Exercise is Better than Medicines and Cutting Out Smoking – The Best Exercises for Longevity with Peter Attia

Exercise is the single most important longevity drug we have bar none

Everybody knows that if you smoke or have diabetes your risk of death goes up a lot but your risk of death from having high cardiorespiratory fitness goes down by much more than your risk of death goes up from smoking or diabetes.

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Having a vo2 max that is elite is a five-fold reduction in all-cause mortality death from any kind.

We don’t have drugs that have a 5X reduction in mortality.

Strength is more important than muscle mass. The metric that matters and it’s about a three-fold reduction in all-cause mortality when you compare high strength to low strength.

The tests are not like how much you can squat and deadlift it’s like grip strength, dead hang, how long can you do an air squat, quad strength, how quickly can you do five reps up and down from a chair.

The benefit honestly by going from not fit at all to average fit that gives you 3 of the 5X.

If you know if you’re a 52 year old male i’m asking you to have the vo2 max of an elite 42 year old male so i want. you to be a decade younger elite and then we do the same thing with strength metrics.

We start with a base of zone two defined as the highest level of aerobic output that you can generate while keeping lactate below two.

A bike is the easiest way to do this because the you can keep it steady state. On the road it’s all over the place. Also wattage is such an easy metric for people to understand.

You probably need to be doing at least three hours a week of that zone two which is building an aerobic base so four 45-minute sessions at zone two. Constantly driving it up and one session of VO2 max training per week.

The best protocol for that is the 4×4 protocol so that’s four minutes at the highest output you can sustain so here you could do it on an air bike or something Do what’s the highest wattage you can hold for four minutes and then four minute recovery. 5 of those sets once a week.

You can do this on a treadmill you can do this on a stair climber, on any kind of cardiovascular activity but you need 45 minutes four times a week. The minimum effective dose on zone two. Someone’s super de-conditioned can be three 30-minute sessions to start and they’ll see benefit.

Deadhangs – males standard of two minutes and females to a minute and a half at the age of 40. It gets discounted by decade.