Before you buy another longevity gadget, try this: sit down on the floor and stand back up without using your hands.
We’ve made longevity far too complicated. You can now buy supplements, sleep trackers, glucose monitors, cold plunges, saunas, red-light panels, recovery boots and countless other gadgets designed to help you optimise yourself.
Some of those things may have their place. But a lot of people are trying to optimise the final 1% while overlooking the obvious 99%.
Can you get yourself up off the floor without using your hands?
Can you keep up with your children, or your grandchildren?
Can you walk up a few flights of stairs and feel perfectly capable at the top?
Those questions tell us far more than most of the numbers on a smartwatch. And one of the simplest ways to keep answering “yes” in 20 or 30 years’ time is to get stronger.
The floor test that predicts how well you’ll age
In 2025, researchers in Brazil published a study of more than 4,000 adults, most of them in their fifties and sixties. Each person was asked to sit down on the floor and stand back up using as little help as possible from their hands, knees or anything nearby. They were then followed for around 12 years.
Those who struggled most were almost four times more likely to die of natural causes during that time than those who did it cleanly.
That doesn’t mean a wobble on the way down seals your fate. But getting off the floor takes leg strength, balance, mobility and coordination all at once. It’s a very good snapshot of whether your body is still working as a whole.
The same pattern turns up elsewhere. The PURE study measured grip strength in almost 140,000 adults across 17 countries and found it was a stronger predictor of death than blood pressure. Every 5kg drop in grip strength was linked to roughly a 16% higher risk of dying from any cause.
Grip is only a proxy for overall strength, but the message is hard to argue with: strong people tend to stay around longer.
Why more people in their 40s, 50s and 60s want to get strong
For a long time, exercising for health meant moving more. Walk more, get your steps in, run, cycle, do your Zone 2.
None of that has suddenly become bad advice. I run myself, and I’d never tell anyone to give up their cardio.
But more and more of the people I train in their 40s, 50s and 60s want to learn how to get strong. They want to squat properly, deadlift and press something reasonably heavy. They want to know how to add weight over time, rather than turning up, getting a sweat on and going home.
The reasons are changing too. People still want to look good and lose a bit of body fat, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I’m having far more conversations about what they want their body to still be capable of in 20, 30 or 40 years.
I often put it in a slightly ridiculous but very simple way: if you don’t want somebody helping you off the toilet when you’re older, it’s worth learning to squat properly now.
It gets a laugh, but that is all a squat is – sitting down and standing back up again. Picking your suitcase off the floor isn’t a million miles from a deadlift. Carrying the shopping, lifting a grandchild and getting up off the floor all need strength.
Most of what we practise in the gym is simply a more controlled, progressively harder version of something you want to be able to do for the rest of your life.
Two hours of strength training a week is enough
Here’s the good news for anyone who is busy.
A Harvard study published this year followed more than 147,000 adults for up to 30 years. People doing around 90 to 119 minutes of resistance training a week had a 13% lower risk of dying from any cause than those doing none, even after accounting for their cardio. The lowest risk of all belonged to people who did both.
Perhaps most usefully, the benefit levelled off at around two hours a week. More wasn’t better.
That’s two decent sessions. You don’t need to live in the gym, and you certainly don’t need to become a powerlifter.
Lifting heavy safely: control matters more than load
Heavy is good. Stupid is not. When I say people should learn to lift heavy, I don’t mean loading as much weight onto a bar as possible and somehow getting it from A to B.
Heavy is relative. A 20kg goblet squat might be genuinely difficult for one person and barely a warm-up for another. What matters is that you can control the weight, produce good, repeatable reps and gradually become capable of more.
Done properly, heavy lifting is far safer than most people assume. In Australia, the LIFTMOR trial took postmenopausal women with low bone density and had them squat, deadlift and overhead press at genuinely challenging weights, twice a week for eight months, under close supervision. Their bone density at the spine and hip improved compared with a group doing gentle exercise, with no serious injuries reported.
These were exactly the women many people would have told to be careful with weights.
The key words there are “under close supervision”. If every heavy session leaves your back sore for three days, something has gone wrong. The strength you build in the gym should make you more capable outside it, not stop you doing the things you enjoy.
Losing weight? Protect your muscle while you do it
The rise of GLP-1 weight-loss injections makes all of this even more relevant.
Whether you take one is a conversation for you and your doctor, not me. But from a training point of view, one thing matters enormously: weight loss and fat loss are not the same thing.
A 2026 analysis of 20 clinical trials, involving almost 16,000 people, found that roughly a quarter to well over a third of the weight lost on these medications was lean mass rather than fat.
This isn’t only a GLP-1 problem, either, because dieting alone costs you muscle too. A 2025 review from the University of Glasgow found that adding resistance training to a diet helped protect muscle and improved strength compared with dieting alone.
So the message is simple. If you’re losing a meaningful amount of weight, for whatever reason, give your body a reason to hold on to its muscle. Lift something.
How to start strength training in midlife
- Two sessions a week. Around 45 minutes to an hour each is plenty.
- Learn the basics properly. A squat, a hinge such as a deadlift, a push, a pull and a loaded carry. Have someone qualified teach you, at least at first.
- Add weight gradually. A little more, or one more rep, over weeks and months.
- Leave your ego at the door. Good reps first, heavier weights second.
- Keep your cardio. Strength sits alongside it rather than replacing it.
The boring truth about longevity
Muscle isn’t just something we build to look better. It’s a huge part of what lets us get out of a chair, climb the stairs, carry our own bags and keep doing the things we love without relying on anyone else.
That is longevity. Not desperately trying to live forever, but stretching out the part of your life in which you still feel physically capable of doing whatever you want to do.
So before worrying about the latest supplement, recovery gadget or whether you need a red light shining on you at six in the morning, start with the boring things: maintain your muscle, keep your cardio up, sleep properly, eat sensibly and move regularly. None of it is revolutionary, and that’s rather the point.
If it means that at 80 you can still carry your own suitcase, get yourself up off the floor and, yes, get yourself off the toilet without anyone lending a hand, that’s a pretty decent return on investment.
