How does aging play out past sixty?

How does aging play out past sixty? Did you notice things changed dramatically after sixty? What do you wish you'd known a decade earlier to help you prepare for it?

Mansour Ansari

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It sucks, Big Time. It does indeed. I now know how to prepare for the next chapter in my life. Please allow me to share my discovery.

So, as we age, two things happen. We slowly deteriorate, we get closer to the end zone of life.

If that sounds like bad news, I have some good news for everyone. We can do a few things to make life to last longer and while still living to enjoy a terrific quality of life. So let’s stop the whining and get with a program that drastically enhances the quality of life.

Rehabilitate what you got. The sooner you begin, the better the results.

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When I started my rehabilitation journey many years ago, I was in bad physical shape, hard to move around, had extra body fat all over; I looked inflamed from head to toe. I ate and drank the crappiest stuff that tasted good, neglected my health from every aspect. Does that sound like you? If it even remotely resemble, seem like you, then read the rest of this answer.

I wasn't healthy. I had low stamina (weak cardiovascular), got hurt easy, I had a hard time coping with the signs of aging. I would not do anything that would reveal my weaknesses, and I was reluctant to step out of my comfort zone at all costs.

Life sucked big time. The worst thing was the perpetual, never-ending freaking depression. Self-confidence at the lowest level might as well call it non-existent. The idea of “no longer being relevant” was frightening, discouraging. So, I lumbered through daily life walking around with droopy shoulders, head down, inflamed body, and frustrated.

I now know that my hormones depleted, I was slowly losing connective tissues around my joints, and my bones were thinning. My core muscles were weak, my support muscle groups were at weakest limiting my mobility, balance. On the top of all these nasties, I was tending to a mostly deteriorated pair of knee joints preventing me from doing anything physical.

I was fighting the Osteoarthritis, a common form of tear and wear of knee joints. That comes with aging but will come with a vengeance if your lifestyle contributed, intensified the results. I wished, I knew how to fight back when I turned 30.

Here is what I do (to fight back, that is) in a nutshell:

I included in my new lifestyle, a robust program of barbell strength training. The newly adopted lifestyle forced me to eat clean and sleep/recover accordingly. Slowly and surely, I rehabilitated my condition, improved all my fitness attributes. Fast track nine years later, that is me lifting weights at home in my backyard.

The good news: You can do it too.

Thank you for reading my answer.

Picture: Me.

Edit: December 31- 2020 -Added video clip sample of my workouts at 65

Edit July 2022

I am 66, and I remember writing this answer a few years ago. It is a popular answer, and the Quora algorithm often circulates it.

I have improved a lot since then and have aged a few years. Over the last few years, I have learned to plan better and have improved my diet and nutrition knowledge. I have become much leaner and learned ways to stay slim and fit. You guys out there can do the same. It is no rocket science.

My workout quality has not changed much, but the volume and intensity shifted differently. My methods are a bit different to adapt to my age, recovery ability, and goals; I have added a prescription for specific bodybuilding workouts, some Powerlifting movements, and plenty of Olympic lift variants used as therapeutic prescriptions. The Olympic lifts (snatch and Clean and jerk variants), compared to Powerlifting workouts (deadlifts, Squats, and the Bench), are easier to recover because they are different concepts. My lifts are not as heavy, but I lift plenty of lightweight and high-speed workouts. My mobility has substantially improved, and I am here to tell you that there is a life beyond 60. Stay active and keep moving. Don't sit on the sideline and watch others.

I walk and jog every day and train with weights at least twice weekly.

One piece of advice for folks past 60 is to lift weights and do daily cardio. Walking is an excellent cardio exercise that can help balance, stamina, and fat loss. Do stretches and balance routines, do meditation, and don't take yourself too seriously.

Mansour’s disclaimer:

Don't do anything stupid and get hurt lifting big weights after reading some of my answers. It would make us both quite unhappy. Consult a Medical Doctor, a Strength Training coach, and common-sense specialist before doing anything you may read in some of my answers.

The Battle of Polygon Wood

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In the mud of Polygon Wood in 1917, a young Australian soldier stopped fighting a war long enough to bury his brother with his bare hands and a groundsheet.

Ninety years later, the earth gave Jack Hunter back — exactly the way his brother Jim had left him.

September 1917. The Battle of Polygon Wood, Belgium. Two brothers from New South Wales, Jack and Jim Hunter, fought side by side in the chaos of one of the Western Front’s bloodiest offensives. When Jack was killed, Jim did not keep running with the rest of his unit. He stopped.

In the middle of machine-gun fire and exploding shells, he wrapped his older brother in a groundsheet. He folded Jack’s arms gently across his chest. He laid him down the way you lay someone down when you love them and you cannot bear to leave them like they do not matter.

Then Jim had to keep fighting.

He survived the war. In 1919 he returned to Belgium with one purpose: to find the place where he had buried his brother. To stand there again. To know Jack was still where he had left him.

He searched the churned, re-shelled, unrecognizable ground for days. He found nothing. The battlefield had swallowed the grave whole. Jim had to sail home without the closure he had crossed an ocean to find.

He carried that weight for the rest of his life.

In 2006, a construction crew doing routine roadwork near Polygon Wood hit something that made them stop. Beneath the surface of ordinary Belgian soil lay five World War I soldiers who had been waiting in the dark for nearly ninety years.

Four had been buried quickly, practically, in the chaos of combat. But the fifth was different. He had been wrapped carefully in a groundsheet. His arms had been folded gently across his chest. Someone had taken time in the middle of a battle to lay this man down with love.

Archaeologist Johan Vanderwalle was called in. DNA testing began. When the results came back, a name emerged from nearly a century of silence: Private Jack Hunter, Australian, from New South Wales.

When the family was contacted, they shared the detail that reframed the entire discovery: Jack had not gone to war alone. His younger brother Jim had been with him. It was Jim who had stopped in the middle of the fighting to bury his brother with his bare hands.

Jim never found Jack in 1919. But Jack had never actually gone anywhere. He was right there, waiting, wrapped in a groundsheet with his arms folded across his chest, exactly the way his brother had left him.

So moved was Johan Vanderwalle by the bond between those two brothers that he refused to let the story end with a DNA result and a military reburial. He and his friends created the Brothers in Arms Memorial Project. An Australian artist worked from family photographs and battlefield relics to sculpt a bronze statue of Jim holding Jack one last time. The statue weighs 800 kilograms. It cost 160,000 euros. Every gram and every cent of it is a monument to what it means to love someone enough to stop a war, even briefly, even just for yourself, to make sure they are not left alone in the mud.

On September 25, 2022 — exactly 105 years after the Battle of Polygon Wood — the monument was unveiled just steps from Johan’s café in Zonnebeke. Inside the café, his museum now holds the brothers’ full story. Helmets, shell fragments, photographs, and two small brass rings made from battlefield shell casings, twisted together into a single symbol of two brothers who fought side by side and were separated by death but never truly apart.

The ANZAC spirit does not fade. And neither does the story of Jack and Jim Hunter — two brothers from New South Wales who went to war together and, in the end, were never truly apart.

Patsy Takemoto Mink

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In 1948, a brilliant young woman applied to medical school twelve times.

She was rejected by every single one.

Not because her grades were poor. Not because she lacked ability.

Because she was a woman.

Most people would have stopped there.

Patsy Takemoto Mink did not.

She was born in 1927 in Maui, Hawaii, the granddaughter of Japanese immigrants who had come to work the sugar plantations. Her father was a civil engineer. Her mother was a homemaker. From the beginning, Patsy was told the world had clear lines about what girls — especially girls who looked like her — were allowed to become.

She ignored every line.

She graduated high school as valedictorian and class president — the first girl ever elected to lead that student body. She studied science and decided she wanted to become a doctor.

So she applied.

Twelve times.

Twelve rejections.

The message was clear: medicine was not for women.

Patsy switched to law.

The University of Chicago accepted her. She was one of only a handful of women in her entire class. While there, she met a man named John Mink — a white man from Pennsylvania — over a game of bridge. They fell in love. They married.

She graduated with her law degree in 1951 and tried to find work.

No firm would hire her. She was a woman. She was Asian American. She was in an interracial marriage. Any one of those facts was enough to close a door. All three together made her, in the eyes of most employers, unemployable.

So she did what she always did when doors closed.

She built her own.

Patsy moved back to Hawaii, opened her own law practice, and became the first Japanese American woman to practice law in the state. Then she looked at the political world around her — at a legislature full of men who weren't talking about the things that mattered to working families, to women, to minorities — and she decided to do something about that too.

She ran for office.

The party didn't think she could win.

She won.

Then she ran for the territorial Senate. Won again.

Then she ran for Congress. Lost. Came back. Ran again.

And on January 4, 1965, Patsy Takemoto Mink was sworn into the United States House of Representatives.

The first woman of color ever elected to Congress. The first Asian American woman ever to serve. She was 37 years old.

On her very first day, she joined an effort to challenge the seating of Mississippi's all-white congressional delegation — men elected in races marked by violence and voter intimidation against Black Americans.

That was Patsy. No warmup. No easing in. Just fighting, from the first moment.

Over the next 24 years in Congress — with a stint as Assistant Secretary of State under President Carter in between — she opposed the Vietnam War before it was safe to do so, championed Head Start, school lunches, special education, and national childcare, and traveled to Paris to push for peace when the Nixon administration stopped talking to Congress.

But her most enduring gift came in 1972.

Working with Senator Birch Bayh, Patsy helped write 37 words that would change America forever:

"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Title IX.

Thirty-seven words. Signed into law on June 23, 1972.

Because of those words, girls who had been told sports weren't for them suddenly had teams, scholarships, and futures. Women who had been quietly pushed out of academic programs suddenly had legal protection. Doors that had always been locked were, by law, required to open.

The same doors that had been slammed in Patsy's face.

She kept fighting until the end. In August 2002, she was hospitalized with pneumonia. On September 28, 2002, she died in Honolulu at the age of 74 — just one week after winning her primary election.

On November 5, 2002, the people of Hawaii voted for her anyway.

Patsy Takemoto Mink was posthumously re-elected to Congress.

Shortly after, Congress renamed Title IX in her honor: the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.

She never got to be the doctor she dreamed of becoming.

But because she was rejected — and because she refused to let that be the end of the story — millions of women have been able to pursue medicine, law, athletics, and education without facing the same walls she did.

Every door that closed on her became a law that opened doors for everyone else.

That's not just resilience.

That's legacy.