The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Support Your Brain, Improve Energy, And Use Exercise As Medicine

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. If exercise was in a pill, it would be the most powerful drug ever invented. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark here. We all have food emergencies every once in a while when we need some quick convenient calories in between meals and that's why it's a good idea to have some healthy options on hand for when you need them. I do all the time and you might think that grabbing a couple of protein bars would be the perfect portable healthy option but you you know that most, quote, health food bars on the market today are filled with refined sugar, weird artificial sweeteners, sugar alcohols. There's a serious need for actually healthy protein bars.

Starting point is 00:00:34 And thankfully, my friends at Paleo Valley have come through. They've created superfood bars, which are loaded with nutrients without added sugars. Their delicious superfood bars are sourced from only the highest quality organic ingredients while avoiding any harmful sugars you'll see in all the rest. Right now, Paleo Valley is offering my listeners a deal. You can get 15% off the entire store at paleovalley.com forward slash hymen. So be sure to stock up on your food emergencies today. That's paleovalley.com forward slash hymen. As a functional medicine doctor looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other internal variables, it helps me find the

Starting point is 00:01:11 most effective path to health and healing for my patients. But such extensive testing can be very complicated and time-consuming for both the practitioner, somebody like me, and our patients. But lab ordering became very quick and painless since I started using Group of Health. I can order, track, and get results from over 35 different lab companies within a few clicks in one lab portal. And this means one invoice for all labs paid online upfront. Plus patients get practitioner pricing and receive full patient support through easier personalized collection instructions, automated follow, super bills, and answers to testing questions, and so much more. And best of all, it's free for practitioners. So sign up free today.

Starting point is 00:01:48 You can find out more information by going to rupahealth.com. That's R-U-P-A health.com. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy Podcast. Exercise is medicine, just like food is medicine, and it reduces many hallmarks of aging. Whether it be strength training, resistance training, or just like food is medicine, and it reduces many hallmarks of aging. Whether it be strength training, resistance training, or just taking a long walk, there are numerous benefits to each type of movement and exercise. And if we want to be strong, stay mobile, and maintain our health, we need movement to be a part of our daily habits and lifestyle. In today's episode,

Starting point is 00:02:20 we feature conversations from the doctor's pharmacy on the importance of moving regularly and strengthening our bodies. Dr. Hyman speaks with Max Lugavere about how exercise protects the brain. He also speaks about why building muscle will give you more energy. Then Dr. Hyman talks to Mark Sisson about lifting weights to maintain muscle mass. And finally, he speaks with Tony Robbins and Peter Diamantes about a special technique to build muscle. Let's dive in. Exercise is such a big topic and a lot of people are talking about it. I just think it's really important to underscore that exercise is, you're always talking about how food is medicine, exercise is medicine. Exercise is medicine. Yeah, I always just say if exercise was in a pill,

Starting point is 00:02:59 it would be the most powerful drug ever invented. It really would be. It really would be. So I'm a big fan of resistance training. I think this is something that not enough people are talking about. Women I see can be afraid of weight training. They don't want to get too big and too bulky. I've been trying to get jacked for 20 years. It's not easy. It's not, it doesn't happen overnight. Resistance training, going to the gym, getting stronger, building muscle, prioritizing protein at every meal. It's going to re training, going to the gym, getting stronger, building muscle, prioritizing protein at every meal. It's going to cause a recomp of your body, essentially.

Starting point is 00:03:32 I've been trying. I started at about 60 years old. I'm in the gym. It's Struggle Street, but I'm starting to like it. But I think it's working. I can see a big change in my body, and I feel stronger and less pain, and it's working. I can see a big change in my body and I feel stronger and less pain and it's good. Yeah. I mean, if nothing else, having more muscle on your body provides a sink for excess energy,

Starting point is 00:03:55 for excess glucose, excess starch and sugar that's going to make its way onto your plate inevitably. As much as we try to abide by the blood sugar solution, you know, and others who have told us to, you know, to read that. I mean, great book. It's important to note that like a New York City apartment, and I know you know this, Mark, there's not a lot of place to store stuff. Nope. And that's especially true in the body of sugar.

Starting point is 00:04:23 Yeah. We have very limited, you know, there's very limited options in terms of where we can store the sugar that we consume. Muscle. Muscle is one of those places. And by growing more muscle, by getting to the gym, you provide a sink basically to soak up extra sugar that you might consume or starches or, you know, what have you. That's good. Cause you know, yesterday I went to a class called Yoga Sculpt, which is basically like yoga with weights. Oh, wow.

Starting point is 00:04:48 Which is hard as heck, but I told myself it was good for me. Max would be happy with me if I did that. You're looking lean. I'm good. I know. I didn't want to say this. I probably shouldn't say this, but I eat healthy and exercise, and it's like I have to make sure I don't lose too say this. I probably shouldn't say this, but I eat healthy and exercise. It's like I have to make sure

Starting point is 00:05:06 I don't lose too much weight. Wow. You know, so yeah, there's also something that happens with exercise is really cool, which is that it stimulates this chemical in your brain. It's like miracle grow.

Starting point is 00:05:17 Can you tell us about that? Yeah. So exercise stimulates a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF. Or miracle growth. Miracle growth for the brain, yeah. It promotes the survival of our existing brain cells.

Starting point is 00:05:31 It promotes the growth of healthy new brain cells. So it makes new brain cells, and it increases the connections between your brain cells, so your brain works better. Yeah. You can actually, I believe there's a YouTube video where BDNF is sprinkled on dendrites, which causes them to sprout. Those are like parts of your nerve cells. Yeah, it's like the physical correlates of memories, actually. And so it's like a chia pet.

Starting point is 00:05:55 And we can cause this upregulation of BDNF in our brains by exercising. And I think for a long time, the emphasis was on aerobic exercise. And aerobic exercise is great. We know that aerobic exercise can cause growth of the memory center of the brain, the hippocampus, which is vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease and aging. But we now know, thanks to new research, that whatever the exercise modality is that you enjoy doing, even resistance training can boost BDNF. So just being more active.

Starting point is 00:06:23 That's great. So you talk about this thing in the book, which is like a marathon in 10 minutes. Yeah. How do I do that? Yeah. How do you basically get the benefits of running a marathon in just 10 minutes? It's high intensity interval training. So along with resistance training, I think HIIT training, H-I-I-T, crucially important. Which is basically exercising as hard as you can until you're about to throw up and then stopping. Is that it? Pretty much. But doing it. But here's the good part.

Starting point is 00:06:47 You only have to do it for a few seconds, like 10 to 20 to 30 seconds. Pushing yourself to your max effort and then recuperating and then doing it again. And so what the study found is that when you take subjects and you have them do this HIIT routine, about a two-minute warm-up and then four or five cycles of all-out either cycling or swinging around the big heavy battle ropes, which is something that I enjoy doing, or doing sprints up a hill, that people are able to achieve the same boost to their cardiorespiratory fitness as people who are doing like 30 to 45 minutes of steady-state cardio on a treadmill.

Starting point is 00:07:22 It's really true. There's some great studies that I reviewed about this where if you do high intensity interval training you you literally can exercise like fraction of the time and get far more benefit than if you ran an hour a day you burn nine times percent more fat and you actually increase your metabolism and what's incredible about it it's not it's not just the calories you burn when you exercise because you're going to burn more calories if you're running for an hour than if you're doing high-intensity training, but it speeds up your metabolism

Starting point is 00:07:50 so that when you're sitting down or you're on your computer or you're watching TV or you're sleeping, you're burning more calories. And people who are fidgeters also tend to burn more calories too. Yeah. People who overeat tend to fidget more

Starting point is 00:08:04 and fidgeting is a great way to burn more calories too. Yeah. People who overeat tend to fidget more. Yeah. And fidgeting is a great way to burn calories actually. Fidgeting falls under the category of non-exercise physical activity that I talk about in the book. It's called NEAT.

Starting point is 00:08:14 Non-exercise. Yeah. How NEAT is NEAT? You can burn anywhere between 300 and 1,000 calories every day just with fidgeting, with chasing your cat

Starting point is 00:08:23 around the living room. There used to be that guy in medical school kept knocking the kid in his seat in front of him it wasn't very popular but i was always pitching he probably loved you um but yeah going back going back to high intensity interval training what's amazing about it is it kind of does to your cells what calorie restriction does and calorie restriction we know is one of the few ways of extending lifespan in smaller organisms right high intensity interval training the way that it works is it creates a momentary energy crisis for your cells where your cells basically say to one another we've got to keep up or we're

Starting point is 00:08:55 going to die and what they do to keep up is they create healthy new mitochondria yeah they uh there's a process called mitophagy it's sort of like autophagy where old worn out um mitochondria that have become dysfunctional basically get gobbled up yeah and this is one of the i mean mitochondria that don't function well is at the root of aging at the root of neurodegenerative conditions so by doing high intensity interval training we basically get to it's like the fountain of youth for our, for ourselves and our mitochondria. A few of these things you've talked about are, you know, um, really interesting and they have to do with ways in which the body gets stressed that activates a healing response, right? Whether it's, it's the, uh, exercise intensity, whether it's the cold therapy,

Starting point is 00:09:44 uh, these have powerful effects like that. It's called hormesis, which is a medical term for it. And it's actually such a good thing to push yourself a little bit because it actually activates all these healing and repair mechanisms. The time-restricted eating, the when to eat, the cryotherapy, the exercise intensity, those are all very scientifically validated mechanisms for activating these healing systems in our body and they're not that hard right yeah they're not that hard roll around naked in the snow roll around naked in the snow run as fast you can till you're thrown up for 10 minutes a few seconds yeah and make sure you don't eat before bed and it's so

Starting point is 00:10:22 cool it's so cool and one of the coolest things about it that i talk about in the genius life is the spillover effect that happens and i don't i haven't seen this talked about in any other book so i think this is kind of a novel idea that i one of the novel uh ideas that i advanced in the in the genius life it's that this notion of cross adaptation so by rolling around in the snow or by sitting in a sauna or by exercising vigorously, these are physical stressors, that hormetic stress that's so good for us, right? We know that when we take cold showers, we acclimate. When we go to the gym and we get in better shape, we become more capable of doing more exercise.

Starting point is 00:10:59 But here's where cross-adaptation is amazing. It can actually make us more resilient in other areas of our life. So by acclimating and getting more resilient in the gym and taking these cold showers and sitting in a sauna, you actually can become more psychologically resilient. There's this spillover effect. It's called cross-adaptation whereby you actually can adapt psychologically by imposing a stress on your body physically. What does strength training do? How does it improve all the hallmarks of aging? How did it look at the root causes of disease and aging?

Starting point is 00:11:31 I talk about this. I book young forever. If you haven't gotten a copy yet, please get a copy. It's the number one New York Times bestseller. Thanks all of you. Thank you so much. And here's how it works. Exercise improves your mitochondria, which are important to produce energy in your body.

Starting point is 00:11:45 And as we age, we lose mitochondria in terms of both their number and their function. So they become less efficient and we get fewer of them. So when we do strength training, we build up more muscle and we get more mitochondria and we make them work better, which is really, really important. It also improves your blood pressure, cholesterol, lowers risk of heart disease. Strength training improves your mood, your motivation, your cognitive function, increases something called BDNF, which increases like miracle growth for your brain. It helps prevent dementia by doing that as well and increases neuroplasticity, makes new brain cells. It's pretty impressive, actually. Obviously, it improves your muscle strength, your bone health, so it can stay about osteoporosis and prevent you from being frail as you get older.

Starting point is 00:12:27 It helps with sleep. It helps with libido and sexual function because it helps testosterone boosting in men and women. So there's a lot of benefits to strength training. So what should you do to incorporate strength training into your routine, into your exercise routine? Well, just first understand that preserving muscle, building muscle, optimizing muscle function are the keys to the fountain of youth. So try something, anything, please. Weightlifting, resistance bands, body weight. Those are the three main ones. And there's a lot of things like TRX and this is often using body weight,

Starting point is 00:13:02 but I love it. And I find my body works better. It feels better. And I don't really like going to the gym that much. Sometimes I go. But I basically do a home strength training program. I use Tom Brady's system called TB12 Sports. You buy the bands online. You can get the app for $50.

Starting point is 00:13:19 I don't have any relationship with them. I'm not selling it for them. But basically, it's changed my life. So that's why I love it. And it's portable. I travel with it everywhere. I can use it any place, a hotel room, any place there's a floor and a doorknob basically. And it's incredible. And I find, uh, I can do my routine in half an hour. I'm in and out and I love it. And I feel so good afterwards. Uh, the bands tend to cause less injuries. Uh, then you get older, you might

Starting point is 00:13:44 be more prone to injury. You can start with lighter bands and work up to heavier bands. But if you haven't done any strength training, I started off working with somebody to make sure my form was right, that I was doing it right, that I had my body position, right. Cause you can hurt yourself. So you want to make sure you do it properly. Never too late to start. My dad was like 89.

Starting point is 00:14:02 He was, couldn't get up out of a chair. He was sort of frail. And I'm like, Hey dad, uh, you know, I know you walk every day, but you need to do strength training. And I got him a trainer and he got so much fitter. We ended up playing tennis at 89 years old. Pretty impressive. So what puts people in nursing home is not a disease usually. It's their lack of ability to do their daily activities. And that's what you don't want, right? You want to have high functioning. What is the biggest risk factor for death as you get older? It's one of the things is falling. If you fall and break your hip,

Starting point is 00:14:36 it's like getting a terminal diagnosis of cancer, like pancreatic cancer. You're basically 50% likely to die in a year. It's really bad news. So you don't want to fall. If you have more muscle, you can brace yourself. You can resist your falls. You probably won't fall. So basically try to do three times a week of strength training, 20 to 30 minutes. It helps in every possible way in terms of your fat burning, muscle, function, energy, longevity, pathways. It's just, it's dope.

Starting point is 00:15:03 So whatever you do for any of your health practices, aside from what you eat, this is one of the most important. And if I had to sort of pick two things to do for longevity, it would be cut out starch and sugar and eat the right protein to get muscle building and strength training, do strength training. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now the basis of any healing protocol should be whole real food, but with all the GMO foods and long transportation, storage times, and monoculture farming methods, depletion of our soils, food's not as nutritionally dense as it once was, even good stuff. And that's why I recommend supplementing a whole foods diet with a high quality multivitamin

Starting point is 00:15:43 as a basis for any health oriented program. And the product I personally use comes from Athletic Greens. Their AG1 supplement has 75 different nutrients that work together to fill out the gaps in our diet. I take AG1 every day and I've noticed that I consistently feel better and have more energy throughout the day. Plus, it works with any diet, keto, paleo, vegan, dairy-free, even gluten-free. AG1 is a simple, easy way to optimize your health. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving away 10 free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com forward slash hymen. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash hymen.

Starting point is 00:16:17 And now, let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Lifting weights is what causes you to keep muscle on. If you don't lift weights, especially as you get older, like when you get to be 45, you'll see what I'm talking about. I'm 60. I passed that mark a long ago. I'm just messing with you. But I'm biologically 39 because I did my telomeres. As you get older, the importance of lean tissue becomes more and more critical. Muscle is the forgotten organ. And people think, well, if I'm jogging in my 50s and 60s and 70s or riding a bike, that that's accomplishing what I need to accomplish,

Starting point is 00:16:54 and it's not. It's actually much more important to spend some time in the gym lifting heavy weights, like the heaviest weights you can lift without getting hurt. Without getting hurt is a key component. So my trainer tells me I should do more reps. I do three sets. It's pretty hard, but it's not my maximum that I can do.

Starting point is 00:17:13 Sometimes it is. But is that the same, or is it better to do heavy weights? How many reps do you do? Are we talking six or three or five? Ten to 12, and then I do three times. That's fine. That's a standard. That hasn't changed in decades.

Starting point is 00:17:27 That's still, and there's no right answer there. There's no magic. It's like whatever you feel good doing. Is that building enough muscle, or should I do more heavier weights and fewer reps? Heavier weights and fewer reps builds more strength over time. But there's no, I can't tell you that that's where you need to go. But I'll give you an example. It's sometimes the type of weights you're doing. So if you're just doing bicep curls, you know, that's, you know, for the beach, but that doesn't really impact bone density,

Starting point is 00:17:57 you know, muscle mass throughout. So hex bar deadlifts. You ever do those? Yeah. Yeah. That's the best thing you can do. What about just a regular deadlift? Yeah, they're good, but I'm too concerned with my back so so i lift heavy with a hex bar deadlift oh really yeah so but i do it once every week and i do three sets of that i keep adding weights and how many how much you do i do up to 300 pounds on a on a one i do one you know to two rep max on a on 300 oh one to two yeah i can do 335 on one, but it's too much.

Starting point is 00:18:27 I wind up taking too long to do it, and I'm afraid. Again, I don't want to hurt myself. Yeah. So I do, but that's like that one exercise impacts the entire body. You know, it's not just what you would see, obviously, from doing the weight of the glutes and the lower back and the hamstrings and the quads. But it's pulling on the shoulder muscles. Like my grip strength is sometimes the thing that gives out more than anything else.

Starting point is 00:18:54 But that one exercise then has an effect on the pulse of growth hormone and testosterone through a, you know, it involves so many muscles, including major muscles, that then when you go do the pull-ups and the push-ups and the dips and the squats and all the other lunges, then you get the impact is greater. The effect, the muscle building effect is greater because you did that. Yeah, I like that. I like that. So I should do that first. Or last or whatever. All right, that like that. I like that. So I should do that first? Or last or whatever.

Starting point is 00:19:25 All right. That's amazing. But I mean, yeah, if you do it first, a lot of times you'll like, you know, you won't have the strength to complete the other stuff. So what is the biology of doing it? You mentioned you can burn fat, but why is that better? Like what does it do in terms of longevity? What does the science show? Well, as we—so burning sugar is a—in and of itself, it produces reactive oxygen species at a greater rate than putting—combusting fat through the mitochondria.

Starting point is 00:19:56 So the more energy you can drive through this metabolic pathway that uses the mitochondria, the better off you are. A lot of times people burn sugar in the cytosol of the cell, not even... The way I think about it is interesting. So when you eat a lot of sugar calories and starchy calories, it burns dirty in your mitochondria and releases a lot of waste products, which is these reactive... Oxygen species. Oxygen species or oxidative stress or free radicals that are driving aging.

Starting point is 00:20:22 And when you burn ketones, more like hybrid, like an electric, like an electric fuel, it burns clean, right? Like a 93 octane. Yeah, it burns much cleaner. Yeah. Is that true? That's true.

Starting point is 00:20:33 I mean, that's the simplest way of looking at it. Then there are other nuances to this, which are when you become good at burning fat, then when you skip a meal, or when you have this very easy to manage compressed eating window, all the good stuff happens when you're not eating. Yeah. So the longer you can go, and that's why fasting has become the rage, the longer you can go without eating, the more your body says, oh, this is a great time to do some house cleaning. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:02 And the term autophagy is thrown out probably too much now. But, you know, the body does tend to want to clean up and consume damaged proteins. Autophagy means like you're literally eating yourself. Correct. So eating all the waste products. Eating the waste products. Pac-Man goes around and cleans up the place. And if you never fast, you just become this increased collection of garbage in your body.

Starting point is 00:21:25 The whole three meals, three snacks, eat late at night, after dinner snack, and wake up eating right away, that's a bad idea. It's a bad idea. And what's ironic to me is that even going back 15 years ago in the bodybuilding and the weightlifting in the general health community, the mantra was don't go more than two hours without eating. Bring your Tupperware, you know, little meals with you with, you know, some amount of protein, some amount of carbs,

Starting point is 00:21:49 no fat, skinless chicken breast, and you know, all that stuff. It was a horrible concept. And yet, the thought process was, you know, you don't want to cannibalize your muscle tissue. And if you go more than three hours without eating, you'll cannibalize your muscle tissue. Now, all of that was predicated on an assumption that glucose was the primary fuel that we needed. When we ran out of glucose, it would cause the brain to go into a state of, oh my God, send a signal to the adrenals to secrete cortisol so we can basically melt some muscle tissue and send some amino acids to the liver to become glucose. Exactly. It was a horrible, again, it was all based on a concept

Starting point is 00:22:33 that somehow assumed that glucose was the muscle fuel that we needed, and if we didn't manage glucose, all hell broke loose. Now we know that fat is the preferred fuel for human movement and human activity and that ketones are not just a legitimate alternative energy source. They're probably a preferred energy source in many cases. Exercise. It doesn't have to be hard exercise. You know, we did a study. It was done in the JAMA, and it was saying literally one hour of walking on a treadmill, you reduce your chance of heart attack by 48%.

Starting point is 00:23:06 You know, there are some cool things, you know, years ago, I heard about static contraction. They did this study with 35,000 athletes, mostly people, bodybuilders that are, you know, going seven days a week to the gym. And they discovered a lot of things, muscle confusion, a lot of cool techniques came out of those original studies like 18 years ago. But one thing they didn't know what to do with initially that came out that I got exposed to was that they, these inevitably these, you know, bodybuilders would get injured or get sick and they get injured. And most of them were plateauing because they're going to the gym six, seven days a week. And most of us know you don't build muscle while you're making the

Starting point is 00:23:40 stimulus. You make the stimulus, you make it when you sleep and your body has been stimulated to rebuild, right? So these guys are overtraining, but no one got it until they saw these guys would get sick or they get injured and they come back 10 days off or two weeks off and they do a personal best. So this group created this thing called static contraction. So, you know, I got long arms. So if you were doing like a, you know, something like a bench press, I would do like 210, 220, something like that, you know, short guy, a little bit easier would do like 210, 220, something like that. You know, short guy, a little bit easier, right? And it was never my focus. But I started studying this. And what they do is they say, look, if a car was coming at you, would you start here with the

Starting point is 00:24:14 barbell or the car and try and push it away? And you're going to start out here so you can use all the muscles. And so they do this process. This is what they did originally, where they drop just below bending point. So you're not locked out and you have to find a weight that you can hold for 15 seconds. If you can at least five, if you can hold it for 15, you got to go heavier. Well, my first way of doing this, that contraction was 425 pounds. I took a woman who was doing this for a while, who was like 62 or three years old. She looked a little older gray hair and i took her to gold's gym to film her and there was this 25 year old kid with you know ponytail and really

Starting point is 00:24:51 built and he's doing the leg press machine he's got all these weights on there he's sweating profusely i got a camera crew because i want to capture this because i want to show people the static contraction and so he finishes you know he's in the middle of a set he finishes one of the sets and this one says excuse me sir while you're resting can i finishes, you know, he's in the middle of a set, he finishes one of the sets. And this woman says, excuse me, sir, while you're resting, can I get a, you know, can I jump in and just do a quick set? And he's looking at her, he sees the camera, he thinks he's being punked. And she goes, could you guys add 150 pounds? I swear to God. She didn't bring it all the way here to her legs. She was out here just below and she held it and it fires off all those muscles. So I did that for several years

Starting point is 00:25:25 I built 24 pounds more muscle in my body. I thought I was great, but You know, I got to like 575 on the weights I got people trying to hold it and then one late one arm was a little stronger than the other and I talked that so I was in so much pain I stopped doing and I said someday somebody's gonna build something but I thought it would be like compressed air So you wouldn't have something that could kill you, right? But now there's a company and it's called OsteoStrong. I invested with them because I was blown away. They took this technique and, you know, muscle development is limited by the strength of your

Starting point is 00:25:58 bones. Most people don't know that. And so, you know, most women know that, you know, osteoporosis is a real problem past 50. And, you know, most of the that, you know, osteoporosis is a real problem past 50. And, you know, most of the drugs fossilize the bones. This is the first technique. You've got to get three and a half times your body weight. Most people could never dream of doing that. But with this device, you can build to that point. My wife couldn't do 120 pounds, and she's done 350 to give you an idea.

Starting point is 00:26:22 And it doesn't make your muscles bulky. It makes them long and sleep and strong. And it's't make your muscles bulky. It makes them long and sleep and strong. And it's four exercises with these machines. It takes 10 minutes. You can do with your clothes on and it works for every muscle in your body. You know, there are people don't want to work out. So now there's VR workouts. I'm sure you've seen that are unbelievable. Like there's so much fun and you don't even realize you're working out. So part of it is just consistency. Part of it is getting the right stimulus and the amount of rest still. Because what happens is if you overdo this,

Starting point is 00:26:50 if you try and do it a week from now and you don't improve, they say take 10 days off. And sure enough, you come back in 10 days and you improve again. So there's great breakthroughs in exercise. It doesn't have to just be doing the same crap over and over again and being bored silly. It's true. You can really see it.

Starting point is 00:27:04 And by the way, I'm sure you know that lack of muscle, the breakdown of the muscle, now it's being seen by a lot of people in medicine as important as blood pressure. Absolutely. Because when people age, that's what starts to break down. That's where they end up in the hospital. And then now the whole thing starts to break down. No, it's sarcopenia is the biggest driver of all the metabolic changes, low hormones, inflammation, blood sugar issues,

Starting point is 00:27:25 all that stuff. And, you know, Tony, I read in the book that you love that machine so much, you got one for your house. So I'm coming to Florida in April. I'm going to come over. I want to try it. Come over.

Starting point is 00:27:32 I'll have you check it out. It's pretty awesome. It's four machines. Come on over. We'll do it. Okay. So, Peter, tell us more about some of the basic foundational things besides the diet, exercise.

Starting point is 00:27:43 So we talked about keeping hydrated. We talked about food, minimizing sugar, whole plant diets, the work that this guy, Dr. Mark Hyman, speaks about and writes about so proficiently. That quack, that quack, I wouldn't listen to him. You know, on the exercise front, you know, it doesn't have to be heavy weights. It's just getting, you know, stressing the muscles. Muscle is a direct correlation between muscle mass and longevity. Most people die because they have a fall and break a hip or break a pelvis and end up in a, you know, in the hospital. And it's a spiral from there. You know, one of the things that I do and I commend to everybody is I take as many of my meetings walking as I can. So I will try and get 10 to 20,000 steps a day

Starting point is 00:28:26 because I'll do my Zooms. They work on my phone. You know, I wasn't going to do this one walking or have a walking treadmill. And I take my meetings there and it's getting as much as I can. So I feel good about it. Yeah, you dragged me out at five in the morning

Starting point is 00:28:39 for a walk in the Santa Monica Pier one day. I did, I did. I take many meetings walking on the, I mean, I live in Santa Monica, so you might as well enjoy doing that, right? You have an excuse if you're in the middle of Buffalo. So that exercise mindset is so important. I mean, I cannot express enough, right?

Starting point is 00:28:58 You all know those studies of a man and woman who are deeply in love and the wife dies and the husband goes a few weeks later or vice versa. You know, you can will yourself to death and you can will yourself to life. You need to make sure that your vision of your future is bigger than the vision of your past. You're excited to be alive. This is the most extraordinary time ever. And so what would it be like? What would you do with an extra 30 years of healthy life? Now, most people get sad and they want to retire and they want to slow down. Why? Because

Starting point is 00:29:33 they're in pain. They're not enjoying, they're exhausted. They don't have the energy. They're in pain when they move. And so what if you didn't have that pain? What if you had the energy? This is the vision of healthy longevity we're pain? What if you had the energy, right? We're not, this is the vision of healthy longevity we're talking about, where you have the aesthetics, you look good, the cognition, you're thinking clearly, the mobility, you're moving well. And then it's like, yeah, I'm in, you know, put me in for the next round coach.

Starting point is 00:29:58 I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff, from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health.

Starting point is 00:30:38 And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health

Starting point is 00:30:59 and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search

Starting point is 00:31:27 their Find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.

The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Support Your Brain, Improve Energy, And Use Exercise As Medicine

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.