The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Most Replayed Moment: The 7-Day Training Blueprint To Live Longer! Peter Attia

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

Dr Peter Attia is a Canadian-American physician specialising in the applied science of longevity. Known for his rigorous approach to extending healthspan, he integrates medicine, nutrition, exercise physiology, and performance science to help people live longer, stronger lives. In this moment, Peter Attia reveals the training principles he uses to optimise strength, endurance, and injury prevention for longevity. He explains why muscle mass and grip strength are key predictors of lifespan, and how we can warm up for movement to prevent long-term decline. Tune in to learn how to train to stay powerful and mobile decades from now. Listen to the full episode here: Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/DztAE7bIkXb Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/KNhOpvgIkXb Watch the Episodes On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

And when you think about all those things you want to accomplish, if we were then to sort of codify them into a bunch of exercises or areas of your health that you had to now be thinking about, that I needed to be thinking about, what are the most important things? So I'm a 32-year-old. What are the most important parts of my health that I should be thinking about if I want to achieve all the things that I said to you in my final decade? No one in the final decade of their life ever said,

I wish I had less strength, and I wish I had less endurance. So you cannot be too strong and you cannot be too fit. The only time that one would throttle back on the pursuit of those is, A, if doing so is come at the expense of something else, either with respect to your health or your life, and two, if the pursuit of that at such an extreme level produces risk of injury. Okay. So, in other words, could I be strong? longer than I am today? Yes. I'll give you an example. We know that in resistance training,

the sweet spot for pure strength is one to five reps. When your goal is to maximize strength, you need to be pushing one, two, three, four, five reps. Once you start thinking about hypertrophy, muscle size, we're starting to think about seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve reps. Once we start thinking about muscular endurance, we start thinking about north of 15, right? Those are the general patterns of resistance training. So if I want to build my muscles, because I'm going for aesthetic goals, then I need to be aiming above five reps. It needs to be 10 or 12. Yeah, if I'm just purely thinking about strength, bigger weights, but lower reps. That's exactly right. Okay. And then if I want muscular endurance, we've got to be even higher reps. Okay. Lower weight. Yep. Okay.

So again, we could go into much more detail around that, but just to finish the point here, why do I not do much training at one to five reps? In fact, these days I don't do any training at one to five reps anymore. Why? Because to train at one to five reps comes at a risk. Okay. Especially for heavy compound movements. So, like, I'm okay getting a little bit less of a strength benefit while still, of course, getting stronger, but training at a higher rep load.

So I'm typically... So I'm targeting eight to 12 reps with one to two reps in reserve is basically how I'm doing my resistance training. That means every set I'm doing, I would expect to get to within about one rep of failure somewhere. So today, when I lifted, I don't think I did less than seven. I didn't do more than 12. And the weight was always titrated so that I was either failing, almost failing, or one rep away from failing somewhere in there. And I was adjusting the weight constantly on every exercise to get there with the exception of one exercise. I did push-ups was one of the things I did.

Push-ups are kind of more in the muscle endurance. Obviously, I'm doing more reps when I was doing push-ups. But pretty much everything else was in that range. So, again, I'm not fully maximizing strength anymore because the cost of it might be a little bit high in terms of injury risk. Similarly, I'm not strength training 24-7 because I need to make time to do my endurance training and other types of training. How often do you train resistance training? I've resistance train three times a week.

And how often do you train generally? I train every day. Every day. Yeah. Why? Because, you know, again, the intensity of my training is not that high, at least three days a week. So the three resistance days are pretty hard

because I'm really only doing each body part once a week. So when I'm doing it, I'll spend that 90 minutes really kind of hammering, those body parts. Three of those days are just zone two. So my three, three of my four cardio days are zone two days where I'm doing, you know, I'm on a bike and I am riding at a level of intensity that actually allows me to still talk. Some, you know, not talk like I am now, but talking in a sort of a strained way. So for me, that's about a heart rate of 140 beats per minute and that's just not that's just not taking a huge toll on me like that those are

almost like recovery days for me and then one day a week I do a really really hard VO2 max day and that's that's a really hard day that burns a lot of matches that's tomorrow not looking forward to you do cardio on your resistance training days as well no no I don't so it's the seven day it's four days of cardio three days of of resistance. Now, that's going to change in the summer when I'm going to add three days of swimming. And I will end up doing some swims on some resistance days. So before you do your resistance workout, you don't go on the stepper for 20 minutes or cycle for 20 minutes or something. I don't. Is there a particular reason why? It wouldn't really serve a purpose. So I know a lot of people

do that. I know a lot of people will say, hey, I'm going to do a little bit of a warm up on the treadmill or the stepmaster before I lift. But I actually have a pretty strong point of view on how we should warm up to lift. And I don't think walking on the treadmill or running on the treadmill or being on the stairmaster on the bike is a great prep for the lift. I think it's better to warm up for a lift doing movements that prepare you to lift. So for example, like if it's a leg day, so Monday's leg day, right? So what am I going to do? I'm going to start by doing a bunch of core stabilizing stuff. So I'm going to do a whole bunch of this dynamic neuromuscular stabilization stuff. So you get into basically these baby positions and you really learn to

activate your core as you move around in a six-month position and stuff like that. I then do a whole bunch of, like you know what a 90-90 is or a shin box exercises where you're kind of on the ground in a position where you're really, you know, you can start out doing it isometrically, but ultimately going through a slow eccentric and concentric phase of movement that's kind of activating glutes. So I go through basically a whole DNS sequence. Then I get into a dynamic movement prep. So then I get into a bunch of bouncing, a bunch of footwork. And then I start with really lightweight. So I'll go to a leg extension machine and do very, very light leg extensions, very light leg curls, come back and do more jumping and moving and lunging and go back and forth.

So I'll spend 20 minutes doing a warm up, but the warm up is geared for me to lift. Whereas if I had just sat on a bike and peddled around, that doesn't actually replicate any of the movements I'm going to do when I start loading myself. I've got particularly concerned about injury now that I'm 32, because when I was 30-20, I could do almost anything it seemed, and nothing would break. But I had a couple of injuries when doing like shoulder presses and things like that. And one of my friends had a similar injury recently, which took him out for three or four months, where he did a shoulder press, pulled something in his back or something as like neck. Yeah. And then he couldn't like turn his head anymore. In terms of injury,

if I wanted to get injured, am I right in thinking that the thing that leads to injury is basically just walking straight in and trying to lift something heavy? Or is there things further upstream that cause injury in the gym? No, I mean, that's one way to increase your risk of injury for sure. But yes, there are other ways that it can happen. And I think about it a lot. I mean, one of the injuries I think a lot about are calf injuries, Achilles injuries, sort of tendon injuries. This is, I think, one of the things that becomes a real problem for people as they age. You know, you often hear about people my age tearing in Achilles. It's a devastating injury. Now, again, it's not devastating and

that you won't recover from it, but boy, it's going to take you out of commission for six months. So a lot of these injuries happen because the individual still has strength, but they've kind of lost some of the pliability and the tendon because they've kind of lost some of the jumping. That's why I always start these workouts with low level of jumping. And I'll progress to higher levels of jumping. But jumping is actually a very important part of training. And it's one of the things that we take for granted. But boy, when your ability to jump is gone.

And jumping, by the way, can mean like just initiating a jump, but it can also mean jumping off something and stopping yourself. Those are really important skills. And so something like jumping rope is really important, right? Your feet are just kind of moving like that. They're acting as shock absorbers. Calfs and Achilles have to constantly change in length. And that accommodation is a really important part of resilience.

And I think that should be an important part of everybody's warm up at a minimum, if not part of their workout. One thing I'd love you to do is to persuade people listening that muscle mass matters for longevity. Because, and also, if you can, within that, that leg day matters. because we all avoid leg day treating me. And sometimes I need to be told again why it matters for me to add it. Well, I mean, I think, look, muscle mass is probably the second most highly correlated finding, or third most, to longevity after strength and cardio-respatory fitness, V-O-2 max.

So why is that? So first of all, I think that muscle mass is both directly a proxy for strength. In general, the more muscle you have, the stronger you are. We all know exceptions to that. We know wiry little people who are insanely strong. And I have patients like that. They're just naturally, you know, thin people. But when we put them through the testing protocols, you know, they're remarkable in terms of their strength.

And I tend to not worry about the fact that they're slight and bill. when I see that they're strong across the board. There is another benefit of muscle mass, which is it's the place where you dispose of glucose. So from a metabolic perspective, the more muscle mass you have, the more glucose buffering capacity you have. And why does that matter as I age?

Because, you know, one of the hallmarks of aging is a reduction in the capacity to metabolize and buffer glucose. And so as glucose levels become less and less regulated, all sorts of bad things happen. Bad things happen to microvessels in the body.

So if you think of the most extreme example of this is type 2 diabetes. So once a person has type 2 diabetes, what are they at risk for? They're at the risk of reduced vision and ultimately blindness, amputations of their digits, impotence, right? The penis has tons of tiny blood vessels in it. And the more that glycosylated proteins accumulate there, the less they get blood flow. And obviously damage to the small blood vessels of the brain.

as well. So all of these things are hugely problematic when glucose is dysregulated. And again, the most important thing that you can do to regulate glucose, in addition to the obvious, which is eating in energy balance, not eating too much, is making sure you have large insulin sensitive muscles, which means large muscles in the context of an individual who's sleeping well and exercising. And you're going to basically have a great place to put all of that glucose when you consume it. And is that going to stave off me getting belly fat? Because my glucose is going to be stored in the muscles as opposed to somewhere else. Again, it all depends on the total energy balance, but yes, it's clearly going to make a difference, right? So one of the surest ways to

reduce your capacity to store fat is to add more muscle. Okay. I did the grip strength test. I've done it twice now. Meaning you did one of the grip meters or you did a hanging test? One of the grip grip meters. I actually did it at Brian Johnson's house, but I also did it with Andy Galpin. And people tell me it's a indicator of longevity. But I've never really understood why. Is it just testing my strength? Yeah. Grip strength, of all the strength metrics, it's one of the most highly correlated with longevity. We actually prefer to do it like a 10 squared where your colleagues tested yesterday. We prefer to do it on a dead hang. So we make them hang from a bar. And we just time how long they can hang. So that's a really good metric of your grip strength because it's

also normalized to your weight. Okay. So we want to see that people can hang for at least two minutes on a bar. And so the question is, why is that so highly correlated with longevity? And it's what you said. It's strength. And the reason for it is it's really hard to be strong anywhere in the upper body if your grip is weak. Like, if you think about being able to push, especially being able to pull, like all of the real metrics of upper body strength require a strong grip. And if you have a strong grip, you have a strong hand, you have a strong forearm, you have a strong scapula that is connected to your rib cage, like it goes up the whole chain. And that's another reason why we like the dead hang as a way to test it. Because the dead hang is testing everything. It's testing your actual

grip, it's testing your scapular stabilization, the stability of your shoulder. It's basically testing that entire chain. And then I also think there's a practical side of this, right? It's very underappreciated what frailty does to an aging individual and what sarcopenia, loss of muscle mass does to an aging person. And what it is about falling that is so devastating to an older person. And the stronger your grip, the easier you're able to navigate a lot of those things, things, right? It just seems unthinkable that falling is something I should be thinking about at 32 in the future. Like, because my mobility. It seems ridiculous. It seems ridiculous, yeah. Yeah. And yet it is devastating. So once you reach the age of 65, which that ain't that far.

I mean, you know 65 year olds all day long. That's not a very old person. Once you reach the age of 65, your mortality from a fall that results in a broken hip or femur, is 15 to 30%, just think it is such a staggering number. So you're over 65, you fall, and that fall results in the break of a femur or hip. There's a 15 to 30% chance you'll be dead within a year. What kills me? It could be something very acute like you bank, you know, the fall that's significant enough to do that also bangs your head. It could be that you get a fat embolism, you get a blood clot.

It could be that, you know, during the recovery process, of this, you just never really get better, you never thrive again. I think a more disturbing statistic is that of all the people who survive, 50% will never again regain the level of function they had before the injury. Wow. So they will require a cane for the rest of their life or something like that. Now, there are lots of things that account for that. Andy Galpin, who you mentioned a moment ago, talks a lot about this, but a lot of it comes down to foot explosiveness, power. So the reason you're not really afraid of falling, like, when was the last time you were walking and your foot caught something and you slipped? Like yesterday? Yeah, quite often. Yeah,

exactly. Why don't you fall when that happens? Because I can quickly readjust. Right. That's power. Okay. So you have the power in your foot to readjust when you lose your step. You step off a curb, not realizing it, it doesn't matter. You readjust. Okay. Those are a very, very specific muscle fiber that is responsible for that. It's called the type 2b muscle fiber. That is the first fiber that atrophies when you age. In fact, you're already at your peak. It's all downhill from where you are now. Thank you so much. Yes. So I'm already 20 years past you and my power is a fraction of what it was 20 years ago. Now, I fight like hell based on the exercises I do to try to make, to try to keep it as high as possible. So the reason that these, you know, people who were in their

70s are falling all the time is people think it's a balance thing. It's not just a balance thing, right? It's that they're undergoing the same insult you and I undergo on a daily basis, but the difference is their probability of being able to catch it, either through the explosiveness of their foot or their lower leg, coupled with maybe not being able to grab onto something as quickly and adjust. It's a power deficit problem. So what do I have to train now at 32 to ensure that specifically the example of hitting something and quickly being able to adjust, I'm able to do that when I'm 70. I think jumping is a great way to do this, right?

So, I mean, I use certain specialized pieces of equipment that actually have power built into it because power is different from strength, right? So strength is really the ability to move, is just the ability to move a force, independent of the speed at which you move it. Power is the maximum combination of force and speed. Okay. So if you, on the, on the, on the, on the, um, X axis, if you were to put force and on the Y axis, if you were to put power, the curve is an inverted U. So as the force or the weight that you're moving goes up and you're trying to move it as fast as you can, you're getting more and more and more and more power.

But then at some point the weight gets so heavy that even as you continue to move it, it's going slower and slower and slower. So there's a sweet spot there. So one of the things I do is there's certain special. pieces of equipment that allow you to train in that way. So I definitely rely on a lot of those. But even if you don't have access to that machine, jumping is a really important way to generate power. So if you're just doing a vertical jump, that's a, that's power. What about balance?

I was at Brian Johnson's house and as he was cooking his, I don't know, breakfast or lunch or whatever, he was balancing on a half ball. You've seen one of those things. Yeah, yeah. I don't think I asked him why he was balancing on it, but I assume it was to do with balance and there's certain muscles in the leg? There are lots of exercises that are great for balance.

Anything that produces instability is great because it's, you know, for lack of a better term, I've heard it described as problem solving for your foot. Okay. Right? So if you think about being on any unstable surface, even if you're just walking on an unstable surface, so if you were to look at a person's foot,

their lower leg, actually, as they're walking on a surface that's constantly changing. like a gravel path or something like that, you're going to see, like, if this were my lower leg, you would see the musculature of the lower leg constantly adjusting to it. And so, yeah, I really enjoy things that force that type of training. Do you do flexibility stuff? Yeah, so I'm actually naturally a pretty lax person. So I don't do any stretching, if that's what you're asking, but all of the sort of stability and dynamic stuff I do incorporates movement at end ranges. So I'll give you an example of why I think the notion of flexibility might be a

little bit misunderstood. If you ask a person to stand up and with their legs straight touch their toes, most people would say that's a great test of flexibility in the hamstring, right? And most people can't do that. What they don't realize is everybody's hamstrings are long enough to allow them to do that. The reason they can't do it is their central nervous system will not release them to do it. Does that make sense? Interesting. The central nervous system won't release them to do it. That's right. It doesn't feel safe for them to do it. Now, how do I know this? Because if you take a person under general anesthesia, you can put them into almost any position possible. So if you took a person under general anesthesia, laid them on the operating room table,

you could lift their leg up to here. When they're awake, you couldn't get it past here. When they wake up from surgery, will they have a torn hamstring? Not at all. They won't even know their leg was moved. The difference is when they're under general anesthesia, their brain is not sending a signal to the leg that says don't lift. So why is the leg, why is the brain doing that to the individual? This is how I learned it on a personal level.

So about six years ago, I had tweaked my back and had just done a, you know, unnecessarily heavy set of deadl and just pushed it a little too far. And I was kind of nursing this sort of, you know, just very, very tight QL. I was completely jammed up. And I came in to do some training with a friend of mine who's one of the guys that, actually, he is really the guy that introduced me to this thing called DNS, dynamic neuromuscular stabilization. And, I mean, I was stiff as a board. I couldn't, you know, get past my knees bending forward.

And I'd been hurting for like three days. And we went through a series of exercises for 40 minutes, which included me laying on my back with my legs up, him leaning on top of me. So my feet are here on his chest. and doing isometric pushes while working on generating intra-abdominal pressure. And after maybe 40 minutes of this type of exercises, I was palms on the floor. Now, how do I go from not being able to get to my knees to palms on the floor in 40 minutes with three days of horrible back pain? The difference is when my back was hurting, my body was not going to let me go down, right?

The body was saying, no way, your back, I'm protecting you because you were not stable. You're not going to go any further. And what we went through with this exercise and a series of exercises was basically, I mean, I'm oversimplifying this and sort of anthropomorphizing it, but letting my brain know, it's okay, you're stable, you're stable, you're stable. The back is safe. The back is safe. Let him go. And then, ah, I'm palms on the floor. So I love testing this. Sometimes I'll just wake up in the morning and do five minutes of breathing exercises when I'm stiff as a board and just get into a, you know, a position on the floor. Why the breathing exercises? Because that's really how it's the, it's the, the breathing is how I kind of create this cylinder in my abdomen to sort of push the, you know, push the floor of the cylinder down is the pelvic wall. The diaphragm is the cylinder, the top.

And then the entirety of my abdomen is the wall of the cylinder. And so I kind of go through these exercises every single day. Usually on my back, actually, that's kind of like part of my warm-up. And it's just a way to kind of ground myself around creating concentric pressure in the abdomen. Just to get some tips from you around your strength training regime, how many exercises do you do? What does, I'm really curious, so you train three days a week doing strength and resistance stuff. do you do like shoulders and back and as like a pet like you know people just it's just totally yeah yeah exactly so on monday monday is uh is pure lower body okay and uh wednesday is arms and shoulders and friday is uh chest and back

super simple like nothing nothing no rocket science an hour uh i mean it's it's a like an hour and a half of lifting play plus maybe 20 minutes of the warm up stuff So on the chest and back day, how many chest exercises are you doing? Four. Four, okay. And then four on back. Yeah. Okay.

And I'm just super setting them. And I'm going to do maybe five sets of each. So five working sets. So there's a lot of warm-up in there too. And I'll also do some other stuff, like some med ball slams or things like that as well. It's been a huge rise in people doing these hypoxes and sort of elite endurance events and such. it's really interesting that it's become so popular, even things like running clubs, I know, but the fact that more people are doing marathons now than ever before, why do you think this

is happening? I don't know. I mean, I think it's a very net positive thing, though. I mean, I do think that there's more and more people that are taking up things like rucking and running and, you know, finding camaraderie in these things. The only thing I hope is that people are doing it in a manner that's sustainable and safe and allows them to do it indefinitely. So, you know, I just, I'm always hopeful that whatever thing that people are doing, they're not injuring themselves because, again, rule number one is don't get injured. So, so you're, you know, you're, you're playing, you're playing, you're playing, the game, the name of the game is to play the game as long as possible. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to

listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you. Thank you.