 Question is from Melissa Shepard. What are the best methods for fat loss in a 80-plus year-old with limitations? Well, this is all on that mobility, being consistent with mobility. The number one thing that I would focus on, especially with people in advanced age, which towards the end of my career, I worked with a lot of people in advanced age, which I would categorize people over the age of 65 or 67 and up. I would focus on getting them more mobile and getting them stronger. Regardless of if they want to lose weight, gain weight, or whatever, getting them stronger has a tremendous impact on speeding up someone's metabolism. The greatest impact is on people in advanced age. I swear to God, I can get someone's metabolism to get faster through strength training, especially if they're already inactive, but you take somebody who's 80, who's inactive, and you start reversing what's happening to their body with weights. All of a sudden, miracles happen. I mean, it is literally life changing. We talked about this in previous episodes. The difference between an 80-year-old that exercises regularly and the difference between them and an 80-year-old that doesn't exercise regularly, it's like two different universes. It's completely different. So the first thing I would do, focus on strength and mobility. That's number one. Now, when it comes to weight loss, of course, we can look at diet and all that kind of stuff, but I don't even touch their diet until later on. The first thing I focus on is increasing their protein intake. There's lots of evidence now that shows that a high protein diet has tremendous benefits for people in advanced age. They're finding it does a good job of reducing muscle and strength loss, improving mobility, and this is for otherwise healthy individuals. It also does a good job just getting them to feel better and improve their hormone profiles. So when I do work on nutrition, it's like this. It's like, okay, let's look at your diet. All right, I want you to start eating more protein. Let's try having protein with all of your meals that you have throughout the day. Yeah, it's especially important to work on strength, mobility, and to also increase their proprioception in terms of their body's ability to understand where they are in space, but also like to balance just movement. Yeah, movement in general. And so I would focus a lot on multi-planar movement and making sure that they're able to react a lot more because we're dealing with somebody that's probably, you know, this is 80 years of fixed types of movements because like you start like down regulating like certain movements that you don't use. And so for the first thing for me is really to find those movements that they're not doing and just just sort of lighting those pathways up again is going to do a whole lot in terms of the overall stimulus. And now that's going to affect, you know, even their cognitive ability is going to increase and all these like benefits are going to happen as a result of that, which is going to be momentum. Dude, this I've seen this, this is I've seen this far more with people in advanced age than any other category. Getting them stronger, not changing their diet, they get leaner. Yeah, just because I think we don't realize just how inactive people get after, after a certain age. And so just getting them to move and build some muscle without changing their diet. And then before they know it, oh, I'm getting, I didn't have to change their diet. They just start to get leaner. Throwing in the protein is just a plus. So the thing that I used to have to coach to my trainers with clients like this is avoid the temptation to want to just put them on a bunch of machines and do a bunch of bullshit exercises. It's really easy to have somebody this age and go like, oh, just, you know, we'll go to the preacher girl machine and we'll go to the little chest press machine and just move these clients around the machine. It seems safer. Yes. So it seems safer. It's easier. Like they can do it. You feel like you're providing some sort of exercise for these people and it's probably better than them doing nothing. But where I see a lot of value and Justin touched on it a little bit with the stability thing. I like incorporating a lot of stability stuff with that age. I like doing a lot of unilateral work. I like doing things that I think that are really basic functional movements that they start to lose, like being able to lift their arms above their head. Yeah, no weight. Yeah, exactly. No weight. It could be no weight at first and then eventually be five pounds and then be able to do that. To get someone to that age to press five pound dumbbells over their head and then also balance on one leg would be like a fucking huge accomplishment. Just balancing on one leg. Not even lifting anything. Right. Or going to a split stance and doing that. Getting them up off the ground. That could be a workout. That's three sets of five times of them starting on the ground, getting all the way back up and then teaching them proper ways of doing that. You'd be amazed how many people that age can't even get off the ground anymore. No, you're bringing up good points. Consider their limitations and try to take off the filter of what you think is a workout. Because you're working with someone who's old and you're working with someone with limitations. I'll give you a couple examples of common exercises that I would do with people in this age group. One of them would be sit down and stand up out of the bench. And sometimes they couldn't do that without assistance. So then what I would do is I would get pads and I put them on the bench to make the bench higher. So now they didn't have to sit down so far to stand up. And then the way I would progress them would be take one pad off. We've been working with two pads now for the last four weeks. Now today I'm going to take one pad off. Let's give that a shot. That's their exercise for the lower body. That's it. Here's another one. Leg extension with no weight. Literally. I'm sitting down on the bench. Try to maintain posture, Mrs. Johnson. Try to keep your hands across your chest. You have to support yourself. Now lift your knee off your leg off the bench and try and straighten your leg out as straight as you can and bring it back. That's enough resistance for a lot of people in this category. Here's another great exercise. I would have people stand if they had the balance. Sometimes I've had have them sit or so stand or sit. I'd have a balloon and I'd pop the balloon to them in different directions. And their job was to reach to hit the balloon and hit it back to me. So I'd hit it above their head. I'd hit it to the side. I'd hit it down low. We would do that for 30 seconds to a minute. Then we would rest. Or I would take a bunch of pens and I'd put them all on the floor. I'd drop them on the floor. It's okay without shuffling your feet, bend down and pick up each one of the pens. So they have to reach over the left, reach over the right. And then when they'd stand up, I'd say, now make sure when you stand up, you have really, really good posture. Don't overestimate their ability to move and what is considered a workout. A lot of these exercises, believe it or not, these people will come back to you the next day and be like, oh, I felt a little bit sore. I put ginger snaps up on a shelf. They like ginger snaps. You've been listening to this podcast long enough. We know that Sal's trained Mrs. Johnson a thousand times. And I've trained Susie. She's a super human. I don't even reference anybody. I work with Butterscotch discs. Wothersmoons. Wothers originals. Wothers are legions. Wothersmoons and actress. I tie it on a string in front of their face and say, hey, go get it. Bands are great too. So I like using bands for people in advanced age. I think that's... But just oftentimes you need no resistance at all. You're right. No, just getting them to move and just think of all the basic things that we take for granted, okay, that we do every day. Walk sideways down the hall. Yeah. I mean, I swear to God that's, you know what will benefit you if you're a trainer and you want to work with people in this age group? The way I learn how to train these people. Go to a retirement home and watch them walk around for a while. Actually, I volunteered at a couple of retirement homes and did some stuff, but we would do stuff in chairs. So I'd have them sit in a chair. But where I learned how to train people like this was I had an exceptional physical therapist that rented space in my studio. Yeah. And physical therapists, brilliant at working with people. My best friend was a PT. And when I was just starting as a trainer, he was going through PT school. And so he was actually somebody who I always would use for that because they're dealing with most people in advanced age. And so the stuff that he would do, I'd be like, Oh, wow. Like he'd give me an exercise and he'd be like, you know, sit her on a stability ball and have her just lift her leg and extend the leg. Lift the leg up, extend it all the way out straight on a stability ball. And I'd be like, I would have never thought of that. And he's like, Oh yeah, no, they lose all that control on their hip. And then you're just the weight of their leg is enough for them. No, if you're a trainer, if you're a trainer, see if you can volunteer with a physical therapist, tell them you'll help them. That's great. Actually, watch them because I watched her for about a year. And then I started working with this, this population. I learned a shit ton from, a shit ton from watching her, you know, work with these people.