131 | THESE Exercises Increase Your Lifespan!

Welcome back to another episode of the Real Health Podcast. This last episode of our series, how to increase life expand, lifespan, how to increase life expectancy, will be all about exercise, strength training, VO2 max. If you wanna know how to maximize your time in the gym or out of the gym, it's an increased lifespan. This episode is definitely for you. We are going to talk about the greatest predictor that can be measured in in lifespan, which is relative to exercise, which is called VO2 max.

We're also talking about strength and endurance training as well. Hey. Just a reminder, our Manna Monday is no longer on the Real Health Co podcast form. It's gonna be specifically as a separate- it's a separate program called Manna Monday. You can research it on all podcast platforms, and make sure you go over and subscribe to our Manna Monday podcast because that's where all episodes that have been recorded and future episodes that will be recorded will be on that platform.

Okay? Check out Manna Monday. Every Monday, five minute kind of "start your week off right" podcast. Alright. Let's get into it.

Let's talk about how to increase life expectancy or lifespan by utilizing exercise. The first thing I wanna talk about is simple, just leisure time running. Research shows that even small amounts of running can pay dividends in life expectancy. There was a study that showed adults who ran even less than an hour a week, actually, it was fifty one minutes a week. If you ran fifty one minutes a week, you experience a 30% lower risk of all cause mortality and a 45% lower lower risk of cardiovascular disease.

And this was compared obviously to nonrunners. And and if you were a persistent runner, it was tied to around three additional years of life expectancy. And that's just leisure running. We're not even talking about competitive running. What about walking?

Right? Number two, walking. Just fifteen minutes a day can actually cut your mortality risk. A key finding showed in nearly seventeen year study of 80,000 people, only fifteen minutes of brisk walking each day can lead to a 20% reduction in mortality risk. And especially obvious it's obvious from the cardiovascular system or cardiovascular diseases.

So that's just fifteen minutes walking. So if you did fifteen minutes walking a day and tied in about an hour worth of running every single week, you would significantly reduce all mortality risk. What does steps mean? Right? We we spend so much time talking about steps.

How many steps should I get? 7,000 steps a day yields big gains. There was a meta analysis that showed walking 7k per day was associated with a 47% lower risk and more lower mortality rate compared to those that were walking about 2,000 steps per day. There's additional health benefits that plateau- that kind of starts to plateau about 7,000. So is it worth doing more?

Well, it looks like 7,000 is kind of the key to get to. And then, obviously, we can start to move from 7,000 steps a day into other modalities of training like strength training. We're gonna talk about our VO2 max training. So this is a great prediction model for disease, a great prediction model for early death. Adults over 40, increasing to level of most active.

Okay? So that's about a hundred and sixty minutes per day of movement. It's pretty easy. Can actually add up to eleven years. Eleven years to your lifespan if you move your body a hundred and sixty minutes a day.

What does that mean? It means are you up and moving, walking, using your body to some degree a hundred and sixty minutes a day? If you're sitting all day, every day, you will increase your risk of- decrease your life expectancy, decrease your lifespan. We are made to move, and so we gotta get up and move. So, again, research shows an hour of walking a day can equal six more life hours each day.

Each day. Every day you walk an hour can increase six hours of your lifespan. Think about that for a second. And if you just stack those days one over another, that's how we increase life expectancy. Now let's talk about more moderate to vigorous exercise.

There is a dose response here that if we're adhering to the guideline of about a 100 and fifty to three hundred minutes per week of of training, a moderate training. Okay? Moderate exercise would be, you know, in the gym typically or at home in your at home gym. It cuts all cause mortality by up to 31% percent. That's substantial.

And then if you were to even increase beyond that over 300, we start to get a two to four times return on that investment compared to just 300 per week. One of the things I wanna camp out probably the most in is strength training. You know, strength training, we talk about a lot. Strength training increases bone mass, bone density, muscle mass. It has a great metabolic regulation, so it helps balance blood sugar, and it reduces the risk of chronic disease related deaths.

If you strength train, it is linked to a 17% reduction in all cause mortality. Strength training is massive in its ability to help. I mean, you strength train and and and and get your 7,000 steps in every day, you are making such a massive dent in all cause mortality. You're increasing lifespan just simply from those two modalities, walking and strength training. It's really simple, and it's low risk for injury.

But, hey, I'd rather you get injured walking or strength training or running than than having a heart attack on the couch. So let's get up and let's move our bodies. You know, one of the biggest things that we're gonna talk about here and one of my favorite things to help people understand is something called VO2 max. If you actually look at at lifespan and you you measure what's termed VO2 max, if you measure it and you increase it, one the term we use is called one met, we increase it and make it better, then you will directly decrease your mortality risk. You will directly increase lifespan and life expectancy.

VO2 max is the is your maximum aerobic capacity. So it's just the highest amount of oxygen your body can use during intense exercise. It integrates the heart and the lungs and blood and muscles, and it really is the gold standard of cardiorespiratory fitness. A higher VO2 max, the higher it is, the longer you live. It is that simple, it's direct correlation, and so we should be striving to increase our VO2 max.

Actually, the American Heart Association recommends treating VO2 max as a clinical vital sign. If you go in and get your blood pressure taken, they should be checking your VO2 max. It's that important as a predictor of cardiovascular disease and other risk factors. So 2023, there's a meta analysis done that showed one met improvement of your VO2 max, so just a subtle increase of your VO2 max, is linked to an eleven percent low risk of all cause mortality. So just getting your VO2 max up one, okay, just a little bit better, is linked to 11% lower risk of all cause mortality.

And and those in the top third of VO2 max, top one third, top 33%, which come on, let's be honest, look around you, it's not that hard to probably be in that third. It was associated with a 45% lower mortality than that of the bottom third. Think about that. VO2 max is such a substantial claim here that says, hey. If you if you get into the top third, you are you you have 45% lower mortality than those in the bottom third.

VO2 max is a more powerful predictor of death risk than even your traditional metrics like BMI, for instance. That is so outdated science when we look at BMI, whereas VO2 max is the gold standard nowadays and should be treated that way. One study tracked midlife individuals over the course of years and found that for every rise, every bit of rise in their VO2 max, it corresponded with an additional forty five days of expected lifespan increase. Forty five days for every one milliliter per kilogram per minute. So we call that a met.

So getting your VO2 max, again, increases the days of how long you're gonna live, and healthy days, not just long life, but long, long, healthy life. In a cohort of 400,000 high fitness or really high VO2 max, again, was associated with lower mortality even in patients that were obese. Whereas low fitness greatly increase the risk regardless of BMI. So how do we do it? How do we increase VO2 max?

VO2 max, I'm gonna- we're gonna camp out here because this is probably the most important. You know how to increase strength. This week you you do three by 10 at 10 pounds, dumbbells. Next week, you do three by 12 at 10 pounds. Then the next week, you do three by 10 at 15 pounds.

You just progressive overload. Okay, very simple strength training is very simple. Do more than you did last week in reps or weight and you're gonna get stronger. But VO2 max, the first way to increase your VO2 max is high intensity interval training or HIIT training, where short bursts at about 80% to 90% max heart rate alternate with recovery promote rapid gains in your VO2 max. The best way to do this is what we call TABADA.

Check it out, TABADA, twenty seconds on, ten seconds off, for eight cycles, which is four minutes of work and rest is a great way to increase VO2 max. Number one, TABATA or high intensity interval training. Number two, zone two steady state cardio. This is where you got to think conversational pace cardio. You can literally, whether it's walking, jogging, biking, running, hill climbing, trail climbing, running, whatever.

Can you have a conversation doing it? Usually, you're at a zone two level. You gotta get your heart rate to a certain level. Maybe that's 110, 120, 130 beats per minute. But when you hang out there, you build an aerobic base and mitochondrial density.

Zone two is fantastic to build VO2 max. Those are the two ways to build VO2 max. You don't wanna camp out at about 150, 160 heart rate. That is what we call the gray zone. Fitness does not occur in the gray zone.

Fitness occurs with low, slow, steady heart rate, 110, 120, 130, and really, really, really high heart rate, short rest, short rest, short rest. That's how we go to the two ends of the spectrum and we don't camp out in the middle. That's how we increase VO two max. If we do those plus strength train, we're gonna live longer, healthier, happier lives. Hey, this content is designed to give you just practical, applicable information to immediately start your health journey.

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