have measured. A higher VO2 max at 75 means more reserve to survive a hospitalization, a pneumonia, a bad fall, or a stretch of weeks where you cannot move much. Members in Group 2 of last month’s diagnostic (Article Four: Which Fitness Group Are You?) — strong but under-trained aerobically — most need this pillar.
3. Strength — the pillar most members are weakest in
   Heavy resistance training, two and maybe three days a week, hitting the five major movement patterns we covered in Article 5: squat, hinge, push, pull, and carry. Heavier than you think you should lift. This is the pillar that catches your body when you stumble, that gets you off the floor when you need to, that lifts the carry-on into the bin, that holds the grandchild. The single most under-trained pillar on most members’ programs.
4. Stability and power — the pillar nobody trains
   This is the one that goes most often missed, and I see the gap on our floor every week. Single-leg work. Anti-rotation core. Jumps and throws and skips, scaled to your level. Fast-twitch muscle fibers — the ones that produce quick, explosive force — atrophy first with age, and they are precisely the fibers that catch you when you trip on a curb. If you are not training power, you are not training fall prevention. Power can be trained safely well into the 70s and 80s; it just has to be coached, dosed, and scaled correctly. Ask any of our coaches and we will set you up.

Four pillars build the Decathlon. The Decathlon is what you actually live.

How to build your own list

Take twenty minutes this week with a pen and a piece of paper. Not a phone — pen and paper. There is something about writing it by hand that makes it stick. Then work through these five steps:

1. Project yourself forward to 80, 90, 100, in detail. Imagine yourself at this age vividly. Where do you live? Who do you spend time with? Where do you spend a typical Tuesday morning? What does it feel like to wake up that day? The more vivid the picture, the better the list.
2. Identify ten specific activities. Not “stay active.” Not “be healthy.” Concrete things, in plain language. Play eighteen holes of golf walking, with my own clubs. Carry a sleeping grandchild from the car to the bedroom. Swim 500 yards without stopping. Climb three flights of stairs at the airport with a carry-on.
3. Mix daily living with recreational. About half your list should be ADLs — activities of daily living. Getting out of a low chair. Climbing stairs with a load. Lifting a suitcase overhead. Standing on one leg long enough to put on your pants. The other half should be recreational — the things you want to do for joy, not just for survival. Travel. Sport. Hobby. Family time.
4. Be honest about what would require preparation. Some of your items will require training you do not currently do. That is the entire point. If every item on the list is already easy, you have not aimed high enough.
5. Bring the list to a coach. This is the step most members will be tempted to skip. Do not skip it. The whole point is to map your training plan to your list. The coaching staff at Shape-Up will help you do that — that is exactly what we are here for.

A sample list, to get you started

To give you a starting point, here is a representative Decathlon for a Shape-Up member in their late 60s, projecting themselves to 85:

1. Walk one mile briskly without needing to rest.
2. Get up off the floor without using my hands.
3. Carry two bags of groceries up a flight of stairs in one trip.
4. Pick up and hold a grandchild for several minutes.
5. Drive a long road trip and carry my own luggage into the hotel.
6. Hike a moderate trail for an hour with rolling terrain.
7. Swim 200 meters continuously.
8. Get in and out of a kayak or low car at the dock or curb.
9. Climb three flights of stairs without resting or holding the rail.
10. Stand on one leg for thirty seconds without falling.

Yours will be different. The point is that yours exists, and that it is written down where you will see it every day.

My list, at 72, training for 92

For whatever it is worth, here is mine. I am seventy-two years old. I am writing this list for myself at ninety-two, and I am training for it every week.

Some context, because this list does not exist in a vacuum. From the time I opened Shape-Up in 1982 onward, I held a birthday contest on the floor every decade — open to members, staff, and friends. The biggest one was at sixty. I weighed about 260 pounds and I announced months in advance — to every member and employee of the club — that I would bench-press 400 pounds, standing-press 225, and put the full weight stack on every machine in the building for ten reps. I did all of it. That was my way of making a point about raw strength at sixty. Once the point was made, I went the other way. Over the twelve years since, I have dropped sixty pounds, shifted my training toward function and longevity, and now at seventy-two I weigh just over two hundred pounds and feel as good as I have felt in three decades. I cannot bench-press 400 pounds anymore. I do not want to. I want to be able to do what Bert showed me at sixty-six — and a little more — for the next twenty years.

That is what this list is for.

1. Lift my own carry-on into the overhead bin without help.
2. Get on the floor with great-grandchildren and stand back up without using my hands.
3. Ride an e-bike for twenty miles with Christi on a real trail.
4. Play a full drum set for an hour without my shoulders or legs giving out.
5. Hike up to the bristlecone pines in Bishop with friends.
6. Carry forty pounds of groceries from the car in one trip.
7. Travel internationally without assistance and carry my own bag.
8. Climb three flights of stairs with a small suitcase in hand.
9. Get in and out of any vehicle, including low cars, unaided.
10. Stand on one leg long enough to put my pants on each morning.

Those are the ten things I have decided I refuse to lose. The list lives on my desk at home where I see it every day. Every Tuesday morning session on the floor is, in some small way, a deposit toward one of those ten lines.

Write your list this week

The decision you make this week — about whether to actually write your own list, and then whether to train for it — is, in my forty-four years on this floor, the difference between two completely different next ten, twenty, thirty years. One version of you is mowing your own lawn at 85, traveling with your grandchildren at 88, and still walking into Shape-Up three mornings a week at 90. The other version is waiting for someone to help you stand up from a chair. The math is not subtle and the difference is not luck.

Write your list this week. Bring it to me at the front desk, or to any coach on the floor. We will map your training plan to it. From that point forward, you will know — every single morning — exactly what you are training for, and why. That clarity changes the work. It also changes the next thirty years.

Six weeks builds the habit. Three to six months builds the body. Ten lines on a piece of paper builds the next thirty years.

Next week: when fasting helps, and when it hurts.

— Robert Burns
Owner and Head Coach, Shape-Up Health Club