WHOOP Podcast - Dr. Bob Arnot returns to share tips and tricks on defying aging

Episode Date: August 19, 2020

Dr. Bob Arnot returns to the WHOOP Podcast to share his tips and tricks for defying aging and talk about his new book, Flip the Youth Switch. Dr. Bob dives deep on why age is just a number and details how you can lower your “biological age” by improving your heart rate variability with WHOOP. Dr. Bob discusses how he competes athletically with 25-year-olds at the age of 72 (3:15), how WHOOP taught him to recover (5:28), why wearables are changing medicine (15:05), optimizing workouts and recoveries (19:54), advice for millennials (22:46), how to tackle your 30s (29:04), the importance of finding a lifelong sport (35:14), what we learn from athletics (41:12), appreciating the advances of modern medicine (46:19), and his best tips for people as they grow older (46:52).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Woop, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. We build technology across hardware and software and analytics to really understand you. So that includes things like sleep and recovery and strain. More recently, a statistic called respiratory rate that we found can be. predictive of COVID-19. I encourage you to check out some earlier podcasts in which we talk about respiratory rate and COVID-19. We're going to get into our amazing guest this week in just a

second. First, I want to remind you that you can get 15% off a WOOP membership if you use the code Will Ahmed. That's W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D. We had an amazing week last week. We announced a partnership with G42 healthcare to become the first wearable to be used in a phase three COVID-19 vaccine trial. Yes, I don't think there's anything more important right now than a phase three COVID-19 vaccine trial. COVID-19 vaccines are going to hopefully save a lot of lives, and we are proud at whoop to be a part of this and to help look at physiological data before, during and after a phase three trial and make sure that baseline data stays stable. And really, I think it's the future of medicine to use health monitoring to understand

deviations in your body during vaccines, drugs, and other therapies. So anyway, if you want to learn more about that partnership, you can check it out at the locker. That's whoop.com slash locker. All right. Now, our guest, Dr. Bob, are not. Fascinating guy, former chief medical correspondent for both CBS and NBC News, the former chief foreign correspondent for NBC. He's a pilot. He's a world champion paddleboarder, a skier, an author. Really a Renaissance man. I mean, Dr. Bob does it all. And at age 72, he's got the whoop data of a 25-year-old. And we talk a lot about that we talk about his philosophy on life health fitness he just wrote this new book flip the youth switch which is out now and it's all about folks heart rate variability it's all about health it's about heart variability uh i read the book i think it's awesome uh and so i encourage everyone to check it out well without further ado here is dr bob or not

are not welcome back to the WOOP podcast. Hey listen you had no idea how excited I am this summer last summer I listened to every single podcast all of them so I'm like a Will podcast junkie. Wow I'm flattered. This device that you know a lot of other people are saying that it's gamified and it is I have joined this group called Woop Hardo's so every single morning I think there's some buddies ears actually. Every single morning I get up in my seven-year-old walks into the room and he wants to know what my score is today, which is not very good. You got a 37% I can see. I did heavy intervals there. But he goes and he wants to know what my ranking is among Wupardo's. There's some good young players on there. So the thing is that this winner we start doing this, I beat them every single day

because I'm good. So every day I'm like 21. And these guys, they get compared. competitive, right? They go out there. They start sleeping and they start eating right and they start exercising. Now these guys, I mean, sometimes I can't even make it into the top four. That's killing you. So the Wu-Pardo's team, that's for everyone looking for a new team to join, check out the Wu-Pardo's team. And you can try to beat, you can try to beat Dr. Bob. It is interesting, though, is how much they have up their game. And the other part of it is that, is, you know, I'm a huge believer in Woop in general, but also as a marker of biological age, and with this coronavirus epidemic, your biological age is everything.

You know, they, in one of the White House briefings they, Deborah Berks was talking about how you could be, you know, 60 or 70 or 80, and if you had a black biological age, which would mean it was 10 or 20 years later, you were finished, right? And that's all they found in London. Everybody on event over a certain age had that very bad biological. age. So with Woop, using H.R.B. as a marker, you can bring your biological age down by down, bit by bit. So the significance of Wup Hardos is, they're all 25 years old, and I'm like late 20s. Well, how old are you actually? Let's tell the audience, because you, part of the magic is that you're competing with 20-year-olds, and you're how old? 72. Isn't that amazing?

Oh, what's amazing about it, though, so I started out. The story is that, so a year ago, I get back from the world cross-country ski championships in Norway after competing there and then climbing Norway's highest amount with their lead guide and I come back and I'm fried so I call this coach and I said I need a coach why do you need a coach because I'm fried I need a recovery he goes buy a whoop good advice honestly I did I bought the whoop and you know loom behold I like read every day for like you know weeks and weeks and weeks and so obviously I completely changed my training and I had HRV like 1820 which was you know like my age age, like 72, I actually got up so as I was 130. I was the equivalent of my seven-year-old.

What I love about is, you know, when you look at metrics, look at all the other metrics in terms of, you know, real hard in points like biological age, I mean like CRP, six weeks, cholesterol, two and a half weeks, blood pressure, three weeks or so, this is day to day. So in one day, you can see an improvement. The week, you can see a big improvement. And what I love about it is that, again, you know, people are so motivated, they're so competitive that they want to see these scores change. And they do. So I ended up 130, which is the equivalent of like a seven-year-old. And, you know, my fiance, I always thought that was true mentally, but now it's actually true physically. Well, you've written a phenomenal book, which is all about this, flip the youth switch.

I devoured it. I loved it. And I think a big theme right off the top of the book is this importance of, you know, age just, being a number and you actually have a real biological health as well, a physiological health as well. And you talk about how heart rate variability is so core to this understanding of your physiological health. Well, you know, the thing, Will, is there is no greater dream in life than to perpetually live the life of a 25-year-old. Especially, you know, you're older, you're wiser, hopefully you're, you know, you're richer and, you know, no more and are smarter or whatnot. But to biologically be 25, and honestly, part of Wu part of us, 25-year-olds, you know, ex-IDI League athletes, yeah. Athletes is phenomenal, you know. So it really is a,

it's a tremendous dream come true. And, you know, heart rate variability, when I first looked at this, you draw my, drew my attention to it. And, you know, look, I'm a scientist, I work, you know, with one of the best hospitals in the world. And I'm skeptical about it. I read the literature and I kind of get into a little bit. And then I saw that HRV has, of course, nothing to do with the heart, the heart health. It has to do what we call inflammation, which is that when you're young, you know, you're balanced.

So your HRV is a very good high score because, again, what HRV shows is how kind of springy your overall automatic nervous system is. You know, you rest and recovery because it's very elastic. lively or is it kind of like dead? And when you look at heart rate variability, as you know, here's the distance between two heart bates. Is it like, you know, boom, bum, bum, like cutting sausages, there's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. With that variability, it turns out it's the best overall marker of biological age. And as you've also educated in the world, it's the best overall mark of somebody's recovery. If

you are able to get a great HRV, you've really recovered. coverage. So it's a tremendous motivator. And it's exciting. Exactly the book 25 years ago or more called Turning Back the Clock. Arnold Schwarzenegger actually wrote a blurb for the cover of it. And it really is a dream come true. I have been able to live the life of a 25-year-old. And thanks to whoop, and again, of course, we're not on video here. You can see, look at, talk about the loyalist. I have two whoops on anyone, thanks. I never want to lose the data. You're a unique whoop member in that you actually will wear two whoops. straps to ensure that nothing goes wrong with your name.

Nothing gets lost. Not a heartbeat. Well, I love the book. And, you know, it obviously reinforced a lot of things that we believe here at Woop. Why don't you talk a little bit about this actual switch that you refer to, this idea that your body is sort of constantly oscillating between fight or flight and rest and recovery? So, you know, let's look at it. That is, we have obviously a voluntary nervous system.

I move my fingers, my head, I run, or whatever. We have this automatic nervous system, and we kind of don't really control it. We don't say, heart go fast, heart go slow. It's not like, you know, Siri, make my heart go fast, right? Yeah. So it's a delicate balance, and it's as you say, you have two different settings. So you have one which they call fighter flight. The idea was that in the old days, you know, a lion came up or a leopard,

came up and you said we had to fight it or you had to flee and you needed every last ounce of energy. So you had stress hormones in the health. You had adrenaline in the health. Your eyes change. You know, the hair on your skin kind of like picked up. And all of those things gave you the energy to run away or fight that lion. But now, unfortunately, you're stuck in traffic and somebody cuts you off. There's no lion to kill. All you can do is sit on that horn or get frustrated. And so you have the other part of the parasympathetic. What that does is it is you say rest and recovery. So it's a chance to rebuild muscle. It's a time for your brain around kind of recover. It's a chance for your body to kind of look across its great kind of

breath and say, you know, I need some more protein. I need to be able to repair that. I need some more fuel in here. You know, you've got to settle the whole thing down. And as you know, in your 20s, it's a very nice sort of mix. So you've got some inflammation. You go out there and you you party and you hammer, you do an athletic contest, you come back, you kick back, you relax. But as we age, you have more and more of just the sympathetic drive. And that sympathetic drive, to be clear, so lower and lower HRV. Now, just to take a moment aside, a lot of people when they think of HRV as a scale, right, they won't know what's good and bad, but low is bad, good as high. And so if you're low, it means you have, well, we term infomaging, is we

know the primary driver of disease and aging is inflammation. Clearly, you may have genetics or other things going on, but it's the one controllable thing. And Mauritio Fabu, who's now the chair of psychiatrist or Harvard took me apart a couple of years ago, Harvard Club, and said, Bob, look at, the average American is an inflammatory mess inside. And there's no better delimiter than the inflammation. And no better measure of that than HRV with a will be able to see that on a day-to-day basis. And I give you an example. So I do between 2 and 6,000 feet every morning. I climb up my skis and ski down during the winter.

You know, it's exhilarating and exhausting. But when they had this terrible pain, it was like, I shot me out. It was like, tried to exercise it out. I couldn't. I looked at my whoops going and it was like red, bright red. And I go to my doctor, I don't know what's wrong, but something's wrong. So I go to the emergency room, they do a CT scan and they go, I don't know. We can't tell what it is, but it's bad.

And I go a million miles an hour down to Dartmouth, where my surgeon was, I said, look, it. He goes, okay, Bob, you get two choices. Choice A is we keep you in a hospital a couple days and put an I mean. I go, B, which was, let's operate. The guy operates. I complete and test the obstruction, right? So the warning sign was my whoop told me something was going on over the previously, because I had all yellow scores, and it suddenly goes red. So in the basis of that, I went down and had the operation. the guy comes up with a big smile on his face in the recovery who goes, Bob, you can ski tomorrow. Now, most people with an intestinal instruction wait too long, they have a colostomy, they're in a hospital for a couple weeks, it's a mess.

So thanks to whoop as an early warning system, I knew and was able to take decisive action. So I love it as an early warning system. And I know with Corona, you know, you've looked at respiratory rate as a way of determining whether someone sort of headed down the road is the very earliest sign of having a, you know, a SARS-CoB-2 infection. So it's, I don't think I open or close the conversation without saying, whoop, people are. You are truly a true fan, I have to say, in the best. And you're coming at it from such a place of authenticity because of the amazing,

amazing career you've had, especially not just as a, you know, high-performing personality and author and scientists, but also as, as someone who's a real athletic animal. I mean, you know, you're shot out of a rocket, Bob. You're about to go up a mountain right after this call. Now, what you're referring to is it's been a fascinating phenomenon for us, which is this idea of early detection because we have heard so many examples like the one you just described of someone out of the blue getting their first red recovery and having something really up with their body. And you know, for us it's a thing that We have to be careful to mark it around because we don't want to, we don't want to overstate

what a red recovery might be. But we have so many examples of people saying, my data was off and I went to a doctor, and lo and behold, it was blank. Anyway, it's obvious that this is the direction that whoop is going and wearable technology should go, which is to help people understand things about their bodies before they feel them. I was just on a call with a venture capitalist with a very cool company that does telemedicine. And what I think is happening with wearables is you're completely changing the face of medicine. I mean, take asthma as an example.

So in the old days, you wait until you're like, you're struggling, wheezing, you're running the emergency room and you enter a couple of days in the ICU. But now, you know, I always, I did 10,000 hours as a director of a 137 hospital emergency medicine group. And every time I send a patient on, I go, It's like, you know, sending somebody to space, let any monitorers.

What am I doing? It's like the craziest thing in the world, you know? I mean, they can lurch and crash out of control. It's like a driverless car sending somebody home. So what I love about the wearables is that now you can track it. You have this red warning is examined. You have the increase in respiratory rate. So how much medicine is changing is that increasingly you're going to have a telemedicine appointment.

You say, well, the doctor can't examine me. Well, you get better than exam. You have minute by minutes, second by second data, you know, day after day, year after year. So the doctor's going to go, I don't know, I think there's something wrong here. So to take asthma as an example, what would happen is you couldn't breathe out as fast, called your FAB1. So there's now a home device for that. You'd find that you're not as active. So the cell phones now will say you're not tracking as much.

You're not going as fast. You're not talking as quickly as long. You're not making as many phone calls. your fever is going up. The devices that now show whether or not you're taking too many inhalations. So you have all those coming together and using the deep learning system. And I tell everybody, nobody has had a better job with deep learning and data than Wolf. We have a phenomenal team on that front, led by John and Emily, they do a phenomenal job.

Well, I had a great chance to sit down with Emily for a couple hours. And what a superstar she is. It's amazing how good this is. So what is changing now is that, you know, these devices are not taking the place of doctors, but what they're doing is they're working as an assist. They're basically wanting to warn you. So it could be in an ICU where you have so much data you can't possibly keep up with it. But also with the rest of us, you know, I read the other day that the human body has a data exhaust

where it puts out like something like 2.2 gigabytes a day potentially, you know, all the biological information. So as you capture more and more of that information, with deep learning, you're going to have all kinds of warning systems. It will change the face of medicine. Now, as an example, it's a very prominent school, which I won't mention by name. They invested $10 million in a project that used these wearables to detect disease. And they stopped doing it.

Reason why, it was so good. They lost hospital admissions, and they lost the business because it detected the disease early and they were able to intervene so soon. So unquestionally, now with COVID, you can do all these telemedicine appointments. with the addition to the wearable device, it's going to completely change the face of medicine

so we're able to intercept far, far earlier. As another example, last summer, I had a race. I did this stand-up surfing race. It was over in Sarenet Lake, and I had been yellow all week long, and I said to myself, I don't think this is a good idea, and I just kind of didn't figure it out.

So I went and I raced, and three hours later, I felt like death. I went to the emergency room that night and I had this giant right lower load pneumonia. So I spent the night in the emergency room and the next night in the emergency room and the next night in the emergency zero. So if I paid a little closer attention to my whoop and gotten out of the yellow and to the green, I probably would have avoided it. But you know what's so interesting to me, Willis said, you know, when you take a look at older athletes, and older athletes really now means 25 or older.

You know, the average 25-year-old is just destroying their body. by a seven-year-old, when he looks at our group's scores, we'll go to sleep, is the last thing in the morning. Someone will have two hours of sleep, and he laughs, he howls, he rolls over. He's crissing. What he sees, you know, someone's HIV at like 19, you know, the rusty heart rate of like 70 and two hours of sleep. It's just incredible.

I like that your seven-year-old has identified what bad data looks like on whoop. He's a smart kid, but it's a, no, it's just totally in love with Wolf. But I mean, every day, I have some kind of conversation. I'm always, on calls like this, my Zoom calls, I've actually figured out how to hold my iPhone so that the world will actually show up in the window I can tell people with my score is for the day. And, you know, the thing you've really brought to the world

will more than anybody else is, you know, we all kind of knew anything that is anyone over the age of 25. They all do the same workout every single day. They go out, they stay out, they're stale. They can't figure it out. They think they're getting old. They start to hurt. they go to the orthopedic surgeon and they don't realize that the gain is it's really really hard

and then really really really easy totally totally so fundamental that idea of of putting completely different strains on your body most people are doing a 10 or a 12 every day and they should be doing an 18 and they should be doing an 8 you know that's what you taught the world will is that is that you need to have you know you want to you want to do that 18 or 21 and again the scale goes up to 21 in an 18 to 21 but you can't do that unless you're recovering enough and you don't know you've recovered unless you have a loop. You just don't know. And I have looked at all the other devices. And, you know, I measure HRV in my garbage example. It's junk. I mean, it's just not a very good measurement. You know, you measure it right in the middle

of deep sleep. You grab it out. And I've looked at it against, you know, laboratory quality equipment. So you're getting a very, very high quality HRV. And that means people can rely on it in terms of measuring, you know, the longer term biologically, the shorter term recovery. So, you know, Your legacy is that you've finally been able to show people and demonstrate them that if they're fully recovered and they're itchy and they just feel like they haven't worked out and you go out and you crush it. That's where you win. You know, Jesse Diggins, she and Kiki Randall won the first ever gold medal and cross-country

scheme in the United States. And when you ask Jesse how she wants, she said, I rest it, which is interesting, right? Isn't that amazing? Isn't it? Yeah. I'm rested. So, actually incredible crushing workouts. You know, I'm in our local cross-country scheme here, team here,

and competing for a team of the world championships in Norway last year. And, you know, we all go on to the same thing every day. We feel tired and old. And the fact of the matter is, you're not old. You're just not recovered. I love that. Well, one thing you do really well in the book is you talk about different age groups and you talk about some of the things to focus on

from a fitness standpoint or a health standpoint. So let's do this. Let's go through a few different age groups, and I'm going to say the age group, and you give me like two things or three things that someone should worry about. Okay, if you're, so if you're in your 20s, what do you need to worry about? Biggest thing you have to worry about will in your 20s. And I have a 25 year old who you know. Yes, Hayden's terrific. So what you're doing is you see your body as an expendable commodity. And chances are I'm going to outscore you. You should be angry about that. You should get a woman and you should get to work. And the reason is you really think you can burn up your body. You know, before corona, you're on planes all the time. You're up all night.

You're drinking. You're partying. You're not exercising. And, you know, if you look at the millennial, the millennial, and the centennial, they have much more obesity and diabetes and anxiety and depression and older generations. So you may not think you're old, but your biological age is screaming up there, even in your 20s. So at 25, I would say, don't rest on what your first certificate says. Look at your whoop score and get it together because now is the time in your 20s to get those lifelong patterns together.

And if you start now, you're going to develop phenomenal maxiote, and you're going to have a great life because you feel so good. You know, there was a runner from the distant past named George Sheen back in the heyday of the running movement. And he had a great quote, which was, First Be a Good Animal. And I think in a day of the gig economy, when you're worried about the future and you don't have a house, you don't have enough money to get married, you know, the whole world's falling apart. We're going to this global, you know, depression. It's because we've been brought up by the media to believe that you need got to grow up, be a billionaire, you need this financial success. The fact of the matter is if you feel great every day, if you have lived life as a great animal person, you have one. I tell everybody, you're like, if I love that so much.

be a great animal how good is that if you've had a great nicely great nutrition a wonderful work out there you don't need anything else you've won so whether you've made it to be church chief of surgery at harvard or you know you're you know you're writing an ambulance out in the middle of duke you've won and i always you know i one of the books talked about the sit class the sitters and so i go okay so yeah you're big you know what do you sit in your golf stream you sit in you're 20 million dollar apartment. You sit in your 150 million dollar yacht. But I've got you beat 10 different ways to one. You can't go into ski mountaineering race. You can't go in the world championships and cross-country skiing. You know, you can't do an Iron Man. You can't do a marathon. But you've lost it

life, right? So keep your priority stake because you can win, win, win, uh, without having to, you know, make tons of money or have all those other successes. I love that. I just think that we've been, We have been loaded up with all these terrible artificial goals by, you know, pure pressure and going to places like Greenwich and very expensive Fifth Avenue apartments. And the fact of the matter is the good news and the bad news is he was a millennial and with this second huge financial debacle within, you know, 15 years or so, it's true. You know, you may not do as well as your parents or grandparents have. But if your first great animal, you feel great, and you're biologically young, you have one.

And then be artisan, find great stuff. You know, reinvent yourself every five years. I've taken the complete career course on graphic design, so I can do graphic design. I've taken the complete career course on deep learning. I've now just did a whole, you know, a four-hour series for Google on, you know, how to do machine learning and deep learning and whatnot. I've just done this book.

I've done a whole wonderful series. I've collaborated with Massachusetts General Hospital, which I admire is the greatest hospital that's ever been. and actually called the world's greatest hospital. And so I've collaborated with them on a series of videos for coronavirus. So I just think, you know, the joint life is continually reinventing yourself. And this gig environment is it's a curse in the sense you're not going to have a pension. You have to work your whole life probably.

But it's also a joy in that you can decide to do anything. You video, you photography, you can be a director. You know, you can be a doctor and you can learn so much online and be able to pump this up. But you have to be able to prepare to do this. So I have this advanced unpublishable age, you know, get up every day. And I do a whole series of courses. You know, I reinvented myself in terms of deep learning and machine learning. So it really, you know, it makes life a great joy.

And I really have to compliment you because you have given the world a great gift, well, with Woo, because it really does probably improve somebody's overall quality of life. Their biological age, their longevity, and how they feel more than anything in recent history, after the kill cell. Wow, thank you. Well, look, you have a, you know, you have a positive attitude towards life that's really infectious and really, really healthy. And it's no surprise you've been so successful throughout your entire life and also been able to be so successful in a number of different areas because you take that attitude of, I can learn something new, I can reinvent myself, I can go deep on anything. And I think that's just, it's such a healthy, healthy attitude. Now, if we go back for a second, I mean, obviously everything you just talked about

applies to really all ages, but I like it as a framework for someone in their 20s who's, you know, trying to figure it out. How do you start thinking a little differently about your body in your 30s, maybe even early 40s? I remember when I hit 30, and I thought, oh, my God, is this as old as anybody could ever possibly get? I mean, I felt like I was ancient. So what you have is you have this progression now.

So now you're really aiming, you've had all these risk factors. The risk factors are developing. So maybe you had a little gastric refox. You took a few times to do much about it. Your blood pressure is keeping up. Your pulse is starting to increase it, creep up. You know, you're not feeling that great. You're starting to put a little punch on.

Your workouts aren't it's good. You aim towards 40. When he hit 40, he really is like, oh my God, the old warms go off. You're like in a fire station, the alarm store. And you think life is over. And as somebody who's been through all those milestones, it's 72, I feel healthier than any 25 or 35 or 45-year-old than I know. So as you go through your 30s, you have to realize that, you know, this isn't, you're not going to fall. You don't have to fall apart.

You know, I was in a race last year with a 42-year-old who still wins the Basso Lopet, which is the longest ski race in the world for biggest longest, 85-kilon. years, which I've done, actually. And he was this in a record time in his early 40s. His max CO2 has not changed since early 20s. They're Olympic athletes who still win Olympic medals in their late 30s in their early 40s. So, you know, life is not over. But remember, you're a progression where, you know, now you're going to translate all those risk factors in the beginning parts of disease.

You're going to start to feel things. You're going to see people drop early. You're going to see people who have, you know, doing family history for early heart attacks. It's going to be very, very scary for you. So I think that, you know, the 30s are where you really want to start to put together a program. You want a regular program at athletics. And the other thing I love about whoop, you know, is a lot of people, they look at exercise as onerous and oh, my God, and they have to do this, and this is terrible.

And it's like this lifelong sentence. And with Wu, because it delivers you to a state, you feel so good, you want to go out and kill it, you want to crush yourself, that it changes the face of exercise because you can have those incredible easy days. You can have those rest days so you really feel great all the time. So I think it's transformative. And, you know, I would make certain you certainly have picked up some kind of life sport. You know, one of the great tragedies think of America is, you know, we turn so many kids off to sport. We use them as a feeder system for professional sports. If your kid goes into peewee football, there's a one in 5,000 champs they're going to make in the NFL.

I mean, how many destroyed knees and brains you have, you know, making your way through there. We really should, you know, and I talk about this in the book for the sort of, you know, one to 12, have a motor education when you, you know, have a complete motor inventory, learning all these wonderful things you can do with your body. But we need to teach kids life sports. And so, you know, as you're in your 30s, you know, you'll be continuing squashed, of course, because you're, you know, you're, you're such a champion. And hopefully your, your knees won't go out because you're, you know, you're, you give me a hard time for playing squash because you say it's got too much impact, right? So,

But if you could paint the perfect picture of sports that I should pick up now, or even that we should be teaching our 10-year-olds, what are, you know, this motor inventory, what is the Bob Arnott program? So as youth, that is, you know, from two or two or start of 12, you don't want to drive your kids in the ground. Like I have a seven-year-old. So, you know, we don't push it. We don't have to run so far.

I have to run so past none of that. It's all about acquiring enough skills that as life goes on. You could pick up anything. You could pick up skis. You jump out of your flight, you fly to the flight of plane. So it's that inventory. It's going to be some gymnastics skills, which I think are very good. It's to be some crampling skills.

It's going to be able to, you know, run around cones and whatnot. The interesting thing is when they looked at ski racers, at the best ski academy in America, they found that many of them were motor idiots in the sense that they were very good at skiing, but they were kind of uncoordinated. When they came to walking across a tight rope or came to, like, you know, jumping between different platforms, they couldn't do it very well. So, you know, your kids, you really want to give them that complete motor education. For instance, I coach soccer.

I coach first grade soccer. And there are a lot of kids who are intimidated. You know, sports, unfortunately, is the rich get richer. You have some kid who's naturally talented as far as a soccer coach, and they do very well. And the other kids have discouraged. They don't in the game. They fall on the wayside. They want to play goal.

So what I do is I say, we're going to do drills. We'll do like the marioni drill. And I'll have them come at me, and they won't get in the first one. But I make them do it. I encourage them to do it until I've done it five or six times. Every one of those kids learns the skill. Then I go into the game with them, and the lesser kids I take, I get them the ball, I drive them through. I feed them some little bit of success.

So I think it's up to us not to use sport as a way of being able to select out the elite. We need to get everybody up to speed on sport. Then you were saying, you know, so for 30s and 40s, what do you want to do? The bottom line, you know, for someone like yourself, is that you do want to have that aerobic Now, you live in Boston, so you can row, right? You've got the Charles River right there. I'd encourage you to stand at Patton, and I will bring a board down to you. Well, we're due for that.

You're going to take me out there because I want to learn from the world champ, and I know you're going to kick my ass, and this will kind of inspire me to actually get good at it because I'll be like, I can't be loose into this guy. The, you know, cycling is great, the hill climbing, the cross-country ski. Any of those sports that have. And so explain why running, in your opinion, is not as good. So the way to think of it is you have this pump, your heart, and you want to put the maximum amount of blood through it. So you go, okay, I'm going to run.

So it's kind of a calf sport. May you use some quality hips and whatnot, obviously. But, you know, when you look at overall maximum consumption, maximum oxygen consumption, 96 is the cross-country skier. You know, you have some cyclists in there. Some runners be really dropping into the 70s for most runners, marathoners and cyclists. Why? Because, you know, you're not using your delts and your quads and your glats and your abdominal muscles to max, right? You're just not.

So you're not able to develop that. And, well, I love running for the right person. Look, you know, you have a light, very athletic frame. And so you may go playing your whole, playing squash your whole life, on your whole life, never have an injury can do very well. But what happens is that the real thing that goes with aging is elasticity. when you land when you're running or you land when you're trying to get a squash up. You know, you don't have that elastic platform.

The elasticity goes away. And so you're deadening that elasticity with running. So the fact of the matter is, and I've talked to a bunch of runners in their late 30s and only pools, and what happens is they just are going slower, not necessarily because of their heart and lung package because they're skiers or still on the Olympic medals of that age, but it's because they become less elastic.

So if you can't drive your heart and lung package, because you are getting slower, you need to shift sports. It doesn't mean you can't run some, but find something that's going to deliver elasticity back in your system. So for you in Squash, I would look at how can I drive my heart and lung system? So I can do it with the ski mountaineering, which I'm going to get you into this winter. We're going to do it. We're going to do it. I'm committed. Stand up paddling.

You could do all of those. And then you're developing this huge heart-lung reserve for when you're playing squash. And you're also developing some elasticity, you're putting elasticity back in your legs. The nice thing about cycling, if you're doing a very, very high cadence, like 95 or 100, is you're building elasticity back into your system so you feel more elastic rather than the deadening out. So I just say to, you know, I say to athletes, look, you've got to have a transition sport. You have this great heart-lung package that's allowed, you know, on marathons and triathons or whatnot. But you're kind of losing the muscular component there.

So find something you can translate into what happens, unfortunately, is because people don't have a motor learning. You know, people take up running later as almost like a default sport, right? It's a throw-away hobby. I mean, no offense to our listeners. I'm a runner. And, like, you know, I find I'm doing it most of the time almost as a meditation. It's like I'm thinking about other things.

It's less about the activity itself. No, I mean, and I was a serious, I did a 238 marathon and 10, you know, a one hour, a 10 mile, I did all those things, did the arm until I completely burned my hips out. So then when they operated on this, so there wasn't, there hasn't been any cartilage in there for years. It looks like polished marble inside. So the tragedy is because so many runners, like, I'm a default runner. When I was in ice school, I couldn't do anything. When I was at summer camp, they used to put me out in left field with two other left field

it was just in case the ball or her cave my direction because they wouldn't want me to try to catch it, right? And so I interesting was kind of a default athlete. I was not very good at skill scores, largely because I wasn't good early on. I kind of get shunned aside, you know, he's kind of an awkward little kid. And then I get my teens, and I'll never forget, I met an exercise physiologist at age 15.

I think his name was Everett. And he'd gone to Northeastern, which always had a very good reputation in exercise sociology. He said, Bob, look. don't worry about not being a great football player or, you know, baseball player. Sure, you're not going to give the girls, but don't worry about that. He said, you are an endurance athlete. And that afternoon, I went out, I think I swam a mile, I went out, I ran 10 miles,

and I went out, I bike 50 miles. He just gave me this such passion because they said, you're going to be good at a sport. My first book ever was called Sports Selection, and said, every one of us has a sport that we'd be very, very good at. As I was saying, the tragedy is, you know, the runner didn't do well, didn't pick up the motor package, doesn't have an agility. So, like, you know, my significant other, I try to get into cross-country skiing, she does

a little bit of a phenomenal runner, you know, national class runner. But, you know, because she doesn't have that, you know, she can't be able to say this, but, you know, that whole kind of skill package, she's not as willing to adapt, and this happens with runners, and you have to believe that through motor learning you can do better. One of the sections of the book I have is on mode of learning. And it's interesting, you know, Howard Gardner at Harvard School of Education had the seven different kinds of intelligence. So we have the intellectual intelligence.

We have this kinesthetic intelligence. And it's a real intelligence. You know, you're such an admirer, and I love hearing you on the broadcast. I mean, you have such an admiration, you know, for the professional players player, you know, soccer player, or football player. You know, it's that they're a marvel to look at because they do have this tremendous intelligence. And if you understand motor learning theory, with motor learning theory, it's like learning language, you know, like if you're learning Arabic, you go, you read anathab, you know,

you'd like to go, and you have to think, you go through everything, it takes your whole brain to come up with every word. Well, what happens over time is that it then kind of comes, It could dance, you go, you know, and that's a fluke, right? So it becomes much shorter and much more, it becomes automatic. So what I emphasize, for instance, with a stand-up surfing, which is a great example, you go out and you'll learn how to back, where do you put it in, what's the drill, what kind of angle do you put it in, how to use your hips. It's a wonderful kind of overall curriculum as you think about every different component

of your body. As you pick up these new sports, you become a more and more skilled motor learner. So now, when it becomes fully automatic, you've taken. All those little pieces there, and they come into a motor program, and now you're a skilled athlete. But I'm very much a believer in building athletes rather than just having someone who's a national skilled athlete. You know, you may not win the gold medal or you may not become, you know, Tom Brady. But, you know, you can be a very good at, you can win at your sport. You could pick a new sport, and you could win at least regional contests in your sport

by understanding that this is not just a gift. Do the people learn it? And the best example of this was, well, during World War II, they looked at training army pilots. So the guys who got it were the natural pilots, were the guys that died. Why? Because it wasn't, they had no reinforcement. It was the guys who had to learn and make mistakes. You want to make mistakes.

I can remember, like with Arabic, I was in cartoon once, and I was talking about, you know, the car here, the truck hit something. You know, Al-Safina, you have to Saddam, he goes, no, no, no, no, no. You must double the D is. Yet the sudden, because you have the second verb class in Arabic, but you double that. So I will always remember that. And I always tell people with language and sport, make the mistakes and get corrected. Because it's the error correction that allows you to learn. You know, take lessons.

I actually saw this. I saw this as an undergrad at Harvard. And I think it's a huge problem with top ranking institutions in general, which is that you have these students that are incredibly brilliant but also incredibly fragile. And it's because they want to get A's in everything. And by the way, they got into a school like Harvard or fill in the blank, great place because they got a lot of straight A's and they got a lot of check marks and they got a lot of accolades. But it's also now made them incredibly risk averse and in turn fragile.

And what I found so rewarding about being a college athlete, and I think it's an advantage that athletes have over non-athletes or people who just aren't in that system, is an athlete is taught to use failure as a point of learning, as a point of process for improvement. You know, if I hit a bad drop shot and I put it in the tin, the next thing I'm doing is hitting 100 drop shots off a ball machine to figure out how to hit it properly, right? And that process, if I hadn't had that sort of ingrained in my life up to my early 20s, I don't know if it would have felt comfortable starting a business where, by the way, the probability is failure. You know, so for me, at least, it's been incredibly rewarding to have what you're describing in this backdrop as part of my life because I think you have to embrace that. You have to embrace the possibility of failure.

Obviously, you don't want to fail, but you have to embrace it. Athletics is such a wonderful surrogate all the way through because I always tell people, look at, you know, so maybe things aren't going well today in some aspect of your life, socially, marriage, partner, business, your job, whatever it is, but you could have an athletic success today. And so, well, all the contests that I've got, I mean, I think about doing, you know, a hundred mile cross-country ski race. I led a team one year that won the Canadian ski race. Actually, two years. One of the Canadian ski marathon. So you start out in, you know, a foot and a half with deep snow doing a hundred miles, over two days, 50 miles a day. You know, and you fall, you break a school, you're breaking a pole, you're injured, you're bleeding, you're headache. You know, I mean, the whole thing is crazy. So it's such a great surrogate of life because, you know, life is not this smooth path.

You know, you read about the most successful author of the day. You know, 170 people who reject his books, people reject, reject, reject. You know the Star Wars, the Star Wars script was rejected 142 times? No, I was, George Lucas was rejected 142 times. Is that crazy? I love that. I mean, imagine if he didn't go up to bat for the 143rd time. Just the whole Star Wars thing would never have existed. I mean, how it just went to be. How did you know this is going to work out when you put loop together? I mean, it really was, it was crazy because you're going up thinking you already have these people out there who's got hundreds of millions of devices. to huge budgets and whatnot.

Well, I would say from a raising capital standpoint, I've definitely been rejected more than 142 times. That's sort of the nature of the bees. But the thing I've always reminded myself is it's sort of a what the hell do they know because they'll venture capital, it's the name of the game, and I'm sure you've done this as well, the name of the game is you pick 10 companies and you hope two of them are successful. It's not like they've got that high of a batting average to begin with on the things they pick.

Okay, now let's go back. You've now, you've saved 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds. Boom, 50, I'm looking at 60. How do I rectify my life? So at each 50, you're starting to see real disease, and you may, if you're very unlucky, you have your first heart attack. If you had GERD, now you may be starting to get some assroot from that. So it's the advent of real disease, and you're really starting to, you know, see mortality

now because you're going to see your first friends die, unfortunately. And certainly in this COVID era, you may have seen several. you know, acquaintance or people die in their 50s and 60s is starting to take a toll there. Certainly with COVID, you know that as you get in your 50s, 60s and 70s, the death rate, you know, continues to go up. So that's the point where you really want to, you know, what important part of the book is I have a chapter called Battle and uses George Clooney's quote, which is that aging is not for the faint of heart. These chronic diseases, they're not a simple matter of you just take a pill, for cholesterol or pill for, you know, your gastro reflex or whatnot, it's hard.

You know, I've got a bunch of bad things go wrong, and you've got to battle me up to be aggressive, just like an athletic contest, you can wrestle them to the ground. So what I would say is that, you know, in your 50s, you're starting to see the onset of diseases that are eventually going to kill you or eventually cause you to age much faster than you should. And they're the big ones. There are high blood pressure, their asthma, their chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the heart disease. their arthritis. And so I unfortunately went through my 50s

with terrible hip pain. I couldn't walk a block by the time I was through. She couldn't walk a block. Wow. And then I had, you know, both of my hips redone. Then I suddenly went big back to me to kidding. I vow I would never do less than 90 minutes exercise any day now that I had this kind of gift back.

So I would just say that you don't, that when I look at people their 70s and 80s. They've accumulated all these diseases. And you know what happens is they don't die so much as they kind of give up. They go, I've had it. I'm sick of living. And I know all these things going wrong with. Part of a chapter of the book is what I would have looked like back in 1918. In 1918, I would have been a wheelchair on an early oxygen, unable to see, right? I'm going to think up and they would keep food down, constantly miserable, terrible pain. And I probably wouldn't live out of my 50s. And through the miracle of modern science, you know, I've got a cataracts replaced,

that both my hips replaced, I've got a whole bunch of operations, you know, clean myself up inside, and now feel like, you know, physiologically and medically perfect. So just realize that those diseases are now starting to really show themselves in your 50s and 60s that are going to kill you or slow you down or make you give up. So be incredibly aggressive. It's like a car. In other words, your tires are one, your transmissions more, your cylinders are starting to go.

You know, the rings of them, you know, are leaking. You're starting to belt to exhaust. So you're like a car, and you have all these different systems, and all of these different systems are going to start to go bad. And so you want to focus them and make sure that your heart's 100%. You know, you're using your work, to have those green days, to go on, have the big workout, your cholesterol, your inflammation, or where they should be.

You're seeing a cardiologist early on to look at it. those risk factors, you know, your lungs, your testable system. So it is a battle. The chapter really goes in a great detail on how do you want to win that battle. So you're not starting to accumulate those chronic diseases that will be your demise over time. Well, I love it. I love the book. I've read a number of your books. And in my opinion, this one is the best, in part because I love how much it's plugging heart rate variability and whoop. And whoop is a big component of this book. I highly recommend it to everyone listening. Where can people find book. It should be in books to art. It's certainly on Amazon. And so it's available now. I love it. Dr. Bob,

it's been a pleasure having you on. We look forward to having you back soon. I hope you be back soon. I love it. Thank you to Dr. Bob for coming on the podcast. You can check out his book, Flip the Youth Switch online. We copied that in the show notes. It's on Amazon and everywhere else. You can use the code Will Ahmed, W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D, to get 15% off. And please follow us on social at Whoop at Will Ahmed, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms. Stay healthy, everyone, stay in the green, and keep your respiratory rate flat.

Thank you.