"Strategically Tuning Out," with Gwendolyn Bounds

"Strategically Tuning Out," with Gwendolyn Bounds

Distilling our live conversation recorded above, Wendy aka Gwendolyn Bounds [https://substack.com/profile/24226423-gwendolyn-bounds] made a kick-ass list of 10 recommendations for strategically tuning out of the digital noise [https://open.substack.com/pub/nottoolate/p/strategically-tuning-out-10-constraints] assaulting us all nowadays. Worth reading. Below, I add a select few of my own, forged and tested in the real world of a older single-dad entrepreneur: * Run a 1-minute experiment not reflexively looking at your phone. The next time you’re bored—or think you’re bored, because you may be only conditioned to feel bored when you’re actually full of interesting ideas and thoughts—instead of pulling out your phone, leave it in your pocket or bag for 60 seconds. Give yourself one short minute to have thoughts, let memories flood in, remember something you wanted to try or someone you want to get back to. When the minute’s up, reach for your phone, if you still want you. Try this experiment every day when you feel the urge to stare at your phone screen. Watch what happens after about 2 weeks of this daily experiment. * Brutally overhaul your phone’s notifications so that you: * don’t hear, see or feel a buzz or ding every time you get a text or email (but can still get your calendar reminders, which are obviously important to allow through. * activate the function that blocks everyone except the people you designate (ie, parents or children or school/doctor’s office) from reaching you when you’ve activated your “notifications silenced” setting. * experiment with activating this setting during work or evening hours, when you really don’t want to be jumping at the phone whenever it flirps. * End your relationship with your phone (temporarily) every night before bed. Just for the hour before you turn the lights out. The phone should be dead to you in the run-up to bedtime. * Run a 1-hour experiment—are you ready for this?—leaving home without your phone. I know. It’s almost inconceivable. But it’s possible. And it’s strangely incredibly liberating. It’s like turning invisible to the world for a short time. Try it and see what happens. The Baby Steps version of this experiment is to leave work desk or office without your phone when you visit the bathroom, break room or a colleague’s desk. Graduate to spending lunch or errands without the phone. * Consider going back to paper when possible. It may cost a few dollars, but what about reading a paper newspaper or magazine, for instance, instead of just consuming them through a screen? Put a paper book (or, if you must, a digital book reader) on your bed pillow, to read for a few minutes in bed before sleep. Try it and see what happens. How have you strategically tuned out of the noise around you? We’d love to hear your thoughts, experiments, wins, misses and everything in between. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.agingwithstrength.com/subscribe [https://www.agingwithstrength.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Unconventional strength workout #1: Rings

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.agingwithstrength.com [https://www.agingwithstrength.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Many AGING with STRENGTH subscribers asked for specific exercises that build functional strength and neuromuscular fitness (see the definition of both, below) across multiple planes of motion—which I consider an absolute necessity as we age because it develops coordination, balance and strong bodies ready for anything. Because Substack is increasingly l…

Menopause for men with Dr. Annie Fenn

For men interested in learning more about menopause and perimenopause, or who just want to become better partners to women experiencing either, my candid and wide-ranging, no-b.s. conversation with Annie Fenn, MD [https://substack.com/profile/23887995-annie-fenn-md] is for you. We include clear, trustworthy information about sex, alcohol, nutrition, hormone treatments, fitness, sleep and other menopause-related topics that are so often marbled with misinformation. “Menopause for men” podcast timestamps 01:27—Defining menopause and perimenopause in clinical terms. “It is a retrospective diagnosis,” Dr. Fenn says. “There’s also a lot of misunderstanding in the medical community.” 04:15—Typical age ranges for perimenopause and the clues that it’s arriving. 05:24—Estrogen, progesterone & the hypothalamus. “They rise and then they fall, and then they rise and then they fall….“ 07:00—The rise of the menopause/perimenopause conversation (and the subsequent industry) during the past few years. “On social media, there are many ‘menopause experts’ talking about it.” Baby Boomers started it; Millennials wanted to talk more about it; celebrities took it to the next level. 08:25—The biggest male misconceptions about menopause. “You can’t just say, ‘Go to the doctor, get on hormones’ and you’ll be fine.” 08:58—How the Women’s Health Initiative study of 2003 “scared off a generation of doctors.” 10:05—The dearth of experienced menopause doctors. “There is a huge gap.” The “counterintuitive” choice for women. 11:20—Male misconception #2 about menopause/perimenopause. “There’s a lot more things going on than what’s happening to a woman’s emotions.” The problem of poor sleep quality. 12:30—“Zoom out a little bit” to understand a woman’s menopause experience: She’s taking care of work, kids, home, husband, etc., and then….”the bio-energetic crisis” hits. 13:38—The “injured athlete” corollary to menopause: how a guy might, might be able to relate to the changes and challenges menopause may bring. 14:41—The specific hormonal changes that occur during menopause. Estrogen, the master regulator, has receptors throughout a woman’s body—including hundreds in the brain. “Whatchamacallit Syndrome.” Brain fog, fatigue: “This can be very distressing.” Exercise becomes more difficult, through lack of sleep & food choices. 17:10—Making the right food choices in menopause & perimenopause. “Women are constantly pushing against this pre-diabetic state.” Eating for stable blood sugar. The great harm of UPFs. “Muscle is mandatory” — and its “a glucose sink.” 19:07—Being a good partner to women in menopause. “The last thing in the world a menopausal woman wants to hear is, ‘Oh, is it your hormones again?’” Being proactive and enabling (with some specific examples). Volunteering to take the kids out for a few hours or taking care of the damn groceries (or both). 21:34—Foods to avoid during menopause. 23:19—Alcohol’s role and caveats during menopause and perimenopause. 24:55—Two books for men (or anyone) interested in learning more about menopause and perimenopause. The amygdala & The I Do Not Care Club. “Women don’t care about stuff that they used to.” (Also: check out Annie’s Brain Health Kitchen [https://open.substack.com/pub/brainhealthkitchen] articles about menopause and perimenopause.) 27:16—Sex and intimacy during menopause and perimenopause. “Most of the time, it’s not about she’s mad at you (although she might be).” Lack of estrogen in vaginal tissues = “an easy fix.” Work on sex communication beforehand, if possible. 29:20—Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). Estrogen & progesterone; “testosterone could be included in the mix.” The new way to refer to this therapy: MHT. Tablets, creams, etc. Reducing colon-cancer risk and maybe risk of dementia. “Not every woman wants to be medicalized. But every woman deserves a discussion about the pros and cons.” 34:42—Resources for further reading. ”Your questions were not stupid at all!” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.agingwithstrength.com/subscribe [https://www.agingwithstrength.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Physical strength and flexibility in 2026

Last January, I published an audio & text essay, Physical strength and flexibility in 2025 [https://www.agingwithstrength.com/p/aging-physical-strength-and-flexibility-in-2025]. The thesis was that our bodies are meant to move and that, for healthy aging, some form of strength training—which need not be intense or include more than your own bodyweight—is non-negotiable. My goal, I wrote, was to “get both stronger and faster, and leaner and more flexible.” (Oh, is that all?) I also said I wasn’t after bigger muscles but greater neuromuscular efficiency [https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-does-science-say-about-ne-hrxsuMuiRUmS1XYmeCXpsQ#0]. Looking back, my 2025 goals bring to mind a childhood admonishment from my grandpa, when I failed to eat what I’d put on my dinner plate: “Your eyes were bigger than your stomach.” In 2026, I’m organizing around a simple mantra: Move your body. Every day. With purpose. The simplicity of this 11-syllable mantra is intentional. A year ago, I wrote about jumping rope, bar squats and box jumps as means to achieve my personal physical strength and flexibility goals. The jumping rope habit stuck, thankfully, but bar squats—one of my oldest and most reliable weighted exercises—no longer work for me, I realized after one too many “uh-oh” setbacks. (If you’re interested in a fuller explanation of my break up with heavy bar-squat routines, drop a note in a comment, and maybe I’ll write a separate post about that.) On the other hand, moving with purpose for just 20 minutes a day is a goal that each of us can interpret and tailor to our 2026 physical strength and flexibility goals. What does “with purpose” mean? Moving with purpose simply means intentionally putting your body into motion and your muscles into positions of healthy stress. For some people, gardening or a brisk walk is sufficient for their goals and bodies. For others, moving with purpose means resistance training, practicing yoga or pilates, a short swim or bodyweight movements in the living room after lunch. In other words, purpose means doing more than only the minimum movement required to continue your existence and fulfill your daily obligations and needs. It means doing more than moving your body from bed→bathroom→kitchen→car →desk→car→kitchen→couch→fridge→couch→ bathroom→bed each day. Another way to think about moving with purpose is that it’s a want, not a need. And that suggests how much of physical strength and flexibility is really about desire. If you can figure out why you want to work your body for those 20 minutes a day, you’re much more likely to end up doing it. Why 20 minutes? For physical strength and fitness, small wins lead to bigger wins. We can’t all realistically get to the gym, pedal 10 miles or grind out a run three times a week. But we can all burn more calories being active in our own homes, 30 seconds or 2 minutes or 5 minutes at a time. My argument is that while 10 minutes a day is not enough to do much, and that 30 minutes can feel unrealistic to many people, 20 minutes a day of purposeful physical movement is enough to build gains in functional strength, flexibility, balance, proprioception, and neuromuscular fitness that you can feel and that gives your body and brain invaluable, habit-forming rewards for long-term strength into old age. If you’re like me and want to be able to walk briskly when you’re 80, think about moving your body with purpose now, for 20 minutes a day. An eminently achievable goal for 2026 Twenty minutes represents roughly 2% of a 16-hour waking day. Can you carve out 2% of each day to build physical strength and flexibility in 2026? I think you can. In a subsequent post—if there is sufficient interest from all of you—I’ll stake out specific movements and exercises for building muscle (lean or large), cardiovascular endurance (VO2 max), greater balance and core strength (highly correlated to greater longevity) for 2026. All of which are the result of some hard lessons I’ve learned after 45 years of physical training…and some unexpected breakthroughs from last year. Until the…keep going. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.agingwithstrength.com/subscribe [https://www.agingwithstrength.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The question to ask your younger self

TRANSCRIPT In this audiocast, I invite you to join me on a slightly provocative thought experiment: Imagine you could reach back through time to ask your younger self a simple question: What do you want for me? Not what did you want for me, but what do you want for me now. Because this conversation is happening in the present — and because that vision your younger self had remains alive — and actionable — in you today. That’s my argument….and here’s why. I came across this quote recently. “Discipline is remembering who you said you wanted to be.” There are four important parts to that idea: 1 | You had a vision for yourself One is simply that you had a vision for who you wanted to become. It was specific, ambitious, thoughtful and achievable. And it came from you. Decades ago, for instance, I had dreams of becoming an oceanographer, a literary travel writer, a jazz bassist and a spy. 2 | It was about who, not what, you wanted to become Second, your vision is about who — not what — you wanted to be. We often default to defining ourselves by what we are, professionally. But for many of us, what we do for money is a superficial proxy for who we are, really, if or when our jobs disappear. When I left The New York Times, I began the uncomfortable exercise of figuring out who Paul von Zielbauer — no longer from The Times — actually was. 3 | You spoke your vision The third important part of this idea that “Discipline is remembering who you said you wanted to be” is that verb — said. You spoke this vision. You expressed it to family, friends. And speaking it put life into it, whether or not you knew it at the time. Back in 1993, I’d talked about traveling the world so much that, after a Chicago taxi smashed the front end of my trusty Mazda 626, I used the insurance money to instead buy a plane ticket to Hanoi and ride my mountain bike through Vietnam. 4 | It starts with having the discipline The fourth important part of this idea is that it starts with discipline. It takes discipline and self-belief to move the idea of who you said you wanted to be from nostalgia and memory to the present and actionable. After I left The Times, which I did because its vision for me had become a pale shade of what I knew I could accomplish, I started a social enterprise, called Roadmonkey [https://www.oprah.com/world/philanthropic-adventure-travel-roadmonkey], that combined ass-kicking physical adventures in remote foreign lands with hands-on volunteer projects for local communities in need. I had no idea how to do it, and it didn’t make much money, but it was the purest expression of who I am and what I believe in as I could have imagined. What are the purest expressions of who you are? I suppose starting Roadmonkey, and building playgrounds and school rooms and chicken farms for struggling, disregarded communities in Vietnam, Peru, Tanzania and Nicaragua was my version of remembering who I said I wanted to be. (I just wish I’d been smart enough to figure out how to make a living wage from it.) It was me asking my younger self: what do you want for me? As fate would have it, I had to ask that question yet again in 2023, when my last salaried position — head of content for a Bay Area venture capital firm — was terminated with prejudice. “Hey, it’s me again. Yeah, I know. So, one more time: what do you want for me?” I’ve written about that experience in a different post, about aging with resilience [https://www.agingwithstrength.com/p/aging-with-resilience-in-an-unstable], but I raise it here because many Gen X, young Boomers and even late Millennials are now going through a reckoning of forced reinvention thanks to a combination of old-school ageism and the corporate imperative to cut workforces to the bone, because…AI! What’s in your “radiantly imagined future”? I have a feeling it’s going to get much worse. If it doesn’t, I still encourage you to reach back through the years to ask your younger self what she or he wants for you. It’s not a question born of desperation but of determination: to live as fully and completely as possible with the years you still have. Or as we used to say at Roadmonkey, to live like you mean it. Speaking of which: Maybe my single favorite line in literature is from an obscure F. Scott Fitzgerald short story called “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”: “It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future.” Encouraging you to pose this question to your younger self, about what he or she wants for you, is another way of pushing you to think about and define your radiantly imagined future. That’s where the discipline comes in: to imagine radiantly, even fiercely, who you will become, even well into middle age or older adulthood. Nothing I’m saying here requires making radical changes to life as you know it—unless that’s what you want. It does require re-connecting to your innate understanding that you’re absolutely capable of so much more than you think you are, if you just give yourself a chance to prove it to yourself. Audaces fortuna iuvat (fortune helps those who dare) After successfully completing far-flung Roadmonkey expeditions — cycling through the highlands of Vietnam, or climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or horsebacking through Patagonia sheep country, followed by those several days of hands-on volunteer work — people would often return home with a burning sense of mission and purpose and belief to keep that momentum going. Many ended their jobs or the relationships that weren’t working for them, and began doing the things that matched their visions of who they said they wanted to be. Roadmonkey is dead, unfortunately. But you aren’t. So what are you going to do about it? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.agingwithstrength.com/subscribe [https://www.agingwithstrength.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]