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Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend.
Today's clip is from episode 389 of the podcast with medical doctor and longevity expert, Dr.
Peter Atea. Whilst decline in our physicality is inevitable as we get older, in this clip Peter shares that there is plenty we can do right now that will slow the rates of decline and ensure that we are as fit and healthy as possible in our later years.
If you're listening to this and you're a person who doesn't like exercising that's fine but just understand that there's a huge responsibility that comes with living in the modern world to yourself.
Our ancestors didn't deliberately exercise.
If they saw that there were things like gyms and treadmills, they wouldn't fathom what we were doing.
But all of this is a construct we've had to create to compensate for the fact that the modern world has taken the need for all movement out of our lives.
So we have to go above and beyond.
So I fully buy the beauty of the modern world we live in.
It's not perfect, but it's better than the world a hundred years ago, 200 years ago and 300 years ago, but it comes at a cost like everything.
And we have to be very mindful of that cost.
I think that exercise and nutrition are probably the two greatest examples of where we pay that price.
So in some ways the human superpower from an energetic standpoint is the capacity for energy storage.
We are very efficient at energy storage.
That served us incredibly well until relatively recently.
When energy became so abundant, energy of course in the form of food, that superpower became a detriment.
Now most people, certainly in the developed world, are overnourished and we're on the wrong side of the energetic curve.
Does that mean that we should all aspire to be hunter gatherers again where we don't know where our next meal is going to come from?
No, it just means we have to understand that with this great privilege came a responsibility.
Yeah and also I love that line of thinking because it also means, I think, yes we need to take responsibility as much as we can within our means, within what's possible in our environment.
But I often say to patients if your great -grandparents were here today in this food environment, we'd probably find 78 % of them would also be overweight in a piece.
It's not a moral failing.
No, not at all. It was your superpower in a different environment.
Now it's your Achilles heel.
You have these four pillars of exercise or movement when it comes to being that generalist who's able to do the things that they want to do in their marginal decades.
So you have strength, you have zone 2 cardio, you have VO2 max and you have stability.
I really want to make sure we make this as practical as possible for people.
But I wonder if it's worth just giving the broad overview of these four pillars and what percentage of time perhaps we should be allocating.
You should advocate to each one.
You've got it right.
Those are the four pillars.
I will say that we have the most data, the most clarity around two of them, strength and VO2 max.
We have to be great generalists.
We have to have high peak cardio respiratory fitness, wide aerobic base, high levels of strength, great amount of stability, all of these things.
The data for strength and VO2 max are undeniable.
So when the epidemiology says having a very high VO2 max leads to a longer life, I mean, it's crystal clear.
So the higher it is, the fitter you are.
This is your peak aerobic capacity.
High VO2 max is associated with a lower all -cause mortality to a greater extent than any other health metric, including not smoking, not having high blood pressure, not having coronary artery disease, not having end stage renal disease.
None of those compare to the harm that they bring more than being unfit does.
So the association, the hazard ratio for being in the top 2 % of VO2 max compared to the bottom 25 % is a hazard ratio of over five.
It's just, it's a staggering.
It's almost as staggering when you consider having high strength.
High strength to low strength is almost as potent.
It's a hazard ratio of over three.
And for people who don't know hazard ratio, Peter explained it in depth in our first conversation.
Yeah, yeah. So, so, okay.
So let's talk about these things.
Why is strength so important?
Strength and muscle mass are positively associated with lifespan and health span for men and women equally.
And there's a big step up once you're at the 75th percentile.
So in other words, the top 25 % compared to the bottom 25 % for muscle mass is a pretty significant difference in terms of risk of all -cause mortality.
Why is stability so important?
Stability basically is the capacity to transmit force from the body to the outside world and vice versa, stably and without injury would be the easiest way to explain that.
So every time you're taking a step, you're transmitting a force to the ground.
That's what propels you forward, but a force is being transmitted in the equal and opposite direction back to you.
So what prevents your knee and hip and back from hurting?
It's stability. What allows you to do that efficiently is stability.
So typically when an elderly person falls, it's due to a lack of strength and stability.
Stability is, for example, what allows the foot to maintain balance.
Stand in front of a mirror and stand on one leg and watch your foot.
Watch what it needs to do.
You'll notice that that foot is twitching like crazy to try to preserve balance.
And we think of that as balance, but balance is kind of like the readout state for stability.
Most people probably have heard of different types of muscle fibers, fast twitch muscle fibers and slow twitch muscle fibers.
Well, the fast twitch muscle fibers, the type two muscle fibers are the muscle fibers that give us power.
So you can have strength in both of these fibers, but the explosive power comes in the type two muscle fiber.
Well, that is the hallmark of aging is the atrophy of that type two muscle fiber.
So hold on Peter. So when we hear about fast twitch, some of us will go to, yeah, if I want to be a hundred meters sprinter, that's what I need.
What's the relevance of that to when I'm 80 years old?
Because when you're 80 years old, if you lose your footing slightly and you, let's just say you're stepping off a curb and you lose your footing, you need to be able to react with enormous force.
And so much of the injury we see in people as they age is the direct result of the atrophy of that powerful fast to fatigue muscle fiber.
Now, if you train it, you can maintain it.
Now you'll never maintain, no 80 year old is going to walk around with the volume of fast twitch muscle fibers that a fit 30 year old has.
That's not going to happen, but a well -trained 80 year old can still have the fast twitch muscle fibers of a 60 year old.
And that's what we want to have.
We want to know that we still maintain some power in those muscle fibers.
And that's why, for example, lifting heavy weights is essential for everyone at every age, be it man or woman.
So strength training is imperative for people as they age.
And not only does it have an enormous impact on bone mineral density, but it has this enormous impact on these type two muscle fibers.
I just want to clarify, when you're lifting weights, does it need to be done with speed in order to really help that fast twitch fiber or does simply lifting a heavy weight slowly also counts as a stimulus for that particular fiber?
It still does. It doesn't have to be lifted quickly.
So it really comes down to the weight.
So you have to lift a heavy enough weight that the type two muscle fiber gets recruited.
And if the weight isn't heavy enough, the muscle will simply recruit the slow twitch fibers to do the work.
Yeah. What is zoned -to cardio for people who've never heard that term before, right?
And I think there will be quite a few.
This is the tell for when you're in zone two, or what we call rate of perceived exertion.
When you're in zone two, you can speak, but it's uncomfortable and you don't want to, but you can still speak in full sentences.
If you can speak in full sentences easily, you're in zone one and you're not achieving that training effect.
So in other words, it's not hard enough.
So if you and I went for a walk right now, we would not be in zone two.
Because we'd be in zone one.
Flat ground, having a wall, we'd be in zone one.
That's right. Let's just assume for a moment we did something where we're both kind of comparably fit and we couldn't speak to each other.
Or if we did, it was one word here and there, we would be in zone three, four, or five.
And there's benefit in doing that, but not for this type of conditioning.
You have to thread the needle to that sweet spot.
And that's what you're basically doing is enhancing your mitochondrial efficiency.
The beautiful thing about zone two is it's quite easy.
Yes, you're a bit out of breath as you say, you can hold a conversation, but you don't want to.
A lot of people get put off exercise, I think it's too hard.
And I find one of the great things about zone two is I really enjoy it.
I can think, listen to a podcast, listen to an album I haven't listened to for ages or whatever it might be.
And the recovery time is negligible.
So actually I feel it enhances my life and it enhances my cognition.
And I know it's doing something with longevity.
So I'm not sure how appreciated that is.
So for people who are scared of exercise and don't want that uncomfortable feeling of real high exertion, zone two can become one of your very best friends very quickly.
And it's important even if you're the best in the world.
So if you look at the kip chogis of the world, they're still spending 80 % of their training time in zone two.
And you asked earlier, can you think about a way of what percentage of your time should you spend in each of these zones?
I mean, that's really what it comes down to.
Exactly. It's about 80 -20.
So it's about 80 % of your cardio time should be spent in zone two, 20 % of your cardio time should be spent at a much higher intensity.
But if you start to push that down, you're going to risk over -training, burnout, and injury.
Yeah. So if you say, I'm going to do 50 % of my time will be high intensity and 50 % of my time will be low intensity or zone two.
A, you're not going to achieve as good a result, but more importantly, I think you're going to run the risk of that injury and over -training.
If we just zoom out for a moment and think about a lot of the centenarians that we see being interviewed.
And of course, that's not a scientific study.
This is just observations of humans in blue zones or wherever it might be.
What strikes me as very interesting is that very few of them were trying to work on their longevity.
From what I can tell, it doesn't mean we shouldn't be.
It also is pretty obvious that most of those people are living in environments whereby a lot of the things that you write about were being automatically covered.
Let's say, I don't know, a farmer in Sardinia still, still herding goats in his 80s, right?
Well, it's kind of going up hills a lot, walking, VO2 max, probably lifting things around.
I just think it's always good to zoom out and go, OK, these guys weren't measuring every metric.
I feel, and I wonder what you feel about this, is that because of the way many of us now live, we kind of need these frameworks to help us achieve what these guys are doing naturally.
What did you see it differently?
No, I see it exactly that way.
Do you remember in the original Spider -Man story, you've got Peter Parker, when his uncle Ben gets shot.
Right before that, his uncle says to him something, which is, Peter with great power comes great responsibility.
I kind of always have that in the back of my mind when I think about modernity.
There's a huge responsibility that comes with living in the modern world.
Even though your ancestors, five generations back, wouldn't exercise, they didn't need to because of what they were doing.
Just to finish off then, Peter, final words, if someone is asking you, listen, I'm inspired by what you do.
There's so much info out there.
I don't know where to start.
What do you say to them?
Boy, that's tough. I guess I would say just sort of pick one thing.
I mean, presumably the person asking this question has enough awareness to know where they are most efficient, whether it be, hey, I'm really over nourished, I'm under muscled, I'm sleeping four hours a night.
I would say, pick the one thing that you're confident you could chalk up to a win and just do that for the next 12 weeks and really fix that pattern.
Again, if it's your sleep, really fix your sleep.
We haven't talked about that today, but again, there's lots to do there.
If it's nutrition, just really get that because it's just as much about the confidence that comes from sort of addressing that pattern and making incremental changes that stick as opposed to trying to make massive changes that are harder to stick.
For a person who's never exercised, I think it's actually quite intimidating and initially unpleasant to exercise.
And you can tell them until you're blue in the face that once you get over kind of the initial challenge of this, it's actually going to feel quite good.
You're actually going to appreciate the fact that it's not just beneficial for you in the long run, which it is, but even in the short run.
But they do have to take a bit of a leap of faith sometimes to do that.
One of the things that we try to remind folks, try not to have two back to back misses.
I think that a lot of people get into a negative spiral when they punish themselves for that bad day and they feel ashamed that they've missed their workout, something that they set themselves to do.
And that shame becomes the more dominant emotion as they are getting ready to have that next workout and it becomes easier to miss that next workout.
And instead, what I think you want to try is say, look, you have that bad meal that you said you weren't going to have.
You miss that workout.
You do something that is kind of off your path.
Just give yourself a total pass with no judgment and just say, yeah, it's really hard.
Like if this was easy, you would have done it last year or the year before or the year before, but just get it right.
The next one, just make sure the next meal is right.
Make sure the next workout happens.
And I even find this as important myself.
I mean, and I tend to, people would look at me and assume I'm sort of a beacon of willpower, but it's not always true.
And I still have to be very nonjudgmental and sort of remind myself when I slip that it's okay.
And let's just turn up to slip tomorrow.
I hope you enjoyed that bite -sized clip.
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