The Simple Exercise Routine That Will Extend Your Life w/ Helen Messier | EP #77

0:00I'm NFL Lineback at Tijayawatt and this is my personal best. YPB by Abercrombie is the active wearer I'm always wearing. That's why I reached out to co -design their latest drop. I work with designers to create high -performance active wear that holds up to my toughest workouts. Shop YPB by Abercrombie in -store online and in the app. Because your personal best is greater than anything.

0:31When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp. The secure messaging app that brings the whole group together, use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end -to -end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at WhatsApp .com. My dad, you know, was getting out of his bed at night, tripped fell, broke his pelvis, ended up in the hospital, and a lot of times what happens next is you develop a pneumonia, and then it's a slow glide to the end of your life, and which happened with him.

1:15Diet and sleep, and you know, all of the things, the kind of the lifestyle pillars of longevity and optimal health, if to choose one of them, it would be exercise. If you're over 60, if you exercise, you know, at least once a week, you reduce your chance of cancer threefold and you reduce your chance of all cause mortality by 50%. Most important, just move, move every day. If it means just getting up and walking, that's better than nothing. In fact, the research shows that the biggest benefit of exercise happens for those that have nothing to do with something.

1:57Let's dive into one more topic in this segment of our series here, which is exercise. Because I think, if I were going to say that if there was one thing you could do that has the biggest impact on longevity, if you could bottle up and sell it, it would be a a trillion dollar blockbuster drug, it is exercise. Yes. No question. Oh my God. So important. And yet people, yeah. Let's talk. Let's dive in exercise. Yeah, no, yeah. I was just going to really confirm that. Really, if you know people ask what if you had to choose between diet and sleep and you know, all of the things, the kind of the lifestyle pillars of longevity and optimal health, if you have to choose one of them, it would be exercise.

2:48I think that by and far can, doesn't mean go and eat McDonald's every day and then exercise, but it's so critical. It's in the evidence, I think, it's overwhelming. There's really no question. Yes, there's controversy on what the perfect diet is. Yes, there's controversy, but I don't think there's any controversy on the benefits of exercise. And so, you know, definitely different types of exercise. You want to get cardio respiratory fitness. You want to get muscle mass and buildings strength training are really important. And you know, muscles are like we talked about at the beginning. So critical for overall longevity and they predict mortality.

3:33And exercise also keeps those little mitochondria, the power plants of your cell healthy, which is fundamental for longevity. Yeah, the number I remember recently I was with the team from Tonal, which is a one of the products I used to get my daily exercise in and the CEO was sharing some stats that I found impressive. If you're over 60 and you're listening to this podcast, if you exercise at least once a week, twice, twice preferably, you reduce your chance of cancer threefold and you reduce your chance of all cause mortality by 50%. I mean, it's a huge, huge difference. So that's pretty amazing.

4:23It is amazing. And I think a lot of that benefit comes from the muscle mass. And I think muscle mass, a lot of the benefit of having the muscle mass is because muscle contains a lot of mitochondria. So every cell in our body contains mitochondria, right? The power plants, but muscle, brain, the tissues in our body that need the most energy are the brain, the muscles. And they are the ones that contain the most mitochondria. Would it be great if you could like make more brain connections, more brain cells? The other thing that muscle contains a lot of is stem cells, which are important. Absolutely.

5:07So let's talk about, you know, when I, what we wrote in, in, in, in longevity of practical playbook is a focus on muscle, overall muscle mass, and then also, VO2 max, and you're sort your cardiovascular side. So let's dive into muscle mass. So I'm on a mission to add 10 pounds in this calendar year. And I've gotten about plus six, and I'm pushing hard to get there by a 360 next year. And I don't think there's any substitution for building muscle mass, either then really working out. But I mean, I wish there was a pill. Maybe someday there will be a pill. I keep on, I've made a few investments in startups that are, again, Sarkopenia.

6:03Sarkopenia is the term for muscle loss as you age. You lose muscle mass over time. We've just announced an ex -price at one of the parameters that teams are working on is reversing your muscle loss by 20 as much as 20 years. But it comes down to actually doing the work. Yeah. Yeah. You can supplement that. You can make it easier for yourself. But let's talk about what it takes. Yeah. You know, you can. There's some really innovative biotech startups now as you know, Peter, that are, I think, from stem cell secretions to the really amazing work being done that is shown to increase muscle mass. Now even in those cases it's still important to use your muscles to stimulate them.

6:56So no matter what you have to move, if you sit on a bed, bed rest or sitting on a couch you're going to lose muscle mass very quickly. So most important just move, no matter what you do. move every day. If it means just getting up and walking, that's better than nothing. In fact, the research shows that the biggest benefit of exercise happens for those that have nothing to doing something. Right? So just getting up off the couch, you're going to get huge benefit. Then, you know, obviously you get more benefit incrementally more as you work harder, but doing weight training, I think, is really important.

7:39You know, we can talk about how we really build mitochondria and make them more efficient by doing zone two training. So the way I like to think of how much to exercise what you should do is think of your base, your foundation, as that zone two. Now zone two is the rate of exercise. It's typically a fast walk for most people. It's where your heart rate is such that when you're at rest, we've mentioned that you might have Condria like to burn fat. As you start to work out and you demand more energy, right? So when you're burning fat, you're using oxygen to burn and make that energy. As you start to work out more and you have more demands for more energy on your body needs, your muscles need more energy, that more ATP, your mitochondria can't keep up.

8:33And so they're going to switch from oxygen and fat to burning glucose, right? So something called glycolysis and carbohydrate. That point at which they switch from fat to glucose burning, you know, sort of without oxygen, that's what makes lactate, right? We've all heard of lactic acid in our muscles when we work out too hard. So that lactate threshold, so to speak, when you start making lactate switching, that's your zone two. Now, Enigo San Melan is published an amazing research on this. and he's shown that that's what increases mitochondrial efficiency. So doing that for about four hours a week, that zone two, it's really easy to do, right?

9:12You can do it on your treadmill in front of your desk if you need to. And then on top of that, you wanna do some weight lifting. So let's talk about continuing on zone two in second. Okay, so I have, I'm staring here at a techno gym bike that I take my Zoom meetings on, you know, I'm sitting on too many boards and I have these boring board meetings. And so unless I'm presenting, I'm gonna be on a bike doing something else. Or during COVID, I took all of my meetings as walking meetings. I live in Santa Monica, I'm gonna take advantage of the situation. And it's, but for me, you can calculate your zone to heart rate.

9:54You can get it, there's ways to do it, but your zone to heart rate, for me, I'm just going to read this out loud here. So first of all, calculate your maximum heart rate. It's 220 minus your age. So for me, I'm 62. So my maximum heart rate is 158. I think that's recently stands up to my experience of my maximum heart rate. So 220 minus your age. Then calculate your lower limit of zone two. and which is your maximum heart rate times 60%, so that comes out to 100, and then calculate your upper limit, which is your maximum heart rate times 70%, which is 110. So I find 110 as that level where I'm having a little bit difficulty talking on the bike.

10:49And so my technogen bike has a heart rate monitor or I'll wear one and I'll get myself there and keep myself going. Now, what happens at zone two besides the switch from fat to glucose? Are we stimulating the growth of more mitochondria or making the ones we have more efficient? Both, actually. So what you're doing is you're sending a signal to the cell to your body to say, I can't keep up with the energy demand, right? And so that's the purpose of exercise, the purpose of, when you get into the phytonutrients too, it's basically sometimes there are negative stimulators, meaning your body has to respond in order to meet the demands that you're making, even with weight training, you're inducing small tears in your muscle, which actually when your body repairs it makes you stronger.

11:44So exercise can be damaging. So what you're doing is you're stimulating your body to make more mitochondria and you're stimulating them to be more efficient when you do that. So your body is just trying to meet the demands. Now if you go too far, and you know that's important to get to that VO2 max and we'll talk about that in a minute, but you don't want to do the vast majority of your training at that level, you know that intense, intense VO2 sort of that level of maximum consumption of oxygen. It's important to do that because VO2 max does correlate with longevity. There's no question. But you do also cause a lot of those free radicals, a lot of oxidative damage.

12:27So you don't want to do that too often, but you want to get that foundation of just stimulating enough, but not too much to damage. Everybody wants to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me. and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. A company is called Fountain Life. It's company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. Most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day, when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician and they burn into your room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on.

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14:35It really is something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends, it's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy life spans. Go to foundlifed .com, backslashpeter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you is one of my listeners. Alright, let's go back to our episode. So you mentioned the amount of zone two, not to be confused with VO2 Mac, zone two exercise, right? And for me, it's 110 beats per minute. How money hours and how much chunk at a time? So what's the minimum there you need to be hitting? Yeah, you really want to strive for about four hours a week.

15:20You know, you can divide it up into four one hour sessions. you can do 30 -minute sessions, 45, whatever works, it doesn't really matter that it's all in one go. But if you can get about three, but ideally four hours a week is really what you want to strive for, for the zone two. Okay. And then there's one other layer which you've talked about, which is interval training. So what does that mean? Yeah, the interval training or the hit training, that's when you push your heart rate, really to its maximum or close to its maximum, you know 80 % of its maximum. And that, again, that also stimulates cardiovascular fitness, that's really important.

16:05And we do know that VO2 max, when you work out at that level, you increase your ability to work out harder and faster at that level, you increase your VO2 max over time. So that again has been associated with longevity, right? Many people that have a higher, better VO2 max have a much lower risk of dying. There's no question about that. One of the reasons, unfortunately, that people who've got sarcopenia -reduced muscle pass, and it's something unfortunately I suffered with loss of my dad, and many people have, which is as you get older and you've lost muscle mass, it becomes easier to trip and fall and break your hip or your pelvis.

16:52My dad, you know, was getting out of his bed at night to go to the restroom, tripped fell, broke his pelvis, ended up in the hospital, and a lot of times what happens next is you develop a pneumonia and then it's a slow glide to the end of your life and which happened with him. And the numbers are staggering for people who after the age of 60, I think, end up breaking their hip or pelvis, there's a large percentage that don't make it back. And what you really want is have the strength to catch yourself, the strength to not trip and fall. Absolutely. It's all far, far too common, right? People, they get sarcopenia, we're loss of muscle mass, which goes along with loss of bone mass, right?

17:42Osteophenia or osteoporosis. And when you do slip and fall, you end up breaking a bone. And again, that is the end for kind of that long slow decline for far too many people. And so, you definitely need the muscle mass. But also, it's important to work on kind of flexibility and remember that it's our nervous system that controls our muscles as well. And so, before you start working out, you really want to assess whether you have any dysfunctional movement patterns as well. So if you're moving in a slightly off pattern over time, if you're walking a lot or doing something that can lead to injury and once you get injured, it's really hard to keep up that exercise.

18:27So really important to assess that, get a functional movement screen done, I think that's really important for most people and then just get that neurological connection from your brain to your muscles in your body. A lot of says have lost that. As we're kids, when we learn to move, we start crawling. That crawling is such a great neurological muscle integration. A lot of times I get people back on the ground starting to crawl again. There's a great book called Original Strength that really talks about that. And even kids that have skipped the crawling phase, you know, they go from the bum scooching to the walking right away, they tend to have problems later in life because they didn't actually do that neurological integration.

19:14Sometimes we get people back to rolling, right? Just basics, try rolling on the ground without using your arms and see if you can do that. A lot of people have lost the ability to do so. Hold on, I'll go check that out. Yeah, but getting up without using your hands to a standing position is something you lose fairly quickly along the way. I think one of the points that is really important for people to hear is the biggest challenge we have as we age is injury. It is, you may be in great shape, but you fall, you tear a ligament, you break a bone, and it ends you up in bed rest and sarcopenia and it is difficult to recover after that.

20:05And so minimizing injury is super important and that comes from flexibility. It comes from like you said, just coordination. And like I say, we'll talk about this later, not doing stupid things. I'm not doing stupid things. Yeah. And one of the things I think that people also confuse sometimes is flexibility versus stability. And this was a great example of, I took a functional movement screen course a number of years ago, and there was a physiotherapist there that could not bring his hand up his back. He couldn't touch his shoulder blades if he put his hand behind his back and lifted it up. And he thought it was a flexibility problem.

20:46So he spent years doing towel stretches and trying to get him more flexible. with assessment, it turned out it was a stability problem. And he actually wasn't, his brain was not stabilizing his shoulder blade before he could move his arm. And once we taught the five minutes of teaching his brain to stabilize, he had full range of motion again. So, you know, sometimes it's surprising. And so that movement patterns are really important. Hey everyone, I want to take a quick break from this episode to tell you about a health product that I love and that I use every day. In fact, I use it twice a day.

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22:45Anything else on exercise that you want to... Let's talk about one last element here, which is if you're trying to build muscle mass, let's talk about the supplements or the what you recommend for building muscle mass. Alright, so we've talked about protein, talked about 0 .8 to 1 gram per body pound weight. So I'm 150 pounds, I'm taking 150 grams, I'll do that with a neutral 11 shake and then a kachava shake and then some fish and then some chicken. And I attack my protein. I don't go, I don't eat red meat for a number of reasons we can not talk about there right now. but what are the other elements?

23:35Creatine, other supplements, protein, amino acids, what are your thoughts there? Yeah, so definitely like we talked about get enough protein, your muscles are made of protein. There's other things you can do like creatine. Creatine is an energy source for your muscles. Your body is going to make creatine because it's so important. But when it makes creatine, it uses up a lot of capacity. So we've probably all heard of methylation, right? The ability to add methyl groups to a lot of different things in our body, including DNA, which controls DNA expression. We use methylation to make neurotransmitters, to make new DNA and RNA and new cells, essentially.

24:20And so we also need methylation to make creatine. And when your body, if you're working out a lot, you are going to be using up quite a bit of creatine. And so you need, if you, it's fine, your body will make it, but then it uses up from other areas where you need that methylation capacity. And so taking the creatine supplies that, very, very safe, and it frees it up for your body to do other things with the methylation. How much creatine should you take? Yeah, around five grams or so. Five grams, sure. And again, creating is really easy to get. It's kind of flavorless. You can add it to any shake, put it in water.

25:02Very one of the easiest things you can take. Great. What else do you want to do that? Yeah, you know, looking at, you could do free form amino acids if you want. But I think if you eat enough protein, you're probably good with that. And then the other things to support your mitochondria, you know, that will help you build muscle and help you exercise more as well. And your mitochondria need a lot of support. They need your B vitamins, you need your antioxidants, coenzyme Q10. Magnesium is a big one. A lot of us are magnesium deficient. If we get that tightness in our muscles, you have to get a tightness in your neck or tightness.

25:42That's often you're not having enough magnesium because calcium helps your muscles contract and magnesium helps them relax And so I'd say 85 % of us are deficient in magnesium and we need it every day and the more stress -runder the more we need it We'll talk about peptides when we get to meds and supplements and peptides a little bit later But there are some peptides that can support muscle growth as well How about testosterone for men who are? Yeah, so you know definitely keeping your hormones in an optimal range as we get older testosterone for men estrogen progesterone for women I think are really low hanging fruit when it comes to longevity Both of them support muscle mass bone mass and brain health cardiovascular health.

26:33So that's really a no -brainer Helen Thank you for this conversation on diet and exercise When we get together next, we'll jump into sleep. We call our annual found upload. How do you image and diagnose yourself? What can you know about what's going on in your body? We'll dive into meds and supplements. We'll dive into mindset. And then we'll talk about what's different for women's health as well, which is an important subject. Because for way too long, women have not had the differential attention and it's been way too male -oriented, but that is changing and changing rapidly. Thank you for your brilliance.

27:17Thank you for being one of the most extraordinary medical leaders in my life. Those of you who are interested in learning more, you can get a free copy of my longevity practices if you go to demandus .com -slash -longevity. You can also get a daily AI email. There is an AI I built that searches the world for the latest longevity breakthroughs. And if you go to longevityinsider .org, you can sign up for free, you get sort of what are the latest breakthroughs occurring today, because it's just an amazing period. And then please check out fountainlife .com. Awesome, Helen, take care of my friend.

28:04Thank you Peter, such fun, really enjoyed this. Bye. Bye. I want to take a moment to tell you about a Bunnence 360, my year -round leadership mastermind for people who want to go big, great wealth, and impact the world. It's also a singularity university's highest level program. A key focus of a Bunnence 360 is helping my members develop their massive transformative purpose, or MTP, and also to define and execute on their moonshots. You're listening to the moonshot podcast. So question is, do you have an MTP? Do you have your own moonshot? For example, my massive transformative purpose, my MTP is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs just like you to help you create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for humanity.

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