261 ‒ Training for The Centenarian Decathlon: zone 2, VO2 max, stability, and strength

if I knew that all this training I was doing everything I'm doing if I knew that it was going to shorten My Life by a year I would still do it purely for the Improvement in quality of life between now and the end of my life the fact that it's not shortening My Life by a year the fact that it's probably adding five to seven years to my life and improving the quality of my life means day in and day out I just think it's about the most important thing um that I can do Visa

my physical health hey everyone welcome to the drive podcast I'm your host Peter [Music] AA never done a live event never done a live AMA everything has been recorded so how you feel ready you feel like there's more pressure on this because there is you can't screw up everything you say is officially written in stone yeah that's that's good so we'll see we'll see how it goes so what we're doing tonight today depending on where you're at is kind of an AMA that's all focused on one thing which is the centinary into cathlon and so

what we did is for everyone who pre-ordered they could sign up for the event they submitted a bunch of questions we went through I mean there was thousands of questions so right off the bat we'll apologize to anybody who we can't answer the question but we tried to group them together kind of organize them a bit really to try and get through as much as we can so if anyone has heard our amas before they'll probably know sometimes we can go into a little bit of detail and sometimes one question can take a while but

the goal for this one is more of that rapid fire let's see how many we can get out and I think it should be it should be good so anything you want to add or say before we get rolling no but feel free to interrupt me if I'm being too longwinded all right well just just point at the watch and say we got to speed it up um so I think what would be helpful is because we did get a lot of questions around hey what's the best thing you can do for longevity like there's

only one thing you know you have five tactics in the tool kit but if there's one thing people should focus on what would that be and maybe it' be worth just kind of giving a little piece on that just as we set the stage on why we decided to focus on the centinary de cathlon and kind of why you think that's so important for people's longevity Journey yeah I mean look it's an impossible question to answer because if you got a person who's sleeping four hours a night if you don't fix that nothing else will

matter if you have a person who's um you know malnourished you know you sort of have to address these issues but generally speaking if everything in your life is a six or or seven out of 10 taking your exercise to a 10 out of 10 is going to have a greater impact on both the length and quality of your life than any of the other domains that I can think of perhaps with the exception of emotional health that's one that can be you know such a binary thing um that you know if you if you

take a person who you know for example like me where you know that house is not in order you know until that's addressed all the exercise in the world wouldn't fix that either so it's a tough question I I get asked that question all the time I wish I had a slick answer for it but that's that's really the best I can say yeah yeah if anyone's read the book and has a really quick 30- second answer they want to email to us that Peter can steal feel free to do that because we'll take it

um so I think it'd be helpful maybe let's just quickly Define centenarian de cathlon marginal decade two terms that we use quite a bit obviously people will have read the book but I think it's still good to just get a quick definition of that because it will set the tone for everything we're going to cover yeah marginal decade is the last decade of your life so everyone will have a marginal decade uh most people certainly don't know the day they enter it um sometimes you know when you're in it you know if you're especially if

you're nearing the end of it a person probably has a sense of that appreciation but it is an important uh model because I think that the marginal decade for most people is really a period of poor life quality uh physical health has usually declined significantly cognitive Health potentially has declined as well and as I as I sort of observed many people in their marginal decades including you know people I've been close to um I noticed that there can be a great sense of withdrawal uh because of these things right you're not participating in in in

life so the idea here is quite simple right which is if you plan to have a remarkable marginal decade by definition it means that all the decades that came before it also had to be pretty remarkable and the analogy I use in the book is that of an Archer probably because that's what I am but if you really want to be proficient at 50 yards with a bow and arrow practice at 100 and you'll be amazed at how simple 50 becomes and 60 and 70 and 80 it's a very nonlinear relationship in terms of accuracy

with a bow and arrow the centinary IND cathlon becomes the scaffolding upon which I actually think of this so This Again came from an idea or an observation I suppose I had in my own life which was from age 13 to about 42 I was constantly involved in something very specific that I was training for so I never exercised I trained right I trained for boxing I trained for cycling I trained for swimming I had competitions I had meets and everything I did Visa exercise was in service of a goal and that made it very

easy there there was real specificity to what I did and then when I sort of hung up my bike I realized oh my God like I don't know what I'm doing I mean I'm still exercising but it didn't feel like it had a purpose and I sort of realized that's actually how most people exercise and when compared to the alternative which is not exercising that's okay but I realized as I thought more about this marginal decade I needed to be very spefic specific in my training to make sure I didn't arrive there and sort of

Leave it to chance would I be strong enough healthy enough have enough balance all of those things and so what I realized is I had to you know to borrow the phrase from Annie Duke I had to backcast from that marginal decade around a set of very specific events and that set of events um we would we would call the centinary in De cathlon and everybody's going to pick different events these can be activi of daily living these could be very specific you know recreational activities I think it's a good idea to have both in

there um and the more specifically you train for those uh the more directed your training is yeah and I think what would be helpful right now is I know you have that list right next to you is maybe just reading through your list and again as you kind of stated your list doesn't mean it has to be everyone else's list but a lot of times I think when there's newer Concepts or people people are trying to figure out how this works it's helpful to hear like an example so do you kind of want to just

burn through your list and let people know how you're thinking about this in your life yeah and and I I will say this it's organized in a way that's a bit confusing um because in my mind I'm constantly thinking okay mobility and strength matter um aerobic uh capacity matters so sort of aerobic efficiency matters Peak aerobic performance matters um so I'm in the back of my thinking I have to make sure I can do all of those things well and then some of my centenarian to kathon Olympics are like exercises or metrics or Feats and

others are activities so I I'll try to add a bit of color here right and real quick you kind of mentioned your four pillars of exercise but people also know by different things which is Zone 2 maybe or V2 Max so do you just kind of want to explain when I talk about aerobic efficiency that's Zone 2 when I talk about Peak aerobic output that's V2 Max strength stability in withth stability is mobility balance things like that okay so in no particular order um pick up a 30b child from a squatted position or from a

crib those are two very difficult positions so that requires strength stability Mobility get up off the floor with one point of support that's stability and strength place a 30 lb suitcase overhead strength also Mobility dead hang for 30 seconds strength and stability Farmer Walk for for 1 minute with 25% of body weight in each hand so again it's something that today I could do for a day that's really that's really pushing the bounds of what I would want to be able to do in my 80s for example strength and Anor robic uh pull or push

a weighted sled 100t with and I've put in here kind of a metric of resistance um again what is that really all about um this is kind of one of those things if you're if you're in a dangerous situation uh you know a spouse has fallen you have to pull somebody out of the way or something like that walk up and down stairs with feet pointed perfectly forward so if your feet are pointed perfectly forward as you're walking up and down flights of stairs it means you still have the ankle Mobility to do that so

you can get an angle between your foot and your tibia your shin um into an acute angle as opposed to having to turn your feet outward uh single leg stand with eyes open for 30 seconds with eyes closed for 15 seconds single leg um uh get up without support so like getting up off a seat for example um hex bar deadlift my body weight for five reps again pretty aggressive not now uh a dumbbell lunge in perfect form with 15% of my body weight in each hand for 10 reps cover three miles in one hour

by foot so again that's 20 minute mile is pretty slow but if you think about being able to do that in the last decade of your life carry 20 lbs up four flights of stairs produce a V2 Max above 30 milliliters per minute per kilogram and if you can do that that that basically buys you a whole bunch of activities that means you could walk up a 6% grade at 3 miles an hour you know for a period of time not necessarily for an hour but but perhaps for if you know 20 15 minutes tread

water for 10 minutes um not that I have a plan to but you again you think about what's implied like that's a very functionally aerobic thing to do scale a ledge at shoulder height or pull myself out of a pool onto a deck 12 in above the water surface um single leg GL glute Bridge 15 reps without loading my lumbar spine um and uh do a plank in perfect form with scapula retracted no hip sag for 1 minute so I have several of these lists there are things that I would add to this that are

you know I have on a different list that get more into recreational activity so I I do want to be able to pull a 50 PB bow back a compound bow that's 50 pounds and a compound bow of course lets off as you get further but you still have to be able to pull 50 pounds at the outset so yeah and I think it's helpful for people because if you think about the list you made very specific things but you kind of hinted at there's a reason behind everything right like the the dumbbell being able

to lift it is grandkids great grandkids you want to be able to play with them being able to get off the ground is you want to be able to live by yourself or with the spouse and be able to like fully move not worry about falling and so if anyone's having trouble kind of thinking about how they do it it sometimes it helpful to just take a step back and be like you know do you want to live in a city area where you can walk to get groceries and bring them back and then you

can get specific from there too so you know for anyone who's kind of thinking okay what specifically should they think about for that always feel free to take a step back and then get detailed going forward now you mentioned earlier kind of emotional health there wasn't anything on there on your list as it relates to that and we did get a few questions on that and also you know you kind of talked about how physical and cognitive as you get older is always going to decline but emotional health on the other end that's the only

piece of Health span that can actually go up and so is it purposeful you don't have that on your centenarian de cathlon list yeah the centenarian de cathlon is is focusing purely on that physical piece that is invariably going to decline um so it doesn't really get into the cognitive or as you said the emotional part which you know for really doing that right should should be getting better as we age and when you talk to your patients about this because I know you work with every patient you want them to be able to create

this list and kind of anchor back to it because like you said is you know you're not training for a marathon you're not training for a triathlon you're really training for this what advice what encouragement do you give them as they're starting to kind of think through okay how do I create this list how do I start to build this process in my mind so we we've gone through several iterations on this initially we asked patients to do what I did which is just sit down and come up with the list that didn't produce as

much fruit perhaps because people weren't putting as much thought into it as I was uh it wasn't you know it just wasn't something they were spending all of their time thinking about so what we do now is we give them a list of about 50 items about half of them are activities of daily living about half of them are sort of Feats of Fitness or strength and we say Pick 10 and we've gone through multiple iterations of this we used to say pick as many as you want that turned out to be so now it's

like Pick 10 and and so you have to really think about this you have to prioritize what are the 10 most important things to you on this list and then we ask the question okay to do those things do you know what is required you know if you do you know what's required to to you know pick up a 30 pound child off the ground what type of stability is required what type of strength is required and how much will that require you to be able to do today based on the extrapolation of how much

those each of those parameters declines and one of the questions we got come through a ton was those are the things you want to do at a 100 well I to be clear I don't expect to live to a 100 uh you know if you look at my uh my wall chart it says 88 so it's call it in my 80s was probably you know where I hope to be so in your in your marginal de in my marginal decade yeah and so how are you thinking about okay so if in your marginal decade you

want to be to do that you know there's people who are listening who are going to be in their 20s 30s 40s 50 60s 70 80s you know so the people who are on the younger spectrum of that were kind of wondering you know you kind of mentioned you can do all those right now easy all day every day so how do you think about how much you should be able to do in your 30s or 40s or 50s kind of how do you talk to patients about how they kind of like Back cast and

figure out okay my goal at 40 should be X to be Y at 80 we we have a pretty good sense of how major parameters like strength and V2 Max decline with age and so even though I can do everything on that list blindfolded um it's going to take a lot of work to make sure that my V2 Max is 30 to 32 Ms per minute per kilogram in 30 to 40 years especially if it's closer to 40 years um and truthfully like right now my V2 Max is not what I'd like it to be

it's probably in the mid-50s which is again fine for somebody my age but you know it I really would like a bigger margin of error and maybe want it to be mid to high 50s as opposed to low to mid-50s um so if you're 30 if you're 20 years younger than me the bar is even higher um so yeah paradoxically the youngest people aren't necessarily in the shape here um on a relative basis they might be in absolute terms but they have longer to maintain that and therefore they have to be starting from a higher

place and you mentioned V2 Max there do you maybe want to talk about a few metrics or you know tests people could do so they can understand where they're at currently from a cardio perspective and let's say a strength perspective well I think V2 Max is um I don't know that it's necessarily the single best metric of of cardiorespiratory Fitness but it's certainly the one that's been studied the most and it's obviously the one that um you know for which we have the most data it's also one that you can go out and get done

on your own you know it's not it's a $100 test maybe $150 you know test you can go and find any in most cities they would be able to do this for you you there are also free versions you can estimate it you could run a Cooper's test or various versions of these tests which we've talked about elsewhere and you can just look that up to if you want to run know how to do that protocol so you don't need to even spend a dollar to estimate your V2 max if you're willing to go down

to a track and run a mile or something um so the question then becomes what are some other metrics that go with it well I mean certainly strength metrics matter um we've talked about some of those things uh you know good metrics for a great metric for for both upper body strength and grip strength and uh a bit of stamina to boot is a is a is a farmer carry um and so you know for men we'd like to say a guy in his 40s should be able to carry his body weight for a minute

so half his body weight in each hand do you maybe want to explain what a farmer carry is for people who aren't familiar yeah it's it's it's literally just carrying and walking so uh if a person weighs 180 PBS can they put 90 PBS in each hand and walk for a minute uh for a woman who's 40 we would want to see that at about 75% of her weight so um you know just do the math and adjust a accordingly um you know I've talked about the dead hang that's another great one for grip strength

uh again we have sort of metrics that we would look at we would say a man in his 40s we'd want to see two minutes of dead hang for a woman a minute and a half uh and then of course that gets discounted by you know roughly 10 cents 10 cents roughly 10 to 15 seconds per decade as you go from 40 to 50 Etc um there are other you know great examples of strength a wall sit for example you know can you do a wall sit for 2 minutes so you're sitting with your back

against the wall your thighs are parallel to the ground you're not using your hands and basically this is a you know one way to test uh leg strength there are better ways to do it we typically do this in a more free form where we have people do uh we have we have people do a an air squat where they're hovering but not using their back for support so now it's a little more stressful because you're not just using your legs but you have to stabilize whereas on the wall sit you get the stabilization for

free because you're pushing back into the wall so um you know there are no shortage of ways to do this kind of thing and and probably beyond the scope of our discussion now to to go through all the different ways zone two of course is another really important thing to do so um you know there's the technical way it's defined based on lactate production but again the simplest way for most people is the is the RP way right is is zone two is that threshold where you go from being able to speak while you're exercising

but being uncomfortable to not being able to speak and where where most people cross that threshold is where you will now start to net accumulate lactate with your activity and so figuring out and demonstrating that you can generate more and more work at that level whether it be wattage or speed or whatever your metric you're using that becomes also just an enormous you know um way to track your progress and do you not to put you on the spot or make it awkward but I think with RP and Zone 2 sometimes people don't know what

that level is of like if I'm talking like this is that okay should it be like I can only get one word out every five seconds do you kind of no for me I mean it's it it feels like you know if if I'm on my bike doing a Zone 2 and my wife comes in or one of my kids comes in to talk to me I'm like I can talk I'm like hey yeah okay yep I got it yep I'll pick them up you know um do I want to sit there and talk no

but I can yeah if I could talk like this I'm in zone one if you and I went for a walk we're in zone one in fact you've rucked with me most of rucking is below zone two except when you're going up the hills which is brutal then you're not talking then you're out of zone two so there's very little of a Ruck that's actually in zone two the closest I can get to zone two is doing that shuffle I can do sort of a light Shuffle um but if I'm walking it's it's you know

it's hard but it's not hard enough and if I'm walking up a hill uh if I'm walking flat it's too easy if I'm walking up a hill it's too hard and another important piece is muscle mass and I know you typically will kind of look at muscle mass based on metrics from a dexa scan and then there's also you know certain percentiles that you want to see patients in so maybe talk a little bit about that because that way anyone who's listening to this and is curious okay how how do I stack up from a

muscle perspective do I need to increase am I okay they can go out and get one of these done relatively cheap they're relatively easy to find and there's a few core metrics so maybe just talk about that for a second yeah I think everybody should have a dexa scan um you just have to know this data you have to know your bone mineral density um I think you have to know how much visceral fat you have and I think you you have to know how much muscle mass you have obviously you're getting body fat which

is important but it's not as important as those other three um aexa scan will either automatically calculate for you or at least give you the data to calculate for yourself something called the almi and the um ffmi so um the almi stands for appendicular lean mass index and again sometimes it's just spit out in the report but if it's not you would simply go to the report where it shows you lean mass for left leg right leg left arm right arm and you add those three up make sure they're in kilograms so if they're in

pounds you have to convert them to kilograms divide by 2.204 and then divide that by your height in meters squared and if that's given in inches or feet you have to make the conversion so um and then you'll get a number right it could be8 nine 10 if you're a male uh you know five six 7 8 if you're a female and then there are nomograms that will tell you for your age and for your sex what percenti you are in and we want all of our patients to be at or above the 75th percentile

for almi uh and again it's it's associative data but it's very strong associative data which is look muscle mass is a great integrator of exercise and strength so um you know hemoglobin A1c is a metric that is effectively an integral function for glucose so you you get this number 6.5 and it tells you directionally over the last 3 months your average blood glucose has been 140 milligrams per deer so the hemoglobin A1c integrated the area under the curve and spit out that number and similarly that's effectively what V2 Max muscle mass and strength are doing

they are integrators of the work that it takes to have a high V2 Max to have high muscle mass to have high strength and the work that goes into that is the secret sauce in other words it's not so much the muscle mass I think that is the most important thing it's what you had to do to get said muscle mass and what that muscle mass will then do Visa um metabolic function and of course the implication with respect to the the functional side of things so muscle mass and strength are not equivalent uh and

when put head-to-head strength beats muscle mass as a predictor of lifespan but all of these things are important metrics to be tracking so I think then the rest of the conversation we'll kind of focus on the actual training piece of it right so that was the bulk of questions that we received which is how much should I be training how much in the different pillars how do you best train Zone 2 How often how many times a week VO2 max so I think we'll kind of now start getting into those pieces but I think what

would be helpful is we also received a lot of questions from people who are like hey I play basketball four times a week hey play tennis I play golf hey I like I do marathons I maybe just I go to the gym and I lift you know is that okay or how important is it to actually be really specific to train for this and to hit all of those pillars well again I think it depends on your objective um so it everything has to be compared to the alternative so if a person says look I'm

I'm playing tennis twice a week I'm playing basketball twice a week um and I'm lifting weights once a week am I doing great the answer is yeah you are doing great relative to most people um but I don't think that that's a recipe for Success if you want to be in the best shape possible in your last decade and the reason being is sports like any sport whether it be you know basketball tennis swimming any particular sport has so much repetitive uh stress in it that you're you're going to develop movement issues you're going to

have asymmetries in um in in in joints in muscles and you want to kind of balance those things out as much as possible so again if if if you're you know if you want to be able to play golf um every week and you know you're going to walk five miles that's that's great but you have to acknowledge like every time you're swinging that club it's asymmetric um so you have to think about what am I doing to counter act that same with tennis same with basketball um and so it it just again it just

depends on how much time a person is willing to put into this I you know I don't want to suggest that everybody needs to do this because I I acknowledge it's really difficult if it wasn't difficult everybody would be doing it already you know by definition this is this is really a complicated idea and um maybe I just have the privilege of two things right one I got to experience my marginal decade in my 20s right I had that back injury when I was 28 that left me unable to walk for 3 months and in

so much pain I didn't know my name for a year and you know during that period of time like I would have given my life to have had everything back so when I got it back I it's just it seared into my brain what it feels like to be so immobile so debilitated and in so much pain and I think that's just the greatest gift I ever received was to to have that time machine to basically go and experience the last decade of my life and then get zapped back to being 28 with a totally

different mindset of yeah I'm I never want that to happen again and at least I'll do everything in my power to make sure it doesn't so long answer to a short question but the reality of it is you really do need to be training very specifically and that means you know a lot of really silly looking unsexy things that I do every day um sometimes as little as 10 minutes a day sometimes as much as an hour a day just on the stability stuff just on the movement piece you know um but I wouldn't trade

it for anything because the the way my body feels uh you know it I'm thanked for it so now let's talk about so if someone's listening they're like okay I want to train for this and I'm willing to put in the work to the four pillars so the strength stability Zone 2 V2 Max just to keep it simple what's the minimum effective dose where it's okay how much per week does someone need to commit to be able to hit those four things and then we can get into each of them in a little more detail

but just you know from a minimum effective dose if they have kids busy job families don't have a ton of time what should they strive to set out for well it depends where you're starting right so the minimum effective dose if you're doing nothing is not that much you you're gonna get huge benefits When you you know go from nothing to probably three hours a week that would be an enormous Improvement um so maybe that's you know I don't know that's the right way to think about it um well let's maybe let's just start there

so let's say someone starts at nothing so you're saying okay start at three hours a week how are you breaking that out well if you only had three hours a week to commit to this you know I think you'd have to put probably an hour of that into steady state aerobic training zone two I think you'd have to put an hour of that into strength training I think you'd probably want to put 20 minutes of that or 30 minutes of that across one or two sessions into high-intensity aerobic training um so not hit intervals by

the way but you know sort of longer intervals that V2 Max appropriate and then the remainder of that time call it another you know 30 or 40 minutes spread out at 10 minutes a day into some of the stability training and again I think it's important to to understand you're better off if you say look I'm only willing to devote 60 Minutes a week to this stability stuff which seems so boring should I just blast it out in one one hour session the answer is no you're better off doing 10 minutes a day six days

a week there's really something to the neurologic pattern that comes from practicing your IAP practicing your breathing your scapular cars your cat Cow exercises um doing that for 10 minutes every day is better off than just trying to do it all in one shot um so so anyway that's probably how I would structure a three-hour um uh program and for the on the stability side um you kind of mentioned a few exercises there and actually what you and Beth did is we recorded those videos in the gym and so those are available petmd.com outlive SLV

videos and so anyone who wants to learn more about okay what are those stability exercises that I could do 10 minutes a day real short real simple videos um you can go check them out so we won't spend time double clicking on those because as you've said before it's you really have to see it to understand it as opposed to just hearing about it um and so let's say then someone you know is like okay I'll start with three hours a week how often do you ratchet that up does that get increased every week does

it get increased every month is it when certain Milestones are hit well it depends what the limiting factor is so usually when a person starts at three hours per week it's because that's the only time they're willing to put into it um now conversely if a person's never lifted a finger and they say oh my God like I'm willing to do whatever it takes and they only start at 3 hours a week because you don't want to injure them then you're in that situation where how much can you ratchet it up and I'd probably ratchet

a person up every six weeks in a scenario like that but I think the far more typical scenario is okay I'm willing to do three hours I do three hours a week usually a person sort of starts to habituate to that stress um and one of the important uh principles of training is a principle that most people have heard of called Progressive overload so in one way or another the training the load the the ask needs to get more complicated needs to get more difficult so if you're talking about strength training that could mean heavier

weight that could mean more reps more sets less rest between other things that make it more complicated such as using bfr so you know we're always looking for ways to make this more demanding and for example at my stage now I'm not adding time anymore like I don't I am at the limits of how much I'm willing to spend on this my kids are young every minute I'm doing that I'm not spending time with them or I'm not you know working or you know I'm just falling behind in some other area of my life so

you know I'm already spending about as much time as I'm willing to spend in the gym and it's you know probably on the strength side six hours a week um so I have to find other ways to to add that demand um the other thing I would be doing is thinking about where the deficits are so let's say you have that person that's at 3 hours per week maybe their almi is already at the 70th percen on they're actually reasonably strong but their aerobic training is an atrocity so then I'm going to disproportionately add to

that as opposed to just equally build all of them conversely you know we have a patient in our practice uh who's you know upon entering the practice I mean this guy's V2 Max was probably above 60 and he is 60 um but he's been a lifelong Runner so but he never touched a weight in his life so he has you know very little muscle mass and um you know this is a guy who were actually saying look you probably we're probably going to need you to run a little bit less and you know your running

is amazing and you're very fortunate that you haven't been injured doing it we want you to keep running as long as you can but we also have to address some of these other issues because you do have some of the really common issues of Runners um the some of the very common balances and things like that so in his case it was like can we subtract a little bit of running time and start to get you doing strength training yeah so it really is so people almost need to take just an inventory of what they're

doing and where their strengths are and that's kind of where it's good to know you know where is your V2 Max how does your Dexter scan look you know can you farm or carry what percent of your weight and if it's high and that piece is good it's like okay keep training that but then fill in those deficits what about you know so we kind of hinted that the the three hours per week really is for the people who are Tim limited what about different ages because we did get a lot of questions of you

know I'm older is it too late for me to start training for this and if the answer is no how should I think about that because I'm not as young I can't quite bounce back I'm not as strong as when I'm younger you know they might be coming into this with not as much strength and so when you have a patient like that do you think about how they should tackle this differently are they on kind of a different program than if someone was 30 kind of how do you think about that from an age

perspective I mean it's everybody's different in age is definitely one of the factors that um that that you know calls for sort of nuance around programming but I I'll say this like you know and I think I've talked about this on a previous podcast I recall which one um there was a study that was done in Australia um that I think we talked about on one of our podcasts actually where um an investigator took a group of women with osteopenia or osteoporosis so these women had very low bone density they'd never exercised in their life

they were if I'm not mistaken the no one was younger than in their mid-60s they were probably you know in their 70s um and these women were put on a Pumping Iron regimen I mean literally like old school in a gym picking up weights walking around like this wasn't like some fancy you know Posh pilates class this was like pickup weights and I think by the end of this study one of the women may even got to the point where she was deadlifting her body weight you know like imagine that 120 lb woman picking up

120 PBS off the ground so while that was a great example because it was documented in a clinical trial there are so many stories of these things that you just see that I just have to believe that people are far more resilient uh than they than they can imagine and you know I write about one example of this in the in the case of Barry uh Barry is someone who gets mentioned in um I think it's in the stability chapter actually and you know here's a guy who you know traded his health for wealth right

which is a pretty standard refrain and then retired and had all the money in the world and realized wait a minute like I can't do anything my body hurts so much and if you look at Barry today I mean the guy's functioning better than he was 20 years ago so you know I I just I think it really just comes down to being consistent and having a real sense of purpose around this stuff and obviously you have to be smart about it I mean you can injure yourself in the process of these things so you

know having someone who knows how to kind of guide that um and and using common sense is is is essential but um I I would never want anybody to come away from this thinking I'm too old to do anything about it I I think as long as you're breathing you have a chance to do something about it yeah and on that front you kind of mentioned osteopenia osteoporosis we did get a lot of other questions too outside of age which is is there anything female specific that they should be thinking about as it relates to

centenarian De cathlon and I know dexas scan in addition to the muscle it can also give bone min density which is very important as we age so maybe you want to talk a second about kind of bmd and then also why that's something that maybe femal specifically should be paying attention to thinking about and then ultimately how that leads to how they should be training yeah bone mineral density is very important for both sexes but women are at a greater risk and the reason for that is um the way bones work and I'm oversimplifying a

little bit but you know bones effectively have strain gauges in them and they respond to tensile stress so when a muscle is Contracting the muscle via the tendon is attached to the Bone and as the muscle contracts the bone is compressing so imagine a strain gauge inside the bone that senses that well that's a that's a mechanical signal that gets converted converted into an into a chemical signal so mechanical to chemical via estrogen estrogen is the hormone that does the signal transduction and that tells osteoblast and osteoclast which are the bone building bone reabsorbing cells

to make the bone stronger not weaker so in other words the the use it or lose it philosophy is at play here and estrogen is the key link now men and women have estrogen and it's very important for both sexes um the difference is women lose estrogen precipitously in midlife and therefore women are more at risk for osteopenia and osteoporosis now for men and women alike it's very difficult to add bone density after you reach the critical period of maturation typically in the early 20s so unfortunately most our audience is past that point right we're

I'm not sitting here having a discussion with teenagers um but of course if I am the answer is loadbearing load bearing loadbearing reach your genetic potential while you have a chance um but for those of us who are past that point the key is how much can you slow the rate of Decline and nothing is more important for that than loadbearing activity and in fact it needs to be you know heavy loadbearing activity walking does not count as loadbearing activity uh running certainly better than swimming or cycling where you're not bearing load but none of

those compare to strength training so strength training is really the most important piece of maintaining bone mineral density and it must be supported from an endocrine perspective with the appropriate amount of estrogen and potentially testosterone and certainly with the correct nutrition and supplementation such as vitamin D and the right amount of protein and things like that and one of the other questions we received is people were saying hey like what if you can't afford a trainer maybe don't have a gym to go to how much of this can you do kind of without fancy equipment

maybe with body weight you know how do you think about that in terms of as people are wanting to train for this um you can definitely do quite a bit of stuff with body weight I but I would also encourage people to say like if I don't have a lot of room can I at least get some dumbbells and kettle bells um and you know they do make these dumbbells they're not cheap but they're efficient and they're cheaper than buying all the sets where as you know one dumbbell has multiple links in it so it

could be you know 70 PBS 60 PB 50 pounds Etc depending on where you click it so I feel like if you're going to think about okay what's the what's the most efficient way to do this I would say you do want to splurge on a few pieces of equipment and certainly heavy enough dumbbells that you can get into carrying would be important um I think resistance bands are also really important I've had a couple periods in my life where I haven't had access to a gym for you know three or four weeks and during

those periods of time traveling with heavy resistance bands um was was essential and if I could have added to that having some dumbbells makes a big difference so yeah it's it's definitely easier if you have access to a gym or you can go to a gym uh like a TRX is probably another really great piece of device for people who know what that is that's kind of this strap device that you either hang around a rack or something or you can even put it behind a door you just make sure the door is you're on

the right side of the door so the door can't open um and you can do a lot of exercises with that as well and what about injury so you kind of mentioned there earlier you know just being conscious of if you're starting out just to not get injured how should people think about this if they're either coming into it with previous injuries if they're worried about injury especially kind of in the older population is you know is that where the stability work can be much more effective is it if you haven't lifted much weight start

lower and work on kind of positioning and how the movement works or how should people think about the injury piece you know this is something where I think you just have to be careful and I I don't I don't think it would be reasonable for me to represent that I can offer an answer that would cover that in a in a broad way for example we did you know a podcast with Alton Baron looking at injuries of the shoulder neck elbow hand was that like a six-h hour podcast it was very long it was like

definitely one of our three longest podcasts up with maybe Tom dpring and Matt Walker and that didn't even really get into the rehabilitation that just talked about like what's at the root of it you know I've certainly done a number of videos with Kyler Brown where we've gone over some of my rehab post shoulder surgery um so I think the truth of it is you're just unfortunately I hate to say this it sounds like but you've got to be able to align with people who understand how to how to how to you know how to

not paint by numbers in their approach to Rehabilitation right so um maybe one way to help screen for that is basically when you meet a practitioner just spending some time talking to them about their philosophy around your particular injury right so how you know for example before I had my shoulder surgery I wanted to understand all the details of early versus late mobilization um range of mo you know the the trade-off between range of motion and stability these are trade-offs when you're repairing a joint as flexible as the shoulder you can make it really stable

again if you're willing to give up all range motion and vice versa so I hate to say it but I think you just have to become a more involved consumer of your care in that regard um but unfortunately I just can't offer some blanket piece of advice around injury is there but for the most part even if someone's dealing with an injury you would highly encourage them to not let them just give up on working out because of that injury no I mean if anything that should be motivation to get better I mean injuries it

depends where you are in your life cycle right but but for most people who I think are listening to us right now if you have a nagging injury and you take the approach of I'm just going to sort of ignore it and it's not necessarily getting better you're on a very slippery slope right this I I know someone very well who's had a shoulder injury for the last 6 months and it's not getting better it's clearly not getting better but more importantly she's beginning to atrophy around it she's becoming so weak and um her pain

is so significant around it that she's altered all of her movement patterns in response to this and you know she's younger than I am and you know so I sort of had a heart-to-heart with her recently and said what do you think the natural history of this is like do you just think this is magically going to get better when you're 70 no chance you need to do X Y and Z right now and yeah that means you're going to have to invest like at least three hours a week in doing this kind of rehab

to to see if you can get this better without surgery uh and maybe it will require surgery I don't think it will actually in this particular case but it's you know the alternative is worse yeah and let's touch on V2 Max again so a lot of people reached out and said how should I train for v2 Max so if you take away the only three hours a week to do everything if it's someone saying Okay my muscle mass is good but my V2 Max sucks what program should I get on so the first thing to

remember is you've got to be spending if you're really committed to developing your cardiorespiratory Fitness uh you know I think I talked about this on one of the podcasts maybe it was on Tim's podcast um you're trying to maximize the area of a triangle right so the triangle has a base and the triangle has a peak and the goal is how big an area can I get not how wide not how tall you don't want one that's this wide and this tall and you don't want one that's this tall and this wide you want the

max the base is your zone two the peak is your V2 Max from a training perspective the rule of thumb that is applicable for People Like Us I.E normal people and the best athletes in the world is roughly 8020 80% of your volume is down here 20% of your volume UPS here in fact some of the really really Elites are probably closer to 9010 so you're saying no matter if you're just just an ordinary athlete or you're the best of the best it's still roughly the same Tad poacher who's the greatest cyclist on this planet

two-time winner of the tour to France um you know absolutely mopping up the field of cyclists like their children that guy is doing 80 to 90% of his training at Zone 2 and I know that for a red fact because we know who his coaches so so then let's maybe talk about that pyramid so maybe let's just step back and say I didn't answer your question question by the way about V2 Max which we can come to but yeah so maybe I was just going to say maybe let's just cover the whole pyramid so what's

the training of the whole pyramid if you know it's kind of 80% 20% let's break out so I just start with how much time am I willing to put into this now I got to be honest with you I wish I could be putting 10 hours a week into cardio I do I I mean historically I've put in 14 to 20 hours a week into cardio up until 10 years ago so like I really miss those days I miss being insanely fit you know Miss I I miss that terribly and I miss I miss the

joy of that much training um it's simply not possible today I you know for all of the obligations that I have and there's I've done the math 10 Ways to Sunday I'd have to give up something I'm not willing to give up I had to give up archery or give up driving or give up my kids or something like I'm just I'm not willing to give any of these things up so I basically start with what's the most amount of time I can put into dedicated cardio and for me me it's like four to five

hours a week not including rucking I sort of keep that in its own bucket so then it's a very simple calculation 80% of that time is Zone 2 and 20% of that time is V2 Max and how are you breaking out let's just start with zone two how many I divide it into four workouts a week so four Tuesday Thursday Saturday Sunday and do you always recommend doing it over very like let's say you could do four hours in one day is there the same benefit of doing all your Zone 2 in one day vers

spreading it out no I think you know I've talked about this with then youo his view is if you can get at least 30 to 45 minutes you should spread them out so again if you're only able to commit an hour to it it might be one hour once or 30 minutes twice um but I'm sort of doing 45 to 45 minutes to 60 minutes each time is what I do and and are you doing Zone 2 V2 Max on the same day one of those days so Satur uh sort Tuesday Thursday is just zone

two uh and then two long sessions of uh stability training so it's like call it an hour of zone two an hour of stability actually why don't I just walk you through the whole week that'll be easier so Monday is just strength training so that's about uh 90 minutes to two hours when you include the stability training that I do as well so movement prep stability training strength training and that's all lower body that's Monday uh Tuesday is Zone 2 followed by dedicated hour of stability Wednesday is uh upper body strength and stability again 90

minutes to two hours Thursday is a repeat of Tuesday Friday is a repeat of Monday Saturday is Zone 2 in the morning upper body strength repeat of Wednesday in the afternoon Sunday is Zone 2 followed by V2 Max and will you ever do V2 Max before you do Zone 2 um I generally don't just because I like to have a lot of reps before I go for broke so even when I was like a cyclist and doing two Zone V2 Max workouts a week they were always preceded by a long the metric we would use

um on a bike was kils so was how many kogs of work would you do before you would do the super hard sets and it had to be at least a th kogs which is translate to at least a thousand calories of work and for zone two I know you said you kind of like to break it up is if someone is like hey you know I can do four days a week a Zone 2 but I can only do 15 minutes a day would you say and I'd compress it I would say do 230s

so so in your zone two sessions you like to do at least 30 at a minimum yeah and now when you're in those Zone twos are you like when you hit the bike and the clock starts no I take 10 minutes I I'm I do all mine on a bike um sometimes on a treadmill but what I do is there's a like a a little it's a it's it's the the computer is programming to the Wahoo kicker which is the device I'm sitting on so it's it's taking 10 minutes to ramp me up and maybe

just walk through what modalities can people do zone two on treadmill bike anything that is steady state so you know swimming is a great way to do it because you can really swim in a pool at a steady state um running is a great way to do it because you can pretty much run at a steady state cycling Outdoors is generally hard um unless you have spec like Fiesta Island was a great place to train I used to train at Fiesta Island because for people who don't know where that is in San Diego it's where

all with the time trial bike races were and it's just a 7 kilometer Loop that you can ride on without lights or any like there's no traffic or anything that gets in your way but for the most part like I wouldn't be able to do Zone 2 outside here in Austin it's just it's too hilly and there's too much traffic and it just it it's it it fits and starts I can do my V2 Max here CU I go to a hill and that's my favorite way to do V2 Max is on a hill that's

about a mile long and just do very hard up the hill and then easy down the hill but um a treadmill is another great way to do it just kind of a walking incline typically rowing machine if you're really a good rower um you have to be efficient enough most people are not efficient enough and they just they don't have the strength they don't have the stability to row really well for 45 minutes stair climber is another really good one um but you know depends again if you're if you're starting out brisk walking is probably

good enough too yeah and we we don't have to get into all the reasons of the benefits of Zone 2 because we have so many podcasts with Inigo son Milan people can listen to but you kind of hinted at another thing there which is you know when you start your zone two workouts you'll ramp up but also a lot of times we get questions where you know hey I did a 90 minute workout and I was in zone to for 45 minutes of it is that am I good no I mean what I think what

you mean in that question is you know like I went out for a three-hour bike ride today and um when I got back my computer told me I was in I did 44 minutes of Zone 2 so two issues there one is that's just a Zone 2 based on heart rate that's generally the worst approximation of Zone 2 so Zone 2 really is more based on lactate if we're going to be purely accurate or at a minimum RP but even if you posit that that 45 minutes of zone two from your heart rate is roughly

accurate it's not the same physiologically because usually you're passing in and out of Zone to in that situation and so you're not getting kind of that constant steady state churn which you're looking for what we're really kind of looking for is the harnessing of mitochondrial efficiency and to do that you you have to be able to push oxidative phosphorilation right to its limit before you trip into glycolysis and you're just you're at the limit of that glycolysis being the dominant energy source whereas if you're on that ride you're going into and out of glycolysis constantly

so it's not that you're so much in zone 2 for 45 minutes as that you passed through Zone 2 for a sum total of 45 minutes which again that's there still there's still value in that but not for what we're talking about yeah and what about V2 Max what modalities can you do V2 Max training on uh you know here I think it's it's probably easier in a way right because it's pretty much anything that gets your heart rate up and gets you very tired um so you know look it could be a you know

an airbike it could be a regular bike it could be a stationary bike stair climber treadmill running outside you know the sky's almost the limit you know it's it's hard to do it on you know it's hard it would be hard to do it I'm trying to think I mean heck you could probably do it with something like burpees is probably pretty tough once you get into something that intense like jumping because the sweet spot for VO2 max is kind of 3 to 8 Minute intervals so you don't want to be doing things that are

so intense that you can't do them for at least three minutes um and and so that's why I'd kind of hold off on that stuff I mean when I was young and I really fit I did I did a lot of it with jumping but like those I mean I can't jump for 3 minutes anymore like I don't have it's just that you know I'm not that fit anymore so I have to rely on easier things and so what's your what's your current V2 Max workout so you mentioned kind of three to eight minutes on

is it typically I do four on four off is is sort of where I spend most of my time sometimes three on three off on a rowing machine um I got into that quite a bit last summer but these days um and sometimes by the way I just am in a bit of a rush and I'll just do one minute on two minute off at a much higher intensity on the stair climber so I have one of those like industrial grade strength climbers and sometimes I'll just go Sprint for a minute up the stairs and

then it takes me two minutes to get my heart rate back down to about 100 and then repeat that for 20 to 30 minutes so that's kind of like my poor man's cheating V2 Max workout um but what I really like to do is 4 minute repeats four minutes on four minutes off and on the four minutes on are you going 100% for the full like how how should someone think about yeah this is one of those things you have to you have to play with this there's a this is years and years of practice

to know what that feels like um so again I'm doing this on a bike so I'm looking at wattage and um my watts are so low now I'm in embarrassed I'm not going to tell you what the watts are because they're so much lower than they used to be but I know I have a sense of what I need to average my wattage over those four minutes so I might go out at 105% of that wattage and it feels pretty easy for the first minute if it doesn't I've gone too hard by three minutes I'm

very uncomfortable and at a minute I'm I mean with at that in that last minute I.E at four minutes I'm I don't have much left so that's you know if you go out all out in that first minute you're not going to get to four minutes you're you're just going to crash and you're you're sort of not in that zone you want to so it's not there's no question I positive split the thing meaning I do more work in the first half than the second but I don't want it to be more than about 10%

and how much how much of this can it improve for people right so if people are saying okay I'm willing to put in the work for Zone 2 I'm willing to put in the work to increase my V2 Max is this something if it's been two weeks a month two months and they're not seeing maybe huge increases like they should get discouraged I mean I don't think you're going to getting your V2 Max tested every three months you know so it's how how should people think about just monitoring progress in order to see if improvements

are happening just to keep people motivated well again it depends on what modality you're using but yeah I don't think you need to test your V2 Max more than once a year um what you're what you're looking for is so you pick a modality and I'll give you an answer so let's take bike okay so again most stationary bikes have a power meter if you're riding Outdoors you'd probably want to have a power meter I do think it's the great equalizer so speed can be misleading because of wind and stuff like that um so you'll

know how much wattage you can do so when you start out you might only be able to you know put out 150 watts for the 4 minutes but if in 6 months you're putting out 175 Watts for those four minutes assuming that your weight hasn't increased significantly your V2 Max has gone up um again the other thing to keep in mind with V2 Max is weight plays an important role in it because it is it's your V2 Max in liters per minute divided by your weight in kilograms so you know if you're if the name

of the game for you is how do I maximize my V2 Max in total absolute terms you can really game the system um my V2 Max when I was cycling was high because I was very light and I was disproportionately light in my upper body and your upper body is contributing nothing to the V2 Max for most tests cuz it's basically tested on a bike or on a treadmill so you get punished for any upper body mass and you're only rewarded for lower body mass so the lighter your upper body is the better you are

but it's also it can also be good motivation to people who you know let's say on the you're you know kind of 2 by two nutrition framework if you maybe are overnourished and you do lose weight while you're starting to get the cardio you can see a good jump in your V2 max if you're losing excess weight yeah just comes down to how long you're willing to put into this the literature on this suggests you can only improve your V2 Max by 50% but you know the the literature is typically looking at eight-week studies so

what we're interested in is a lifetime of training and in a lifetime of training you can increase your V2 Max by 50% so there is a strong genetic component to it um you know when you see these people who have freakishly High V2 Maxes in the 80s there's a there's unquestionably a strong genetic component to that um but they're also training like crazy yeah well and you kind of hinted right which is the goal for people who are wanting to start training for the centenarian de cathlon for them is thinking about it based on their

lifetime Horizon right so it's not something that's going to play out as I can train for this for six months like it's not like I'm going to train for a marathon after I train for the marathon I'm GNA go back to doing what I was doing it's you really do want to create a program that you can keep up with for years and decades and also you keep that timeline perspective of okay I don't need to increase at a insane amount because what I want to do is not get injured be able to do something

that I can do find enjoyment out of it and find Value yeah um well that kind of took us that time this was a little bit of a shorter am for us we also just kind of speed around those questions but hopefully people found some value out of it and just kind of to build off what they learn but any last piece of advice that you would want to give people as they think about centenarian to cathlon as I think about their longevity Journey again kind of assuming people read the book you know what advice

would you give them it's a good question but this is where the live podcast hurts you I don't I can't hit pause and think for a moment and make myself sound smart uh uh let me think um advice maybe not but but but certainly um incentive would be the following we talk so much about the benefits of exercise in terms of how much it reduces the risk of chronic disease how much it reduces all cause mortality um you've probably heard me say this before but it's worth repeating if if I knew that all this training

I was doing everything I'm doing if I knew that it was going to shorten My Life by a year I would still do it purely for the Improvement in quality of life between now and the end of my life the fact that it's not shortening My Life by a year the fact that it's probably adding five to seven years to my life and improving the quality of my life means day in and day out I just think it's about the most important thing um that I can do Visa my physical health there other elements of

Health that we didn't get to um so I think that that would be sort of my parting thought and of course my parting comment would be a thanks to everyone who's listening to this because by definition if you're listening to this you were an early purchaser of outlive so I really want to thank you for that means a lot to me um I I think I mentioned this once before on our podcast but it's probably worth repeating I never thought that a book would mean as much as it has in terms of how personal it

feels and how attached to the thing that I feel as it's out there and um there's no other piece of content I've ever created such as a there's no blog post I ever felt this attached to or newsletter or you know podcast anything there there's just nothing and and this feels oddly personal and therefore whenever I go somewhere and I run into someone and they they send me a message about it and they say hey I got your book I read it I really liked it you know really it means a lot to me means

more to me than I thought I would um and so I'm I'm sorry that I can't be thanking each and every one of you in person for purchasing the book um as early as you did but hopefully this is the next best thing and so so thank you very much and I should say too the one thing I forgot to mention earlier is for anyone who has a physical copy of the book If you haven't popped the jacket cover off yet seen the actual cover uh there is something on the actual cover too itself that

um was a special design and again shout out to no one's no one's mentioned that yet not not a lot we gotten a few but um again Rodrigo caral and that whole crew just awesome not only on the jacket cover but the physical yeah what's that called the board what are they called the hard cover of the thing there's a name for that and I forgot I just call it the book the book yeah yeah that's a it's a different question but it's a little Easter egg out there for people but awesome all right Peter

thank you very much thank you very much thank you for listening to this week's episode of the drive if you're interested in diving deeper into any topics we discuss we've created a membership program that allows us to bring you more in-depth exclusive content without relying on paid ads it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription now to that end membership benefits include a bunch of things one totally kickass comprehensive of podcast show notes that detail every topic paper person thing we discuss on each episode the word on

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