5 Everyday Tasks To Test Your Functional Mobility

Robert F. Kennedy Jr @ 69

Longevity, or the duration of life, is made up of two primary attributes, health-span and life-span.

If we had to come up with a mathematical formula to express this relationship in everyday terms, perhaps it would be:

• Quality of life = (Health-Span) / (Life-Span)
• note that the quality of life increases as health-span increases, with the converse also being true

If you are truly lucky and blessed, not only will you have a long life-span, but your health-span will equal your life-span. And while our health naturally deteriorates into our later years, our goal should be to maximally slow down this decline.

Table of Contents

• Functional Movement Is Key
• Tactics For Increasing Healthspan
• Takeaways

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Functional Movement Is Key

Increased mobility is never a bad thing. The same cannot be said for decreased mobility.

The mobility of your body is a key component of the health-span equation. After all, your body can either be your greatest asset, or it can become an anchor, or worse, a prison.

Think of mobility as the cornerstone to a healthy, pain-free body. Lesser mobility leads to instability which decreases the movements you’re able to perform and without proper movement, it’s difficult to build strength, power, and endurance.

How To Test Mobility

If you would like to test your current mobility-level, here is one of the most informative Mobility Tests you can take.

It doesn’t involve going to the gym, lifting weights or even running. Instead, it’s a test to gauge how ‘easily’ your body can perform five essential, movements:

Test #1: Can you do a slow, deep squat, without losing your balance?

Squat Test

Test #2: Can you put on, take off your shoes while standing up?

Shoe Test

Test #3: Can you easily get in and out of bed?

Bed test

Test #4: Can you easily get in and out of a car?

Car test

Test 5: Can you hang off a bar for 30 seconds?

Not enough is said about the importance of grip strength as we age. It’s one of the strongest physical associations with a longer, healthier life.

Grip strength serves as a great proxy for overall strength and muscle mass, as gripping involves not only the muscles of the hand but also those of the arms and shoulders.

Grip Test

Tactics For Increasing Healthspan

According to researchers, here are the four most important things you can do to increase your health-span, that are within your scope of influence:

1. Nutrition

• Best nutritional advice is to eat less and mange your sugar consumption. The focus here is on maintaining low, steady blood glucose (sugar).

2. Exercise

• The body can put glucose away quickly into only two places, the liver and the muscle.
• The liver has a relatively finite capacity for glycogen. Muscle has a much more elastic capacity for glycogen, which means, the larger the muscle the more insulin sensitive the muscle, and therefore, the more glucose that it can dispose.
• For health-span / longevity purposes, the goal is to have muscles that are really big sinks for glucose. The bigger your sink is, the more efficiently it can take in glucose with a lower level of insulin.

3. Sleep

• There’s this mentality promoted by some high achievers that “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”, which will may come sooner than later if sleep isn’t given its due.
• Sleep is among the most highly conserved behaviors of our species that doesn’t seem to go away (meaning, it’s been with us since we were us). Humans have typically always spent about one-third of their lives sleeping. There must be a good reason for it.

4. Distress

• This one is easy to understand: stress literally kills. An increased health-span demands that we learn how to manage and deal with stresses of life.

Key Takeaways

There’s a lot to unpack, but it’s pretty straightforward if we stay away from the science / genetics and focus on those things that we can control.

Remember, to increase the odds of a longer health-span (there are no guarantees), it boils down to the following:

1. Eat less, and when eating, eat nutritious foods
2. Watch your sugar intake life a hawk
3. Build and strengthen your muscles, do not let them atrophy
4. Learn to effectively manage stress
5. Get a good nights sleep