Hey everyone, welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host Peter Atia, this podcast, my website and My Weekly Newsletter, all focus on the goal of translating, the science of longevity into something, accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoyed this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of this space, to the next level. At the end of this episode. I'll explain what those benefits.
Tsar, or if you want to learn more now, head over to Peter attea, m.com forward, slash subscribe. Now, without further delay. Here's today's episode. Welcome to a special episode of the drive. Now that we've released over 200 episodes. We realize we've covered a lot of stuff across various topics in a lot of detail that I think, frankly, for people can be very difficult. If you're not someone who started listening for years ago, I think even if you
Were listening from the very beginning. It can be really hard at times to kind of piece together all of the information. So we thought about trying an experiment for today's episode. We've decided to pull a variety of clips from previous podcasts, but around a given theme. And in this episode we're going to focus on clips that discuss exercise and my framework for it. So we put these clips in order of what we think, is the best way to listen from top to bottom. So think of this as kind of a mashup
A whole bunch of things on exercise, but they're organized in a way that I think should make frankly, a lot of sense and hopefully provide even more value than if you were to listen to each of these podcasts in their completeness. So the Hope here, of course, is that this going to allow you to understand this topic better, but also to identify some previous episodes. If you now want to go back and dive really deep into those first set of Clips, we're going to look at is what I'm optimizing for with my exercise. And why I think training for the centenarian Olympics or
Canary, decathlon, as I'm more commonly referred to it. These days is so important. The last thing to note here is that some of these clips are actually from a Mas. And so if you're not a subscriber, hopefully this gives you a sense of what lives behind that pay wall and why we think there's a lot of value there. Additionally, for the stability and DNS content Clips in our episode with Beth Lewis and Michael rantala. We actually filmed a lot of instructional videos of them showing us how to do these exercises. I recommend you spend the time to go and look at those videos because I think seeing here is probably better than just hearing. So this
First time we're doing this. So would love your feedback. So tell us what you think about this and tell us if this is the kind of thing you'd like to see more of and tell us if you think it sucks because it's a lot of work to do this and if you think it sucks, I'd be happy to not do this anymore. So, without further delay. I hope you enjoy this special episode of the drive, everything we're talking about Bob right now is based on longevity and that's very different than if you were asking this question through the lens of performance.
Does that point kind of make sense, or should I expand on that a bit? Yeah, I think you should expand a little bit, maybe on the Performance Health and Longevity, particularly performance and Longevity, and the possible trade off between the two. If someone said to me Peter, my goal is to break 2 hours and 40 minutes on the Chicago marathon next year. I would be talking about this in a totally different manner. That is a very difficult performance goal and that requires training at an
G system that I'm not even really going to talk about in the context of Longevity. If someone says, I want to break 10 hours on the Iron Man. If someone says, I want to deadlift three-and-a-half times, my body weight, if you start to really look into the far, recesses of amazing physical performance. Everything I'm saying needs to be modified and I'm not going to talk about what those things look like. What I will say is they are in generally, not
Near with longevity. And at times, they can be outright orthogonal, and I realize that's coming out of my mouth. It sounds pretty freaking stupid if you're not a math person, so let me explain what that means in English. Something is collinear. When it's directly in line. With something is orthogonal when it is completely at odds with, or at 90 degrees to. So, trying to run the fastest 10k is
Training at an energy system that is very demanding. If the cardiovascular system, it is pretty much maximum. Cardiac output, just beneath vo2max above functional threshold. It puts an amazing strain on the body and frankly, while doing that is better than sitting on a couch all day.
That is generally past the point
of optimizing longevity returns, and
He comes at some longevity cost relative to something more at a slightly lower energy system.
So everything I'm talking about is geared towards this centenarian Olympics, which we've talked about in the past, this idea of being the most Kick-Ass ninety-year-old
possible.
And that's really based on to Energy System. So it's got the stability in the strength. Peace, we talked about and then it's got this low end, aerobic Energy System, which is zoned to that. We'll talk about in a
second. And then I think it's
punctuated with brief bursts of generally zone 5.
If and the reason I think those two matter is, that's generally where life takes place, life is Zone, 1 Zone 2 and zone 5. And so by training Zone, 2 and zone 5 obviously much more in zone 2 than zone 5, we're really teaching ourselves up metabolically and also structurally to do these things. Based on what you know today. What do you wish you would have implemented?
Ended when it comes to physical conditioning / training. When you were at the age of 25, to make the question more. General. What do you believe is typically overlooked in this realm among very active, 25 year olds who wish to be in the race for the gold medals in the Centenary and Olympics. Hmm. Well, that's a question from my heart. Have I spoken publicly about the Centenary in decathlon? In the Centenary Olympics? I didn't realize I had, but obviously become less of a good suggestion. There's a number of questions that talk about
Centenarian Olympics, musters the centenarian Olympics. I don't, I honestly don't remember talking about this, so but I did let me restate what I'm talking about and that will put this question in
context about,
I don't know, nine months ago, maybe, a year ago. I just sort of had this Epiphany which was that the system is going to fail first in body for most people, which isn't to say, always, right. So some people just died suddenly, you know, their mind and our body are fine, but they get
truck with the disease and they die for another subset of people. Unfortunately, not that small, their mind is taken from them first. So cognition gets robbed of them and then eventually, you know, either they died or their body also breaks down and away, they go. But but as I really reflected on what's going on, I think that for most people, the decline of mind-body, and then the burden of disease seems to be one by one in the wrong way. Meaning body seems to fail first.
So it got me thinking that, at least for me, how would I mitigate that? So I came up with this idea of backcasting, instead of forecasting. What I want to do in the end and I borrow that term backcasting from Annie Duke who wrote thinking in bets a book that I love and any will also be a
guest on the podcast soon. I hope
so. The idea of backcasting is instead of trying to say, well, if I'm 25, what do I need to be doing tomorrow? And I'm 26. And then what do I need to be doing when I'm 30? And what am I doing it for?
Me an easier way to do it is say, what do I need to be doing when i'm 100 and then how do I work backwards from that? And so for me as a ripe old 46 year old 45 year old. When I started thinking about this, the question was, okay. Well if I want to live to 100 and again Genetically speaking, I probably won't because I don't have the genes to get there. But let's assume that I can eat my way out to 100. That's 55 years away. What do I have to physically be able to do to be satisfied with my life. So as I went through that exercise the way
I did, it was doing it through the lens of my kids. So I took the ages of my kids and I projected them forward to how old will they be
when I'm 100 and
that's an easy calculation to do. Obviously, anybody can do that for themselves. And then I said, well, probabilistically, how old will their kids be? So I said, well, you know, my kids are this, this, this their kids will be approximately this range and then you realize, wow, their kids are going to have kids. By the time, I'm a hundreds about time.
I'm 100. I'm going to have great grandchildren that will likely be between like one and seven or eight. That's basically my calculation. Okay, so then I thought, okay. Well, what are the things I'm going to want to be able to do when I'm 100 to just be happy. So it goes without saying I would love to not be, you know, bedridden with disease per se. It also goes without saying that I would love to have the cognitive faculties that I have or at least.
Enough amount of them that I'm able to sort of have the executive function processing speed, and you know, memory that's necessary to sort of function, but then I really kind of double clicked on the physical part of this.
So there's a bunch of activities that I want to be able to do. I still won't be able to shoot a bow and arrow. I still want to be able to actually exercise, like, I do enjoy, you know, some people exercise because they have to I think there are a number of us who exercise because we actually enjoy it and it's fortuitous that it provides benefit. But the one I really focused on was the real simple stuff, the activities of daily living and among them is like playing with kids, right? So I started thinking about well, what would I want to be able to do with great grandkids when I'm 100 and their three, four, five and in going through that I made a list and there were
10 things on my list and I just began to refer to that as my centenarian decathlon, which is problematic because the decathlon has 10 things and my list has 18 things. But not with thinning, that tiny little detail. What's the
Latin origin of 18?
I assume Deca is Latin for 10 of something. Right? Anyway, well whatever. Okay, so we'll come up with a fancier term for it or I'll figure out a way to consolidate make, let us know. So my centenarian decathlon, has these 18 things that I want to be able to do when I'm 100 and some of
them seem so trivial that you'd be like, how is that even on your list? Like, for example, I want to be able to get up off the floor with a single point of support, which means I want to be able to using just one arm, get up off the floor. Now, it's not that it's the end of the world if I need to use two arms, but like I want to hold myself to that
standard.
I want to be able to drop into a squat position and pick up a child that weighs 30 pounds. I want to be able to lift something that weighs 30 pounds over my head because that's about the weight of my little roller board suitcase.
And I would really be bummed. If I couldn't put that in the overhead compartment of an airplane, presumably, I'll still be flying on
airplanes and
you know, those are still exist. They'll be flying yourself. No way. Yeah, right. We'll we'll all have little jet packs or something. You know, I want to be able to get
myself out of a pool without a ladder. Simple, right again? How
trivial is that to do today? Where you have, you know, four inches between the concrete and the water and how it, how easy is it for us to just pull ourselves out today without the latter seeing the guys that can jump without support, they can jump.
Out of a pool, just jump out of a pool onto the platform. No, I think there's some videos. Nice for that. Yeah. So when I go through that whole thing, I then
say okay, what are physical tasks that would approximate those things? So for
example, like picking up the 30 pound kid who comes running at, you could be approximated by a 30-pound goblet squat lifting 30 pounds above your head in the form of a suitcase.
So pretty easy to approximate with these things, goblet squat, just for the uninitiated. Usually, think of it as like a kettlebell, but almost like you're holding a goblet in front of you, like a front squat. That's right. You're going down coming up. That's right. Imagine such picking up a child. Then I've just been working backwards from there. Which saying, well, if I want to be able to do these things at a hundred, there's going to be a decline. I have to be able to do these things at 80. I'm going to need to be able to do it at this level at 60 and I need to be able to do it at this level today. Again, given the
Inevitable decline. So most of my training today. In fact, I would
argue all of my training today centers around that
I no longer train for
Anything, that's not related to that. So I don't do any training that's related to racing or competing in anything which is not to say. It's bad to do those things. I'm just saying that that's the point. I'm at in my life. So this is kind of a long-winded answer to what I think is a great question, which is a 25 year old who's frankly thinking of something that I most 25 year olds. I can't imagine would be thinking of certainly I wasn't thinking of this at 25. I mean the 25 your sort of immortal but
This question is, presumably realizing that hey in 75 years, the world's going to look different and I wanna be able to do X Y & Z. So, I don't know the answer because I don't know what that person's limitations are today. So rather I would just say, what is the framework and my framework for thinking about? This is four components of exercise. One is stability. The second is strength. The third is aerobic performance. The fourth is anaerobic output and I didn't go through all of my 18, but each of my 18 touch, at least one of those and many
Touch more than one. For example, the goblet squat requires both strength and stability. Walking up. One of mine is being able to walk up three flights of stairs with 10 pounds of groceries in each hand. Again, you and I could do that today, blindfolded and backwards that starts to become harder when you get older. Well, that's got a little bit of aerobic. That's on the threshold of aerobic anaerobic and it's also got strength. So, what I would be looking to do is say how well am I doing on each of those things. Now that said,
In my experience, the one where most people start to fail, first is stability. Because as a species, we usually begin to fail that once we enter school. And I think I've talked about this before, and I've certainly posted pictures of like my youngest son squatting. It's just incredible. Like, the way that they can do. This is so beautiful. You don't, you don't have to be a kinesiologist to look at them and go. Wow, they're so natural when it comes to these movements, everything they do and the field of
Dynamic neuromuscular stabilization is in fact, built on this principle, which is you know, they're about 13 or 14 movements that are completely
innate to us. And by the
time we're a year and a half older. So we do them all perfectly and then it's basically all downhill from there accelerated significantly by school. Once you start sitting that's when we lose so much of that stability and we you know lose the ability to maintain tension through our pelvic floor and throughout the entire. I hate the term core but core, of course describing the diaphragm.
The obliques, the transversal is fascia and the entire pelvic floor. So my two cents would be spend as much time
as possible working
on Dynamic, stability, static stability, static first, then Dynamic. And as long as you incorporate, those principles into what you are doing strength-wise, that's great because at the age of 25, you can do a lot of dumb things and get away with it incorrectly.
I think I've always squatted in deadlifted, somewhat incorrectly. I don't think I've ever fully engaged. In fact, I know I've never fully engaged, my pelvic floor, doing those. And I think I got away with murder for a long time though. I now realize the damage that's occurred as a result of it. Do you want to talk about your? I think it was your squat routine. I think you mentioned this to me one time way back when with your my high school. Yeah. Yeah. The breathing squats. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing routine. I don't that. I recommend this. But again, if it was once
Week. So, we lifted six days a week in high school 3 hours a day. I mean, we just lived in the gym and on Fridays we would do this routine of breathing squats, which was you took your best 10 rep weight. So weight that you were going to absolutely fail at 10 reps with you, loaded it on your back and you do a rep and that the, so you go down and up at your normal, Cadence, at the top. You took three of the deepest breath you could.
Could take each breath taking 10 seconds. So that takes 30 seconds. So it's a
Five in five out, three of those and then do another rep and you do 20 reps. So the set takes 10 minutes and by the end, it's the only thing I've ever done. Since that Rivals that degree of discomfort is like an air bike Tabata. And this is like one of these knucklehead things. We got out of like our body building magazines for powerlifting magazines, and the idea was like nothing will stick.
You're late more strength and growth than that activity. And the reality of it is it worked. I mean in the course of one year of doing that I added over 100 pounds to my Squat and that was starting at a level where I was already pretty strong and just but, you know, it's so funny about it.
Like it was so painful that on Thursdays. I'd start getting
uptight like knowing that we were going to do this the next day. It was just you just dreaded this.
In so much. Yeah, we might get into this to there's slow. It's called super slow or slow training. Doug macguff is one of the guys that body by science is one of the proponents and he talks about lifting lifting slow and basically accumulating time under tension of maybe 90 seconds, which I don't think people realize is like an eternity and you're talking about what you're talking about that if you actually calculate when you when you lift, if your bench pressing or squatting or something like that, if you ever timed yourself and realize when you're working out like that and you're lifting weights, how
Actually, actually little the time is that is spent under tension and then you compare it to that, which is, yeah, because are in that 10 minutes. I'm not under the same tension. The whole time when you're standing, you're under much less tension. I mean, in many ways, my recollection of that was your upper body hurt as much as your lower body. Again. It's the fortunately, it's been so long since I've done it, but honestly, I think that your traps you have the last because you know, when you're squatting you're really trying to wrap the bar.
Around your neck, you have to engage your lats, to squat. So the fatigue here, the fatigue there and the whole thing's a mess. But, you know, your legs are getting a bit of a break during that period of time because you're locked out. So, yeah, it's, I mean, 90 seconds of totally being under tension is an eternity. If the weight is heavy enough. Hmm, which is the principle behind that whole lift. Yeah, and on that, on the note of a centenarian decathlon, a little show called the Olympics. There's 18 events. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about
And I think one thing too is that if you're thinking about doing a goblet squat, it's almost like a checklist of things that you want to be able to to achieve. So it's not necessarily like going to the CrossFit Games in, you're going to see how many goblet squats you can do for time compared to other centenarians. You're basically checking something off that you would hope to do. And one thing that I think like once this is refined down to maybe less than 18 or maybe it's 18 events is maybe put it in front of, there's a lot of ongoing centenarian studies. There's the New York the
Stein, one, which is the Ashkenazi Jews. Long-lived centenarian study. I got that wrong. But there's the Thomas pearls where I think they actually have like, an aggregate Italian centenarians the okinawans and things like that. And I wonder how many of those centenarians. I even you give the list to nir. Barzilai, or Tom. My guess is, none of them could do it. None of them that. Yeah, and here's the reason this is why I think this is different. Anyone who's a centenarian today. I'm willing to make an
Statement which I know is a dumb thing to do. Anybody who's a centenarian today is a centenarian because of their exceptional genes. They haven't hacked their way there. What we're talking about people our age as we're talking about hacking our way into being centenarians. So that is going to be very deliberate. Now again, I'm not taking away from the odd Centenary and who's also lived like a monk, but, you know, we know this really well because we done all this research on it, for the book, most centenarians.
I mean, I haven't done anything necessarily better than or worse than their peers, their unpacked on average. They tend to smoke more exercise less any worse. So what we're really talking about is a completely new model, which is actually forcing your way to become a centenarian rather than just sort of gliding your way into it. And therefore, I think it's going to require much more, deliberate attention
around
what your mind and body are doing at that
point.
Now we've set the stage for what we're optimizing for with our exercise. These next two clips are going to focus on strength. One of the pillars in my framework for exercise. The first clip is from a recent AMA, on the importance of preserving strength and muscle mass as we age and the second it from an older episode where I speak about the importance of deadlifts and why I think they're so beneficial to our Longevity. If we're able to do them safely.
Let's kind of just put some numbers to
So what is it mean, you know how much lean mass and strength are people losing my time? Because I think this is another thing. I try to communicate to patients a lot, which is it goes back to that idea of what I said about the gravity of Aging, you know, what is aging, kind of robbing you of as time goes on and you have got to fight like hell to avoid it. But basically you look at multiple studies. They're going to say meant the lowest rate of
The client that I could see as 1% per year, another study and will be, can post these studies in the show notes, you know, one point three percent per year, others are sort of putting it. One to two percent per year. After Fifty, thirty five to forty percent between age, 20 and 80 and the strength loss is might even be greater. Right? We're talking about two to three, some studies, even showing four percent strength loss.
Every year, I mean it's very difficult to put that in context, right? When you understand. What compounding does it gives you a sense of what it means to sort of be.
Average, when you're 50.
If you have the aspiration of kind of kicking ass when you're 85, you can't afford to be average when you're 50, and that's just the bottom line. There's no other way to describe that. Either through cardiorespiratory, Fitness strength, or probably even muscle mass to some extent given its association with strength. So I know it sounds like we're kind of harping on this point, right? That like, you've got me strong, you've got to have muscle mass to accompany that strength.
Probably because at some point when you lose enough of it, you lose the strength and you've got to have the cardiorespiratory Fitness. So there is another study that we looked at Bob that had the, I think it went out ten years on the kaplan-meier curves, didn't it? Yes. Let me see if I can pull that up. Okay. Yeah, this is the one. I thought this was a very interesting study. So you have to refresh my memory, but I'm pretty sure this is the one where they looked at men and women leg strength versus grip strength. They measured.
These in sort of Newton meters doing I think a leg extension and a grip exercise.
Correct? Correct? The leg strength, they didn't do it in meters, which I know that's that's those are the units that you like to use when your workouts and then the the grip strength is in kilograms.
Okay. So men here, average age about 50 for women about the same. I think 53. So you evaluate people in their sixth decade of life and then they were followed prospectively.
For five to six years. Now. Remember, this is all cause mortality. So looking at the men's strength, leg strength, specifically, it's definitely not subtle. Right? So, obviously, with time Ivory kaplan-meier curve moves down as you go to the right, but the weaker, you are the quicker. It goes down. What this analysis. Showed for the men. If you if you look at quad strength.
Basically, for every point to unit reduction in Quad strength and they normalize this for muscle size. It's important to point that out here. I think is that they took their strength metric and they normalized it by muscle size and they did it in two ways, which I think this study a little more complicated than I would like because you get the same answer both ways. I think but I guess it speaks to the rigor of it. They used actually CT, cross-sectional area and then they used EXA, but when you when you take
That normalized unit of strength /, CT area, and reduce that by point two units, which can seem somewhat, you know, I think for the listener, that's not the important point or dexa, reduced by point three, four units, you're seeing this increase in mortality, a 26 percent or a 39 percent increase in mortality, and with reduction, and grip strength, which was normalized by dexa arm measurement. It's a 23%. All of these were statistically significant now for
Owen, it's worth noting that they were statistically significant, but they had a basically a higher confidence interval or a larger confidence interval. Meaning they came close to Crossing unity. In fact, Bob. I think it's probably worth including table for in the show notes because frankly I find the table to be an easier way to appreciate these statistical relevance of this. I think the figure is great because the figure shows you the magnitude of the gaps between it, but it's
You know, nobody can look at these figures and tell what's statistically significant and what is not. But again, I think the point of this is using a pretty rigorous way to quantify strength, normalizing, strength, by size of muscle and prospectively following people. We again, see this trend and I think that this goes hand-in-hand with the previous analysis, which showed us that strength is the more important parameter, which
Which again? I don't think we're gonna be able to say that enough. Today
importance of
deadlifts as an adult.
How is your thinking changed on this? I like your history on this one. So maybe even take it back to
in school when you were you were doing powerlifting before. It might have been in Vogue. Yeah. Long before it was in Vogue. One of my best friends in high school who was also involved in boxing and martial arts. We would go to the
Bro, Campus of the University of Toronto, everyday and lift weights. And it was, it's still one of the Fondest Memories. I have of what a gym could be. Like, it would certainly be the it was certainly not the sunny warm Golds and Venice but it had some of those features which was old school. Lots of iron nothing fancy. Of course, unlike a nice gym. This was like two stories below ground. So there are no windows poorly ventilated.
Dated. So in the summer, it was staggeringly hot in the winter. It was so cold. You felt like you were getting frostbitten by touching the iron and aside from me and my friend. There were no kids. There. We were 14, 15, 16 years old. And it was this group of men who to this day, I think back and like can't believe how strong they were, and most of them competed in powerlifting and so that sort of got us interested in powerlifting and that's how we sort of started, putz.
Around with it. And as most people know who are listening or I guess people who might know, who are listening, powerlifting is different from Olympic lifting power. Lifting is three lifts the deadlift, the squad, and the bench press. And so, yeah, make a long story, short grew up doing a lot of dead lifting, a lot of squatting, a lot of bench pressing. It was always very horrible at bench, press, much better at squatting and deadlifting fast forward to, I don't know. A few years ago, maybe three years ago.
I had an injury where I kind of told or, or partially tore one of my obliques. I don't even remember how I did it. If you remember, it was very stupid. Whatever I did and everything on the phone book, that would be great Isabel, but everything went kind of sideways after that. And I really was never able to fully deadlift again without some discomfort. And so again this
Now take it back to maybe 2016. I sort of decided. You know what maybe the deadlift has reached its point of futility and maybe I've extracted all I'm going to out of that and there's no denying. What a wonderful movement. It is in terms of being a total hip, hinge, compound movement, but I was like, look, I can probably get most of the benefits of a deadlift doing things that place me under less load and also,
So again, in the spirit of thinking about longevity, I thought why does one need to subject themselves to twice their body weight or more in an axial load, so I sort of got away from it. And then I think all that kind of changed when I started DNS Dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, which I started about 18 months ago, and we're going to have a podcast on this topic because it's just, there's so much. I want to talk about here. And so actually, I think today we got an email about how we're trying to make some time for this podcast. So we'll definitely
If you're listening to this and you don't know what DNS is dynamic, neuromuscular stabilization, by all means, you should go read about it. But we're going to have at least one solid podcast on this, but it was through that process that I realized. Actually. The deadlift for me was going to be beneficial not because of the metabolic benefits. I was not going to be doing Tabata deadlifts like I used to or even by trying to set records for how much I could lift or anything like that. But rather because it becomes a beautiful
Full audit for everything working perfectly. So I deadlifted this morning. So today's a Monday, I deadlifted on Saturday. I deadlifted a few days before that. I deadlift at least twice a week often three times a week, both straight bar and trap bar. And Bob. I don't go of that heavy. I don't know the last time, maybe I've had four hundred pounds on one of those on the trap bar in the past year, but I usually sort of
Stop at about 350 to 375 on the straight bar. I'm even lighter. Maybe 185. I do a lot of slowy Centrex. I film every single rep of every single set and I study it and I send it to Beth Lewis, who is my coach and we do so much around making this deadlift. Perfect, and I'd rather take a
Eight and deadlifted perfectly several times a week. And I'm not doing like killing Crusher sets. Like I mean, it's today was four sets of ten five sets of ten maybe. And at no point was, I like past my limit. So again, I can push myself harder doing other things. But what I could get out of doing that deadlift perfectly is, do I have just the right amount of thoracic extension. Do I have just the right curvature in the lumbar spine? Am I?
Eating my glutes, and my activating, my hamstrings. And my pulling back instead of pulling up and my wedge incorrectly. Like all of this little stuff translates biomechanically to the activities of daily living, that matter to me like getting up off the floor, picking up one of my kids, lifting a piece of luggage or something like that. And so if I can do the deadlift and it feels right, then I know I'm ready to do everything correctly and when I'm dead lifting,
I feel like, hey, this isn't correct. This doesn't feel right. Well, first of all, now, I've really learned what that feeling is. And secondly, I've now learned the steps that I can go back and reconstruct, what needs to be done. And so, one of the things I definitely want to do is actually put together kind of a video on deadlift and deadlift preparation because I think that there are probably 10 exercises that I do as a way to get ready to deadlift and they don't take long like this. My deadlift checklist is like 10 to 15 minutes, so
It's not so ownerís. It's almost like ketosis the way we were talking about it in the past, right? Which is it's not even clear if it's the ketones themselves that can sometimes be the benefit versus the metabolic conditions that allow you to make them right. In other words. I'm not even sure how much
of the benefit is the
actual deadlift versus all the things you have to do to do the deadlift correctly and one of the most exciting things
just on this. Last thing I say on
this, is it never occurred to me up until
A year and a half ago that you
could actually deadlift in a way that puts your spine under traction. That's very counterintuitive. You would think that anytime you're lifting under an axial, load. Your spine is under compression, but it turns out when you learn
the right positioning and you understand how to create intra-abdominal pressure and you know, how do we Long Gate, your
spine? You can actually deadlift and create Traction in the spine actively and that's why deadlifting is the most important.
One thing I do before I get on an airplane, because when you're on an airplane, you're sitting there for five or six hours, which you really want to do is not let your spine be compressed. And the deadlift
primes me to then go and sort of
maintain that
activated form of
traction. Yeah. It's a significant investment, but I would say it's worth it that you'll bring your hex
bar to the gate before your flight yourself up and
bang out a few sets. I mean, I don't know what it is about the TSA guys, they get so wet.
Out. When you have your X bar there, the gate that overhead. Yeah, if you're TSA Pre, they don't mind as much, but if you're not TSA Pre, they just lose
it sticklers. They're sticklers. Next set of Clips is from a topic that we've covered on a lot of episodes. And of course, is a very important pillar in this framework of exercise. This is aerobic training and specifically looking at low-end aerobic, efficiency, razón, to training this.
Was most recently covered again, in our second episode within you go, son. Milan is a training Zone. I spend a reasonable amount of time in it. Not as much as I used to, when I was a cyclist and I probably spent, I don't know 10 to 12 hours a week in this Zone today. I spend three or four hours a week in this Zone, but I still believe this is incredibly important and I want to make sure that you understand this.
All I'm doing is swimming.
I'm not doing workouts. I'm not looking at the pace clock. I'm not doing intervals. I literally just get in the water with No Agenda other than to get wet and hear the sound of water going by my ears. Probably. I'm not even swimming hard enough to get into zone. Two truthfully. I doubt my heart rates above 120. That's the next topic. Yeah, that's where I think. This is a good segue. Alright is everyone?
So if you think about it, you can talk about it, but I think that's one of the things
is like a governor putting a rate limiter on.
Your performance when you do Zone to that, it's almost like for a lot of people is for me doing this reminds me kind of of Stillness. Although I
might read on the bike or things like that. But can you talk about
Zone to importance and how your thinking has changed on that? Yeah, when I stopped riding a bike with a purpose, which was for me a time trial. So that would have been late 2014. Early 2015. I kind of really just stopped doing any low intensity aerobic training.
So anyone who does ride a bike or swims-a-lot has plenty of that activity in them. So even if you're training for the 200-meter individual medley, which is a race, that's very short very quick and very painful. You still put in hours and hours a week of aerobic base training. Similarly. If you're training for a one-hour all out time trial, you still put an hours a week of low-end aerobic base training.
But when I stopped doing that, I was like, well, I don't need to do this anymore and I went from cycling to rowing and running and I was sort of obsessed with just being as efficient as possible. So everything was all out. I mean, I was if I was running, it was going to be a six-minute mile. It wasn't going to be a 9-minute mile. I think, especially through the interactions that I had with in ago who I met about a year before.
Come on the podcast, which was just recently, it was sort of meeting him and kind of going back through the literature on that type of training and the benefits that it could have both from the standpoint of metabolic benefits. Such as glucose insulin dependent, and insulin-dependent glucose, mediated disposal looking at, just sort of mitochondrial function, mitochondrial Health density. And then looking at sort of the the sort of neurotropic factors that bdnf.
Secretion that can come from this type of activity. I mean, all of these things were just pointing towards this was a glaring hole in my training that I needed to get back. And so that has been great. And like you said, I mean, one of the things about Zone 2 that I really enjoy is it's just not that hard, you know, like frankly, sometimes it's just nice to get on the bike and I probably spend three or four hours a week doing it. And that is my time to listen to podcasts and audiobooks and I really enjoy it. I can't
Wait to get on that bike, as sort of boring is, it seems to be sitting on a stationary bike for that long? There's never been a day when I've been. Like, I don't feel like doing this. I just, I always look forward to and I think in large part it's because I also get to combine it with learning what you wouldn't be doing. If you're out there crushing intervals and not that there's something wrong with that. I think each of these things has this time in a place,
but I think that we can do Zone to our entire lives. We can do it safely and it just yields enormous.
Adams question, if I recall was, if you wanted to use on to training at home, what's the best type of device to do it on? I don't think there's a best device, but I would say it's one where it's very easy to reproducibly produce the same output. So I am hugely fond of a bicycle because it has a very clear metric that I can adjust, which is the wattage.
W are
super easy to track. I'm riding on a bike that is an ergometer. So I put my road bike on a device called a wahoo
kicker and
it is hooked up to a computer where I'm telling it the numbers of w that I want. And it's putting that resistance into me and I generate it. Now. My wife conversely likes to ride a Peloton. I don't know why I think it's the worst bike on the face of the Earth, but on the Peloton it works a little bit.
And which is she goes into like a mode where she's not doing a class, but she basically sets the resistance with a little knob and then the amount of RPMs that she can put two it spits out a wattage, but it's actually in my mind a little harder because she has to kind of control. Like, she has to be titrating, her Cadence to stay the same so that she can hit a wattage number. So it's the difference between being an ERG mode and spin mode, but the point is
Regardless of how you do it on a bike. Wattage becomes the metric that matters. We of course are always measuring heart rate as well. And we'll talk about this in a second in terms of how you tweaked. It.
Treadmills are also a great way to
do this in my experience. Unless you are a really good runner, which is to say, you're very efficient at running for most people running gets them out of Zone to a little too quickly. So for treadmill with our patients, we prefer
Risk, incline. Walking most treadmills will go up to 15 degrees and we generally start people between 10 and 15 degrees somewhere between two and a half and three miles per hour, maybe less. And again, it's very empirical. It's sort of how quickly can you figure out where somebody is by those two metrics. I have a very clear sense of my zone to, I know exactly how many watts my zone 2 is I also know what heart rate, I should expect to see, and if I'm vastly
outside of that, there's usually a physiologic reason and I have to make an adjustment on the wattage. So if my heart rate is significantly higher than that, it might mean I'm a little bit sick, dehydrated, something else is going on and I might have to back off to get the heart rate down. Even if it means bringing the wattage a little bit below and I'm checking my Lactaid. Every single time. I do this and I do it four times a week will discuss frequency. Same thing on treadmill. I know on a treadmill exactly what incline exactly what speed and what heart rate and it's
Comparable heart rate to on the Pike. That's an easy way to sort of make that happen. The other thing, my wife loves is a rowing machine. Now. I'm not fond of the rowing machine for Zone 2. I like the rowing machine for zone 5, but that's because I'm not a very good rower. So again, my wife's a better rower than me, and she has better form than me. Someone like, Beth Louis. We've had on the podcast, who's an amazing rower. She's more efficient. She can get his own to work out on the rowing machine.
Jean. I love rowing but it's just cycling for me. A second nature. Cycling is a very efficient thing for me to do. I'm not hugely fond of ellipticals, personally. But again, if you have one that works for you, where you're able to get your heart, rate, high enough, and you're able to move quick enough, then great. The key is, how much energy do you have to put into maintaining a sustained? Oh, so that's the biggest challenge. Bob with zone two is, you don't want it to be.
And that's why ultimately I love being on a urgh mode of a bike, which is I don't actually have to think about it. It's putting 200 watts to my wheel, no matter what I do, even if I slow down or speed up, it's just always keeping the W. The same. Frankly. I can just tune out and listen to podcasts and audiobooks, which is what zone 2 is for. My next set of Clips. Look at another pillar in
A framework of exercise which is now that upper end aerobic verging on anaerobic exercise. So we sometimes talk about this is zone 5, but again, I would be less concerned with the terminology the zones. Really are a function of the underlying system that you are referring to. Whether you're talking about a heart rate Based training or a power base training. I think of zone 5 as basically your VO2 max training and I think a lot of people sometimes spend too little or too much time in this.
Zone and we want to kind of help you understand what that sweet spot might look like. Assuming that you're not training specifically for athletic events that require unusual levels of Fitness around that Energy System. But again, if you're really just talking about being the fittest healthiest person you need to be to be kind of a kick-ass 90 year old, then I think we don't need to be spending quite as much time there as you might think to harness the benefits. So in these clips, I'm going to talk about how I train there and how I think about VO2 max now.
We talked about vo2max in am a 27? And that's where we're going to talk about how the benefits appear to comparing someone of low Fitness to Elite Fitness with respect to these metrics. And it's kind of Staggering the difference between someone at the bottom, 25% of VO2 max versus someone at the top two and a half percent is about a five fold difference. So this shows the importance of VO2 max and why I think you ought to be spending more
time, man.
You've got a Zone
Zone, wait for it. Five
question not to what is Peter's approach to zone
5 training. What about other anaerobic, training,
protocols? I love this. So my zone 5 is mostly done on my StairMaster, which is my absolute favorite piece of equipment. That's not a
bicycle other than the
elliptical. Yeah. I can't stand the elliptical. So basically my zone 5 workout, which
I really only do once a week, is three minutes of Zone 2 with 1 minute at vo2max, because I know what my VO2 max is. I know how to convert it into mats, which is VO2, max divided by 3, point 5 and the StairMaster allows you to work in watts and Mets. So basically I'm doing three minutes at my zone 2 and then I go 1 minute at what my VO2 max is which truthfully is quite difficult to hold your VO2 max for
One minute. And then right back to three. My recovery is then the three
minutes at Zone 2. And so that four-minute pattern. I just
repeat for 20 to 30 minutes
and I usually do that on the tail end of his own to work out. So that's kind of my longer aerobic day, other workouts that I liked when I'm Outdoors on my bike. I also like doing kind of a more VO2 max training type ride, which would be kind of like a four minutes.
At call it a hundred and twenty-five percent of FTP. Functional threshold power
followed by
four minutes recovery. So 121 work rest, but obviously at a lower intensity than the three. Two one rest to work that I just described. So yeah, there's lots of ways to hit zone 5 and it's a very important Zone as well. My view is most people spend too much time there and not enough time in zone 2 though.
I've got a few follow-up questions. It'll give you more time to on
this. I went almost to my two minutes on that one. I was like staring at my clock once I think simple. So the
StairMaster are is it a StairMaster? As if I don't, it's called a stair. Climber. Do you have the one where it's like, literally you're going up steps or is it the one where there you just have like two levers and you're pushing them back and
forth. Oh sorry. No. Mine is like the fancy gym one. Where it's like an
escalator ladders. Is that what? It's?
No, no, no. No, it's not a Jacob's Ladder. It's, it's a series of eight.
Steps that roll up and down a machine. So the higher the intensity, you set it. The less resistance is in those steps and the faster you have to go to not fall off the back. So if I set it to like eight Mets, it's moving quite if there's actually quite a bit of resistance so I can step quite slowly without falling off when I set it to like 20 Mets. It feels like there's no resistance and I'm running up the stairs to not get thrown off the
back.
I think we could do a podcast on a lot of the stuff VO2 and all that other stuff, but one of the things that sticks out to me because you know, when you got like a coach or anybody and they want you to give 110% and you think like what the hell is this? You know, I can give 100% maybe but when you're talking about your VO2 max and you're saying I'm yeah, I'm going at 100%. I think some people might just think like, oh this person you must be going all like balls to the wall all out. However, we're doing. I like what's my workload to my VO2?
You can actually you can exceed 100% of your VO2 max. Absolutely the work
you're doing. Right right. And now it's Hutchinson who is going to be on the podcast very soon. Writes about this very elegantly in his book. Indoor. Basically, the limits of human performance. In terms of quote unquote, going all-out is about 10 seconds. So really no human has the potential to go all out for 10 seconds. You might think you are but you're
not. Wait, wait, wait, wait, B, I take spin class. I've taken spin classes before and I'm going all out.
Out for like 80% of it, you know, or at least the instructor wants me to go, all out for sure. Your instructor. The instructor is playing games with your mind and if that helps you, so be it. But
look, you only need to look at the difference between a hundred meter and a 200-meter Sprint. So take the best explosive athletes on the planet. And even by the time Usain Bolt is running the 200. He is slowing down in the second half of that race.
The force with which he's able to hit the ground. In the second half of that race is slower. He can go faster in the second half because he gets a flying start. But the hundred meter which is basically a 10 second race is about the true limit of what All Out means. So I even find this interesting when you consider two variants of Tabata, as you know, there's the 2010 Tabata and the 10/22 bada and you and I both have are bikes which have you know, which are great tools for doing.
Matt when I go through cycles of Tabata, which these days, I'm not, I'm focusing much more on zone. Five workouts on both the rowing machine, which I didn't get into and also in the stair machine, but sometimes I just do like a couple two bottles a week. I mean anybody who's tried both knows you can go so much harder for the 1020 than the 2010. The 2010 is generally favored because that's the one that was studied by or Sawa and Tabata fun fact, by the way, tomatoes are not named after.
After the guy who developed the protocol, he was the guy that wrote the paper or Sawa developed the protocol. They should be called Ursula's. So, the problem with a quote unquote, 2010 Tabata is whether consciously or subconsciously, you're actually pacing yourself to complete it, which is what it is, but I think it actually poses a little bit of difficulty. Okay?
I'm surprised you don't actually just say, I do our saw was and then have people that people look it up. Look at you. Yeah. Yeah, dude, Mondays and Fridays when
Fridays are so I just do our sawa's people, nodding their
head.
So with that, let's just start with sort
of something. You've already alluded to. Let's explain what it is. Talk about how much it matters and then kind of get into some examples. So let's start with a term that many people have heard before, but I don't think most people understand what vo2max really means. And eventually, we're going to talk about running efficiency and lactate threshold and going to get into all this stuff but
But let's let's make sure people understand what VO2 max is both in an absolute term and that in a manner that we normalize it by weight and what it is and what it isn't, how its measured how it matters and maybe we'll even talk about some notable exceptions. Sofia to Max is the one physiological parameter that anyone who's involved in endurance has heard of and has some sense of the first order analogy is its kind of the size of your engine physiologically. VO2, max is telling you.
How quickly you can take oxygen from the air into your lungs, get it into your blood, pump it to your muscles and then have your muscles. Use it in the metabolic processes that will provide energy to move you to do whatever you want to do. So, it's a rate. It's how much oxygen per unit time can you process absolutely flat out. Now, the sort of back story here is it was first sort of discussed or measured in the 1920s by a guy named Davey Hill, who was actually a very good runner.
The observation that he made is, if you have someone, you ask someone to go out and run a test at a gentle Pace though. Consume. Let's say 2 liters of oxygen per minute. Then you tell them to speed up. Now, they're doing three liters of oxygen per minute. Tell them to speed up again. Another going, pretty much maybe not as fast as they can, but they're growing fast and they're losing four liters of oxygen per minute. So you tell them to speed up again and you measure it. Oh, they're only using four liters of oxygen a minute just like last time. So speed up again, and they're still
Using four liters of oxygen, a minute. There's a plateau, there's a point at which even though you're working harder. You're not using any more oxygen. And so this Plateau looks like it's a physiological limitation and it probably is in some sense, you know, it's a controversial thing. But basically you've reached a point where no matter how hard you push yourself, you can't get more oxygen and so you can still go faster because you're starting to use other forms of energy, but this is the limits of your Aerobic System. This tells you what it tells you if we can get into it.
It's not clear. What? It tells you, it tells you exactly what I just said, it tells you, how much, how much oxygen you can use. Does that tell you exactly how fast you can run know. There are a lot of other factors, but it's that tells you what sort of aerobic engine you have to play with. I remember in high school. I mean we would sort of talk about well, which athletes have the highest VO2, max is at the Norwegian. Cross-country skiers, is the professional runners and cyclists and things like that, but people are usually used to hearing these numbers reported not in liters per minute, but
In milliliters per minute per kg. So you give an example. So people understand those differences because we usually talk about the outliers is a number, that's a bigger number than
2 liters or five
liters. It would be, you know, sort of 75 80 milliliters per you just explain to people how those are different share. So I'll use my own numbers that when I, you know, typically when I was tested I could get about the little bit more than five liters per minute. So 5.1 5.2 if I remember correctly. Now if you compare
Add me to a rower. The road would make me look pathetic because the rower would be using seven liters a minute or more. But the rower is also huge twice my size or whatever. And so that doesn't necessarily mean that that rower is better at using oxygen for me because the roller has way more muscle. And so the rower is the amount of oxygen reaching, any given muscle cell may be lower. So if you want to compare apples to apples between athletes of
Sizes, you divide at least for a crude approximation, you just divide by weight. And so the numbers we usually here are rather than liters of oxygen per minute. It's mL of oxygen per minute per kilogram of body weight. So for me, five liters of oxygen per minute, works out to something like 80 mL of oxygen per minute per kilogram of body weight.
There's a whole Rabbit Hole to go into is to say, well. Why are we dividing by whole body weight? Because, you know, there's a bunch of things like skeleton and organs and stuff that don't scale. The adipose tissue, doesn't matter mean, you could argue a better comparison would be total liters per minute divided by lean, mass divided by time or normalize the time. And then you're you're at least getting the metabolically active tissue. Presumably. Yeah, and there's papers where they do things like, let's divide by weight to the power of zero point.
Fate or point seven, which is another way of getting effectively. It's a way of approximating just the lean mass, the metabolically active tissue and you can go down that rabbit hole, but I suspect you'll want to get to is like at a certain point. It doesn't matter that much anyway, so we don't need to you can't just measure someone's vo2max and know how fast they're going to race. So it's useful, but it's not, it really, especially for comparing between people. Now, comparing within yourself. It tells you something, if you've increased your door, if your VO2 max is decreased.
But in that sense, it doesn't matter what you're dividing by. I remember there was a guy that I used to ride with and this was not that long ago, maybe five or six years ago when I was still, you know, somewhat competitive. At least with myself, actually, it's funny. My number was just like yours except I was heavier. So I was about five point one, two, five point two liters, but I weighed more, so that worked out to about 70 mils per mig's per kig, was my vo2max. His was 55 to 60, but there was never a day.
I could ride faster than him. Not one. They're simply. And I always felt like although we did the test so many times. I kept feeling like the machine must have been broken on him. Like I knew my 70 was about right because I've been tested
so much and that was lower than it had been when I was
younger. So it seemed appropriate. But I was always convinced that that there is no way. He's only 55. The reality of it is he may well have been and he may have simply been a far more efficient Fleet, which we're going to get into before.
We get to the story of oscars fence and let's talk a little bit about historically. What people have believed. The limits are a VO2 max. We don't even have to go very far, historically to get into a whole mudslide of confusion and debate and disagreement. There's a lot of places along the way that could in some circumstances, be the bottleneck. Normally people tend to assume that what is it that causes vo2max to Plateau is essentially, what I think what we're talking about and just one thing I should add here. It's like why is that interesting?
It's because you think well, if you want to measure endurance, just have someone run a mile or whatever, you know as hard as they can. But any tests like that depends on motivation. Depends on whether you paste it, right, there's all these factors that come into it. The nice thing about VO2 max is that in theory. It's independent of motivation. That's why scientists like it, because it doesn't matter if the subject doesn't really care about the study. If you see a plateau, you know, that's a property of their body and not a product of whether they were excited about the study.
So the question is this Plateau, what is it that causes it and it could be in the lungs. It could be the heart. It could be the circulation. It could be the muscles ability to extract it. I don't want to pretend that I know the answer because it's still controversial that the picture that emerges is that almost every part along this Cascade is engineered more or less to what it needs to be. And so if you perturb any of those elements, you can get limitation. So for example, the conventional wisdom,
Is that your lungs are not a limitation? You can always breathe enough in. And so then the question is, can you defuse enough oxygen from your lungs? Into your bloodstream and so on and so forth. There are situations where and has been for decades in conventional wisdom that the lungs don't respond to training because they're overbuilt. There was just a paper published a big review in the last month or two arguing that, you know, in some cases, the lungs aren't overbuilt. And one of the situations is highly trained endurance athletes. They can be limited by their ability to get enough oxygen.
Oxygen in, and you can also run into situations where an athlete is so fit. Their heart is so strong. It pumps blood past your lungs so quickly that it doesn't have time to fully stock up on oxygen. You get something called exercise-induced, arterial hypoxemia. So this this is usually an issue at altitude but in Elite endurance athletes is actually about half of them, exhibited even at sea level. So they're already running into a limitation just in getting oxygen from their lungs, to their bloodstream. And then at every stage of the way. There can be limitations.
If anything is knocked off kilter and certainly right down to the ability of the muscles to First extract, the oxygen from the bloodstream and then the to make use of it metabolically in the, in the mitochondria. So it's, there isn't one single answer, which is why you get these debates because everyone is because I have evidence that this is the limits, like, yeah, but I have evidence that this is the limit and that's the limit and they're all the limit. You
have always wanted to see the experiment where you took a group of athletes. Maybe this
has been done, you run them all to Max and then you reduce the fio2 of the in
Coming oxygen. So normally we do it with room are so you're getting a fractional, inhalation of oxygen is 21% And the way of course just for the listener, the way these things work is the way they're calculating. How much oxygen is being consumed. Is there measuring the concentration of oxygen on the way out. So you're calculating the Delta and so I've always thought, well wouldn't it be interesting to start selectively dropping? Fio2 21 percent, twenty percent, nineteen percent 18 percent. Now, presumably if the lungs aren't the
Sharon, you should still see the same absolute Delta. And you could at least start to eliminate one of those variables, which would be fio2 and capillary exchange. And then you start pointing to
some of these other variables. Again.
I'm sure somebody has done this experiment but I don't know what it yielded. Probably not with the fine tooth comb that that you're suggesting. People have compared 21, percent, 10 percent, or whatever. And 15%. I mean, it's interesting when you go to altitude.
Or the equivalent when you reduce the amount of oxygen, funny things happen, like the first thing you would think would happen. It's like you can't get enough oxygen. So you're going to be go anaerobic sooner. You're going to produce more lactate and yet the opposite happens. There's something called the lactate Paradox. If you try and exercise to exhaustion at lower levels of altitude, you actually give up when your lactate levels are lower than you would at sea level. And there's debate about what causes this and even whether it's a real thing, but the picture that makes sense to me is that these things are not just about.
How much oxygen is making it to the muscle? It's also like, what is your brain? Oxygen level? And so, you're getting these other circuit breakers that are starting to come down. There. Aren't even on this path from mouth to lungs to blood to muscle. There's other factors that are saying whoa, wait a second. Oxygen is getting a little low. So we're going to actually cut off the supply to the muscles or reduce it in order to make sure that we don't get stupid.
This next clip is going to focus on stability as I mentioned at the outset.
It with both Lewis and Michael rental as we filmed a bunch of instructional videos to go with this. I can't recommend them enough. It's one thing to hear us talk about these things. It's quite another thing to see the exercises and be able to do them yourself. Stability is the Corner Stone upon, which you do everything. It is the Corner Stone upon which your strength is delivered. Your aerobic performance is delivered in your anaerobic performance is delivered and it's the way that you do.
So safely. So stability is a way that we transmit force from the body to the outside world and vice versa from the outside world to the body in the safest manner possible across the muscles, which are designed to carry that load, as opposed to seeing the dissipation of force across joints, that are not fit to do so. So, for example, when you're picking something up, let's say, you have to pick up something and it weighs 60 pounds. Well,
You have to exert 60 pounds of force on the world around you. That's Newton's Laws. Tell us that. That's what it means to pick up 60 pounds. The idea is you want all of that 60 pounds to be transmitted from your muscles, to the ground, lifting this thing up and you don't want anything dissipating out your back out, your knees out your hips. And while we're most of us are born with the ability to do that. Naturally It generally gets lost by the time we're in grade school in
Too many things but probably Chief among them is a relative lack of activity in a relative abundance of sitting. And when I look at my two-and-a-half-year-old move, it's a perfect clinic in Force, transmission safely, across the body. When you look at me move prior to sort of becoming obsessed with and schooled in these disciplines of, as you mentioned, one of them.
Amick neuromuscular stabilization or DNS? It's always a little bit of an inefficient way to get things done, and it results in a lot of force, leakage, or seeping out around my scapula, my elbow, my knee, my back, my hips, and this is sort of, one of the root causes of a lot of The Chronic injuries. A lot of us have so stability. Then is probably what I think of is the foundation upon which everything should be done, vis-à-vis, exercise.
Just yesterday. I was actually talking to a patient and she was asking me if she needed to do DNS or if she could continue to work on the Pilates that she has been doing for many years and my response was that I think a great Pilates teacher is already teaching many of these principles. So I think this is somewhat discipline agnostic but it's heavily dependent on the practitioner and the student. So I've seen really good Pilates teachers who?
Even though they're using a very different vocabulary than the one that I use or that the DNS practitioners, use the results speak for themselves. And those patients do have the correct patterns of movement. They are able to get are fully into their lungs. They're able to get their diaphragm low into their abdomen, they're able to flatten out their pelvic floor. Generate concentric robust intra-abdominal, pressure that
Eliza's, every aspect of them. There are other people who either the teacher doesn't have the skill to do that, or the teacher does, but it's just not being presented in a way that the student can understand it. And so, this is also one of those things that's iterative. And I think one should always be searching for this. So, postural restoration, PRI DNS, Pilates. These are all different ways. That one can come about trying to learn these principles. I think unfortunately, of the 4 pieces of exercise. We're going to talk about this.
Is the one that probably will take the most tinkering for people to find the right type of practitioners. Probably some time next year. Bob, as you know, we are going to start to put together some material on this for people outside of our practice. Currently, all of the work we do on this front. We've put together, many video courses. Those are exclusively for our patients at this point, but as our knowledge expands and our footprint in the space, expands my hope is that we are able
To start to create digital curriculum on this type of stuff that can help. People, who again don't have access to.
Somebody
will end this week's episode with a clip from one of our recent a Mac. I Believe. Episode 32 where I talked about the macro structure of my current training routine as we come to this end, the one I mentioned in the intro the first time we've done this, so we'd really like to hear your feedback positive and negative. Is this something you want to see us.
Do again with other topics. If so, maybe even suggest some of the topics you'd like to hear. And if not, please, be honest with this until it's not. As I said, it's a lot of work to do this and we only want to do this if people find this valuable, so thanks so much. I thought it might be helpful for people before we get into some of those specifics. Just what is your current exercise routine look like each week. I know it's always changing. But if you can give people a rough overview, I think that will be helpful.
Awful, as we get into some of these other
questions. Yeah, I mean, the
actual macro structure of what I do has not changed much in the last year. The micro structure has changed a lot. Meaning, the exercises have changed a lot, but the macro structure
is that on, let's see, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, our cardio days. So tuesday-thursday Sunday, our Zone 2.
Saturday is either a
zone two, followed by a zone five. That's kind of a separate work out. So each of those are 45 minutes own twos and then kind of like a 30-minute zone 5 as a separate work out that's done almost immediately after. So basically getting out of bike clothes and putting on stair, climbing close alternatively. I might just do a longer bike ride on
Saturday and make it more of an anaerobic workout, then from a lifting standpoint.
It's Monday, Wednesday friday-sunday is Lifting and about, I don't know, nine months ago. I switched to an upper body lower body split. I used to lift three days a week and do upper body lower body every day. So each day. I was doing kind of pushing
pulling and hip hinging and now the lower body component, I think is monday-friday. The upper body
is Wednesday
Sunday, and I always lift after doing cardio because I think the reverse has
Has been demonstrated to erode strength training, gains Peter what happens if you miss a day because I noticed you didn't say day, 1 Day, 2 Day 3. You were very distinct on the days of the week. I know you typically don't miss a day. But if you miss Wednesday, do you just scrap those exercises? And then just continue with your program or are you trying to make up in the interim
know, like yesterday, Sunday would have been a ride followed by lift day, but I was on
the track the whole day and I knew that in advance. So I
Just ended up doing that lifts on Saturday, but obviously was shortchanged on the Zone 24
yesterday. So I will pretty much
will never compromise a lift. I will always get those for lifts in during the week. No
matter what and
sometimes, it just means moving
the days around or doubling up on a different
day. And what about timing? Do you have a preference morning afternoon evening? Is that flexible as well within kind of your schedule a little more flexible on weekends, but Monday through Friday, pretty much no flexibility.
Those lips have to be done first thing in the morning and not first thing in the morning. So morning routine is kind of more about the kids and stuff like that. But once they're out the door to school around 7:15, 7:30. That's when I'll typically live. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the drive. If you're interested in diving deeper into any topics, we discuss, we've created a membership program that allows us to bring you more in-depth exclusive content without relying on paid ads. It's our goal to ensure members, get back much more than the price of the subscription after that.
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