Hey everyone, welcome to a sneak peek. Ask me, anything or am a episode of the drive podcast? I'm your host Peter attea. At the end of this short episode. I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full along with a ton of other membership benefits. We've created or you can learn more now by going to Peter Atia, m.com.
R /, subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the ask me. Anything
episode.
Welcome to another ask me. Anything episode here we are at number 39 and I'm joined once again by Nick Stenson. In today's episode we answer a lot of questions that have come in from subscribers based on all of our recent exercise content. Given all those questions that we've been saving and coming off our last am a witch looked at the J? Curve data and the question around. If you can exercise too much, we decided to do
To an AMA with more of a rapid-fire style question follow up on those topics. So in this discussion I answer a lot of questions run the centenarian decathlon, which many of you have heard me discuss and exercising with the goal of longevity, inning, lengthening your life, and improving your health Span. In addition to how I'm personally thinking about that. We talk a lot about the follow-up questions around various types of cardiovascular training, this gets into everything from partitioning two methods to
Comparing different ways in which one might go about trying to get that cardio, respiratory benefit, we then get into nuances, around vo2max training, versus Zone, to training the ideal breakdown in terms of time, and intensity for each and specific, follow-up questions around vo2max in general. So, if you're a subscriber and you want to watch the full video this podcast, you can find it in the show notes page. If you're not a subscriber, you can watch a sneak peek at the video on our YouTube page. So, without further delay, I hope you enjoy. Am a number
39.
Peter, welcome to another am a, how you doing doing? Good, man. How's the heat out there?
I don't mean to sound like that guy. Who's like just too cool for school but it's just not fazing, me and people just can't stop complaining and I don't know why. And it's interesting because I'm normally the, my nickname in one phase of my life. Maybe it was residents here, Medical School. My nickname was Bubba boy. It was below 72 or above 76 must have been med school. I was like, yes.
It's just too cold or too
hot. California does that to you though? Just getting those bubbles and anything outside of that. Feels good evening. You saw in San Diego 60 degrees and people would be in North Faces walking
around my thermostats. Definitely clicked to the much higher end. Again we'll probably talk about wrecking but rucking, I was picked the hottest time of day to do it. So usually about somewhere between 4 5 p.m. and it's just moved my thermostat higher. So it's been a hundred six hundred seven every day for as far back as I can.
Member and it's looking like it's going to be that as far forward as I can see. But I was in California, 34 weeks ago and I had dinner with a friend. We ate outside. I was in a T-shirt and I was freezing and it was about 65. I thought I was going to die and wasn't that bad but I was amazed at how cold I felt. So clearly, I've lost my comfort level at the extreme low end of temperature.
The Canadian in you is just sad to hear that just the freezing cold at 65.
Well,
so be it. All right, so I think what we're going to do for
this AMA is the last day. I met, what we did is we took a lot of questions and answered it. Looking at the various literature to understand some of the confusion around. If there's such a thing, as too much exercise, but we weren't able to do is with all the exercise content. We've been putting out lately, we've gotten so many just follow up questions and so coming off the last AMA, what we thought is it be a good time to just do a little more rapid fire.
Style of those questions. Not necessarily A Heavy Deep dive and just really look at answering all these different questions around exercise. That's what we're going to do today. If all goes. Well, we'll cover all four pillars of questions that have come in and so it should be good. Well-rounded am a on all things. Exercise there should be something for everybody. So before we get to the first question anything you want to add to that?
No I think that's a great framework.
Perfect. So I think the first question is just to set the stage. It may be again. Talking about
About what you view as your goal with exercise, which you mentioned before, as training for the centenarian decathlon. So, maybe just give people a really brief rundown of what that is and why you think it's so important for you? As you look at your longevity Journey.
So the Centenary decathlon, which I think many people listening will have heard me talk about is simply a mental model, for how I think about training in all of my years of training which have basically been my entire life since I've been 12.
13 years old, a couple of things appear clear to me. And by the way, this is true of not just my own training but the training I've been involved with for other people athletes. And this includes professional athletes Olympians things like that specificity matters and people confuse specificity with narrow, that's not the case. So I want to elaborate on these two things.
You can be broadly,
trained and broadly condition.
And but with specificity and focus and as we'll see in a moment, that's really what the centenarian decathlon is all about. You can be narrowly focused with great specificity, that's what certain types of athletes are doing. If you're a golfer, you're the best golfer in the world. There are some really really specific things that you need to be doing. By the way, they're highly asymmetric. Depending if you're right or left-handed and your training is basically focused,
I'm enhancing those very very specific movements and probably some training to counterbalance the asymmetry there. In my experience, it's very difficult to be successful in a physical Endeavor. If you are not pursuing, some sort of objective, I'm just going to work out. Strategy, doesn't really produce great results over the Long Haul and it certainly doesn't when you're trying to solve a complicated problem. So even if you could convince me that no
No, no, no. The just work out for the sake of working out is better than sitting on a couch? I would say, you're absolutely correct, but now we're going after a really hard problem, which is to be in the last decade of your life, what we call the marginal decade and be incredibly robust physically. What does that look like? Well, I think it means imagine a 90 year old whose functioning like a seventy-year-old. I think that's attainable. So I'm not talking about 90 year olds functioning like 20 year olds. I think that science fiction,
But I am talking about 90 year olds functioning like 70 year old or 80 five-year-olds functioning like 65 year olds, but that is going to require a lot of preparation as we'll talk about later. When you think about the inevitability of decline of muscle mass strength, cardiorespiratory Fitness, you have to be training for that with the same degree of focus and specificity. That a person is training for to be an exceptional athlete in their 30s or 40s. So the centenarian
One basically forces us to be specific in what our metrics are in that last decade of life and allows us to Back cast from there. Because forecasting from wherever you are today will almost without exception failed to get you where you need to go because you'll end up missing the mark by slipping underneath it. Instead you want to start with where you need to be at the very end and work your way backwards and almost everybody myself included.
Added is unpleasantly surprised with how far they are today from where they need to be to allow the decline. That's going to take place to take them to their resting spot at the end
that all makes sense. And we'll look at some graphs later on that. I know you show patients, which when I saw Matt did a really good job of explaining why when you look at that rate of decline where you start at matters so much and it kind of
Me of the recent bone density episode. We did too, when we looked at those graphs with, if you didn't reach your full potential compared to. If you did reach your full potential in bone density, your fall off looks very different and we see the same with a lot of this exercise, which I think is going to be really interesting when we get to it. But I think what might be helpful is maybe just showing people how you're currently structuring your program to train for the Centenary decathlon. So in the last AMA, we talked about me.
At hours per week as a way to standardize looking at different literature. So do we want to walk people through your current structure and how you break that out to ensure? You're not just focused on one piece but focused on the broader picture.
You know my exercise is not really geared towards the things that used to be geared towards. So if you look at how I exercise today and compared to how I exercised call it eight years ago when I was very focused on one specific thing which was time trial,
Type of bike racing. If you compare it to where it was, I know call it 15 years ago, where it was really very, very focused on Marathon. Swimming again, pretty Niche and specific thing. The training that I was doing 15 years ago versus eight years ago, had zero overlap. Similarly, if you look at what I'm doing today, it would not produce a good cyclist. It would not produce a good swimmer, that's just not the way it is. So it's really focused on something different. I think my training kind of fits into four, five buckets, and I have my zone,
Into my zone 5 strength stability and I kind of lump them together even though they're very specific and there are some very specific stability things, I'm doing and they're not necessarily strength related in the moment and then I include rucking in there because it is so physical, although truthfully What drew me to rucking was actually more the psychological benefit of it. But as anybody who's done it knows it's quite demanding. If you allow it to become demanding and we talked about this, you've joined me on a rock. You can see between the
Temperature, the elevation change in the weight, it's quite a lot of work. So that's how I kind of organize myself. And as you said, you can identify how many Mets are required for each activity. How much time you spend in each, the dot product of that gives you met hours per week and then you can get a sense of where your energy is going. That's probably the purest way to understand, energy expenditure across those domains
Peter, that makes sense. What I'm going to do is I'm going to share a slide, we put together about a table that you broke out
Of what your current meta hours per week or if you want to walk people through what it is and then also how you're thinking about
it. Yeah, so this has back-of-the-envelope but as I said, really straightforward Zone to cycling and my zone 2 is somewhere between 220 and 235 Watts. So, I took a slightly lower estimate adjusted, just let's averaged 225 Watts. You can use a calculator to tell you how many Mets that is. So that's 11 Mets. And if I spend four hours a week there,
444. So that's 44 met hours per week zone 5. I do via cycling and stair climbing and that's about 16 met. So now I'm really pushing the intensity but I'm only spending half an hour a week at that intensity. So you can see that's only giving me eight met hours per week, lifting weights is about an average of five Mets so some things are less, some things are more. It also depends greatly on other things that
Go in there. So all the time I'm on an air bike and doing more intense stuff. In there would be at a much higher met whereas doing a bicep curl is at a lower met. We've looked at a bunch of papers and I think our best estimate is, I'm probably averaging about five minutes which is really not that labor-intensive but you multiply that by six hours per week, There's 30 minutes and then the best data I could find was looking at military personnel. Rucking says, 50 pounds there, I do use about 60 pounds, or 55 to 60 pounds.
So, you can get a sense of if you're at zero, percent grade is 4.8 mats. If you're at five percent grade seven point five, if you're a 10%, grade 10 Mets, I kind of look at my heart rate data when I do it. Plus the elevation change. I think I'm probably averaging 6.5 Mets. I do three usually closer to four hours per week. So maybe that's a bit of a conservative estimate of call it twenty met hours per week so directionally you total that up. And you can see, okay, it's about 100 met hours per week of activity.
There's the breakdown by percent where they are and we'll come to this in a minute, but I want people to notice the relative amount of Zone to zone 5. My zone 2 is slightly more than five times, the not just the duration but more importantly it's eight times the duration. But it's five times the Met our, the aggregate intensity the integral intensity that's going to become an important point when we start to talk about how you would partition, your time between
Zone 2 and zone
5, that makes sense. And it kind of leads into a good question that we got, which is one of the things we see a lot is what do we know about whether moderate-intensity exercise is as good as vigorous intensity exercise. So we do see a lot of questions that people are wondering how they should think about that. Moderate verse. Vigorous intensity, as they look at their cardio work.
Thank you for listening to today's sneak peek. Am a episode of the drive? If you're interested in hearing the complete version of this am
Ma you'll want to become a member. We created the membership program to bring you more in-depth exclusive content without relying on paid ads. Membership benefits are many and Beyond the complete episodes of the AMA. Each month, they include the following ridiculously comprehensive podcast show notes. That detail every topic paper person, and thing we discuss on each episode of the drive, access to our private podcast feed. The quality is which were a super short podcast typically less than five minutes.
Released every Tuesday through Friday which highlight the best questions topics and tactics discussed on previous episodes of the drive. This, particularly important. For those of you who haven't heard all of the back episodes, becomes a great way to go back and filter and decide which ones you want to listen to in detail really steep. Discount codes for products I use and believe in, but for which I don't get paid to endorse and benefits that we continue to add over time. If you want to learn more and access, these member only benefits head over to
Peter Atia MD.com forward, slash subscribe. Lastly, if you're already a member, but you're hearing this, it means you haven't downloaded Our member only podcast feed where you can get the full access to the AMA, and you don't have to listen to this. You can download that at Peter. Atia em, d.com. /Members. You can find me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook all with the ID. Peter Atia, MD, you can also leave us a review on Apple podcast or whatever podcast player you
Not this podcast is for General informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine nursing or other professional health care services including the giving of a medical advice. No, doctor-patient relationship is formed, the use of this information and the materials link to this podcast, is at the users own risk. The content on this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay.
In obtaining medical advice from any medical condition they have and they should seek the assistance of their Healthcare Professionals. For any such conditions. Finally, I take conflicts of interest, very seriously for all of my disclosures in the companies I invest in or advise please visit Peter, Atia MD.com forward slash about where I keep an up-to-date and active list of such companies.
