Training for The Centenarian Decathlon: zone 2, VO2 max, stability, and strength | Peter Attia, M.D.

Generally speaking, if everything in your life is a 6 or 7 out of 10, taking your exercise to a 10/10 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.

The triangle has a base, and the triangle has a peak ... The base is your zone 2. The peak is your VO2 max. From a training perspective, the rule of thumb... is roughly 80/20—80% of your volume is down here, 20% of your volume up here...

It's going to take a lot of work to make sure that my VO2 max is 30-32 mL/minute/kg in 30 to 40 years ... Right now, my VO2 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 I really would like a bigger margin of error...

A great metric for both upper body strength and grip strength and a bit of stamina to boot is a farmer carry ... 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.

I think everybody should have a DEXA scan. You just have to know this data. You have to know your bone mineral density, 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 also getting body fat, which is important, but it's not as important as those other three.

I got to experience my marginal decade in my 20s. 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 ... It's seared into my brain what it feels like to be so immobile, so debilitated, and in so much pain.

I basically start with what's the most amount of time I can put into dedicated cardio? And for me, it's like 4 to 5 hours a week, not including rucking; I sort of keep that in its own bucket.

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.

Zone 2 is that threshold where you go from being able to speak while you're exercising, but being uncomfortable, to not being able to speak.

Any particular sport has so much repetitive stress in it that you're going to develop movement issues. You're going to have asymmetries in joints and muscles, and you want to kind of balance those things out as much as possible...

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 1-hour session? The answer is, no, you're better off doing 10 minutes a day, 6 days a week.

The sweet spot for VO2 max is kind of 3-8 minute intervals, so you don't want to be doing things that are so intense that you can't do them for at least 3 minutes.

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.