It is paradoxically anathema/beguiling that I have barely climbed half a dozen times the last year when I have spent the last 30 years incessantly training and climbing. For the past 18 months I have been building my house. For the first nine months, and through winter, my family and I lived in a tent and a van. As you would imagine there was some urgency to get the house to a point we could move in. That urgency was replaced by other urgencies and, although understandable on a rational platform.

Yesterday, I installed my hangboards in the shed. I did a session. Not too hard, just enough to reacquaint myself. My giddy god, was I thrashed by a Neanderthal during the night? This morning I am prickly, swollen and oddly satiated in my bedraggled state. I am 49.

Gravity is the gunnery sergeant of aging, and an unforgiving one at that. The cosmetic changes are all but too apparent. Our skin begins to droop, boobs go southbound and when you hang the washing out your triceps flap in the breeze much like the tea towel you’re pegging up.

Less obvious is the internal dilapidation. Small tears in tendons, narrowed joints spaces, decrepit cartilage, and an immune system that has taken on the response time of a Toyota Camry rather than the Ferrari it once was.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all about forging ahead at the same intensity as usual (thus far, at least). Just not at the same rate. Once upon a time I climbed for two days and rested for one. That became day on day off. Now it’s day on and two days off.

Inno, you need to be cognizant of both the aging process and its outcome—slower recovery—as well as the training process of introducing new loads. That your body may not ultimately tolerate what you are asking is entirely possible. Ask less; it is likely you will be just as happy about what you are doing with a lot fewer physical ailments.

Dropping weight may well take 10 years off your current predicament and quite a few others you don’t even know about. Start today. Go to your cupboard and fridge and throw out everything that you know is shit. I don’t care if you just bought it. Trash it. Buy a bag of apples instead.

Eating, sleeping and exercise have more intertwined feedback loops than a love party. And they are just the ones we know about. Doing each of these well is about as close as you are going to get to the elixir of life.

1. You need a minimum of seven hours sleep a night. Get fewer than seven hours and every metric you care to look at, from heart disease to reaction time, is measurably worse. Turn all screens off 90 minutes before bedtime and start to dim the lights an hour before. Worship the actual sun, not the false one hanging from your ceiling. That one will just mess you up.

2. If you can’t get to the gym or rock, there are options. Adapt. Try cycling or weight lifting. The latter has its place, even if it has gotten a bad rap by climbers over the decades, while biking will get your blood pumping without stressing your joints.

3. Buy suspension straps. These are cheap, doable in a small space and, in terms of core strength, you can turn yourself into a hexagonal crowbar just by looking at them. I kid you not, they are that good. I thought this podcast from TrainingBeta was quite good just for general information about suspension strap training.

This article first appeared in Rock and Ice.