Your Biological-Age Test Is Fuzzier Than It Looks

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Today’s Health Upgrade

Fitness 
Strength or Cardio? The Longest Lives Had Both

Spend any time in the strength corner of the internet, and you’ll hear that lifting is the only longevity exercise you need. Spend time in the endurance world, and you’ll hear the opposite. 

A large new analysis suggests both camps are half right because the people who lived longest didn’t pick a side and prioritized lifting weights and cardiovascular training. 

Researchers followed nearly 147,000 health professionals for up to 30 years, tracking how much aerobic exercise and how much weight training each person did. Because they recorded both, they could see how each one related to risk of death, on its own and together. 

To be clear, the research was observational, so it shows which habits were linked to longer lives, not proof that exercise caused them.

Regular aerobic activity was associated with roughly a 26% to 43% lower risk of death than barely moving, and more activity tracked with more protection. 

Lifting was linked to additional protection. 

And the main takeaway is that the lowest risk belonged to people who did plenty of both.

One detail is easy to misread. Lifting alone showed only a weak signal in this data. That doesn’t mean strength doesn’t matter. The study measured time spent lifting, not strength or muscle mass, and those are the things that protect your independence, your bones, your blood sugar, and your ability to get off the floor or carry groceries upstairs at 80. 

Cardio can’t build those. Lifting can’t build a strong heart and lungs in the same way. Each covers what the other misses.

That’s the real takeaway: exercise isn’t a competition over which program matters more. They stack and work together to build a healthier system. Strength keeps your body capable. Cardio keeps your engine running. You need both for a long life you can actually enjoy.

So look at your week and find the missing piece. If you’re all dumbbells, add movement that leaves you breathing hard: three brisk 30-minute walks, a couple of bike rides, a swim. If you’re all running, add two full-body strength sessions. Neither replaces the other. Together, they’re where the longest lives were found.

Together With Cometeer
The Coffee That Actually Tastes Good Black

Most coffee comes from a plastic pod, a plastic machine, or both. And too often, it takes milk and sugar to hide the bitterness. What if better coffee meant more flavor, less plastic, and nothing to cover up?

Meet Cometeer. Developed by coffee-obsessed engineers from MIT, Cometeer brews coffee at 10 times normal strength, then flash-freezes it in an aluminum capsule at peak flavor. 

The result is remarkably smooth, naturally sweet coffee that actually tastes great black. Even the former president of Nespresso invested after a side-by-side taste test.

Conventional brewing can over-extract coffee, introducing bitterness that masks its natural sweetness. Cometeer's precision process — including a $500,000 grinder — extracts rich flavor and natural antioxidants with none of ashy, overly-bitter notes. Liquid nitrogen at -321°F then locks it all in.

And unlike traditional pod systems, there's no plastic countertop machine. Cometeer brews with stainless-steel equipment and uses advanced reverse-osmosis filtration and remineralization to remove microplastics from its water. Just melt a capsule for hot coffee, or melt and mix for iced coffee, lattes, or espresso-style drinks.

Each capsule packs 180mg of caffeine (about twice the amount in many conventional pods), plus more antioxidants than a handful of blueberries. No added sugar. No fillers. Just pure coffee.

Take it to work, pack it for travel, or blend it into a post-workout shake. Café-quality coffee for about $2 a cup, without the coffee-shop detour.

Cometeer features hundreds of roasts throughout the year from award-winning specialty roasters like Counter Culture and Intelligentsia. It's a whole world of great coffee, without the bitterness.

As an Arnold’s Pump Club reader, get $20 off your first order.

Health
Fact Or Fiction: Should I Test My Biological Age

Your Biological-Age Test Is Fuzzier Than It Looks

You spit in a tube or give some blood to get a better picture of your health. That’s the good news. These tests can prompt people to pay closer attention to their health, and proactive prevention is a good thing.

But when your labs come back, you see a list of markers and learn you’re “really” 41, even though your birth certificate states you’re 49.

You suddenly feel better about all your decisions, but the age you want to believe might be noise.

A Yale-led team analyzed 36 blood samples that had each been run twice through popular epigenetic clocks, the DNA-based tests behind most biological-age kits. Same blood. Same person.

The results should have matched, and often they didn’t. Typical gaps were one to two years, but one widely used clock differed by as much as 9 years between two runs of the same sample.

The team then built a redesigned version that brought most repeat results within about a year and a half of each other. Even then, processing samples in different lab batches shifted one clock by about four years. You can correct that kind of shift statistically, but most consumers have no way of knowing whether it happened.

It’s worth noting that the senior author has advised a consumer clock company, and the redesigned clock is patent-pending. The broader problem doesn’t rest on this one study, though.

Saliva and blood from the same person can give very different answers, with average gaps of almost 30 years for some clocks. In a two-year calorie-restriction trial, different clocks disagreed about whether it slowed aging at all.

And a 2023 consensus of aging researchers put it plainly: “There are not yet any formally validated or likely surrogate endpoint biomarkers of aging.”

That doesn’t mean biological clocks have no value. On a practical level, if trying to lower your number helps you make healthier decisions, the result is better behaviors and better health, even if the number itself doesn’t mean much.

On a larger scale, clocks can help researchers compare thousands of people to spot links between lifestyle and health.

Both uses are helpful. But for now, the clocks aren’t reliable enough to give you a precise personal number or tell you whether last month’s protocol worked.

You don’t have to stop using them, but it’s good to know what they can and can’t tell you.

If you want a self-test tied to health outcomes, check your blood pressure at home and track it month to month. Unlike biological age, blood pressure is a proven predictor of heart attack and stroke risk. In trials of blood pressure-lowering treatment, each 10-point drop in systolic pressure cut major cardiovascular events by about 20%.

Adam’s Corner
The Box

Peggy sat on a barstool and answered questions. I half-listened, half-prepared for the rest of the day’s video shoot. Then she said something I don’t remember well enough to quote, but it was also too memorable to forget.  

My life made me shrink.

Those weren’t the exact words, but that was her point. It was sharp enough that I stopped, made a note on my phone, and a few minutes later asked her follow-up questions to learn more.

The thing is, Peggy didn't say it like a confession. She said it the way you'd mention traffic, which is usually how you know someone has been carrying something for years.

She flew to Los Angeles because of what she'd accomplished in the Pump Club app. She went from a beginner who only did bodyweight exercises to winning powerlifting competitions in her 50s. By any reasonable measure, this was the kind of day people frame and hang on the wall.

But in this moment, there was reflection, joy, and pain. Because the shrinking came from something that also made her feel pride.

Peggy is a mom. From what I can tell, she loves and values it. It’s a role that gave her purpose and answered who she was before anyone had to ask. Over the years, it's also the role that took everything else about her and folded it down until it fit inside.

Moms don't take up space in the weight room. Moms don't spend that kind of time on themselves. Moms definitely don't get flown to LA.

Some of those rules came from other people. The rest, it seemed, she'd repeated to herself so long she'd forgotten she'd written them.

Then, at a live Pump Club event a few years ago, Peggy deadlifted for the first time ever. I still remember it because I told her she was strong, and then she told me it was her first time deadlifting. I couldn’t believe it because her deadlift was great for anyone. But for a first-timer, it was spectacular.

But let’s not turn the moment into something it wasn't. It wasn't a speech. It was one sentence, said in passing because it was true. She took it more seriously than I did. No one had ever told her that before.

One line from me challenged an entire story she had written for herself. And she decided that maybe it was time to edit the narrative and write a new chapter.

She kept training. She kept showing up. She became a powerlifting champion.

So when she sat in that chair, she wasn't thinking about cameras. She was thinking about the box. The one she and others created. And how she started living beyond it.

The Box Isn’t Always Bad (But It’s Still A Box)

Most of us live in a box.

Some we build. Some get handed to us, already labeled, and we carry them so long we forget we ever had a choice.

Mom. Dad. The reliable one at work. The guy who was a high school athlete and isn't anymore. The person who swears they're "not a gym person."

What makes this tricky is that the box often isn't bad.

Being a mom or a dad isn't a prison. It’s a privilege with enough good to last a lifetime. And that’s why it’s complicated.

A bad box, you push against. A good box, you decorate and move into. You hang pictures. You get comfortable. And little by little, the role stops being something you do and becomes a key part of who you are.

The problem is, for many people, the box can become the only thing you are. And that works fine, until it doesn't.

The kids move out. The job disappears. The body that used to cooperate starts negotiating. And what follows isn't just a change in routine. It feels more like mourning, because you're not only losing a role. You're losing the only version of yourself you've let exist for years.

A box doesn't have to be bad to make you small. It only has to be the only place you believe you're allowed to live.

If anyone understands this, it's the farm boy from a tiny village in Austria who became the world’s greatest bodybuilder.

For so long, the bodybuilder was Arnold’s box, and he earned every inch of it. Even back in the 1970s, he was already recognized as the greatest bodybuilder ever.

Then he said he wanted to be a leading man in Hollywood, and the people who decide those things handed him their list. The accent was too thick. His body was too big for the screen, and nobody would ever fit “Schwarzenegger” on a marquee. They told him to stick to what he knew.

He held out for the dream anyway and became one of the biggest movie stars on the planet.

Then he wanted to serve, and a new set of experts showed up with new reasons. Actors don't belong in politics. He became governor of California.

The highlight reel misses that bodybuilding wasn't a mistake he had to escape, and acting wasn't a phase he had to grow out of. Every box was good. None of them was everything.

If a farm boy from Austria can refuse to be just one thing, any of us can.

You Are Built For More

We talk about the benefits of training, and most people assume it’s only about health and your body. But it’s bigger than that.

The gym is an environment where the entire goal is to take up more space than you did yesterday. By pushing yourself to become better and grow beyond who you were.

It doesn’t matter who you are, your age, or your background; everyone has to work hard to improve. It’s a shared experience where everyone is equal, and progress must be earned.

Because of that, strength has a funny way of seeping into everything else.

Peggy didn't become a different person the first time she pulled a weight she thought was impossible. She just had evidence. Proof that one rule was wrong.

And once one rule is wrong, every other rule in the box starts to look a little less permanent.

So it's worth asking which rules you're still following and whether the box you live in has become too limiting.

It’s time to ask whether someone else created your limits, or whether you wrote them a long time ago and never went back to read them. And what the smallest version of breaking out might look like.

That’s the thing about boxes. Just because you live in one doesn’t mean you’re limited to only one.

You fill the first one to the brim, and somewhere in all that filling, you learn how it’s done. The patience. The willingness to be bad at something long before you’re any good. And when it clicks, you can see it as the only place you’re meant to be. Or you can see it as a blueprint of what you are capable of achieving.

Arnold did it on the biggest stage imaginable, from bodybuilder to movie star to governor.

But you don’t need Arnold-sized ambition because the move is the same at any size: master the role you’re in, and that mastery is all the evidence you need to do more, whatever that might be.

Peggy spent years filling one box.

Now she’s expanding out and eyeing what else she can become.

If you’ve been living in one box so long it feels like the whole house, look around. More boxes are waiting to be filled. And it’s never too late to grow into them. -AB

-Adam Bornstein is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Arnold’s Pump Club

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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell