This Triggers Alzheimer's! (Especially After 40 ) - #1 Mistake Making Odds Worse | Louisa Nicola

you've been studying the brain for many years and I'd love to know at the top here what are some of the common habits that people are doing or not doing that predict the function of our brains and things like Alzheimer's as we get older wow that's a that's a hefty that's a hefty question because there are so many things to consider if we're looking at long-term brain health outcomes which is what we all are really looking for if we're looking at these neurodegenerative diseases and we reverse engineer those we know that they are driven through

Lifestyles so the habits of not sleeping well not exercising enough and adequately I would have to say the foods that we're eating the stress that we are having because inflammation which we'll touch on is a very big factor here so if we look at these five things and we think what are we doing each and every day to form good habits around those we can set ourselves up for a healthy performing brain as we age but unfortunately we're just not doing that if we look across Society whether it's here in the UK or where you

live at the moment in the US and frankly many other countries around the world what's the state of our brain health how do it compared to where we were a few years ago and what are the predictions for the future the state of our actual Global Health in my opinion is horrific to say the very least right now Alzheimer's disease 55 million people worldwide have this disease that number is going to Triple by the year 2050 in the UK Alzheimer's disease is the second leading cause of death and the first leading cause of death among

women now two out of three Alzheimer's disease cases globally are female so that's something to consider and you know rongan I I rack my head every day I am Deep In The Weeds of Alzheimer's disease I study it I have been I first author a paper on it and I'm going to be doing several others so I'm I'm I'm critically analyzing the evidence and if we date back to the early 1900s when sir Alzheimer actually found this disease we haven't really made much progress since then so the state of our of our global I would

even say our Global Health crisis is something that we need to that we need to talk about I think there's a common belief in society that our brains are going to decline as we get older I think many people believe that Alzheimer's is an inevitable consequence of the Aging brain but it's simply not the case is it absolutely not and I always tell people that dementia is not part of the natural brain aging process so we we we can take a trip down what is about to happen to both you and I and everybody as

we age and I will clearly point that out but we have to understand first of all what Alzheimer's disease is what dementia is and then what the brain really is so dementia is the umbrella term used for Alzheimer's disease Parkinson's dementia so we've got de we've got dementia then we've got all these different subdimensions on underneath it and Alzheimer's disease is the most prominent one as I mentioned the statistics earlier and Alzheimer's disease is a multiprotein opathy meaning that there are two proteins at stake here we've got amalo beta which has been demonized by the

way it it first this disease first started off with something called the acetyl choline hypothesis now it's the amalo Cascade hypothesis which is still what we used to think of back in the early 1900s we're still we're still calling at that whereas you know we're demonizing this protein we're demonizing amalo and amalo isn't the demon here amalo is actually a great antimicrobial peptide it is there to protect our brain against insults against stress against inflammation so we need it yeah so that's one protein at stake in Alzheimer's disease the second protein is Tow and and

TOA is phosphorilated within the axon of the actual brain cell so we've got two cells we've got two proteins here we're really attacking one when we talk about these therapies you know these newly approved FDA therapies that uh that you can administer when you have Alzheimer's disease we're just attacking it as a one- siiz fits-all approach for one protein yeah a few years ago I was in America um doing some work with Professor d brers oh I love him yeah Dale's great and um I remember him talking to me about beta ameloid at the time

and saying look we're trying to Target this and get rid of it but it's there for a reason yeah and I think that's of course one of the reasons potentially why all these treatments to get rid of beta amalo aren't working so well because it's actually not perhaps addressing the underlying root causes yeah so we follow that logic and say okay in Alzheimer's and other conditions of course there is beta amalo protein in our brain I've heard you say in previous interviews that beta ameloid is accumulating in our brains maybe from the age of 25

or 30 yes right so let's explore that because that's really interesting if it's there to protect our brains what are we doing that means that it's having to do that job at such a young age and therefore and this is one of the things I love the most about your message it's very empowering the message you're putting out there to the World on podcasts in your work in New York on your Instagram is very much about saying to people look this is not an inevitable consequence there is so much that you can be doing right

now no matter how old you are that's absolutely going to make a difference in the future 100% we think about Alzheimer's disease as this one point in our life in our 70s that we're diagnosed with but Alzheimer's disease is comparable to end stage cancer when you get Alzheimer's disease there is no reversal there is no cure there is no going back there is Alzheimer's disease and it is a very very you know another 2 three years until death okay so that's what we need to be talking about we need to be talking about that when

you actually are diagnosed in your 70s or in your 80s that disease has been accumulated since your 20s your 30s and your 40s and like we mentioned let's talk about beta amid this this toxic protein which it's not a toxic protein it is a sticky protein it actually lives outside of the neurons and it accumulates over time and it's actually part of our innate immune system so when we are stressed we can be stressed from anything it's emotional stress anytime we raise our inflammation our brain says okay we're under attack now remember our brain is

really responsible for two things survival and reproduction so it basically says she's under attack let's let's raise the level of amalo beta so we we activate our innate immune system we raise amalo beta in a way to protect the brain cells it lives outside of the brain cells and it says let's protect her brain cells against these various insults that is inflammation now if you have a healthy performing brain you then activate your other immune system and it kind of downregulates the innate immune system we've all got that but what happens is when we don't

take time to rest and we don't have time to clear out that amalo then it starts to build up and it starts to stick together and end up we end up with a a head full of maybe about 4.5 gr actually has been noted in some of the brains of of Alzheimer's disease patients there's a couple of principles I just want to highlight because you've just brought them up and they come up in different forms with regularity on this podcast one is this idea that chronic disease the diagnosis of any chronic disease does not happen

overnight MH so you just mentioned that the process in the body that ultimately leads to a diagnosis of Alzheimers at some point let's say when you're 70 years old right that starts at least we know 30 years before that right and you're saying it might even be you know 40 50 years potentially that process right we know that type 2 diabetes when you get that that doesn't just happen you don't just go on a holiday have too much alcohol and have too many uh Rich um calorie dense meals and come back with a diagnosis of

type two diabetes that has been building up for 10 years right so I think that's a really important principle for people to think about and it's also what you said about inflammation this idea that you know if there's an insult to the body if we've having a stressful time in our lives that's okay if we rest and allow everything to recover yeah but if it's chronic and we don't allow ourselves to switch off so you can apply this principle to inflammation acute inflammation helpful chronic inflammation problematic acute stress helpful chronic stress problematic those two kind

of core principles I think are absolutely at play when we're thinking about the brain yeah absolutely I also think there is miscommunication around what this disease is how to treat it and look when you're in your 20s you're not really thinking about Alzheimer's disease you're not thinking about a nursing home why would you I wasn't in my 20s to be honest I wasn't thinking about that I thought I was invincible and then things evidently start to slow down as we age just due to the brain aging process but let's just actually also reflect on what

Alzheimer's disease actually is it's not just the accumulation of amalo beta and phosphorilated towel proteins it is a network insufficiency what do I mean by that let's look at the brain the brain is around 2 lbs it's kind of got the consistency of hard Jell-O if you look at it it's got around 87 billion neurons their brain cells these neurons each have around 5,00 connections so the way neurons communicate with each other is via these connections we call them dendrites these dendrites synaps together and this is how we create our emotions our feelings uh thoughts

all the actions we produce so that's a network in and of itself so 87 billion Neons 5,000 connections so at any given point in our 24 hours each day we're we're producing around 500 billion if do the math yeah connections Alzheimer's disease is a breakdown of those connections dementia is a decline in our cognitive performance our cognition is things such as information processing speed Reaction Time memory they decline because we have a an interference within the connections of these neurons and that interference is amalo because amalo lives outside of the neuron cell body and it

interferes with the connections and what ends up happening is the connections start to die it's not the neuron itself per se the connections start to die so we have a network insufficiency yeah that's super interesting so it's not the brain cells that are dying necessarily it's more that the connections between them yes are starting to go so so I don't know what would would this analogy work right let's say you have a field of trees right the trees representing the nerve cells I guess the the branches aren't connected to the other trees so maybe it

doesn't work but it is one helpful way of looking at it that you really want as you get older each of these brain cells that to be rich with all these connections and as we get older if we don't do the things that you're going to be talking about on this podcast today then actually those connections start to go down and at some point you pass a critical threshold and then you start to get symptoms is is that is that a reasonable explanation would you say correct and I love the analogy of a tree because

actually if you do imagine an entire tree the word dendrite actually comes from the Greek word tree so it's it's somewhat similar and if you imagine the axon as the trunk so within the axon that's where the towel builds up and it actually breaks down you get the collapse of the axon within that so it's a collapse of the of the the the trunk then we move up the leaves okay the leaves are the let's just say the the dendrites that connect with other leaves if we get pruning away of those then yes we end

up losing the the the ability for one neuron to connect to another we've given a lot of technical terms so far uh talk about amalo you know beta amid protein and towel protein and all these things and dandrites and connections before we go into those practical things that people can do which you're so passionate about let's humanize this condition a bit okay because when I see you online talking about this there's a real passion that comes across this doesn't feel in some ways I can almost say it feels personal like the something that you are

driven to communicate with the world about this condition there's a really fiery passion which I'm sure we're going to see shortly where does that come from why does Alzheimers mean so much to you you know it I don't have a personal story per se my father in 2019 uh did have a stroke of the right paral lobe and I've seen some cognitive declin since then but my real passion comes from working in clinical practice I'm a neurophysiologist by trade and as part of that we scan brains using an Electro andram and I remember scanning brains

and and my main job was to look for dysfunction dysfunction in different brain lobes and I remember this one patient let's call her Betty and she was very young and by Young I'm talking 55 and I remember her coming in she had three kids and her husband and she ended up you know I worked with her for a year and I saw the decline it ended up she couldn't even remember who I was and I saw the look in her husband's face he said sometimes we wake up and she doesn't even know who I am

so why would she remember who you are Louisa and this woman had done nothing wrong she actually didn't even have the genetic risk factors that predisposes you to certain types of dementia she didn't even have the risk genes she wasn't even positive for APO E4 and when I looked at her she was actually doing everything right wrong and she was doing what she thought was exercise doing what she thought was good eating trying to sleep and you know maintain her you know a full being a full-time mother and also working full-time and I thought who

has failed you because she actually had no idea what Alzheimer's disease was she didn't know what dementia was she just thought this is something that occurs when you are 80 and it was at that moment that I thought something has to change and ever since then that was that was 2019 ever since then you know it breaks my heart to think that we are spending millions or billions of dollars trying to get to space literally trying to figure out how can we live on a different planet and yet we haven't solved for a disease where

you literally forget your husband's name and your children's name you forget who you are you know the FDA will have you say that uh we're making progress through these various types of uh drugs you know danab LMI but we've seen that these drugs just treat the symptoms yeah that's not progress that is a systemic failure of our health care System it's the same thing with frankly every quic disease um is that most of the time the pharmaceutical drugs are treating the symptoms which may have value in some conditions some of the time but what really

drives me and I I really feel it drives you is to try and help people understand the root causes of what's going on so you're saying that brain decline as you get older is not necessarily inevitable at least not to the degrees that we're seeing and you're saying Outsider is not inevitable and it's not a normal part of aging yet you're also saying you're sharing statistics that rates are going to Triple by 2050 yes right and I love that analogy saying we're spending billions on trying to get to space and live on a different planet

right but let's figure how to live well on this planet but but it's literally basically it's like the 1900s called they want their medications back that's like a dad joke right because we we are still not understanding that we are attacking the wrong thing we are basically saying that's okay guys get Alzheimer's disease because we have therapies that are going to eliminate the symptoms and by the way I don't know if you read the New England Journal of Medicine where they did the study on danab which is an intravenous drug that you get and it's

around I'm telling you it's around 50 or $60,000 in the US and what does that drug do that actually well it's a monoclonal antibod that eliminates the amalo and what we've seen is that the risk factors associated with that is micro hemorrhages so you're they're getting brain bleeds from these patients edema so you're getting brain swelling from taking this drug and some of them have caused death in some patients so we're attacking the symptoms of this disease where by the way even if you remove the amalo even if you remove the 4.5 G of amalo

from somebody's brain you are still not curing Alzheimer's disease because you're going to build that back up if you don't address the root cause of why do you keep attacking urinate immune system for it to raise amalo beater in the first place and not just that let's look at it this way there is a supply and demand issue here if you do not supply the neurons or if you do not supply your brain with the things that it needs to not only survive and thrive but be able to meet the demands of everyday life you

will succumb to this disease so you need to have more Supply than demand yeah okay so in terms of getting into the root causes and specifically the things that we can do today whether we are 50 or 60 or whether we're 20 and 30 years old I think it's relevant for all of us right to start doing these things as soon as we can let's just set out and address a common misconception genetics V lifestyle yeah right because there is still this perception out there that genes are a big thing for brain Decline and things

like Alzheimer's people will still say oh you know my grandma had Alzheimer's so I think I'm probably going to get it can you clear that up for us before we get into the lifestyle factors absolutely and almost everybody body can say that they know somebody who had dementia I when people find out you know when they get a chance to speak to me they're like oh Louise yeah my grandmother had dementia and I always ask did she have Dementia or did she have like what did what type of dementia nobody ever knows they just say

dementia when we talk about genetics it's important to determine and differentiate between risk factor genes and genetic mutations so genetic mutations for example if you have a genetic mutation on chromosome 4 you will get Huntington's disease so these genetic mutations that you are born with unfortunately if there is a disruption in your DNA somewhere which has been passed down from your parents you will get the disease associated with that Gene when it comes to dementia there are three involved in the mutation process you've got prelin one prelin 2 and then a mutation on the amalo

precursor protein that represents are mere 1% of the Alzheimer's disease population wow genetic risk factors which is still a small percent of the population are the very famous genes that most of us have heard about apoe4 so we have um we have APO E2 APO lipoprotein E2 which is protective against Alzheimer's disease we have apoe3 which is basically a null it doesn't protect you but it also doesn't raise the risk and then we have the APO E4 now we get two genes we get one from Mom one from Dad so you could be E3 E4

which raises your risk slightly to get the disease raises your risk notice how I say raise your risk not it means you'll get it yeah um if you are a 33 you're part of the the population the average population I'm a 33 if you are a 44 then you've raised your risk by 12 times of getting the disease so significant increase in Risk it's a significant increase in Risk however it's not a foregone conclusion that you will get it okay so this is really interesting so you mentioned there are some genes uh that are predictive

yes but that's only that's under 1% of this population right so we we let's assume that most people don't have those which I think is a pretty reasonable assumption given how low that number is you mentioned apo3 and apo4 I think many people uh will have heard of those things now first of all I want to know would you recommend people get tested I think this is quite a tricky area for people and I think we also have to acknowledge aren't there studies in places like Nigeria where people with apoe4 yeah double apoe4 don't end

up getting Alzheimer's yeah right so what can we learn from that well that means then that these risk factor genes just raise our risk of getting it just like going out into the sun yeah you raise your risk of getting skin care it doesn't mean you're going to get it it just depends on what you do and how long you spend in the Sun and how you protect yourself Etc if you have I think everyone should get it it is a controversial topic I understand that it's scary for some people you know if you want

to go and get it done and you need genetic counseling that is always offered why do you think people should get it I think everyone should understand their risk okay now of course some people even if they had the knowledge that you have and had the means to get their genetic testing they just wouldn't be able to do that exactly financial reasons family commitments whatever it might be okay so we have to acknowledge that that not everyone can do that but I think there's a wider Point here which is how much information should we get

because you know I remember back at Medical School when we used to talk about these uh um deterministic genes for various conditions that if you have them you know you're going to get the disease and we used to have ethical things at med school and we'd have to write you know essays on both sides the pros and cons have actually should someone know and should or or is it going to just stress someone out for the entirety of their life because they're going to get it anyway I probably wir a bit more like you I

would like to know cuz I very much like to take agency over my life I like to know what's a situation so I can take action but I also think some people have a personality whereby this sort of stuff really stresses them out I've seen that honestly with blood pressure monitors that some people find having a blood pressure monitor incredibly stressful or putting on a CGM incredibly stressful they're worrying about every single thing they eat whereas other people can go okay this is really interesting now that I've seen that this food puts me consistently into

the type 2 diabetic range I'm going to now use that information to make different choices so I kind of feel that's a wider conversation right um but it's really really interesting to me that you do recommend testing and I think for me I would like to know I don't I I meant to do it a few years ago I never got round to it and now you're making me think actually maybe it's something I'll prioritize so you want to know if you're raising your risk and then it becomes about education yeah and also I think

the imper thing is that even if you have it it's not a life sentence it doesn't mean you're going to get it this is where I think this information can be massively useful for people let's say you're a bit passive about your health you like you know what I'm 40 and things are going fine I don't need to change much and when I finish work on Friday I go out and have a few drinks with my friends but everything seems fine yeah Grandma had Alzheimer's but I think I'm fine which is the state for many

people oh yes if you then go and get it and see that you are a double apoe4 if you get the appropriate education around it that may be a very significant wakeup call to go okay wow I have an increased risk a significantly increased risk it doesn't mean I'm going to get alimer especially if I now start to take control of my life and pay attention to these I think you mentioned five factors at the start you mentioned physical activity sleep stress nutrition was it inflammation was the fifth one yeah so let's then look at

these five factors let's go through them and and see what we can educate people with I think exercise is your passion yes so let's start there what do you wish everyone knew about exercise in the brain I wish everybody would exercise for their brain health and for health outcomes and Longevity rather than Aesthetics in my world people are but that's a mere probably 10% of the population the physical activity guidelines globally state that we should be exercising around 150 minutes to 300 minutes per week and that's moderate to V vigorous physical activity which means what

exercising at around 65% to 75% of our maximum heart rate and for people who have never taken their heart ratees um are you able to give some examples of activi that might fall into that category yeah so imagine you are running up a flight of stairs and you are going full force and the last step is when your heart rate you feel like it's going to come out of your chest you've reached most likely your maximum heart rate let's just say that's 200 okay okay you want to be working I mean that would be very

high that's a young young person let's just say 100 then just for argument's sake that means that we want you working out at 65% of that 100 beat that is your maximum heart rate so we want you to be working out for 150 minutes at 65% of your 100 so 65 beats per minute okay so that's going to depend on who we are and what our maximum heart rate is but essentially we're talking about things like a pretty fast walk uh fast walk yeah fastpaced walk a jog and an easy jog where you can where

where you can hold a conversation but you are you feel like you're working out at the same time okay do you agree with those physical activity guidelines first of all or do you think they are conservative they're conservative I think that there's a Norman clature issue here people think about physical activity and by the way I do all of these epidemiological experiments on my parents uh for example my mother if you said physical activity she will say but I took the clothes out today and put them on the line that's not what we're talking about

here we need to change the word physical activity to exercise so you should be ex physical activity is literally anything above sedentary Behavior so for you and I when we walked in here that's considered physical activity that shouldn't be part of your 150 minutes to 300 minutes that's the first thing the second thing is I don't think many people really understand 65% of maximum heart rate like you just said this is what we just explored right these I think that one of the problems with the way we as doctors and we in this healthc care

profession often communicate is that we use a different language that the laid public doesn't understand so even moderate physical activity I believe if you ask 10 people what that is you're going to get 10 different interpretations yeah which then creates confusion and therefore inaction yeah do you sometimes find it difficult to find time to fit Wellness into your life I know many of us do we feel our lives are too busy Bond charge are a wellness brand who have a fantastic range of products to help you feel better sleep better and live better and I've

been using many of their products for well over 5 years now and what I love the most is that they don't require me to find extra time in my life I think their blue light blocking glasses are some of the highest quality out there I've been wearing them for years in the evening also when I go traveling I also love their infrared SAA blanket which is much cheaper and more accessible than having a sauna in your own house it's really easy to set up and you can have a quick 30 minute session whilst relaxing reading

or watching television and this sauna blanket is going to help you with recovery relaxation and sleep Bond charge are giving my audience an incredible 20 % off everything on their website all you have to do is go to bonch charge.com more and use the coupon codes live more to get your 20% off or just click on the link in the description box below and if we can first start with understanding that every single day I believe we should be moving our body second part of that is we can split exercise up into three different parts

we can talk about aerobic which is what we should all be doing we have to be doing resistance training so that is exercising with weights weight training and then there's a third part which is called neurocognitive training wow so let's go through those three um and and before we do let's just clarify that point let's say you were doing moderate to physical activity 150 to 300 minutes a week yeah I know because I've spoken to people in public health over the years that sometimes public Public Health guidance is given not necessarily because it's Optimum but

because it's like well if we push it much Beyond this no one's going to do it yes right and so I get it we've got a sedentary population across the world well it's around 80% 80% what people who are not meeting the physical activity guidelines in what countries like America and the UK yes correct yeah okay and we know that physical inactivity is one of the leading causes to premature death globally right so that's pretty well established so if 150 to 300 minutes a week is not enough what is enough in your view based upon

the research that you've seen yeah that also that 150 minutes to 300 minutes encompasses everything people don't know how many times am I going to be doing weight training how many times have I meant to be doing aerobic training so they're just compiling it all together so let's break it apart your aerobic training should be made up of at minimum 3 hours a week so aerobic training are things like your longdistance running cycling anything where you're where you're able to move at around that 65% of maximum heart rate so you don't feel as though you're

crushing it or you're pushing hard it's quite you know aerobic it's easy it's your long slow distance running I call it so what about someone who doesn't run right and they're like okay like I really want to protect my brain I'm I'm hearing what you're saying exercise is one of the most important things to focus on like I really want this to be accessible to people and I don't want people to get put off because they're like well I don't run what else counts for that aerobic activity in your view I'm so happy you pointed

that out because your brain doesn't know the difference between you running cycling or swimming it just knows heart rate so get on a bike get on anything the there is an elliptical trainer at the gy anything that is that c it's in the cardio zone of the gym anything that's just going to get you into that steady state of 65% to 75% and you don't have to push yourself hard here I think that's important right so you should be able to have a conversation whilst doing this yes and at the end of every sentence you

should be like you know you have to take a breath okay so you're you're you're lightly exerting yourself but your heart rate is certainly elevated compared to when you're just sitting down yes and you would say what maybe 30 minutes a day is good for that well I think that you should be doing at minimum 45 minutes per session okay so if you're doing three hours a week make it around a 45 minute session and is that because if you've been doing that and your heart rate is elevated for 30 minutes you could obviously do

that every day seven times 30 is 210 minutes or you could do you know let's say 5 45 minute sessions which is you know a bit more like 225 minutes is there do you think a benefit from actually having it longer than 30 minutes going it to 45 minutes yes and the reason being is that it does take a while for your heart rate to elevate and then steady out but second thing let's talk about the benefits of aerobic training and what it does because the benefits really come when you're okay you're in the zone

you and I right now we're in our Zone one right we when we talk about zones we talk training Zone zones Zone one we are sedentary that zone two is that next level up 65% of maximum heart rate we've got zone three and then when you're in that zone four I call that the death zone that's when you are working so hard running up those stairs to your maximum the death zone yes the death zone and I and we'll talk about what that means in terms of V2 Max and is this on a five zone

model I use I use four some people use five some people use six but is it useful for us this is how often have explained it to PTI in the past I say think about your car your car's got five gears okay think about your body and when you're moving your body also in terms of five gears you can be going really slow first gear a bit more second gear third gear fourth gear fifth gear and now let's think about your activity and figure out you know where are you putting you know where which gear

are you in would you say that's a helpful way to think about it really helpful and everyone needs to understand it's very individualized your zone two is different from my zone two if I am not very metabolically fit my zone two might be fast-paced walking my parents zone two is fast-paced walking my father is 72 and my mother is is 69 you mean if someone's not that fit correct then it's not going to take much to get them into second gear right well think about second gear is above first gear and first gear is us

sitting down okay so another another way of looking at this is uh let's say someone's at the same age right um so if they're getting fitter if they were measuring their heart rates right and they and they sort of go okay I want to be just a bit better than you know a bit higher than me just sitting down and you can go to labs and measure lactate thresholds and all this kind of stuff um which have spoken about before with Steven Silo when he came on the show last year but I guess the point

is as you get fitter you'll be more efficient and therefore it may be that now for example if you start moving your body you get into zone two just walking around the block but maybe in six months time if you are consistently doing this 200 300 minutes a week actually that's no longer going to be in zone to that's almost going to be Zone one and you're going to have to push yourself even further because you've got that much fitter yes and that's a good thing that's a good thing that's a very good thing and

I'll tell you why you are improving your stroke volume stroke volume is how much blood you pump out with every beat we need that because when you pump blood to your body especially your brain you get a profusion of oxygen and nutrients everything our brain needs to survive and as we get older that the stroke volume tends to decrease just because we we our the valves of our heart um and our aoda tends to stiffen as we get older so the more you strengthen your heart through aerobic physical activity and aerobic exercise the greater amount

of blood you can pump out with each beat so meaning that you can be pumping more blood efficiently through your body lessons to this podcast will have heard us talk about strength training before and this idea that once you hit the age of 30 you start to lose muscle mass each year unless you're doing something about it okay yes try and build up as much as you can before that period but certainly after 30 make sure you're doing things to prevent how much that's going to decline and hopefully keep it static or even increase it

yeah can we think about about cognitive capacity in a similar way like I know just to take it out of exercise for a minute this idea of you mentioned about our brain cells the neurons and all of these connections and you mentioned before that Alzheimer's in your view is a connection issue so can we think about it in a similar way like should we be doing something at a young age to maximize those connections is there an age where they start to go down that we have to be working on them to prevent the rate

of decline yeah that's a really good point because we see that a lot of these connections die off at one point in our life do you know when that is it's when we retire so we can think about the same thing because when you retire you think you lose some form of social interaction you lose your thinking abil abilities you know I saw it in my parents my father was no longer doing calculations and he was no longer working with money per se so he had less pressure in that instance so he wasn't really exercising

brain so your connections die off if you don't use them your brain basically says use it or lose it and we have a map of the brain they're called bradman's areas and every single part of your brain is responsible for something different whether it's climbing a tree whether it's throwing a ball jumping up and down Plyometrics if we stop doing those we lose the the the the network okay the the neural pathway that connects us neuroplasticity that connects that we lose it so yes we should be doing things or we should have variety your brain

loves variety we should be having Variety in everything that we do yeah retirement is quite a modern phenomenon as well if you think about it on an evolutionary level it kind of didn't really exist you don't just suddenly at one age go you're useful to people and then because you've had a birthday yeah you suddenly can't go in anymore yeah it really is and I've seen it in family members actually as well like when they retired and again you could say oh they're also older when they retire but I've seen it enough times and I've

seen it with patience enough times go wow there's something seems to happen to our brain function when we retire unless of course you stay engaged well here's the thing the beautiful thing which we realized in 1964 Mar and Diamond did the first ever experiments on mice to show that exercise actually grows the gray matter of the brain meaning we have gray matter and white matter the gray matter holds the cell body of the neurons and the white matter is the the axon the myin and neurons she showed that after 6 months of aerobic exercise the

brains of these mice increased so greater bra greater brain volume and the gray matter thickened the gray matter which I want everyone to know is not increased uh they they didn't produce more neurons they increased the synapses they increased the connections between the neurons and that is what formed greater brain volume so with that said we know that arobic exercise grows new Connections in the brain so not new nerve cells no that's actually a really critical point because adult neurogenesis doesn't exist and I am seeing a lot of that on social media I've got two

pet hates when it actually comes to social media and there two myths that we should debunk the first one is doing medit induces neurogenesis that's adult neurogenesis does not exist unless it's in the hippocampus of the brain so neurogenesis meaning the growth of new nerve cells correct right so you're saying that adults cannot grow new brain cells in humans but but they can in the hippocampus yes why do you think that is we're still trying to figure that out we we I wish I had a I wish I had an answer but uh I on

that a lot in my paper where I show you that through exercise through a specific pathway it's the myoc kind pathway when we when we are engaging in aerobic activity we get this expression this release of a growth factor it's called bdnf okay so pet haate one yeah was um that meditation induces neurogenesis what's pet ha to that cholesterol is good for the brain meaning okay there are people saying that if you eat cholesterol rich foods it will help you with your brain and it will feed your brain and that is not true so you're

you're not talking about serum cholesterol your blood cholesterol you're talking about dietary cholesterol eating cholesterol in foods will not increase the cholesterol in your brain a cholesterol molecule cannot pass the blood brain barrier and if it did you have more problems than that because that would mean you'd have a compromised brain barrier and why are people saying this uh in terms of the is it the makeup of the brain yes because we do know that the brain is made of both water and fat but the lipid component of the brain isn't the cholesterol found in

food in fact 20% of the total lipids in the brain are actually made of DHA which is a type of fat polyunsaturated fat that comes from fatty fish for example Omega-3s but we can get that into the brain from the diets we can get into the bra you're eating DHA fatty fish of course is one of the richest sources although not the only one that can actually help our brain matter and our brain structure yeah and we can talk about that later on okay so let's go back to aerobic exercise youve said some really interesting

things there so you you mentioned that aerobic exercise can increase the gray matter of the brain yes that sounds really great I'm sure to many people in terms of what that actually means for them if they have more gray matter what is that is that the way they process information the way they think absolutely everything your your brain is responsible for everything that you do it is responsible for who you are how you see how you interpret information how you sleep how you eat even down to the spouse that you choose so your brain if

you have a better functioning brain more gray matter more functional neural networks you will perform better think faster and live longer it'll make you a better human and aerobic exercise which isn't actually that difficult is going to help you do that absolutely and and what are the mechanisms there you you mentioned bdnf bdnf is one yes okay so so what is bdnf and is it aerobic exercise that specifically increases it or do other forms of exercise like resistance training and high intensity training also do it please yeah so bdnf stands for brain derived neurotrophic Factor

it is a growth factor for the brain meaning that when it is expressed and you have to be let's just say we're at that zone two right we're running it gets expressed into the bloodstream so it's a little hormone if you will and when it does it goes through the bloodstream up into the brain it does cross the bloodb brain barrier by the way the bloodb brain barrier is a collection of cells on the outside of the brain that is there to protect you protect your brain from having unwant but this is great it gets

in there and it go into the hippocampus the hippocampus is this seahorse shaped structure deep in the temporal loes and when it goes in there it basically helps you grow new brain cells in that area now here's the here's the phenomenal thing that is the first structure of the brain to go during Alzheimer's disease yeah that is the part that holds your memories short-term memories it's where memory formation occurs and we've seen now through human studies that the hippocampal sub regions the areas around the brain can also change in structure but the the volume of

the hippocampus grows it increases becomes more dense I think I read some research a few years ago from art Kramer MH and from recollection it was people in their 60s maybe in their' 70s and just from walking not that much every week I you may know the study to hand I think a year later the hippocampus looked bigger yes and that's because the the starting point they were very inactive okay yes so that's really interesting so if you're really inactive anything you do is going to make a difference that's the great Point yes that's really

empowering for people CU because you don't want you know when we start talking about Zone 2s and Zone fives and high intensity and V2 Maxes and I want to talk about all those things I think some people who don't move that much are like yeah I mean that all sounds great but I don't know where to start like I don't really move much at the moment so I think we want to leave that message at least that hey it doesn't matter where you are just start moving a bit more also I want to point out

that I'm not disillusioned by this I have like I mentioned I have parents who I I we have literal you know fights at home around exercise you know when I call them and I see what it's like for you know a 50 plusy old who's let's just say you've never exercised I understand it doesn't come a second nature to you so I understand that I see it but we have to do something and so even if that involves you walking for 10 minutes a day you know what's really great if you live around Hills just

walk for 10 minutes a day maybe get on one Hill call it a day don't scare your brain don't go out too hard too fast yeah I've done that before and it scares your brain into not wanting to do it again you stop releasing that dopamine which is that molecule of motivation and drive so just get out and just do it easy because when you do you will feel the benefits by the way bdnf when it when it is expressed it doesn't just help with hippocampal volume we get other things as well it helps with

the expression of different neurochemicals that are involved in mood we know that there's a direct correlation between depression and and exercise why is that maybe it's because you're Chang changing the structure of your brain through physical activity so your recommendation for aerobic exercise is what like for Optimum brain health at minimum 3 hours per week of 65% of your maximum heart rate that zone two Zone okay so conversational Pace a little bit out of breath y but not too out of breath 3 hours yeah okay fine so that's minimum minimum so at least half an

hour a day yeah which I think is pretty reasonable and and do you want to make things accessible to people at the same time you want to be honest with them and and sort of go listen you have to move your body and for the people who are like but I don't have enough energy this actually helps you create more energy when you're training in this Zone you're trading the mitochondria which is the the PowerHouse of our so where we produce our energy to work better to function better to create more of itself yeah so

you can have more energy the lifestyle factors we've sort of touched on and there's plenty more to say on exercise but exercise sleep stress and food they're all important yeah but if you had to pick one for people to focus on is there one that comes to the surface for you I don't think any other intervention can compare to exercise I I believe that exercise is the Panacea for health exercise is medicine and our muscles are like pharmacies let's move into another area of exercise which is our Peak aerobic zone so you mentioned something called

the V2 Max V2 Max is a test that measures our cardiorespiratory Fitness pretty much how fit we are and it basically takes a it's it's your heart rate times your your stroke volume but basically it wants to assess how efficient are you with taking the oxygen from the atmosphere when you breathe it in pulling it into your body and extracting it to your muscles at what rate can you do that and how fit are you and we want to be able to do this you can measure this at home even without a device I think

everyone should go and get a V2 Max test I don't know if you've ever gotten one I have but not for a few years now well it benchmarks you against your age and your gender so you know oh this is how fit I am I'm I'm below average I'm fit I'm I'm super fit and and some people uh have smart watches or Garmin watches and they'll use them when they walk or run a lot of these things now do estimates what's your take on those estimates so I don't um I don't think that they're good

I don't think you should be relying they're very inaccurate when it comes to measuring your VO2 I know because I've done one in a lab and then I also wear a Garmin to just track my mileage so you're not a big fan of them in terms of for accurate V2 Max yeah okay so a V2 why do you think people would benefit from doing a V2 Max test again because then you have the data you can't optimize what you don't measure so then we have the data to say well here we are we've got a

V2 Max of let's just say 45 that puts me in the elite category I'm fit but not just that it also gives you a representation of your training zones so it basically tells you what your Peak is so you can work back from that okay so if we just use this gear model um just just so everyone's following so you made one recommendation well let let's even back up even further you're saying that exercise is probably the number one thing that people can do and focus on to protect their brains long term yes one of

the mechanisms by which exercise does all this magic in our bodies and frankly our brains is through bdnf brain derived neurotropic factor and you're saying that we need to do a minimum really of three hours aerobic exercise a week okay you've also just mentioned V2 Max MH okay how does that relate to what kind of activities that we actually practically do yeah so when we are when we are training in that zone four or zone five so this is more int what high intensity high intensity right so that's the Sprints that's when you're doing running

up those stairs where you're really like struggling to get air many things are happening in this Zone you're doing a lot for cancer outcomes and for brain health outcomes so remember when you're training at that zone you're getting a massive shunt of blood to your brain and to the rest of your body during that process during the sheer force and the shunting of the blood you are able to have an effect on 13 types of cancer you are able to inhibit 13 types of cancer through this type of training wow yeah and the way that

it does that is there's three there's three ways the first one is when you exercise in this Zone you are increasing your production of natural killer cells and these natural killer cells they're a and kill them these circulating tumor cells are abundant through our body if we have a tumor let's just say you are diagnosed with stage one cancer which is the best type to get diagnosed with it there is a tumor that has formed somewhere in your body what happens is that tumor some of the cells tend to break off and we call these

circulating tumor cells and they roam around through the body looking for a different sight to Lodge and create another tumor that we then move into metastasis during that process these circulating tumor hum cells through the body can actually be ameliorated through the sheer force of this blood flow via that maximal aerobic exercise wow yeah so it's helpful for your brain function as you age but it's also helpful for reducing your risk of getting cancer absolutely okay there's going to be some people listening who go well I'm no longer physically capable enough to run up flight

of stairs you are at your age and your Fitness level I am but some older listeners may go well hold on a minute I can't do that or I feel that would inj me yes these heart rates and these zones are all relative to your own Baseline right so what someone in their 30s might do might be different from someone who's 70 yes yeah and so what I do with my parents uh is I get them to walk up a hill we've got this Steep Hill back at my my home that I grew up in

and once a week they have to walk up and down that for 20 minutes and let me tell you they are getting to their maximum I even get to my maximum if I'm jogging up it is really steep they have to take some some breaks as they're going up they're not running they are just walking up a hill I think walking uphills is one of the very best forms of movements it really is and look it only needs to be done 20 minutes a week so this kind of training in terms of your brain prescription

y you're saying 3 hours aerobic 20 minutes of this form of exercise yeah okay I mean one of one of my favorite uh recommendations to patients over the years um regarding intensity you know maybe above the age of 50 or above the age of 60 depending on their age would be okay where you live okay walk around the block as a warm up and then if you're back at your house um see in one minute walk as fast as you can and see what number door you get to okay when you get there walk back

yeah relaxed and you come back hopefully by the time you're back to your house you're feeling really relaxed and you've recovered and then go again as fast as you can and see what number house you can get to and maybe do that four or five times and then what I really liked about it was a very uh simple and accessible way for people to start playing around with intensity and using their inner competitiveness to go oh you know I got to number 24 yesterday oh man you know doc you know after two weeks of doing

it I could get to number 28 so you're gamifying it exactly and I found for people who maybe get put off by going to the gym or maybe Hill walking seems like something that they can't do or if you live in a really Urban environment that's flat and you don't have access I found that quite useful what would you say about something like that I think that too and I wouldn't discount running groups I actually want to start one in every city right even if it's in age groups it's a really great way to just

get together and you push each other you motivate each other and I think that's a really great way to I understand the gym is off-putting for some if you can afford a trainer maybe that might be good but yeah just definitely doing whatever you can to you to do the work just taking a quick break to give a shout out to Vivo barefoot shoes now I've been a huge fan of Vio Barefoot for over 10 years now well before they started supporting my podcast they are the only shoes that I wear and they really have

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the link in the description box below and where have these uh numbers come from this 3 hours of aerobic the 20 minutes of intense training like this is all coming from the research that you've studied right absolutely and one other thing I want to point out and by the way everything I'm talking about I've I've I've researched thoroughly I think my last paper there's about 1,500 to 2,000 references uh and that's what I do daily so they they're very uh gold standard when we to academic research but if that doesn't motivate you to to exercise

I'm going to give you something else that this maximal aerobic uh activity does there is a wonderful doctor by the name of Ben LaVine he's a sports cardiologist and he did an amazing study on the hearts of 50-year-olds so basically he got a group of 50-year olds and he worked with them for two years he subjected them to 3 hours of maximal aerobic exercise per week now that's a lot okay but just remember this was a study so he took scans of their hearts remember their 50y olds he took every type of scan he could

to assess the functioning of the heart now remember as we age your heart ages too we get stiffening of the arteries so the aort for example the big pump that comes out of your heart that stiffens and it Narrows therefore less blood flow goes through it we also get something else called left ventricular hypertrophy so we just get thickening of the the walls around the heart left less blood that can be pumped out and profused to the rest of the body what he found was that after the 2 years he rescanned the hearts he reversed

the age related deine of their heart by 20 20 years wow he actually turned these 50-year-old hearts into 30-y Old Hearts so these people these 50-year-olds are walking around reversing basically giving thems a 30-year-old heart which I think is absolutely that is better than any other medication yeah I think people really need to pause on that and just reflect on that and just think about the implications of that for them in their life just have a think about where are you in life at the moment how is your health how is your well-being how do

you see your future are you happy with the choices you've made over the past 5 10 15 20 years if not okay you you can't change what's happened but you absolutely can change what you do going forwards and something like that is really really impairing because we're not looking at 20y Old athletes no we're looking at people in their 50s and going you can by changing your lifestyle effectively reverse the age of your heart by 20 years yes that is huge now that was 3 hours of maximal aerobic training right three to four hours yes

so don't be on the actual time okay yeah but is that the zone that you just spoke about where you recommend 20 minutes correct okay so this was quite significant it was it was around 75% of maximum heart rate you're around a zone three yeah so that's the point it's not like as a gear four or gear five if your car where the engine's revving it's like yeah it's higher than your light aerobic walk yeah but it's not ridiculous it's not like sprinting no so what should people take from that people should take that every

time you do this type of exercise you are adding to the V2 Max right so you can measure your V2 Max like I said and we can train it and get fitter and fitter and fitter for every Mill that you go above your V2 Max that is a 45 day life extension so when we measure your V2 Max Max it is measured in milligram gr per kilogram per minute we don't need to understand that but for every Mill that you increase your V2 Max that is a 45-day life ex extension you can get a 5year

life extension if you go from one group which is the average group on your V2 Max to above average yeah so you're increasing your lifespan your health span your rate at uh inhibiting cancer diagnostic outcomes for other different types of cancer one of the biggest things I've changed in my life over the past two years is my levels of physical activity you have to love it yeah you've got to find something that you love and something that's going to allow you to do this regularly without it being a real pain and everyone's got something they

can do if you find it I guess for me I've realized that for much to my 20s and 30s I felt life was very busy it was very stressful I've had caring responsibilities for elderly parents and I would very much prioritize short intense bursts of activity that didn't take long that kept me fit but when you really dive into the research on exercise and Longevity and brain health and cancer and all these things it's very hard not to come away with a conclusion that despite the common narrative that society today often puts out which is

you know take it easy as you get older I kind of feel that's problematic I feel the older you get the more you have to be thinking about moving your body and not allowing yourself to get a sedentary so what does that mean for me I now I would say 95% of the time I'm walking for at least an hour a day yes like it's just something I've decided I made a decision in my brain a conscious decision a couple of years ago say no rongan listen if you want good brain health good heart health

if you want to be functioning as well as you can as you get older if you want to be the best dad the best husband the best son you have to move your body you cannot let other things get in the way of that am I fortunate to have some autonomy in my life to do this yes I am but nonetheless with that autonomy I've made that choice and that's kind of like a minimum for me I do other things as well but one hour's walk is kind of a minimum for me and I I

I you know think about this for a moment what is evolution basically if you look back into Evolution and we look at the fact that we need to fight for survival right we need to place stress upon a system for it to grow that's how we get our immunity that's how we you know the stress response the althetic stress response that's how we grow our muscles because we're placing our muscles under stress why have you told yourself that at a certain age you need to take it easy why is that if we look back into

the fact that we need to be stressed to make ourselves fitter to be able to adapt and survive and we need to build our Reserve because God forbid that we fall over at the age of 85 if you fall maybe you break your hip maybe you don't survive the fall you don't know what you're coming up against at 885 but I know for damn sure for myself and for my parents I want them strong enough to be able to withhold whatever it is that is coming for them at that age how important is strength training

oh my gosh well now we're getting into it strength training I believe is probably fundamentally the most important part of exercise really many reasons one you're increasing your muscle mass we know that at the age of 40 we get a decline exponentially in strength and mass think about muscle as your your reserves okay muscle is an endocrine organ it stores a lot of our mitochondria where we produce all of our energy it helps us and stabilizes us as we get older but it's j it's the Journey of building the muscle that is the most important

because when we are strength training we are releasing and expressing a whole host of myokines now we mentioned bdnf that's a myokine but oh my gosh strength training releases another one 100 of them and what do myokines do myin are muscle-based proteins that when they go into different organs in the body the brain the liver the pancreas they have positive effects for so for the brain they help preserve the synapses so those dendrites that die off they help preserve them they help the other neurons survive they help with the growth and proliferation of other neurons

in the hippocampus so they're doing the same thing as bdnf but they're doing even more than that remember bdnf just goes into the brain but these myocin can actually go elsewhere we know that this is the one responsible for inhibiting prostate cancer there was a wonderful um there was a wonderful study that was produced in cell press journals that actually showed down regulation of tumor that the tumor actually shrunk due to this myokine activity we know that Incan six can help us with immunity and with our mitochondrial function Incan six has this dual effect we

know that it can be it can be pro-inflammatory depending on which site it's released from but when it's released from the cells of the muscle it's anti-inflammatory and this is why you are calling our muscles our own inter internal Pharmacy our muscles are our own internal Pharmacy and the myo kindes are the medications that you need to survive as we age relating to something you said before you said you wish that people would exercise because it's good for their brains not necessarily because it's good for their physique yeah I think certainly over the last few

decades and still today although I think it's changing is that the number one reason most certainly many people exercise is to have a better physique yeah is to look better is that problematic or are you okay with that because it gets them into the gym to get those brain benefits anyway I'm okay with that to an extent but I'm seeing a a lot of people remember what is the number one problem that you would come into contact with with a patient if you were to tell them to exercise more adherence adherence yeah right so out

of exercise sleep and diet diet's probably my my worst one right in terms of your own behaviors my own behaviors now that is a behavioral trait adherence to a diet for me is way harder than adherence to a sleep protocol and an exercise protocol that's just me okay so if adherence is is the hardest thing then just going into the gym and getting anything done is great but I would rather people know why they're doing what they're doing because what I'm seeing now is that people are just going for aesthetic purposes they're not touching on

the hit training I hear people saying it's you know if I do aerobic training it's going to eat into my muscle gains and then I just see people just pumping weights just purely for uh muscle mass and not even touching on strength and they're two different things yeah I guess the problem with doing it around Aesthetics and I understand the desire to do it around Aesthetics who doesn't want to look yeah good and lean and have a great physique right I I totally get that but I guess if you're dependent on that as the outcome

if you're not getting that outcome and if that outcome is not coming as quick as you might want it to you risk stopping doing it yes whereas if the motivation to go to the gym or move your body or pump weights or whatever it might be is this is one of the best things I can do for my brain to function well whilst I'm alive on planet Earth well you've always got a reason to go and you will adhere to this every single day throughout the lifespan instead of taking massive breaks just because oh I'm

going on holidays I'm just not going to exercise for the next two weeks because I'm going to have I'm going to binge I'm going to drink yeah it also means for people who let's say naturally are leaner than others and there are many people out there who can seemingly get away at least from their external appearance from not eating well obviously there is a condition which colloquially is called Skinny fats where on the outside we look lean but on the inside we've got you know visceral fat the fat around our organs which is incredibly dangerous

and increases our risk of getting sick the reason this conversation this part of it I think is really interesting is because if you look at yourself in the mirror and go well I'm I'm okay you know I might have a little bit of a belly but there's nothing to worry about at the moment you're not then being driven into these behaviors because you're not connecting it with your brain you're just connecting it with your physique and if you think your physique is fine you may not engage with the behavior and you're basically doing this elimination

oh I had two drinks today I had three drinks today but I'll just burn it off at the gym and that's not the right attitude or I'm going to have a cheat meal today and then I'll just burn it off at the gym I hate when I hate when I hear that because that just means that you're just going to the gym just to basically burn the calories that you ate yeah okay so it was 3 hours of aerobic 20 minutes of intent so kind of gear four and gear five or zone four and zone

five whatever you want to how you ever you want to think about it do you have a specific recommendation for resistance training so in the paper that I authored alongside our our friend uh Dr Tommy would I think Gabriel L was on that as well gab was on it too yeah so this was at minimum two days a week and this is compound movements what does that mean for people who've never heard that yes so that's just squats instead of doing the the the designer Aesthetics okay you want to be doing things that move as

many muscle groups as possible per exercise so not the bicep curl while looking B Cur no no so you want to be doing squats bench press walking Lunes are great anytime you can really work the the lower part of your body as well just due to Vector size of your of your quads for example you're just increasing your your gray metal so so two sessions a week that's minimum I do believe you should be doing three you do okay and and you have um I mean obviously the time thing is quite tricky because it depends

what you're doing with that time are you you know in between sets on Instagram for 5 minutes whil you recover or are you moving from you know exercise to exercise I think it's quite tricky but are you basically saying two to three times a week resistance training for at least 20 30 minutes kind of thing correct yeah yeah okay make it hard go to the gym make it hard the one thing I don't like is middle-aged women and by the way I'm not I'm this is just what we're finding from the data maybe go to

the gym and they're lifting well below their average average they're lifting these tiny weights because they're afraid that they're going to get big muscles that's not true and so okay for women then in their 40s and 50s obviously that's a time also when there are quite significant hormonal changes happening is there something specific they should be focusing on around resistance training yes doing it and doing it hard working at a like you have on your sixth rep which is what I generally say when you get to the sixth rep that's when you should be struggling

you you should be shaking okay I want to look at this a slightly different way if possible you've got so much expertise in this area with your company neuro Athletics are you dealing with a certain type of population are these sort of high Achievers High performing yes so they're generally the the CEOs of of major Banks and so they are very high performing okay so a lot of these guys and girls in general in my experience are well a they have um Financial resource yes okay for various things like a trainer and a gym membership

some of them of course you can't make things too generalized but many of these high Achievers are quite a type and they sort of you know go go go struggle to switch off you know they're sort of working hard then they're exercising hard which can have its own own potential problems in terms of the stress response and not switching off but I want I really want to dial into these exercise recommendations and maybe get your perspective on three different groups yeah okay so if someone's listening and they are a high performer and they've got time

and money what is the optimum thing you'd recommend for their brain and let's contrast that with someone who doesn't move at all okay but is interested into what you're saying and going okay all right where can I start yeah so if you've got time and you've got money great place to be in in life congratulations if you've got all of that then hire yourself a trainer and just work on building strength and muscle three to four days a week and the trainer is there for safety and for motivation and accountability motivation yes all of that

okay because what I see a lot of as well is many people going to the gym they don't even know how to do the correct exercises you're going to just end up leading yourself to an injury and and injuries are really apart from the pain and the frustration of being injured I'm realizing this more and more as you get older there's a massive cost to injury oh that goes beyond the direct injury because it's the fear it puts into you about future exercise it's then the lack of movement that you're doing potentially whilst you're recovering

and then how long it takes you to get back to your Baseline because you weren't moving so it it really is I think an injury can compound quite quickly into the negative impacts yeah so trying to prevent injury it is actually look you could try and prevent injury by not moving at all right so that's an extreme which is probably going to have other delerious consequences but you have to kind of get that sweet spot so as you say if you're lucky enough to have the resource to hire a professional to help you you're saying

go for it exactly now let's talk about somebody who doesn't even and they've never been into a gym before you can still get the same benefits you know if I put my I we have a a close family friend and she was she's kind of like a grandmother to me she's not she's 98 years old cognitively she is firing she's unbelievable she's maintained exercise and dancing her entire life and social interactions right if I was to tell her to increase her muscle mass we just have to get her to wallit she can increase her muscle

size in her legs and get massive gains if she was just to wallit for me that wouldn't work because I have stronger legs and I'm much younger to her than her what I mean by that is if you are completely set entering you want to start lifting weights you don't have to go into the gym and pound these weights as I'm saying you can start with calisthenics which is just body weight movements yeah start with doing some push-ups almost everyone has access to the internet right you can go on to YouTube and just type in

beginner workouts for 50-year-old females I've seen them yeah I set them up for my mom all the time when she tells me she doesn't know what to do I'm like there you go there it is uh so you can be doing that and that's how you can start yeah so don't allow where you currently are to put you off getting started basically so the recommendations you've given around the uh 3 hours of walking 20 minutes of intensity and two to three sessions of resistance training a week with some of your real elite uh Achievers um

is that what you recommend to them or do you push them even higher so with them we everybody comes to us with a goal in mind so we have to take that and we take look we take a battery of tests we're looking at blood work we're doing Blood Sweat urine we're doing full body MRIs I'm really understanding as some of them you know I've got females who are optimizing for fertility that's a different that's a different performance routine than a 52y old male who's like got the apoe4 Gene and he's just wants to do

better everybody's different yeah I've heard you talk about the combination of resistance training with brain training yeah and I found this absolutely fascinating I don't think we've ever covered that on this show before so can you explain what that is yeah and why you might even get some additional benefits by combining these two CU it's so interesting that's where the name neuro Athletics came from so there's this whole part of of of training called cognitive training where you're training your brain we're training it to think faster to react faster to have better Vision because remember

your eyes are two pieces of your brain so you can literally work on your vision in many ways and strengthen your brain and it's as easy as getting a tennis ball and throwing the ball to the wall you're doing so many things when you do this remember the last time you know bad Mitten for example is is wonderful it's probably one of the best brain training exercises you can do why because you're incorporating so many different cognitive abilities you've got reaction time you have to think you have to process when the ball's going to come

you're also in that aerobic Zone sometimes you're dipping into zone four and it just does wonders you've got you've got Vision in place I went on your neuro Athletics website this morning and one of the reviews at the bottom was from someone who was saying that Louis has really helped me with my peripheral vision oh there you go yeah and I found that fascinating that's come up a little bit on the show over the last couple of years because since I started working with my own movement coach Helen Hall who's phenomenal one of the things

that we've been working on is eye movements really and she's been tracking she's got this very very very um sensitive devices under 10 around the world in terms of our spinal movements and what's happening when you're in Gate how is every vertebra moving how's your pelvis you know it's phenomenal what if you know how to interpret it which Helen does it can be incredibly helpful and I've seen how just something as simple as walking or running on that treadmill with peripheral vision versus Focus concentric vision changes the way you move and she can measure that

she can show you it's really really interesting and so without going into a deep Rabbit Hole there which I'm sure you'd be really interested in actually is is this idea that what well first of all I'm thinking a lot now with my kids about what exercises are also helping them with their Vision yeah right so I've become a real fan I always have been but things like tennis yeah badminton where you're you're tracking something that's moving far and then near and then far and then near so that's a that's an incredible workout for your eyes

and I think about on an evolutionary level we we had to track animals we had to you know we're losing a lot of those things especially with screens and all this constant near vision and being inside yeah so I think trying to combine things is a really good idea have you spoken before about some studies where you're doing let's say squats but also counting backwards from 100 serial s yeah serial sevens can you explain that and explain what are the so what are the benefits of let's say you're doing body weight squats and you can

do 10 let's say what's the benefit of also counting backwards and subtracting Sevens at the same time you are working on the the neurocognitive part of training that's actually pretty hard okay take out take out the the fact that you are squ in and of itself it requires a lot of concentration right your your your neuromotor system is really getting a workout the way that your brain talks to your body so we're working that out but if you have if you combine that with stimulating brain exercises literally counting down while you're squatting from Seven it

creates a lot of pressure in your brain and what did we say earlier you adapt when you stress the system exactly and so how often do you stress your people ask me what about Louise if I do sodoku it's like has kind of you know crossw puzzles chess yes you are thinking right but that's just taking one part of cognition into the process we've got now we're squatting you're counting down from you know counting down from Seven there's another exercise that I think everyone should do go to your local pharmacy and get an eye patch

you know those eye patches if you have an eye infection you're literally blacking out half of your brain you're blacking out 50% of your vision so therefore you're the other half of your brain your entire brain has to work harder to compensate for that so we do we do drills with just one eye sometimes like throwing the ball to the wall with one eye wow yeah we're doing these counting draws you know there's a you know when you have uh we had a battery of tests for Alzheimer's disease patients where we were getting them to

do uh like different senses smelling spices right because smell and and hearing are one of the risk factors of Alzheimer's disease we've also got language processing would get them to say different words that were beginning with letters such as f s and a if you can do this this helps with the language production of your dominant lobe for example if you can be doing this whilst exercising as well you're just creating more pressure and stimulus in your brain is that effect what's going on so you're basically saying that if you stimulate the brain and ask

it to do a little bit more all the muscles than it currently can do comfortably when you rest the body's going to grow back a little bit stronger it's going to adapt for the new demands that it thinks it needs yes hey guys I really hope you're finding this useful if you are and you want more content like it please do check out my book make change that lasts nine simple ways to break free from the habits that are holding you back it's in all the usual places as a paperback ebook and there's an audio

book which I'm the rating now back to the video so in some say something really practical someone could go okay Louisa I've got to exercise more got it I'm going to do 10 squats in my kitchen every day whilst I wait for my coffee to brew let's say but now instead of just doing those 10 squats and thinking about my to-do list or whatever I have to do today and let my mind Wonder no what I'm going to do is do these serial sevens I'm going to start hundreds and go subtract by seven each time

which is frankly for some people that's hard to do without squatting right like you know just to make it really practical people that would be down to you know 93 86 see 79 72 right 65 you're going down that you're saying that's better than just squatting yes if you can do it but remember you want to do this air squats right because the last thing you want is an injury because so this is body weight squats home right safe but it would be fun for people to play with that and see how how their experience

of it changes but what is is there there's some papers which have studied this right mhm I mean what what has there been research on this in terms of what it actually does it grows gray matter in the brain so basically this was a juggling study that they did and they did MRIs and fmis on these patients and they put them through a juggling protocol so they got three balls and I know that we can't all jug I can't even juggle but they showed that due to hand ey coordination reaction time and thinking and they

were also placing the the the benefits of Serial 7 and other different ma mathematical equations and puzzles onto them they grew the gray matter of their brain I mean even that phrase they grew the gray matter of their brain they increased the connections no I'm saying it's a positive thing I'm like genuinely I'm thinking if you take nothing else from this just this idea that you can do something at home that literally is changing the structure and function of your brain yes that's pretty empowering that is the most beautiful thing about exercise that 85% of

brain gray matter is modifiable by exercise yeah we haven't really covered some of the other factors we've gone deep into exercise which I think is really important um let's go to sleep mhm what would you like everyone to know about the relationship between sleep and brain function first of all sleep is the the best way for you to clear out these amalo proteins that build up during the day wow when we sleep we dip into our our deep sleep Zone which is stage three sleep we generally when I talk about sleep I really just talk

about stage three sleep and stage four now stage three is non rapid eye movement sleep this is our deepest sleep possible two major things happen during this stage this and this is towards the you know around 90 minutes after you fall asleep we're going to our deep sleep Zone you're activating something called the glymphatic system and this is when all of the cerebral spinal fluid in our brain washes out all of the debris so those toxins that built up that we mentioned earlier the environmental toxins the mot toxins and the amalo beta when that builds

up in the brain it has a chance at night during deep slow W sleep to be cleared out and it does this because the certain are certain brain cells in our brain called gal cells they they shrink in size and they they stick between neurons as well they're our immunity uh our immunity cell they shrink in size and that's what allows us cable spinal fluid to act like a washing machine so sleep's important to clear out toxins that may build up over the years yes just a reminder for people what we said right at the

start which is this idea that beta amid protein which yes we do see in people's brains with Alzheimer's is not really the root cause of what's going on and beta amid perhaps is a response to inflammation and stress and all kinds of modern day insults and that accumulation May well be starting at the age of 30 or 25 okay so when we think about that you're now connecting sleep saying listen this stuff may start to appear in your brain because of the stressful toxic lives many of us now lead especially we live in urban environments

right but actually one of the best ways to insulate yourself from that potential damage and accumulation is to focus on your sleep yes remember also I mentioned that the amalo gets gets triggered due to the innate immune system that's the body's first line then we've got the Adaptive immune system which is meant to take over and basically calm down the innate immune system so this is your chance all right of when you're sleeping you're also building up immunity we've actually seen through a really well documented study in presented in PN pnas where they took a

group of healthy men and they subjected to sleep deprivation for one week which was around 6 hours per night just on one week and what they found over just that 7-Day period was that they had a epigenetic change of 3% so they they changed their genome so we have around 20,000 genes in our human genome they changed 3% of this genome so they changed around I think it was 711 genes for the worse for the worse hold on a minute did you say that they were deprived just for one week but the sleep deprived individuals

were sleeping 6 hours a nights yes right 6 hours a night I know that's the problem is actually what some people are are happy if they're getting 6 hours a night that's the hey I had a great night I slept for six hours yeah and that was the sleep deprivation so that impacts the way your genes are expressed okay there is a growing awareness in society particularly people who listen to health podcast of the importance of sleep but you specifically focused on stage three and stage four the deeper phases of sleep now most people are

not going to a sleep lab every night and tracking what their phases of sleep are so how do people know if they are getting these phases or not well before they even even look into that right let's get the basics down what are the most important factors of sleep we've got quality obviously quantity I do believe we should all be sleeping at minimum 7 and 1/2 hours of sleep if you've had a really tough day both physically mentally emotionally maybe you need eight and a half or nine hours everybody's different but at minimum I believe

every human should be sleeping 7 and 1 half hours the second thing to that what we're now finding in the research is regularity is actually more important than anything else which sucks right but so you need to be sleeping every night night at the same time and waking up at the same time every day now that's hard because we're not robots so what I say is stick to 80% of the time you're sleeping regularly so my bedtime is you know if I'm lucky 10: p.m. 10: p.m. till 6: a.m. that is a beautiful sleep if

I get that and I try and stay within around you know 10 to 20% of that so maybe I'll sleep at 10:30 one night maybe 11:00 but I wouldn't be sleeping at 2:00 a.m. 1 night 9:00 p.m. next night there's too much variation yeah I think the was at the UK buer bank study yeah loads of people they showed what it's like a 10% variation was start to be associated with negative outcomes I think yes and and increases in all cause mortality and I believe it comes down to what I just mentioned with the epigenetic

change you know how I said 711 genes half of them were upregulated mean that they were switched on that's what genes do they switch on and switch off the one that switched on were the genes responsible for tumor production so you're increasing your likelihood of developing cancer from sleep deprivation the ones that were downregulated were the immunity genes yeah I've always been I feel very susceptible to changes in uh my daily rhythms I I know I've always felt great when there's a consistency I think everyone does frankly not everyone can do that shift work you

know all kinds of things I've said this many times on the podcast but but I I'll repeat it again in case it's new information for people like I I really prioritize my bed times yeah you know I I'm I'm asleep by 900 p.m. those nights oh wow yeah and again that works for me yeah at this stage of my life with kids and you know I'm happily married and all this kind of stuff that works for me I'm not saying it works for anyone else but yesterday I did something I haven't done in years which

is I'm making a a TV documentary at the moment about smartphones I forgot how long filming days are and I didn't get back to my hotel last night till about4 to 11 um so normally I would have slept by an hour and 45 minutes so I got back to the hotel then I had to unwind and although I slept pretty well last night I'm feeling it today yeah and it so I think I got maybe enough hours cuz I lying a bit which is unusual for me but I'm not my best self and I'm sure

missing that routine you know 9 to five I I think that's one of the main reasons why and this is one of the main reasons why a lot of people feel like they've got brain fog and they're like why do I have brain fog it's like well did you sleep and did you activate that lymphatic system to clear out all of these toxins which are pretty much what's giving you that brain fog so when it comes to sleep without getting too too deep into it we really need to prioritize it and you mentioned earlier like

how do we track it yes cavia you can wear a sleep tracker I've got an aura ring on right now I love it I sleep on a temperature controlled mattress my house is pretty much like a lab it's not that accurate I want to be clear on that yeah I don't care who you know the best thing this does is it I use it for heart rate variability and how long I stayed in bed yeah it can't really and this is coming from somebody who you know I was trained in sleep science you know I

had to go into a polysomnography which is a sleep study you when you see what we put patients through you've got these leads coming off you you've got a head like it's we're measuring so many things it's hard to think that that can replicate be replicated just on this ring I I really appreciate what you're saying about trackers because I think all of them including the really good ones some of their sleep stage um reports I I don't think are that accurate but I think they can be useful for Trends Trends yes and if you're

someone who likes data I think they could be so helpful they helping you act to go actually you know what I'm actually not sleeping for as long as I thought I was and my the amount of time I'm spending in bed is going down so for some people I think they're gamechanging yeah if they can keep a healthy relationship with them and not become obsessed which I think also can happen yes and there's now a phenomenon used for that but look when you do you know just take it for what it is use it for

Trends and use it for just tracking okay last night I my heart rate variability was 150 today it's 50 might I be getting sick in some of these high performers who comeing to see you in your Athletics would you say some of them because they're so on and wired with work and stuff struggle to switch off at night yes and if so what are some of your top tips to help people with that so I generally like to ask two questions are you having trouble falling asleep or are you having trouble staying as sleep I

I find that once men reach the age of around 55 and above they tend to start waking up and going to the toilet at around 4:00 a.m. and they switch the light on and then they can't get back to sleep but if we're talking about my high performance it's always I'm having trouble settling my mind down so I attack this from a behavioral perspective and also a supplement perspective so from a behavioral perspective what I want everyone to do is actually just write down everything that you have in your head before you go to sleep

your brain wants to be able to process it if you're not going to process it on another individual probably not your your spouse but if you want to just process it in a journal just write down all the things that are worrying you because that's what's keeping you up at night setting clear guidelines and standards with yourself here's something to recognize most of my clients who are high performing they don't set goals they set standards they have a standard for I'm going to be offline at 8 8:30 :30 p.m. I'm going to dim the lights

I'm going to have my last meal by 8:30 and then once you get into that routine you your your brain settles down in terms of supplementation and by the way everybody should always talk to their their healthcare provider but there are supplements that can help you really downregulate cortisol such as ashwaganda I love turmeric turmeric has a really great role in inhibiting this uh this pathway it's called the nfca B pathway it's an inflammatory pathway but then even Gaba gamma Amino Bic acid has really been shown to help people with a racing mind and you

can get all of these over the counter G it really just settles your mind down and helps you fall asleep any other supplements you recommend for other reasons oh yes uh okay so we're getting into it now I've gone viral for talking about this one supplement okay I don't know why but uh it's creatine um creatine monohydrate it helps with Cell Energy metabolism and we used to think of creatine back in the day of this bodybuilding drug but creatine is so much more than that it is the safest supplement on the market it is the

most studied and it's arguably the cheapest may not be cheap but in terms of other supplements it's the cheapest so we have natural stores of creatine in our body but this one if you take monohydrates specifically it helps give your cell more energy and it also helps with your brain if someone's listening to this and they're not pro supplements they're like you know I think supplements are overhyped I'm a food first guy or whatever it might be why would you recommend they consider taking creatine so first of all there's two supplements I recommend everyone take

regardless of a blood panel wow I would never tell you to take zinc if your zinc levels were fine I would never tell you to take vitamin D if you had if your vitamin D was 60 n per deciliter however creatine and omega-3 fatty acids by far across the board everyone should be taking them and why do you say that it doesn't affect hair loss it doesn't affect your kidneys it doesn't have any damaging effects in any way it doesn't make you big or bulky or bloated and it helps with the stor of creatine in

your body we already guys we already have creatine in our body what is it explain to me what is creatine it basically helps with the Regeneration of ATP and ATP is the currency of energy within the mitochondria of our cell okay so people might hear that go okay so is it going to give me more energy if I take it yes it's going to oh not as not as in caffeine energy okay we're not talking stimulant energy it's going to help your cells work better I have not seen uh an A A A really well-designed

study to show that creatine has any negative side effects when our mutual friend Tommy Woods last appeared on this podcast I think Tommy's been on three or even four times over the years I love Tommy I think he's fantastic he's so knowledgeable he puts everything in context there's appropriate Nuance when he talks about different concepts he also is a big fan oh yeah of creatine and Tommy would probably also he probably also stated that is neuroprotective it protects the brain cells against certain insults so if someone wants to start taking it you're saying they don't

need a blood test nope and are there different dosages and things that they should be thinking about you can start on five grams a day and for the ladies listening this is not going to make you bigger I just want everyone to be aware of that you can start minimum recommendation is five grams a day you can take it pre-workout post-workout at night in the morning in your coffee you can take it anytime anywhere wow if you want the more brain health benefits so I mentioned earlier my father had a stroke in 2019 I would

get him to be taking 10 to 12 gram of creatine because you do lose the bioavailability when it crosses a bloodb brain barrier and it's uptaken by the neurons so you want more there to start with yes and it's a powder that you put in water just a a scoop it usually comes in a 5 G soup but Louisa can't we get creatine from the meat we eat yes but it's a very very small amount and it's not that bioavailable okay Omega-3s why do you recommend those for everyone and also you said specifically you don't

need to do any testing beforehand no I mean you can get a test an omega-3 index test really good pin prick test and it will test the amount of Omega-3s in your red blood cell it gives you a percentage if you are part of the average population in the US you will get a 4% result which will put you in the same category in terms of all cause mortality as a pack aay smoker so hold on a minute the normal population in the US have levels of omega3 in their body that puts them at the

same risk as someone who smokes a packet of cigarettes a day yeah you're going to have to explain that to my audience yes so we want to so omega-3 fatty acids which come from fatty fish it's made up of three parts EPA DHA and ala I'm not going to touch on ala because that's the that's the plant-based omega-3 that we get from flax seeds we know that we need an omega-3 content in our body for the survival and growth of our cells it helps with many things the first thing that it does is it acts

as an anti-inflammatory it is has a way better safety profile than neuropen for example the the nids it's it has a high safety profile it acts in my opinion as an FDA approved drug so it is incredible for downregulating inflammation the second thing that it does is it helps with cell membrane fluidity so the way that our cells move throughout our body it helps with the outer portion of our cell it even helps in some instances with ameliorating some of these plants the amalo beer and is it more important in your view for people who

are choosing to be vegan or vegetarian is it even more important for them do you think yes because they cannot get it naturally from their diet and I understand that there's going to be and i' I've Got Friends in the plant-based Community who will argue and throw different studies at me to prove otherwise but a lot of these studies are done looking at for grams of EPA and DHA per day I don't know where you're going to get that from yeah when I touched on this with Tommy actually we discussed this issue with uh you

know meat eers uh vegans and and any combination in between and we were really discussing that everyone converts um to these ala in in in in different amounts depending on genetics and all kinds of different factors so one of the things we discussed was if you have access to an omega-3 test let's see what your level is yeah if your vegan and that level is really good he was saying well maybe you don't need to supplements exactly you know but maybe that's where an omega-3 test could be potentially very very useful there's quite a few

out there is there one specifically that you recommend Omega Quant by Dr Bill Harris yeah and why is it that one you recommend as opposed to a lot of the other ones out there well this one specifically measures the omega-3 in the red blood cell if you were to get this done by your general practitioner they're not measuring the amount of Omega-3s in the red blood cells so this one is really accurate it's the only one I've used so I I I like it I like that it's a ping prick test it's easy it's affordable

yeah do you know what I like about that is ultimately whenever we are debating you know can one get enough omega-3 from this diet or that diet we kind forget that we're all individuals so maybe some people actually can on a particular diet but that's where I think testing the right test perhaps can become really really valuable because then you know you're like actually yeah I'm one of these people who maybe genetically and whatever other reasons are there am able to have adequate levels of omega-3 with what I'm currently doing but other people may find

actually wow that's really low it's increasing my risk of dying mentioned right so maybe I need to either up things in my diet or I need to take a supplement not just that remember earlier how I said 20% of the lipid component in your brain is made of DHA yeah it's made of DHA so you're literally feeding your brain what it's made of yeah incredible I want to briefly touch on something you said earlier and we were talking about your pet hates on social media one of them was people saying that meditation increases the growth

of nerve cells in your brain you're saying it doesn't let's just close that Loop you're not saying that we shouldn't meditate are you no meditation is wonderful yeah you're just simply saying because I just want to make sure no one takes that away from this you're basically saying that meditation does many things but one thing it doesn't do is increase the growth of nerve cells correct why has that idea being perpetuated were there some studies that have been misinterpreted imagine a supplement company marketing to you that you can grow new brain cells wouldn't that be

incredible imagine if we could just eat our way through more brain cells and grow new brain cells we'd all be doing it so of course it's going to be marketed to you in any way whether it's through exercise whether it's through meditation whether it's through food so that's where I think that we're going wrong and I actually have have been sent many labels of different supplements that say this increases neurogenesis yeah it's interesting because I can't see yes meditation apps but I can't see the massive business opportunity for someone because there's now headbands um that

where they're trying to mimic this is another thing they're trying to mimic an EEG as they're trying to mimic some of the med meditation benefits through other things and saying do this okay fine so let's just then try and close this off and go okay we have covered exercise in quite a bit of detail you've said a few things about sleep that are really important in terms of um food we've mentioned at least Omega-3s and creatine as a supplements and we haven't really touched on stress of course meditation is a great way for some people

at reducing stress what would you like people to know about the impact that chronic stress has on our brain function chronic stress ends up leading to that chronic inflammation right that's something that we really need to take care of because remember inflammation is one of the root causes of what is killing the network in our brain it's killing the synapses so we've got a network problem here and if we want the growth and survival of this network which preserves our cognitive functions as we age which basically halts the the onset of of Alzheimer's disease we

need to get our inflammation underway you can go and get this tested by getting something called a HS CRP High sensitive C reactive protein which is a measure of inflammation in your blood you want it to be below zero but what do we do on a daily basis to manage this okay because every time you get stressed you activate that innate immune system you in you increase the amount of amalo in the brain and for short periods of time that stress is okay it can help you perform better it can help you function well it's

that chronic day after day especially with no recovery yeah where this starts to become a problem right I see everything rongan as um an allotment you have a certain allotment which you probably have told your patients of how much radiation you can have each year you know just getting an x-ray is not going to be bad if you're doing an x-ray every single day it's probably going to be bad for you I believe this is just my own thinking we have an allotment of stress let's say we stress our body by going to the gym

because that's what we do we we we micro stress but it's a good stress right if we stress our body at the gym and we are sleep deprived and we are having the worst day and we're we're negative and we're angry and we're emotionally triggered and we're having refined sugars and Ultra processed foods you've you've exceeded your alotment of stress we're in the middle of London at a moment you're basically talking about I would say is that a normal thing I I don't that's that's a make belief thing to me I think it is pretty

normal now for many people I really do I think having you know refined sugars Ultra processed foods being sleep deprived being chronically stressed getting angry emotionally reactive um and if you do get any time you go and kill it at the gym and add to your stress load and maybe not have the proper sleep and Recovery afterwards I don't think it's as uncommon as you might think and that's probably why Alzheimer's disease is as common as you think and going to Triple by 2050 because that is the lives that so many people are living these

days right and and I get it that for some people they are living tough lives the world does feel out of control there's all kinds of events going on that people don't like maybe they're struggling to have the money to do the things that he want to do right so I think we have to acknowledge that that that is real but one thing I like about your message is that a lot of what you're talking about actually doesn't cost that much money it really doesn't right what do you say for stress for some of your

high performers write down everything in your mind right that really doesn't cost any money no right you're talking about uh walking bris walking you know maybe doing some squats while actually trying to do some calcul culations in terms of practical advice for people there's a lot one can do if they don't have the financial resource of course they do need the time resource and there's some people who are working two or three jobs to make enme and they don't feel that they have the time so you do you think that's a fair reflection and do

is is that fair from what I said in terms of your work and another thing I wanted to point out is what above all controls all of this it is your outlook it is your perspective it is your mind I believe we've got three different minds and they all live in the brain so a stronger brain a stronger Network a stronger mind you'll be able to talk yourself into creating the life that you can have to improve these brain health outcomes you just you said it yourself it's free yeah I think one of the most

important decisions you can make in life that is at the root of your health outcomes and your happiness outcomes is whether you're a victim to life or you're in charge of life and I say that with all the compassion that I have within me wherever you are on life you have to take agency and go okay what one small five minute action can I do today for my health for my well-being for my family's well-being start there but if you don't have that agency I don't think it matters what else you try and do I

think you are going to be a victim to life and a victim to external circumstances yeah and I use the analogy of compound interest everything you do has an effect for the positive or the negative when it comes to your longevity your mindset and your brain health one night of sleep deprivation probably won't do anything if you ex if you don't exercise and you're sedentary for maybe five six days that won't do anything it is the compounding effects of that certain habit so want to be able to fix it you want to be able to

build a stronger mind which will build a stronger mindset so you can have that ripple effect I love it Louis honestly I I really love what you're doing out there on the world you're publishing studies you're looking at the research and then certainly what I've seen on your Instagram you're trying to put out this positive inspiring message for people to say look brain decline is not inevitable you can do something about it so please start if people want to stay in touch with you they want to find out more about your work where would you

send them definitely come to Instagram that's where I hang out a lot um we actually at neuro Athletics we have our Flagship course which is the neuro Athletics coaching certificate where we actually teach coaches our pillars of human performance yeah fantastic and if there's one final message you could leave for people right let's let's imagine you're talking to that one person who was just stumbled across this podcast or this video on YouTube they've never heard any of this before and they thought wow I didn't know I I didn't know that I had this much control

over my brain function but they're struggling with motivation to get started talk to that individual what would you say to them you know we get one life and the one thing that you don't want is to lose or forget who you are because we spend our entire lives in search of meaning of who we are and to come to the end of your life and to think I could have just exercised I could have just slept I could have just not stressed out as much the last thing you want is to look in front of

the mirror and see your reflection and not recognize that and not recognize who your children are so it is my it is my dream that one day we have a cocktail of interventions where everybody no matter what your location is geographic location or your socioeconomic status that everybody is able to exercise Louis you're doing incredible work thank you so much for coming on the show thank you so much for having me if you enjoyed that conversation then I think you are really going to enjoy this one if at 37 your limit is just being able

to run that 30 minute park run at 75 you're going to have a very difficult time getting around