Mihail Pautov explains how mobility naturally shrinks with age, using a triple wide hallway metaphor: your physical options narrow over time, and many people stop running by their 40s due to injury. He defines mobility as moving pain-free the way you want, and suggests tracking movement, sleep, and nutrition as vital signs.
Chapters
Can you tell us more about this idea of mobility? Let's define mobility. First, you use your body in the ways that you want, and can you do it in a pain free way? So it really ends up being a very personal idea. Everyone knows that 120 over 80, it's not good blood pressure, but it's a normal blood pressure. And then that's the point where we said, hey, we should pay attention a little bit more, or we know what your temperature should be. So people are very sophisticated about some of the very basic vital signs of human beings. Why don't we have a set of behavioral vital signs in terms of movement and sleep and nutrition? I said to a person, what, what's normal blood pressure? Like 120 over 80. That's good. And I'm like, how much should your hips move? And they have no idea.
If you think about your mobility like a triple wide hallway, that's what your mobility is like. You have a lot of choice. 20s, you can pick up new sports, you can do whatever you want physically. You know, you can put on muscle mass. You have all this sort of physical flexibility at that age. But for any of us who are not 20, we start to see that hallway begin to narrow as we get older. When I was 20, everybody I knew was like a jogger or a runner. They would do that as exercise. And now, Once I reached 40, I noticed that only like 10% of my friends could still run because they'd all had injuries. Running hurt their bodies too much. They felt like it was too much load, so they cut running out and switched to biking, for example.