#089 How to Exercise for Longevity | CrossFit for Health 2024

If you're a below-normal VO2 max and you go just to normal, you're getting about a 2.1 increase in life expectancy. If you go below-normal to high-normal, which is about where half the population lies, then you're getting an almost 3-year increase in life expectancy. And then if you go to like more of an elite level, so you're getting into, like, above the upper limit, that's a 5-year increase in life expectancy compared to where you were when you were below normal.

1 to 2 minutes of vigorous-intensity exercise... 3 times a day had about a 40% reduction in all-cause mortality, so that's dying from non-accidental causes of death, and a 50% reduction in cardiovascular-related mortality, which is like the number one killer in most developed nations...

Peak muscle mass happens around, between the ages of 20 and 30. And then after that, as you start to get into your 40s and 50s, you lose about 8% of muscle mass per decade. Once you get into your 70s, 15% of muscle mass per decade. So most people, by the time they're 70 or 80-years-old, only have about 60-80% of the muscle mass they had when they were 30.

People in that low-fitness group, they had a low VO2 max, their risk of death and all-cause mortality was similar to having diseases like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease. It was similar to smoking.

The brain also works really hard during exercise, and so lactate is communicating with the brain. And there's many benefits to having lactate go into the brain, and one of those is that it signals to the brain to make something called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, and what this is is a growth factor that is involved increasing new neurons inside the hippocampus.

Just getting that blood flow to go faster by exercising, by getting that exercise, kills what are called circulating tumor cells.

There was also a very recent study... People that were engaging in resistance training, either just alone or then went into the sauna right after the resistance training, they had greater gains in muscle mass if they went into the sauna right after the resistance training compared to resistance training alone. Well, actually, it was biomarkers of it.

Each unit increase in your VO2 max is associated with a 45-day increase in life expectancy.

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor is like amazing for your brain. You want more of it, and high-intensity exercise is the way to get more of it.

There have been studies showing that even 10 minutes of a high-intensity interval training workout can improve, cognition improved mood.

Doing exercise snacks around meal time, so anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour before or after a meal, can really dramatically decrease the postprandial glucose response and improve blood glucose levels.

High-intensity interval training is one of the best ways to increase mitochondrial biogenesis in skeletal muscle.

You don't have to lift heavy to get gains in muscle mass and muscle strength. You can lift lighter, as long as you're putting in that effort, and still get improvements in muscle mass and strength.