- Morning, Motivators.
I went on a ride the other day,
listened to a podcast, you might have heard of it.
It was a guy named Bro Jogan, something along those lines.
And he had on Dr. Peter Attia,
who is one of the world's leading experts
in longevity research.
How do you age well, how do you stay alive longer,
and how do you stay healthy longer
so that the time that you're alive is much more enjoyable.
If you don't know Dr. Peter Attia,
he started out as a cardiac surgeon.
He has a background in mathematics,
so at one point he ended up leaving
and going into investment banking and finance,
has a really big background in crunching data,
crunching numbers, analyzing studies,
and sifting through data to come to conclusions.
Found out that he's genetically predisposed
to having heart problems, and with the understanding
that the number one cause of death in adults
is from heart failure, he started looking
very deeply into how do you reduce
the chance of heart failure,
which then expanded into how do you live
an overall better life.
He now has a practice where he consults with people
privately, taking care of their lifestyle,
of their strength training, of their
cardiovascular training, of their overall health.
And he does so with this background of
what does the data show us in mind.
It's been really interesting to follow him
because he is so data-driven that over the course
of just three, four years he's even changed
what supplements he takes, how he approaches exercise.
And that's why I am so intrigued because I want to know
what the data says, what is he actually doing day to day?
And now we know, so let's dive into
what the podcast actually said.
- I think exercise is the single most important
longevity drug we have, bar none.
Like if you were, if you said like,
"I want to go deep down the rabbit hole of living longer,
what do I need to do?"
It's like a super well-crafted exercise program
that is geared towards strength,
muscle mass, and cardio respiratory fitness.
- So it's super general to just say, well,
you've got to have strength, muscle mass
and cardio-respiratory fitness.
I knew that that's what he believes in,
but I didn't know what he actually does.
- All right, so I do my four days a week.
I do four sessions a week of the 45 minute zone two,
so I'm titrating my wattage to keep lactate
at two millimole.
I do one session a week of a higher end anaerobic exercise.
I typically do it on a stair machine, you know,
those rotating stations where I just do like,
I'll do a one minute sprint, a two minute easy climb,
one minute sprint, two minute easy climb,
or four on four off on a bike.
- What particular exercises do you think are the best
to achieve that result?
- So we start with a base of zone two.
So this zone two is that lactate thing I was talking about,
so your zone two is defined as the highest level
of aerobic output that you can generate
while keeping lactate below two millimole.
So I think a bike is the easiest way to do this
because the... - Stationary or?
- Stationary, just because you can keep it steady state.
You know, when you're on the road,
you're all over the place.
So if you're on like a stationary bike
and also wattage is such an easy metric
for people to understand, so how many Watts
are you putting out, right?
The first thing we would do is say
you probably need to be doing at least three hours a week
of that zone two, which is building an aerobic base.
So four 45 minute sessions at zone two,
constantly driving it up.
And honestly, one session of VO two max training per week.
- So from a cardio standpoint,
the vast majority of what he's doing is zone two,
exactly what we've been talking about.
Whether you use the math method or your aerobic threshold,
or we use the Karvonen heart rate method,
a low intensity training zone keeping your
lactate levels low so that your stress hormones
are nice and low.
But then one little session of a pop of
really big intensity.
We're just talking hard, in that really intense
kind of training zone.
What does he do about strength training though?
- And then four sessions of strength a week,
four strength sessions a week.
And that's it like, I mean,
this is the least I've ever exercised in my life.
- So then four strength sessions a week, and that's it.
If we total it all up, we're looking at
three hours of low intensity zone two,
probably somewhere between about 40 and 60 minutes
of a workout that is high-intensity,
then four, again let's say it's 40 to 60 minutes,
of strength so somewhere around eight to nine hours of work,
largely focused on low intensity training
and strength training with just a little pop of intensity
is what he does for health longevity.
And if you look at him, he's a super fit guy.
He's not just somebody who writes about this stuff,
but how do we translate this sort of thing
to those people that want to do endurance sports?
Well, oddly enough, I didn't plan on this.
I didn't know this, but it mimics a lot
of what the motive method is.
Let's explain.
Broadly speaking when people aren't training
for a specific race, so outside of three months
before most races, we're recommending that athletes
train somewhere in that eight to nine hours
of maximum total training throughout the week.
Past that point, you start getting
diminishing health returns,
diminishing performance returns.
So just keep people up at that seven to nine hours
sort of a week, which is going to keep you healthy
and it's going to keep you ready to go
and do any sort of endurance event.
Within that seven to nine hours a week,
we're spending the vast majority of the cardio training time
at a very, very low intensity at that zone two.
We do have one or two sessions of high intensity,
but it's not a huge amount.
It's 15 to 60 second bursts, so you're not spending
a ton of time with very high lactate levels,
with very high stress levels.
This is going to keep the body's ability to move quickly
to recruit a whole bunch of muscle groups
to actually go and fire really well
by just having tiny little bursts.
So you're going to have that nice base of low end
cardio aerobic fitness, and then the ability
to push really fast when it's time to move fast
and start doing the fast training for the race.
But during that seven to nine hours of training per week
when people are outside of a race specific training plan,
I want them to load up on strength training.
So during this period, we recommend as much as
four strength sessions a week,
being about 30 minutes in length.
I recommend three of them as actual strength sessions
and one as a yoga session, because I do believe
that mobility makes a big difference,
being able to bend and twist in different ranges of motion.
The super interesting thing about this is that
I didn't come up with the motive method based off of
what Peter Attia or really anyone else has said.
But what I've experienced is that
the more you go down the rabbit hole of Pub Med
and looking at research reports,
all signs kind of point to the same thing,
that if you want good performance and you want
to have health at the same time,
you need to spend a fair amount of time
doing strength training,
a fair amount of time doing low-intensity training,
and then a tiny little bit of time
at high intensity training.
But the endurance sports culture and what most coaches
give is unfortunately, workouts, workouts, workouts,
lots of intense, let's challenge it every single day.
And then when we come down, eh we'll come down just a bit,
maybe give you a rest when you need it.
And that is not good for performance,
and it's not good for health.
If you want an endurance sports training plan
that accomplishes all this,
our app that you can try at app.mymotive.com
is what this is all based around.
It's how do you get to your races
and accomplish all these goals
and perform really well while staying healthy.
So all the workouts are given to you,
all you have to do is put in how much
you want to train every single week,
when your races are, and all the workouts
will appear every single day for you
to keep you healthy and get you ready for those races.
So check that out at app.mymotive.com,
really cool that we got to see a peak
inside what Peter Attia is doing.
And if you found this really helpful and insightful,
hit the like button below.
Love it if you did.
Later, Motivators.