The Shocking Truth About Exercise That Could Save Your Life | Peter Attia EP 704

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0:34Make sure to get your tickets right now and step into greatness with us at the Summit of Greatness 2024. Head over to lewishouse.com slash tickets and get your tickets today and I will see you there. Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:56What are you doing to reverse it now that you've been experiencing this kind of, not maybe a cliff, but a dip over the last five years for yourself? how are you thinking about it? Well, I sort of had a change of heart, um, five years ago. Uh, so actually six years ago, 2014. So I sort of hung up my bike, which at that, so at that point I'd switched from swimming to cycling as sort of my main sport. Um, but I, you know, at that point, a couple of things had happened. So one, I had become very familiar with a lot of emerging research on excessive cardiovascular training, which again, ultra marathons, ultra biking, ultra swimming hiking that's that's right that's right so i'd be again there and it's the same sort of curve right where as exercise dose of exercise goes up mortality comes down but it has this little bit of a j where once you start to get into hyper amounts of exercise especially over the age of 40 you're actually driving an increase in mortality now really yes does that Does that mean like running a marathon once a year or is it running a marathon every week?

2:04Yeah, great, great point. Running a marathon once a year, probably not increasing your mortality at all. But, you know, running 40, 50 miles a week probably is, especially at that age. Now, again, this gets to your point about resilience. Someone in their 20s doing that doesn't seem to have any impact on mortality. It really only seems to be an issue if you continue. In fact, I did an interview with a cardiologist, James O 'Keefe, on my podcast, who is the world's expert on this. And it was actually James's work six years ago because I heard him speak at a conference 10 years ago. We became friends.

2:43It's one of those things I'm sure you've experienced this where you hear something and you don't want it to be true. So you basically come up with all the reasons you're going to poke holes in it until you can't do them. You find the evidence the other way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And eventually it became very difficult to ignore that this hyper amount of exercise was counterproductive. So that's one piece of the change six years ago. The second piece. It's probably bad that I just committed to doing the marathon next year yesterday. That's all right though. You'll be fine. I just think don't do one a month.

3:09Yeah, exactly. And then I think the second thing was I realized like, it was sort of funny, but I realized like my prime was so far behind me that I needed to think about like, what, what was, what was I doing this in service of? Right. Like, um, and not that I needed anyone other than myself to do these things. Cause I'm very self-motivated. So I don't like, but just as a joke, one day I asked my wife, I said, Hey, do you know what my PR is for 20 K like bike, run or swim? Yeah. Bike on a, 20k bike on the time trial. And I was like, this is my wife. She hears me talk about this stuff all the time.

3:51I have spreadsheets and models and data, and I analyze my power data every single day. And I'm trying to break the record for San Diego. Like I'm really so switched on to this. She'll probably get it within a minute. She'll guess what my PR is within a minute. She was off by 20 minutes, meaning she wasn't even in the zip code. So I was like, huh, that's funny. Like, it's like literally the most important person in my life couldn't care less about this. And what I realized was, you know, I need to start thinking about a different sport, which is the sport of longevity. So what does it mean to be a kick-ass hundred year old?

4:30And so that was the beginning of a mental model for me that in the past two years has gained much more traction called the centenarian olympics so how do you train to kick ass at 100 should you get there and of course everywhere along the way so that now dominates my landscape of training which means i don't you know care about how fast i can you know ride a 40 kilometer time trial because that doesn't quite fit into what a centenarian needs to be able to do what is your mindset going into a 40 mile bike then, or some type of experience? Is it more the joy of it? So I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't train.

5:13No, my training is very specific, but now it is fundamentally organized around four pillars. Um, so the pillars being stability, strength, uh, mitochondrial or aerobic efficiency and anaerobic performance. And so each of those then has a super layer detail approach. And I still ride my bike four hours a week. So it's a fraction of what I used to do. And it's now very much geared to a certain energy system and a type of training. What was the fourth one? Stability, strength, mitochondria, and... Mitochondrial efficiency or aerobic efficiency. And then the fourth and final one is anaerobic performance.

5:49So you focus on those four metrics now on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. Yeah. Those four pillars sort of make up the training program, which is then in service of something that I invite every patient to define for themselves. because you will have a different, you know, set of variables for me potentially. But, you know, my centenary Olympics has, you know, 18 events in it. You know, like I want to be able to pull myself out of a pool that, you know, where there's a one foot gap between the water and the curb, like lift myself up. I want to be able to hop over a three foot fence. I want to be able to walk three miles in an hour.

6:25I want to be able to carry two 10 pound bags up four flights of stairs. I want to be able to goblet squat 30 pounds because that's about the weight of a kid. I want to be able to get up off the floor without using my hands. So I could rattle off all of my 18 things and you would say, Peter, those seem really easy. And you'd be right as a 37-year-old stud. But the point is most 60-year-olds couldn't do this if their life depended on it. And I have yet to meet but maybe one person in their 80s or 90s who can. And so that's the aspiration is to get to that level in your 80s or 90s. How do you work that backwards to inform your training in your 60s, in your 50s, and in your 40s?

7:14Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. And I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

8:05Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.