Forever Fit: The Science of Staying Competitive as You Age

Steven Kotler shares 5 key insights from Gnar Country: Growing Old, Staying Rad.

If you’ve been watching the Summer Olympics, you may have noticed a few wrinkles in the games this year. I mean literal wrinkles. Andy McDonald is representing England in skateboarding at age 50, which is pretty radical. Zhiying Zeng made her Olympic debut at 58, playing table tennis for the nation of Chile. And the oldest athlete out there is 65-year-old equestrian Juan Antonio Jiménez, riding for Spain. So if you think the Olympics is a young person’s thing -- well it mostly is. But the participation of these older folks is testament to the fact that the body and mind can stay sharper longer than most of us realize. Until recently it was thought that athletes getting up in years should probably stick with golf and maybe pickleball. But new research suggests that people of just about any age can enjoy and sometimes even excel at a wide variety of physical activity, including some extreme sports. In Gnar Country: Growing Old, Staying Rad, author Steven Kotler explores this new frontier, even as he puts his own aging body on the line by trying to become an expert skier in his fifties. Steven is a New York Times-bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective, where he studies human performance. Here he is to share 5 of his big ideas.

1. Long slow rot theory is simply wrong.

The place to start is with the traditional ideas about aging, or what I like to call the long slow rot theory: the idea that all our mental and physical skills decline over time and there’s nothing we can do to stop the slide.

This idea dates back to Sigmund Freud. In 1907, a few months before Freud’s 50th birthday, he wrote: “About the age of fifty, the elasticity of the mental processes on which treatment depends, is, as a rule lacking. Old people are no longer educable.” Freud believed that anyone over fifty was so beyond their sell by date that even therapy was impossible.

Freud’s statement is the origin of the long slow rot theory and the birth of the notion that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Yet, nothing could be farther from the truth. For starters, Freud himself wrote many of his most famous and important books in his fifties and sixties.