Exercise Scientist: The Best Strategy For Extending Lifespan

I'm playing the power laws of longevity I know I don't want to get injured but I also know I'm not training to become a professional athlete or whatever how do you compress this to make it easy for people what do they do your body should move all of your joints through all of its ranges of motion that is one of our laws you want to move and play an unstructured environment this is the thing that's going to happen in your life that shuts you down Dr Andy Galpin he's a professor of kinesiology at Cal State

feron coach to professional athletes and one of the world's leading experts on the science and methods of how to build strength endurance and athletic performance we should have fundamental skills everyone should be able to throw something and catch and jump oh my goodness jumping like we've lost that entirely then we have to have resilience I should be able to throw you right now into an exercise you've never done before and you don't have extreme injury or pain because of it too often we spend time trying to optimize for the task we're already doing but are

we fantastic and nonprecious can we handle the the thing that we did not plan for are you zombie apocalypse ready one of the things I'm excited to talk to you about today is I've been doing a lot of things that I think is is uh contrary to popular opinion you can say that again a lot of things all things yeah why do you think uh I provoke such a strong reaction well you can answer this in a lot of ways it probably would take us far longer than than we have anytime you challenge standard thinking

it's good to be met with push back right this is how actually all of us evolve you need to be shown when you're wrong for you you need to be showing other people where they're wrong for them right this is how everything gets better then there's a little bit of unfill unfair sure that's working but I won't have access to it which is I don't think a legitimate claim for what you're trying to do I think in General my position on your approach has been you're very clear with what you're trying to do if someone

doesn't like that fine I would never live your lifestyle that I think but if we were to change you out and say Yes Brian is going to go live in the the Nepal mountains and he's going to do nothing but meditate the rest of No One Would Care MH like so now you want to use this funny weird lifestyle we're like oh that's so unrealistic sure but so's the monk it's very true right no one wants to do that either for the most part the only line we have to be careful of is are we

giving people false information are we leading people into false hope like things like that that I think is a good push back and I hope people continue to push you yeah on that right that is always the line we need to make sure people are fairly informed that they have a a a understanding of risk or not risk but past that like if people want to do some really wild I'm into it cool let's go yeah cool all right so you're down to play um the AC is currently on oh we can turn it off

I I would always vote Comfort over 100 I don't care about Comfort at all where does that come from that is a core principle of mine of like that just since I was a kid since you were a kid yeah when was the first time you encountered discomfort you're kind of like huh kind of nice I don't remember not yeah right it's a everyone I grew up with my family my mom my dad my grandparents it was always generally you're in charge of this thing in in the sense of you're responsible so like you're tired

do you want to do this thing or not I don't care I don't want to hear about your whining like that sort of thing just carried through of a high sense of responsibility or ownership so if it is hey we're going to be uncomfortable great like that has always worked for me because I don't know anything different so whether it was you want to win more football games great the city kids aren't as tough as like that's your ad that's your advantage that you put in your head or saying like well they have more resources

or more kids to pull from or whatever we're going to out tough them right we are substance over style yeah so all of that is is like great uncomfort fantastic like make it the worst thing possible any great story any great memory is almost always not almost always but oftentimes is built with like well why was that hunting trip so awesome well because I tent my tent broke day one I got rained on for four straight days like yeah it could have the same exact thing in the end but that's the irony is most of

our most enjoyable memories come from discomfort yeah it's the thing that we often times want to avoid yeah yeah 100% right like I I mean I have so many I always come home from things like that and I'll tell my wife what happened and she's just like that sounds miserable and I'm like yeah it was amazing just the greatest greatest thing right in the moment you want nothing more than to get out yeah as much as you know afterwards you're going to appreciate it's almost like yeah it the trip was not great it it went

too well yeah oh yeah yeah you know what's funny like like hunting very specifically is that if you were to go out and you were to have the best hunt of your life morning one of day one there's almost this like oh damn that sucked but if it was like 5 days of Agony nothing went right and the same so yeah I mean you could do different examples if you're not hunting or whatever but it's that same thing uh it's the company you started it's it's the whole it's just like nothing but failure it's got

to be such a significant personality indicator of like what is your relationship with discomfort and then it has to Cascade into all the other branches of likely character character traits yeah it's uh it's one of the things I Joy have joy in the most whether it is the the project that you started scientifically and you just cannot get it to work and then it does now you're like wow like something really happened there or or the one capture um sense of achievement is always on the back end of failure well we have kinship in in

pain yeah I can't profess to take it to your level and in many things think about it this way would you ever retire you could have you certainly chose not to right yeah I mean the concept is uh it it's it's incomprehensible to me I don't don't understand why why one would want to retire there is a 0% chance I would ever retire I may not do some of the things I'm doing now but I'm going to be doing something and there's a hard line there too because you also have to be careful of balancing

that with being present right like we we we always play a game here of optimization versus adaptation it's short-term versus long-term gratification there's there's lots of ways you could slice this same thing but if you're too far focused on future and you're not present we have all kinds of psychological disorders for those names right you're not fun to be around you're going to have all these other ones at the inverse if you're only paying attention to now which is clear detriment down the rine so playing that game of saying I'm going to make a bunch

of hard choices now to make my life arbitrarily more difficult is probably where we should hedge most of our stuff but we can't always be in a place of I'm not going to do anything right now to bring joy people are not going to live very long very happy that life so it's a balancing act I think probably too many people are shoved a little bit more towards optimization right now do something that feels good in the moment and you could expose the bunch of things that that could be but at the same time if

we're too militant about it many people are going to struggle with that because of lack of presence right no appreciation and joy being a parent that's the easiest example right you want to be in the moment for your kids as much as possible and not thinking about your next meeting or the next project you want to do or just always being in your own head most parents would say I would rather have some sense of presence around my kids yeah that's so true being split there yeah yeah hard to hard to get no balance but

it's always a game you're gonna play right and you're gonna fail it every day and then tomorrow you get the chance to fail again yeah so on the on the note of kids like so I've got three kids and lately I've been trying to teach them about exercise and strength training and cardio and also the risk of injury and why injury matters and then recovery they all have wearables and so they're now introduced to this idea that they sleep and then they wake up in the morning they have a score that's looking certain things so

I've been trying as a father to teach them basic things you know from when they're kids all the way through like there's this a fun story where my son Talmage uh went to the store and we bought him these socks and he was always very fast and I said Talmage these are magic socks when you put them on they're going to make you run fast look we're going to test it right now so we're in the store you run from this point to that point and come back I'm going to time you and then you're

going to put the new socks on and you're going through the same thing and I timed him and I actually I was accurate like I timed exactly I didn't fudge it and he ran faster with those magic socks of course right it was of course and I was really surprised I believe he was eight or nine years old but it was such an interesting thing and then I that with that experience I then did this thing with their birthdays where the day before they turned uh on another birthday I would say we're going to do

a panel of measurements we're going to see how far you can jump you know like yeah yeah um how high you can jump how fast you can run around the house how fast you can run up the stairs I see where this going so I did like 10 things right and like tomorrow morning when you wake up we're going to the same 10 tests and every year it became this thing where in their minds they just level up to this new possibility and it was such a f fun family Endeavor and then as the kids

got older like the oldest kid you know would be like in on the joke but then the youngest daughter she was all in she's like I can't believe this like I've just reached a new level of capability so as I as I do this like you you have become well-versed in all things strength and cardio and recovery and uh I would love to learn from you today so if if we were to talk to kids like if I were to say you know okay let's just say they're 18 so like they're an adult what do

they do for strength training like how would you compress what we know about that and what would we instruct them to do I'd recommend a couple of things number one Avery Fagen bomb has been publishing in this research for probably 30 plus years he's the person I give the most credit to certainly many scientists in this area have worked hard but we have so much information very specifically on exercising kids because of Avery and people like that and the evidence is overwhelming we can answer a couple of questions very quickly is strength training safe for

kids absolutely is it beneficial for kids almost always the case the NCA has actually a free position statement where you can go you can download it and it has strength training power training speed training recommendations by age category it's Open Access so you can go how much should I be doing what's too much is my kid overdoing it all that information I don't have all them numbers memorized per you know six to seven seven to eight you know girls boys things like that but that's all publicly available in that position statement I'm sure you guys

can link it to Theos and such in addition when you look at other people who have launched this entire field called long-term athletic development ltad don't worry about athletic if you're not an athlete it's just how do we get kids to be healthy as adults now I know you kind of ask a little bit of a different question kind of 18 but my answer is you got to walk into 18 in a good place if you are starting this journey at 18 fine we can make a ton of improvements if you start this journey at

70 we've done studies starting at 80 there's never a time when you no longer have plasticity and muscle cardiovascular tissue anything never right it's not been documented so let's actually start with kids and work our way up through the various stages so let's just say I mean what at what age can you instruct can begin helping your child do exercises and what kinds of things do they do great the age you can start is zero not your zero like like they real zero because you don't want to think about this as when should I start

deadlifting or when should I start ply metrics what you want to think about is what does my kid have to do so that they're successful when they're 18 28 88 painfree and Performing well that starts with the very basic and I can give you the three threes here number one it is run jump throw okay as a functioning human if you are 60 years old and you can run jump throw I don't really care about anything else painfree and reasonably effectively okay starting at zero my kids are four and six right my kids will go

into the weight room with me every day when I train they're messing around doing different things I'm not optimizing strength I'm not optimizing speed or power I'm doing basic human movements do they understand proprioception do they have motor control do they know where they're at in space if they go faster heavier I do not care but I'm working towards lift jump throw do you care if they do push-ups do you care if they do curl-ups you care you they're just if they just move weights around do you worry about them doing a wrong movement and

hurting themselves nope because at the age of four to six they're going to Auto regulate perfectly if you watch my four-year-old pick up a kettle bell he's going to lift it up if it doesn't move he's going to set it back down they're very smart and they're not going to actually go past that point for the most part where an 18-year-old would definitely do and they also don't have any historical context they don't know I used to lift this weight my friend lifted they're just pick the thing up or don't pick the thing up so

if you're at home and you're around the house and you're trying to encourage your your children to run jump throw do you set things up like do you have them do you set up a place for them to jump do you have them throw things around in a specific way like a baseball or all of it you don't care it's just like all of it yeah yep I want them structured so if we can get them to play structured Sports great if not fine I want them unstructured I want my kid I don't have rules

in my house against jumping on and off couches we do not regulate it at all like jump and climb on anything you want there's some consequences we pay there but I want my kids to think of the whole world as movement I don't want it to be oh only when we put our cleats on and when we go to this field we run none of that I want them to be thinking and feeling and moving cuz they're also watching Natasha and I do the same thing if I'm in the living room and my kids are

doing something I'm practicing a golf swing I'm doing high like I'm doing something I'm moving in different areas and so I want them to mimic that they need to learn Movement by watching and by doing and doing in different environments I don't want them to just have to have the right setup and situation and being what we'll call very precious MH right they're they're six they shouldn't be specialized in anything my son is is pretty far Advanced physically my daughters not as far okay fine but I'm not going to put them on different programs cuz

they're still veling I want them to be in out of shoes as much as we possibly can I want them to not be warmed up I I don't want any of those restrictions because we're trying to get there because they're four and six years old it's it's a family culture of being active it's you setting the example run up throw and most of the sports they would participate in soccer baseball basketball hockey like they all have roughly those characteristics so if they're in sports they're kind of getting that so let's say now we're in the

early teens perfect uh now how do you change your thinking I'll keep the answer brief to go from six to early teens but it's the same thing the literature and most uh scientists are going to say when they start physically lifting weights or start doing structured exercise notice what we said before it is Sport and it is movement it is unstructured on purpose it is always coming down to their maturity level the answer is you could start lifting weights at 5 years old I have friends that have done that with their kids no problem it

always comes down to their maturity level okay do you have structured supervis uh capability do you know what you're doing and are they mature enough to follow attention I told you my son is further ahead than my daughter is physically but there's no chance I would have him lift weights he he cannot pay attention at all to anything my daughter will 100% follow exactly what I'm saying so she's mature enough to do it when whenever she expressed an interest in it I do it as soon as she doesn't want to do it anymore of course

there's never the we have to finish the rep or that great I want to go draw sure get out of here do whatever you want to do right when you go from six to teen it's the same Spectrum some of you might be at six when you can have that some of you might be at 13 when you can have that so just pay attention to your kids you want them moving and you want them moving in a variety of ways this is the very fundamental difference between physical exercise and a physical activity or a

physical nature however you want to phrase these things right the one I will always use is physical practice so we're going to have a physical practice whether you're in sports or not I don't care we're going to have a physical practice though whatever that happens to be my daughter will run for hours in a field picking flowers and looking at animals stood on the soccer field all day would not did no no interest in soccer fine MH that transition is going to be the same as we go from six to the teen now once we

get to teen I think we need to actually be a little bit more bullish in forcing some sort of exercise if this is Sport cool if not it needs to be walk it needs to be there needs to be something there I think it would be best for most people to start engaging in some sort of strength training and some sort of endurance training in that early years you just need to move well or wellish enough right I don't need to Peak your speed we don't need to Peak your strength even even for athletes high

level athlete freshman All-American football player I still don't really care about getting as strong as possible we still are focusing on moving better right we're setting up Foundation to move appropriately body control and we're building tissue tolerance in the right joints and the right movement patterns that's pre-teen that's all it really is if you look at lastly here the research on professional athletes very few of them specialize in sports so you almost in all cases should avoid sport specialization until you're probably at the end of high school or even past that for the first 1820

years of life it's just about Play It's enjoying being active it's doing um think yeah run jump throw yep in the various forms and having the foundation for movement yep it is it is those three used start with from there you want to progress to the next three which are going to be squat press pull and that's in the 20s or that could be in the teens yeah that could be your 8-year-old yeah okay great eight-year-old can jump and run and throw now let's get him squatting now let's get him pulling let's get impressing that

could be a push-up yeah could be a pull-up I see Ros right what let's say what are the you know three things someone does to squat is there just one squat or are there multiple ways to squat infinite ways to squat yeah right think about what you just said you didn't say is there one way to do a barbell back squat squat of course I can squat any thousands of ways right and I should be practicing especially with that goal in mind I should be practicing moving in a large variety of patterns if you notice

what we've been saying for this entire question it's emphasizing variety of movement I need to understand control and I need to have variety those things allow me the capacity and the resilience to do many things as well as reducing overall load on any given area yeah one of the things that's challenging in the health field generally is that there's so many opinions out there about everything and then it's hard to know what to do so when a person is in a in an environment where they say I'm going to exercise and I'm going to do

a squat like exercise you know they could pick from a variety of techniques Y and so it's hard to know which one a lot of people just want to just know just be told like here do these three things because otherwise sorting through the entirety of the option set is kind of hard Y how how do you think about that how do you narrow the set of options so people have a particular program for a squat methods versus Concepts okay what are we trying to get done is the concept the methods are infinite and leave

them infinite okay pick one to start with if we're not getting the results move on to the next one but do not worry this is where perfect being the enemy of good that kind of thing the methods will drive you crazy because they are infinite and I learned new squat variations still like okay great right people are very creative with their exercises that's not the rabbit hole what you in your case have to pay attention to that example is what's the why am I squatting in the first place okay great uh I know it's a

big exercise people say it's important that's the only information I know okay let's stop right there that's all you need to know great let's pick a variation then that allows you to load yourself and you're basically painf free you're painf free in the immediate and the long term I don't mean discomfort free right that exercise is uncomfortable but my back isn't getting tight afterwards and so on and so forth actual injury in the moment or 6 weeks 6 months there if it is for most people it's a new variation right so say you started with

a barbell back squat the most traditional one and then you noticed some sort of pain discomfort great maybe we start a go to a goblet squat and maybe we manually walk ourselves all the way out of that CU you're still getting pain discomfort and we're on a leg press machine MH fine they're different variations they are not the exact same thing and we will nerd out later on all the micro variations within them I love that part but for your question there it is what are we trying to do was this a back exercise was

this a leg exercise was I trying to get my heart r St up and then make sure you're just choosing a variation that checks those boxes off as long as you're poting in the right direction you just do not need to worry about the things even within the back squat am I doing a wide St am I doing narrow STS sure great step number one are you getting the results you're trying to get and then are you staying pain free for the most part yeah that that's all the surface level have to has to worry

about on this squat question let's imagine someone's listening they're like okay great tell me what to do sure what do you say as a general exercise back squat IS F fantastic it is pretty complicated though if you want to make it a little bit less complicated for the general Mass something like a front squat or even a goblet squat now the downside is you can't load it your legs will not get the same stress and stimuli because the load will be a tenth amount so what you need to do in that case then is go

backwards and add some sort of leg strengthening exercise to really actually strengthen your legs but a gobl squat is is a great place to start and it is still complicated but it it reduces the barrier and if those are still too hard then just get away from the squat entirely MH that's maybe not the place to go and go to the leg press leg extension something like that and then for pull yep what would someone do for pull so this is really easy um we have upper body and lower body right so upper body you

can think of horizontal pull pulling to your chest opposite of a push-up or a vertical pull so a pull up something down like that pick one thing if your jam is pull-ups fantastic if you want to use machine great I can survive in a lot of different ways there in terms of the lower body one things get more complicated now you can do something like a trap bar deadlift a lot of people are big fans of the trap bar deadlift because it it lowers the barrier of Entry to the exercise opposed to like a barbell

deadlift where you have to cross your knee and there's some other things in the way that is fine if you want to do a kettle bell the Implement doesn't matter as much at this level it is the movement pattern as long as you're hinging or pulling we'll use those synonymously that's basically the same thing you're fine and if your entry point is a kettle bell awesome totally fine just hit the other marks we talked about but that's a nice easy way so if you pattern those sort of together you did a goblet squat you did

some sort of RDL or a hinge or a deadlift not the same but close enough movement pattern and you do something for the upper body call it a bent row those three exercises you're in a good spot now and so how careful do people need to be for injury prevention or injury awareness in doing these things if if um they look up on on YouTube and they say you know show me a few variations of squat they look at a few pull options and a few push options yeah um is that okay like do people

need to be more granular or concerned about I'm going to talk out both side of my mouth answering this question okay because one I want people to pay attention to Quality the overwhelming majority of people should pay more attention to movement quality than they are their quantity their reps their load it is so much more important to move well at the same time I have learned recently actually honestly based on social media and YouTube comments sometimes when I say things like that it puts up a barrier yes and so people think oh my God I

if I can't be perfect I'm not going to do it and I never realized that yeah so I don't want you to also think that so how perfect you have to be don't make red flags if I look at it and I'm like oh my gosh you're going to get H hurt right now that to me is not worth it but if it is a like we could probably dial that in a little bit if it is a situation where you're not using the right muscle I don't care as much if it is you're probably

going to get hurt really bad then maybe we should stop right there all you have to really do that is keep your spine in reasonable attention at the same time I I the spine doesn't you don't need to be precious spine doesn't need to be perfectly straight and narrow and locked in at all times either it's not what it's meant for but if you're going to put a big load and rotate and Pull and you do that a bunch of times like let's be conscious of our spine outside of that the rest of the joints

are probably fine as Andy I've actually I've built a similar intuitions as you with comments online so doing a video you realize that when you when you say a given thing some people understand what you're saying like generally be active and then there's a a tail end where people are like but hold tight yeah what do you mean by this and they'll want five additional additional layers of clarification yeah in this case I'm really wondering with health and wellness it is so hard right people are aware there's there's Pro there's challenges to being injured in

the gym also knowing what movements to make they want to be correct but then they obsess over reps and weights and then a whole bunch of metrics it would be great if it was just easier like you just showed up and just played and you didn't even have to think about it yeah but it often times it I find that when you when it comes to strength building and cardio that the methods as you said yeah uh basically ruin it for a lot of people because they get so hung up on the details that they

just don't know what to do anymore and then it be they become paralyzed yeah and so that's what I really what I wanted to speak about today is like how to actually make this simple where people are like you know what like I'm playing the power laws of long ity I know I don't want to get injured but I also know I'm not training to become you know a professional athlete or whatever like how do you compress this to make it easy for people what do they do I actually like how you frame that a

little heuristic you can use with this technique jock supposition we put up here is your body should move all of your joints through all of its ranges of motion that is one of our laws is all of your joints through all of its ranges of motion your joints are different than mine your limb lengths are different than mine I was sizing you up earlier like how long is that femur okay great we what did you what did you estimate you're in a good spot for your movements you're okay your femur is long it's a little

it's different mine's very short you and I are going to have success in different exercises for sure right doesn't mean we both can't be successful but you're going to be hedged more towards pulling stuff I'm going to be hedged more towards pressing stuff okay fine but that said you want to move and play mhm an unstructured environment right we this is a Jiu-Jitsu class this is a playing with your kids it is swim swimming it is whatever stuff and I don't want you to be worried about any technique for that at all your spine doesn't

need to be neutral it should be flexed and rotated and twisted and turned when you're doing whatever where I want you to care about your spine in particular for technique is when we're putting a big load on and or taking it to high fatigue M if it can be that simple so if you're going to the gym and you have a strength training practice and you have a cardio practice and you have a movement practice great for cardio and and your movement stuff don't worry about technique play Joy play the tennis game do do not

worry about your Technique at all shouldn't be there for the 45 minutes twice a week that you're in the gym now I want to pay attention to that that spinal position I think that's how we get the best of both worlds right because we go too much in this direction and now we're loading it in bad positions probably also if we never let ourselves be human we're not going to move well to be totally honest so starting right out the gates exercises don't hurt people ever it is the load the intensity or the complexity now

those three things can lead yeah and stack on each other but that's the issue so move as much as you want and be mindful of progression that's as simple as I can make this what do I mean if you are starting your journey and you really don't have much of a physical practice you kind of sit at work a day and maybe you walk the dog okay great now you're going to go to the gym and we're going to add a 45-minute workout 5 days a week you know where the story ends mhm if you

really know what you're doing we could be fine but most people are going to run into problems pretty quickly the progression was not a progression it was a rocket launch right you just you went to the moon you went from zero to following the entire blueprint protocol and you're going to break right lose motivation all those things so you need to think about a a more realistic progression strategy into it if you can do that you're going to be just fine so staying uninjured staying still motivated and now staying adherent that's really the place we

have to get to yeah if we're aimed at the wrong targets it's not even the big deal like I don't even care about that we will get to execution later we have to get to habits and basic tissue tolerance first Okay cool so if if I review where we've been for my kids I'm trying to create a family culture of being active yep and teaching them the basics of run jump throw and then as they get older you can get into some more structured things of squat Push Pull yep where you start doing yeah more

structured exercises but in doing that you don't need to overstress about which ones you just want to pay ption to not being overburdened with uh risk of injury or too intensified but otherwise like you're just trying to create a habit of being active that was a phenomenal summary I would give you 10 out of 10 oh great thanks if you were in class great well done on top of all that think about what we're trying to do you want a human to move yeah we want our kids to move in a variety of ways so

that the rest of their life they can still move in a variety of ways learning how to move as a 40-year-old is GNA be a thing you know so I realized that I just went through that so I was active as a kid that so like check but then in my 20s and 30s I became I I basically was active but on a treadmill like active like you go there you try to your oh my God I love this so much sorry yeah I know where this is going but I got fat because I was

depressed and I was in a really bad spot and so I didn't ever really learn how to exercise like how to stretch how to do all these basic things so it was just in the past 3 years so now every day I spend an hour in the gym basically moving every muscle of my body and it is just Exquisite joy I love it when I don't get to do it I feel so sad my body just feels a little tighter not as loose but every day I I feel so limber and light and free and

so I wish I could have been doing this my entire life because it just I've never my body has never felt better I'm glad you brought that up because this is the perfect example we talked about zero to 18 almost all kids are going to be involved in some sort of sport activity or they're going to play with their kids they're going to run outside they're going to do something they're moving yeah they're going to sit in weird spots have you ever watched an eight-year-old girl sit they don't sit like me or you they're going

to watch TV in a weird ways they're going to be in pigeon stretch watching TV normally like they're going to be doing couch stretch without even trying they're all over the place right like wow that's interesting when we get to high school past that into college Everything Changes watch the dramatic change in physical activity from 18 to non8 if people continue to exercise sports are almost always gone very few people play that all play is gone you don't hang out with your friends outside all this stuff is Gone Gone Gone Gone Gone some of those

people are going to choose to exercise and their exercise is going to be on a treadmill or on weights MH awesome we love that but look what happened all variety of movement went to here what happened to all the range of motions and all your tissue they only are subject to what you're doing if you happen to be doing a well-rounded training program great but probably not you're probably on a treadmill or a bike one movement pattern no rotation all these things no connection between right toe and left shoulder like all this is gone and

if you're lifting weights you're probably doing some basic stuff and a couple of movement patterns that right there summarized everything worst case they don't and now all physical activity has gone completely to zero so why do you feel so much better when you're moving cuz you're finally moving like you were a kid you're using all your joint in the way that they're supposed to be moved yeah that's true okay so now we're we're um if we're following the timeline we are now in the teens where we we're structuring squat push pole and now we're at

this danger zone where we're transitioning post 18 yes and we're going to become increasingly narrow in the things we do and our body is going to become inherently limited by now what we can do so we're going to fill the intensification so what do you do in your 20s okay think about the problem we we think of things we lost and build them back in okay great you're not going to have the time to run around all day like with your kids so how can you put that back in this is Kelly starett all day

this is a standing desk this is we were joking before we started filming I'm never going to sit in a conference room for two hours like zero chance it's going to happen on a zoom thing I'm going to move I'm going to be stretching not intentionally I'm just going to be jumping up and down I'll be moving around if you can restructure some amount of physical activity back into your life if this means you're going to take the stairs you're going to walk I don't care but you got to get that back into your life

one way or the other if you can handle that now we've at least opened things up now we have to put back in our higher heart rate stuff we have to put in some standard um endurance training we got to put in some strength training fine that can be Rand engineered but let's start with the foundation that we truly lost the most of which is movement yeah so if you lift weights and you do treadmill life workouts it's it's good it's better than nothing but it's also limiting so then there's options like yoga Pilates but

you have a much broader range of movements so that me and Concepts right so what was the method open up move variety play or that was the concept right what are the methods sure yoga swim jiujitsu paddle board don't care about any of it so is the advice basically uh constantly seek to be active in a variety of ways so if you're doing treadmill and and weight work fine but also couple up with that thing other things like play sports outside of that of a of a certain variety is that the idea of getting your

body enough variety to keep limber it's a variety in terms of movement patterns yeah right it is not just if you think about and we'll get into this later but when I looked at your training program the one that was available lots of great stuff in there lots of limitations we'll go over all of them if we have time but some of the major limitations where you do very little rotation right so a lot of people there's three main movement planes sagittal frontal and rotational right you don't think about that um up and down forward

backwards and then rotating side to side most people get stuck forward front and back M I run I cycle I swim I squat up and down I bench press and they're doing this right and there's almost no translation transitional rotational stuff so we need to make sure that my right elbow can touch my left toe right I need to make sure that my knee can go and touch my my left knee can touch my left ear not directly but you see what I'm saying here that's why people feel tight because you're like you you have

you're lifting and all that but you're moving in the very same movement patterns in addition people are almost always moving what we call bilaterally Left Foot Right Foot even balanced right shoulder right shoulder even balanced head up and down perfect there are connective tissue slings that run throughout your body and they're not on the same plane right I kind of mentioned earlier but as an easy example your left shoulder the back side of it to the back side of your right glute are connected so if those things are never crunching and rotating and moving together

at the same time that sling just gets Tighter and Tighter and sort of tighter also loses its elasticity so things hurt more more now that puts tension somewhere in the neck back blah blah blah so making sure we are moving and re-engineered in those different movement patterns unilateral support one leg at a time one arm at a time one elbow at a time bilateral support as well as varied movement rotation pattern so when I say variety that's specifically what I mean is variety of movement patterns different angles different joint contraction profiles holding flexing relaxing extending

that's the variety that I'm really talking about and if we can get stuff on top of that it is now vestibular so can I do that thing when my eyes are focused on something at a different length right can I have neural this is pro proception right do I know where I'm at in space that's our last piece we have to re-engineer things back into there's a variety ways we can do that but want to be clear when I say variety that's the stuff I'm referring to yeah so for those listening after this Andy and

I are going to work out together and I've asked him to help level up my workout so he's yeah he's made a a review of what I'm doing so we're going to go in the gym together he's going to both analyze my movements and the actual workout so we're going to try to uplevel it then we'll share it with all of you so you can incorporate it into your daily routine uh wanted to throw one thing on top of that because I know that was pretty complicated it doesn't also have to be I threw a

whole bunch of stuff out there and that may have just overwhelmed some people it can be as simple as let's start off with the win let's take your strength training let's take your cardio and let's add pilotes yes sign up and go okay tons of limitations against stop right there there we go now we're talking it's a win Right add in the yoga class add in two days of I don't care right like we have got some movement back we'll build after time but that's all we have to do from one thing ideally this would

be a daily routine thing I love people to do is in the morning if you can a 5 to seven minute window of play on the ground on a mat roll don't hold a stratic stretch but roll spin turn flip your arm up backwards put yourself in bad positions you would be stunned when you walk up out of that and go oh my God like everything's open now your nose opens up like back pain goes away just roll and move and I mean physically roll if you can for five minutes in the morning it will

change people's lives I'm going to surprise my son talage tomorrow morning he'll be like what's going on Dad we have a wrestling match yeah yeah there you go I'm into it all right now we're going to jump to someone in their 30s so someone in their 20s they've had a dynamic decade they've done a variety of exercises they' feel pretty limber they're now in their 30s and 40s they're beginning to feel the ravages of Aging a little bit here and there like this hurts that hurts they can't quite do the things if they drink one

night they can't quite recover as fast like they they feel the effects of Aging to some degree how do you think about these two decades we shouldn't from this point on change anything nothing between a 20 to 120y old should be changing your starting place is different if you're starting this journey at 60 versus 20 fine we might be a little bit less aggressive we we'll progress more conservatively but fundamentally we've already laid that scaffolding we know what we have to get done so whether you're 26 or 66 or 96 the F minute routine is

still a fantastic idea you should still do your Pilates or your hike or whatever you're going to do nothing's changed in terms of our physiology the Same by the way would be my answer for male or female how should a woman no no there's no structure at this level that is different there might be a few layers down where we start splitting some things out but at the core this is what it is if we think about the physical side of longevity there's biology and mental health and yeah sure just within my Lane here what

do we think we have to get done okay starting off number one we have to have the physical attributes to age successfully now there's of them that I go after we could name them you could probably guess many of them of course aerobic capacity and physical strength and great okay we have to have those most people are too dialed in on that and it's important it's good start but that's just number one physical attributes number two we have to be injury-free because you will never get to Point number one if we're going through disc injuries

and things like that okay great but then we have more interesting things we have are you zombie apocalypse ready what do I mean by that I think a 60-year-old should be able to jog well yeah you should be able to jog not like 400 yards not a marathon but we should be able to jog you should be able to stand up paddle board you should be able to roll you should be able to stretch and grab something that you don't have this is the thing that's going to happen in your life that shuts you down

this is already taken care of in our basic play but we should have fundamental skills everyone should be able to throw something and catch and jump oh my goodness jumping like we've lost that entirely jump and land and play we have to have that you're never going to find that in a meta analysis stacked up against VO2 max right for scientific reasons we I could talk about but that but that's a part we have to go after too right then we have to have resilience what's resilience mean I should be able to throw you right

now into an exercise you've never done before and you don't have extreme injury or pain because of it you should be able to do that and then wake up tomorrow not in blistering soreness now I could do that to anybody but if I just did a little variation in your day let's say our car broke down we had to walk 5 miles you shouldn't wake up the next day with blisters on your feet she had weird shoes you get the point here right we should have some physical resilience on novel tasks touch too often we

spend time trying to optimize for the task we're already doing but are we fantastic and non-precious can we handle the thing that we did not plan for can we handle oh by the way we're going to have to do that 10mile hike by the way with no food you're not going to perform your best it's but can you actually physically do it or are you literally not going to make it that's the resilience we need to have from the physical side of the perspective so when we think about that as we're going from our 20-y

old to 40-year old to 50-year old and our eye does change a little bit towards Longevity if if that's how you want to phrase it that's the stuff I start folding back in and saying okay great when you're 25 even if you're out of shape I could probably make you go play basketball and you're not going to tear an Achilles it's very unlikely your acl's not going you're you're going to be super sore in your Cales and stuff if you do that with a 60-year-old we might tear something MH okay great we've lost some resiliency

you called it some of the Aging things we have a they like physiologically we can measure resilience yeah lots of different ways but that's the stuff we need to be thinking about is what happens when you tripped on that thing and you put your foot out real fast did you then tear a calf muscle did you pull a hamstring did like that's the resilience we need to build up for unexpected ons yeah and you're saying that is that's built up by being active for all these years that when you narrow your set of things when

you're not active that's what you create this deficiency yeah but what I I hear you saying two things one is that culturally we've over indexed on methods oh well for sure when you when we talk about all the particular you're mostly a fault for that by the way you're you're to blame for a lot of that so over indexing on methods it basically it um it Narrows the aperture to a point where we miss out on just go out and play and be active Y and being active means generally sports or like like you're saying

rolling around or like just doing whatever but it's generally that's the uh it's a much more of a Carefree approach to being physically fit yeah we we want to be careful about unstructured also leads to lack of progress so too much variety is hard to adapt to if we did a random workout every single day you would have a really hard time progressing there's not enough stimuli of stressor onto a system for it to adapt so if you to use your terms over index on variety and randomization great you've made yourself super resilient against novel

challenges you struggle to make any specific progress though if you over index on specificity you make progress in those exact areas but you've now opened up the window of lack of resilience okay so what we need to do is have our eye probably for your this this goal of saying mostly resilient but also not just making stuff up as we go humans are really bad about if we have that approach we're not going to progressively overload we're not going to really remember what we did and we're going to kind of choose the things we're probably

good at and fall into the same patterns this is I mean this is the challenge I would imagine someone listening to this conversation they've heard us ping pong right where you're talking about this general idea of being active I come back and say hey we're over indexing methods and then you add the the clarification also like you do need some structure to make sure you've got these basics in place also free play is really important so I would imagine the next thing someone's going to say is so what do I do yeah and so this

is the thing that I mean even I struggled with this right you you try to take the world's information and say all right I'm willing to spend an hour a day being active what do I do okay great so I'll give you an example now caveat cave caveat caveat okay you guys fill in the blanks it's just an example of what one could do I personally for all of the the middle to later age people that I coach and myself I do it by physical Seasons so every quarter of the year I change the Approach

at the highest level it is something like this in the winter time I'm going to choose physical activity that's more indoors makes sense right my outdoor activities might be something more like I'm going to be out in the woods in the snow stuff like that but my real training hard training is going to be endorsed because I can control it I can overload I can load I can do all those things in the summer time it's going to be flipped I'm going to intentionally choose the bulk of my workouts to be outside because the day

is literally longer my options are longer now I've got more hours to train in the sunlight and I want to be outside that's the goal so why fight that thing right and we like can you imagine just like sitting on a treadmill inside looking out at this the amazing California weather and hating your life and wanting don't do that go outside just build it appropriately right so I will go quarter by quarter generally in the springtime I will tend to go in more of a fat loss hypercaloric hypocaloric high energy expenditure who doesn't want to

look lean for the summer great what do I do in the winter the opposite right like I don't of course get fat but that's when I'm probably going to add muscle mass I'm going to be indoors more I'm going to be cold probably and I'm going to be stuck in joying the heck out of Thanksgiving Christmas like S I know I'm going to add weight anyways because I'm going to do those things I I've chosen that Vice great so why not take it to a purpose if I'm going to be hyper chloric in my personal

life then why not put myself in a position where hyper chloric is needed for the training adaptation so I'm just matching a little bit of discipline with my lifestyle that I've chosen to you know go forward and go against right so I will run them personally by quarters if People's goals are different or lifestyles are whatever is fine but I'm not going to fight some basic principles like I know the physical activities I'm going to choose in the summer because of my kids because of what I prefer I'm going to lean into it right so

I'm going to spend the summer while I'm lean also ramping my conditioning way up because the fall ends up being a lot of outdoor hiking for me I'm in the mountains running around the like most of the Fall I'm going to be prepared for that I'm going to come back after that my feet are going to be trashed cuz you're running around the mountains in Boots all the times and things like that and going be cold and all that stuff and now I'm going to go back to a different thing but then I'm coming off

of the winter not in great physical shape muscle mass is up a little bit bigger and then we spend the thing repairing some injuries coming back down spending more time on Mobility things like that opening things back up coming into a fat loss phase there so that's one example of how I run it and how I'll typically do it so imagine someone hears that they're like okay so what do I do yeah right so it is as simple as this you have your foundation of physical activity yeah can you move throughout the day figure that

out does that mean you go for three 10minute walks a day can you have a standing desk what is the thing you can do to get your Baseline physical activity in there check that box off two how are we getting our Mobility flexibility range of motion can we get a five minute flow in the morning are we going to need a structured 45 minute what are we doing to move our joints through a large range of motion check that off number three we need to be doing something that requires non-controlled environment some part of your

physical practice has to be reactive are you engaging with the stimuli are you making a decision right that is our vestibular side that is our balance that is propri reception that is unplanned movement that could be surfing that could be tennis that could be um playing Nintendo Wii if that even exists anymore like it does oh okay great something where I'm making a choice I'm not on the treadmill I'm not plann my feet aren't perfectly together my breath isn't locked down and I'm not controlled uncontrolled movement okay that is physical activity is going to be

every day movement is going to be be most days if we can what I'm talking about here can be as little as one day a week to 3 days a week great if that's five days a week fine but no minimum or less than one day a week so this is reducible like we actually yeah we can get there we could yeah so as like maybe a product of this conversation is we could give people a weekly summary of like this amount of time basically just summarize those activities of unstructured of structured of movement so

that then they can fill in the blanks with the things they enjoy in those categories yeah it's the it's the list of Concepts that we're trying to hit how many days per week and then sample methods yeah boom boom boom boom boom some infinite ones right because I know like in sleep like I I mean I've been working very hard on sleep I can compress that into about seven todos like if you want good sleep do these seven things yep it's very straightforward and so it feels like exercise is oh yeah you think it's easily

as compressible to get to that level right now it's it's it's ASM to right so to get to that level probably maybe Seven's going to sound about right and then to get to level two it's a few at the tail end now where every minute detail is going to matter but yeah for the the average person I mean I think we're at what three or four sort of right now some some movement some range of motion yeah some reactivity we stack on something that adds a challenge to physical strength okay minimum two days a week

per muscle group would be ideal for most people most of the time by the way this could be in the same session yeah could be the same day could be separate sessions could alternate them could be in the morning evening those things don't necessarily matter at this level level 2 three 4 maybe right now no all right next one something that challenges your ability to sustain long-term effort this is not high intes intervals this is long-term effort if you everyone's super excited about rocking great if that is classic cardio fine if it is your activity

class your group class whatever again we can combine these things in the same node then we have another one which is you got to get to a high heart rate you got to hit the high rate come back down do it again that could be done in the same session could be done a different ones minimum one day a week getting to a true heart rate Max but probably no more than three either um we often times not always but many people run into problems if they're really up to max heart rate more than three

times a week and they're not taking care of business in the rest of their down regulation of their life especially lots of problems there so we don't want to over over push that one yeah that has put us in a good spot already right so if you stack that up if you wanted to you have a let's be more realistic five days a week you're fairly active moving around if this is when you're at the airport you're instead of sitting there between layovers you're walking all the little hacks you can do to be more physically

moving you try to do something with your joints every single day even if it's as little as 5 minutes and now let's say on Monday and Wednesday and Friday you're going to lift some weights for 30 minutes okay got that out uh Tuesdays you're just off entirely and Thursday you're going to do one Max interval this could be 30 seconds on as hard as you can 30 seconds off there's no magic number to that by the way I'm just giving one example you're going to do five or six rounds of that on an assault bike

and that whole workout takes you 20 minutes at Absolute Max right great now on the weekend you do a longer walk like we're pretty close M like we we've missed the sport sort of thing or whatever but maybe we fold that in one of the other days maybe that's the same day you lift maybe that's the same day you also do it on your strength or your uh uh your interval day because that was shorter anyways and you go play basketball in your backyard maybe you play basketball and you time it like there's lots of

ways you can fold this into your um into your time domains with your restrictions of equipment and availability things you could collapse this conversation and say okay it's kids run jump throw family culture Y Community culture in your teens you're doing squat push pole where you have more structural things in your 20s you start this new habit of basically uh thinking through like a 7-Day cycle where you have these core principles of cardio uh rest and we can map this out for people we can say like have these methods or have have these what you

call them Concepts Concepts in place and then here's a few examples of methods and then pick and choose which ones you like but otherwise a person could approach Life Fitness through this very simple framework and not feel overwhelmed by the nearly infinitely long list yeah of uh methods that are otherwise going to create some paralysis is that is that accurate the only little tweak there is the first part run jump throw never goes away yeah stays in there it always yeah it's a through line right if you can run jump throw you'll age well yeah

cuz I've never heard anyone actually in all my reading of fitness I've never heard anyone compress this into an easy to understand life formula yeah like often times you'll hear you know V2 Max is a good predictor of longevity great you know or like single rep max or continuous push-ups or grip strength and so you're focusing on these given things but you're really missing this larger picture of what is activity what is physical fitness and so like this to me it resonates as a a well structured form that spans decades it's not going to change

when you're 60 or 70 or 80 it's going to be the same as when you're 20s uh you may move differently on those time periods but the same structur is in place I like this yeah is it the case uh Andy that when you do things like throw jump run squat Push Pull are you spending down your joints so like there's a part of it of course that you're strengthening your joints and you're creating resilience also are you spending it down so how do you how do you think through spin down versus uh build up

yeah this is a hormetic stressor right this is toxins it's the devil is in the dosage so anything that you bring into your body is going to create a physiological stressor if your body comes back responds bigger faster stronger whatever then we can we think that as positive if it comes back as worse then we think of that as negative this is the exact same question how do I figure that out where is that ju position of am I making my shoulder worse or end up healthier number one you have to move wellish is how

I'll phrase it you don't have to be perfect but you have to move wellish this is your Technique comment of like don't overstress but also be mindful that there is some remember the joints are supposed to go through their full range of motion your knee joint is flexion extension for the most part slightly bit translation rotation right um it is not going to do a ton of internal external rotation and you're going to move internal external rotation from the hipper for the most part okay great the shoulder has a different range of motion it needs

to be put through its range of motion so one of the challenges we want to look at in your gym in your workout is are you actually stressing it over all of this range of motions are only stressing in a one mhm that's going to be a recipe for injury because you are going to overuse on one side of it and now you've got the analogy what we've used for decades now is you can imagine a car with four tires and the alignment is slightly off yeah wear and tear right great so alignment is everything

as a starting place it's not the only thing and you can get away with bad alignment for sure when can you not get away with bad alignment when the volume gets ratcheted up so that's the second thing you're paying attention to if you're at a low volume then a little bit of asymmetry doesn't matter a lot of asymmetry will not matter as you ratchet up volume now the exposure starts to really become an issue so what do you do move well and be judicious with your volume 10% is the number will say don't go over

about a 10% increase in volume per week as a progression strategy that's going to give your tissue some time I've used this phrase several times now tissue tolerance that's what I necessarily mean can I tolerate joint stimula just basically mean if I'm picking up the game of tennis yep and my first day out I'm going for 15 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes and then next week out I'm going out for 35 minutes like then 40 45 is that how I think about it sure just 10% right so if you went for 20 minutes

and you went three times this week great first of all let's go three times not five because now we weren't ready for it day one now we're back let's give it some 15 minutes now 10% of that is another minute and a half you're not going to go to 16 and a half minutes it's not realistic right but think about it the five actually I love is because the same thing happens the weight room I'll add five more pounds I'll add five more minutes okay great well 15 went to 20 you saying you're saying it

actually it it's worth being particular it's going to compound yeah fast right because 15 is going to go to 20 205 your 10% rule is actually precise it's not an approximation it's still an approximation because again you're who's going to me who's going to stop and start there you might right most people are going to stop me like it's been 16 minutes I'm sort of out of there yeah but what you want to think is okay I went from 15 and then I went to 20 then I went to 25 now you're a month in

and you've doubled you're at 30 that happened fast maybe we should hold at 30 for two months M long time so we can run that average out pretty good so if you're going to progress quickly like that then when you get to even just below your threshold maybe we should spend months and months there and now we have an option do we want to fold on a fourth day okay great do we want to bring in 10 more minutes we we can be fine but we can't add a fourth day and 10 more minutes yeah

I like this this is like a again a power law as we're listing out our 10 things to do yeah I would include this in the list of as you build up capacity in any given thing stage it yeah and like it's important that you if you're going to over index on methods don't do that like just work on Concepts but in this case you do want to be mind of some degree of accuracy because like you're saying you've got a compounded problem if you're approximating you could get yourself into trouble and then be a

risk of injury there is a I can't remember his name but there is a famous uh historical figure as I call him who held his right I think it was his right arm up in protest of some event right I remember reading about this you see this picture right and decades later his arm is basically fused vertically okay your body will adapt this was in India right yeah his fingernails had grown out to be tot like his shoulder bones were turned upwards almost right I don't know if he was born that way or the story

is real it doesn't matter right it's the point of saying your body is very plastic and it almost always is paying attention every little thing you're doing is going to matter it will adjust if you give it time what it won't adjust for well sorry it will adjust but it's going to send you an adjustment signal that says don't do that anymore yeah that we call that pain mhm right whether a classic injury or almost likely there isn't but there is a pain signal that will start far before an actual tissue injury occurs especially chronic

overuse right that's what those things are they are warnings that say hey we weren't used to this we don't like this if you can play right below that threshold in fact this is how a really high class physical therapist will adjust or will will uh go after pain what we want to do is let's say your hip hurts every time you do um running okay great we're not going to go take four weeks off running that's generally a terrible strategy what we want to figure out is okay what speed does it hurt and how many

miles does it start hurting at Great and then I want you to go below that line and I want to do it and take a day off and do it again take a day off and do it again and now next week let's go 1% higher and what you're going to notice happen is that Baseline of pain that pain threshold starts to move up mhm because you have desensitized pain desensitization is is the principle here it's it's very very effective it's not always going to work but it is a really strong strategy it is much

preferred to then the old adage of just take two weeks off and come back and try again it's like propaganda to the nerves and muscles 100% we need to tell it this is okay we're safe here build up tolerance and we move up and we move forward it's not ignoring it's not blocking a pain signal it is saying we're safe here we're going to trust me we're going to progress appropiately we're cool yeah not propaganda it's um it's a news it's an an announcement yeah yeah yeah there you exactly yeah and now we need to

say hey cool we got the signal we're going to adjust so we do want to pay attention to progression that is one of the things that's going to allow us to have that hortic stresser yeah that it makes it healthy for the joint rather than unhealthy for the joint okay let's jump to uh two other topics and then we'll go to the gym yeah finally I didn't work out this morning so my body is like what's up um sounds a bunch like a pre- excuse heard that one before no no like uh a pre- excuse

would have been if I would have worked out ah I'm saying I haven't oh I'm sorry yeah I didn't work out oh you didn't yeah because I wanted to give it my best today like if you had me doing hard things I didn't want to be worn down okay I'm just saying my body's you resilient you would have been fine my body's complaining because it didn't get its normal movement this morning what percentage of the days in the last 500 Days have you done your training before this time of the day uh every single day

that's right so you probably are very thr gr off right now yeah yeah yeah I do that's the thing is like when when I do deviate from my protocol I feel the effects so strongly and then most people's response is well you know like you've shown you have no resilience now change I make the argument there's just different ways of being like I'm not training to be dropped into a forest and fight a wild animal like you can do that sure like like you sure like and or being dropped into the desert and saying survive

on your own for 30 days you definitely can do that I'm trying for a very particular thing which it has its trade-offs like I fully acknowledge it but it's just like a it's such a foreign concept because people take their frame of like the resilience thing must be the solution for all things see I don't get it because as a a scientist this is the my whole life you cannot design a study that answers two questions that's not the point right like you're trying to answer one exactly and of all the complaints you get of

which sure many of them are reasonable that's not the one yeah because you have been clear at least from what I've seen and followed of exactly what you're going after and if you don't like that question fine follow along elsewhere right like I even told you like that's not the target I want to go after yes but I don't want to sit in the Napoleon mountains either and Med so but fine like you've been clear you're going after it your way that it is what it is that's the target you after that's the question you're

trying to answer I actually personally like the resilience side more I want to answer that question but fine science can only answer one thing at a time it's a great way to frame it because often times people will try to explain what we're doing at blueprint to their family and sure it's like the family they they make all the same arguments right it's like yeah sure sure the very it's like he's so busy trying not to die he's not living right like all these easy ones and often times it's it's challenging for people to know

how to defend this because for them it's the first time these arguments come at them and now it's like maybe I I shouldn't be supporting this thing with you know I could I shouldn't have confidence in this and so um these kinds of conversations help people like that's a really really great clarification like when you're doing science you can ask one question yeah you can't ask two and so then it just it lessens the value of the Endeavor and so that's a really great clarification and that's what people can then say is like the reason

why this thing exists is to do this given thing and when you do this thing structurally you can't do two things so no I mean this is where we always laugh about when people make comments in public forums or other places about oh the study was terrible because I'm like okay yes there is such a things as a badly designed study there's also studies that were asking question that you weren't interested in yeah that doesn't make it a bad study just I'm sorry didn't answer your question but that's not what we were trying to do

over there so judging the quality of the study your methods fine like bring it all day I said earlier I hope people continue to challenge you uh it's only going to make you better and all the things right let's figure out where you're failing and get better yeah but challenging the point that's an Ethics question right this is an is or an ought yeah and you want to go after that mission fine I think the easiest way I have answered that question if if you care is always one way to think about it would be

the question of what could happen if that's as simple it is he just wants to know what could happen if no no there's nothing else to it like what could happen if I did all these things I don't know I don't know the answer you don't know the answer you've gotten a lot of answers thus far that's that's as complicated as it has to be right someone has was going to do it or would have maybe and uh you're going to answer questions that I don't know you know from your an of one there but

what could happen if yeah yeah that's way that's as really complicated as it has to be that's a good way of saying it okay let's jump now to the topic of injury yep so two things on this leading into this question I have stopped doing certain things in life because of the risk of injury so for example I grew up snowboarding in skiing yeah I no longer do those things I used I rode motorcycles with my son I rode motorcycles as a kid I love them when my son uh was growing up I thought you

know I want you to have the experience I did too and then in recent years I've stopped because they're dangerous and so I've chosen particular activities like I still drive though yeah probably more dangerous than the other ones I agree I agree yeah so I agree like statistically it's probably safer for me snowboard than it is we actually we need to look at the stats on that but like I'm sure it is but there's definitely like a it's not a clean stats thought like if you're basically saying I'm looking at statistical nature of of injury

it does not translate cleanly to life right life is messy it's like I still need to drive two places in my life I can choose whether I'm going to ski or snowboard and so I one is I've made that decision now a lot of people will say you know that means you've lost life like if you can no longer do those things then you've given up on life and now you've chos this really bad you know track so one is my first question is how do you think about uh my decision personally and two is

your know injury I recently sprained my ankle and I did it in like the most ironic way possible so this is this is amazing I mean we know that irony hunts me right like irony wants to kill me for the beauty of its manifestation we know eventually irony will probably win because that's the universe mhm so in a very small example we were at a music festival I was with a group of people and the ground was uneven there were holes and so I said hey everybody be careful you said that yes oh a beautiful

love it everyone be careful you know like you could sprain your ankle and I I was wearing my don't ey hat and so then we're at this uh with the set plays one of my favorite songs comes on I'm with my son and it's like beautiful Saturday night right we're out and about together we're having fun and I'm like it let's go so I break out into dance and my foot drops into a hole and I twist it and so it's a it's a high-grade sprain and a fracture mhm and so I'm now 12 weeks

is since the incident and I'm fully recovered yep and um I got my doctor said he's never seen anyone heal as fast as I did we we threw the kitchen sink at it like we did all therapies and so but still like it derailed my life as injuries do and so I now have this acute awareness of injuries that I of course knew before but now it just meant so much so this is why I've made these meaningful life decisions like I'm not going to do these things that have the potential of wrecking my life

so first like General thoughts on injury what I love about this is a few weeks ago I was in Oregon with a guy named Cameron Haynes and he could not be more opposite of you he is everything on resilience right I want to be able to wake up do everything no matter what I can possibly do and he is optimized for nothing like for nothing in his possible life when I got up there he had a broken foot why do I love it so much here's the fun part he was running which he does every

day his Ultram marathons things like that and I think he stepped in a hole and I showed up and his foot was this color of your pants oh man right and I looked at him and his you know his manager and his wife were like can you please cuz he's stubborn like bull in the brain you threw everything in the kitchen sink at it he threw zero things he did nothing didn't take a multivitamin like did nothing on it okay great that morning he ran 10 miles on on the foot right wait when it's broken

after he broke it the day after the day after he ran 10 miles the day after that so day two broken foot it is purple we ran up a mountain together mile and a half a th000 FT elevation carrying a 72lb rock runs up the whole thing we shoot bows and arrows we like we do the whole thing he runs down the mountain like no derailment he is so resilient against that that weekend he had a charity event ran the whole thing with the broken foot right he wouldn't get an imaged until finally I got

him it's broken right all those things so you're sort of the opposite in the Spectrum which is like Made Me Love because honestly both of those bring me so much happiness this is the beauty of life to me that I can love him as much as I love cam I can love all the stuff you're doing as much and like we don't have to all have the same values here yeah I agree with that I want to know what all you did I want to know exactly your protocol there I also want to know cam

like how did you run 10 miles on that yeah I want to do both those did you see the images when he did have images eventually oh yeah yeah yeah and what did oh no it broken as hell yeah yeah and he didn't get he's not getting surgery yeah he's trying to like get through it and he did a whole bunch of protocol got Imes again guess what still broke cuz he did nothing but run on it okay so is I guess a few thoughts like one is this a good idea no okay there's nothing

about that that's a good idea there's nothing I support I support him as like a like you're such a so if he is awesome is that approach going to enable him to heill no and I was clear with him you're going to sacrifice most likely many more Decades of running quality on that foot yes but he like this is why I like the he just doesn't like what's his thought process uh thought process is he's getting close to September at the time and he knows he's going to be in the mountains and if something like

that happened in the mountain and he needs to get out he has to have that fortitude that ability right he's very much pushed to the now yeah right I see rather than the long-term he's like I'll figure that next 30 Years out I see so long term you think itad idea it's going to compound the problem it's not going to heal correctly it's going to create more complications and it's probably going to leak up chain yeah knee's GNA hurt back's going to hurt yes oh no yeah I I was clear with him and he understands

all that I see but that's his sort of and that's what that's what the people around him were saying is he's stubborn so like Andy can you please get him to talk some sense to him totally that he just doesn't care like like you're saying he has a different way of understanding the world and and he has a different thing if you you gave him the choice and I'm sorry cam for speaking for you but I don't think he disagree with any saying he would choose I'd rather figure these lessons out now even though he

is he's not young he's in his 50s yeah and we'll figure out the the down consequences later but he is more interested in saying as much as you want to ask your question what happens if he wants to know a question of what happens if in a different way like what would happen if this happened could I survive how much hurt could I deal with like he wants to know those his book is endure that that's what he finds as a central tenant in his life and I love that too again I told him not

to do it we put him on our our recovery protocol thankfully he followed that yeah and but I'm like I can't fix a broken bone unless you you go in there this actually reminds me my my oldest son got into David goggin for a while uhhuh and it was definitely this concept of pain is not a signal of warning pain is a signal I think David says like you're 40% uh there he has some kind of concept and so my son was definitely he he leaned into that concept and he definitely did things that uh

imperiled his health I'm not against that entirely I've never met David I don't have anything um I think he's as cool as everybody else right to me it is looking at all these people you and David and camon going okay what lessons can I extract and what yeah where do I want to aim at right so you want to aim to being feeling great now while also not sacrificing down the road right David is clearly right now a different game 100% that's fine I don't have the same value system as David I don't do that

I wouldn't coach people do that if you said I'm a robot should I do that I would say absolutely not but that's up for him to decide what goal he's trying to kick after great I would generally recommend most people not do that I don't think even as far as in cam situation my cam just like come on man you want to go run Ultra marathons the rest of your life L yeah because you're saying that that basically you're saying that the value system that like cam is saying I'm in the present I'm playing this

I want I can I survive question game and you're making the observation that look you're going to play the game less shorter in a shorter time than you want so like play your game cam just do it in a way that is slightly adjusted so that you've got a longer Horizon on gameplay yeah that's a great way to say it another way I would express it to him was okay fine let's do that but now that you got that question answered I know you can run 10 miles on a broken foot I just saw you

do it can we go it fixed now yeah can we we get it fixed yeah like checkbox yeah I mean I think goggin also has some like Hero Stories of doing something unbroken whatever so maybe for certain people they want that checkbox where they've got that story that can be told about them yeah and I'm in for that too like I when people do insanely crazy I coach athletes many of them I coach a lot of Fighters there's not a single way and there's not a cogent argument I can make that anything that they're ever

going to do is good for their long-term Health there's just not right I've got a couple of Fighters that'll be fighting in the sphere in a few weeks it's only taking life away from them yeah at the same time there's no way I could also say you shouldn't do this yeah for so many other reasons so it is just trying to step all the way back is first principal stuff and saying okay are long as you're conscious of the choice you're making I'm certainly not here to judge or even tell you where those lines of

values should be established I want you to be aware of the choice you're making because I think most people aren't yeah that is helpful I feel like I feel okay stepping into that but then saying if you choose to Value this epic experience over potential long-term risk your initial question right boy I I can't answer that with science I can't answer that with my experience that's that my values are different when you think about injury risk you have to bucket them differently you have acute injury risk and you have longterm right I don't want to

uh mountain bike or Motocross or whatever you're going to do because there's an acute injury risk okay fine that's not no necessarily a long-term overuse sort of risk that's a little bit different if you look at which sport has the highest injury rate most people are going to be stunned with what I say here but you want to take a guess my first thought was basketball but I'm probably yeah given that it's pretty low actually okay like water polo no way down it's way more obvious than you would think or completely unintuitive running running it's

not thank you you had it uh soccer's pretty high uh but running is number one now it depends on when you want to play absolute or relative games here in terms of injury rate but why a ton of people do it they're unprepared for it and they jump way up yeah and mileage so if you want to reduce injury risk oh I see they they violate that 10% they violate it all right they jump in they don't do it well they're not prepared for it boom foot knee back and they run mileage on very little

progression so what I would say is yeah sure like I don't want to you may want to think I don't I'm not going to snowboard anymore because there's a very high acute yeah injury risk of that I would also think what about your running you're at a higher risk there you're so what are you going to do here so I don't worry about it personally terms of acute injury risk I actually like things that are fairly High acute injury risk I don't snowboard or ski things like that but many other things I do where I

cut my risk is the other side of the equation I don't want to do anything that is a controllable injury risk I'm not going to run a bunch of mileage if I'm not moving well that's 100% controllable whether or not I get hurt hiking up and down a mountain or something I can't control that but I want that I I want that life experience in there that's the the game I want to play personally with our athletes they've chosen the risk I know those risks are there so then we work as hard as we can

on the other stuff so we're going to do lots of corrective movements and other stuff and sleeping the whole deal so that we can make sure we're not adding any more injury risk to that plate that is on that other side of that controllable Factor because we know we've already got our risk bucket full over there yeah you this just a a sidebar here this reminds me of like so much of the tension in reacting to what I'm saying is the entire premise of my experiment is just a thought experiment that we're entering into a

future that sits in tandem with giving birth to Super intelligence yeah and when that happens our reality is going to be different then than it is today and that means we're going to play different games and so what I'm really trying to say is uh there's a possibility that as a species when you're giving birth to Super intelligence gameplay changes and so the previous ways we thought about existence like I'm willing to trade down my life you know to fight is no longer going to be a game that people are willing to play now like

that's so offensive to some some people of like you're uh taking away my free will it's like no actually not like culture is going to move in a certain direction yeah and you're going to exist in that culture and it's just not going to be something people do and so it's not necessarily so those who exper experiened it in the moment they feel a sense of loss of like but I am this and this is my identity and this is my but that's really and I to explain this to somebody is so hard that I'm

simply saying human games are going to shift and that shift is likely going to point in the direction of increasing lifespan now we're going to play other stuff too like it doesn't mean that fun goes away just fun is different that it is right now I think of all the inflammatory and perhaps overly aggressive things you've said in your career that's not one of them I mean just look back at history with what we used to do for recreation exactly look what we do now it's not difficult to project like moving forward we're probably going

to minimize and depending on where you want to put that flag five years from now no 600 years from now I I think you're on a reasonable thing that says hey we're probably not playing football you know a thousand years from now I I love football I coach NFL athletes I played college football I'm not very offended if if you're like hey look at what we've where we've been where we're at we're probably going to reduce the amount of things cuz it kind of sucks getting hurt all the time I don't know I'm not offended

by you saying that I think like actually you're probably right it's almost like I'm I'm making a bet on a penny stock and everyone's like that's a really stupid investment like I'm I'm in these you these bigp yeah and like your your BET's really dumb and I'm saying like it's legit the right bet because yeah and it's going to happen faster yeah yeah I get of all the things you've done and said in your career like that's not that's not high on my list of like but it really is it's the source of contention it's

like when people have a beef with me yeah it's that I'm choosing a game different than what people are playing today they feel like they need to dunk on me and or Justify their existence Andor both like there's tension created that they have to reconcile through some way yeah I my my position on this with with all characters in the field is really not changed I don't really care what anyone wants to do in this type of space as long as they are not misrepresenting data they are not providing false hope especially to vulnerable populations

so people that are sick or you know emotionally distru things like that right we have to be really careful to make sure we're not leaning them down a false hole especially for than extracting money out of it selling services that that really is the line that we have to go after right we cannot misrepresent data we cannot say things are proven when they are not we cannot especially when we're in a position of power and we can't pray upon vulnerable positions Financial emotional other ones if we're outside of that if if David Goggins wants to

run a marathon every day and people want to follow that advice and they all end up hurt I don't really I'm not I don't hold David a single scent responsible for that he's very clear with what he said right if you want to do your thing I don't really care if you were to be online saying you're doing ab and c and then you were doing something else in the background then I'm like okay you're fraud that's not that's not the truth if you are misrepresenting the nature of the research whether that is scientific stuff

or your own like I don't care those are red flags those are are um those are Bad actors in my field in my opinion yeah but outside of that like you're playing it again a very different game I don't want to play the game but yeah pretty fun to watch injury so summary on injury for those listening would be um uh know the game you're playing y so if you're playing the resilience endurance I want to check a box of doing something insanely hard just know you're playing that game and it comes with a trade-off

yeah if you're playing my game of of don't die just know what that game is why you're playing it and how it's different than other people's games and then if you're somewhere somewhere else like if you're somewhere in the middle but really it's just the self-awareness to say I choose the following things for the following reasons so you're comfortable with what you're doing 100% And You Know by making that choice what your pros and cons are yeah you're getting a giving up B in classic Andy fashion you hit a great summary and I'm GNA go

back and add more things to it right this is this is this is what I do cool so I think we succeeded today because I think it is so hard I I haven't yet been able to compress yeah exercise into an easily followable format that doesn't just get demolished by Method 80 to 90% of the world lives yeah in this area totally yeah and then the remaining remaining people who really aren't the talent of optimization like that's their thing they've got their own practices and they know to do and that's great totally yeah earlier we

we were talking about having a movement practice having good range of motion V2 Max has been covered at nauseum talked about physical strength as well as sustained effort we should be able to walk for five hours or be active and chasing our kids all day like what however you want to frame this thing one component though that gets forgotten a lot about and actually I noticed is very minimal in your program is speed and power development it's really important that we do that for a bunch of reasons one almost by definition you're rarely going to

do that in a single joint fashion other stuff can be done that way uh so if you're working on V2 Max and you're biking knees and ankles are kind of moving a little bit but really not nothing else and and strength training can certainly be isolated but power is hard to do with a single joint so almost by default we're using multiple joints at once and we are connecting joint to joint and that's a very important concept that can get lost I have to be able to transfer power from my foot to my shoulder and

the entire connected chain more importantly we know that you will preferentially lose fast twitch muscle fibers with aging and the only way to activate or preserve those fast muscle fibers is very high Force demand we cannot get those through endurance training or activities to daily living we know we preferentially lose those when those go away they're not going to come back okay we we do have the ability to transform slow twitch fibers to fast twitch fibers and back and forth but we need to preserve that lastly if you look at the longevity research there's a

fun New phrase you're aware of sarcopenia which is the advanced loss of muscle with aging but now we have what we call power penia and that is you'll see equally as impressive research on lack of power from every perspective as a prognostic as a um epidemiological number for longevity we can see it as a direct training application so we have all layers of research supporting we need to have power through aging you are probably going to have the cardiovascular fitness by the time you get to be 100 with what you're doing you're probably going to

have the leg strength whether or not you have the power is going to be a real hold because you have got to be able to get up those stairs you have to get off the ground that's not a slow activity even a high Force activity if there's a Time domain to it and by the way this is what power is it is force multiplied by velocity it is work over time and so let's use an example of if you're going to walk up some stairs you might go out of breath walking up the stairs and

you think man it's my V2 Max is low M if your legs are weak then that step represents a 90% effort as an example what drove your heart rate up is the fact you just did a 90% squat right so that was a leg strength issue more than it was a cardiovascular issue by the same token getting your foot up to the next step before you fall on your face is a velocity issue you have to have the speed to get your foot up there the strength to then stop your body from falling on top

of it and now the cardiovascular thing is a secondary input As you move throughout life you're going to be limited by your speed more than you will anything else when we start talking about the numbers you're talking about if you want to live to 70 you'll probably be fine slow if you want to live to 140 you have no chance living from 70 to 140 slow as hell it's a very hard thing to train and it is the very first physiological trait that goes away with aging and I see almost nobody paying attention to it

from the Aging longevity perspective despite the fact that we know those two big things great so as long as we cover power or sorry yeah as long as we cover force and speed yeah we're there we got power um Andy this has been great I've been trying to find the power laws of how to approach health and wellness and so we approach it initially looking at the markers of physical fitness that do have the highest predictive value for longevity right we look at V2 Max we look at strength um I think some of the things

you mentioned that I'm missing power I think it's great great um that's a new dimension of what we're doing um also the rotation I I don't think I'm doing any rotation so I'm excited to fill these holes of my routine uh package it up in a way that can be easily implemented by others so really enjoyed having you here I thought this was a great conversation the first time in my mind where things are easily structured and understood that someone else can be like oh sure like I can totally do this so I enjoyed this

all right well it was a real pleasure and we got a couple things to work on in the gym but there's also some things we haven't unveiled yet so you have to check that video out to see exciting look at that promo cut for you cool guys all right love it great this was great amazing