My trainer told me my consistency was exceptional. I smiled and didn't tell him I'd been dreading every single session for the past six months.
I want to be precise about what I mean by that, because dread is a strong word and I'm not sure it's quite right. It wasn't dread exactly. It was more like a low-level reluctance that hadn't been there before. The kind of feeling where you're already dressed, keys in hand, and you have to give yourself a small speech in the hallway before you'll open the door.
I am fifty-four years old. I have been training four days a week since I was thirty-eight. Weights, mostly. Some cardio. I am not casual about it. My wife Sarah will tell you I have never, in sixteen years, skipped a Monday session for anything short of a flight or a funeral. She says this with a tone that implies it is not entirely a compliment.
So when I say something had changed, I want you to understand the baseline I'm describing it against.
The thing that changed was recovery. Or rather, the thing that stopped working the way it always had was recovery.
I used to train hard on Monday and feel ready by Wednesday. That was the rhythm I'd had for years. By my early fifties it had shifted to Thursday, which I told myself was normal and probably was. But somewhere in the eighteen months before this story begins, Thursday became Friday. And then Friday became the weekend. And then the weekend became barely.
I was going into Monday's session still carrying last week. Every single time.
I want to tell you what that actually feels like from the inside, because I think precision matters when you're trying to figure out whether someone is describing your situation or something adjacent to it.
It felt like standing at the squat rack with a weight I'd moved cleanly for two years, and having my legs tell me no in a way they'd never told me no before. Not injury. Not pain. Just an absence of something that used to be there.
It felt like my upper back being sore in a dull, persistent way that used to mean I'd had a good session and now just meant I was behind on something I couldn't name.
It felt like tracking my numbers — I keep a log, have for years — and watching the progress line go flat and then quietly backwards, across months, in a way I kept making excuses for. Bad sleep. Stressed at work. Getting older. I rotated through all of them.
It felt like a conversation with my son — he's twenty-six, he trains too, we talk about it — where he mentioned his recovery time after a hard session and I did the math in my head and did not say out loud that it was taking me four times as long. I just changed the subject.
I want to be clear about what I had already tried, because I think it matters to be honest about that if you're going to trust anything else I say.
I had tried increasing protein. I had tried creatine, which I'd taken before with good results in my forties and which at this point seemed to be doing very little. I had tried NMN — one of those NAD-precursor compounds the longevity podcasts kept talking about — for four months. I'm not going to tell you it did nothing, because I don't know what it was doing that I couldn't see. What I can tell you is that I couldn't feel any difference in recovery at all.
I had tried sleeping more. I had tried sleeping better. I had tried backing off training volume, which felt like surrender and also didn't help.
I mention all of this not to sound comprehensive but because I know what it's like to read a story like this one and think: yes, but have you tried the basic things. I had tried the basic things. That's how I ended up looking at less basic things.
The less basic thing I found was called mitophagy. Which is not a word I'd heard before, and which I want to explain to you the way it was explained to me, because I think how something is explained tells you as much about the explainer as about the thing itself.
I was listening to a physio who works with masters athletes — he had a segment in a podcast I follow for other reasons — and he said something I wrote down because it stopped me. He said: the reason most people over forty feel like their recovery has a ceiling that keeps lowering is not the amount of effort they're putting in. It's the quality of the machinery doing the work.
He was talking about mitochondria. The parts of the cell that produce energy. And he was making the point that as you age, your body gets slower at clearing out damaged mitochondria and replacing them. They accumulate. They fire less efficiently. They sit in the cell taking up space that healthy mitochondria should be using. And no amount of protein or creatine addresses that, because neither of those things touches the clearance process.
The process that touches the clearance process, he said, is called mitophagy. And there was now a compound — urolithin A — that had been shown in a published clinical trial to activate it.
I went and looked up the trial. This is the kind of thing I do. The study had been published in JAMA Network Open, which is not a supplement company's website. The participants were older adults who took urolithin A for four months, and they significantly improved their muscle endurance — the number of contractions they could perform before fatigue — compared to the placebo group. Blood markers for inflammation and cellular dysfunction came down. A separate trial in middle-aged adults showed about a twelve percent improvement in muscle strength. Real numbers. Real journals. Not a whitepaper from the people selling the thing.
I read for three weeks before I did anything.
I also looked at a compound called phosphatidylcholine, which kept coming up in the same context. The short version is that it's a structural phospholipid — the primary building material of mitochondrial membranes — and the research suggested that adequate levels were associated with better mitochondrial function and slower age-related muscle decline. The Baltimore Longitudinal Study, which is one of the longest-running human aging studies in existence, had found that low levels predicted impaired muscle oxidative capacity and slower gait speed, independent of how much someone exercised.
The combination of the two made intuitive sense to me in a way I tried to interrogate carefully, because I am the kind of person who knows that things making intuitive sense is not evidence.
What eventually moved me toward trying it was the structure of the clinical evidence. Not the marketing. The journals.
I spoke to my GP before I started. He's a man in his early sixties who runs half-marathons and is more interested in performance than most physicians I've encountered. I told him what I was thinking, what I'd read, what I was already taking. He said he had no concerns, looked at the compounds for about ninety seconds on his screen, and said: let me know if you notice anything.
I started on a Thursday. Two capsules with breakfast. Nothing ceremonial about it.
The first two weeks, I want to tell you honestly, I noticed nothing that I could confidently attribute to anything. My training felt the same. My recovery felt the same. I was trying not to watch for it too closely because I know what watching for something closely does to your perception of it.
The first thing I noticed — and I noticed it only because my log showed it to me, not because I felt it as an event — was in week four or five. My recovery data had shifted. Not dramatically. But my numbers on Thursday, the day after a hard Wednesday session, were where I'd been expecting them to be in the weeks before I started. I'd been underperforming my own projections for months. That week I didn't.
I looked at it for a long time. I was trying to decide how much weight to give it.
The second thing I noticed was physical and happened around week six. I had a hard leg session on a Tuesday — heavier than I'd gone in some time, partly to test something — and I woke up on Wednesday sore in the way I expected. By Thursday morning I was at about seventy percent. I went back to the gym on Thursday. I had not done that in close to a year. I just walked in and did it, because my body told me it was ready, and I listened, and it was right.
I'm not going to dress that up. It is not a dramatic story. It is a man walking into a gym on Thursday instead of waiting until Monday. But if you are the kind of person who keeps a training log and has been watching a number go the wrong direction for eighteen months, you understand what that Thursday felt like.
The third thing — the one I keep coming back to — was something my son said. We were at a Sunday dinner, maybe week eight or nine, and he said afterward, to Sarah, not to me: Dad seemed like himself today. She told me that night. She said it the way she says things she's been holding onto for a while.
I sat with that for a minute. Then I said: I know. I think I'm getting there.
I want to be clear, because I'll feel dishonest if I'm not, about what I am and am not claiming. I was also sleeping better in that period. I had reduced my work travel somewhat. Bodies are systems and I cannot give you a clean isolated variable, and I would not trust anyone who told you they could.
What I can tell you is that I added one specific thing, kept everything else as constant as I could manage, and the ceiling I had been pushing against for a year and a half started to lift. Slowly. Without drama. With specificity I could put in a log.
That is the most honest version I know how to give you.
My GP, at my last check-in, looked at my labs and said everything is where we want it. Then he asked, not as a doctor but as a runner, what I'd changed. I told him. He nodded and said: the JAMA paper is solid. Keep going.
That was his entire contribution and it was the right amount.
If you are in the version of this I was in — you are doing everything right, you are training consistently, you are hitting your protein, you are sleeping — and the ceiling keeps lowering anyway, I am not in a position to tell you this will work for you. Bodies are different. Some people notice something in the first few weeks. Some people take longer. Some people don't respond meaningfully at all. That is what the honest version of this looks like.
What I can tell you is that the compound has more rigorous clinical evidence behind it than almost anything else I researched. And that for me, specifically, the thing that had been going wrong for a long time started going right again.
— David
P.S. The mechanism, if you want the short version: urolithin A activates the cellular process that clears out damaged mitochondria and makes room for new ones. It's called mitophagy. Exercise promotes new mitochondrial growth but does not directly restore the clearance process. UA addresses the clearance. That's the distinction I hadn't understood before, and once I understood it, a lot of the other things I'd tried made more sense in retrospect — they were working on the growth side of the equation, not the clearance side.
P.P.S. Please talk to your doctor or pharmacist before adding anything new, especially if you are on any medication. I mean this practically, not just as a disclaimer. They have your chart. This letter is not your chart. The two minutes it takes to ask are worth it.
P.P.P.S. Jones Longevity offers a satisfaction guarantee. If you try it and you don't find it useful — for any reason, including just changing your mind — the policy is there. Look at it on the site. That's not the reason I'd tell you to try it, but it is a reason to feel less uncertain about trying it.
P.P.P.P.S. The formula is called Age > Less. Two capsules in the morning with a meal that has some fat in it — both compounds absorb better that way. That is the entire protocol. I have a six-step morning routine that I will not bore you with. This fits into it without requiring a seventh step. At fifty-four, I have stopped tolerating protocols that require more steps than that.
Individual experiences vary. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
