What would happen if Usain Bolt raced against himself? This is 21 year old Usain Bolt He’s competing against 31 year old Usain Bolt And other Usain Bolts in between Who wins? Bolt was 23 years old when he set the current world record at 9.
58 seconds. He was never able to match that time again. If we look at the other best sprinters in history, we see some peaked in their twenties and a few in their early thirties.
The typical peak of a 100 meter sprinter is at around age 25 to 27. But what about our other physical and mental peaks? Do we just peak in the 20s?
You might be thinking this is going to be a depressing video showing that your life only gets worse from now on. But as a 30 year old man who gets back pain from coughing too hard, I was happy to find out there are still several peaks in life ahead of me. I looked at scientific papers and gathered data on the physical and mental peaks across different stages of our lives.
I also asked my subscribers to fill a survey with their age and these are the results. And good news, there should be some life peaks ahead of all of you in this chart I’m going to start by breaking your life into 4 stages. Stage 1: your childhood.
It seems that you can run around forever, even when adults around you get tired. It’s at this age that you get your peak in fatigue resistance and speed of recovery. You keep getting into accidents, but that’s ok because it’s like your body is made out of rubber.
Your flexibility peaks around early adolescence. The skills you have now are built on the neural circuits that were shaped during certain critical periods of your young life. For learning a second language, it seems that the critical period is until age 7.
If you start learning a second language after that age you can still become proficient but achieving a near-native fluency becomes more challenging. And research suggests there are also critical periods in childhood for musical abilities. But things are still getting better.
Enter your 20s. Life’s good. You feel invincible.
Your reflexes are faster than ever. Your reaction times tend to peak in your 20s. This study measured the reaction times of players in a video game and found that the peak was at age 24.
It’s also in your 20s that athletes peak for most explosive sports. That’s the case of the 100m meter sprint, as we’ve seen. In Olympic weightlifting, the age peak is around 26 years old.
It’s a bit harder to measure performance objectively for team sports, but the studies I found for basketball and football also place the peak age in the 20s. Even though in the 20s you don’t learn languages as effectively as a kid, you’re sharper than ever. Your visual working memory, the ability to temporarily remember and use visual details, peaks at age 20.
And in the early 20s, you also peak in fluid intelligence, the ability to solve new problems without relying on pre-existing knowledge. You’re smart, but you’re still figuring things out. You quit your job and you book a trip to Bali to find yourself.
You see, your brain still hasn’t accumulated a lot of knowledge and your peak in wisdom will come much later in life. Enter the 30s. Your hangovers now last 2 days.
You don’t understand how you could party so often when you were younger. It’s getting harder to keep a flat belly. Half of your friends can’t shut up about their new air fryers.
The other half are running half marathons. You’re not sure which one of the two you want to be associated with. In endurance sports several peaks happen in the 30s Marathon runners peak around age 30.
And there’s an interesting trend. It seems that the longer the duration of the event, the later the age peak tends to be at. 100 km ultra marathon runners peak around age 35.
And 100 mile ultra marathon runners peak at around age 37 or 39. Most people also hit their top strength around this age, with powerlifters peaking around age 35. Cognitively, although some capabilities start to decline after the 20s, some hit their peak in the 30s For example, the ability to remember new faces tends to peak past age 30.
So the notion that you peak in your 20s is not necessarily true. There are several peaks in the 30s, and still a few more to come. Enter the second half of your life.
You feel tired and you’re not young anymore. You’re trying to avoid the infamous midlife crisis. What other peaks could there be left?
Although your brain no longer has the neuroplasticity nor the fluid intelligence of younger times, you have a greater ability to use accumulated knowledge, also known as crystallized intelligence. In careers where the years of accumulated knowledge are crucial, age peaks can occur in the middle age. For example, the average age of a successful startup founder is 45, contrary to the stereotype of young founders.
And to my surprise, some research indicates that the peak in happiness actually happens in old age. There’s a theory that suggests that happiness has a U shape: the hypothesis is that your happiness dips during midlife and peaks in old age. This U-shape theory is still debated by researchers, but I found it interesting so I looked into a study that tried to measure this curve.
They looked at the data from the European Social Survey, a survey that measures things like happiness, income and health. They found that the self-reported level of happiness was higher for people with higher income overall, suggesting that money does contribute to happiness. But they also found that it was lower for older people.
Does that mean the U shape theory is wrong? Well, firstly, they found that people in the lower and middle income groups did have a mid-life dip. And secondly, they found that if we adjust the data to include factors like being healthy, having children and living together with someone, you do get a U-curve with the peak at an old age, regardless of the income level.
In other words, old Europeans who don’t fall into certain factors like being unhealthy or living alone are actually likely to report a higher level of happiness than younger people. The data is open source so I decided to explore it myself. If we plot the age on the x-axis, income on the y-axis, and the self-reported level of happiness on the z-axis, we get this picture.
As the age increases, the spread in happiness between the different income groups increases as well, suggesting that income matters less when you’re young. And we can see the mid-life happiness dip for people of lower and middle incomes. Even though the happiness U-shape theory is still debated, I personally think it’s uplifting to see that there’s at least a few people that hit their peak in happiness at such an advanced stage of their lives.
There’s more research related to your life peaks that I didn’t include to keep the video short. But in summary, these are some of the peaks in your life. Does that mean you can’t learn new languages when you’re 30, or be strong when you’re 50?
Fortunately, you can. That’s the good news, for most of these things you can maintain good form and even improve if you take care of yourself. Many athletes can maintain good form throughout life with training.
Bernard Hopkins, a professional boxer, won the IBF light heavyweight title when he was 49 years old. And the same principle applies to your brain. Although there is some neural deterioration that occurs with age, your brain can still adapt and improve its performance with mental training There are a few things you can do to make sure you age well mentally and physically: Take care of your physical health.
That means staying active, eating healthy and sleeping well Take care of your mental health: Do social activities and hobbies and manage your stress And finally, engage in mentally stimulating activities throughout your life And no matter how old you are, I personally think it’s never too late to start climbing towards a new peak. And if you want to make sure you stay sharp and never stop learning new things you can try today’s sponsor, Brilliant Brain rot was named as word of the year by Oxford. Why don’t stop your brain rot right now and replace your mindless scrolling by a little bit of intentional learning every day?
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