I’m living proof it’s not too late.

For most of my life I took my health for granted. I worked in sales and sales management — too many hours, too little sleep, too much worry about numbers that never stopped moving. I told myself I was eating fine, and that the aches in my back and neck were just the price of getting older.

Then the company I’d given all those years to was bought, and I was laid off. Around the same time, I found out I had heart disease. That got my attention. It turned out a lot of what I’d accepted as “just aging” was actually the result of how I’d been living — and that meant I could do something about it.

When COVID shut the gyms down, my youngest son challenged his older brother and me to do a thousand push-ups in a week. I had a bad shoulder — arthritis so bad it’s since been replaced — so I couldn’t do them all at once. Instead I did ten at a time and spread them across the day. By the end of the week I’d done over eleven hundred.

That little experiment became my whole approach: small bits of movement, often. I call them exercise snacks. My daughter talked me into posting a video of one — getting up off the floor from sitting cross-legged — and half a million people watched it. What struck me most was how many wrote back the same thing: “You don’t understand — I can’t get up off the floor.” I’ve been posting something every day since.

A lot of people in their 60s, 70s, and beyond have quietly decided it’s too late for them. It isn’t. You can make real, meaningful changes in your strength, your balance, and your mobility at any age — if you start gently, stay patient, and keep showing up.

My goal isn’t a six-pack or a marathon. It’s to help you get back your confidence and your independence — to make the everyday stuff doable again, and to help you age more on your own terms. Aging shouldn’t suck. That’s the whole idea behind A Friendly Nudge, my weekly video newsletter, and everything I share here.