40+ Fitness Podcast

Pain is built by the brain, and because the brain can change, pain can change. That is the core of what pain psychologist Dr. Rachel Zoffness lays out in this episode. Pain is never all in your head, but it is never only in the body part that hurts either. It is biopsychosocial: biology, psychology, and your social world all turn the volume up or down.
Dr. Zoffness is faculty at the UCSF School of Medicine, lectures on pain science at Stanford, and is the author of Tell Me Where It Hurts: The New Science of Pain and How to Heal. She walks through her three core truths about pain, why 96% of medical schools teach no dedicated pain science, the pain dial (how stress, mood, and attention change what you feel), and the pain recipe: writing down what makes a bad pain day so you can build the opposite. She closes with the three things that matter most for a healthy life with pain: movement, social health, and balance.


Time Stamps:
03:48 Why pain is coming for all of us
07:56 Core truths 1 and 2: pain is the brain's opinion, and the brain can change
10:40 Core truth 3: pain is always biopsychosocial
16:05 A hammer and a bigger hammer: why medicine reaches for pills and surgery
19:41 The sociological domain: loneliness, trauma, and the 80% overlap
23:06 Acute vs. chronic pain, and the opioid lie
26:40 The pain dial: how stress and anxiety turn the volume up
27:46 Mood and attention change pain volume
32:03 Your high pain recipe, your low pain recipe, and painsomnia
36:11 Movement first, pain reduction later
37:35 Loneliness, cortisol, and social health
41:12 You have more power over your pain than you've been told


Links:
Dr. Rachel Zoffness (free resources page): https://www.zoffness.com
Tell Me Where It Hurts: The New Science of Pain and How to Heal
Instagram: @therealdoczoff
Fit for Task Muscle and Strength Workshop: https://40plusfitness.com/muscle

You can still build muscle after 40, and the research says you can build it at close to the same rate as a 25-year-old. What has to change is not how hard you train, it is how strategically you train, eat, and recover.
Alain Gonzalez is a fitness coach, author, and the creator of the largest YouTube channel dedicated to men's fitness over 40. He has spent more than 17 years helping men build muscle and get their health back, and his book is Muscle After 40. In this conversation we walk through his four pillars of muscle growth: mindset, training, nutrition, and recovery. We cover why volume is the thing that has to change with age, why movement quality sits above everything else in the gym, how to order your nutrition so protein comes first, and why recovery is the pillar most people over 40 quietly skip.
Time Stamps:
05:21 Why muscle matters as you age
07:08 The four pillars of muscle growth
08:30 Pillar one, mindset
09:39 Pillar two, training and volume
11:14 Movement quality comes first
15:24 Can you still build muscle in your 50s and 60s
18:06 The staircase model
19:18 Effort and training close to failure
20:37 How progressive overload really works
22:23 The nutrition staircase, protein first
24:10 Protein frequency after 40
24:47 Recomposition versus bulking and cutting
26:14 The recovery staircase
26:59 Sleep and chronic stress
28:49 Three strategies to get and stay well
Links:
Alain Gonzalez on YouTube: Muscle Monsters
Alain's book, Muscle After 40: How to Build the Strongest, Most Jacked Body of Your Life: https://amzn.to/4cVbmAD
Fit for Task Muscle and Strength Workshop, free and live Tuesday September 8th at 8:00 PM Eastern: https://40plusfitness.com/muscle
Allan's book, The Wellness Roadmap: https://amzn.to/3U1xEdn

Living longer is not the goal. Living better is, because the extra years most people are gaining are sick years, not good ones.
In this solo episode, Coach Allan digs into the Global Burden of Disease study published in The Lancet Public Health, which found the gap between lifespan and healthspan grew from 8.8 years in 1990 to 10.7 years by 2023. That is nearly eleven years, about 15% of a life, spent sick and incapable at the end. He opens with a story from Puerto Vallarta, where an earthquake left a man in his early seventies stuck on the third floor because he did not have the leg strength to walk down the stairs, and had to tell his wife to go on without him. The earthquake did not cause that. It revealed it. Allan then walks through his own earthquake moment, a stage 3 kidney cancer diagnosis and the immunotherapy he is still going through, the five levers that actually close the gap, and why the retirement-account model of health is the wrong one.


Time Stamps:
00:00 Lifespan versus healthspan, and the gap between them
05:58 Why the United States has the widest gap
10:02 Strength and stamina as non-negotiables
13:17 Purpose and relationships as the foundational why
17:23 Health deposits are not a retirement account
20:02 The Long Life Readiness Quiz
 
Links:
Long Life Readiness Quiz (free, takes a couple of minutes): https://40plusfitness.com/gap
The Wellness Roadmap by Allan Misner: https://amzn.to/3U1xEdn

Relying only on low-impact exercise can leave you more fragile as you age, because your bones and connective tissue need impact to stay strong. Graham Tuttle, a coach, the author of Born to Sprint, and the self-styled Barefoot Sprinter, argues that sprinting, jumping, and throwing are the real markers of a healthy body at any age, and that stripping impact out of your training in the name of safety quietly erodes the very capacity it is meant to protect.
In this conversation, Graham and Coach Allan get into why impact signals your bones and your brain that they are still needed, how training barefoot restores feedback and movement most of us have lost, the story of Graham coaching his own father to run again 15 years into a Parkinson's diagnosis, and his 10% rule for reintroducing impact safely when you are starting from badly out of shape.


Time Stamps:
06:00 Trusting the body's natural design
07:44 Poor eyesight, lifting for looks, and losing body connection
12:27 Rethinking the reductionist physical-therapy model
13:42 Fascia, movement patterns, and the whole body
17:57 Why impact keeps the body and brain online
20:51 How the muscle system manages force
24:04 Physical limitation and how you perceive the world
30:23 Impact, hormones, bones, and the brain
32:56 His father's Parkinson's and rethinking fitness
35:55 Finding purpose and meaning in older age
39:44 Jeffy: starting from ground zero
41:12 The philosophy of sprinting
46:44 Using impact to shake things loose
48:25 Rebuilding movement patterns from the ground up
54:03 Sprinter swinging and plyometrics
55:01 Restoring the ability to sprint


Links:
Graham Tuttle's book, Born to Sprint: Unlock Your Natural Strength, Speed, and Athleticism: https://amzn.to/4xzlCqa
Graham's website: https://thebarefootsprinter.com/
Graham on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram: The Barefoot Sprinter
Coach Allan's book, The Wellness Roadmap: https://amzn.to/3U1xEdn

Mobility, your ability to move a joint through its range using your own strength, matters more for men over 40 than passive flexibility, and rebuilding it is what lets you keep squatting, lifting, and moving through daily life without pain. In this episode I talk with Dean Pohlman, founder of Man Flow Yoga and author of Yoga Fitness for Men, about why sitting all day leaves most of us with mobility deficits that gym work alone won't fix. We get into the real difference between flexibility and mobility, why knee pain usually starts at the hips, core, and ankles, and the simple daily habits that keep you moving well as you age.
Time Stamps:
03:59 Why yoga feels time-intensive
07:42 Why men feel out of place in yoga classes
09:51 Flexibility vs. mobility explained
12:15 The everyday movements that need mobility
13:33 Why mobility work is essential, not a bonus
14:41 Benefits beyond mobility: breathing, balance, pain relief
17:39 What makes Man Flow Yoga different
21:02 Why you shouldn't quit squats at 40
23:38 Knee pain starts at the hips, core, and ankles
25:30 Allan's ankle injuries and the mobility fix
27:16 Building yoga and strength into a weekly routine
29:33 Dean's 3 wellness strategies: mobility, mindfulness, connection
Links:
Dean Pohlman on YouTube (Man Flow Yoga): https://www.youtube.com/user/ManFlowYoga
Man Flow Yoga app and membership: https://manflowyoga.com/join
Better Man Podcast on Instagram: @bettermanpodcast
Dean's book, Yoga Fitness for Men: https://amzn.to/4hJuZz5
Coach Allan's daily wellness tips newsletter: https://40plusfitness.com/tips
The Wellness Roadmap (Coach Allan's book): https://amzn.to/3U1xEdn