How To Get Stronger, Healthier, And Happier At Any Stage Of Life
Date Published: 01-03-2025
Publisher: New Line Books
boost your energy, and improve your mood every single day-no matter your age.
“Built to Last” is your complete blueprint for transforming both body and
mind, making it easy to overcome fitness challenges and truly thrive.
– 84 Easy-to-Follow Workouts: Each exercise is designed to be effective and
accessible, whether you’re new to fitness or looking to break through a
plateau.– Science-Backed Strategies: Learn the latest techniques from exercise
science, longevity research, and neuroscience to get the most out of every
workout.– Stress Management and Habit Building: Discover practical tips to manage
stress, form lasting healthy habits, and stay active even when life gets busy.
With clear, actionable advice that fits seamlessly into your daily routine,
“Built to Last” takes the guesswork out of getting fit. This book isn’t just
about exercise-it’s about creating a balanced, healthier lifestyle that
empowers you to live your best life.
Your journey to becoming stronger, healthier, and happier starts now. Let
“Built to Last” be your guide every step of the way.
EXCERPT
PREFACE
We all want the same basic things in life: to live long, stay healthy, and be happy. If we have those three, we can handle whatever challenges come our way.
But getting there can feel impossible-mainly because when we actually stop to think about it, we have no idea where to start. Breaking it all down into simple steps that we can act on isn’t something we’re taught to do. So instead, these big life goals seem so overwhelming that most of us just end up hoping for the best-wishing good health and happiness on ourselves and others during birthdays, holidays, and special occasions, as if the universe might grant them to us like a wish come true.
The truth is, we usually don’t start thinking seriously about our health and well-being until something shakes us awake-a personal crisis, a health scare, or a reminder that the choices we make today shape our future long before life forces us to take control.
This book is here to help. It’s not about magic solutions or one-size-fits-all formulas, because real health, fitness, and happiness are more complex than that. But at the same time, we all share the same biology, the same funda mental building blocks. And that’s good news! It means there are universal principles we can use to improve our quality of life, feel better, live longer, and be happier.
The catch? It’s up to you. No one is coming to do it for you, and no one will care if you do nothing. The responsibility is yours, no matter what stage of life you’re in.
Each chapter in this book gives you a plan. Each plan includes actions. As you go through, you’ll find the information you need to build your own ap proach-one that works for you.
And with the knowledge in these pages, along with the DAREBEE work outs included, you have everything you need to create a stronger, healthier, and happier life.
Make the most of it.
INTRODUCTION
Fitness is too important in life to be left to the lottery of socioeconomic sta tus and zip code luck.
Whoever you are, wherever you are, you have a right to feel strong and be healthy all your life. Achieving this has to be your work, your construct, your project. For certain, you cannot do this without some help. None of us can.
This book addresses that.
Use it to feel stronger and be healthier. In the process you will become better than you ever thought you could be and feel happier than you imagined. Because of that it may also help you live longer, be more productive and achieve more of what you dream of.
Nothing would make me happier.
David
Built To Last
THE PARADOX OF FITNESS
Fitness is not 1vhat you have been led to believe it is. The onfy expert on your bocfy isyou and though you mqy, at timeJ seek outside specialized help the goals and the drive to get fit and stqy healtry must come fromyou.
T
hink about being fit for a moment. What image comes to your mind? Depending on your age and sex I am going to bet that the images you project in your mental screen are people who are lean, sport a six pack and have strong and muscular arms and legs. While there may be a spectrum in just how specific and developed these attributes might be, these physical attributes are usually all present in the mental image we have of a fit person. And if I were to ask you a little more specifically about capabilities not just attributes then the mental model of a fit person you have created, in addition to looking lean and muscular is also capable of running fast, running long and jumping
high for as long as possible.
Ask yourself now: Where did this image of a fit person come from? Certainly no one took you to one side one day, pulled up a chart and explained to you that fitness means this thing or that thing. Nor was it something you were taught specifically at home or at school in so many terms and so many visual images.
Our perception of what fitness is has come about by osmosis. We’ve absorbed it from our environment through a barrage of advertising images, fitness industry posters, what we see in magazines and what we see on our screens of professional athletes and the semi-naked images of film stars in major Hollywood films. All of these have contributed to our own mental image of what fitness is. What all these different industries have in common
is the fact that whenever they promote an image of fitness that feeds into the popular conception of what fitness is, it is being promoted for professional reasons of their own that serve them and have nothing to do with what is actually good for us.
The paradox here, and it’s an important one, lies in the fact that we all make the mistake of accepting an externally imposed and largely culturally guided idea of what fitness is. We then use that as a standard against which we measure our own. By doing so we, essentially, accept what the external world tells us about fitness and then we use that externally imposed definition to shape the unique internal world and physique of every individual to match it. Obviously this can’t work. If it did we wouldn’t be having this discussion and you wouldn’t be reading this book. You would already have the knowledge necessary and the understanding you need to help you be healthy and feel
strong your entire life. And you would be practicing it.
A lot of what we will cover here appears intuitive. You already know it or sense it and if you don’t citing numbers is not going to make much of a difference to how you really feel about it. We will look at some numbers however because when it comes to fitness, the numbers help create a clearer picture of the reality around us. It is the numbers that tell a grim story about the state of fitness of the people around us and, quite possibly, reflect part of our own directly experienced reality. And it is the numbers that help us better understand where we fit in the picture that is revealed.
A Gallup survey contacted in 2009, for example, found that nearly half (49%) of all Americans “report exercising for at least 30 minutes, less than three days per week.” In other words nearly half the population of the United States exercises nowhere near enough to what it needs to so it can feel physically well and psychologically capable. We’re not even examining specific fitness attributes like strength and endurance, we’re only talking about basic exercise.
You’d think that a survey like that would be a strong wake-up call and something would have been done to change things, but no; the situation actually got worse. Nine years later, in 2018, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Prevention National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) drew on five years of data to show that only 23 per cent of Americans get enough exercise. That means that more than seven people out of ten do not exercise enough, if at all. In the intervening nine year gap between the first survey and the second half of the people who exercised, did so even less or had stopped.
Despite the fact that America leads the world in spending in every segment of the fitness market to the tune of $264.6 billion a year it ranks just 20th
12
in participation in physical activities that are classed as exercise. The NCHS figures for 2020 showed that the number of Americans who got enough exercise had improved by barely one percentage point. Yet, in America alone the average consumer spends $111.80 per year on athletic gear and the fitness industry is poised to grow in terms of revenue, by approximately five per cent a year.
Globally the fitness industry is worth a staggering $828 billion. Yet what is spent on fitness gear is not reflected on improved effects on health or even in participation in exercise. In Europe, figures released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for 2022 showed that more than one in three European adults does not do enough physical activity and only four in ten adults exercise regularly, with low rates in women, the elderly and lower socio-economic groups. This shows that despite all the socio-economic initiatives launched by European countries to help people exercise the number of people who don’t do enough is six in ten, barely better than what we see in America.
Clearly, there is a disconnect here. We all understand the need for exercise and fitness. We are all willing to spend some money on it. But most of us are unwilling to actually exercise or, if we are, we appear unable to stick to it long enough for it to make a meaningful impact on our health and longevity.
The problem then, and this paradox makes it apparent, is not that we don’t want to exercise or that we don’t understand what exercise will give us. We just saw that we are bombarded from virtually all sides with ideal images of fit people. We are on the receiving end of constant reminders from government organizations and health authorities of the need to exercise and its benefits. We are constantly told by the advertising industry how important exercise is and why we need to spend money to get new shoes, new outfits, new equipment, new gym memberships. No, the real problem is that for reasons we will look at here, we can’t make exercise an integral part of our lifestyle so that we can truly be healthier and live longer.
There are many reasons why this is happening. Each of them forms a layer of the paradox of fitness and we will unwrap them all, one by one. But let’s start with a truism: our current setup of modern life makes good health difficult. It’s a depressing thought and in this chapter we need to ask “Why?” Why is life as we currently experience it incompatible with good health? Surely the opposite should be true. Everything we do or, are told to do should be leading us to a healthier, longer life.
Even if we take the cynical approach that the world is a hard, cold, uncaring place that views each of us as a productive unit that’s only there to work, earn
13
money, consume goods and pay bills until we die, it stands to reason that it is to the world’s benefit if we can do all these things it asks of us, with more vigor and for a longer time. And for that to happen however we need to be in good health and feel happy in our body.
Unfortunately this is not the reality most people experience as they age. The reason their experience is so different from the idealized version that we hold in our imagination should become evident as we peel back the layers of the fitness paradox to better understand what lies at its core.
No One Is In Charge
If you were an intrepid alien looking for some great intergalactic investment opportunities and came to planet Earth you too may want to invest in some of the organic, biomechanical units living there. You may reason that unlike on your planet where no one works because smart machines do everything, on planet Earth the bulk of the work, both manual and mental is performed by organics.
Organics have a shelf-life however. As they age they begin to perform below expectation and then, eventually, break down and die. As a smart intergalactic investor then you may think that if you managed to somehow purchase a number of these organics and set them to work for you, in order to get the most out of your investment you will need to ensure that each of them is guided by a nutritionist, a therapist and a personal trainer. That way not only will you prolong their lifespan and help them live longer so you can recoup your investment but you will also prolong their healthspan so they can work harder and help you turn a tidy profit.
To the best of my knowledge there are no aliens purchasing humans. The world also doesn’t automatically provide us with nutritionists, personal trainers and therapists from the moment we are born so we can be healthier and live longer. The world, as we perceive it, appears not to care much about us because it is not an actual organized construct that has some kind of overseeing authority guiding it. The world emerges as a necessity that makes the many activities we engage in, as a species, possible.
As an emergent phenomenon, a wrapper of sorts, the world around us exists but it is not guided by anything beyond the blind dynamic forces that shape it. These forces are always reactive. Because they tend to shut the figurative stable door only after the horse has bolted, they help to highlight the magnitude of the problem but never really offer much of a solution until after the fact by which time everything is way harder to solve.
Let’s take a look, however, at some figures to see just how that reactive
14
nature takes form: In the World Health Organization (WHO) European Region report, being overweight and being obese affect almost 60% of adults and nearly one in three children (29% of boys and 27% of girls). The USA currently ranks first in obesity prevalence levels, Europe is in second place globally.
By the time these figures emerge get processed and are accepted it is already too late. On the ground they translate into a reality where there are a lot of people like you and I who have not had sufficient guidance in what to eat, how to eat, how to exercise and how to think about food and exercise. This means we are likely to end up in the depressing obesity statistics. If we are obese or even if we are just overweight we are significantly more likely to suffer from disease and die earlier. Even worse, before we die we are likely to experience a significant segment of time during which our quality of life and our ability to feel capable and be productive, requirements essential to experiencing personal happiness, will be severely limited.
Even at that stage, however, we may not be a completely lost cause destined to be consigned to the scrap heap. The return to good health and a long and happy life is certainly possible if we change the way we move our body, start to take care of our nutrition and do some work on our selves so that our emotional regulation, and the life choices we make, improve.
When no one is in charge it means that there is no benevolent alien coming to invest in us so that we can work for him and be as productive as possible for as long as possible and be well looked after in the process. Since no one is coming to save us this means there is no one looking out for us. We need to be the ones who take charge of ourselves and we need to be the ones who look after ourselves.
While this makes eminent logical sense it is also extremely difficult to navigate correctly. As we shall see, what we need to help us do so is a good plan.
The Adversary Within
Think, for a moment, about all the help we didn’t get when we needed it the most.
No one came to teach us about nutrition, exercise and mental health when we needed it. Our brain however is not designed to accept an information vacuum, so we learned what we could from the sources available to us: our parents, friends, the media, movies and TV and the culture around us. We learned this by watching and emulating, by working things out for ourselves using the limited experience we had and by making certain assumptions that
15
About the Author
in laminar flow processes. He converted his knowledge of science and
understanding of mathematics into a business writing career that’s helped him
demystify, for his readers, the complexity of subjects such as search engine
optimization (SEO), search marketing, social media, decision-making,
communication and personal development. The diversity of the subjects is held
together by the underlying fundamentals governing human behavior and the way
they are expressed online and offline. A lifelong martial arts practitioner,
David Amerland is found punching and kicking sparring dummies and punch bags
when he’s not behind his keyboard.
