This Type of Exercise Reverses 20 Years of Heart Aging, Improves Brain Health, & Fights Cancer

but I think one of the most convincing studies that I've seen for vigorous intensity exercise has to do with structural changes in the Aging heart so as we age our heart undergo structural changes it gets smaller in size and it gets stiffer and this translates to functional um you know deficiencies like Exercise capacity goes down but also it increases the risk for cardiovascular disease a lot of different changes to happen in the cardiovascular system when that occurs and so um there was a study done at UT Southwest and Dallas by Ben lavine's group where they

took 50 year-olds that were they were disease-free but they were sedentary right so they didn't have type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease but they weren't physically active and they put them on one or two two different exercise protocols one that was the control group which was more like a stretching a little bit of a body weight um training it wasn't high intensity they weren't really getting the heart rate up a little more like yoga is type of workout and the other group did that but they also had a high-intensity like vigorous exercise workout program and

this was a two-year intervention um study and so the first six months was like a progressive building up their their their endurance and um once they got to the six-month part U Mark uh most of these people were doing about four to five hours a week of training and a good portion of that time was spent in what's called maximal um your maximal state exercise state where they they were doing like 20 to 30 minutes a day of maximal intensity exercise not maximum intensity but um steady state so they were able to basically maintain the

maximum amount of intensity they could for 20 or 30 minutes so it was it was vigorous they were going 75 80% Max Max heart rate um they also did the Norwegian 4x4 protocol once a week and after those two years the structural changes in their heart reverted back almost 20 years so this their hearts got like more malleable and they got larger and it was like looking at a 30-year-old heart and these were 50-year olds and so I mean to me it was just so astounding that you could get structual changes in the heart essentially

is reversing the Aging Heart by just about 20 years from doing this vigorous intensity exercise protocol in 50-year olds that were sedentary and there's also drug siiz blood pressure improvements in um with blood pressure with vigorous intensity exercise so there's been a variety of randomized control trials and meta analyses of these trials that have found people that work out and do more vigorous intensity exercise 3 to four days a week about 20 to 60 Minutes of vigorous intensity exercise can improve their blood pressure similar to medications like anti anti hypertensive medications and blood pressure is

not high blood pressure is not just um a risk factor for cardiovascular disease it's now been establish that it's one of the most important early risk factors for dementia and Alzheimer's disease so the fact that you can comparably get these improvements and blood pressure um like you would get with a pharmaceutical drug is also I think extremely encouraging right so I want to shift gears just for a minute and get into um some of the brain benefits I think probably one of the most convincing reasons to get your heart rate up high when I say

High I mean 75 80% max heart rate to do that is from brain benefits and that largely has to do with something called lactate which probably many of you are familiar with so when you force your muscles to work so hard that they they you can't get oxygen to them fast enough to make energy they're they have to adapt right and they use glucose as energy without the mitochondria which is generally how you're making energy and as a body byproduct of that you're make you're you're turning out lactate which was thought to be this sort

of metabolic byproduct um it turns out it's much more than that and so lactate gets into circulation and it's taken up by other tissues including the muscle the brain the heart liver and it's used as energy in those tissues so it's a very energetically favorable source of energy it's actually easier to make energy from lactate than from glucose so it takes less energy to make energy from lactate than glucose but also it acts as a signaling molecule it's a way for your mus your muscles to communicate with other parts of your body um because you

know when you're exercising it is a stress on the body and so adaptations happen right when you're when you're working your muscles hard you can you know increase muscle hypertrophy um these adaptations happen cardiovascular improvements you're getting increases in stroke volume cardiorespiratory Fitness improvements well the brain also works really hard during exercise and so lactate is communicating with the brain um and there's many benefits to having lactate go into the brain and one of those is that it signals to the brain to make something called brain Drive neurotrophic factor or bdnf and what this is

is a growth factor that is involved increasing new neurons inside the hippocampus um and other regions in the brain but mostly the hippocampus which is important for learning and memory um and there's been intervention studies showing that aerobic exercise after you know older adults that do it for 2 years increase their hip cample volume by like 2% so um it increases neurogenesis but it also is important for neuroplasticity um this is this is the way your brain adapts and um is able to adapt to the changing environment and still function it plays a big role

in um depression people that are depressed have a very uh low level of neuroplasticity and so they're they have a hard time adapting to the changing environment and that causes depressive symptoms so brain Drive neurotop factor is like amazing for your brain you want more of it and high intensity you know exercise is the way to get more of it it ALS lactate also signals to the brain to make neurotransmitters like norepinephrine and serotonin these Studies have been done in humans um lactate again made from muscles when you're forcing your muscles to work hard when

you're going high intensity crosses over the bloodb brain barrier and your brain is working hard during exercise and so lactate is fueling that your brain function during exercise but it's also increasing things like norepinephrine which is involved in focus and attention serotonin and there have been studies showing that even 10 minutes of a high-intensity interval training workout can um improve cognition improve mood I mean it's just really easy to get those improvements in just a short amount of time by like you know just getting after it pretty hard some of the protocols that have shown

improvements in U maximizing B bdnf um really are intensity and duration dependent so the harder you go 80% max heart rate for 30 to 40 minutes is one of the most robust ways there's also another really good protocol so this would be 6 minutes of high-intensity imal training where you do about 40c allout intervals separated by some recovery periods that also has been shown to pretty robustly increase brand dve neurotropic Factor as well so I just want to spend just a second talking about some of the anti- metastatic effects of a vigorous intensity exercise most

of us here know that exercise is one of the best things you can do to prevent cancer but also as an adjunct cancer or treatment many different ways that's occurring but one interesting way that most people don't know about is through the shearing forces of your blood just blood flow so just getting that blood flow flow to go faster by exercising by getting that exercise um kills what are called circulating tumor cells um these are these are tumor cells that have escaped a primary site of the tumor get into circulation and they go and you

know try to travel to other tissues and take Camp there and you know metastasize well circulating cheer cells are very sensitive to the mechanical forces the shearing forces of blood flow and they can't they can't handle the stress like anormal cells can and they die um and so I think that's a really interesting way to think about it because it's so it's like oh yeah I need to get my blood flow up I need to I need to get my heart rate going and my blood flow up and that is something that has an antimetastatic

effect