A longevity roundtable on exercise, reserve capacity, cardio, strength, walking, and the dose that supports a longer, stronger life. The useful question is not how much intensity a person can tolerate once. It is which signal, repeated with care, helps the body become more resilient over time.
I think a lot of people they worry too much about their nutrition and micromanage it and they should take some of that mental energy and focus it on improving their exercise. Once you have pushed into those reserves, you've actually created those reserves. The level of exercise that you actually need to maintain those reserves tends to decrease substantially. My takeaway for from that was that yes, both matter, right? If you combine both, you see additional benefits on your mortality risk with strength. There need appears to be a smaller ceiling or like a lower ceiling where you get the maximum benefits. Nick, Greg, welcome to the show. Thanks. Yeah, this is our second round table. First of one was hosted by Greg about supplements. We got pretty positive feedback on it. So, we decided we'll do a follow-up and uh do this one on exercise, which is a bit more, let's say, powerful than supplementation, as we would all agree on is your supplements get a lot of more attention and they're very popular. But exercise, you know, in our opinion, I think would be 10x more powerful than uh all supplements out there when it comes to health outcomes. Do you agree? I know I do for sure. Uh I don't even know how much I would quantify it as but 10x even seems too small for me. But yeah, I the overall point absolutely completely agree. Yeah, I think it's hard to put a number to and I think the reality is that all dimensions of lifestyle matter and how
dimensions of lifestyle matter and how much they matter varies a bit between people. So just to give an example, if someone's doing manual labor, then they're already very physically active. So for that person they might gain relatively more by optimizing their nutrition whereas a sedentary office worker is going to benefit massively from exercise. And as a general comment I think a lot of people they worry too much about their nutrition and micromanage it and they should take some of that mental energy and focus it on improving their exercise. Yeah, I think like if you're not able to, let's say, do even a few pull-ups or over 10 push-ups or something like that or you got wind at walking up the stairs, then uh that's the most important thing you need to focus on when it comes to improving your health. And if you just improve your fitness, especially from a low level of health or low baseline of health, then um you're you're going to expect to get the most return to your health compared to some other things like people. It's kind of a meme that, you know, biohackers spend hundreds of dollars in supplements, but they're not exercising regularly and they can't run a mile without uh dying. So, you know, it's uh definitely one of the biggest priorities in my opinion when it comes to health and physical health fundamentally starts with a degree of a physical fitness, at least like moderate physical fitness. Yeah, I think it also scales up, right? I mean, exactly to to your guys's point, um, when you put in a little bit of
um, when you put in a little bit of effort, you get a massive benefit from it. And as you continue put in more and more effort into it, it gets diminishing returns. Um, and it can actually be, you know, to a point where you start, it becomes detrimental. But I think for 99% of people that is not going to be the case, so it's probably not something to worry about. Mhm. I think how we frame exercise is interesting too because nowadays we speak about it as an intervention when for 99% of the time that humans have been on the planet it's been a normal part of our existence. And so really it's only in the last few decades or perhaps in the last couple of centuries that we've systematically engineered it out of our lives. And when we add it back in really we're just adding in a normal part of human existence that we need for our bodies to function well. Yeah, I guess that that's a good way to put it that exercise is a modern invention in that sense that people in the past didn't exercise because they were physically active due to living. But nowadays you kind of needed to replace that physical activity with some form of exercise. You know, most of us aren't going to go work on the field or uh you know cut our own lumber or those kind of things, milk the cows or something like that. We will need to incorporate this physical movement or physical stress into our life to uh prevent our bodies from breaking down with age and to not increase our risk of other chronic
increase our risk of other chronic diseases that are caused by this modern lifestyle and the modern food environment. Yeah, I like the image of you milking a cow intervention. Yeah, I mean I grew up in the countryside and you know I I made the hay cut the hay uh milk the cows those kind of things. Um so I'm not foreign to milking the cows but uh yeah we'll discuss things like you know how much exercise and uh what's the sweet spot for exercise a bit later but maybe we can start with uh what does the you know research suggest the what is the health benefits of exercise. you know the generally people think that people who do exercise regularly they're healthier they have less body fat they have more muscle those kind of things but what does it say about longevity and these chronic diseases things like heart disease or cancer or Alzheimer's maybe uh Greg can start with that sure yeah so with respect to chronic diseases perhaps unsurprisingly there have now been many meta analyses focused ing on various individual chronic diseases, everything from cardiovascular disease to type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, various cancers. And in general, the punchline is that exercise reduces risk of those often with evidence of dose response. So people who are more physically active have greater
are more physically active have greater protection against those. The size of the protective effect tends to vary a bit depending on the disease that you're looking at. It's probably a little smaller for cancer for instance than it is for something like cardiovascular disease. But this is true across different types of exercise. And I think a helpful way to unify that work is to look at all cause mortality and cause specific mortality too. And we see the same thing with that. So physical activity tends to have a dose response protective effect against all cause mortality. I don't know why, but I always gravitate back to a study that Hannah RM published a few years ago now, and that was based on people in Europe and the US, and they looked at physical activity levels relative to government recommendations. And they found an increasingly protective effect of physical activity up to a level that was five times the minimum recommended by typical government guidelines. And at very high levels of activity, so 10 times or higher, there wasn't any evidence of harm. So I think for the most part, what people should take away is that being more physically active tends to be better. There are a few more things that I think are worth considering. One is that not all exercise is made equal. And
that not all exercise is made equal. And when it comes to exercise volumes, they interact with exercise intensity too. And you can get meaningful health benefits from very brief periods if the exercise intensity is sufficient. And then a lot of the relationship between physical activity and disease risk and mortality is mediated by physical fitness. So you could be a bit less physically active, but if you have very high levels of cardiorespiratory fitness and strength fitness, then you will be well protected against those diseases. And cardiorespiratory fitness and strength fitness tend to have somewhat additive effects. So if you are interested in longevity in general, you'd be best off having both good endurance exercise performance and resistance training exercise performance as well. So, I'll pipe down there, but those are my high level thoughts. Yeah, I I completely agree. I think um let me to your point, Greg, about all cause mortality. So, we think of all cause mortality for the listener, we're thinking about a number of different factors that feed into what could potentially kill you. And if you're reducing cancer risk, you're reducing heart disease risk, diabetes, Alzheimer's, all those different factors, then of course you're going to see differences in all cause mortality, reductions in all cause mortality. And it's true, exercise, physical activity, even if we take a step back and look at physical activity, which is not
physical activity, which is not necessarily planned activity, um we see decreases in almost every single disease state. And exa exactly to Greg's point, it depends on the disease. It depends on the population you're studying. It depends on a number of different factors, but across the board in general, exercise and physical activity, whichever you choose, is going to have a significant effect at reducing all these disease states. And the reasons for that, I don't know if we're going to go into some of the physiology, but I'll quick describe just a few of the mechanisms by which exercise can affect these different disease states. So if you think of like uh metabolic demand, if you think of diabetes, you think of cancer, you think of heart disease, those tend to be pretty interlink, not completely, there's not complete overlap, but there's a lot of interlinking between them because typically it's people that uh may be more overweight. They don't exercise. they they have this uh this lack of metabolic demand where exercise can be this this intervention that causes mass metabolic demand through the musculature. So the muscles start taking up large amounts of glucose. Uh they'll start metabolizing that glucose. They'll start uh changing the inflammatory profile of the body. uh they'll exercise will have an effect on the endothelial cells that line your blood vessels making sure that they open up correctly that they constrict as they're supposed to. Um it just has widespread benefits. If you think about the brain it
If you think about the brain it increases neuroactors like BDNF, brain derived neurotrphic factors. So uh there's and that that's just a teeny tiny sampling of the number of ways that exercise has tremendous positive effects across the body. So I echo everything that that Greg said. Absolutely. Yeah. There is one uh study that referenced in like my social media often is uh I think it was 2013 or 15 where they had a graph that exercise pretty much improves all the hallmarks of aging. It improves all organ function. It improves virtually all blood markers. So it is like the magic pill that uh has this uh all incompassing effect positive effect on the body and improves just pretty much all health outcomes. I think I don't think there's anything that comes nearly as close to that as exercise just physical activity that uh you know whatever health concern you have generally you would see improvements in that or some protective effects against future ailments maybe with a few exceptions with uh some I don't know physical trauma or like some injuries right then it might not be the most optimal strategy but even then you know The best way to recover from an injury is to still move the limp to a certain extent. Maybe not to full power or full strength, but even in that kind
or full strength, but even in that kind of extreme situation where you're physically mo immobilized or injured, then you you would benefit from some minor aspects of physical movement or activity. So yeah, it uh is quite a magical thing when it comes to health. I want to take a quick break to let you know about my favorite wellness devices, which are the Bond Charge red light therapy devices. You've probably seen many of your favorite longevity influencers using these red light therapy devices. But do they actually work? Yes, they do. Red light therapy has been shown to have many benefits on skin anti-aging, hormone optimization, pain management, and even exercise performance. I use my device every day for 15 minutes, especially during the winter months when there's not much sunlight. It increases my energy in the morning and makes my skin glow. Just check out the testimonials on the Bont Chargearge website for the before and after pictures of other people. Most rail therapy devices don't have the right wavelengths of light which might mean you're not getting the claimed benefits. Bon Charge uses the exact wavelengths of light used in research and they also have near infrared light that's beneficial to the joints. Head over to buncharge. com and use the code seam sim for a 15% discount. Sorry, I was just going to say one thing we haven't mentioned is just that the flip side of physical activity is sedentary behavior. And in the last few decades, scientists have increasingly focused on that. So that Frank Boo has probably spearheaded that work more than anyone. And if people want a helpful resource, he published a paper in physiology or physiological reviews maybe nearly 10 years ago now. And that
maybe nearly 10 years ago now. And that looked at that whole body of evidence. And back then it associated sedentary behavior with about 35 chronic health conditions. I'm sure there are more that have been added into the mix since then. So, sedentary behavior per se independent of things like physical fitness is not a good thing. And for that reason, little ways of building activity into your day can be particularly good for metabolic and vascular health. Yeah. Nick, you mentioned some of the uh like mechanisms. Why do does exercise have such a broad range of effects and why does it, you know, improve pretty much all health uh conditions? Is it that you're less fat or is it the act of physical movement that stimulates certain metabolic pathways? Is it um you know stimulation of lymph? Is it increased blood flow? What do you think it is guys? Is it just the idea of you know being in better body composition or is it uh more related to different pathways that get activated during exercise or something else? I think uh I think it's many different things that you could point to but if you go broad you could go into the fact that it stresses and when I mean stress uh just to define that there's distress and there's ustress. So when I'm talking about more of the positive type of stress as in you're you're working that system. So that could be your your
system. So that could be your your lungs. It's so it's affecting your pulmonary system. It's affecting your cardiovascular system. It's affecting your heart. That's what I mean by that. Um it's affecting your skeletal system. It's affecting your bone system. It's affecting every almost every single system all at once. So you're doing one thing and it's just having mass impact. Now, if you zoom into exactly how it's doing that, it's going to be very tissue specific how it's affecting. So, like for example, when you're when how it helps your liver, so if you have like a fatty liver disease or something along those lines, it's not like exercise is physically moving your liver back and forth, right? Just like it would for your musculature. the actual cells respond because they stretch and they con they compress and that stretching and compressing leads to all these signaling changes within the cell. So that's a direct impact. But for your liver, you can have things like it changes your inflammatory profile. So the immune cells that may have infiltrated into your liver trying to deal with all of this uh damage that's occurring in your liver will suddenly start to turn into a more uh resolving state or an anti-inflammatory state as a result. And the reason for that is because your musculature and your heart and and your brain, your nervous system, all these these different systems start releasing different molecules, different uh anti-inflammatory molecules that bind to the immune cells and ultimately quiet them to a less inflammatory state, which ultimately benefits your liver and allows it to recover. So it you can see
allows it to recover. So it you can see that there's indirect and direct mechanisms by which exercise has these positive effects. And I could go on and on about all the different ways, you know, direct and indirect, but those are just a few examples of of how how you get that that effect from exercise. Greg, you have anything to add? Yeah, well, I think one point to emphasize is just that the way your body adapts to physical activity depends on the specifics of it. So there are some commonalities between different types of activity when it comes to things like energy metabolism. So turning over substrates. There are some other commonalities too. You can see those at different levels. For instance, various different types of exercise can improve sleep and then that in turn can have beneficial effects on things like cognition. But then with respect to discrete adaptations, if you're doing structured resistance training, then you're going to see changes in bone, an increase in bone mineral density, those are going to respond according to Volv's law, which basically states that bone gets remodeled in response to the way that it's loaded. So the magnitude of the loading matters, the direction matters, and the rate of the stimulus matters, too. If you look at skeletal muscle, then you're going to see an increase in the size of muscles as a result of an increase in the size of muscle fibers
increase in the size of muscle fibers due to there being more sarcomir which are the contractile units themselves. Whereas if we were speaking about endurance training then a lot of the adaptations would relate to changes in the heart itself the mioardium. So you might for instance see an increase in the size of the left ventricle and that enables the heart to pump out more blood per beat. So you got a greater stroke volume which then increases cardiac output. You'll also see remodeling of the whole vascular network so that various tissues throughout your body are better perused and that includes the brain which is going to mediate some of the beneficial effects that you see on cognitive function. changed in the respiratory system to minute ventilation, the amount of air that your lungs can process per minute and so on. So, it really does depend on the type of exercise. And for that reason, if you're interested in supporting the function of all of your organ systems, then arguably a combination of different modes of exercise is going to be best. And I mentioned resistance training, endurance training there. But there are benefits to be had from stimulating the body in other ways too. For example, improving joint range of motion if you have limitations at certain joints, challenging your balance, challenging your coordination, your timing and so on. Yeah. If if someone exercises, at least when I exercise, then I notice I sleep
when I exercise, then I notice I sleep better. I tend to have better mood. I have better overall discipline with my other lifestyle habits. I tend to eat better unless I'm bulking or something. But uh you know it's uh has this uh auxiliary effects as well on other lifestyle habits. You tend to when you see you you look better from the exercise that is a positive uh feedback loop that you start to improve your diet and improve your sleep as well at the same time. Whereas if you're sliding off the hill where you're slowly gaining weight, etc., you get less motivated. You start to eat more. You start to exercise less because you're just, you know, might as well go full full out with with uh junk food or something like that. So it's a positive is like a virtuous cycle that uh you exercise, you feel better, you look better, you take care of yourself more etc. So it improves many aspects. But I think uh one good universal law or like a law of the universe to remember is that use it or lose it. If you don't use your body, if you don't use your muscles, you know, the best example is uh when you go to space, then uh if you don't lift weights in the space, then you're going to lose a huge amount of uh bone density and muscle mass because of disuse. So, uh you can think of aging and and uh being alive as a you know very very um stretched out example of that that if you never use your muscles over the course of 50 60 years you will s you
course of 50 60 years you will s you will lose significant heart function, lung function, uh even brain function. You'll have significantly less bone density, significantly less muscle mass. So yeah, use it or lose it essentially. And if you stimulate those systems, not only do you maintain the functioning of those organs and systems as they were when you were younger, but you will you're able to also exceed them to take them to a higher functioning capacity, which we see in people who are exercising regularly that they have better card fitness, they have better lung function, they have higher bone density, higher muscle mass, less fat mass. And as a result of those, you know, higher levels of organ function, they are healthier as well, basically. Yeah. And I think for that reason, you should focus on pushing your biological reserves as much as possible, whatever stage of your life you're at at the moment, that you can think of it a bit like saving for the future. The more you can save early on, the longer you can have in retirement and the better the time that you can have. And that goes for your muscle mass. So building muscle given that you're going to lose some of that over time. All else being equal, goes for your strength. It goes goes for your cardiorespiratory fitness, your joint mobility, but also things like your cognition. So pushing your cognitive reserve as high as possible. So yeah, I completely agree and it
So yeah, I completely agree and it emphasizes the need to to challenge all of those different capacities as opposed to focusing in particular on just one exercise modality. One of the beautiful things about exercise too is once you have pushed into those reserves, you've actually created those reserves. Um the the level of exercise that you actually need to maintain those reserves tends to decrease substantially. So it's it's not like other systems. um you just have to work really hard for a period of time and then you still have to work hard but you can cut back significantly and a lot of research is coming out indicating you know especially for something like resistance training that you can do very minimal amounts of work and maintain 90% of what you built up over years. Yeah. That's this muscle memory phenomenon that you can get back to it much faster. Um we'll cover like the details of resistance training and aerobic fitness a bit um shortly later. But uh now we'll do like a quick lightning round. So like more uh interesting uh fun question. What's your current training split right now? What kind of what's your weekly exercise? How does it look like? And um has it like changed over the course of the years as you've learned more about uh the science and the studies? Maybe uh Nick can start. Sure. Uh so currently I'm doing a
Sure. Uh so currently I'm doing a lower body, upper body, lower body. So I just do um I just do three days a week. Um I do primarily resistance training. I do all of my cardio comes down to just going for for walks and jog and whatnot, but there's nothing overly structured to that. I just do it several times throughout the week. Um the lower body, upper body routine is that I do lower body, I do some sort of like a squat or leg press um to hit particular sections of my quads. Uh so the front part of my legs for for those that may not be quite as aware. Um and then I do a a posterior chain exercise. So that would be something like a deadlift, some sort of like stiff leg deadlift. uh or and then I I'll sometimes throw in something like a hamstring curl. And then I do a little bit of uh glute work as well. So I'll do like hip thrusts um on top of the the squatting that I do. And then on my that's typically my lower body day. And I I'll switch up a few exercises, but the main point being that I target uh those two specific regions, so the posterior chain and the um and and my quads especially. And I don't do a whole lot of sets. Uh I try to keep each
each workout uh relatively short. So about 45 minutes. So I'll do maybe three sets of each. Uh, and the intensity is, you know, maybe one to two reps shy of failure. For upper body, I just I don't do barbells, so I just do dumbbell work. Um, I'll do dumbbell press. I'll do dumbbell uh raises for for my lat for my shoulders. Uh, I'll do for my back, I'll do things like pull-ups or do lat pull down, things of that nature. I'll do a little bit of arms. I don't think that that's that important. Um, but I do it anyway. um for vanity reasons. And then from there, I'll do my my third lower body. I just focus on lower body a lot because it's my weakest point. So that's why I do that. So um and in terms of what I did in the past, I used to be an absolute fiend. Uh again, I would say 100% based on vanity reasons when you know when you're young and dumb. Um, so I used to work out 2 and 1 half hours a day to even sometimes 3 hours a day just uh every other day. So I started out with a bastardized version of the 5x5 program like the starting strength. Um, and then I just kept increasing volume volume till I was doing 15 sets per muscle group uh every every other day which was just insane. Um, and I've learned from my mistakes since then. And I can tell you that my results doing
I can tell you that my results doing much lower volume have been identical. At least the maintenance uh has been identical to what I've been able to achieve, especially from a strength standpoint. It's actually gotten better uh doing lower volume. So, I know it's a lightning round, so I'll leave it there. But that's a general idea what I do. I could certainly talk more. Yeah. What about you, Greg? So right now I'm in England. I'm pretty itinerant. I move around a lot and therefore my exercise varies quite a lot depending on where I am, access to gyms, that type of thing. If I was permanently here, it would be a lot better structured and I would periodize it in a way that I would hope would be semi-intelligent. But right now, given that I'm back in England for 6 weeks or so, I'm training up a lower as well, 4 days a week, and I have one day of moderate intensity continuous training during the week, just using the stepper. I like that because it's less likely to produce interference than something like running where you do more muscle damage. The resistance training sessions take about an hour. The density is very high. Volume per muscle group is probably 10 to 20 sets. The loading parameters probably five to 20 rep max loads. It's
probably five to 20 rep max loads. It's a mix of some strength oriented work tends to be movement pattern focused. So, trap bar deadlifts, front squats, reverse grip bench presses, seated rows, pull-ups, and overhead presses with some higher rep single joint stuff. And I'll do some stretching for all muscle groups at least once a week. Throw in a little bit of mobility stuff, which is mostly focused on my thoracic spine because I'm 6'4, so I get kind of bent over because the rest of the world is full of midgets. And that's pretty much it. And then otherwise, how has that evolved over time? It's changed a lot. I mean, I became interested in health and fitness when I was 12. I always joke that I had a misbent youth and I started lifting weights when I was 13. Not that you would be able to tell. It's not like I'm some massive bodybuilder, but I've tried pretty much every type of training under the sun over the years, including some impressively stupid training programs. So now at this point, hopefully I'm somewhat sensible and managed to balance things relatively well. And I enjoy it. So that's important to mention. And the way that I train, I wouldn't recommend to other people necessarily. It's based on what I enjoy, my health status, which is very good compared to most people, and the amount of time I have available, as well as access to equipment.
as well as access to equipment. Yeah. Um, I started lifting weights when I was I think first time I did was when I was 16, but I didn't do it consistently. And I started doing it more consistently when I was 18. And uh let's say between the age of 20 to 27, I did mostly calisthenics. So I just uh exercised at home with uh my own body weight and walking. So I didn't do cardio back then either that much. But uh around uh 2020, so 5 years ago, I started to do a little bit more cardio without without any specific goal in mind. I was just cycling uh during the summer and things like that. And uh this is the time I also went back to the gym. So five four year four four years ago, five years ago, I started to do more weightlifting again. And um this is when I was also bulking and that kind of thing. But uh over the last 3 years uh I've uh cut down on a lot of let's say volume as well. I'm not exercising as much as I used to and uh I'm doing now three days a week of resistance training. So I have a push, pull, leg split. So I do pushing, upper body exercises, things like uh push-ups or bench press, handstand push-ups, shoulder press, dips, those kind of things. Then I do pulling exercises, uh mostly pull-ups, weighted pull-ups,
mostly pull-ups, weighted pull-ups, rows, uh front lever or something like that. And then the leg exercises are usually just squats. I just do barbell squats because I'm not trying to, you know, gain mass or bulk up my leg muscles. It's going to make calisthenics much harder. So, I just do barbell squats and and focusing on strength development rather than um hypertrophy for the legs and mess. And I do, you know, sprinting as well. That's a more explosive and power type exercise. I do sprinting maybe once a week. And uh then the other days of the week I either yeah just walk or do low inensity cardio. So that's going to be zone two cardio. In the summer right now it's been a cycling mostly. So I do uh 60 minutes of uh low intensity cycling, maybe a few intervals in there as well in the mix. So um I work out maybe six days a week. three of them are harder and uh three of them are kind of low intensity and uh easy to do. So yeah, that's that's what I've been doing uh myself right now. And um yeah we discussed you know most of us or all of us do some mix of weights or cardio or some you know let's say walking as well but uh what do you think is the research about cardio and weights or resistance training? Is one
weights or resistance training? Is one better or the other or um what is your impression of the research? Uh maybe Greg you can start. Sure. Yeah. So I would ask someone important for what? Because they both lead to different adaptations and I'd argue that they both matter. It's been interesting seeing the evolution of exercise science over the years because initially there was a lot of focus on endurance training and then the strength guys came along and the pendulum has swung back in that direction. But the reality is that they both confer lots of health benefits. And something that we didn't speak about earlier is that when it comes to adaptations to training, they're quite general initially. You can take someone who's not very physically active and therefore not very physically fit. And you can have them do almost anything initially and they'll probably get a little bit stronger and slightly improve their cardio spiritual fitness too. And then over time training needs to get increasingly more specific to continue to progress in a given domain. I would also say the relative importance differs between people. You could take someone like you seem who is quite misomorphic naturally. They're quite muscular. And for someone like that, they might not need to do much resistance training at all in order to
resistance training at all in order to have high bone mineral density, plenty of muscle mass, good strength, good force production, and they might really benefit from focusing on boosting their cardiorespiratory fitness. At the other end of the spectrum, you could have someone who's very ectomorphic. They're naturally very live and perhaps they're naturally quite good at endurance training, but their bone mineral density is low and they haven't got much muscle or bone reserve and so focusing on building that through appropriate resistance training is really going to benefit them in the long term. I said that some combination of both is preferable. And that brings up the subject of so-called concurrent training. And people will define this in different ways. Some people they'd speak about concurrent training as being when you're doing both resistance training and endurance training within the same session, whereas combined training would be you're doing them both, but they're split across different days during the week. And there was a lot of discussion about the so-called interference effect. The suggestion being that if you do cardio and resistance training on the same day, then the cardio in particular is going to dramatically blunt the adaptations to the resistance training because you're sending your body different signals. Cardio is creating some energy stress and they both activate discrete signaling pathways and the cardiovascular exercise could blunt
the cardiovascular exercise could blunt some of the grow growth promoting pathways and as a result you won't get nearly as strong or gain as much muscle mass as had you just focused on the resistance training alone. I think the body of research now shows that within reason, if the endurance training isn't too damaging and isn't too voluminous, then the size of the interference effect is actually quite small. And so I think if people are pushed for time, then they can combine them both within the same session. And in that case, I'd argue that it makes more sense to do the resistance training first because by doing the endurance training first, you're going to reduce your force output in the subsequent exercises. Whereas, if anything, if you combine resistance training with the endurance training, then the resistance training actually can improve endurance training performance. We see that in elite endurance athletes, too. If they add in resistance training, then they might be able to produce a little bit more power late in the race and their exercise economy might be slightly better. Data on injury risk is somewhat mixed. So to summarize, I would say the relative importance differs between people. Both are important. So doing some assessment of your preferences and your needs. So, are you relatively
and your needs. So, are you relatively strong, but your cardio spiritual fitness isn't very good, or vice versa before starting to think about how to optimize your training program? Makes a lot of sense. I've learned that we have to stop letting Greg go first because he offers such nuanced answers. Um, yeah, I mean, again, I I completely agree. I think the the first question that a person should ask I I understand we're we're trying to go through uh question by question but typically you know when you're prescribing exercise or I suppose that's true of any sort of prescription uh you have to understand what the goals are. So if a person wants to just generally be healthy uh healthier than their current uh state of being then you know just a a simple very simple mixture of the two uh is going to offer the most bang for your buck. And then uh exactly to Greg's point if you do one or the other they tend to translate a little bit across the board if you're pretty untrained. Uh, however, as you get further up, then you start to have more and more specificity. As you start to decide, okay, well, I would like I'm dealing with osteoporosis, so what am I going to do with that? Then you probably try to slant a little more training towards like resistance training, and you probably change how you do the
you probably change how you do the resistance training as well. Uh, so there's a lot of variables that you have to consider, but I think that no matter what, doing both is important. I would say that exact I completely agree with Greg that's starting out with resistance training if you're going to do them both in one session that's starting out with resistance training and then going into uh the the cardio uh respiratory fitness and trying to improve uh through aerobic exercise is the way to go. Um, I think that also starting out with very low amounts of training, one to two times a week for somebody who's first starting out and then again you start to get into more specificity and you can start increasing that volume. So the the volume I mean by total amount of work that you do and if for that you know it starts to get really tough to to stick that all into two training sessions. So you may want to break that into a third and it just kind of evolves. you can see it continues to evolve and you have to have some level of idea of how you're going to make that evolution happen. And once you get to really high levels, so once you you know we I've been talking about we've been talking about kind of untrained individuals. As you get to really trained individuals, uh Greg mentioned a word called periodization. So you start talking about that undulating periodization programs and things of that nature depending on if a person wants to become a pro powerlifter or if they want to be a a bodybuilder or whatever it might be or if they want to become really good at calisthenics then it does it make sense actually seem you
it does it make sense actually seem you gave a a perfect answer. you said that you do squats, but you don't want to do a whole lot of e leg exercise because it doesn't fit with what you want to do with what you want out of your body. So, again, you start getting into that specificity. So, there's a lot to say on the topic, but for sure, which one matters more? They both matter, just very different ways that kind of uh cross uh pollinate with one another. Yeah. I used to do a lot of squats and that made my calisthenics harder. That's why I'm I'm taking it down a bit uh currently. But um yeah, obviously for optimal health, people need to do a mix of both and um you know, different degrees. How much of each type of exercise you do depends on the goals and the situation. And I totally agree that in the beginning the fundamental type of exercise that everyone should do is resistance training because you're not going to be able to increase bone density or muscle mass with with cardio. And uh resistance training tends to have more unique effects as well. Whereas you can increase your uh cardio fitness with resistance training as well. I guess especially in the beginning if people are unfit they start to lift weights the RIA to max will also increase from the weight lifting. Now, if they get more advanced with the weightlifting and they get a little bit fitter, then it plateaus. They're not going to see additional effects. So, that's where they might need to incorporate some cardiorespiratory fitness to increase
cardiorespiratory fitness to increase their V2 max as well. But um I would like to add that I've looked at okay if you were to compare head-to - head then which one is more impactful on the risk of all cause mortality and things of that and what I found one study where the um cardiorestory fitness didn't have or had a much higher threshold for health benefits people who had advanced level of cardiatory fitness they gained additional reduction in mortality risk whereas for strength which was measured with grip strength which is used to assess total body strength upper body strength then uh the benefits plateaued at intermediate level of grip strength. So um if you have very high level of grip strength then that's equal to having intermediate level of grip strength for mortality risk benefit whereas for card respirator fitness having high like more advanced level of card fitness provided greater risk reduction than intermediate level of card fitness. So at least my takeaway for from that was that yes both matter right if you combine both you see additional benefits on your mortality risk but uh with strength there need appears to be a smaller ceiling or like a lower ceiling where you get the maximum benefits whereas with cardior respiratory fitness it's the ceiling is much higher that uh you can go much more advanced with card respirator fitness and get even greater results compared to being intermediate level with that at least that's that's what I found from uh
least that's that's what I found from uh my own research. I would see. Do you mind if I just gently push back against something that you said? Yeah, I realize I'm probably nitpicking here, but people can actually get stronger from doing endurance training if they haven't done any. And that's most true of sprints interval training and high intensity intermittent training, which we might come back to. But it's also true of moderate intensity continuous training. And it's probably especially true of older adults who likely stand to gain most from exercise. So if someone is really quite deconditioned, to use a nerdy term, then even endurance training could actually get them stronger. There's also an interaction with the type of exercise. So returning to concurrent training, the jury is still probably just out. But if anything, running exercise tends to produce more interference than cycling because running produces more exercise induced muscle damage. It's harder to recover from. Whereas with cycling, a lot of people do cycling alongside their resistance training and they won't get particularly sore and they won't notice any effects on their lower body strength. So the modality does matter too. And then with respect to the relative importance of those different types of exercise and different fitness characteristics, I'm guessing that that would interact with the population in question too and
with the population in question too and their existing risk factors. Bearing in mind that some populations have in general slightly greater cardiovascular risk than others. And there are other factors that are environmental that can influence people's fitness. So, how walkable the neighborhood is, the altitude that they live at, and so on. And that could have some bearing on the type of exercise that's best. So, I don't mean to be, but it it just emphasizes the importance of bearing the individual in mind. Yeah. I guess rowing would be a good way of doing cardio if you're not doing weights because you're getting upper body strength as well from that. Whereas, yeah, for running, you're not going to increase your biceps. Yeah. And as a general comment, I would say if I had to pick one type of exercise, then I think some sort of circuit based resistance training would would probably come out as the king because that way by choosing appropriate exercising exercises and pairing them well, you can create quite a strong peripheral and central cardiovascular stimulus while also getting some muscle hypertrophy and some strength gains. If you choose exercise that challenge balance, then you can improve that as well. If you're training through a full range of motion, then you can build your flexibility and you can therefore tick off all the boxes that you want to take build all the capacities that you want to build through a single type of resistance training. And this I think is part of the reason that CrossFit is so popular
the reason that CrossFit is so popular because some forms of CrossFit, some CrossFit workouts are a bit like that. But it still leaves quite a lot to be desired because I just think that they combine exercises that can be quite injurious in particular in the face of fatigue. So I don't want to lament CrossFit by any means, but I think for people who can survive it, they do get impressively fit across the board, right? Yeah. I guess with CrossFit, the danger is uh these complex movements done to fatigue. So your risk of injury goes very high. But something like hybrid, being a hybrid athlete probably is the best for longevity, being like a hybrid dad or uh things like that, running and doing lifting and uh trying to do uh everything to a moderate degree. Um yeah, but um you know, exercise is good. What about uh the optimal amount of exercise? because um I think we've all seen some studies indicating that insane amounts of exercise or insane amounts of volume um might be actually associated with some health risks especially ultra endurance masters athletes they have higher rates of atheroscerotic plaque and um I've also seen a study I think Nick also made a video about it where a specific amount of resistance training per week or like very a lot of
per week or like very a lot of resistance training per week was associated with increased mortality as well. So, is there a sweet spot? Is how much exercise is uh you know beneficial and how much is too much when we're talking about minutes per week or workouts per week? And maybe Nick can start this time. All right. Um yeah, there's a number of ways to approach this. uh like if we put aside the specificity that you have to have depending on the person that you're talking to. So if they're untrained, if they're partly trained, depending on their goals, they're if they're like you said, M's athlete, for example, uh is going to completely change the recommendations. But um I So you could answer this by like the the way that the clinical organizations like the ACSM, so the American College of Sports Medicine, uh recommends things. So they say the bare minimum to see benefit is around 10 minutes of physical activity. Uh so that would be the absolute bare minimum. But and maybe that research will evolve. I haven't looked at it in quite a while. But they also go up to 150 minutes is kind of the overall what people should be aiming for. And I think they mentioned a person can go up to 300 minutes of exercise. Now from there you would change the intensity as well. So if you're going going to do moderate intensity or if you're going to be doing what they call
you're going to be doing what they call vigorous intensity. Um so there's a lot of variables that you can play with. Um, how I would start out is just doing if again if I'm looking at a person who's never trained before, uh, I would start out not even in the gym, just go out for a walk or go out for something simple, low intensity, do 10, 15 minutes and you may at the end of the week be flying up like you're like, "Oh, this is so easy." And that that's great. That's fantastic. From there you just keep building from there and uh just add let's say a 30 minute session and then you start going into the gym once a week. So you do maybe a 30 minute session in the gym where you do resistance training for 20 minutes and then using compound exercises and then you might do let's say 10 minutes uh to finish things off with a little bit of like a cool down or whatever it might be walking or if that's a stair step or whatever it might be. Um and you just keep building from there. Uh I think the point that a person will know if they are doing too much at least from the a feeling perspective is if you start to feel really run down uh if you feel uh there's complete lack of energy, you have a hard time sleeping. Um and bear this in mind that no other variables have changed. So, if your stress levels at work have increased substantially, that's something that you should consider as as a potential explanation
consider as as a potential explanation for for that. But assuming that everything else in your life stays relatively the same. Um, you're not making progress in the gym, that's another great indication. Uh, if everything else is staying the same, uh, yeah, you just feel run down, then, you know, scale it back. And we do this in in exercise physiology and exercise programming all the time that are called D losses. you take a a week where you massively reduce the amount of of exercise that you do. So, let's say you started out at that very low level and you've built up to 150 minutes. Let's say you go to the gym 5 days a week and you you do 30 minutes of exercise and and you're starting to feel kind of like that, you know, you're just not that motivated and and that the actual pro progress isn't that great, then it may be something that you could experiment with and just cut back uh to let's say twice a week for a week or two weeks or cut down to once a week for a week or two weeks or cut down the amount of exercise that you do in each one of those sessions. So, there's a lot of variables that you can play with, but uh ultimately I think that just building up to where you're seeing progress on, let's say, a week or a bi-weekly basis, I think that's a great great uh marker to aim for. And in terms of endurance athletes, um I actually I I'll give it to Greg and then we can discuss why masters or endurance athletes in general have some of these negative uh health effects that come from exercise.
health effects that come from exercise. Yeah. So, I completely agree with what Nick was saying there. You got to meet people where they are. And so, if you've got someone who's not doing any structured exercise at all, then initially they might do a single work set per muscle group per week. And then you would increase their training volume in particular according to their progress. There's this idea that's come up in recent years of exercise non-responders because if you give a large group of people a standardized training program, you'll see a bell-shaped curve mapping their responses to some people having very large improvements in whatever parameter you're looking at and others not improving at all. And so then the people without the improvements got labeled as being non-responders. But some really nice subsequent research has basically shown that if you then take people who didn't respond to a training program and you increase the training volume, they do respond and there don't seem to be any global non-responders. It could be that one person responds with a large increase in V2 max whereas someone else gets a large improvement in their oral glucose tolerance. With respect to government guidelines, they all basically say the same thing. They all focus on moderate to vigorous physical activity and define that according to metabolic equivalence met which is just a multiple of your resting metabolic rate. So moderate activity is
metabolic rate. So moderate activity is 3 to 5. 99 times your resting metabolic rate and that includes things like brisk walking, walking uphill, cycling gently and so on. Whereas vigorous activity is anything done at six mets or higher. And so the guidelines say 150 to 300 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per day with resistance training for all major muscle groups at least twice a week. And I think that that's a perfectly appropriate starting point. that there was an analysis that came out not long ago looking at the proportion of people that actually meet those guidelines and based on a data set including more than 3 million people 17% of adults meet those guidelines. So most people are way short of it and therefore speaking about training too much is just not that relevant to many people. It might be relevant to some of the people listening to this because they'll be more interested in health and more physically active and not representative of the general population. With respect to doing too much, you certainly can do too much. So I spoke earlier on about analyses by people like Hannah RM showing that the population level more is basically better. But if we speak about individuals then clearly people can do too much. There are various extremes of that. One is the so-called overtraining syndrome where you push your training so hard that your
you push your training so hard that your performance actually starts getting worse and it tends to be accompanied by listlessness and often overuse injuries, disrupted sleep, a predisposition to picking up upper respiratory tract infections and so on. And on that subject, when it comes to how people respond to exercise, you tend to see nonlinear responses. A really nice example of this is work by a guy called David Neman, who's an immunologist who did the early work showing that when it comes to exercise training loads and upper respiratory tract infection risk, so risk of picking up the common cold, say, you see a J-shaped curve where people who are very sedentary, they have a slightly increased risk. People who do a moderate amount of activity they have the lowest risk and then people who do heroic volumes of exercise have a higher risk than the people who are sedentary. So you see it in immune function. And then with respect to plaque which he mentioned, I think those data are really interesting and they're slightly hard to pass because we have to bear in mind that when it comes to looking at say endurance athletes and then scanning their arteries and finding calcium in their coronary arteries has has been done. These people aren't just doing more exercise. They also eat differently to people in the general population. Just take an extreme example of that. Think about Michael Phelps, the Olympic
about Michael Phelps, the Olympic swimmer. He's probably the most decorated Olympic swimmer ever. When he was at his best, his diet reportedly comprised huge volumes of junk food in order to provide the energy necessary to volume to fuel his huge volumes of training. And so there are confounding factors that are at play. But I I do think that there is a signal there. However, we have to bear in mind that when we actually look at disease risk in these people, they don't have an increased risk of cardiovascular events. Actually, they're slightly protected against them. And so, you might see, say, an increase in coronary artery calcium, but they'll also have better vascular function than other people. their blood pressure will be lower and they'll have some other changes that are relevant to they probably have better blood sugar control and so on. Yeah. So the overall profile is still favorable. So I think I ticked off the the different boxes that were relevant there. But Nick, I know that you teed me up to speak about that and I think that you had some additional thoughts when it came to to what I was just discussing with respect to to plaque. Yeah. uh from there there the research on the plaque development in extreme endurance athletes is uh exactly to your point Greg it's very associative in that it's difficult for them to control for a
it's difficult for them to control for a lot of these factors especially when they don't have a t they don't have a massive population of people to work with in general. So these studies tend to be small and then they have difficulty controlling for these different factors. I still think that to use Greg's words, there's still a signal there. Um the so there's two things that I wanted to say. One is that even though there's plaque when they compare against let's say similarly aged individuals and you know with us understanding that there's confounding in there, they tend to be more calcified plaque. So it's actually more I don't want to say beneficial but it's just better quality plaque as in less likely to rupture which ultimately leads to these cardiovascular events. The second thing that I wanted to point out was that the thing that I have looked into more is the uh fibrootic nature around the heart um that can occur from some of these endurance in these endurance ultra endurance endurance athletes. um in that scenario they do have at least some mechanistic data to substantiate as well uh that if you're I don't remember the exact signaling but there's some sort of effect that occurs from constantly uh stressing the heart to a point where you have more activity of uh fibroblasts these uh these particular cells that ultimately lead to a deposition of uh fibroic material in the heart which can lead to some problems in terms of like
lead to some problems in terms of like signaling and whatnot of the heart. Again, to specifically say that that's going to be devoid of confounding factors and whatnot is really tough to say. So, I think that like Greg said, there's a signal there, but I just don't think that the research is fully fleshed out. We'll just put it that way. I would also Sorry, Zen. Go for it, mate. No, I was going to say that I agree that um there's uh quite a lot of of those studies finding these uh alternate endurance athletes having higher plaque, but yeah, it's more stable. It's less likely to rupture and they still have a total lower risk of cardiovascular events. So even if exercise were to be quote unquote excessive amounts of exercise being bad for your in terms of increasing athoscerotic plaque, it still lowers your total risk. So it's still a net positive in that sense. And uh like Nick said as well, there's so many other confounding variables that it would be hard to say that it's the exercise per se. Maybe it's these ultra endurance athletes, they're you know, drinking these gels or something sugar drinks or something like that. Maybe it's that or eating, you know, enormous amounts of junk food after running. So if you're doing a marathon, but you eat a ton of McDonald's after that, then maybe that's the issue. Um but you know, most people are not going to reach that to begin with. So when you have this is a threshold that it becomes harmful then most people are you know 100 m away from that they're not nearly even close to
that they're not nearly even close to reaching that that threshold where it might be uh harmful. I was going to say I would be quick to draw a bright line between people say running marathons and ultraathletes. I've worked a bit with ultra marathon runners, ocean broers, ultraathletes in general. They are a different breed and their nutrition is not always stellar. They they're not as professional athletes and that's understandable given their competition so on as some of their counterparts who are competing in shorter events. I also think that we need some longitudinal studies on on these types of people. I know that there's the cardia study but on people following their training and then looking at how that relates to changes in the myioardium and so on. There was some really interesting work came out not that long ago that was looking at people undergoing marathon training and it found a loss of brain myelination. Myelin is this fatty sheath that gets wrapped around nerves that basically speeds the rate at which they can transmit electrical signals and also increases the efficiency of that and that loss of mileelination generally would be viewed as being a negative. But when the training ceased their brain mileelination seemed to recover within a couple of months. Whether that would be true of something
Whether that would be true of something like the heart we don't really know. And we've known for some time that when people do do these types of very high volume training programs, we see markers in we see increases in markers of mioardial damage like cardiac proponent and so on. So my guess is that it is really hard on the heart. But the question is what's the net effect of that? And then when we look at these individuals, how do we best help them as individuals? Because someone could have a large plaque burden, but their other risk factors look good. Whereas a counterpart could have that, but then meanwhile they've got very high apo B levels and their overall cardiac risk profile is not very favorable. Yeah, I think it's maybe useful for people to imagine how much training these endurance athletes actually do. So, you know, depends on the athlete, but you know, typically they'll have running sessions that last one and a half hours or two hours multiple times per week. So, this is the type of volume that we're speaking of. So, something like 10 plus hour 10 to 20 hours of exercise per week cardiovascular exercise. And you know, I shared my own workout. I do, you know, two times a week of 60 minutes, so two hours of zone 2 cardio, which is pretty low intensity. maybe a third one if I'm, you know, especially motivated or uh enjoy it more. But, uh, that's significantly less
more. But, uh, that's significantly less than what these actual athletes uh, do. I've actually never, you know, ran an endurance event that's longer than one and a half hours. Like the longest endurance one work like endurance workout that I've ever had was in the military. We did a 14 km run with the equipment. So, uh, it was one and a half hours, but that's the longest I've actually ever ran in one session. So, you can split it up into multiple sessions and minimize the harm. So, rather than going for a three-hour run in one workout, right, you might want to split it up into three 1-hour workouts across the week, and you will have less potential harm. You will minimize the harm by just splitting it up and allowing some recovery in between those sessions. Now, some people might not have the time to split it up, but um if you do have the time, then splitting it up into multiple workouts probably minimizes any potential long-term harm in my opinion. Yeah. And I think there are other acute events that can take place during exercise. So, focusing on plaque there, but a good example of this is when someone's heart loses its rhythm. So maybe they experience atrial fibrillation for instance. And people who have been very physically active with high cardiorespiratory fitness sometimes who have been very good endurance athletes or team sport athletes have a higher risk of AIB than many of their much more sedentary counterparts.
counterparts. But those events are still sporadic and their overall risk profile is better. So again, I think we have to think about the long-term trajectory, but suffice to say, problems do occur when people do high volume, high intensity endurance training. Yeah, there was one review by O'Kee James O'Keeffe uh few weeks ago, 2023, I think, that looked at the biggest studies on risk of heart disease, mortality, and exercise over the last 5 or 10 years. And they found that for all cause mortality there was both types of exercises were beneficial and pretty linearly were associated with lower risk. But moderate intensity had a slightly bigger mortality risk reduction. So it provided more benefits and the benefits kept going until like 900 minutes per week of moderate intensity exercise. So that's like 40 to 60% of your max heart rate. So hiking, speed walking, maybe slight jog, cycling, those kind of things. and uh high vigorous intensity exercise also had reduction benefits but it was slightly small smaller and the benefits tended to plateau much earlier. So what what I remember from reading that study was that okay I'm going to actually rather than trying to add more highintensity exercise to my weekly workout. I'm just going to copy that whatever three times a week, four times a week. And the rest of the workouts, if I want to do more workouts, I'll just do moderate intensity, lower intensity um
moderate intensity, lower intensity um physical activity just to move uh more. At least that was my takeaway from that uh study that inspired me to change some of my own routine. I think that makes sense. Yeah. And when speaking of lifespan then uh there's this common trope that uh athletes are super fit and healthy but they die sooner and they're not living as long as regular people. Now most of the longest living people don't exercise. You know there super centinarians they didn't do any exercise but there are a few studies that Olympic athletes actually have about five years longer life expectancy than uh the general population. Now of course they might have more money but you know Olympic athletes actually don't make that much money but uh they might have some other you know soioeconomic benefits but still even if you control for those factors then it appears that even if you're at the Olympic level you tend to improve your life expectancy at least a few years compared to the general population who you know doesn't exercise that much any thoughts on that yeah I I think uh well for centinarians I do think I mean again it's to me we talk about exercise but they they do they are physically active so I think that's a big distinction. They may not specifically go out for a jog or whatnot but um they they tend to be very
whatnot but um they they tend to be very active and they tend to be uh strongly in um in social groups and and doing social activities and whatnot. So I think that the physical activity aspect if we were to focus on that I'm sure that that is quite high at least relative to the average let's say American um the overall effect that exercise has on longevity I think in general uh it tends to improve longevity and then of course you can go into the health span differences as well. So, health span, we've been talking about that essentially this whole time that you get all these improvements in the quality of your life due to exercise. So, I think that part is pretty set in stone, at least in my mind. The actual extension of your life, I think that for the average person, there's no doubt that it extends your life. Uh, I think maybe I I could see an argument, although I don't really have a strong one at the moment. If you wanted to live the absolute longest possible, then potentially uh certain exercises may get in the way of that, but probably not the exercises themselves, but probably the habits that go around that kind of uh that kind of mentality. So, it's tough to tease out. Um I yeah I think but on average I think that people
think but on average I think that people who exercise just live longer and they live healthier lives and typically happier lives. Not to say that uh it's going to cure every every you know uh mental health issue or anything like that but um yeah just on average it's generally a benefit across the board. Yeah, it's more like a spectrum that the worst situation is you don't exercise, you also don't have any physical labor, you're just sedentary, right? That's the worst outcome. And the on the other hand, you have this ultra endurance athlete who also eats a bad diet and uh is, you know, very physically stressed out because of that. And in the middle you have anything that involves moderate amounts of uh exercise a few times a week, not overdoing it and uh you know having some physical non-ex exercise type of activity as well. Something like walking, hiking, um cutting wood or something like that. Uh that all count as a physical activity that improves and it's generally the trend that people don't do enough of physical activity or exercise. So that generally general population would benefit from more and uh you know it's very unlikely that they will reach this state where they're actually harming their health in most cases. Just to go back to the Olympians for a second, I don't know how much we can read into those types of analyses for several reasons. One of them is that there's a really strong selection bias at play. So if you think about the
at play. So if you think about the extremes of this, take the Russian system or the Chinese system, it's basically a meat factory. Like you throw loads and loads of kids very early in life into very strenuous training and the strongest survive. It's a numbers game. So the people who have managed to withstand that probably have really resilient biology. I think there's also going to be a lot of sport specificity. So to take an example, my guess is that a decathlete or a heptathlete is probably going to have a longer lifespan and health span than a super heavyweight Olympic weightlifter, right? So we we need to bear that in mind because I think those types of studies, they often draw a lot of attention from the media because they're cool. People want to see what Olympians are up to and find out about the extremes of their biology. How high is this person's V2 max? How much can that person squat? But I don't know if there's that much that most people can learn. And going back to the centinarians, I've never looked actually to see if anyone systematically studied this, but my guess is that a really big contributor to their physical longevity is they probably haven't had any really disabling injuries because you pick up a knee issue in midlife and you don't treat it well,
midlife and you don't treat it well, don't go through appropriate physiootherapy and so on and it gets worse. worse and then you start shifting around how you load your different tissues and then you end up with a hip problem and an ankle issue that compounds over time in something meaningful. Whereas a lot of these people that live very long lives, they're not super fit, but they haven't knackered their joints in the process. And I think that's a really important consideration, especially for people who are getting interested in this stuff and they see people training certain ways on social media and they think, I want to be able to do that. they jump into a training program that's too much too soon and then they hurt themselves and we need to avoid that happening. Mhm. Yeah, genes definitely play a huge role for both athletes and u centinarians. And with centinarians, there's obviously a mix of luck as well that uh you're not going to fall off the stairs or you know some uh life event fortunate life event. It's kind of interesting that the John Kment, the longest living person in history, she's uh from France and uh you know she lived through World War II. So she was kind of lucky in that sense that she actually survived that period. I want to also talk about resistance training. So um resistance training tends to be one of those sports that can be more unhealthy as well uh mostly because of the other recreational drug use and uh you know diet related uh things that can be harmful for overall
things that can be harmful for overall health. And there was a few studies that Nick covered on his channel, I remember, where too much resistance training, something along the lines of over 200 minutes per week appear to be associated with increased mortality risk. And uh there was like a sweet spot. Now, the problem with these studies, yeah, is there's no standardization of okay, how many reps, how many sets, how many rest time between the sets, so when does the time count but contributes to that weekly volume. So, it's obviously not anything that you should take away as a, you know, guideline of how much weightlifting you should do, but it might again indicate a trend that perhaps too much resistance training, too much volume with weightlifting could be potentially harmful. Or it might be that you get sucked into a wormhole of like a gateway drug. First you take creatine, then you take debol, whatever it is. So, there's obviously some implications in that. um realm of uh sports. So uh what was your uh impression of that study specifically, Nick? Uh yeah. So those studies are pretty poor quality uh for some of the reasons that you pointed out, right? They don't have a standardized way of identifying how much resistance training was done. None of these analyses are done doing like how many reps did you do? How much weight did you do? Can we make that relative to your body weight? Can we make that relative to something? Um they
make that relative to something? Um they just look at minutes and typically minutes is not a very exact way of measuring at least resistance training. um because you don't know if a person is taking 2 minutes of rest between sets or 1 minute or 15 seconds or whatever it might be. So there's there's all kinds of uh of wishy-washiness related to that data. But beyond that, the the analyses too, those specific analyses that I looked at uh they were simple associations. So they didn't do any sort of uh adjustments or anything of that nature. And even if they did, there's a lot of things you have to adjust for and there's a high likelihood that you're missing something that uh could be tracking that you're just not uh you're not addressing. Um and to your point seem it's absolutely true that if you're getting up to that higher echelon of oh I exercise or I resistance train specifically uh five six days a week or whatever it's it's possible that you're starting to tap into a population of people that are starting to take all these different uh these enhancers the the steroids like creatine. I'm kidding for anybody listening. I'm aware it's not. Um, so yeah, it's certainly possible you're getting into those those types of individuals. In addition, as you get into those types of individuals that are really serious and
individuals that are really serious and really want to pack on as much muscle as possible, you're also decreasing the amount of individuals that you can sample. So, uh, it it also creates a bias in in that regard. So there's bottom line is my impression is that I wouldn't put too much stock into those studies for the time being. Right. What about you, Greg? Yeah. And I don't know the specific studies you're referring to, but I completely agree. It smacks of residual confounding. So people not having adjusted statistically for all sorts of things that could confound the association. One of those being drug use, but also if people have that much time for resistance training, you have to think what else do they have going on in their life because we're probably speaking about middle-aged people. And we know that things like being married and having strong social connections predicts better health outcomes. And so my guess is that this would also be confounded by relative social isolation. And when you couple that with being an environment where in a spit and sawdust gym, people quickly go from the creatine to the Diana bulb, it wouldn't surprise me if those are driving a lot of that association. And again, I I don't think there's that much
again, I I don't think there's that much that we can take from those types of studies. Yeah, I wonder if um there would probably be some sort of a generational difference. I would imagine in the early 2000s when uh these people probably started lifting weights in that study, you know, the gym culture wasn't that mainstream. It was kind of yeah underground and only the gym rats and more like hardcore bodybuilders were doing which yeah there's a short pipeline to anabolic steroids from there. But nowadays you know gym culture is so mainstream and it's kind of cool or trendy to do it uh you know Gym Shark or whatever it is a mainstream fitness brands. So nowadays, I would imagine it's actually kind of double-edged sword because, you know, nowadays you have these social media influencers who have normalized steroid use in uh fitness and bodybuilding. They actually share what they're taking and stuff like that. And a lot of, you know, young individuals are inspired by their physiques or whatever. And they they're more likely to actually start using steroids as well because in the past, no one was talking about it. it was kind of considered illegal and no one even dared to mention it. But whereas nowadays you have, you know, every third social media fitness influencer, a bodybuilder influencer is open about their steroid use and taking things or nowadays it's TRT. If you take TRT, you're actually naughty still. But um you know the point is that yeah, I I would imagine I would like to know maybe in 10 years if there is another
maybe in 10 years if there is another study like this is there any generational difference? Is it that more regular fitness people are just lifting without taking steroids and they're just doing it for the health or would you see that actually more and more people start to use different types of performance-enhancing drugs? That would be kind of interesting to see. Um but uh you know bodybuilders are notorious for not living very long. So you you don't see a lot of uh super old bodybuilders. And of course most of the bodybuilders might die in their 40s or 50s because of too much drug use. Maybe there's also some genetic differences or problems there that increase the risk of heart disease or kidney disease or something like that. But you see every once in a while like every few months there's another famous bodybuilder who passed away quite young. So, um obviously that's uh with anabolic steroid use and it doesn't imply that lifting weights naturally would be necessarily harmful, but um yeah, it's just one of those sports that has this aura of um of dying young. And the contact sports as well are one of those things that uh is associated with shorter life expectancy. So, boxing, MMA, those kind of things. Yeah, I think uh the way I think about it is it's like a bright powerful flame that just burns really brightly for a period of time that's much shorter than if you just had a slow
much shorter than if you just had a slow ember that occurs over a long period of time. Um, I think that there's there's something there that I I haven't delved into this enough, but I I think from a protein perspective, um, there's like two camps. There's like two groups of researchers. You have like the the Walter Longos that believe that, you know, protein and all that is Greg's already laughing, but you you have this like this idea that uh too much protein or particular amino acids and whatnot can contribute to shortening of a person's lifespan. Then you've got another group of uh researchers like uh what Luke Vanlon and and uh and several Stu Phillips like the these researchers that believe or at least talk about protein being higher protein being beneficial for muscle mass and and health span and all those good things. So, um I wonder if some of that may contribute to at least from a natural perspective, again, if we're eliminating, um the whole steroid aspect, if that may contribute, I don't know. Again, I haven't looked deep enough into that research yet. But Greg, any any thoughts on that? Yeah, I don't know where to begin with that conversation. It's so interesting seeing how this stuff evolves on social media and I try and for the most part distance myself from that. But yeah, people are just
from that. But yeah, people are just banging on about protein and creatine at the moment as if it's going to save all of mankind's wos. And I I'm a card carrying high protein guy. Always have been. Undergrad masters in exercise science. The research back then was pretty clear that a higher protein diet was good for appetite control, was good for body composition, it was good for recovery from exercise, it supported immune function during times of duress. And the data still show the same things for the most part, but to Nick's point, the sources of the protein matter. Of course they do. And so if you have someone whose blood lipids respond very negatively to large increases in their saturated fat intake and they start consuming 250 grams of protein a day from animal sources that are rich in saturated fat, then their blood lipids are probably going to go haywire. So the protein source does matter, but for the most part, I think many people stand to benefit from a higher protein diet. in large part because of its effects on appetite control because the positive energy balance in the long term and the increase in adaposity that follows is upstream of so many different issues whether it's increased risk of diabetes
diabetes diabetes Alzheimer's the list just goes on and on so I don't want to get sidetracked by protein but it is just entertaining watching this stuff unfold from afar and how people miss the forest for the trees and they they just hyperfocus on one subject and then everyone starts weighing in. It's as if there are a few different podcasters, especially in social media personalities who will highlight one thing and then suddenly everyone else just weighs in. And it's it's quite funny to watch, but it's also frustrating because you think this is a really big forest and it's helpful to understand something about how to navigate all of it as opposed to just the protein tree. Yeah. It's like, you know, the outcome is what matters more that people with more muscle mass tend to have lower mortality, especially in elderly age. Now, of course, it's uh not necessarily doesn't mean that you need to be a bodybuilder in terms of muscle mass, but uh elderly people who do have slightly more muscle mass and muscle strength have lower mortality and uh lower rates of other chronic diseases and uh increased uh quality of life and health span as well as a result of that. So you do need to do some form of resistance training to mitigate the muscle loss and u bone density decrease that happens with age. So uh some amount of resistance training is quite fundamental. I I would imagine
is quite fundamental. I I would imagine especially after the age of 50. Maybe before 50 you can get away with not lifting weights. Ideally you should still do it but uh after the age of 50 it pretty much becomes a must for anyone wants to who wants to increase their health span especially. I I think it depends on the outcome, right? Like if you're talking about musculature potentially, connective tissue potentially, but if you're talking about like bone, that's something that somebody needs to attack as early as humanly possible simply because the the bone degradation occurs pretty quickly after age 30, as in like it plateaus and then it starts to decrease. and resistance training can help fight that. But um you know building that base as strong as possible as early as possible is extremely important. Yeah. Anything else uh specifically about resistance training? So um what do you think about is it more important to focus on strength or is it the muscle mass or you know there's also some recent talk about speed and power being also important. So what are your thoughts about that? Yeah, I think it all matters and also happily they all tend to go together. So there's been this debate again largely online about how big a contributor to strength gains and muscle mass are. And there are all
and muscle mass are. And there are all sorts of factors at play. A lot of those relate to muscle tendon unit morphology and other things that we don't need to get into. But for the most part, gaining muscle is going to support strength gains. It's also going to support general metabolic health. Muscle is the biggest sink that you have into which to pour the glucose that you consume. So, it's particularly important to mitigating risk of things like diabetes. And then with respect to power, again, this is something that exercise scientists have been speaking about for years, but but finally the influence of catching up. that tends to go hand inhand with gains in strength, too. But there are things that you can do to accentuate improvements in any of those, whether it's gaining muscle or focusing on strength or prioritizing power. For most people listening to this, I don't think we need to be too granular about distinguishing between the three of them. And there are probably a few things that they need to understand, which include training parameters for each of those different outcomes. But also power for the most part can come along for the ride if you understand that when it comes to recruiting your motor units which are the muscles and the nerves that innovate them. It's the intention to move quickly that matters. So you have different types of motor units that differ in how easy they are to recruit. And if you're
easy they are to recruit. And if you're doing something that doesn't require lots of force, then you'll rely mostly on your so-called slow twitch or type one muscle fibers. There's this principle of orderly recruitment that was put forward by Henman decades ago in which the recruitment of motor units increases according to the demands of the task and you start with the slowest twitch fibers and then you move into the intermediate fibers and then you get the highest threshold ones. However, if you're trying to move quickly, then you can recruit all of those different types of fibers from the get - go. And so, if you want to build your power, you can do that provided that you're focusing on moving whatever you're moving quickly. And you might not do that from the start of resistance training program. Let's say that you've not done resistance training before. You're getting accustomed to the new exercises. For the first couple of weeks, you can do those lifting with a relatively slow cadence, but then over time, you can focus on moving the implement faster and still lowering it under control. And that way, you can get some improvements in your power. There are specifics we don't need to get into like the force velocity curve and how training at different intensities can push that around in different directions, but that's only really relevant to athletes. So what I would say for the most part is build all three of those capacities. Use the lowest dose of the least specific exercises that is needed to accomplish that. Bearing in mind that if
accomplish that. Bearing in mind that if you do that then you give yourself greater scope to progress training variables in the future and your exercise is more time efficient. Whereas if you jump in and do too much too soon, you don't have as many levers to pull and you're more likely to hurt yourself too. So I think in terms of resistance training parameters for most people again if you've done nothing at all you can start with a single set per muscle group per week and progress from there. And then ultimately if you're focusing on gaining muscle then I think the meta regressions largely show that doing at least 10 sets per muscle group per week is going to optimize your gains. Again bearing in mind this variation between people. A key wrinkle there is that scientists count exercises in a way that doesn't entirely make sense. And what I mean by that is that if you're doing a preacher curl, that is just focusing on your biceps. There aren't really other muscles that are contributing as prime movers. Whereas, if you're doing a seated row, it's primarily the shoulder extensors like the lats that are contributing to that movement. and your biceps are functioning in an accessory role. In research settings, they would count the seated row as one of those 10 sets per week. So, just bear that in mind because it means that you don't have to do 10 sets of dedicated curls and tricep
sets of dedicated curls and tricep extension exercises to meet that threshold. But again, work up to that. And then in terms of training intensities, which is typically in this context defined as a percentage of one rep max, you probably don't need to lift anything heavier than a five rep max at any point in time unless you're actually a strength athlete to get stronger. And doing too much work in that type of range could dispose you to injuries. But the intensity needs to be high enough that you are going to get some sort of strength stimulus. You can get roughly equivalent hypertrophy from using intensities as low as about a 20 rep max. So, a weight that you could lift 20 times until you couldn't lift it again with perfect technique. But training at those types of lower intensities isn't going to give you as strong a bone remodeling or strength stimulus. So, just bear that in mind. And what that means is that if you want to focus more on hypertrophy while sparing your joints, you can include some lighter training using sets of 15 to 20 and get a good stimulus for muscle growth that way. But if you also wanted to get stronger and more powerful, you might include some multi - joint exercises that are done in the five to 10 rep max range and focus on progressing the loads that you use in those over time. And then that's going to provide a good stimulus. And then finally, with respect to power, you can
finally, with respect to power, you can also include some other types of exercise to boost that. And see, you mentioned sprinting earlier. Sprinting is great if your muscular skeletal system can put up with it. That's not true of many people. I'm saying this as someone who was a sprint coach for four years. And if a lot of people jumped into trying to do 50 m sprints or 100 m sprints, they'll probably just strain a hamstring almost immediately. So don't do that. And instead, you can build that power using non-lifting based exercises like various different jumps. And I really like box jumps because they remove the landing component, but they give you a target and you focus on jumping as high as possible. So you get the recruitment that you're after. And then you can also do things like stepping off boxes, catching yourself in a good position. And I won't go into the biomechanics of that, but by doing that, you're giving your bones a very strong remodeling stimulus because the rate of the loading is so high because you're dropping from a height. It's quite different from doing something like a leg press or a split squat or a squat. So including some jumping exercises and some landing exercises can be helpful if you're ready for it. If they're bilateral, so you're using both legs, then the loads aren't so high, so your muscularkeeletal system is probably going to tolerate that better. And then for your upper body, it's a little trickier. I don't know if you really need to do dedicated power work for your upper body, but there are lots of different medicine ball throwing
different medicine ball throwing exercises that you can include. Again, though, you can just focus on moving the implement quickly. And actually, I think calisthenics are quite nice when it comes to building up a body power because you can do things like push-ups where you're you're pushing yourself up fast enough that you temporarily leave the ground with your hands and then you catch yourself which is giving you a nice bone stimulus as well. And then you can do body row and pull-up exercises where you're focusing on moving yourself as quickly as possible. If you've got sufficient strength, do those exercises well. So, sorry long - winded answer, but I would say you can kill three birds with one stone through resistance training alone if you understand the importance of moving quickly. And I think those loading parameters are a good place to start, but just start with the minimum that's necessary to get you to progress in the different domains that are of interest to you. And for strength alone, that could be a single set. For muscle growth, it's likely to be slightly more than that. for power, the volumes needed are really not very high at all. Yeah, that's uh that was perfectly put. Uh the I I think of the hierarchy slightly differently. I don't maybe Greg you don't think of them as the same either, but um I think of it especially from a health perspective. I think that strength is number one. Power is just slightly kind
number one. Power is just slightly kind of head head-to - head kind of very close with one another. And I think I put muscle mass further behind. Not to say that it's not important, but I would put it at further behind um simply because of the effect that strength and power can have especially later in life uh 50 60 and definitely beyond that. Um, so how I would structure it for health reasons is to focus on strength. And the the beauty of it, just like Greg said, is that you can easily do both of them. I'm talking about uh strength and and power without too too much input. You don't have to do tons of volume or anything like that. You just have to focus on intensity and intentionality and the type of exercise that you do. Um and ultimately you'll get results that are that will translate uh for a a long period of time for the rest of your life. Uh on top of that because as a person gets older you have to start considering the the joint and uh the problems that a person might experience at the joint. you can still create a program that focuses on strength and power at pretty low volumes and get all those benefits. And then when you do need to give your joints more resting time, which you will have to oscillate back and forth, you can increase uh the the repetitions and massively decrease the the actual intensity so that you're still getting
intensity so that you're still getting stimulus. um you're just giving your joint time to to rest and and uh to get blood flow and whatnot. So, uh yeah, that's everything else. I mean, Greg said is is absolutely perfectly put. It's just uh I would probably just prioritize those two uh over muscle mass when it comes to longevity and health span in general. Yeah, I like that hierarchy and I would make it probably the same that the strength is the most important thing and power obviously is very close to it and matters a lot as well and muscle being the least important but the best thing about it is yeah if you build strength then you will increase muscle mass as well and uh with muscle mass you know there's a lot of talk online that muscle is the organ of of longevity and you need more muscle which is obviously True. Most people need a bit more muscle, but I don't think it's just muscle. It's also the overall body composition. Because if you have a lot of muscle, but you're, you know, 20 kilos overweight, you have 20% body fat, then that muscle isn't good for you. Or, you know, it's obviously better than being just 20% body fat with low muscle. But, uh, excess adiposity at the expense of, you know, by getting too much muscle or something like that is not going to be the optimal scenario. So you what you want is lean muscle like lean body composition, adequate muscle and uh the strength training drives the
and uh the strength training drives the muscle growth. Like if you focus just on getting stronger without necessarily trying to pack on huge old amounts of mass, that's that's the most perfect scenario. So rather than thinking of being like a bodybuilder who lifts a lot of light weights or lighter weights relatively speaking that they do a lot of reps, I think it's healthier to think of about okay more like a powerlifter style. Not necessarily like one to two reps, but you know five to 10 reps is a pretty good sweet spot for strength and hypertrophy mix development. And uh by doing some some of those uh reps or sets with speed and power, you're getting the power development as well at the same time. Yeah, I I agree with those comments and Nick, what you're alluding to really is that age moderates things and you're going to give a 70-year - old a different training program from a 30-year - old. I wouldn't have a 70-year - old go straight into doing box jumps by any means. So, We just need to bear that in mind that what's best is going to fluctuate across the lifespan. Yeah. And you know if uh you have a 60 or 70 year old they are psychopenic then uh you know they might benefit from quote unquote bulking to increase their mass total mass and by even even if they increase some body fat they increase muscle mass as well at the same time. So that total benefit is better. But if
that total benefit is better. But if you're a 20-year - old, you have, you know, naturally speaking, slightly more muscle mass and you're at a lower risk of hip fractures and just dying to sarcopenia, then you might not necessarily need to quote unquote bulk. You can just focus on the strength and the muscle mass will come in adequate amounts in that scenario. Two ideas just to throw in the mix there. One is that people should understand that they can gain strength at any point in their life. And actually, if you look at gains relative to strength at baseline, they're very similar. Old people gain relative strength at a similar rate to young people. They don't gain muscle mass quite as quickly, which probably relates in part to endocrine status, but they certainly see large improvements in various different markers of the quality of their muscle, which is somewhat contentious issue, but we don't need to worry about that. And then Nick, going back to something that you said earlier, relative strength is really important. So how strong are you relative to your body weight and relative power is to how powerful are you relative to your body weight? That's especially key to activities of daily living, whether it's getting up from a chair or what have you. Absolute strength does matter, too, though. And this is actually very relevant to calorie restriction because with calorie restriction, some people have been concerned, well, if I go on a long-term low energy diet, then I'm going to lose muscle mass and strength. And actually, if anything, relative strength tends to improve, but without
strength tends to improve, but without intervention, absolute strength will get worse. And that might mean that you can no longer put the bag in the overhead compartment when you're on the flight or open the jam jar. So by doing strength training you can build absolute strength as well and then mitigate any adverse effects of that low energy diet. So I don't want to focus on calorie restriction hasn't come up for any one particular reason but what you guys are getting at is that if anything relative strength is really important and I completely agree with that and you can improve that often not through exercise but just by improving your body composition and by losing some body fat too which harks back to something you were saying earlier. So ideally, we're looking to have an appropriate amount of adapose tissue, building some strength, which is going to build that relative strength, and then muscle will tend to come along for the ride anyway. When you put most people through training program, you don't ask them to modify their diets. They'll gain a bit of muscle and lose a bit of fat regardless. I'm just going to call you when I can't open the jam jar. comes in and opens it from a different continent. Um, before we move on with V2 max and cardiorespiratory fitness, quick lightning lightning round, what is some of the dumbest or you know stupidest workouts or exercises that you've uh done with lifting weights especially?
Uh well, I mean going I I did uh I did mention that early on when I was working working out three hours a day every other day. Um that put me under massive amounts of stress and I uh yeah, I just burned myself out. Um so that's that's the first one that that comes to mind. just this general idea that I don't know if you guys had this uh but it was this idea that after 48 hours you have to hit the muscle again otherwise you immediately start going into degradation mode the anabolic window. Yeah. So so I you know this was uh this was what over 15 years ago now. I I had all those those concepts in my mind ingrained. So, I was obsessed and uh very much ignorant and and stupid. But um that was that's those are a few that come to mind. I wouldn't know where to start. See, to be honest, I've got a shopping list. So, one of them would be I'm thinking about this in chronological order. One of them would be when I was about 15 or so, I've been reading about German volume training with Charles Polloquin. RIP was pushing at the time and I was for no good reason at all a bit anti-use of machines. So everything had to be some sort of free weight exercise. So I
some sort of free weight exercise. So I started trying to do 10 sets of 10 snatch grip deadlifts which turns out to be not very sustainable and then first session I strained a muscle in my back. Another one is I've definitely nearly killed myself a couple of times. One of them was doing bent over rows. So, this is it's interesting seeing the evolution of this exercise too because everyone's now talking about training at long muscle lengths as a way of stimulating superior hypertrophy. If you look at the old videos of Schwarzenegger and that lot training, they they often would do bent over rows, so rowing with a barbell while standing on some sort of block. And I would do these in the gym or standing on the bench and then rack the weight into the bench. And one time I I kind of missed and then I I sort of half fell and the upright support that you put the barbell back onto very nearly went straight into my Adam's apple which probably would have destroyed my windpipe which might not have been good. So I've had a couple of incidents like that. I crushed myself under the wardrobe in Sicily, which I think I mentioned on our previous round table when I was doing pull-ups while in quarantine, I I was feeling a bit wow, I just wanted to move my body and having been stuck inside for several days, I thought, ah, do some pull-ups and then tried to do some pull-ups using
and then tried to do some pull-ups using the wardrobe and then pulled this 150 kilo wardrobe onto me and got saved by the bed. Just came away with a fine. fortunately. And yeah, then recently, it's not as stupid, but I I nearly broke my wrist a few weeks ago in a gym in Chile doing box jumps. The box wasn't secure and it wasn't heavy, so I just went straight from underneath my feet and then I landed on my wrist and it seems okay. And then one more. I remember doing some rear foot elevated front split squats at home during the school holidays when I was about 17 and I lost my balance to the right and then I just put the barbell straight through my bedroom window. So I Yeah, it's it's impressive how thick I can be at times. Yeah, with the colors builds. Uh yeah, I've also had you know few times uh the kettle bell falls on my chest or something like that and box jumps as well like quite often you jump on a box and you slip and you scrape your the calf bone. I actually have like one scar on my calf bone since like 10 years ago almost. Um but I think it's not like a mistake or but I used to do um in uni I did yeah 10 years ago as well I did uh squat everyday challenge. So they like one month uh I did squat
So they like one month uh I did squat barbell squatting every uh day not light weights but you know five 5x5 pretty much or 3x5 something like that and quite heavy weights. Now the good thing was that my squat got a lot better. I gained huge amounts of you know strength from the squat or like I progressed quite steadily and um I guess yeah the downside was that my legs blew up in terms of size and my calisthenics skills suffered from that but uh yeah I don't think you need to do like this a high frequency training that you train every day but uh you know maybe every once in a while it's kind of you kind of a good challenge and interestingly I've applied the same methodology ology to do pull-ups a bit later, maybe seven, eight years ago, doing like a 100 pull-ups every day or over 100 pull-ups every day. And actually, it worked the same way that it blew up my back in terms of uh the size, just like this high frequency, high volume training with slightly lower loads. Maybe that appears to be quite effective for increasing muscle mass in specific areas. And what I've noticed is yeah, the the legs and the back is where I've utilized it. And if you look at old uh old men, old farmers or old grandpas who have done physical labor, they have huge forearms and they never, you know, lifted anything. They never did deadlifts, but they use their forearms with, I don't know, screwing things or lifting, throwing hay or carrying things. Farmers
throwing hay or carrying things. Farmers carries those kind of things. It develops massive forearms over the course of decades if they lift every day. something with their forearms. So, there is something there. There's a slightly sub maximal very high volume, very high frequency type of training. I want to take a quick break to let you know that my school community with me and my wife is now live. It's called Usban Society and it teaches you how to look and feel younger. Both me and Inca have reached top 1% of health with our biomarkers and we can teach you to accomplish the same because we have already coached over 500 individuals. Here's what's inside our school community. 12 plus hours of video content about reversing signs of aging and becoming healthier. We're adding new content every week and every month. Video courses on nutrition, skincare, fitness, sleep, biomarkers, and much more. New courses are added every month. Bi-weekly live Q & A calls with us where we answer your questions about your span journey. An in-depth overview of our own health protocols that help us to reach top 1% health. Community posts and discussions where you can get feedback and help regarding your progress. full workout plans and meal plans that are updated regularly. Step-by - step walkthroughs of workouts, skincare, nutrition, and daily routines, and a WhatsApp group for daily tips and inspiration. All of this for $ 1 per day, and even less than that with the annual plan. Check out the link in the description or search for you society on school. com. School with a K. Uh, but yeah, we can move on with the V2 max and card fitness. So this is uh I guess you
card fitness. So this is uh I guess you know by now it's become very trendy and more like a buzzword as well in some sense that year is one of the best predictors of mortality and longevity. So uh yeah maybe we can first start with u is it true and why it is so is it linked to better health outcomes. Who wants to go first? Greg nominated. Yes, it is strongly predictive of many different health outcomes again with some evidence of dose response for the most part and there are some nice analyses looking at its relationship to all cause mortality. If you add it into existing cardiovascular risk prediction models, it also tends to improve their predictive validity. So adding it to metrics such as blood pressure, non-HDL cholesterol and so on can improve your ability to forecast your risk of things like cardiovascular events. The question is why is that so? And really I think of V2 max as just being a helpful composite marker that really reflects the function of cardiovascular and respiratory systems in general. So, it's not necessarily that I would encourage everyone to do anything necessary to push up their V2 max and then assume that that's going to improve their risk because I don't think that's
their risk because I don't think that's true. And instead, if you have a high V2 max, and we're speaking about relative V2 max, so let's say it's 60 ml per kilogram per minute, your body composition is going to be quite good because we're talking about it relative to how much you weigh. Whereas some people have a high absolute V2 max, but their relative V2 max might be quite low because they're carrying a lot of adapose tissue. So in that way, it's related to your body composition. It's obviously related to your cardiac output. So, your stroke volume, the amount of blood that your heart pumps per beat, times your heart rate, your vascular function, and the density of the vascular network that supplies your muscle tissue and so on with blood. And bear in mind that there are some things that you could do that would push down your V2 max that would probably actually improve your risk profile. So an example of this that I've harped on about previously is blood donation. If you go and give blood and you're a middle-aged guy and you've never given blood before, probably got very high feritin stores which are driving loads of oxidative stress, could be contributing to a bunch of nasty processes in the brain like fertosis. And so by giving blood, you're going to reduce your blood pressure. You're going to probably marginally improve your blood lipids.
blood lipids. And the epidemiology suggests that if you do that consistently over time, you can have a lower cardiovascular risk and lower likelihood of passing away at a given point in time. However, it's also going to push down your V2 max massively, albeit temporarily, because you just got rid of a load of oxygen carrying red blood cells. So, V2 max is not the be all and end all, and everyone's banging on about it at the moment because someone on a popular podcast spoke a lot about it. But, it does matter and for the most part, doing things that improve that V2 max are going to be good for you. Uh yeah, I again I completely agree. Um I think that the I think over focusing on V2 max can be certainly detrimental. It may give a person a false sense of security that they are absolutely immune to everything which we do know that as V2 increases that tends to be uh associated with reductions in a lot of different disease states uh and your general performance is much better. Uh I think of V2 as this stressor or this marker of the stressor of your cardiovascular system, your pulmonary system just like I talked about much earlier on uh in in our discussion. And uh it's it's wonderful for that. It gives a great assessment of all that. But that doesn't mean that a person is necessarily perfectly protected from all
necessarily perfectly protected from all disease states or anything of that nature. Like a person can still have significant plaque uh in their arteries because of poor nutrition or whatever it might be. Again, going kind of back to our endurance athlete discussion as well where a person can eat poorly but have a great V2. uh maybe they don't gain much weight but their APOB levels may be extremely high um and which ultimately leads to to atherosclerosis. So yeah, I think it's a great metric. Uh I just uh don't think that it's the end all beall for health. Yeah. is more like this umbrella marker that uh reflects how much you exercise reflects vaguely what your body composition like because if you're too muscular or too overweight in terms of fatness then you're probably not going to have uh that much or that high V2 max. So it's yeah general marker of uh many things and it kind of goes under the umbrella of V2 max that you can measure. It's I guess it's better to think of it as a biomarker that similar to something like grip strength that you know training your grip necessarily with some some of these things isn't going to make you live longer. But um if you have higher grip strength with uh the number that means that you probably train more, you exercise more, you eat a better diet etc. So you put in the work to have
etc. So you put in the work to have higher grip strength and the same with V2 max. If you have a higher V2X, then you're at least doing some things right with your exercise and uh nutrition. And uh age obviously matters a lot here that uh as you get older, your V2X tends to decrease. But uh if you are let's say a 60 year old that has a significantly higher V2X than your peers, then I would say that it is a pretty good sign that uh you are going to be much fitter than the average person of your age. And you will probably also just live longer as a result of that or you have like a lower risk of any immediate it's it's not going to be like your maximum lifespan predictor because um you know we don't have that kind of data but at least we know that you know within this next year the individuals with a higher V2 max among their peers probably will have a lower risk of mortality of some of these chronic conditions. And I guess the one important thing here is to think about is the time differences or um how it's going to change longitudinally. So if you have very high V2 max in your 20s but it's low in your 50s or 60s then that's you know worse scenario compared to someone who has a stable V2 max throughout their life. It might not be the best but at least it stays stable and it's not going to plummet. So maintaining a stable VOTMX is probably better for aging because you need to move up a hill as as naturally than a VOTM declines with age. So if you maintaining stable around the
So if you maintaining stable around the same area then you're actually improving it with age because you have to go uphill whereas if you have super high V2X but it you plummets rapidly then that's probably like a worst sign of of health. So so the changes in V2X aren't necessarily linear that they always decrease with age. If it stays the same then that's the best scenario or if it increases with age then you know that can also be a good sign but the goal is to kind of keep it u stable and some of the research you know looks at how much V2X are we talking about then it's not massive amounts you know once one popular study that gets referenced a lot um they saw that individuals with a V2 max of 50 milliliters per kilogram per minute they had a significantly lower mortality than the ones with lower V2 max And it was a pretty linear relationship that the ones with the quoteunquote elite VOTMAX of 50 had a much lower mortality even compared to even those who had high or normal V2 max. Not to mention the ones with a very low V2 max. But a V2 max of 50 is is not very hard to achieve. Like you don't need to be an athlete to have a V2 max of 50. Athletes might have a V2 max of 65 or 70 or something like that. Olympic athletes might have 80 VOTMX if they're cyclists or skiers, but a V2 max of 50 is very achievable for an average person even in their 40s without a rigorous exercise program. I've seen 40 year olds who don't do cardio have a V2 max of 51
who don't do cardio have a V2 max of 51 or 52 pretty much with just a healthy lifestyle. So it doesn't mean that you need to just become a endurance athlete to have a high V2 max or to live longer. If your VHMax is above 50, then um you know it doesn't require a specific amount of training. Some people might respond better, other people might need more training. Generally, as you get older, you need more training to have a V2X over 50. But uh yeah, the point is that it's actually not that much exercise that you need to have a V2X that's associated with a significant reduction in mortality. And we don't have data about people with V2X of 60 or 70. like it's not no studies, at least what I found. We have a V2 max of 50. That appears to be kind of the threshold that you want to aim for. Yeah. And you don't want to try to hack your V2 either. I think that's something that people get hung up on. They they think, well, I just need to increase this number. And that's not really the point we're trying to get across. Uh the point is that like what you were giving in this example of like maintaining your V2 as opposed to this decrease in V2. I mean to me that's more indicative of the people that are seeing this degradation. They're probably just not doing what's necessary to maintain. So it's actually the habits that prop up that V2 that are going to have the the greatest impact. So, a person could try to maintain their V2 through there's all kinds of supplements that are out there that that you know tout, oh, you know, it
you know tout, oh, you know, it increases your V2. It's like, well, okay. I mean, but does that actually just does that by worsening your exercise economy? Yeah, exactly. like there's a number of ways of hacking your V2, but uh the number itself should be reflective based on in conjunction, we'll say, with your habits that are actually promoting this this increased V2. And I I don't know that people need to go and get their V2 max tested. If you have the means to do so and you enjoy finding out about your biology, then that's great. But if you don't have that much disposable income, I don't think you should necessarily go and hook yourself up to a Douglas bag and get a V2 max test. And instead, what we're really interested in is your performance in various different activities are relevant to your life. And so you might intermittently test some proxy of your cardiorespiratory fitness and use a consistent test each time. And then you know that if you're getting better at that test or worse at it over time, that's probably going to roughly map to how your V2 max is changing as well. And there are some online V2 max calculators that are actually relatively good at predicting V2 max. An example that I think I shared a while ago, I might get the website wrong, but I think it's at
the website wrong, but I think it's at worldfitness. org. It's based on some research by some people in your part of the world seam and they basically have come up with a very simple series of questions that typically predict someone's V2 max within 2 or 3 milll kilogram per minute. So that kind of tool I think is quite helpful at the level of the population when we're talking about people who aren't very nerdy about this stuff and don't want to spend over £ 100 going getting a V2 max test done. Yeah, you can do the Cooper test. So 12 minute distance test. You can uh use calculators to calculate the V2 max from that. And yeah, what you really care about is your cardiator fitness. How do you po perform with cardiovascular exercise? So rather than yeah number that can be fluctuate based on if you take creatine or not or if you have anemia or something like that if you yeah donated blood those things can change that number but what you really care about is the your actual fitness and of course there is a pretty tight correlation between VMX and your card fitness. It's not 100% correlation, but you know, it can be indicating in that direction. If you have a very high V2 max, you also probably be pretty good at, you know, a Cooper test. And vice versa, if you have very bad V2 max, then you probably aren't able to run for
then you probably aren't able to run for very long a distance. And just as an extreme example of that, Andy Jones did some work studying Paula Radcliffe around the time that she broke the world record in the women's marathon. and she carried on getting better at the marathon while her V2 max went down. And it's just because the improvements in her running economy outpaced the decrements in her V2 max. So, it's not everything by any means. And and like you say, if people do want to go and do a physical test and something like Kooper test, how far can you run in 12 minutes or walk in 12 minutes is a good place to start. There are various step tests and things too. But if you're feeling lazy, there are also just those calculators that you can use to check in now and then. Yeah. What about uh then zone 2 cardio versus hit cardio? Obviously, any form of exercise will increase your vitamax. And again, might depend on your preference, which type of exercise you choose and prefer, but uh what are your thoughts on zone 2 versus HIT cardio, Nick? Uh for me I guess it's I haven't done too much research into zone 2 to be honest with you. I've focused a lot on highintensity interval training and I mean my impression of at least that research is that yeah it it significantly affects uh V2. I think there's what the Norwegian 4x4 or something like that is one of the the common uh training modalities that's been used that's shown widespread uh
been used that's shown widespread uh benefit including for V2. So that's that's the one I'm most familiar with. Um but yeah, in terms of zone 2, maybe you guys could could speak to that more than I could. If anyone wants to find out about zone 2, then I recorded a podcast about zone 2, which is a a solo episode. So really, it's not a podcast. It's more of a sod in which I spent 45 minutes talking about zone 2. And the reality is there's very little research on zone 2 because frankly, it's not that effective. The intensity just isn't sufficient to drive substantial adaptations in most people. And instead I used as a proxy of zone 2 moderate intensity continuous training which is done at a slightly higher intensity and therefore leads to slightly greater adaptations in everything from mitochondrial mass to changes in vascular function to changes in V2 max as far as we can tell based on the little work that's been done on zone 2. And if you compare the work on moderate intensity continuous training to highintensity intermittent training or sprint interval training, then hit and sit blow moderate intensity continuous training out of the water pretty much every time when it comes to relatively short training studies. And that is an important distinction because if you want to push up your V2 max, then going
want to push up your V2 max, then going back to the principle of specificity, you should be accumulating some volume right around your V2 max. And the reason that interval training is effective is because by including short breaks now and then, you can accumulate more volume at an intensity right around V2 max than if you were just doing continuous training at that intensity. That fundamentally is how it's working. So, it's no surprise that it pushes your V2 max up more than zone 2 or moderate intensity continuous training. And that's not to dismiss the utility of moderate intensity continuous training or zone 2. I think that for people who have lots of time to exercise, it can be helpful. recreational and elite endurance athletes, it certainly can be helpful because again, they need to accumulate large volumes of endurance exercise because they've been doing that for a long period. And ideally, large volumes that they can recover from and the reality of that type of low inensity exercise is that it's easier to recover from than interval training. But for the masses, for the 83% of the population that don't meet the 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous physical activity, they should be doing HIT or sit unless they have contraindications. So bearing in mind that the risk of acute events is probably marginally higher with HIT or sit. And I said early on that right now
sit. And I said early on that right now I'm doing some moderate intensity continuous training because I was in South America for 3 months earlier this year and I was doing lots of hiking. So I wasn't doing any endurance training and I got pretty fit just because I was walking around mountains at 5, 000 m and I wanted to hold on to some of those adaptations. So I'm not against moderate intensity continuous training or zone 2 training but this is a question of triage and for someone who's time poor who can recover from the exercise and doesn't have any contraindications hit and sit by providing a more intense stimulus are going to drive much greater fitness gains than zone 2. Zone two, the intensity is just not high enough. And depending on how you defined it, it's usually right around three mets. Talk about something that's really quite low intensity. And moderate intensity continuous training being slightly more intense is going to give you more bang for your buck if you want to do some sort of continuous training. But really, I think the world has jumped on the zone 2 bandwagon in large part because of conversations between Peter and in you go Sam Milan. And Sam Milan is a terrific coach and he's worked with a bunch of the world's best cyclists. And for those types of athletes, they they should be doing plenty of zone 2 training. But just because those guys are very prone zone two and a tier can fit in several hours a week of zone 2 training, it doesn't mean that you should be doing it. And
mean that you should be doing it. And frankly, I I don't think that most people listening to this right now would be spending their time wisely by doing zone 2 training when they could be using other exercise modalities. Yeah, it depends a lot on the other exercises you do. So, I like to do zone 2 in between my um resistance training days because like you said, it doesn't cause pretty much any damage to my central nervous system or muscles. So, it's more like active recovery. So, I'm increasing my cardiotory fitness at least to a some degree without uh jeopardizing my progress in uh the resistance training. So, if I were to do, you know, a bunch of hit in between those sessions, then I would probably not progress as fast in resistance training. So, there's obviously you push and pull with those kind of things. So, I like to do it uh for that reason. And I also incorporate some hit at least once or twice once a week or once every two weeks uh for example to target specifically V2X. And I guess the total volume is what really matters. You know how much cardio training are you doing overall like a lot of these uh pro athletes they spend you know 10 20 hours doing zone 2 because it's less uh recovery and uh and I guess they just accumulate that much of volume. you need to do yeah more training as a time like more volume when you're doing zone 2 to reach the same benefits as with high intensity training. So if someone is
intensity training. So if someone is limited in time then just doing high intensity training will save that time. Uh that's that's for sure. I think there's also an open question about the central versus peripheral effects of zone 2 and moderate intensity continuous training. And I was speaking with Christy Stoikuk about this and she published a a review article about zone 2 training randomly. Even though I know her, I had no idea that that was coming out about 2 weeks after I released my podcast about it. And we had an email exchange back and forth. And I think we we both kind of scratched our head at the end about whether doing zone 2 training or slightly higher intensity training could be beneficial for the heart in the long term in ways that interval training is not because there's there's probably tentative evidence that you might get slightly different adaptations in the heart itself. And if you've got a larger, more flexible heart as a result of high volumes of accumulated zone 2 training, then that is going to support V2 max. So going back to the fact that most of these hit and sit studies have been at the most a few months long. If we think about the long term, then people can't just keep pushing their intervals harder and doing more and more of them and instead building in additional volume of zone 2 training like you described doing seam I think makes sense which why I said early
think makes sense which why I said early on when you were describing how you're going about exercise that it makes sense that you layer in that when you have the other things in place because you have a time for it and it's going to give you some acute metabolic benefits and it might give you some central benefits too. But when it comes to some sort of hierarchy of endurance training for the average punter, for me, zone 2 is at the bottom of the hierarchy. Yeah. The lowest down the list of things that people should be doing. It's not the the base of the pyramid. Yeah. You know, my rationale behind is also the idea of, you know, there's I don't want to accumulate unnecessarily too much high intensity training because I already do resistance training, right? That's pretty high intensity. So, I don't want to add a bunch of more only hit workouts. So, I'll I'll do I want to incorporate more the moderate in intensity, which can be hiking, weighted walking, or zone 2 cardio. That's at least my philosophy about it. But what about walking? You know, that's not necessarily exercise as some people would categorize it traditionally, but it's a physical activity. What are thoughts on walking? It's a great uh thing to add to a person's routine. Uh I think just in general being physically active literally ju especially if you sit a lot for your work just getting up and doing uh I think uh some some people have
uh I think uh some some people have defined it as like exercise snacks. So really just any sort of quick a few minutes maybe even a minute of just uh moving your body can have pretty substantial positive impact on your health. And if you're talking about walking here, just extending that out, just decreasing the intensity massively and uh just focusing on duration, focusing on volume. And uh it it definitely has benefits. Um I it's not going to replace, you know, interval training or it's not going to replace resistance training or anything like that, but uh it it definitely has a a place and I'm I'm a big fan. Um al also just beyond I think one aspect that walking has that no other exercise type has is that it it if you're not listening to music or maybe if you are listening to music or if you're listening to a podcast um I think it it can help a person rearrange their thoughts and stuff like that like things that you just wouldn't it wouldn't be like the first thing you think about when you think about physical activity and exercise but it can have a a pretty either I guess certain respects a negative effect, but I think overall a positive effect to uh to be able to to spend that time instead of ruminating in, you know, just sitting down being outside and actually uh enjoying the the weather or whatever it might be and and getting that physical activity in at low intensity, low impact, but also being
intensity, low impact, but also being able to just uh think about things in kind of a a side benefit of of walking. Yeah, walking is yeah something that you know if you're not doing any exercise then uh you'll benefit more from walking. If you're already exercising multiple times a a week then you probably need less walking as well or you can get away with less walking. I think still, you know, I think there was a recent study that looked at it, it was a metal analysis and it came to the conclusion that like 7, 000 steps a day is a pretty good amount to aim for with already a significant reduction in mortality risk. There was another study a few years ago that saw 8, 300 or 8, 700 something like that. So you don't need insane amounts of walking but you know the more sedentary you are the more you can benefit from walking just through physical movement and physical activity and I think if you are you know lifting weights doing hit then you don't need to okay I need to get 10k steps every day otherwise I'm going to die. Yeah I agree with both of you guys. I think regarding the amount of walking obviously more than you're currently doing if you're quite sedentary is is always a step in the right direction so to speak and focusing on behaviors. I think that tracking walking is actually one of the few things that is helpful to track just your step count each day and the bal
your step count each day and the bal science data on that are a bit mixed but I do think that for the general population it is helpful measure to pay attention to with respect to the dose the meta analyses that I've seen are quite variable I think at the low end you probably don't get many benefits above 7 or 8, 000 steps a day some meta regression suggests that there are additional benefits going up to about 16, 000 steps a day, but it probably interacts with age. So, it's probably not that 80-year - olds need to clock 16, 000 steps a day and instead for them 7, 000 might be a much more reasonable target. And then going back to what you were saying, Nick, I think this is an instance where context is really meaningful because like you say, it's a great opportunity to be in that so-called task negative state where you're letting your mind wander. And there's quite compelling research that that's conducive to things like creativity and emotion regulation. So, I'd encourage people when they go walking at some point during the day to not have any incoming stimuli and ideally to be somewhere where they don't need to pay very close attention to stay safe, like walking through the middle of a city, a rush hour or something like that. That's going to be more restorative for you. There are other exposures that come with walking that are good for you, too. For example, spending time in daylight. It's going to help anchor your circadian clock. It's good for your mood. It's good for your
good for your mood. It's good for your attention. And then spending time in nature, spending time with other people while you're walking. All of these things have independent positive effects that probably are somewhat additive. So walking is great. And the question is just if you're currently quite sedentary, how do you build some additional steps into your day? And I think it's often doable. There are probably some times of day that are preferable to go out for a walk. For example, straight after meals, those types of postpranual walks for as little as 15 minutes or so can meaningfully improve your blood sugar responses to meals. And over time, that's going to affect your risk of things like diabetes potentially. And then otherwise, if you're trying to push your clock around, so if you're a real night owl and you're trying to get earlier, then getting outdoors into daylight and doing some activity as early in the day as possible, even if it's just going for a walk for 15 minutes is is going to help get you back on time. What about um balance exercises and mobility? So, this is something that often isn't talked about in longevity space, but it's obviously can be quite important. I haven't seen a lot of uh research about balance although there is the uh from sitting to standing test where you get off the floor that's like a a test used to assess functional mobility and things that and even predicts mortality. So what are your thoughts on should people do some form of mobility and balance exercises?
of mobility and balance exercises? I think uh older individuals definitely I I don't think it's quite as important maybe in your 20s and 30s. I think the idea behind balance exercises is to improve your what's what's the term vestibular is that it uh the whatever the you're thinking propriception Nick proprio proprioception yeah possibly um you're essentially trying to firm up the the connection between how your brain perceives where your body is in space and being able to adjust adjust accordingly and older individuals tend to have a more difficult time with that which can ultimately lead to some in really horrible circumstances some pretty disastrous consequences. So, um yeah, I think balance is uh is incredibly important. I I will say that it probably has to be done uh carefully. uh you should probably do it in an environment that's relatively safe, not just uh anywhere. Um and I think that people probably around 50 or 60 onwards should probably start adding that to their routine. Uh not that it has to be done every single day or anything, but uh it probably is something that people should consider. Yeah. I like to do handstands, but now
Yeah. I like to do handstands, but now that I think of it, it probably has little practical value to longevity because 99% of the time you're on your two feet. So even if you're good on your hands, then you can still fall over on your feet. So um yeah, but I mean, you know, to do handstands, you need to be generally fit and healthy. Whereas for older people, things like, you know, balancing on one leg, this the flamingo test where you're trying to stay on one foot for one minute and go over that, that's a good exercise to use. You know, hip hip mobility, ankle mobility, those things, if you work on them, then they can come in handy in just everyday situations as well, like getting off the chair, getting off the floor, and uh, you know, climbing upstairs and those kind of things even. I think balance training probably has some applications as a adjunctive treatment in certain chronic health conditions. I know some people are interested in using it to improve cerebellar function in ADHD for example and it could be helpful in that instance but in a longevity context the real relevance is to minimizing risk of falls bearing in mind the excess mortality that occurs after someone falls and breaks a hip and then becomes bedridden then they end up in this vicious cycle of frailty so it does matter but I don't think that most
matter but I don't think that most people need to pull out the Bosu balls and the Swiss balls and start juggling on one leg while standing on them in order to train their balance and instead you can just think about what you do in activities of daily living and do things that are relevant to that. And so if you're an older adult, then doing exercises like split squats are still challenging your balance. And so including some single leg or split stance and single arm exercises is challenging your balance as a starting point. And then otherwise you can work in some balance exercises either into your day. So breaking up long periods sitting for example or into your warmup before training sessions. That would be a good time. And if you want to include dedicated balance exercises, then you can play with vestibular input. So you can use closed eyes and that type of thing. And you can use asymmetric loads, too, where you might be using a bar that's loaded on one side, for instance, but not on the other. So there lots of different ways you can have fun with it. But what you said about staying safe is really important. So, we don't want someone to jump straight into slacklin lining at the age of 65 if they've not done any exercise for the previous 10 years because they might just fall and then sprain an ankle. So, start from wherever you're at and you don't need to do anything fancy. But later in life, challenging your
But later in life, challenging your balance is probably going to be good for you. Early in life, hopefully you've still got a little bit of that just because you're doing some exercises that are asymmetrical. Yeah, I think you people maybe shouldn't try to progressively overload uh balance exercises that they start doing weighted bos squats or weighted slack line uh tumbles or whatever things like that because the risk of injuries becoming much higher at that at point if you start to add a lot of the heavy weights on top of balance exercises like I I would like to think that okay do the strength training with the barbells in a relatively safe setting and the balance exercises just don't add extra weights and try to just focus on the balance in that area. Uh but I think maybe like rotational work might be also quite useful. So most of the gym exercises are just you know single dimension up and down or back and forth whereas rotational exercises are rarely actually used unless you're doing some kettle bell exercises. Yeah. And you mentioned mobility, I think, in your original question, See, and that I think is something that many people are going to benefit from targeting. Again, it's going to be quite person specific, but there are certainly patterns that you see that are quite common. If you're a desk jockey, then you're probably going to end up being quite restricted through certain muscles because you're constantly in hip flexion. Your thoracic spine is going to be prone to hypyosis. You're probably going to have a forward head posture. So
going to have a forward head posture. So your cervical spine is in hyperextension and your shoulders might be quite internally rotated. So many people are going to benefit from stretches for things like the hip flexors and their pecs and some T-spine mobility drills to break up that type of sitting posture and smart strength training through a full range of motion is fantastic for flexibility. And if you want a perfect case in point, watch Olympic lifters train. They're so mobile and they're so strong and they're so powerful. It's really really impressive. And a lot of that they've just built through lifting heavy weights through full ranges and sometimes included loading including loaded stretches too, which is a a particular form of resistance training I've always been a huge fan of. And I used to use it a lot training athletes, especially early in the season to build flexibility in certain joints so they could hit certain positions later in relevant exercises. Just as an example of this, if we were going to be working up to doing some heavy squatting exercises in several weeks time, someone might start with a dumbbell goblet squat where they're just holding the bottom position of that, holding it for 30 to 45 seconds. So picking a weight that they can't hold with good technique for any longer than that. And not only does that build flexibility because you end up basically having longer muscle facles, you get more sarcomirs, which the contractile units being added in series. But one of the interesting
series. But one of the interesting things about doing isometrics at long muscle lengths, is that they tend to transfer well to shorter muscle lengths, too. And the converse isn't true. So, by holding the stretch position with a weight, you actually end up getting stronger throughout the range of motion, even though you're not doing a dynamic exercise and you're just statically holding that position. Whereas, if you did that, say in the mid-range of the squat, you wouldn't necessarily get stronger in the hole in the bottom of the squat. So, I'm a big fan of those types of isometric or near isometric exercises because you get some flexibility, you build some muscle tissue, and some interesting work from the last few years is showing that you also get some positive vascular adaptations that result in reductions in blood pressure as a result of those types of isometrics too. So some people who are hyper mobile, they don't need to do any dedicated flexibility training and actually they benefit from tightening up a little bit. But most people they benefit from some in certain joints and loaded stretching can be a really helpful way of getting several adaptations at the same time. Yeah. The weighted stretching is quite quite interesting. You obviously need to do it safe. But uh yeah, even like muscle hypertrophy, if you finish a set, let's say with bench press, you can do some sort of a stretch, right? You can stretch the pec muscles or something like that. The if if you can do it with
like that. The if if you can do it with the weight, then there is some research that this weighted stretching can actually increase hypertrophy as well slightly. Uh but yeah, we can start closing up uh the final lightning round. If you could only do one type of exercise for the rest of your life, then uh what would it be? That's a really difficult question. single exercise. I I can say as a starter that I would do the clean and jerk probably because you start from the bottom. You do like a mini deadlift plus a front squat and then a push. So you're getting a full body pretty much stimulus. Oh, you mean a single exercise? Not a single type of exercise, just one exercise. Yeah. Oh wow, that is tough. So yeah, I would do a clean and jerk because uh that's a pretty full body exercise. Are you otherwise active in your life? So you're otherwise walking around and and No, I mean you can still walk, right? You live a normal life, but uh if you do only one exercise
I think you picked a fantastic one. I was going to say the the preacher curl, but or huge guns. Uh, no, I think any exercise that has that Yeah. like a a deadlift function to it. It's got like a squat function to it. Um, and you're maybe doing some sort of pressing. If you can combine as many of those elements into one exercise, that's it's probably going to be the best one you can do. Um, also, it probably requires some skill and some balance and whatnot. So, yeah, otherwise I would just break some of those apart and just say like, oh, I would do a deadlift or I would do a squat or something along those lines. Um, yeah, it's it's a great choice. Yeah, maybe a snatch as well, but I think the clean and jerk is a bit better. Yeah, I think the nice thing about the clean jerk, too, is that you can dial it down a bit because at the age of 80, you're probably not going to be doing a a snatch from the floor into a full squat. If you are, then fair play to you. But clean and press or clean and jerk, you can use dumbbells and things and you can slow it down a bit and you can do it in ways that emphasize different muscle groups, dropping into a squat deeper or using your arms a bit more or what have you. So, I'm struggling to beat that. It's it's a good choice for a single exercise even though it's not an exercise that
even though it's not an exercise that I've done for years and it's not an exercise that I would program much at all. But if if we had to be confined to a single exercise, then it's not a bad choice. Yeah. I haven't actually done it myself in a lot of years, but it's definitely one of the best exercises out there. Yeah. It's funny cuz when you have the luxury of using multiple exercise, you usually target a lot of those movements more specifically and better than what a clean and jerk can offer. But if you were only limited to a single exercise, a clean and jerk would be fantastic. Yeah. Like a barbell squat is better for building legs than a clean and jerk because you can add more weights. But the and the same with deadlift, you can deadlift more than with the the clean and jerk or or the shoulder press. But uh it's just in a single exercise it again you don't need to be super extreme or super advanced with all these different strength numbers. If you have anything every every other your entire body is uh intermediate or above average in terms of the strength development then I think that's like the best uh for general health and longevity. All right. So uh it's been a great uh discussion. Where can people learn more about you and your work? Greg, you can start. I see. Yeah. So my YouTube channel is
I see. Yeah. So my YouTube channel is Greg Potter PhD and I host a podcast called Reason and Well-Being where cover many subjects that I think people listening to this will be interested in. And then on social media, Greg PotterPhD Nick, uh just look physionic anywhere and it'll pop up. Sounds good. And uh yeah, we'll put all the links in the show notes. And uh yeah, people can also check out our first round table about supplements. Maybe the next round table might be with diet or nutrition or something if people like it. And maybe it's Nick's favorite topic. So maybe he I was going to say find out about Nick's diet. Be grilling Nick about his diet for two hours. Sounds great. Yeah. We'll uh we'll put the links in the show notes and yeah, thanks for listening everyone.
Transcript auto-generated by YouTube. Verbatim — duplicates intentionally preserved.
Exercise builds a buffer between daily life and physical decline. Cardiorespiratory fitness, muscle, power, balance, and mobility all create reserve.
That reserve is what lets a body absorb stress. Illness, travel, injury, poor sleep, and aging all become easier to navigate when capacity is already in the bank.
Aerobic work supports mitochondrial density, vascular health, and endurance. Resistance training protects muscle, bone, glucose control, and force production.
The body needs both signals. One builds the engine. The other keeps the frame strong enough to use it.
Build reserve across aerobic fitness, strength, power, balance, and mobility. — Contrast Collective
VO2 max reflects how well the body takes in, transports, and uses oxygen. It is not only a performance number. It is a window into system-wide resilience.
Improving it often feels like more room inside effort. Stairs feel easier. recovery comes faster. Work capacity expands.
Walking is not dramatic, which is part of its value. It supports glucose control, circulation, mood, joint motion, and daily energy without demanding long recovery.
For many people, more walking is the simplest way to make movement a rhythm rather than an event.
The roundtable returns to a quiet truth: more is not always better. The right dose is enough to stimulate adaptation without eroding recovery.
A strong protocol leaves you more capable over months and years. It does not only produce fatigue today.
Use both cardio and resistance training because they solve different problems.
Build reserve across aerobic fitness, strength, power, balance, and mobility.
Use both cardio and resistance training because they solve different problems.
Treat VO2 max as a marker of capacity, not vanity.
