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1970-01-01

Comfortable and uninterrupted sleeping, eating mostly plants, and getting your heart rate up and muscles moving for half an hour per day.

Anything else is going from 90% healthy to 99%.

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I'd like to add: Stretching or some other kind of flexibility improving activities. Muscles moving for half an hour a day doesn't (necessarily) do anything for that (may even make it worse if you're doing heavy stuff).

The effects on quality of life of a bit of flexibility are huge. Back pain, knee pain, shoulder pain, "RSI", and so many other ails are often just pretty much permanently cramped muscles negatively affecting ligaments and nerves.

Being flexible is important, but the latest research shows that heavy lifting improves flexibility about as much as a dedicated stretching program: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9935664/

On the phone so can't see study details - what do day consider strength training ? I used to lift heavy (well by regular people standards) and for example my squat mobility was shit. Trying to improve that with significant load would have ripped my tendons I feel. Decreasing the load to the point where it wouldn't might as well be called stretching cause it wouldn't qualify as heavy lifting. Also most powerlifters I know have shit mobility.

For the movements that you happen to make with the barbell.

Yeah, I noticed that after a certain age if you want to retain ability to do the movement you need to do that movement. Doing 20 others won't help with that one.

This + avoiding cigarettes, alcohol and any other drug as much as possible.

Biphasic sleep was probably more common before artificial light, and you really need to be moving every 30-45 minutes. Even just a couple of minutes of walking or doing some chore counts.

> Biphasic sleep was probably more common before artificial light

The last time I looked into this theory it wasn’t nearly as robust as I was led to believe. It got circulated as fact for a few years but the people pushing it didn’t really have as much evidence for it as I assumed.

That doesn't make it false. And you'd expect something so radical as extending the lit hours of human life to affect our sleep, as it does many, many other species.

Does caffeine consumption out watching horror films (to greet your heart rate up higher than normal) count, or does it have to be strenuous cardio?

Caffeine destroys sleep for many people. I wouldn't touch it.

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