Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | The Surprising Truth About Exercise and Keeping Your Brain Healthy | Dr Tommy Wood #455

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

It's easy to believe that we have to dedicate lots of time and energy to exercise. That, unless we're pushing ourselves to our limits, it's not worth doing. But my guest this week disagrees - as do I. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 404 of the podcast with medical doctor and neuroscientist, Dr Tommy Wood. Like myself, Tommy is passionate about empowering you to take control of your health by simplifying the wealth of existing information and giving you practical, realistic recommendations. In this clip he shares his current perspective on movement and why you don’t need to exercise for hours to gain benefits for your body and your brain. Thanks to our sponsor https://www.drinkag1.com/livemore Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/404 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 404 of the podcast with medical doctor and neuroscientist Dr. Tommy Wood. Like myself, Tommy is passionate about empowering you to take control of your health by simplifying the wealth of existing information and giving you practical, realistic recommendations. In this clip, he shares his current perspective on movement and why you absolutely don't need to exercise for hours in order to gain benefits for your body and brain.

I think there is a lot of confusion about exercise. What's the state at play? Okay, we have a sedentary population who are not moving enough. There's a lot of talk these days about different types of exercise, different zones of exercise. So let's try and break it down. What's your current perspective on movement and what we all should be doing? I think whatever you can do that's more than what you're currently doing is great. If you're relatively sed is great if you're relatively sedentary or you're you know trying to improve your health through physical activity often what you see is that people assume that they need some vast amount several hours a week in order to see

benefit and if they can't do that then they just don't bother doing anything so whatever you can do sustainably above what you're currently doing or previously have done will benefit your health. And I think, you know, that could be steps per day. It could be amount of time you spend going for a jog or cycling or lifting weights or any kind of resistance training or anything like that. So if you look at, you know, me often think about the brain, the amount of physical activity that significantly improves cognitive function been large meta-analyses have looked at this is basically it doesn't matter exactly what type you do but if you're achieving say government physical activity

of guidelines which is 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous physical activity that is associated with a statistically significant improvement in cognitive function. The way that it works in general at the simplest level is intensity times time. So the more intense, the less time you need, the less intense, the more time you need. And you can break that up however you like. You could do 30 minutes of brisk walking a day. You could do 20 minutes of Pilates a day. You could do 30 minutes of resistance training a day, you could do five minutes of sprinting per day, or you can go for a brisk walk, or you could do an hour of gardening, right? That's even less intense, but even that's going to have some benefits. So incrementally improving this sort of intensity times time, this volume that you're doing in any of those activities is going to be beneficial.

And that's honestly where I start. And if you want to then dig into resistance training versus endurance training, there's other things we can do that. But the most important thing is that you do some movement every day. And if you're sedentary right now, literally anything that you can get up and do is going to be beneficial. Okay, that's really useful and really empowering, I think, for people. What you said about intensity there is really interesting. So by what measurements or through what lens are you saying that one hour's gardening might be equivalent to five minutes of sprinting? How are you comparing them when you say that they're the same? So in general, when that's done, they use something called the metabolic equivalent,

or MET. You can Google, there's a PDF of METs for different activities, and it's very long. Like literally every intensity of pretty much any activity you could think of, it gives you an average met. And of course that's, if I go sprinting, it's a very different number of mets than if you go sprinting, but it just gives you an idea of the overall intensity of that activity. And so then if I think about the cognitive function study, what they looked at was how many met minutes per week. So again, that's intensity times time. What do you need to do per week to see a significant improvement in cognitive function? And it was about 700, which then, you know, with a little bit of back of the envelope calculation is about

the physical activity, general government physical activity guidelines. And when you look at that, that kind of says that, you know, overall, those are going to have equivalent benefits. Then when you look at, say, harder outcomes like VO2 max, which is a measure of how efficient your cardiovascular system is, that's sort of the gold standard, then yes, there's probably some protocols that improve VO2 max a little bit better than others. But if you look across all the studies that have been done, in general, you see the same trend, that it's intensity times time. So if you do very intense work for a short period of time, that has a similar benefit to

a less intense period of exercise for a longer period of time. And again, this is, you know, if we're just thinking about normal people trying to move and improve their health, I think that's really the main important principle that it would boil down to. Could we take that to an extreme? Let's say there's someone listening who, for whatever reason, doesn't move much at all. They get to work, do their desk job all day, come home, sat down at home and struggles with motivation to move their bodies or time or whatever it might be. If they every day did five minutes of sprinting as hard as they could, let's say, let's say a few intervals, maybe, I don't know, 20 seconds of sprinting, 40 seconds recovery walking, 20 seconds of sprinting, and they do that for five minutes.

So that's a pretty intense workout. Whereas someone else says, you know what, I'm going to go for an hour's walk every day, a nice gentle walk every day. And I know there's other benefits, nature, stress reduction, time away from your work. It gets really complex if we're trying to look at all those different things. But from a pure movement perspective on the body, are we saying through one lens, they're pretty similar? Essentially, yes. Assuming that you find some way to match the total amount of work that those two people are doing which you can through like a intensity times time lens in general i think they're both going to improve their health and it's going to be really difficult to separate out one versus the other yeah it's really really interesting and empowering for people so that's a sedentary population right

where you're going okay anything is better than nothing. And you're going to get a huge improvement if you go from nothing to something. What about for people who, I guess, have a bit more time or are already active? Let's say they're already able to go for a 30-minute walk seven days a week. They're like, Tommy, look, I can do that. That's no problem.

My life and my work allows me to do that. What else should I be doing as I get older to look after my health, body, brain, mind, everything? Where would you go next? Resistance training of some kind. There's some kind of weightlifting or something where you're applying resistance to the muscles. There's lots of different ways that you can think about this. In general, I have a movement pyramid. It's my own movement pyramid. At the bottom is just spending less time sitting. There's even benefits to getting a standing desk if you can. Also, say you're in a job where you're sitting all day. Is there some way to make it so that

you're just sitting less? And that could even be this idea of movement snacks, where once an hour you go for a quick walk or you go up and down some stairs or whatever you can do near you. So just less time sitting. And then the next would be spend more time walking. And there's a whole bunch of studies, again,

suggesting that risk walking, particularly in those who are otherwise sedentary, can dramatically improve your health. And there's this linear benefit of number of steps you can get per day in terms of mortality risk and various disease risk up to maybe somewhere between 8,000 and 14,000 steps per day or something. But the more you can do in that 0 to 10 or 12 000 the better really so then the next level i think is is resistance training and particularly as you get older we know there's a decrease in muscle mass but more importantly and probably faster and earlier there's a decrease in strength and as you get older you lose in particular type two muscle fibers these are fast switch muscle fibers and those are important for a number of reasons because they're they're an important glucose sink so they're important for metabolic

health right so if you're talking we talked earlier about all these things that affect your blood sugar having healthy active muscles and having a lot of these types of fibers is really important for our blood sugar control and a whole host of other things and it's also really important for our stability and mobility and function so you know particularly as you get older you know falls risks and broken hips and all that kind of stuff you're going to be protected against that if you have more of those types of muscle fibers and those are the ones that you get through resistance training, the ones you develop in particular. I think when we say resistance training or strength training, we have to broaden it out beyond lifting weights in a gym. Because for the people who love that, they love hearing it and go, yeah, I knew I was on it with strength training, right?

But for people who don't like it, it can be a bit confusing. So, indoor climbing, running up hills, that's resistance against gravity. In your view, what counts as resistance training? It's literally any movement where you're moving your body in space against something that makes it harder than it normally would be for that movement, if that makes sense, right? So carrying your shopping bags to your car, is that resistance training? Because instead of walking, you're carrying, right? Yeah, and we've talked previously about, so you mentioned the blue zones, and in the Nicoyan Peninsula, they're not all down the gym all day, but they are doing physical activity every day

that includes things like carrying and lifting and you can translate that to your own activities of daily living as we call it right so it could be squats just with your body weight that's resistance training or you could do push-ups and it can be against the wall rather than against the floor you know that that's resistance training and and it can just be these daily activities like lifting things into cupboards and carrying things around. All of that counts. The problem, you know, does become

at some point you need to progress things. So in order for it to create, again, anything is better than nothing, but to create an ongoing stimulus, I think it has to be a little bit challenging so the push up against the wall then has to be the push up against the table yeah and then the push up against the chair and then a few months later maybe push up on the actual floor exactly i just want to highlight let's say yoga and pilates for example because sometimes i feel that gets left out of

strength training and there are plenty of yoga moves, for example, or Pilates moves, which I think do count as resistance training. I think they absolutely should be included. I'm relatively strong. There's a lot of yoga poses and things I can't do. It's a different... It's different.

It's different, but it definitely counts, absolutely. Is there a next rung on your pyramid? The next rung is high intensity interval training or hit and this is not for elite sports performances just for average people who want to try and figure out how to separate out their time in terms of movement and so you will get some cardiovascular benefit from your brisk walking and or it could be it could be cycling or something right it doesn't it doesn't have to be walking but i like walking because most people can do it. If you then want to get into

the physiological biochemical nitty gritty, you do get different adaptations to high intensity training versus lower intensity training, right? I think in general, that idea of intensity times time is what's most important. But of course, different things happen

at the cellular level when you do one versus the other. That's a beneficial add-on on top of, say, resistance training, if you're already doing some low-level intensity movement. And then on top of that, if you really enjoy it, I think you can do very long periods of endurance training. But I don't think most people need that if they're just trying to move as much as they can they can or to improve their

health so that's kind of the that's the progression that i use yeah so i really like that um if someone's hearing that and says okay tommy look i don't move much i like that pyramid but do i have to sequentially go up it or for example if someone goes you know what i used to do some strength training while i was at school, but I haven't done it in ages. And I quite fancy that. There's no reason why they can't start there, right on your pyramid. They don't have to progress up. Yeah. And what's quite good about, say, say if you're going to the gym, you start doing the other stuff as well. So when you're at the gym, you're usually not like sitting like you would in a chair at a desk or on the couch or on the sofa

and you're probably walking around quite a bit right you're getting some of that you know additional movement and there are some some nice papers that talk about how particularly if you do weight training to what they call voluntary muscular failure right so you do a number of repetitions to the point where you can't do any more with good form. Even that has some cardiovascular benefits, right? So you're similar to maybe some lower intensity aerobic training. So yeah, I think anywhere in that, there's a good entry point for you, I think is great. And that's always where I would want people to start. The reason why I have like very long, hard endurance exercise at the top is because that's often where people start because that's where they assume they need to be in order

to improve their health, right? If I'm going to, I need to go for a run, I need to be hard, I need to do it for an hour or else there's no point in doing it. But actually that's quite taxing on the body and you don't necessarily get all the other benefits that you would from those other different types of training. So that's why I put it at the top. But there's lots of other places that people can enter. And again, anything that you can do that you enjoy and is sustainable, that's the place to start. And the other thing I guess I'd want to add there is we forget sometimes that exercise and high-intensity exercise can be a stressor on the body.

then high intensity exercise can be a stressor on the body. And what I've often seen with certain patients is they have very high stress lives, go, go, go. And then the workout is also high intensity at a fast one hour run. That is very hard on the body. We also need to think about how much is this exercise now taxing us? But I agree with the message which is

anything's better than nothing and it's probably not that much for most people right that's going to give them some benefits the main thing that i try and get across is that the amount you do needed to to see some benefit again for most people is it's really quite low. So the most important thing is to do more than you're currently doing. And then, you know, once you get beyond that point, you have several hours a week to train. Of course, there's lots of different protocols and different things that you can follow.

But up until that point, anything that you can do and is sustainable and you enjoy is gonna be great. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.