Dr. Mike Simpson: How to Stay Honed After 40

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 516, featuring Dr. Mike Simpson...

Dr. Simpson is a Green Beret medic turned emergency medicine physician who deployed with special operations units at age 48 and still trains Brazilian jiu-jitsu and Thai boxing today. He joins Tom to talk about his book, "Honed: Finding Your Edge as a Man Over 40," and the mindset, training, and supplement habits that let him stay in elite physical condition well past the age most men are told to expect decline.

Dr. Mike Simpson: Mindset is hugely important, and to me that is the first step, and it continues to be the most important step in everything you're doing. We're sold this fake bill of goods that at age 40 you just go ahead and put that weight on. You go ahead and get put on your first high blood pressure medicine, and you play golf on the weekends, and that's okay. And that's because that's average. That's what's expected. We're sold this societal bill of goods based on what is average and what is expected, and it's not true. It's a fake societal construct, and you can break through it. Aging is a real thing. The effects of aging are real, but you can do a lot to mitigate that. Most people just give up to the passage of time and say, well, it's just expected that I'm not going to work out anymore. You won't see me out there doing crazy fitness competitions, getting in the cage, or mixing it up on the mat with people thirty years younger. You certainly won't see me putting on full kit and sliding down a rope out of a helicopter in a combat zone. I'm Dr. Mike Simpson, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Introducing Dr. Mike Simpson

Tom Rowland: What's going on, everybody? Today we have a very special guest. I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Mike Simpson. He just wrote a book called "Honed: How to Keep Your Edge as a Man After the Age of 40," and it's a great book. I read it cover to cover in an afternoon, and I don't do that for many books. This one happens to be about physical fitness after the age of 40 — not just physical fitness, but overall health. It addresses sleep, vitamins, supplements, what you're eating, your hydration levels, and how you can be at your best when a lot of people think you should be in decline after 40. It's just not true. You are nowhere near done at age 40.

Dr. Mike Simpson knows this firsthand because he was in the SOF community. He was a Ranger, went to Ranger school, then later in life went to medical school, went back into the SOF community, and was deployed at age 48, keeping up with the absolute animals of the military at a very advanced age for that profession. Not only that, but he trains Thai boxing, he trains Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and he's older than me — he's 55 years old now, and he looks like he's 35. He obviously has the formula down, and he has a lot of really good things to say. So whether you're 35 or 75, this book is really good. And if you're 25, I'd suggest reading it too, because you're going to know what's coming and what's important, and the lessons Mike has learned to stay in great shape into your fifties, sixties, and seventies.

What this podcast is all about is that we all like to do stuff. We all like to hunt, we all like to fish, we all like to spend time with our kids, we all want to hike up mountains and see beautiful sunsets and sunrises. We want to be outside for as long as possible at the highest level possible. That's why I spend so much time being fit — I want to do the things my kids want to do with me: hiking, backpacking, fishing long days, fishing in rivers, fishing in the ocean, wading. All of that requires being in good physical condition, and the better condition you're in, the longer you're going to be able to do those things. I want to be on the bow of the boat catching tarpon when I'm 90 years old. I want to be able to wade a river and catch trout when I'm 80. I want to be the fittest grandfather on the planet, and I don't even have grandchildren yet, but I'm preparing now. This book is an outstanding resource, and Mike is an outstanding resource — a guy who walks the walk and talks the talk. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Mike Simpson.

Tom Rowland: Doctor Mike, how are you?

Dr. Mike Simpson: Good, Tom. How are you?

Tom Rowland: Man, I couldn't be better. I just got back from an amazing trip with my kids, riding high.

Dr. Mike Simpson: That's a good feeling. I'm doing really good too. Weather's starting to cool down here in Texas — we're about to get our "false fall." It'll set in probably in the next week or so, so that's always a good feeling, a little break from the heat.

Tom Rowland: What part of Texas are you in?

Dr. Mike Simpson: Central Texas, just north of Austin.

Tom Rowland: We have one of the Waypoint offices in Austin — I need to get over there and check it out. Austin, man, what a town, growing so fast. Have you lived there a long time?

Dr. Mike Simpson: I've lived here since 2012. The I-35 corridor is getting pretty crazy.

Tom Rowland: I know. I went to Austin about ten years ago, and I'd imagine it's changed a lot since then. Well, I read your book and really liked it. It was an easy book for me to read — it was like you wrote it for me. It's called "Honed: Finding Your Edge as a Man Over 40." You have an interesting background, so I'd love for you to give us a little background on you and why you're capable and ready to write this book. It's pretty interesting, really.

From a Small Town in California to Green Beret Medic

Dr. Mike Simpson: Okay. I had kind of a nontraditional journey to medicine, and a nontraditional journey in life in general. I grew up in a small town — I was born in the Los Angeles area, in Redondo Beach, but I spent my formative years in a really small town called Tehachapi, California, which most people haven't heard of. Very blue-collar, hunting, fishing, a lot of outdoor stuff that shaped me and my goals early on.

I joined the Army two weeks out of high school in 1984, shipping off to become an Airborne Ranger, which I did for my initial four-year enlistment. I thought I might want to get out and pursue a career in federal law enforcement, but I stayed in the National Guard and got assigned to a Special Forces National Guard unit. We got called up for Desert Shield, Desert Storm — we didn't end up deploying, but I got back on active duty during that time, and I realized active duty was a better fit for me. I'd dabbled in college in the interim and was a corrections officer, but I was more comfortable in the military. So after I finished the Special Forces Qualification Course and language school, I signed an active-duty contract and went to 7th Special Forces Group as a Special Forces engineer sergeant — a demolitions sergeant, depending on who you ask. I did that for a few years, then decided to cross-train to become a Special Forces medical sergeant.

I really enjoyed it, and that's when I found out I had a knack for medicine and that it was something I was genuinely interested in. The logical progression was either to become a physician assistant or go to medical school. Ultimately I went to medical school, then an emergency medicine residency, then back to the special operations community assigned to the Joint Medical Augmentation Unit, where I did six years and five deployments in the Global War on Terror. I retired from the Army in 2016 as the chair of emergency medicine at Fort Hood. As you can see, I did a lot of things pretty late in life — I finished my undergraduate degree on active duty, went to medical school, and was an intern at age 40. I was always a little older than my peers.

Tom Rowland: Let's wind it back a bit — your press kit says you did your last deployment at age 48. Is that correct?

Dr. Mike Simpson: Yes.

Tom Rowland: How much older was that than everyone else deploying with you?

Dr. Mike Simpson: The platoon sergeant was the only one even remotely close to my age, and he was in his mid-thirties. So I was somewhere around 29 years older than most of that platoon. Most of the people on that mission, I was old enough to be their father.

Mindset: Breaking the "Age 40" Myth

Tom Rowland: How much do you think attitude plays into being able to hold your own there? I always like talking to people like you — special operations people, fighters, people on the extreme edge of something — because whatever lessons they've learned on the battlefield or in the octagon can be applied to life in a much gentler way. You're 48, deploying with people twenty to thirty years younger than you. Before we get into the physical side of how you've stayed fit and ready for duty, how much does mindset and attitude play into that?

Dr. Mike Simpson: Mindset is hugely important, and that's the first step and continues to be the most important step in everything you're doing, because we're sold this fake bill of goods that at age 40 you just go ahead and put the weight on, get put on your first blood pressure medicine, and play golf on the weekends — and that's okay, because that's average, so that's what's expected.

Tom Rowland: And your eyes go bad. That's what everybody told me — as soon as you turn 40 you're going to need glasses. Well, I'm 53 and I don't need them yet.

Dr. Mike Simpson: Same thing. We're sold this societal bill of goods based on what is average and what is expected, and it's not true. It's a fake societal construct, and you can break through it. Aging is real. The effects of aging are real, but you can do a lot to mitigate that. Most people just give up to the passage of time and decide it's expected that they're not going to work out anymore, that they won't see themselves in the cage, on the mat, or sliding down a rope out of a helicopter in a combat zone — because that's just not what's expected of them.

You make your own rules. I'm a firm believer in that. I was told in high school, about halfway through, that I probably wasn't going to amount to much — not because I was dumb, but because I was a little lazy, and I'd figured out that football, girls, and cars — not necessarily in that order — were a lot more fun than anything my teachers were showing me. What did they know anyway? I didn't apply myself, didn't do homework, did just well enough on tests to pass, and graduated 100th out of 122 students in my senior class. Most people would have said, well, it's a good thing he's going in the Army, at least he'll have that going for him. If you'd asked any of my teachers, advisors, or classmates on graduation day whether Michael would be a doctor someday, they'd have laughed — the prospect was completely ludicrous.

In fact, at my twenty-year high school reunion, they'd set up a website and message board, and I was in the middle of an OB-GYN rotation during the reunion. I posted that I wanted to try to make it but couldn't guarantee it because of the rotation, and everybody thought that was a joke — they didn't think it was serious. When I showed up, they said, "I thought your joke on the message board was so funny — so what are you actually doing?" And I said, "I'm in my third year of medical school." They thought I was kidding. I was in my late thirties at that point, and pretty much everyone in my class was already well settled into mid-management or higher in their chosen field. A couple of physicians in my class were already attendings, having gone straight from high school to undergrad to medical school to residency.

Tom Rowland: That had to be interesting, being that much older than your peers in medical school — though you also had so much more worldly experience, having already deployed and served. That had to be both an advantage and a disadvantage. And mindset had to play into that, where you just laser focus and don't care about any of that.

Dr. Mike Simpson: Yeah. If I rate the difficulty, first year of medical school was by far the hardest for me. Most people say second year is the hardest, because that's when pathology and the really difficult subjects get piled on in huge volumes. But I was more comfortable in second year. First year felt like an extension of undergraduate raw science, and even though I'd just finished undergrad, I didn't have the same study habits as my peers, so it took me longer. Second year was easier because, having already been a medic, I could see the applicability in everything we were learning — we'd be talking about diseases I had legitimately seen before. This wasn't just theory for me.

Third and fourth year, doing clinical rotations, were extremely easy for me, because as a medical student there's not a lot put on your shoulders — you're not doing surgery solo. You're being evaluated on how you talk to patients, how you take a history, how you do a physical exam, and those were all things I was completely comfortable with from my time as a medic. So if you look at my grades: first year, I looked like I was doing okay, with a C in there. Second year, very solid student. Then third and fourth year clerkships, I was above my peers all of a sudden, because this was basically like going to work every day, and I'd already been in the workforce — many of my classmates hadn't.

The Crossroads: Medical School Instead of Deployment

Tom Rowland: One of the underlying themes on this podcast is people who follow their passion — people who've seen something they want to do and made a real choice to go that direction. Maybe it's a fishing guide, a hunting guide, or going to medical school in your thirties. Tell me about that decision. You probably could have stayed on your military career path and done other things, but that had to be a crossroads where you decided this was what you were going to do.

Dr. Mike Simpson: It was a tremendous crossroads, and it was very pivotal — not just one moment, but a series of moments over a long period of time. Initially I wanted to become a physician assistant, which is what a lot of Special Forces medics do because there's an easier transition to it. I'd started my prerequisites as an undergraduate, and then the PA branch put a cap on the number of years of service and the age at which you could apply, because they didn't want to invest in training someone who would just do their payback time and then leave for a high-paying civilian job. They wanted longevity — someone who might make colonel, even general, someday. I was barred from applying under both of those conditions, which was discouraging.

Some peers started talking to me about medical school, which I thought was kind of a pipe dream — a lot more involved. I'd have to finish undergrad with all the pre-med requirements, take the MCAT, which I didn't even know anything about except that it was hard, then apply and hope they'd take a chance on someone my age, then figure out how to pay for it and get through residency. I had some personal, inward conversations, worked it out, and realized this was something I could do. Five of us started out on that path — guys I'd been through medic training with, either 18 Delta Army Special Forces medics or SEAL medics. Two of us made it as far as an MCAT study course, and midway through, the other guy had to drop out for personal reasons. So I went in alone to take the MCAT and went through the application process on my own. I got accepted at three medical schools in Texas, and ultimately matriculated at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland.

There were a lot of things that could have derailed me, including 9/11, which happened right in the middle of my interview season. I'd already interviewed at some schools and was waiting to interview at others. I came this close to pulling my application altogether and saying there's a war on, I'm needed on a team as a medic or intelligence sergeant or team sergeant — I need to not go anywhere. But my company sergeant major pulled me aside and said, look, we're not going anywhere anytime soon — this could be a couple of years, there's a long line of people ahead of us to deploy — and you'd be needlessly putting this on hold. He said if you close that door, it might not reopen for you, but if you go through it, you can come back to the community as a physician. The group commander had a similar conversation with me. That had always been my goal — to come back to the SOF community as a physician — and the sergeant major emphasized how important that would be for the force, and he was right.

Sure enough, the company I was assigned to didn't deploy for three years after I left for medical school. I would have sat around watching the war unfold on television for three years and missed my opportunity to go to medical school. In the end, what I did was right for me and right for the SOF community, because of the capacity I was ultimately able to deploy in.

Staying Fit Through Medical School and Residency

Tom Rowland: Good advice you were given. During this time you're also aging, and thinking, I've got to be able to keep up physically once I finish and go back. What were you doing at this point to maintain your fitness — or maybe you weren't gaining fitness at all?

Dr. Mike Simpson: My first year of med school, I had this insane plan for how every day was going to work. I lived near the Shady Grove Metro stop outside D.C. My plan was to get up every morning, put on workout clothes with my book bag on my back, take the Metro to school, work out for about an hour in the campus gym, get cleaned up, get into uniform — it's a DoD school, USUHS, so you wear a military uniform every day — go to lectures and labs during the day, study in the library in the evening, then come home. That lasted about three weeks before I realized it wasn't sustainable. I was already not getting enough sleep because of how much studying I had to do, and getting up at 4 a.m. to ride the Metro and work out before the first lecture just didn't work.

My fitness started to slip. I'd make fitness a priority anytime we had a break of any kind — while everyone else wanted to go camping or fishing or just relax, I'd try to squeeze in fitness. But as I talk about in the book, that's not a great approach either, because your fitness level ends up doing this up-and-down cycle, which is a recipe for injury, and I did have some injuries. Probably the only thing that kept me fit to any degree in my first two years of medical school was a club hockey team the school had — I played on it, and hockey was my outlet and my way to maintain some level of fitness through all of that.

During my third and fourth year clerkships, I tried to make it more of a priority — even if it was just getting up for a two-mile run in the morning — which was easier in fourth year than in third. But I always knew that eventually I'd finish school and residency and go back to a military unit, and I wanted that to be a SOF unit. I wanted to be in the kind of shape where they wouldn't look at me and say there's no way we're taking that guy based on what he looks like. I didn't want to hear that, so I always tried to prioritize it.

Residency was a wreck for a lot of reasons. You're working crazy shifts in emergency medicine — day, evening, and night shifts, constantly rotating. Sometimes your day off is what we call a "DOMA" day off — you're technically off, but you still have to go to grand rounds and mandatory lectures, so you don't really get the day off. There was one stretch in my first year of residency where I went 58 straight days having to physically show up to work somewhere every single day, which is ironic, because when I went through Ranger School in 1986, Ranger School itself was 58 days — that's why the number always sticks in my head. You're not eating right either. Working in an ER as a resident, there's no "take your forty-five minutes for lunch." You're grabbing stuff on the go constantly, which means you're eating garbage. I tried to eat right before and after a shift, but it wasn't working well. My intern year, I gained a lot of weight, and I guarantee if you checked my labs, my cortisol was completely out of whack.

Tom Rowland: That's a pretty similar situation, maybe on the extreme end, to what a lot of guys over 40 with three kids, a job, and hobbies go through. The reason I work out in the morning is because when I tried working out in the afternoons, with three kids of my own, there was always something — a teacher's meeting, a wrestling match, a soccer game, something. You'd put the run off, put the workout off. I finally got to the point where regardless of whether the afternoon looks clear, I have to get up in the morning and do it, or it's not going to happen. What state you were in during residency isn't all that different from a lot of the people you're writing this book for.

The Three Types of People Trying to Get Back in Shape

Tom Rowland: So let's talk about someone in that situation — not necessarily to the extreme of residency, but with kids, responsibilities, a job, friends, a spouse who wants time too — how does someone over 40 who's being fed this line that they're just supposed to gain weight, that they're not supposed to be doing CrossFit or wrestling or jiu-jitsu at 40, that they should just take it easy and take some pills — how does someone reverse that? It doesn't feel good, and a lot of people listening are right there. In your book you described three different types of athletes — the high school guy who had it once, and a late bloomer. Can you explain that?

Dr. Mike Simpson: You have people who were in shape at one point and then life got in the way, or injuries got in the way. They crave getting back to that, but they don't have a recipe for it. Maybe they try, and they try by doing the same things they were doing twenty or thirty years ago, and those things hurt now and don't seem to work right. Used to be able to do this, now I can't do that, and now I'm discouraged, because I'm trying to jump right back into it. There are a lot of manufactured obstacles to your success there, because you're trying to do what your old coach had you do back then — and number one, he probably wasn't even having you do the right stuff, because we didn't know then what we know now, and number two, your body is different. He was coaching a 20-year-old, not a 40-year-old.

That's one group — people who used to do it and want it back but keep finding obstacles. Then you have the late bloomers, who were never into it and have no idea where to start. There's so much conflicting information out there, and maybe they hear CrossFit is a good deal, so they walk into a box and see people kipping, hanging on rings, doing power cleans, and they're either going to get injured, discouraged, or intimidated — and if my first-ever introduction to exercise was walking into a box like that, I'd probably turn around and run out too. It's genuinely intimidating.

The third group are guys who continue to work out and stay pretty fit, but notice that mile six is getting a little harder, or a little slower, or getting that weight up is a little more difficult, or a pain in the shoulder just isn't going away even after resting three or four days — and they realize they need to approach things a little differently. All of these groups need to recognize: you are the age you are, there's nothing you can do about that. If you're out of shape, you didn't get out of shape overnight. It's going to take you at least as long to get back in shape as it took to get out of shape, and probably longer.

Tom Rowland: That's a really good point that could easily get glossed over. If you had a baby and stopped working out, and now your baby's three or four years old and things are starting to loosen up a little, you're not getting back to where you were in a month or six months. If you took three years off, it's going to take you about three years to get back — you can make substantial progress, but durability, flexibility, mobility, and sustainability — being able to do it again the next day, and the day after — that takes a while. You can get your resting heart rate down and impress your doctor at your next appointment, but can you keep that up? And going all-out at high intensity at 45, you kind of need to ease back a little, in my opinion.

Dr. Mike Simpson: Right, because two things are happening during those three years. One, you're not working out, so you're getting the deleterious effects of that. And two, Father Time has a hand in it regardless — even if you had been working out, you'd still be aging during those three years. Three years doesn't sound like a lot of time, but when you're not working out, the effect is magnified — it's not additive, it's multiplicative. You might feel like you're back in the groove in three to six months, and that feels good, and that's when you really start to climb back out of the hole — but don't expect to put up the same PR or run the same time for quite a while. The needle on the scale might not get back to where it was three years ago for another three years, and you need to accept that. It's about progress, not perfection. It's not "I've been in the gym two weeks, I should be exactly where I was at 35." That's just not going to happen.

The Warrior Athlete Mindset

Dr. Mike Simpson: But to reflect back on the original question about people with difficult schedules — for me it's all about flipping the switch and making the mental commitment. A huge part of that has been what I call the warrior athlete philosophy. If you look at working out as a hobby, something you dabble in, it gets low priority, because you have to do all the things in life that pay the bills and please your family and keep a roof over your head before you get to your hobby time. I saw something written on the whiteboard at my gym once: self-care is not selfish.

Tom Rowland: We've talked about that a number of times here.

Dr. Mike Simpson: If you look at it as a hobby, it becomes a selfish thing — are you really going to use your only day off to go golfing with your buddies instead of spending it with us? Are you really going to go on a fishing trip instead of taking the kids to Disneyland? That's how hobbies interfere with other obligations. But if you look at fitness as a hobby, it's the same way — and the other trap is looking at fitness as a chore. I've got to go get a workout in, I guess I'll have to do it tonight, I guess I'll have to wake up early tomorrow, I'm not feeling it, but I guess I'll make myself go. Now it's a terrible obligation.

But if you have the warrior athlete mentality — I'm a warrior every day, I'm preparing myself for battle, not against an enemy, but I'm preparing my weapon, which is my body, every single day, and every day I'm going to be a one-percent better version of myself than I was the day before — then you start to crave that time. You start counting down the hours until you can get to the gym, and your palms get sweaty thinking about the workout because you're excited about how much better you're going to feel when it's over. You go in there every day, and that's your mission: to be a slightly better version of yourself.

Tom Rowland: I had to come to terms with something like that when I was running marathons. A lot of days you're doing a three- or five-mile run, which doesn't take much time, but on the weekends approaching a race you're running twenty miles, and there's a lot of recovery involved. I started thinking this was kind of a selfish pursuit — and honestly, at the time, with my mindset, it kind of was, because I'd set a goal to run a marathon in a certain time, and I was working all the time, and that's just what I needed to do. I'd get up really early and do it, and have the rest of the day for my family, but I really had to come to terms with why I was actually doing this.

When I came to terms with myself, it was a complete game-changer for my relationship with exercise and fitness — this is a responsibility for me to be in as good a shape as possible, so I can be a better husband, a better father, have more patience, be a better fishing guide because I have more patience and can stand up there and pole into the wind longer than I could last year. When I started thinking, I am the provider, I am the one responsible for this family, and I can't do my best job unless I'm in my best condition — that was a game-changer. What didn't change is I still can't do it at dinner, bath, and bedtime — I can't do it when I should be with the family, so I had to carve out time away from the family, and that meant 4 a.m. Whatever it means for someone's personal schedule — maybe after the kids go to bed, maybe at lunch — I always say you're not taking time away from the family with it. It doesn't become a problem at home. It becomes a life enhancer, and just scheduling can make a huge difference for somebody with a really busy life.

Scheduling and Building a Plan

Dr. Mike Simpson: Scheduling is huge, and it feeds right into how important it is to have a plan — realistically looking at how much time you have during the week, and where it's located. Is it early morning? Evening? Lunch? As soon as you get off work? You need to plan that out. When people say "I got a gym membership," and I ask what their schedule is, and they say "what do you mean, schedule?" — you need a plan. Some people think a gym membership is a magic talisman that's just going to transform them, and it's not. You have to have a comprehensive plan, and it starts with goals and scheduling — those are the two most important things right out of the gate, and you have to figure out how to carve that time out without it coming at the exclusion of the rest of your life.

I had a really good friend who worked out a lot and was in exceptionally good shape, but he never took the time to stop and smell the roses. What are you working out for, if you're spending three hours a day in the gym? That's not living life, that's living in the gym — unless you're training for a specific competition, doing that at the exclusion of the rest of your life isn't a good way to live. Also, being healthy makes you a better spouse, a better parent, and gives you the potential to be a healthier grandparent, because you're going to have more longevity — and think about the example you set for your kids. When they go to a PTA meeting or a sporting event and see other parents ten years younger than you and thirty-five pounds heavier, on two or three medications, hauling an oxygen tank around, and they see that mom and dad are in way better shape because it's a priority, and the food at home is healthy while other kids have hot Cheetos in their lunch bag every day — that's making generational change. That's not selfish. That's good for them.

Tom Rowland: It does take a lot of work and dedication, though. I saw it firsthand recently on an elk hunting trip with my kids — it's incredibly physical. I'd argue elk are a strong candidate for the most difficult animal to hunt in the Lower 48; it lives in very difficult places. There are lots of ways to hunt them — private land, four-wheelers — but we chose public land, way back where you can't take a four-wheeler, because the animal is less pressured back there. But if you're successful, you have to carry the animal out on your back. My son has put five years into this, mostly met with failure and frustration, and he finally had success. Thankfully I was in good enough shape to pack it out with him, and he looked at me and said, "Good job, Dad." That meant so much to me.

You didn't just write this book because you're a middle-aged guy in good shape — we covered your military background and the fact that you're a doctor, but what we haven't covered is the caliber of people you're keeping up with, like Tim Kennedy. You're three years older than me — you graduated high school in '84, I graduated in '87, so I'm 53 and you're 55. It would be very easy to lose your edge, and that's what your book is about — but you've done it to the extreme, keeping up with elite military at 48, and you're still on the mat doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu and Thai boxing. I see you in posts from Tim Kennedy doing a very intense workout, and you're right there with him, twenty years older than everybody else in the room. That's why you have the credentials to write this book.

Dr. Mike Simpson: You covered it very well, and it links into something I talk about in a later chapter of the book — how important the tribe is.

Finding Your Tribe

Tom Rowland: That's one of my favorite chapters. Let's go into it — it's really important to me, because I have a tribe, and it's such an integral part of my fitness and the sustainability of my fitness, because I have this group of people. Talk about a tribe the way you describe it in the book.

Dr. Mike Simpson: You mentioned Tim, and Tim is a great example, because he's a physical specimen — a professional athlete, and even in the special forces community, Tim is an outlier. He's in the top quartile wherever he's going to go, because that's his mental drive and work ethic. I can't say enough good things about Tim — what a good person, what a good friend, what a great soldier and American he is. But when you see those photos of me working out with Tim, that's my tribe. I'm not knocking guys my own age — I have friends my age — but my tribe, for the most part, is guys performing at a high level, most of whom happen to be younger than me. Not because guys my age couldn't be doing it, but for all the reasons we've talked about, most of them have decided that's just not what's normal for a guy their age. He's got a motorcycle and a "fat guy shirt" — and I had a motorcycle too, sold it not too long ago, and I bought a fat guy shirt myself when I first retired from the military. If you look at season three of "Hunting Hitler," when Tim and I were filming together, I'd put on some weight, because I was freshly retired and falling into that siren's call of "this is just what's expected of you now" — riding my Harley, smoking cigars on the weekends, cooking out.

The tribe matters because motivation and discipline both run out sometimes. I talk all the time about how discipline is more important than motivation, because you won't always have motivation — and some days you don't have the discipline either, and that's where somebody from the tribe reaching out and kicking you in the rear, saying "hey, we're at the gym, why aren't you here yet," becomes really important. Tim, Shane, and all my friends follow each other on a fitness app, and if I don't log a workout for a few days, I start getting texts asking if I'm injured, making sure I'm okay. When I worked as the medical training director for Sheepdog Response for a while, I said something at one of the courses that I ended up quoting in the book: if you look around and realize you're the toughest one of your friends, you need to find tougher friends. You're not getting pushed otherwise — and this is even true for a guy like Tim, because he's not content to always be the toughest guy in the room. He wants to seek out the guys who are going to out-grapple him, out-strike him, out-lift him, run faster than him, do more reps than him. He craves that competition, and I have no doubt that when he's your age, he'll still be in exceptional shape because he's going to keep pursuing that.

Having a tribe — people who support you, who reach down and make you run a little faster or do one more set when you don't feel like it — that's really important.

Tom Rowland: It is super important. Part of what we're describing is that we see it as support, because that's a pleasurable thing when somebody pushes you. But for somebody who hasn't worked out in five or six years, maybe the tribe isn't exactly that yet — maybe it's just an appointment at the park with someone, and if you don't show up, you're letting that person down. Your tribe is accountability, your tribe is fellowship, and it's not the drudgery we described before — it becomes "I get to go for a run and catch up with my friends, I get some social time in the morning before work, this is my time, with my most trusted friends, because you're bleeding together, you're out there." It's no different than in the military, where your training partners become your closest friends. It becomes family. So let's talk about finding the tribe — how does somebody who's 45, tired of feeling sick and tired, and ready to make this transition, go about finding one?

Dr. Mike Simpson: I think the easiest way to start is because walking into a gym always feels a little weird — you don't want to walk up to strangers and ask them to be in your tribe; you might end up with a restraining order. A great way to start is through social media. I'm in various Brazilian jiu-jitsu groups online — people get a new stripe on their belt, they post a picture, and everybody lifts each other up. People ask questions about an injury or a technique, and everybody helps each other out. It's the same with Peloton forums, MyZone heart-rate-monitor groups — people post their workouts and lift each other up. That's a good way to start, and then you can start networking to find people locally you can actually train with in person.

But if you don't find that — maybe you're in a really remote area — these online groups, while some are toxic, there are also a lot of really uplifting ones. Dakota Meyer, the Medal of Honor recipient who lives here in Austin, runs a group called Own the Dash with fitness challenges and a plan telling you exactly what to do, and people post honestly — "I got five minutes into this workout and had to quit" — and other people respond, "pace yourself, come at it from this angle, next time you'll get further, I have confidence in you." I think what Dakota is doing with Own the Dash is amazing, and it's a great example of a tribe you can network with, that's going to lift you up and provide that external motivation. And over time, you'll attract them to you as well.

Tom Rowland: As you're interested in things and you go to a party and somebody starts talking about something, you'll know they're a CrossFitter if they can't shut up about CrossFit.

Dr. Mike Simpson: Or a vegan.

Tom Rowland: That's actually how I got into CrossFit, back in 2008 or 2009. I was running marathons and wanted to try something different, and I found this trainer, Ross Enamait — do you know him? He's a boxer and boxing trainer with this forum on his website where he'd post links on how to build your own equipment and different workouts. It was just a community. I was in Key West fishing all day and didn't have anybody to work out with, and I just wanted something. You could do one of these workouts, kind of like a CrossFit workout, post your time, and see that your time was fifteen minutes slower than some other guy's — and then find out what weight he used, and it just becomes this community of people who are uplifting each other. CrossFit had the same thing in the very early days — they'd post the workout of the day, and there'd be three or four hundred comments and real conversations happening, and that's kind of gone away. But there are apps now, like Beyond the Whiteboard, where you log your workouts and there's a comment section and you can follow people and have friends — kind of like social media. Strava has a similar community aspect. That's a really good point about online communities, because that's another excuse I hear a lot — people say they want to come train with my group, but they need to get in shape first.

Dr. Mike Simpson: That's the most common excuse I hear about Brazilian jiu-jitsu too — "I'm going to get in shape and then start jiu-jitsu."

Tom Rowland: And where does that person end up in a year?

Dr. Mike Simpson: Still saying that once they get in shape, they're going to start jiu-jitsu.

Just Start Now

Tom Rowland: So what advice do you give someone who's telling themselves "as soon as I find a group I'll get in shape" or "as soon as I get in shape I'll start jiu-jitsu, or CrossFit, or whatever" — but it would be embarrassing to walk in right now?

Dr. Mike Simpson: I say start now. Take jiu-jitsu, for example — jiu-jitsu will get you in shape. I don't use it as my sole form of fitness, and I talk about that in the book, but you will absolutely be in better shape just from doing it. And honestly, you'll actually be better at jiu-jitsu in the long run if you start when you're in poor shape. If the guy who won the CrossFit Games last year walked into his first jiu-jitsu class tonight, he's not going to do too badly — he's a good athlete, he'll gut it out, maybe even sweep and get dominant position on some blue-belt-level guys, purely on athleticism. But a person who isn't in good shape has to do the technique properly, or they won't get any payoff at all. I've seen people who started their jiu-jitsu journey in good shape make it all the way to blue belt and then start running into problems, because they're going up against better opponents and their sloppy technique — relying on strength instead — stops working. I watched somebody pop a bicep tendon in class for exactly that reason — a kid with a lot of natural fighting ability who'd fought MMA but hadn't done much formal grappling training, trying to muscle through a technique. That happens because you're not forced to develop proper technique early on when you're relying on athleticism.

And for the people who say they need to find a group or some people first — be patient zero in that group. Start working out. Maybe you're in the park alone doing burpees, and people start coming up and saying, "hey, I noticed you're here every day doing burpees, what kind of workout is that, would you mind if I joined in?" You end up being the pied piper.

Tom Rowland: That's exactly how I started my group.

The Six Pillars of Fitness

Tom Rowland: We could talk about this all day, but I want to touch on a couple of other things. In the book you talk about the pillars of fitness — things people can do even without working out that will improve their health. I found that interesting, because I don't think younger athletes prioritize this. I never put sleep as a priority, never put supplements as a priority, never even put when I ate as a priority. You said it yourself — you used to be able to crush whatever and go run five miles without thinking twice about it. As you get older, warming up becomes so much more critical, sleep becomes critical — can you walk through the pillars the way you do in the book?

Dr. Mike Simpson: What I call the pillars of fitness — I probably should have called them the pillars of exercise, because I later found out a lot of people use "pillars of fitness" more broadly to include things like nutrition. Some people use four pillars, some use six like I do, some use as many as ten. Mine are strength and power — which are different, because strength is about how much weight you can lift, and power is about how fast you can lift it. The comparison I always use is strength is your squat max, and power is using those same muscles to push a sled twenty yards against a stopwatch. Then endurance, which is pretty self-explanatory — muscular endurance and cardiovascular endurance, your ability to sustain movement over time. Then flexibility, which we're all familiar with — that's your stretching, primarily of your ligaments, using gravity and your own body weight against your joints. Then mobility, which has more to do with your muscles, fascia, and tendons — your ability to move through difficult movements under your own active power rather than passively. The example I give in the book, which I still think is the best one, is Bruce Lee: he could bend over and touch his forehead to his knees — that's his flexibility. He could also kick up over his head and strike a target directly above him — that's mobility, because gravity isn't doing that for him, it's active, not passive.

And then the final pillar, probably the most important as we get older, is durability — all of the neglected muscles apart from the prime movers. We all know biceps, triceps, pecs, glutes, but there are a lot of small, unnamed muscles we neglect, and those are what stabilize our joints and keep us from getting injured. That durability aspect, which starts with your core but really extends to your whole body, is very often neglected — even by people who are in genuinely good shape at an advanced age, because they still only want to do the classic six exercises: deadlift, squat, military press, bench press. They're not doing single-limb exercises, they're not doing things like Turkish get-ups. CrossFit lends itself very well to all of these pillars, especially durability, as long as you're doing things slow and controlled — you're not going to maintain gains in strength and power unless you're also addressing durability, mobility, and flexibility. You have to work all of them together.

Flexibility, Mobility, and Avoiding Injury

Tom Rowland: On your own program, jiu-jitsu has a lot of mobility and flexibility built in, and I'm sure you're stretching before and after class. But what are you doing otherwise for mobility and flexibility?

Dr. Mike Simpson: In full disclosure, the last couple of months have been terrible for me on the flexibility front — my schedule with the book launch has ended up cutting into that part of my workouts, and I haven't done yoga in a few months. Yoga is, to me, probably the best thing out there for both flexibility and mobility, because it puts you in positions you wouldn't otherwise choose to be in, positions you won't typically find yourself in during traditional strength training or even something as advanced as CrossFit. I was first introduced to it doing an hour-and-a-half yoga workout, which I think is a bit long, though it is a great workout. You start to identify things you can and can't do, and they might seem insignificant, but when it comes to functional fitness — picking something up at a really odd angle on uneven ground — that's when those things come into play.

Tom Rowland: That's where, for the listeners of this podcast — fishermen and hunters — picking a trailer tongue up in the dark and setting it on the hitch, or picking up a cooler or a cast net, becomes a recipe for serious injury. It happens all the time. Have you ever heard of Joe Hippensteel?

Dr. Mike Simpson: No, I haven't.

Tom Rowland: I'd love for you to look him up. I badly injured my back last Christmas, and it's been a chronic issue for the last twenty years — I wrestled for a long time, and with all the lifting, it would just flare up occasionally. I kept thinking it was because I was losing flexibility. I used to do Tae Kwon Do, and that's probably when I was the most flexible — we'd have an hour-and-a-half class and forty-five minutes of it was stretching, and that helped my wrestling so much because I was doing both at the same time. My coach noticed I was moving way better, and I've always thought about that. As I've gotten older I've thought I'm getting less flexible — it's not dramatic, maybe three or four inches, an inch or two further I could bend over — but that's a recipe for disaster as you move bigger weights. So after I hurt my back, I decided to find a program I could dedicate myself to and regain my flexibility. I used to get on Amazon Prime, which has tons of yoga content, and that was very helpful. But then I found this guy, Joe Hippensteel, Ultimate Human Performance — he's in San Diego and works with the Navy SEALs, and he's mentioned in David Goggins' book for helping with his inflexibility problems. I started his program and feel like a million bucks — he told me it would be like winding the clock back, and he's absolutely right. It's similar to a lot of yoga, except there are standards: you should be able to sit cross-legged and put your head on the ground, and if you can't, you have a problem and you keep working on that position until you can get further and further down. Every position has a standard for what the human body should be able to do. When I first started I couldn't get close to any standard, and the closer I've gotten, the better I'm moving, the better I'm feeling, and the fewer injuries I've had. I've had zero injuries except for developing patellar tendinitis, and for that I also started looking at the "knees over toes guy" — do you know him?

Dr. Mike Simpson: No.

Tom Rowland: His name is Ben Patrick. He's got an incredible story, and he's helping thousands of people with their knees — a lot of it is contrary to what we've always heard, like "don't let your knees go over your toes" when squatting. His whole approach is that's exactly what's missing — you're not training your tibialis at all, and you end up with all these weaknesses and inflexibility issues. Joe Hippensteel isn't on social media like Ben Patrick is — Ben posts videos every single day, and you'll find him immediately. Anyway, I was just curious what you were doing. It's funny how the first thing that tends to go is the flexibility work, because it's the least sexy part of fitness. Sitting there stretching for an hour is boring — but as I age, I'm like, I don't need more deadlifts right now, I need more flexibility, I need more mobility. I don't need more snatches, I don't need more muscle-ups — I can already do those things — but in order to keep doing them at all, I have to spend the time on mobility and flexibility.

Dr. Mike Simpson: Like you say, it's not sexy, and it's hard — it's like sitting in a duck blind for a long period of time, you're bored. Stretching is pretty boring, even with the sitar music playing in the background, it's hard to keep your mind on it. When I did the ninety-minute P90X yoga session, I'd start watching the clock, thinking, how much more of this do I have? But forty-five minutes to an hour of yoga is about what I can tolerate. It's hard for the same reason it's hard to get people to understand how important sleep is — it feels like you're not doing anything, like you're just waiting until you can go do something real. You have to flip that switch and look at it differently. The guys I know who do yoga two to three times a week are by far the healthiest — their durability, mobility, and flexibility are all really good.

I try not to skip it, and for the most part my flexibility and mobility are good, though I'm having some issues with my right hip that will probably require surgery in about five years, and it's hard for me to work around. It's dangerous to do these workarounds, though, because anytime you lose flexibility and mobility in one joint, your kinetic chain compensates in the adjacent joints, which means you're overstressing those. So I'm fully prepared to start having more right knee problems or lower back problems because of the compensation I'm doing for my hip.

Tom Rowland: Maybe not, though — once you check out Joe Hippensteel and the knees-over-toes guy, you might be surprised.

Dr. Mike Simpson: That would be great. My last imaging on my right hip wasn't good — you never want to hear the words "bone on bone."

Tom Rowland: When stretching, yoga, and mobility stop being boring is when you're having trouble with a mundane task — going up and down stairs, getting off the toilet, getting up off the couch because your knees or hips hurt — and you stretch for about two weeks and suddenly you don't hurt anymore. That's when you realize this is actually making a difference in your everyday life, and you can go do the things you want to do, whether that's golf, tennis, pickleball, working out, or climbing mountains. But I didn't realize that until I was about 50.

Dr. Mike Simpson: It really is a basic movement thing. When I was doing my internal medicine rotation as an intern, the attending I worked under was also a geriatrician, and a test she'd have all her patients do was called the "get up and go" test. You sit them on a bed or in a chair, feet planted on the ground, hands out in front of them — not allowed to push off their thighs, the chair, or the bed — and move to a standing position without swinging for momentum or pushing off anything. It's a tricky movement, because even compared to squatting, you're a bit farther back than you'd typically be in a good squat position, and that's one of the first things that tends to go in people. She said she could tell by that test whether a patient was being truthful about being active, regardless of what they claimed. It's such a small thing, but I'd tell people: if you notice that when you get out of bed, or get off the couch, you have to aid yourself to do it, you've got a ways to go, and you need to start looking at things to get yourself there.

Tom Rowland: Or yoga — anything, really. Some things are probably better for some people than others, but doing something is better than doing nothing, even if it's just stretching a little. There are so many free things — most people have Amazon Prime, and if you type in yoga, there are literally hundreds of videos you can watch for free. There's an instructor, Julia Jarvis, who's really good — I can barely do half of what she can do, but she's good to follow. But since I found Hippensteel, that's the one that's legit.

Sun Exposure, Vitamin D, and Skin Cancer Screening

Tom Rowland: What about supplements before we wrap up? You have a pretty aggressive supplement routine outlined in the book. In the age of COVID, one of the things Joe Rogan talks about that I agree with is that we don't hear much about strengthening the immune system — almost everything we hear is vaccine-related, not "take matters into your own hands" through supplements and habits. What supplements do you think we should all be taking once we're over 40?

Dr. Mike Simpson: I outline them all in my supplement chapter, but I'll sum it up. When I launched my own supplement line, the first product I put out was the longevity formula, because I always felt longevity was the most important thing everybody needed. I also released an energy formula at the same time, because a lot of people told me energy formulas would outsell everything — people love pre-workouts and energy products. Sure enough, when I released both, longevity outsold energy at twice the pace, and I don't push marketing hard for either one — I do a few honest videos and posts about what's in them and why, and let people make their own decision, and it turned out exactly as I'd anticipated, because longevity was the one that mattered most to me.

Vitamin D3 — almost everybody is vitamin D deficient. We don't drink milk like we used to, and we don't get the amount of sunlight we used to.

Tom Rowland: Even people in southern climates have been so conditioned to believe they'll get skin cancer in ten minutes without sunscreen. I'd be curious about your opinion on how sunscreen affects the body's ability to produce vitamin D from the sun. I don't wear sunscreen — I think it's gross, and I don't think slathering it on every single day can be good for you. I'm not advocating that for anyone else, but if you're out in the sun three hundred days a year, I don't see how that can be good for you, so I use clothing instead — I cover up to my sunglasses, wear a hat, a long-sleeve shirt, usually pants if I'll be out a long time. I've started wearing shorts on the show, but still covered up. I don't think you're producing vitamin D the same way if you've got a shirt off.

Dr. Mike Simpson: No, you're not. There's a happy medium somewhere, where you get enough sunlight to activate vitamin D without running the full risk of skin cancer, but skin cancer is so common that if you live long enough, especially as a male, it's almost a certainty you'll get some form of cancer eventually just because it's that prevalent — it's approaching the same territory as prostate cancer in terms of how common it is. That's why, like you, I much prefer wearing UV-blocking clothing to caking on sunscreen. I'm a redhead, so I'm especially prone to sunburn, and it's something I have to think about at the range, out mountain biking, whatever it is.

[At this point in the conversation, Dr. Simpson's bulldog interrupted the recording briefly.]

Dr. Mike Simpson: It's important to cover up, and I think clothing is a better approach than caking on sunscreen. I also think you should let yourself get some sun and do regular skin cancer screenings, because if you catch a concerning lesion early, they remove it and you're fine. So get outside, whether it's archery, hunting, mountain biking, golf, or the beach, but get a full skin survey every year, and if there's a concerning lesion, you catch it early and don't have to worry about it. We're just not getting the vitamin D we used to, and I'm vitamin D deficient according to my own labs — I'd venture that most people probably are.

Supplements After 40

Tom Rowland: How much vitamin D do you suggest, in IUs?

Dr. Mike Simpson: Depending on who you talk to, you'll get various opinions — five thousand IU is a number that gets kicked around a lot. The problem, which I found out when I decided to formulate my own supplements, is that not all IUs are created equal — what's on the label isn't necessarily what's bioavailable, and sometimes a company lists it in a different format entirely, which gets confusing. I always tell people: ask your doctor. Take what's in my book to your own doctor and get their opinion, and look at your blood work, because maybe you're not vitamin D deficient. With the fat-soluble vitamins — A, D, E, and K — you can actually get too much. With water-soluble vitamins, your body just flushes out the excess, which is why your urine gets bright yellow after a big vitamin dose.

Tom Rowland: If your body produces vitamin D naturally — say you're in Miami, close to the equator, and you go shirtless for thirty minutes in the middle of the day in summer, and you produce something like twenty thousand IU naturally — is that stored in fat? Could you get too much vitamin D that way, just from the sun, without supplementing?

Dr. Mike Simpson: It's virtually impossible to get too much vitamin D that way, because your body is using so much of it for cellular metabolism and repair in real time. I don't know of any cases of vitamin D toxicity from sun exposure alone. But you can absolutely get too much by taking exogenous vitamin D in supplement form. That's why in the supplements I formulated, it's split into two thousand IU in the morning and two thousand at night — about five thousand total is a good ballpark daily figure that a lot of guidelines recommend, and I like splitting the dose because everybody is also getting some vitamin D through food, even if they're not eating with that in mind. A lot of supplement brands just shotgun five thousand times the recommended daily allowance in a single dose, which is wasteful if you're not getting outside or eating well at all.

Tom Rowland: How important is it to split doses morning and night versus taking it all at once, if your body's just going to use what it needs and get rid of the rest?

Dr. Mike Simpson: With most vitamins, it's better to split the dose. If you take a big vitamin pack in the morning, your body processes what it can in the first couple of hours and then the excess just gets flushed — you wasted what you didn't need in that window even if you got the full recommended daily allowance. Vitamin D especially matters at night because bone remodeling happens overnight, so it's good to have some available then too. I like to load some in the morning to cover cellular function and repair during the day, and some again at night so my body has substrate available as it goes back into that repair cycle during sleep.

Tom Rowland: What about calcium and magnesium? Joe Hippensteel talks about how those are building blocks for recovery — when you're stretching, you're tearing down muscle slightly, and in order to recover you need to supplement with magnesium and calcium. Is that better post-stretching, or at night?

Dr. Mike Simpson: I lean toward the evening for both. Calcium, if I had to prioritize, I'd put more emphasis on in the evening. I also supplement magnesium in the evening, partly because one of magnesium's benefits is that it relaxes smooth muscle, increases circulation — especially to the brain — opens up the terminal airways in your lungs, and because of that relaxation effect, it's a great natural sleep aid. So I load all of my magnesium at night; that's actually why you won't see magnesium in either my longevity or energy formula — it'll be in my sleep formula down the road, but for now I take it separately before bed. Magnesium is probably one of the most underappreciated supplements out there — for sleep, respiratory health, muscle relaxation, and muscle repair. I use IV magnesium to treat migraines and asthma attacks in the emergency room — I've kept patients out of the ICU with it. And as long as your kidneys are functioning, it's really difficult to get too much magnesium orally; toxicity is virtually impossible that way. The only time we typically see magnesium toxicity clinically is in eclampsia patients — women with toxemia of pregnancy who we give IV magnesium and have to monitor closely, watching their respiratory rate, urine output, and reflexes, because dulled reflexes are the first indicator that they've gotten too much. But that's with an IV drip over time, not an oral supplement.

Tom Rowland: Would magnesium possibly benefit someone with asthma as a daily supplement?

Dr. Mike Simpson: I'd defer to their pulmonologist for definitive guidance, but I can't think of a reason it wouldn't help, and there's certainly no harm in it. I think everybody should take it as a sleep aid.

Tom Rowland: So everybody should be supplementing vitamin D, in your opinion.

Dr. Mike Simpson: Vitamin D, vitamin C, and zinc — which most people don't fully appreciate the importance of. Your collagen cross-linking and soft tissue repair are dependent on zinc. It took a surgery rotation as a med student for me to fully appreciate how important zinc is — the stretch marks you see on people are actually related to a zinc deficiency, because their body couldn't keep up with the tissue repair needed as they stretched.

Tom Rowland: I always thought that was just from growing too fast — you'd see it on linemen and heavyweights who grew nine inches and put on a hundred pounds in a year.

Dr. Mike Simpson: Right, but you'll notice not everyone who grows at a similar rate gets stretch marks, and not all women get them during pregnancy either — some do, some don't. Zinc is basically the key to preventing that, which is also why it's in all those cold and flu formulations — your tissue repair and immune response are dependent on vitamin C, vitamin D3, and zinc. If I were giving an elevator pitch on what to take, that's the cornerstone right there.

Tom Rowland: Is that your longevity formula?

Dr. Mike Simpson: In a nutshell, yes — that, along with turmeric and BioPerine, make up my longevity formula.

Tom Rowland: So instead of taking all these different pills, people can just take your longevity formula?

Dr. Mike Simpson: Yes. You can find it at graybeardperformance.com, under supplements. I have two products in the line right now, longevity and energy, and I should have a vitality formula out in probably the next four months, with everything else in the supplement chapter eventually making its way onto that site.

Tom Rowland: What if you're 30 — are you not supposed to take your "graybeard" formula if you don't have a gray beard?

Dr. Mike Simpson: Absolutely, take it regardless of the color of your beard — black, brown, or red. I've actually gotten emails from women who took a bottle of my supplements to their doctor and asked if there was any reason they shouldn't take it, and their doctor said no, it would actually be beneficial. A couple of different women have emailed saying they take the longevity formula and feel great.

Tom Rowland: Speaking from my own experience, once I started researching vitamins, I ended up with a tackle box full of them, and it's hard to feel them working the way you can feel a cup of coffee. Over time they make a big difference, but I got fatigued taking twelve or fifteen different pills. If I just had one pack, morning and night, and knew I was getting everything I needed, I think a lot more people would actually take their vitamins.

Dr. Mike Simpson: That's my long-term goal — a lot of supplement companies do this with a morning envelope and an evening envelope, and I'm hoping to grow the company to the point where I can offer that. Ideally it would be a single chewable pill, but it's really difficult to fit everything you need into one thing, and honestly not everybody needs everything — some people don't want an energy formula because they're happy with a cup of coffee before a workout, so I like people to have some autonomy in choosing what they take.

Tom Rowland: Is it possible to get everything you need from food these days?

Dr. Mike Simpson: It's really not, even though about every ten years a study comes out saying you don't need supplements if you eat well. The problem is those studies don't base their conclusions on what most people are actually eating, and supplements are not an excuse to eat poorly — you still need a good dietary foundation. But those studies also look at averages, not at people who want to be high performers. Just from what I know about you and your social media, you're an outlier at 53, just like I'm an outlier at 55 — the average person our age, activity-wise and strength-wise, is well below us, not because we're superhuman, but because we're doing the right things, and that puts a greater demand on our bodies and our cellular metabolism, so we need a bit of a boost for healing — vitamin C, D3, zinc — and because we're working out more, we need things like turmeric to head off inflammation before it happens, so we're not popping eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen midway through the afternoon. These studies are usually looking at average people eating a reasonably balanced diet and asking generic questions about energy level — they're not checking objective metrics like run times, VO2 max, or how much someone can lift, and they're looking at vitamins as a blanket family rather than individually.

That's why, when I decided what to formulate, I'd look at an individual ingredient like D3 or turmeric and go into PubMed and pull the clinical data — here's a study where one group got a placebo and another got D3, and their lab levels came back different, and they also reported subjectively that they felt better and recovered faster. You can't look at supplements in the aggregate the way most of these studies do; you have to look at them individually, and most people frankly don't have time to do that kind of research.

Tom Rowland: Right, and then they just decide not to do it at all, when even taking any reasonably good multivitamin would probably be better than nothing — and if you can find a high-quality one, you're good to go. Honestly, when you'd deploy, did you have a whole line of bottles on the kitchen counter?

Dr. Mike Simpson: Yes, and that line has changed over time, and it'll probably be different two years from now as I learn new things — sometimes from emails people send asking what I think about something, and I look it up and decide to add it. But when I deployed or traveled and couldn't bring all those bottles, I'd chew on whatever chewable multivitamin was available — a Centrum, or even a Flintstones multivitamin, which the clinic always had boxes and boxes of when deployed. Is it giving me some things I don't need? Probably. Are there things I need that aren't in it? Also probably. But I'm getting my B vitamins, my D, my C, some trace minerals — it's better than nothing.

Closing Thoughts

Tom Rowland: Good. Well, man, I've enjoyed this so far, and there's no way we don't do another one of these — I have so many more questions. But I'd really like to have you on again. If I get to Austin, I'd love to come train with you and see what you do on a regular basis.

Dr. Mike Simpson: That would be great, and I'll be getting out there too.

Tom Rowland: Your book is called "Honed" — what's the exact tagline?

Dr. Mike Simpson: "Finding Your Edge as a Man Over 40."

Tom Rowland: And where's it available — Amazon and everywhere else?

Dr. Mike Simpson: Amazon, BarnesAndNoble.com, really anywhere you'd buy a book online. Most sales are through Amazon, obviously, since that's everybody's go-to now.

Tom Rowland: It was a bestseller.

Dr. Mike Simpson: It was an Amazon bestseller, and still is, in about eight categories — health and fitness, men's health, ab workouts, strength training, and a few others. For a week, I actually beat out a book by Rickson Gracie in one of those categories.

Tom Rowland: I read that book recently too — really good. Do you have any plans to make yours an audiobook?

Dr. Mike Simpson: Eventually. Since I self-published — I didn't have a publisher fronting a stipend the way a traditional deal would work — the audio production was more capital than I had right out of the gate, so my plan is to put book sales back into financing the audiobook. It's roughly a six-month process. I'll be reading it myself, but the production company wants a specific studio, a specific editor, and I'll probably have to read every page two or three times so they can pick the best version. They told me the process usually finishes in about half the time they originally quote, so they probably just set expectations at six months so people feel good when it comes out in three.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome, man. Have you ever written a book before?

Dr. Mike Simpson: Nope, this is my first one.

Tom Rowland: Well, good job, putting it right up there outselling a big book like that in so many categories.

Dr. Mike Simpson: Thank you. I've been really pleased, and what's pleased me the most is reading the reviews and getting emails from people who say they're already incorporating it. I've gotten emails from current and former professional athletes telling me things like, "my sleep is a dumpster fire, I'm going to do everything you're saying in the sleep chapter," or a former professional fighter who told me he never goes to the doctor because he doesn't think he needs to, since he's healthy — but after reading the book, he scheduled a colonoscopy, an eye exam, and a skin cancer screening, and thanked me for prompting him to finally do it. I think there's something in it for anybody, even somebody like you who's clearly already got the recipe down.

Tom Rowland: I got a ton out of it. What I liked, too, is that I've had to be careful about choosing a personal physician — I can't have someone telling me my BMI is too high when it's mostly muscle, or not understanding why I want my vitamin D checked, telling me I'll be fine because I'm out in the sun all the time. I want to check my vitamin D, I want to check all of it. So I chose a doctor who's also an athlete and understands my goals. Reading your book, I can see your background and your mindset, and when you give advice — like getting vaccinated for shingles — I pay attention, because you have zero financial stake in whether I do it or not, and you do the same kind of training I do, at roughly my age. I'm going to take your advice over a 27-year-old doctor's advice who's never felt what it's like to be 50. I got a ton out of it, and I thought it was extremely well written and well organized. Anyone approaching 40, or already over 40, is going to get a lot out of this book. Good job all around.

Dr. Mike Simpson: Thank you.

Tom Rowland: Let's do this again — I'd really like to, especially when we have medical questions down the road. Do you have a personal website or social media you want to give out?

Dr. Mike Simpson: You can follow me on Instagram at Dr. Mike Simpson — "doctor" spelled with a D-R, not spelled out. Graybeardperformance.com is my business site, and I have a personal site at DrMikeSimpson.com, though I tend to do most of my work over at Graybeard now, including a newsletter and blog I'm starting there, because I want Graybeard Performance to be a holistic lifestyle resource — not just supplements, not just jiu-jitsu gear and my book, but something I keep adding to as I keep learning, maybe even future book chapters. Eventually I'd like it to include message boards where people can connect with tribes right there on the site.

Tom Rowland: That would be super cool, as long as it doesn't get overtaken by spam the way my old message board did — it got so ridiculous with people posting "I made five thousand dollars a day from home" that it became unusable.

Dr. Mike Simpson: I follow enough accounts that get those comments to know exactly what you mean.

Tom Rowland: I don't know how that benefits anybody, but it happens. That's probably the death of the message board — now you almost have to just build a Reddit thread and link it from your site instead of trying to run your own.

Dr. Mike Simpson: Maybe.

Tom Rowland: But you're certainly an authority, and you look like you're 35 at 55 — pretty impressive. You're doing great things, and you're going to help a lot of people. We'll do it again, but thanks, Mike, I appreciate it. And if anybody wants to read this book, I highly suggest it — go get it on Amazon.

Dr. Mike Simpson: Alright, thanks, Tom. We'll see you.