Try This – 3 Shares For The week

Try This community, this week we’re talking VO2 max, shingles and dementia, and some solid advice about staying strong as we age and why that’s super important. 

Let’s dive in… 

Number 1: How “Narrowing” Slowly Destroys Your Life

I loved this powerful thread on X from Dr. Howard Luks, an orthopedic surgeon for over 30 years. The thing that quietly destroys more lives than any injury or surgery isn't a torn ACL or a blown-out hip. He calls it the narrowing:

Here's a little summary of how narrowing works: You used to carry four grocery bags. Now you take two. You used to get on the floor with the grandkids. Now you stay on the couch. Your body loses a little capacity, your habits shrink to match, and a few years later that smaller life is just... your life. Nobody chooses it. It happens by a thousand tiny surrenders. And the cruelest part? It feels exactly like aging, so people don't fight it.

Is some decline real? Yes, VO2 max drops about 10 percent per decade if you do nothing. Power fades twice as fast as strength after 50. But Luks says that's a sliver of what people actually lose. The rest is a death spiral. You stop lifting. You lose muscle. You get weaker. You lift even less. The loop tightens until the door you thought was open…closes. 

Here's the hope: That loop runs both ways. Trained adults in their 70s routinely outperform sedentary people half their age. The ones who reverse the narrowing aren't genetic lottery winners. They just decided to stop accepting the losses. Luks is proof at 63. Most of your narrowing is reversible the moment you ask your body to work again.

So how do you push back? Luks lays it out in The Midlife Athlete's Playbook. The big idea: You can keep the same goals at 60 that you had at 30; you just have to train differently. The narrowing is real. But it is not your destiny.

Number 2: The Real Reason VO2 Max Declines with Age

Speaking of VO2 max, I came across this incredibly thought-provoking article by Daniel Tawfik that questions the dominant explanation for why VO2 max declines with age. The standard story has always been cardiac in origin. The heart pumps less blood, so your muscles receive less oxygen.

It turns out there's more to the story. But first, why should you even care about VO2 max? Because it might be the single best predictor of how long—and how well—you live. 

VO2 max is your body's ceiling for taking in and using oxygen, and it’s one of the strongest predictors of longevity. In some studies, low cardio fitness rivals smoking as a risk factor for early death. And here's the kicker: Starting around age 30, it drops about 10 percent per decade if you do nothing, eventually settling around the minimum level you need just to handle daily life.

So, back to that heart-centric story. The new analysis from Healthspan breaks down the research, and it turns out your heart is only half the problem. In young adults, about 77 percent of what limits VO2 max is your heart, while 23 percent is your muscles. By your 70s and 80s, that flips to roughly 56 percent heart and 44 percent muscle. 

In plain English? Young muscle pulls about 80 percent of the oxygen out of your blood. By 80, that drops to around 60 percent. Your muscles literally get worse at using the oxygen your heart sends them, as mitochondria fade and the tiny capillaries feeding them thin out.

So here's the good news: That muscle machinery is trainable, even late in life. 

Endurance work is the most reliable way to build new capillaries, while short intervals (brief periods of intense exercise followed by rest) are the most time-efficient way to rebuild mitochondria. 

And you don't need to live in the gym. Meaningful gains show up in as little as 60–90 minutes a week, and mitochondria start responding within the first two weeks. The takeaway is the same as Dr. Luks': The decline is real, but how steep it gets is mostly up to you. Start training now. 

Number 3: Does the Shingles Vaccine Actually Help Prevent Dementia

You might have seen a bunch of health influencers and media outlets recently shouting from the rooftops that we should all be getting our shingles vaccine to help us dodge dementia. The excitement traces back to some splashy studies, including a widely covered "natural experiment" out of Wales, that found people who got the shingles shot were meaningfully less likely to be diagnosed with dementia in the years that followed.

Sounds amazing, right? But Dr. Vinay Prasad, a voice I really respect, came in and started questioning the data. And his issue isn't that a vaccine could help your brain. It's how ridiculously fast the studies say it works. One JAMA paper claims the shot is already slowing dementia by 100 days. Another shows a 5 percent drop within three years.

Here's the catch: Dementia takes years, sometimes decades, to develop. So how does a shot reverse it in a few months when no drug in 50 years has pulled that off, even with hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at the problem?

Prasad thinks the more likely answer is simple. It’s possible that people who get vaccinated are just different. They're usually healthier, see their doctors more, and stay on top of preventive care. 

His best point? One analysis found that basically every adult vaccine seems to prevent dementia. That's a huge red flag that we're measuring the kind of person who gets vaccinated, not the vaccine itself. He's not anti-shingles-shot; he just wants us to pump the brakes on the dementia hype until a real trial proves it. Interesting take!

That’s it for now. 

See you next week for more shares, 

Dhru Purohit 

The information in this newsletter is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice; please consult a qualified healthcare professional before making any health-related decisions.