Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy - Until You're 80 and Beyond

I've been reading Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy - Until You're 80 and Beyond by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge for the last few weeks. A lot of the basic ideas of the book (at least the first part) reminded me of Exercised: our bodies are meant to move, and movement equals health. Younger Next Year is a shorter read though. I also found that Lodge, who was a medical doctor, breaks down the science in a fairly accessible way (while Liberman is taking an anthropological approach, so his book covers things differently).

Younger Next Year is all about explaining why we need to move, and how moving will fundamentally make your body younger. At its most basic level, everyone has signals in their body to either decay or grow; exercise turns the growth signal on. If you can turn the growth signal on repeatedly (by exercising the majority of days), then your body can repair damage over time, slowly becoming better than it was; doing this for a year will fundamentally make your body younger than it was the year before.

Younger Next Year is mainly focused on people nearing retirement. The book asks them to treat exercise as their new job in the last third of their life, working out on 6 days of the week (if you're not yet at retirement age, the book recommends that you aim for about 4 or 5 days since you don't yet have the time, and the decay signals within your body aren't as strong yet). It also talks about maintaining connections and finding purpose in your retirement, which I thought was very valuable - I've heard stories of people who pass fairly quickly in retirement if they feel they have no purpose outside of their career. 

While I found a lot of the science (Lodge's chapters) and the latter third of the book interesting, I do have to admit that I overall wasn't a fan of Crowley's chapters. He wrote them specifically for (older) men and it shows; I wasn't his target audience, and, being a woman, I felt uncomfortable with the way he was trying to urge his audience on. I did persevere and finish the book, but there were many times during Crowley's chapters that I didn't want to.