What cycling can do to your rate of aging

A new study produced by Stanford School of Medicine sheds new light into how we age – specifically when and at what rate. Can cycling help during these critical times in your life, and what steps can you take to slow your rate of aging.

Chapters
00:00 – The Study
01:33 – Cycling
02:15 – Motivation
04:41 – Convenience
05:22 – The bike
06:34 – My anti-aging bike
08:18 – Summary

Paper cited:
Nonlinear dynamics of multi-omics profiles during human aging
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-024-00692-2

I post trail explorations and related reviews to highlighting the trail and/or what I’m using to explore; mostly with bikes but also by foot, ski’s and more. If your interested please consider subscribing and following along. Maybe you will discover some trails or ways to explore them that you haven’t considered before.

…And thumbs up to you for even thinking about it – double thumbs up for getting out there and doing it.

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What I ride:
Canyon Spectral On (e Mtb): https://www.canyon.com/en-us/
YT Decoy Core 4 (e Mtb): https://www.yt-industries.com/products/bikes/decoy/core-4/590/decoy-mx-core-4/preview
Niner RLT RDO (Gravel Bike) : https://www.ninerbikes.com/rlt-9-rdo/
Trek EXe 9.8 (Mid power eMtb): https://www.trekbikes.com/us/en_US/

Other Components and accessories from:
Fox: https://www.ridefox.com/family.php?m=bike&family=38
Cane Creek: https://canecreek.com/
We Are One: https://www.weareonecomposites.com/en-us
Rolf: https://rolfprima.com/
Leatt: https://leatt.com/us
POC: https://na.pocsports.com/

Other exploration gear:
Oboz, Salomon, and Saucony footware
Fischer, Madshus cross country skis

I support:
Truckee Trails Foundation: https://truckeetrails.org/
Tahoe Backcountry Alliance: https://tahoebackcountryalliance.org/

#Garmin #EdgeExplore #Strava #eMTB #mountainbiking #Truckee

One thing we all have in common is we’re all getting older. Whether we’re 20 years old or we’re 80 years old, we’re all getting a year older every year. But it turns out it’s not as straightforward as that. Fact, there was a recent study uh funded by the NIH out of Stanford uh by Dr. Michael Snyder who led the study. He’s a professor of genetics there. And they found that we age in spurts, not gradually over time, but at specific times in our lives. What they found is about your early 40s and at around 60 are when there’s a rapid change in the makeup of your body uh within the blood within the cells of the body. There are changes that occur that affect your health, affect your immunity system. They affect your ability to metabolize fat and get heavier. Um and they affect your ability to deal with alcohol and caffeine. And so it’s these times in our lives where we really need to be hypervigilant about our health. It’s also these times in our lives that things are changing. Kids are leaving the house. We’re getting more busy at work or at age 60. Maybe we’re retiring and things change. Your activity changes. So, it’s important to stay active because we know staying active is one of the best tools we have to counteract those kind of changes in our body. It’s our best anti-aging tool, if you will. So, this is where cycling comes in. I know it’s not a new concept, but staying active is really important. And we’re now we’re learning through this study that doing it around the ages of 40 and 60 is even more important than ever. Cycling is something you can do through all those years. I’ve done it for about 35 years now. Uh in retrospect, it has been something that’s been my anti-aging tool during those periods of time. It’s three things that have kept me riding and I’m going to share those three things with you today. The last one is about the bike, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Now, cycling, like any endurance sports, rewards those who do it often. And to do it often, you absolutely need the first item I want to mention, and that is motivation. So, how do you motivate yourself to keep doing this? Well, three things worked for me. Number one was social pressure. So if you can find some friends who are doing the same thing, you can find a group ride, something that keeps you connected that sort of makes you feel guilty if you don’t go out there or you’re really not going to see your friends if you don’t do it. Uh that is something that just kept me going. I found a group ride that I did eventually just about every day. Uh and it really kept me motivated to get out there. Of course, when you do it with friends or you do it with people that aren’t yet your friends, it is a bit of a challenge. It was for me. I mean, I was not strong. I couldn’t keep up with them. I didn’t know what to wear. I didn’t know how to fix my bike properly. I didn’t know how I was supposed to ride my bike properly in a group. And you catch a lot of flack for that. And so you really need to put yourself in the position to listen and learn from your friends, from your competitors, from those who are criticizing you, and just be ready to be on the learning side of the conversation. If you can do that, you’re golden. A couple other parts of motivation that work for me is uh challenging yourself. So, I like to sign up for rides or other events that are just going to kind of push my limits a bit. And when I do that, even when I’m riding with a group, if I push my limits a little bit, I will uh get the reward um from from having completed it. And that reward goes a long way. The other thing I do, and this isn’t necessary, but it was it was a third element of motivation for me, is I started racing. What that did was really made me train for the racing. I could see my results. I could see if I was getting better and I could see the results of not getting out there every day. And that really kept me going every day. Those three things together for me, and a lot of you probably experienced this, if you do that, it takes some time, may take a couple years, but after that, you’re hooked. I mean, you’re never going back. You’re going to be riding bikes the rest of your life. So, the second important item is convenience. And because I’m really good at coming up with excuses, I don’t need any excuses not to go out and ride. So, if I can get everything set up at the house to just make the process of getting on the bike easier and have a place that I can ride right out the front door, so I don’t have to load the bike and I don’t have to drive 30 minutes to go for the ride. I know I’ll much better at doing it every day. So, I need my helmet at the ready. I need my bike at the ready. I need a place to ride right out the front door, right out the driveway. And that brings me to the third item, and that is what kind of cycling do you do? And what kind of bike do you need to do it? For me, that has changed. You see, I used to ride road bikes, and that’s because I lived in a suburb of San Francisco, and everything that was available to me outside my front door was roads. Had some nice back roads and hills that we could climb, but it was roads. And I loved it. I loved the people that I rode with. In fact, I thought I’d never leave that area because uh when I would retire, I would want to keep riding with my friends and ride those roads. But for various reasons, I moved and I moved to the mountains. And I’m going to tell you what changed. It’s going to be obvious to you, but I don’t ride on the road anymore because I’m in an area where there’s a lot of tourists. Uh not a lot of back roads. Most of the roads have a lot of cars on them. So, I literally have taken this bike, I love it, and I’ve hung it up. If you watch my channel, you know I ride ebikes, and I love riding e- mountain bikes. I can get out far into the mountains. My friends come, we all have different abilities. We can all ride together, and it just gets me out on the trails, and I I just have a blast with them. But it’s not what gets me out every day. What gets me out every day is this bike. It’s Trek Supercaliber and it’s a cross country bike. Has no motor, but it really checks all the boxes for me. I’ll do a full review on this soon, but let me tell you why I love riding this bike. I’m really loving this bike because I get this great sense of accomplishment that’s keeping me motivated to ride it. I know I’ll ride it every day because of that. Uh, so I’m riding this bike more than I’m riding anything else. Uh, it’s fun. It’s more of a type two fun than I get with the ebikes, but I do get that sense of accomplishment at the end of the day when I’ve had a good workout. And I might even thinking of challenging myself with some signing up for some rides and maybe doing some some longer races with it. And of course, I can ride it right out the door and right out of the neighborhood, straight onto gravel roads, through meadows, up some nice climbs, [Music] hit some nice single track, maybe not in a crazy way I do with the ebikes, but plenty of fun and just enjoy the outdoors. uh that where I live now has to offer. So for you, it’s going to be different. Uh it’s going to be one that keeps you motivated, one that you can that’s convenient, you can ride out the door, and most of all, just something that will keep you fit and push you through those kind of periods of your life that we age quickly. Uh use cycling as your anti-aging tool. Have fun doing it. Uh learn as much as you can. That’s why I put these videos together. So, subscribe if you’re enjoying them. Talk about the bikes. I talk about places you can ride. I do some tests on components and ebikes. And I’ll be doing a lot more with this bike. So, thanks for watching and I will see you next time.