Phil Daoust

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Phil Daoust

One of the lovely things about getting older is realising there’s always something more you should be doing to look after your body. Did I say lovely? Obviously I meant tedious. But how you feel about it doesn’t change the facts. If you take the slightest interest in your health, and want to stay strong, mobile and pain-free in your 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond, you’ll have to pay attention to the exercises that many of us avoid in our 20s, 30s and 40s. Or, in my case, until you’re 61¾.

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Phil Daoust

Lungs are amazing. There they sit, inflating and deflating from dawn to dusk, dusk to dawn, sucking in air, stripping out oxygen and exchanging it for carbon dioxide. They do this 20,000 times a day, 7.5m times a year, 600m times in the average lifetime, keeping our trillions of cells ticking over and saving them from choking on their own exhaust fumes. And we ignore them until something goes wrong and we’re gasping,wheezing, panicking – or worse.

2 months ago | theguardian.com | Phil Daoust

I’ve broken just one bone in my 61 years – my fibula, the smaller of the two that connect your knee to your ankle. I was skiing, I caught my left foot on some ice and the rest of my body just rotated around it until something snapped. Yeah, ouch. I made a full recovery, but I’d rather not break anything else. I definitely don’t want to become so frail that might fracture a rib, or gravity alone could crack my spine.

Mar 9, 2025 | theguardian.com | Phil Daoust

If you can’t do push-ups – or if you’re still scarred by being forced to do them as a kid – it can be hard to see the point of them. Sure, they look impressive, especially the “explosive” variety that launches you into the air, but even the standard version is so demanding that armies use it as a punishment: “Drop and give me 50!” Then there’s all the macho, chest-beating rubbish that surrounds them. It is no surprise many of us avoid them, or think we will never master them.

Feb 9, 2025 | msn.com | Phil Daoust

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