The best exercise to improve your health

23:30And the one here in America is called NHANES, and it's been going on for over 30 years. So you have thousands of people enroll in these studies. They collect them, all kinds of stuff from IQ to personality to physical stuff and blood and work and all kinds of things. And then the government's throwing these big databases and they give it open access to scientists and say like, hey, if there's anything you can pull out of here, you know, grab it. So there's the UK Biobank and NHANES over here and things like that. So we went into that database. We were able to find that grip strength was directly predictive of brain health and more specifically, you're here cognitive health.

24:06And this is the first time it's been documented as likely causal. So it's not just the fact of, well, as people that were smarter had stronger hands, like, well, how does that make sense? There's no causal that way. So the causal is this thing. And the reason why is because of the neurological component. So strength training is very specific and different than corneal-auspire training because the neurological demand of strength training is very, very high, which means you continue to keep neurological pathways activated and healthy. You need those neurological pathways to make decisions and think and to keep your brain alive.

24:40So by challenging your ability to physically do something that is either complex or complicated or requires a lot of force, like a lot of strength. that requires neurological affirmation that requires those things to stay alive and healthy. I'm like totally shocked to hear this. I think you're saying that, you know, we all have this idea that if you had to do the crossword puzzle or like serve some sort of complex task, like that's going to keep your brain working. But I think you're saying something that doesn't sound at all obvious to me, which is if you have to do something, like lift something that's really heavy, that is also going to keep my brain having to think?

25:19100%. In fact, the research on this one specifically, you mentioned crossword puzzles, brain games or what things like that are called. They're good. The problem is once you figure those things out, continuing to do them is no longer neurologically protected. And so it's the novelty aspect that is really important. And so this is the same for folks who have really cognitively demanding jobs. And they're like, oh, no, no, I'm fine because my job is really stressful. Well, actually, after a number of years of continuing to do it, it may be stressful, but it's no longer cognitively challenging, despite what you may think it is.

25:50And so you need to add some novelty in there. So the crossword puzzle thing is like great, but after a while, it's no longer going to have the neuroprotective benefits that it wants to. Strength training will almost always have them. Even though I feel like lifting up, I mean, no disrespect, but I feel like I might lift a weight up from the ground that I've still been doing that. It doesn't feel very cognitively challenging. I know it's going to sit there only to lift it up. Help me to understand And it doesn't work with crossword puzzles. How does it work with lifting something heavy off the ground?

26:22How do you actually lift something off the ground? Well, there's three major steps to that. Going on the inverse here, you actually are, let's just say you're gripping something, right? You're holding onto something with your hand. You're trying to stand up with it. That means you're trying to make bones move, right? Human movement is making bones move, period. Now, how do bones move? Well, muscle is not actually attached to bone. That's a misconception. muscle comes together, attaches to connective tissue and tendons, tendons attached above. So step number one is, I'm going in reverse order on purpose here.

26:55You have to get connective tissue to pull on a bone. So connective tissue number one. It's number three, but you get it. I'm saying going backwards here. Let's call it number three. Number two then is you had to have muscle contract. Now, how does muscle contract? Something has to tell it to contract. That would be your central nervous system, Prince, and your peripheral nervous system. This is your brain, right? Call your brain up here, extended all alcohol on your system, same, same thing here, right? And so really, you have to tell your nervous system, make this specific thing contract on this timing at this exact time.

27:27Now, if it's a heavy load, that's just really, really heavy. The only way you can increase force production, individual muscles themselves cannot change how much force they produce. It's called the all-in-one principle. Muscle fibers can only contract at 100 % effort. That's it. You can't go 95, 93. There's no dimmer switch. It is fully on or fully off. So muscle fibers only go 100%. So the only way you increase your total force production, so how much force you're lifting your arm with, is to turn on more total muscle fibers. This means more motor units. This means more nerves is the way to think about this.

28:06So as you go to pick up that very light thing, you turn on just a couple of nerves. No problem. That medium thing, got to turn on more. That heavy thing, got to turn on more. That heaviest thing, got to turn on the most possible. Now, those nerves are specific to that force production, which means when you don't do anything that's kind of heavy, you never, ever, ever, ever, under any circumstance, turn on those nerves that are getting dedicated to kind of heavy. When you never go really, really heavy, those nerves never get turned on. And so after many, many, many, many years and decades, they eventually die and go away.

28:41When you're talking about crosswords, great, it is still cognitively active in the moment. But we're not accessing a broad spectrum, a neuromuscular connection throughout the entire body that says, hey, there's a certain set of neurons that are dedicated to this type of activity that haven't been activated in a long time. When you strength train, it is doing that, right? You're going to get a whole bunch of nerves that activate muscle contraction at a low level doing any daily physical activity, walking, standing, taking a bowel movement, all those things are going to do those activities of daily living.

29:13But the only way to get what are called those higher threshold motor units is to do something that is a higher threshold. And a higher threshold, again, means force production. So we have a whole cascade of neural activation dedicated to just force production. It's there. The only way really to do this is force production. And this is why strength training is so special. It's one of the many reasons. And Andy, I think that's amazing. I have to admit, I had thought that like doing a deadlift, you know, like which is lifting something heavy off the ground, seems incredibly straightforward from the brain's perspective.

29:47Because as you said, it's just sitting there. If you wait for a while, it's still just sitting there. You know, you have to lift it up. And I'd never thought about it as being like anything like as complicated as you described. So you're describing all of these neurons that have to work. Like, do they have, I think most people listening are saying when they think about neurological support, they're worrying about dementia, right? They're worrying about Alzheimer's. They're worrying what's going to happen. Are you saying that like this lifting really heavy weights is actually protective against that?

30:16Oh, 100%. 100%. And not to say it can protect you 100%. But now you have a couple of different ways to think about this, right? So on one hand, you have things like Parkinson's, which are mostly, they're neurological, but they're mostly musculature based, right? There's a cognitive component of Parkinson's, but it is a mostly like, you have spasticity and muscle control. Then you have things like Alzheimer's. You have early onset and late onset, and you have dementia, okay? Now, if we think about early onset Alzheimer's, that seems to be almost exclusively, well, actually, I don't know how to say this, but it's very heavily driven by unknown factors, probably genetics, right?

30:55If you get Alzheimer's in your 30s or 40s, there's no amount of strength training that was probably going to help that. It's just there. Dementia and late-onset Alzheimer's is extremely preventable. Extremely preventable. Again, tons of research on that. I can't remember the actual numbers, but it is a large percentage of those things are preventable because of this. And it is a combination, by the way, of physical activity, sensory perception, which means you need to be seeing things at a different distance. You need to be smelling different things. You need to be hearing different things. This is one of the reasons why the research on being out in nature is so potent, because it requires you to see and look at things at a different level.

31:35The vision and light amount is different. You're hearing different sounds. All that actually goes into what's called pro-perception and sensory input. And so you have all your senses, right? Your sight, smell, touch, sound, all those things, right? It's the same thing I talked about. When nervous system is not activated, it goes away. Your nervous system is your brain. So when that goes away, then why your brain goes away? This is dementia, right? This is what's happening. And I think we tend to have this view that the two are completely different, I think. And I think we've tended to think that.

32:09And what you're saying is that's wrong, that by losing all of these physical skills that you have with your brain, this is basically directly linked to the things that affect our memory and our ability to make sense of the world and these sort of, I guess, higher of thinking, as we would think about it, separate from sort of controlling our body. I mentioned grip strength being a predictor earlier. A new paper just came out in the last month or so that looked at asymmetry of strength. So how strong is your right hand compared to your left hand? And no one ever really thought about this. But the amount of asymmetry is defined as more than 10%.

32:43More than 10 % is actually potentially an early predictor of nerve denervation. And so what they're saying here basically is, it's not just that your dominant hand is stronger than your left hand. okay great if it's more than 10 % stronger it may be an early indication of neurological degradation i know not that you're losing nerve but you it's denervation specifically but the point is it could be actually it's not just about like you can't open a jar with your left hand oh no worries it is hey this might be early sign something is happening i'd love to come back you mentioned something about blood pressure earlier and there'll be a lot of people listening to this are also worrying about blood pressure because it is something that's very easy to measure.

33:19So it tends to be something that people become aware of. And you said something about isometric exercise, but I don't know what that is. Could you help us to understand? Yeah, sure. So this is going to tie together nicely. I've got a number of studies that have specifically looked at the impact of just grip strength training. There's no warmup required. You don't have to change. You can squeeze something as hard as possible. These are called hand grip dynamometers. They're fairly cheap. You can get them for 25, 35 bucks. So no cardio, no strength. You go in and you squeeze, you hold these things.

33:54That's all you do. Typically something like six to eight second, maybe a little bit longer contractions. So squeeze, it's already shaking just your grip. You know, you do some eight to, I can't remember exactly, eight to probably 12 or so repetitions of that a couple of days a week. And those have been shown statistically significant reductions in resting blood pressure in people that are hypertensive. So people that have chronic high blood pressure over, you know, six to eight to 10, like something like that. So grip strength training alone is an isometric contraction. So you're grabbing, you're squeezing, you're holding it.

34:24What that's doing is because all the muscles or many of them in a muscle group or around a joint are contracting, you're kind of squeezing all the muscles at the same time, which means blood can't go anywhere, right? So it kind of gets, it's what we call it colluded or stoch moving. So in the short term, your blood pressure shoots through the roof. Because you can imagine you're trying to circulate blood throughout your body. And when it's coming out of your heart, it's getting squeezed down by all the muscles. So it can't go anywhere. So the pressure in the heart gets really, really, really high because all the blood gets backed up, but it's pumping and it's pumping and it's trying to get it out of there.

34:53And so the pressure gets super, super high. In response to that, your body then will say effectively, hey, we're having this consistent challenge. Let's make the vessels more pliable, more elastic, more plastic, open them up more. By doing that at rest, now the blood pressure, the pressure at rest goes down because it's easier to get stuff through. And so almost always, this is what we call a hormetic response. And so the body tends to work very well on short, very hard disturbances and homeostasis or kind of the resting state match with recovery. And so if you get your blood pressure up really, really, really, really high in the short term, and then you bring it back down and let it rest a lot, it will respond by causing an adaptation.

35:42I feel like quite a lot of people understand now that if you go and do exercise, then it actually can damage your muscles in the short term, but actually that helps you to build them, that this is tension. I think what I'd never heard of you saying is it's sort of something equivalent for your blood pressure. It's almost like you put the blood pressure up high in your body and actually magically, effectively, It's like, oh, I'm learning from this to make adaptations that are actually going to reduce my blood pressure. Your brain is the same way. You do something really challenging. You do your crossword.

36:13You solve a really hard problem. You just get locked in and you write for 90 minutes. You do whatever it is, right? And then you recover. And what happens? Motor control and motor learning, by the way, doesn't happen during acute stress. So when you're trying to learn a new physical task or you're trying to learn something new, a new language, you're trying to solve a really hard problem you've been working on, in that moment, stress levels are way too high. You just go on super alert. When you come down from that stress moment though, that's when the new learning gets set in stone. Physical learning, cognitive learning, all that.

36:46So it's the same thing. Really high pressure, really high fatigue, tons of stress in the system cognitively. Then when you relax, recover, new systems, new memories, new strategies get built to the brain. It's the same of all of them. I don't want people to think, by the way, everything in your life has to be to level 10. All these things I'm talking about, by far, the biggest benefit, by far, is going from the bottom 25th percentile to just the next level up. It is not, you know, level three to level one. It does not matter at all. Just going from, in fact, it gets worse, just going from the bottom 15th percentile to one percentile group up is the biggest gains you're going to see in your health of all of these groups.

37:28And so if someone is, you know, run 20 marathons and they're trying to get a PR of the next one, they want to get more fit, that will make them a little bit healthier. Maybe, maybe not. They're going to get more original gains, right? Goalie from the worst. Doesn't really matter. It's not a huge deal, but you will have a, again, you'll put years on your life just being not the worst, least strong, least fit person, you know, in the entire city. And I'm very specific in all my examples to use percentages because everything is relative. I don't talk about the weight you have to lift. I don't talk about the, it's a percentage, right?

38:02So if you go to the gym and, you know, you go, you don't know what you're doing. You find one machine and you lift it and it feels kind of heavy. I don't care if it's six pounds. Kind of heavy is still kind of heavy. It is the same thing for you physically. So you're getting the same thing that I'm getting while lifting kind of heavy. If I have 600 pounds, it's irrelevant. It doesn't matter at all. And so it is always about just the individual person. And so when I say speed or when I say strength or when I say like as hard as possible, if you walk off that thing and go like that is the fastest I could possibly move it, then you're getting the exact same benefit I'm getting or anybody else's.

38:39It is always about your internal physiology and your internal system. If it's being challenged, it adapts. If it's not being challenged, it won't. You don't have to challenge things. We always say this. You don't want to annihilate. You just want to stimulate. okay stimulate progress stimulate adaptation but you don't have to annihilate in fact there's excellent research on annihilation gives you no more progress than stimulation if you want to think about this in terms of muscle growth so the amount of soreness you get after uh you know going through a hypertrophy or muscle growth training is not a predictor at all of how much growth you will actually get in fact if you go to what is called reps and reserve and so say you add a weight on a machine and you did eight reps and you think i had two repetitions maybe i could have done like maybe like two or three more stopping right there is actually almost as effective as doing those last two more reps it is about basic stimulation um and this is why when we open up the conversation but i'm glad we're kind of closing in the same spot is um i really do want to let people like you have so many options if you love going to the class and it's a group fitness class and you have kettlebells and you do some sprints and you lift and then you're all on the floor sweating everywhere.

39:57You rip your shirts off and you throw it. Great. If you hate that stuff, you don't have to do a day of that ever. If you like jogging, amazing. If you hate jogging, great too. If you want to do yoga in your apartment, okay, awesome. And you want to just follow along with someone on Instagram live, so the yoga, all of those are options. The biggest key that everyone has to get to though, like by far, every single person, you want consistency over time. Adherence is the number one predictor of success with fitness and nutrition programs. Always adherence. When you talk about this across the lifespan, you have to remember the benefits of exercise are so compounding over the decades.

40:44It's not about this month or this week or this day. you will need to be in this for the decade long thing. So if you can say consistent over decades, you're going to be fine. It's people that go and they do things to a level and they get hurt and then they miss it. Or they do, you know, they're so motivated to lose their weight or to, you know, change after a bad breakup. These are like very common reasons people start fitness programs. And then you get really hard and you go so hard. You go six days a week and you do two and a half hour workouts and you're there for six weeks. and you're just like, okay, I haven't hung out with a friend.

41:19My company's going out of business. Like, I can't, this is not sustainable because it's not and you don't need to do that. And so put yourself in a position where you just don't lose big chunks of training. A day or two, fine. You want to go on a week vacation, fine, no problem. I'm talking about months, right? Where it's like, oh yeah, I got to have it. It's been, well, no, it hasn't been that long, but I guess it has been seven weeks now that I haven't worked out. I didn't feel it and all of a sudden it's just, it's so like, oh, because I hurt my back a little bit and then I had that trip and then I had the, and then all of a sudden, but then I got a cold and I skipped four days there.

41:51Now it's been seven weeks. Now you got to get started all over again. So you just don't want these big ones. And so what I always, another way to think about this is don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Just get something in. Just do something. If all you can do is get a couple of walks in. A lot of people listening will say by this point, they've got, they've accumulated quite a lot of injuries in their life. They're, you know, they're not just going to feel that they can be let loose in a gym. And so I think they often say, well, so I can't really do any strength training because I don't have the capacity to sort of just go and lift a heavy weight over my head or something.

42:26Does that mean, is it too late for them to do strength training? Does that mean that it's impossible if you've accumulated injuries? No, it's completely possible. If you can stand up from a chair or a couch or toilet, then you're doing a leg extension. It's the same day. Right? You can do whatever. work around your injuries for sure and do the parts that you can't do. Or if you just don't like the gym environment for a billion reasons, it's too far, too expensive. If there's another way you can do exercise that is not just walking, get in a pool. Okay, great. There's going to be some contraction going on there.

43:05Put your back against the wall and just hold whatever angle you can hold for a while. That's going to be fine for this type of person you're describing. At the beginning, I said, don't worry about the external part. It's all about the internal change. So if you need a machine to help you turn your quad on, great. If you can sit against a wall to turn your quad on, great. Your quad will not know the difference. It has no idea. It doesn't matter. I find that really motivating. I love hearing that. One final question, because we're maybe imagining somebody different who doesn't have any injuries.

43:41But what they're saying is like, I'm really time constrained. So, you know, there's a lot of listeners here who have a whole bunch of small children and like they're trying to squeeze this in around the edges of their life or other things in their life, you know, that they're having to balance. So they're like, oh, I'd love to be able to have the time to spend, you know, three hours a week at the gym and go and do some running. But they're really constrained. If they were saying like, I'd love to understand if I had 15 or 20 minutes, maybe two or three times a week. What are the sorts of exercises?

44:14What am I looking to do to make that have this best impact given the way you're describing this huge impact it can have on my long-term health? Yeah. Well, for the record here, I have a five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son. I am a full college professor. I coach many professional athletes and I have six companies. I'm in the same boat. I wish you said that at the beginning because I had assumed that you were managing, you know, all of that exercise. So what do you do? Yeah. Okay. So similar thing. If you put those constraints on there, you want at least once a week, in my opinion, at least once a week where you can do a longer session with no bricks, call this steady state, call it cardio, call it whatever.

44:58So for Natasha, she's going to go on the spin bike. Great. For me, a lot of times that's on a bicycle and I'm going to ride around outside on a bike, right? I'm I'm not going to, I'm candidly, I'm not going to warm up. I'm not doing any breathing drill. Like I'm going to get on the bike and I'm going to go. I live in Southern California. So it's tends to be nice almost every single day. Okay. I try to do that for like a 45 minute ride. I'm literally gone 46 minutes, right? Like I come back in and like minute 46, I'm switching out. I'm having a kid. I'm doing something. I'm getting back on a call.

45:30I'm like, I'm not laying around and I'm getting right back after it. I'd love to go longer, but that's for this. So one session a week. That's all she does too. Candidly, I'll do one generally. I will then also supplement that with as much general physical walking as I possibly can. This is any call I can take on a walk, I will. If I'm ever traveling, I will never sit down during a layover. I have just a four-hour layover. I'm probably going to walk for three hours and 40 minutes, right? I'm just going to get steps in. If I can, but I land the same thing, like walking, walking, walking as much as I can.

46:03I don't like walking at all, but that is what it is, right? so when can I just give basic steps in and then one day a week can I go a little bit longer one day a week I'm going to go very very short very high intensity I've got a aerosol bike um which is like the hand crank and let the pedals in my garage right so I'm going to do that um that's probably looking like a five to seven minute warm-up and then 10 to 12 minutes um of any kind of extremely high intensity max effort intervals this could be 30 seconds as hard as I can, 30 seconds off. Could be four minutes hard, four minutes off, couple rounds of that.

46:38All kinds of stuff you can do. I might just go 10 minutes as hard as I possibly can and come back off of that. In addition, I will try to do some sort of strength training at least three times per week. So squats or swings or split squats, presses, sit, like movements, things like that. I know we're coming to the end. So I just love to try and do a quick summing up and you covered a lot of stuff. So So hopefully I will have caught the essence and please let me know if I get it wrong. I think we started by talking a lot about the fact that this idea of fitness is both cardio and strength, and there are ways we can measure this.

47:15And you talked about this VO2 max test and we'll put some links on the show notes, which actually is a better way to predict your long-term health and the quality of your life than most of the things you will get when you go and see a doctor. And there's a sort of scale, I think you said, from one to 100, like a super athletes at 80, people who are really fit at 60 to 70. And basically, as a man, if you fall down to 20, or a woman down to 16, basically, you lose independent living. So you want to stay above that. But I think the really positive thing, because there's something depressing about it falling is you're saying, actually, if you move just up from the bottom 15 % to above that, or if you get out of the bottom quartile, you can have a really profound impact on your long term health.

47:59And there's really things that you can do relatively fast to change your health. So that's one thing that's really interesting, which is sort of on the cardio. And then you talked about something which I think will be even more of a surprise, which is on the strength, you can do something as simple as just measuring your hand grip, that there is a machine, I think, did you call it a dynometer? Hand grip dynamometer. Hand grip dynamometer. So we'll definitely find some links to that. In seconds, you can basically, there's measurement, which is also this amazing predictor of your long-term health.

48:28But interestingly, you can actually use it also to reduce your blood pressure. So you can train yourself just with this device. And that can genuinely, I think, again, you said in just a few months, reduce your blood pressure. So again, there's things you can really do there. We then talked about how surprisingly the work you do on strength directly affects your brain. And that we tend to think about it as being like, you know, some brain puzzle or work will affect your brain. But actually amazingly, just lifting a really heavy but static object is having all of this impact on your neurological system.

49:05And that can actually reduce your risk of dementia. And there's a set of other things that you can do around dementia and we'll share the link there. And then we talked about, okay, what about if you don't have all this freedom of movement, does that mean that all of this is impossible? And actually what you said, which is great, is sort of wherever you are, actually, if you're doing something that is hard for you, you're really going to be having this impact. And that even if you have injuries, there's things that you're able to do. And I think we wrapped up with your own story where you do manage to put in, I would have to say a very impressive set of exercises through the day, but you're interested in saying that actually these are in lots of pieces.

49:43And again, coming back to this original story, like anything we can do across both this cardio or the strength is really going to have an impact on people's health. Nailed it. Thank you so much for spending the time with us. My pleasure, man. Thank you, Andy, for joining us on Zoe Science and Nutrition today. We learned what the best exercises are to keep us healthy as we get older and how to incorporate being active into our busy lives. If you want to understand how to support your body with the best foods for you so you can enjoy many more active and healthy years, then you may want to try Zoe's Personalized Nutrition Program.

50:21You can learn more and get 10 % off by going to zoe.com slash podcast. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolfe. Zoe Science and Nutrition is produced by Yellow Hewins Martin, Richard Willen, and Tilly Fulford. See you next time. I'll leave you with one final thought. What if there was one simple habit that, when repeated, could change how you feel for the better? I'd like to tell you about something that I do daily, for my own health. It's called Daily 30, the gut supplement developed by our scientists here at Zoe. Daily 30 is made of over 30 hand-picked plants, including seaweed, fungi, and different types of fiber.

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