If you’re over 40, you could be losing up to 10% of your muscle every decade — and your regular checkup won’t catch it.
In this eye-opening conversation, Vince Ferguson sits down with Ami Porges, Founder of Longevity Access Partners and Primary Prevention, to expose why our healthcare system is really sick care, and what you must do to protect your muscle, metabolism, and independence after 40.
Ami breaks down his team-based preventive healthcare model that brings doctors, dietitians, trainers, and health coaches together — and why insurance rarely covers what actually keeps you well. You’ll learn why muscle is your #1 defense against diabetes, heart disease, and frailty, how much protein after 40 you really need, why strength training over 40 matters more than cardio, and the truth about GLP-1 muscle loss.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
Muscle Loss After 40: Why maintaining muscle becomes increasingly important as we age.
Sick Care vs. Healthcare: Why traditional healthcare often focuses on treating problems rather than preventing them.
Protein and Strength Training: Why both are essential for preserving muscle and supporting healthy aging.
GLP-1 Weight-Loss Medications: Their potential benefits, side effects, and the importance of protecting muscle and bone health.
Creatine After 40: Ami’s perspective on creatine, muscle health, and healthy aging.
A Better Approach to Prevention: How doctors, dietitians, trainers, and health coaches can work together to support long-term health.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Ami Porges is the founder of Longevity Access Partners and Primary Prevention. With extensive experience improving healthcare systems, Ami is working to make coordinated, personalized preventive care more accessible.
Learn more:
Primary Prevention: https://primarypreventionmd.com/
Longevity Access Partners: https://longevityaccess.co/
Full Episode Transcript
Interview with Ami Porges
The Mission: Making Prevention Practical
Vince Ferguson: For those meeting you for the first time, Ami, tell us a little bit more about yourself, what you’re building with Longevity Access Partners and Primary Prevention, but most importantly, what problems you’re looking to solve.
Ami Porges: I spent 18 years in healthcare looking at different operational problems, supporting doctors, supporting nurses and health systems. And what I noticed is that a huge issue that we have is people don’t work together across specialties in every facet of healthcare. And after I had my first child, about eight years ago now, and went into my 40s, I realized that I need to do a better job of taking care of myself, but I couldn’t find the right resources to put it all together. And I realized that if I’m having trouble doing that with my background and my connections and the intent that I put into this, other people must be having the same trouble. So I went about trying to fix that, and I got a team together of everything that you would need, trainers, dietitians, health and wellness coaches, and doctors. And we came together as a unit so that every patient or every person can have this entire structure around them to be healthy. And I turned that desire to have those resources into a business that now supports doctors and clients to have everything that they need in one place.
Why Healthcare Needs a Team
Vince Ferguson: Wow. But why wasn’t that already in place? This is something that only you’re doing. Why didn’t someone else have that idea that maybe we need a team to come together to help people?
Ami Porges: I would love all the credit. And in my mind, I thought it up all by myself. But when you look, there have been people over time that have done stuff like this in the cardiology space and in the high-performance sports spaces. What you find is that when the life and death situation presents itself or when the very high-end competitive situation presents itself, society and people are willing to put resources together to do this right. But for the, for the normal person, it’s something that didn’t exist, and I think that there are a few different reasons why. mostly, and this, in the United States, we are an insurance-based healthcare model, and insurance covers solutions to acute problems. When you’re sick, they will cover your treatment, but they don’t generally cover the things that are necessary to keep you well. Now, I’m not trying to bash the insurance companies. That’s not where I’m going with this. There has been an attempt by Medicare and other insurance companies to support preventative medicine, and we can talk about that also. They’re beginning to do this, but it’s just not the way the model worked. The model in in the United States was you have a sickness, you have a disease, you have a specific problem, and insurance will cover the solution to that problem. They didn’t cover all the things that you could be doing to prevent the problem in the first place. So when it came to very severe heart conditions, the model sort of existed. And when it came to high-end sport performance, like in Formula 1, those drivers were getting a team around them. But for anyone in between being critically ill and being extremely wealthy and having unlimited resources, it didn’t exist. And it didn’t exist because of the insurance factors, but also because it took a group of people coming together to solve this. It’s not something that one doctor could solve on their own, or one dietitian could solve on their own, or a trainer could solve on their own. It took everybody working together, and that made it a little bit more difficult to get off the ground.
Vince Ferguson: When you have so many different professionals coming together, sometimes it’s not that easy to pull them together for one common goal, toward a common purpose?
Ami Porges: It’s very difficult to do it, and I think fortunately, that’s what my background and my training is in. My background was to go to emergency rooms or neonatology units or surgical suites and to pull teams together of doctors and nurses and administrators and patients and bring them all together and to solve specific goals. And so I was always very comfortable in that space. So going and talking to a doctor and a trainer and a dietitian and a health and wellness coach and a nurse and labs and building a team is something that I’d always done, and so it- bringing that together in this way wasn’t a stretch. It was a good use of what I’d always been doing.
Inside the Coordinated-Care Model
Vince Ferguson: That is pretty phenomenal. But walk me through what someone would expect to have happen once they come into your model versus the healthcare experience.
Ami Porges: Of course. And I’ll say I think what they should expect in our model is what they should expect of healthcare and what they should expect period. I think the only way we’re really going to change everything around healthcare is when people have that expectation, demand it, and eventually the system will catch up. So I love this question, but what someone should expect when they come into our model, either as a customer off the street or as a patient of a doctor that we work with, they should expect to get some objective testing. You need some basic labs to understand how you’re doing, and you should expect somebody to talk to you and interview you and know how your health is going. Are you in pain or discomfort? What are your goals? Are you an athlete trying to achieve a 5K goal? Are you a weightlifter trying to, hit a new PR? What are your goals and where are you now in terms of the data and the interview? Okay? And now, once we know where you are, you’re going to meet with a health and wellness coach that is board-certified and trained to understand human factors that affect performance, longevity, and outcome. These people serve as as a Sherpas a guide, and they’re not trained in any one specific thing. They’re trained in everything, and they’re really sort of your concierge, your person to walk through all of these things with. And now, depending on what you need, you’ll meet down the line with others. So if you need nutritional guidance, you’ll meet with a registered dietitian. We only use the highest level of certifications in our model, and that dietitian can talk to you about calories, protein, fiber, macronutrient breakdown and percentages, micronutrients, supplements. You name it, a registered dietitian can do it. And because we function as a team, you will also meet with a trainer, and that trainer and dietitian can work together to fuel your performance and perhaps get you back from injury or help you build your body in a way that you need. What we’ve found is that most people that we encounter are either in their 40s or in their 70s, and they’re going through transitions. Either they’re somebody like me, to be quite frank, that says, you know, “I used to be fit, but now that I’m turning 40, 45, what do I do to make sure I don’t deteriorate?” And a lot of that came down to strength training and adequate protein and adequate recovery and adequate sleep, and we offer those things. For people in their 70s or 80s, we see a lot of things around weight control and weight loss. We see a lot around sleep, around social interaction. So anybody that works with us would get some objective data on how they’re doing. They would meet with a health coach that can guide them in general. They would meet with a registered dietitian to get their food in order. They would meet with a trainer or exercise specialist, and all of these things are coordinated because if you’re not sleeping well, you’re not going to eat well and you’re not going to train well. If you’re stressed, your cortisol is going to be high. You’re not going to recover appropriately. If your diet is severe calorie restriction for health purposes perhaps, your training needs to be adjusted in order to account for it. And so with these things working together, we can get long-term progress. Now, once you’ve met with all those people, we structure our touch points with clients or patients as they need. Some people will meet with us every week. Some people will meet with us once a month. It just depends on what somebody needs. We do have a way of providing through a portal or through an app people’s ability to track so that we can monitor them, but really everything we do is customized. And so I can say to you, “We give you an app and you go about your day,” and that’s true, but somebody who is 80 and has high blood pressure and is on GLP-1 is at a different risk level, and we’re not going to force that person to use an app. We can talk to them, we can Zoom, whatever works for them. But that’s a good overview of the experience that somebody would get, working with us.
Personalized Care, Not One Size Fits All
Vince Ferguson: So it’s no one-size-fits-all approach.
Ami Porges: It can’t be. It can’t be. The benefit of having a team is that you have all of these resources, and the team can work well around the person. So we would be doing them a disservice and us a disservice if we couldn’t tailor things to what people actually needed. and I, we do find that most people come to us when they have a problem, a real problem, but it works just as well for people who are doing great and want to go to the next level. I have a lot of friends who are training two, three times a week, and they’re stuck, and maybe they want to gain muscle or maybe they want to gain fitness or maybe they have goals, and those are the people that I find need this kind of help just as much as anyone else because it’s hard to diagnose yourself. we live, we live in this AI world, and I love AI. I’m a fan. But- If you try and program for yourself, there’s going to be blind spots, and usually people are missing something that they couldn’t see. If they could see it, they would’ve solved it before, right? Is it sleep? Is it when they’re eating at night? Is it when they’re waking up, the amount of sunlight that they have? we can help find those things in people. And, yeah, I would love to have more people that are doing well and want to do even better, but in all honesty, a lot of the people that we work with are people that have major issues or perhaps people that, just had a baby or some transition, and we help them through that transition.
GLP-1 Medications: Powerful Tool, Not a Complete Solution
Vince Ferguson: Hmm. And you mentioned, you mentioned weight loss for a minute, and I want to talk about something because you’ve been involved in the obesity space for years, and we now have GLP-1 medications completely changing the weight loss conversation, right? Are these medications, in your opinion, solving the obesity problem on the… Are, are we in danger of thinking the medication is a solution when it’s really only one part?
Ami Porges: Okay. My opinion on this, and my opinion on everything goes based on the best scientific data that I can find. So I read research papers, frankly, every week. I work with doctors. I work with some researchers. I work with registered dietitians. And so all I can do is take the information that I’m getting from good sources and put it together. So let me start with that. Given all of that, it’s my opinion that GLP-1s of any level, right, semaglutide or tirzepatide or retatrutide as we get into that sphere coming soon, I think that they are extraordinarily powerful weapons that have very strong health benefits in the ability to fight obesity. For anybody who doesn’t know how they work, and I don’t mean the mechanism, I mean the actual thing that they do, is they make it so that you do not have cravings and so that you do not have, hunger signaling. You feel like you are full. It’s also interestingly, they work on smoking cessation and they work on alcohol control. Essentially any kind of craving that you have, and especially hunger, they help to mitigate. So it’s extremely powerful, extremely powerful, and they’re, they work. The data suggests that they help people lose weight at a rate that people would have a hard time achieving without using these medications, and there is subsequent health outcomes that are associated with these medications that are associated with weight loss, but beyond it. So we know that reducing your weight helps blood pressure and helps cholesterol, but these medications do more than just that. Some of them seem to target very specific types of visceral fat that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to affect if you were just losing weight. So all the evidence right now suggests that these are very good, very powerful things. Now, to the exact question that you asked me no, they are not the solution. Because what we find is that when people use them, they use them as the full answer, and the answer is actually that you need to maintain muscle mass. You need to maintain bone density. You need to gauge micronutrient intake. You need to make sure that blood pressure, is in check, especially with these medications. We see a lot of issues with them with people who did have high blood pressure, and I can explain why. And fundamentally, we don’t know if these medications will work forever, and so you also need to be able to live a life outside of this medication. So the fact that they’re an extraordinary tool that will help you to get from 200 pounds to 150 pounds, if that is your goal, is undeniable. But 150 pounds can look very different o- on different body compositions, at different health levels, and at different levels of sustainability. So I can go on and on about it, but they are powerful. I recommend them. I think that if you need it, use it. Use a tool that you have at your disposal, but it’s far from a solution.
Safety, Side Effects, and Protecting Muscle
Vince Ferguson: Okay. Yeah, and I wanted your take on that because there’s so much talk about it today. You know? The fact that it can help, but then I’m hearing the side effects as well, you know? So you have to be informed when you’re taking such medications.
Ami Porges: Yes. So there’s different types of side effects. And I’ll start with from beginning to, let’s say from the most immediate to the most long-term that I’m aware of. Now, in the immediate term, people who are taking GLP-1s of any kind, and different ones have different strengths of side effects, you’re going to deal with some basic nausea and intolerance for the medication. Now, most people know that, but it should be mentioned. There’s some evidence that taking them orally, taking them as as a pill, has slightly less side effects than taking it as an injection once a week. You can take them as an injection once a week. You could take ’em orally on a daily basis. but when you take it orally, the medicine doesn’t work as strongly. It’s not as direct an impact. So be aware that is a side effect, and if you want to avoid it- You can u- go old school and diet and exercise and calorie restriction to lose weight will work. Ultimately, these medicines work, their core thing is that they help you have a calorie restriction without being very hungry. There’s some other little magic there, but really what we’re talking about is a diet, and they promote the ability to stick to it. So if being nauseous is not something that you want, you don’t have to take the medication, but it will do that to you, to most people. Now, side effect two, and now we’re getting down the line is that there is now, there are whispers that this may have an impact on vision or things like this. Now, these are not fully hashed out. We don’t know for sure. So as with any medication, you should be aware that there can be things five years down the line, 10 years down the line that we don’t know about today that might come into play. I still sit in a place where I believe deeply right now that these are very safe things. if you are somebody who is on medication for cholesterol or for blood pressure, specifically blood pressure, you should be aware that blood pressure medication is gauged to your weight. And when you’re taking a medicine like this that helps you lose weight dramatically, taking blood pressure medication for a 200-pound man that now weighs 170 pounds over the course of weeks can cause side effects that we’ve seen. blood volume effect that the amount of water that you drink will likely have to change, the amount of fiber that you have will likely have to change, and the amount of medication you have will likely have to change, and if you don’t adjust those things in real time, you can have very bad outcomes. You can get dizzy, you could get… l- let your doctor be the one that guides you through this, but we have seen bad outcomes there, and so be aware that those are real. but aside from this, there aren’t a lot of side effects that we see with the GLP-1s. A behavioral side effect, if you can call it that is people take these medicines, they lose the weight, but they lose a lot of muscle mass and a lot of bone density because they’re losing this weight so quickly. Now, the medicine is not doing this to you. There isn’t something in the medicine that makes you lose muscle. You’re losing muscle because when you lose weight at a faster rate than 10% per week, you’re at increased risk of losing muscle no matter what, and we know how to solve that problem. That is a protein and exercise problem. Also sleep, of course, because you need good muscle protein synthesis, and you need to be able to recover. So you can lose weight the way that you would with these medications and mitigate it with lifestyle and behavior factors. So it is a side effect in the way that most people are using it because historically, nobody could lose 20% body weight in a week. I mean, it’s crazy town. But now the medicine is making that possible. So we absolutely see people losing way too much muscle, way too much bone density. If you’re a woman in perimenopause or menopause bone density is the game for you. And losing weight fast is going to prevent that, and there are things you can do. If you’re a man in your 40s, 50s, 60s, keeping muscle mass on you is the game. That is the game. And losing muscle mass too quickly is a massive problem, but I want to be clear that it happens more because of these medications, but it is not a side effect of the medication. It’s a side effect of the behaviors attached to it, and we can absolutely solve for that problem.
Vince Ferguson: Hmm. All right. So it’s a behavioral problem, but that’s something that your team addresses when it comes to working with your, clients.
Ami Porges: Absolutely. It’s something any- And it’s something, like I said in the beginning, anyone who’s going to prescribe this medication or anybody who’s going to get on this medication should expect and be demanding these kinds of services. What is it that I should worry about with water, with fiber, with strength training, with sleep and recovery when I’m taking something that is going to fundamentally change my body and my body composition by, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 pounds at a time? These are questions that people should be asking, and yes, we do that for sure. But the person responsible is you. It’s the patient. It’s the person listening to this. People like me and like our team want to help, but the pilot of this is the, is you, and you have to take responsibility and accountability for your health and ask the right questions.
Why Muscle Matters for Healthspan
Vince Ferguson: Interesting. I hear you. Well, ’cause I don’t think a lot of people are asking the right questions. You know?
Ami Porges: That’s right.
Vince Ferguson: ‘Cause it sounds to me like there’s so much more that goes into it besides just taking a pill or injecting the medication. Like, you have to know the importance of protein. And speaking of protein, why is it, why is protein and muscle so important, especially as we age, Ami?
Ami Porges: Yeah, of course. So a lot of research shows that muscle mass is an endocrine organ, right? It is a living organ, and one of, not the only, but one of its strongest benefits is that muscle is what removes sugar-… from your blood in order to function, right? That’s how, it’s how your body works. And the more muscle mass you have, the better your body can regulate blood sugar, among other factors. And of course, the general function, the ability to do things, to tie your shoes, to walk, those matter. But in terms of in a health standpoint, the most obvious thing is your muscle mass helps regulate blood sugar and your metabolism, and cardiometabolic disorder is the thing that is making people sick, and they’re completely related. They’re completely related. there are cardiologists who can talk better to this than me, but let me say if your blood sugar is high, which happens all the time in the United States, it affects your, it affects your veins and your cardiovascular system fundamentally. And so they’re not independent. Your heart health and your metabolic health are related. Your body is one thing. And muscle mass is the easiest, most fundamental way to fight cardiometabolic disorders that exist, like type 2 diabetes, like prediabetes, which then affect your veins, which then affects your heart. So for men especially, I mean, it’s for women too, but we lose approximately 10% of our muscle mass every decade beyond age 40, and it’s something that’s going to happen, and all we have, all we can do is fight it. And so muscle mass is extraordinarily important because it directly affects our health, our body’s ability to metabolize sugars, to move, and to keep our heart healthy as well. it also affects dementia. It, there’s a lot of evidence that shows that cardiometabolic disorders or even pre-disorders start to affect the way that your brain can degrade over time. So muscle mass is the most straightforward behaviorally available thing that people can do. It’s going to diminish over time. We need to fight to keep it, and that brings us, I think, to protein and to exercise. So the number one thing you can do for cardiometabolic health and to keep your muscle is to strength train, and by strength train, I mean strength hypertrophy training. You want to train to build size and strength. Doing that is number one. Now, what you need to do to support that is eat enough protein for muscle protein synthesis, for your body to be able to rebuild and repair the muscle that you have in a positive direction. So protein has a lot of benefits, but protein is important because it helps your muscles stay healthy and grow and repair. The exercise is the thing, is the stimulus. The protein is what allows that to happen. think of it like the exercise is the blueprint. It’s giving the signal that your body needs to do something. The protein is like the workers and the materials that’s going out and building it. Having materials without a blueprint isn’t going to help. It’s just calories. And having the blueprint without the ability to build it isn’t going to help. You need both, but the order is strength training and then protein to fuel and recover. And you need carbs too, in order to allow your body to work through that process.
Protein, Fiber, and Everyday Nutrition
Vince Ferguson: Right, and you would also say that you need healthy fats.
Ami Porges: You absolutely need healthy fats, and I forget the amount. I believe that it’s something like 10% of your diet. 10 to 20% of your diet, there’s a gram amount, but it goes by weight, must come from healthy fats. It affects your hormones. you can’t live without it, absolutely. Most people will get enough fat in their diet fundamentally, it’s hard to avoid, just like most people will get carbohydrates in their diet if they’re eating normal whole foods. The ones that people seem to miss are fiber and protein. Those are the ones where I really believe people need to be focusing. You should have some sense of how much protein you’re having at every meal, and you should have some sense of how much fiber you’re having. The fat and the carbohydrates I think take care of themselves, to be quite honest, unless you’re putting yourself on a very restrictive diet. and then hopefully you’re asking the right questions. if you go on a keto diet, you’re probably going to have difficulty hitting your carbohydrates and that will cause problems. if you go on a low-fat diet, you’re probably going to have problems hitting your fat and potentially your protein, because those tend to be very carb-laden diets. So my strongest recommendation would be eat good normal healthy foods that taste good that you enjoy. And portion control, and be aware of the amount of protein and fiber that you’re having. Those are the ones you’re probably missing.
Vince Ferguson: Hmm. Very good. Very good. Because I don’t think that most of us are getting a good source of protein when we’re eating protein as well. So I think that’s important, ’cause we need to know where to get our protein. Now, I would, would re- think that you would recommend a lean so- lean protein from, food, from basically whether it be chicken, red meat, whatever it is, but lean, a lean source, correct?
Choosing Protein Sources
Ami Porges: Yes. There’s, there are different benefits attached to different types of protein. So if your diet is everything, which my, mine is not. they say no vegetarian goes without saying they’re vegetarian. So I happen to be vegetarian.
Vince Ferguson: You’re vegetarian.
Ami Porges: I do, I do not actually recommend a vegetarian diet. I follow it, but that’s a different thing for a different day maybe. I would recommend that people eat a variety of foods. The more variety, the better, and there’s different advantages to the different types of protein that you have. an advantage, let’s say, to a lean chicken breast, is going to be that it’s going to be a very healthy form of protein in that there is low fat, and the quality and digestibility of the protein is super. Wonderful source of protein. If you’re eating steak and red meat, can be great, too. It has the most creatine of any kind of meat that exists. And so that helps to build muscle in ways that other types of protein do not. If you’re going to have fish, like salmon, you’re going to get some omega-3 fatty acids that you can’t get in other places. If you’re going to have a lean fish like tuna, you’re going to get higher protein to calories than you might get anywhere else. So I would say having a good variety of different meats, having approximately a fist-sized amount of protein in each meal as is possible, and trying to get it from rather lean sources or good sources is probably the best way to go with protein. If you do that at every meal and you keep some variety, you’re going to account for almost everything. I would love to talk about each protein source. Like, I’m a fan of the topic. As, as a vegetarian, or for people who have some form of restrictive diet, low-fat Greek yogurt is amazing. It has very high protein. low-fat cottage cheese is amazing. Tofu. Tofu and other soy products are amazing. seitan, which is a wheat derivative where you take it’s vital wheat gluten, essentially, stripped away, has very high protein, but the quality of the protein isn’t great. The digestibility isn’t great. So if you’re a vegetarian and you’re having… or vegan, and you’re having that kind of protein, you probably need even more variety in your diet so that your body can absorb it. But ultimately, my strongest recommendation is that people have a variety of protein. That solves a lot of problems. And of course, when you say from lean sources, like you did i would say the protein itself is lean. The protein is lean. Be careful that you’re not eating a whole lot of fat and thinking it’s protein. Having that, having that rib eye doesn’t mean that the red part isn’t lean, right? But when you’re having the marble, the marbleization with it you’re eating fat, you’re not eating protein. And so that becomes, the thing to consider. yeah, I love the topic. So I’m happy to talk forever about it.
Creatine: Benefits and Cautions
Vince Ferguson: I’m going a little behind schedule, but you said something about creatine. I want to ask you, what’s your opinion about creatine? Should we supplement with creatine? Because a lot of people are taking it in addition to, eating, their meat and sources like that.
Ami Porges: Creatine is the most studied supplement in the health and wellness industry. I think that there are more studies on creatine than everything else combined. Creatine has been proven safe and is very effective in a variety of different ways. It will help somebody put on a little bit of weight. And when you think about that, I don’t mean that in a negative sense. It’s generally two to three pounds of water, which is completely fine. It’s going to help muscles recover, and it’s going to help you perform better and get a little bit more in your exercise. I highly recommend creatine. There’s also evidence now that suggests that very high doses of creatine, above 20, 25 grams, are good for your brain, but that research is developing, so we can’t say it with certainty. We can say with certainty, as certain as you can be in science, that five grams of creatine, between three and five grams of creatine depending on your body weight per day, is safe. It’s good for your muscles and for your ability to recover, and people should be taking it. If you lose weight, it helps you keep muscle. If you’re gaining weight, it helps you build more muscle. And potentially it may have positive impacts on brain health over time. We’re still learning and trying to figure out, how legitimate that finding is. But there doesn’t, there doesn’t seem to be a reason not to take creatine unless you are certain that you have a kidney disorder. At which time you should be careful and ask your doctor, because it will strain damaged kidneys. It will not strain healthy kidneys. I’ll also say that if you’re going to take creatine, you should drink more water than you would have before because it absorbs water into your muscle, and so your system needs more.
Redefining Fitness with Age
Vince Ferguson: Yes. Very good. I mean, you’re obviously a student of the topic. I appreciate that. And you’re also a committed athlete, man, which I didn’t know. You do CrossFit, endurance events, and powerlifting, which is impressive. But as we get, as you get older, Ami, has your definition of being fit changed from when it was, what it was when you were in your 30s?
Ami Porges: It’s definitely changed. My definition of being fit has evolved in small ways over time. I would say that when I was in my 30s, my definition of being fit was being capable, being able to play sports with friends being healthy, not having any bad labs, and looking the way that I wanted to look frankly. As I got older, my number one thing in terms of fitness is being healthy and injury-free. As long as I’m injury-free, I can continue to train and perform. The second thing has been body composition, but not just in terms of how I want to look and feel, but making sure that I have adequate muscle mass on me, and making sure that my body fat is low enough so that both of those things are at healthy levels and I don’t create problems down the line. And I’ve focused much more on training that makes those things real, as opposed to trying to compete in events and hit milestones, it, for the sake of meeting an achievement. Now, I love, I love a good achievement. I highly recommend it to anybody. I’m very much i- in the, in the mindset that to be as healthy as you can be, you should be pushing yourself in different ways. And so I love 5Ks, I, marathons, skiing, ski touring triathlons, power lifting, Olympic weightlifting, CrossFit. I do all these things. I’ll try and find some kind of tournament or event and try and do well. I enjoy it. I think that there’s positives, but by far my focus has been on being injury-free and maintaining my strength and muscle mass in a way that I can train forever so that I don’t have to go back. When you’re injured, and those of us that have been injured know this deeply, when you’re injured, it’s a six-month to two-year process to get back to where you’re going to be. It’s not worth that extra push. And so something that I may have done in my 30s that I could recover from, I may not attempt now at 45 because that achievement isn’t worth the three years of physical therapy and mobility training in order to get back to where I needed to be. and when I mention mobility, now this is my personal opinion only, if you are strong, you’re doing some cardio, you’re doing some strength training i think the mobility tends to take care of itself mostly. I know a lot of people put a lot of emphasis on it, on warming up, on stretching, on mobility, on movement. It happens to be that my type of training kind of does it for me. When you do Olympic weightlifting, it’s very hard to do a clean or a snatch if you don’t have good lower body mobility, good shoulder mobility. And so I’m getting it within my training itself. So I like to have my cake and eat it, too. I like for my training to solve the problems for me, but y- it’s something people should consider. It’s not something I emphasize, but yes, you want to be able to meet different positions, to be strong, and to have good heart health. So I would say strength training, some cardio, literally so that you have the energy to continue to move and to do the things you need, and m- minimum levels of mobility so that you don’t get hurt or so that you can move in the ways that you need to.
How to Connect with Ami
Vince Ferguson: Yeah. All very good advice. I appreciate that. But now for someone watching or listening who wants to learn more about you, Ami, Longevity Access Partners or Primary Prevention, where should they go?
Ami Porges: So easiest place is to go to primarypreventionmd.com or longevityaccesspartners.co. But I would say primarypreventionmd.com. We have contact information there. People can get a free consultation. We give way more than we need to at that time. We’re trying to educate people. Of course, we want people to come on board and to use our programming, but really we’re here to help. another thing people can do is they can ask whatever primary care doctor they have or any specialist they may have to get in touch with us. We’re happy to work through doctors. So like I’ve said before we have the highest standards that we can possibly hold, to the point where doctors use us to supplement their practices with patients in order to make sure that they’re getting better from chronic conditions as well. So people can ask their doctor to get in touch with us, or we would be glad to work with people directly. we do have the highest standards. We do care. We really want to make sure that this becomes the thing people expect of their healthcare, of their doctor, and ultimately from their insurance as well. We want this to be the way that care is delivered.
Vince Ferguson: Amazing. Now, I know your practice is based in Miami, Florida, correct?
Ami Porges: Yes. So our team is based in South Florida, in Miami, and primarily in Aventura, Florida. I work very closely with a cardiologist there named Dr. Leonard Pianko. He’s in Aventura, Florida, and if somebody walked into his practice tomorrow, we could connect through that physical location.
Vince Ferguson: Excellent. Excellent. Now, this has been great, but I have one more question, Ami, for you, and I ask this of all my guests. If someone watching or listening today could change just one thing this week to add more life to their years, what would you tell them to do?
One Thing to Do This Week
Ami Porges: I love that question. I’m going to give you a hard answer that is also simple. All right? They should write down this checklist. It’s basic, but you should write this down. They should get a little bit of sunlight every day. They should do some form of strength training once or twice a week. They should walk more. They should have fun with friends. They should watch their calories, primarily. They should make sure that they get adequate sleep. They don’t have to do any of those things perfectly. But if they’re following that basic checklist, they’re going to account for almost everything that you need to do to be healthy. It isn’t a magic sauce. Do these things on a regular basis and you should be able to add more life to your years. You should be able to live a healthy, long life in a very simple way that is not burdensome to you.
Vince Ferguson: Love it. Couldn’t have said it better. Ami Porges, founder, Longevity Access Partners, Primary Prevention. Thank you for coming on my show today.
Ami Porges: Vincent, it’s a pleasure to be here. All the best to you and to everybody watching, and good luck with your health journeys.
Vince Ferguson: Thank you so much. And to everyone watching or listening, thank you for joining us on More Life to Your Years. If you enjoyed this conversation, get anything out of it like I did, please like, subscribe and share it with someone who could benefit. And if you prefer to listen on the go, More Life to Your Years podcast is also available on Apple and Spotify. And until next time, I’m Vince Ferguson, and that’s Amby Porjes. Stay healthy, stay strong, and keep adding more life to your years. God bless.
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