ZOE Science & Nutrition - The best exercise to improve your health

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

Professor Andy Galpin brings you evidence-based exercise regimes to make a fitter future achievable for everyone. Most people need to do more exercise. Despite us being aware of its obvious benefits to our health, we can still struggle to get active. So, what’s holding us back? A persistent injury, lack of free time, or simply not knowing how to get started? Dr. Andy Galpin believes it’s always possible to incorporate exercise. In today’s episode of ZOE Science & Nutrition, Jonathan and Andy ask: How can you improve your fitness to live a long, healthy life?  🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily 30 *Naturally high in copper which contributes to normal energy yielding metabolism and the normal function of the immune system Learn how your body responds to food 👉 zoe.com/podcast for 10% off Follow ZOE on Instagram Timecodes: 00:00 - Introduction 1:03 - Quickfire round 4:16 - Definition of kinesiology, fitness, strength training, and cardio  11:57 - How do you measure fitness? 13:37 - Fitness and its impact on longevity 18:41 - Strength and its impact on longevity  23:06 - Strength training and its link to brain health 31:22 - Lowering blood pressure with strength training  40:15 - How to start strength training 45:07 - Summary and outro  Mentioned in today’s episode:  Demand Coupling Drives Neurodegeneration: A Model of Age-Related Cognitive Decline and Dementia. (2022) from Cells  Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here Episode transcripts are available here

Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. As we get older, our bodies get progressively weaker, putting us at risk of frailty and even early death from diseases like dementia and heart disease. That's why staying physically active is so important for longevity. But what is the best type of exercise to keep us fit? And can it really prolong our healthy years? Professor Andy Galpin joins us today to demystify a vast array of options and to help us choose the best exercises to support our health.

Andy is a professor of kinesiology at California State University, Fullerton, and an expert in exercise and human performance science. He's also the author of the bestselling book, Unplugged. Andy, thank you for joining me today. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. So why don't we start with a quick fire round of questions from our listeners? And this is a tradition now on the show, and we have some quite strict rules, which we know professors always find a little challenging.

And the rules are you can say yes or no, or if you have to, maybe or even a one sentence answer if you really have to. Are you up for it? Yeah, actually, I have to tell maybe, or even a one sentence answer if you really have to. Are you up for it? Yeah, actually, I have to tell you, I like this. All right, let me start. Is there one correct fitness routine for all of us? No. Are most of us doing the wrong exercises to maximize our health?

No. Okay. We had a great email from one of our listeners saying that she's always gone to the gym, but now that she's post-menopausal, it feels like nothing really works anymore and her body is changing. So the question is, do you need to change your exercise program as you age?

That's a loaded question, but I'm going to say no. Okay, brilliant. Should women and men do different exercises as they get older? No. Is cardio exercise more important than strength training for healthy aging? No. I get a lot of no's. All right. I'm going to let you off now. You don't have to say yes or no. No, keep going. This is great.

You can have a whole sentence or two. I'd love for you to tell me, what's the biggest misconception that you often hear about exercise? I would probably say that it's a similar answer with the mind frame you put me in with those previous questions. And what I mean by that is that there is a singular magic specific thing that all people have to be doing. Whether this is style of training, whether this is intensity you have to be at, whether this is a number of days,

this is an exercise, thinking that there is one thing all of us have to do or really, really, really should be doing or is critically more important than others. If I had to summarize it for the people I think are listening here, that would be my answer is the biggest misconception. And it's not true. There isn't like this one thing that everyone has to do. There's a lot of ways to get to the places you need to be at, whether you're young, post-mental pause, male, female, busy, not busy, any of those things. It's not necessarily always about the exercise or the style of training or the amount of days or the intensity. It's the fundamental physiological challenge that you're trying to place in the body.

You got a lot of ways to get there. And so you want to think about more in that term. If I can give you a very quick analogy, it would be you can do if this was a finance podcast and you said, how much money does the average person in the UK need to have before retiring? And I would say, okay, that's a number. That's different than you saying, what job should I do to retire? What job should you, oh, I don't know, there's a thousand ways to stack your money up. You just have to get to this amount of money. That's what we're talking about here.

And so you can make your money early, you can make it late in life, you can make a little bit all the way, you could do all the, I could give you all kinds of examples here. What matters though is do you get to the certain end point? So once you get to a million pounds in the bank account, you can retire or whatever the number is, right?

Doesn't matter. So that's really the better way to think about this is you need to accrue certain physiological skills and abilities. How you get there, it's infinite possibilities. Now, just before we run through, I should probably like state, and a lot of listeners will know this,

that I do exercise regularly. I have a trainer who I try and see three times a week. And I think most people listening, they know that exercise is important for their health. It's also shrouded in a lot of terminology and complexity that can make it hard to approach and really confusing, particularly for those of us who aren't professors. I'd love to maybe just unpack right at the beginning some of us who aren't professors. I'd love to maybe just unpack right at the beginning some of that. Actually, can I start with the new burning question that I have with the new bit of terminology that I only discovered in the

last few weeks? You are a professor of kinesiology. Can you explain to us in simple words, what is kinesiology? The end of that word, ology, anytime you hear that, this means the study of. And kines, k-n-i-k-a-m, like that, means movement. So it's just the study of movement. So this is kinesthetics, this is, in general, kinematics, kinetics, all those things come from the same thing. So globally, it just happens to be the name of our department, where it's all things human movement. And so what that means is, if you think about it, I am one of the directors for our Center for Sport Performance here. So what that means is we are dedicated to sport performance, but from the movement side of the equation.

There's a lot of different ways to think about kinesiology. It's movement for everybody. My specific lane is movement for sport performance. The terms that I'd love for you just to help unpack are maybe the three terms that we hear most commonly. So one is just this word fitness. The other is this word cardio. And the other one is this strength training. Could you just help us to understand how do those interrelate? What do they mean? The first one, fitness, depends on where you're at a little bit. So initially, if you go back to the history of our field, one of the reasons why it's

called kinesiology is because it started on actually Karolinska Institute for the most part and Sweden started it. And definitions come generally from where they start. And so fitness scientifically means specifically referring to your VO2 max, your maximal aerobic capacity. Cardio training is really supposed to refer to the word cardio, right? Which is a way to say your cardiovascular system or specifically your heart. And so cardio is referred to kind of anything that is more conditioning or endurance based.

It tends to be longer duration where the physical challenge on your part, the point of failure is the way to think about it, is not necessarily your ability to pick something up, push it, pull it, or move it one time. It's about repeating over time. So in this case, failure is fatigue, right? Ran out of energy, pain got too high, couldn't take another step. And that's kind of the way to think about cardio.

Strength is generally the opposite, where the failure point was it was too heavy, right? For whatever reason, I couldn't do it. Lost my bake, lost position, things like that. Now, in my courses, I'll actually challenge that notion quite a bit because there's just simply no type of exercise you can do that does not involve the cardiovascular system. Point blank, right? You can't do it. You can imagine actually doing like a one rep max deadlift. One of the things people have realized is your blood

pressure, if you're healthy, at rest is something like 120 over 80. It is the numbers that you get to, right? So 120 over 80 is a systolic and diastolic. During a one repetition maximum deadlift or squat or something like that. Which means just trying to lift the heaviest thing you can, but you only need to do it once. Yeah. Or even if you did it twice or three times. So one rep, just like a very, very, very, very heavy one, like the highest you can let um your blood pressure might reach as high as like 450 over 350 and so you can quadruple

your blood pressure instantaneously which means you're actually basically getting full occlusion which means you're blocking blood flow the entire system it's a great way to to reduce uh blood pressure for those that are high um Isometric exercise is super effective for reducing cold pressure, chronic bone pressure. If you get to a position where your blood pressure is that high, your cardiovascular system in response to that will be sensibly high because it's trying to get blood through the tissue that is now being clogged down and blocked. And so anyone that doesn't exercise like that, you're going to set the bar down and instantaneously your heart rate will be as high as, as one can imagine. Now it comes down pretty quickly afterwards.

Um, so the point is I'm being a little bit facetious here, but it's just really challenging to do any form of exercise without having some cardiovascular insults. So the line between kind of cardio and strength training is traditionally been like, okay, I lift some weights and then I run or I swim or cycle. At the highest level, fine, you want to think about it. But that does really honestly a disservice to people because it makes them think like either I lift weights or I run for an hour and anything else in between is not exercise. And that's just really, really problematic because it dissuades people away from tons of other activities that are as good for you, if not better for you, than those two extremes. So the way you said earlier, sometimes because of that,

when people have too many options, that actually makes things worse. It's scary, it's intimidating, it's confusion, I don't know what to do, so I just don't do anything. So I get that part of it. If it's easier to just tell them, hey, just do this or this, and limit your choices so it's a little bit more relieving, that's fine. But I want to flip that on his head a little bit and say, because it is that way, gives you the option. You can do so many different things. You don't have to worry about, oh my gosh, if I'm doing this style and I like it a lot,

is it even effective? The answer is yes, it will definitely be effective. And that's why I answered those rapid fire questions the way I did, because if you're working out and you're doing it hard, even kind're working out and you're doing it hard, even kind of hard, and you're doing it consistently, it's working. Hi, I'm Zoe's US Medical Director, Dr. Will Bolsowitz, and I'm excited to tell you about a free resource that's going to kickstart your journey to better gut health. If you're a regular listener, you probably already know how a healthy gut microbiome is important for digestion, immune support,

and mental well-being. And that a high-fiber diet is a great way to improve your gut health. But where to start? And what exactly does a high-fiber shopping list look like? With 95% of US adults deficient in fiber, clearly this is not common knowledge zoe's gut guide has the answers to get yours for free simply go to zoe.com slash gut guide and start feeling the benefits of a healthier gut today okay you're saying that like most things are in some sense a combination of both this sort of cardio which are described as like you're doing over and over for a long time, uses your heart, and like the strength, which is like this is something heavy and like difficult to just do a few times.

And you're saying that in reality, most things are actually a mix of both. And therefore you're getting the benefits of both as long as the exercise isn't too easy. No, I was saying it can be. I'm saying lots of things can be, yeah. So you have tons of options. If you have a certain

routine that you like or a certain style or things you don't like then we can find success with those limitations I guess so I want it to be more of like letting folks know you have tons of options you said one other thing that I never heard before I was I was intrigued to make sure you said that fitness came originally from like these in Swedish University a long time ago, and it was very much associated with basically, you said this VO2 max, which I think is like this measurement of the maximum oxygen that you can use, if I understood from previous podcasts. It's very much about cardio.

And is that right? And does that explain why for a lot of people, when they think about fitness, it's very associated with going for a run, being able to do something for a very long time. And that for many people, I think they don't think about strength at all really as part of what being fit is. Yeah. So that's a really nice way to think about it. Fitness itself, again, generally scientifically refers to just the VO2 max portion. So the maximum amount of oxygen you can bring in utilized. This is your highest heart rate stuff. This is high intensity intervals. This is whether it's lower duration stuff, but it is the

conditioning, the endurance, the fatigue inside of the equation. But that doesn't mean you have to always be at your maximum effort to be working on that stuff. So it could be going for a light jog, could be going for a brisk walk, could be gardening. Tons of things you can do that are still going to be working on that fitness component without necessarily being at the maximum fitness rate. But the way that we would measure your fitness would be, what is that maximum? And so explain to me just for a minute, how would you measure that? Because it sounds like you've come around to that quite a bit. How would you measure somebody's fitness? Yeah, some of the ways you can do it, the gold standard is to actually get a VO2 access done, and they're available actually all over the place, all over the world. And it's getting more

and more popular because of how critically important it is to both overall health, how long you're going to live, as well as how well you're going to live those years. So both components there. Or you can do a thousand different versions of free measures. So there's all kinds of VO2max estimators. A lot of fitness wearables will give you a rough ID as well. A lot of them are, you know, not necessarily always perfectly accurate,

but they'll get you close. There are, again, two-minute step tests you can do. Literally, you can measure your heart rate, do a kind of standardized step test where you're stepping up on a very low box and stepping down for two minutes and measure your heart rate. This is sub-maximal. So you don't even need to go all the way to the max, but we have enough information to say if you get this much of a heart rate elevation in this much time, we can project out to where the top will be. And a lot of times with folks that are not comfortable or willing or wanting to go all the way to the true max, an estimate, a sub max. Again, the term you want to Google is sub max estimate equation.

Those are out there. But lots of ways you can do this. Another kind of standard easy test is run a mile and a half and record your time. And then you can plug that number in, and that'll give you another pretty good way to estimate your mean to max. So it typically takes 8 to 12 minutes, plus or minus, to get one done. But again, you can do a sub max one in two minutes if you want, or that's why a mile and a half run is actually a pretty good thing too. So it gives you, you know, 2400 meters will give you a pretty good idea of where you're at. Let's say somebody does this and they're using this to figure out their level of

fitness. How can it help? And what does it mean? If you want to figure out how long you're going to live, there's a lot of ways you can measure how healthy you are now, and then also project out to how healthy you need to be at a certain age. And so let's just say you're 60 years old now and you want to live to be 100. Okay, great. Well, if I know how fit you are now, since we know that there is going to be a decline in physical fitness, no matter what you do, it's going to happen with aging. So I can say, okay, if you want to be at A right now, and we know you're going to drop X percent over the years, this means it's going to put you at B by 40 years from now.

And so the number you want to think about is this. For men, around 20 milliliters per kilogram per minute or so is what we call the age of our line of independence. And for women, that is about 16 or so milliliters per kilogram per minute. These will make sense when you go to your VO2 access. When you fall below these lines, it becomes very difficult to be independent,

meaning you can't live by yourself. And so you have to be in an assisted living home of some sort or have somebody in your house. Okay, great. So if you are at 60 years old and right now your VO2 max

on your test is 23, you're fine now, but you have nowhere to go. You can also look at a ton of, you know, Peter Atiyah actually did this in his book, Outlive, I think it's called. And he walks you through what fitness levels are required for different activities. Just climbing up stairs, putting your own luggage, you know, on a bus and stuff like that. And a lot of these activities take between 25 to 30 milliliters per kilogram per minute. So if you're already, you know, getting to walk around and let's make it worse.

Let's say you're 50 years old, you're a 50 year old male and your VO2 max is 41. Like you have nowhere to go. You've got the next 50, you're halfway through live and you're barely already able to climb stairs. Like you're just above the year, you know, you got 20%. That doesn't feel that bad. Well, we know you're going to reduce, um, you know, every decade you're going down. And so you just don't have anywhere to go. You certainly don't have 50 more years. So the only option here is to just never move your physical body, which we know is not going to last very long or to improve that VO2 max. Now what's also interesting about VO2 max is, is one of the very few metrics we have that scales linearly.

So if we took everyone in the world and we took all their VO2 max and we split them up into, say, the top 25%, next 25%, next 25%, and then the bottom 25%. If you go from the bottom 25% to just the group above you, your expected life,

like how long you're going to live, is probably going to go up five to eight years. Wow. Just moving up like a tiny bit. I'm not even talking about getting super fit, praise for real life, just not being the worst, most unfit people on the planet. You just don't want to be in that number.

Now that five, eight years could be wildly different depending on what age group you look like. Might be even way higher than that, and some could be lower. But the point is, it is a dramatic reduction in your risk of dying. Dramatic reduction. If you go up to the next one, it continues to reduce. Up to the next one, it continues to reduce.

And then it goes up from even the almost most fit to most fit. It continues to increase your lifespan. And so this is when I say it. There's no cost to just getting higher and higher and higher. It's not one of those things where it's like, well, if you get too high, it actually starts making you unhealthy. It doesn't. It just continues to go up higher. So if you are in the 30s, I don't need you to be in the 90s for sure. But if you can get from a 30 to 38, this gives you many years in your life. 38 to 45, this gives you probably at least a decade on your life.

And it's critical here. And last thing I'll say, and I'll pause. It's not just a decade. It's a decade of well-living that goes on in your life. So it is high-functioning 10 years rather than just sitting around in a chair. So it's super, super important to move this thing. In fact, if you take, and you could do this,

you could do health test roulette. You could pick any test of the world you want. Full body MRI, blood pressure, smoking history, cholesterol, familial background. Put any metric in the world on a roulette table

and spin it around. Almost nothing in the world will predict how long you're going to live more than your VO2 max number. With the exception of maybe one thing, and that would be your overall strength. When you stack up strength, the VO2 max is generally in the same ballpark, if not exceeds the ability to predict how long you're going to live. And again, we're talking all-cause mortality, so die for any reason. Strength, depending on the study you look at, and when I'm talking about this,

I'm talking about studies that include tens of thousands of people, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people. So not like a single cohort of six people, like a random study, I'm cherry picking here. I'm trying to globally represent 20 years of research. That's why I'm kind of so confident and brazen about this is because this is not like a study. This is so well documented. So if you were to get a rough and a crude estimate of your overall strength and your'd be able to match, these two things are going to tell you more information about how long and how we're going to live than almost anything you could ever measure. And Andy, I was about to ask about what next, but then you suddenly like from left field said, oh, well, this is really important. But also your strength is at least as important. Is there an equivalent measure that someone can do to understand like what the status of their strength is?

Yeah. So generally we think about this, legs are most important. And so there's a bunch of reasons why, but weak legs is very problematic. Now, one of the things we know is leg strength is more important to longevity than leg size. So muscle mass is cool and we need to have muscle, but the strength is more important than how much muscle you have for longevity here. So one of the things that becomes a problem is as people's legs get weaker as they age, they start declining general physical activity. And so if you can think about it this way, if standing up out of a chair is like doing a squat at 95% of your max, then you're not likely to stand up out of a chair very often.

Because every time it's like doing a one rep max, right? And so people whose legs get weak tend to lose physical activity, which means they stop going out with their friends. They won't go on that lunch day. So they lose social connectivity. They don't go to the grandkids soccer game because it's just going to be so hard to sit in that stadium with those deep chairs. And like, you can see the things, right? Now I'm not going to go out and do this. I'm going to start ordering my food in. I'm not even going to go to the grocery store anymore. Like just all the things are happening. So physical activity starts to plummet. So we lose social connectivity. We lose being outside and we also lose the actual

just physical benefits of being physically active, right? So then those tangential things, as well as the direct ones. So the leg strains to stop yourself from doing that is a huge deal. And I could go on and on and on, but losing leg strength is a really big problem for aging. So how do you test it? Well, any test of leg strength will work. A leg press machine, a leg extension machine, any of those things are generally fine, but I'll go even easier for you. There's a lot of research, a ton of research on grip strength. So grip strength is also an independent and significant predictor of all-cause mortality. How strong your grip is, is going to tell us a ton about how you're going to live. And this is actually very interesting. This is

breaking stuff here. I'm going to share with you that almost no one's heard yet. So a lot of people think, okay, grip strength is a good predictor of mortality. And this is irrefutable, by the way. It's all over the scientific literature. So no one really questions whether this is true, but people will say, okay, grip strength is just a proxy for overall health you are. So generally healthy people are probably even generally. And that's fine. That's true. But there's more and more research coming out showing there is actually a direct cause here. And so actually a paper we just published in the last month or so found a couple of things. And we actually did this in the States. The UK has this too, but presumably other countries do as well. But you have these giant databases of public health studies that

happen every single year for decades. And the one here in America is called NHANES, and it's been going on for over 30 years. So you have thousands of people enrolling these studies, they collect them, all kinds of stuff from IQ to personality to physical stuff and blood and work and all kinds of things. And then the government has thrown in these big databases and they give it open access to scientists to say like, hey, if there's anything you can pull out of here, grab it. So there's the UK Biobank and Hanes over here and things like that. So we went into that database. We were able to find that grip strength was directly predictive of brain health and more

specifically your cognitive health. And this is the first time it's been documented as is likely causal so it's not just the fact that well as people that were smarter had stronger hands like well how does that make sense there's no causal that way so the causal is this thing the reason why is because of the neurological component so strength training is very specific and different than corneal and ulcerative training because the neurological demand of strength training is very, very high, which means you continue to keep neurological pathways activated and healthy. You need those neurological pathways to make decisions and think and to keep your brain alive. So by challenging your ability to

physically do something that is either complex or complicated or requires a lot of force, like a lot of strain. That requires neurological acclimation that requires those things to stay alive and healthy. I'm like totally shocked to hear this. I think you're saying that, you know, we all have this idea that if you had to do the crossword puzzle or like serve some sort of complex task, like that's going to keep your brain working. But I think you're saying something that doesn't sound at all obvious to me, which is if you of complex tasks, like that's going to keep your brain working.

But I think you're saying something that doesn't sound at all obvious to me, which is if you have to do something like lift something that's really heavy, that is also going to keep my brain having to think? 100%. In fact, the research on this one specifically, you mentioned crossword puzzles, brain games or what things like that are called. They're good. The problem is once you figure those things out, continuing to do them is no longer neurologically protected. And so it's the novelty aspect that is really important. And so this is the same for folks

who have really cognitively demanding jobs. And they're like, oh, no, no, I'm fine because my job is really stressful. Well, actually, after a number of years of continuing to do it, it may be stressful, but it's no longer cognitively challenging, despite what you may think it is. And so you need to add some novelty in there. So the crossword puzzle thing is like, great, but after a while, it's no longer going to have the neuroprotective benefits that it once did. Strength training will almost always have them. Even though I feel like lifting up, I mean, no disrespect, but I feel like I might lift a weight up from the ground that I've still been doing that. So it doesn't feel very cognitively

challenging. I know it's going to sit there. I need to lift it up. Help me to understand, like it doesn't work with crossword puzzles. How does it work with lifting something heavy off the ground? How do you actually lift something above the ground? Well, there's three major steps to that. Going on the inverse here, you actually are, let's just say you're gripping something, right? You're holding onto something with your hand. You're trying to stand up with it. That means you're trying to make bones move, right? Human movement is making bones move, period. Now, how do bones move? Well, muscle is not actually attached to bone. That's a misconception. Muscle comes together, attaches to connective tissue and tendons, tendons attached to bone. That's a misconception. Muscle comes together,

attaches to connective tissue and tendons, tendons attached to bone. So step number one is, I'm going in reverse order on purpose here. You have to get connective tissue to pull on a bone. So connective tissue, number one. That's number three, but you get what I'm saying. I'm going backwards here. Let's call it number three. Number two then is you had to have muscle contract. Now, how does muscle contract? Something has to tell it to contract. Number two, then, is you had to have muscle contract. Now, how does muscle contract? Something has to tell it to contract. That would be your central nervous system, France, and your peripheral nervous system.

This is your brain, right? Call it your brain up here, extend it all out, call it nervous system. Same, same thing here, right? And so, really, you have to tell your nervous system, make this specific thing contract on this timing at this exact time. Now, since that's a heavy load, that's just really, really heavy, the only way you can increase force production, individual muscles themselves cannot change how much force they produce. It's called the all-in-one

principle. Muscle fibers can only contract at 100% effort. That's it. You can't go 95, 93. There's no dimmer switch. It is fully on or fully off. So muscle fibers only go 100%. So the only way you increase your total force production, so how much force you're lifting your arm with, is to turn on more total muscle fibers. This means more motor units. This means more nerves is the way to think about this. So as you go to pick up that

very light thing, you turn on just a couple of nerves. No problem. That medium thing, got to turn on more. That heavy thing, got to turn on more. That heaviest thing, got to turn on the most possible. Now those nerves are specific to that force production, which means when you don't do anything that's kind of heavy you never ever ever ever under any circumstance turn on those nerves that are getting dedicated to kind of heavy when you never go really really heavy those nerves never get turned on and so after many many many many years and decades they eventually die and go away when you're talking about crosswords great it is still cognitively active in the moment but we're not accessing a broad spectrum

of neuromuscular connections throughout the entire body that says, hey, there's a certain set of neurons that are dedicated to this type of activity that haven't been activated in a long time. When you strength train, it is doing that, right? You're going to get a whole bunch of nerves that activate muscle contraction at a low level doing any daily physical activity, walking, standing, taking a bowel movement. All those things are going to do those activities of daily living. But the only way to get to what are called those higher threshold motor units is to do something that is a higher threshold. And a higher threshold, again, means force production. So we have a whole cascade of neural activation dedicated to just force production. It's there. The only way

really to do this is force production. This is why strength training is so special. It's one of the many reasons. Hi, I have a small favor to ask. We want this podcast to reach as many people as possible as we continue our mission to improve the health of millions. And watching this show grow is what motivates the whole team at Zoe to keep up the really hard work of creating new episodes each week. So right now, if you could share a link to the show with one friend who would benefit from today's information, it would mean a great deal to me. Thank you. And Andy, I think that's amazing. I have to admit, I had thought that doing a deadlift, which is lifting something heavy off the ground,

seems incredibly straightforward from the brain's perspective. Because as you said, it's just sitting there. If you wait for a while, it's still just sitting there. You know you have to lift it up. And I'd never thought about it as being anything as complicated as you described. So you're describing all of these neurons that have to work. Do they have, I think most people listening are saying when they think about neurological support, they're worrying about dementia, right? They're worrying about Alzheimer's,

they're worrying what's going to happen. Are you saying that this lifting really heavy weights is actually protective against that? Oh, 100%. 100%. Not to say it can protect you 100%. Now, you have a couple of different ways to think about this, right? So on one hand, you have things like Parkinson's, which are mostly, they're neurological, but they're mostly musculature-based, right? There's a cognitive component of Parkinson's, but it is mostly like, you have spasticity and muscle control. Then you have things like Alzheimer's. You have early onset and late onset, and you have dementia. Okay.

Now, if we think about early onset Alzheimer's, that seems to be almost exclusively, well, I don't know how to say this, but it's very heavily driven by unknown factors, probably genetics, right? If you get Alzheimer's in your 30s or 40s, there's no amount of strength training that was probably going to help that. It's just there. Dementia and late onset Alzheimer's is extremely preventable. Extremely preventable. Again, tons of research on that. I can't remember the actual numbers, but it is a large percentage of those things are preventable because of this. And it is a combination, by the way, of physical activity, sensory perception, which means you need to be seeing things at a

different distance. You need to be smelling different things. You need to be hearing different things. This is one of the reasons why the research on gang on in nature is so potent, because it requires you to see and look at things at a different level. The vision and light amount is different. You're hearing different sounds. All that actually goes into what's called proprioception and sensory input. And so you have all your senses, right? Your sight, smell, touch, sound, all those things, right?

It's the same thing I talked about. When nervous system is not activated, it goes away. Your nervous system is your brain. So when that goes away, then your brain goes away. This is dementia, right? This is what's happening. And I think we tend to have this view that the two are completely different, I think. And I think we've tended to think that. And what you're saying is that's wrong, that by losing all of these physical skills that you have with your brain, this is basically directly linked to the things that affect

our memory and our ability to make sense of the world and these sort of, I guess, higher thinking as we would think about it, separate from sort of controlling our body. I mentioned grip strength being a predictor earlier. A new paper just came out in the last month or so that looked at asymmetry of strength. So how strong is your right hand compared to your left hand? And no one ever really thought about this, but the amount of asymmetry is defined as more than 10%. More than 10% is actually potentially an early predictor of nerve denervation. And so what they're saying here basically is, it's not just that your dominant hand is stronger

than your left hand. Okay, great. If it's more than 10% stronger, it may be an early indication of neurological degradation. Not that you're losing nerve, but it's denervation specifically. But the point is, it could be actually, it's not just about like, you can't open a jar with your left hand. Oh, no worries. It is, hey, this might be an early sign something is happening. I'd love to come back. You mentioned something about blood pressure earlier, and there'll be a lot of people listening to this are also worrying about blood pressure because it is something that's very easy to measure. So it tends to be something that people become aware of. And you said something about isometric exercise, but I don't know what that

is. Could you help us to understand? Yeah, sure. So this is going to tie in nicely. I've got a number of studies that have specifically looked at the impact of just grip strength training. There's no warmup required. You don't have to change. You can squeeze something as hard as possible. These are called hand grip dynamometers. They're fairly cheap. You can get them for 25, 35 bucks. So no cardio, no strength. You go in and you squeeze, you hold these things. That's all you do. Typically something like six to eight second, maybe a little bit longer contractions. So squeeze is already should can just your grip. You know, you do some eight to, I can't remember exactly, eight to probably 12 or so repetitions of that a couple of days a week.

And those have been shown statistically significant to get reductions in resting blood pressure in people that are hypertensive. So people that have chronic high blood pressure over, you know, six to eight to 10, like something like that. So grip strength training alone is an isometric contraction. So you're grabbing, you're squeezing, you're holding it. What that's doing is because all the muscles or many of them in a muscle group or around a joint are contracting, you're kind of squeezing all the muscles at the same time, which means blood can't go anywhere, right? So it kind of gets, it's what we call occluded or stop stop moving so in the short term your blood pressure shoots through the roof because you can imagine you're trying to circulate

blood throughout your body and when it's coming out of your heart it's getting squeezed down by own muscles so can't go anywhere so the pressure in the heart gets really really really high because all the blood gets backed up but it's pumping it's pumping it's trying to get it out of there and so the pressure gets super super high response to that, your body then will say effectively, hey, we're having this consistent challenge. Let's make the vessels more pliable, more elastic, more plastic, open them up more. By doing that at rest, now the pressure at rest goes down because it's easier to get stuff through. And so almost always, this is what we call a hormetic response. And so the body tends to work very well on short, very hard

disturbances in homeostasis or kind of the resting state matched with recovery. And so if you get your blood pressure up really, really, really, really high in the short term, and then you bring it back down and let it rest a lot, it will respond by causing an adaptation. I feel like quite a lot of people understand now that if you go and do exercise, then it actually can damage your muscles in the short term, but actually that helps you to build them, that this is tension. I think what I'd never heard of you saying is it's sort of something equivalent for your blood pressure.

It's almost like you put the blood pressure up high in your body and actually magically, effectively, it's like, oh, I'm learning from this to make adaptations that are actually going to reduce my blood pressure. Your brain has to say what? You do something really challenging. You do your crossword. You solve a really hard problem. You just get locked in and you write for 90 minutes, you do whatever it is, right? And then you recover. And what happens? Motor control and motor learning, by the way, doesn't happen during acute stress. So when you're trying to learn a new physical task, or you're trying to learn something new, a new language, you're trying to solve a really hard problem you've been working on, in that moment, stress levels are way too high. You just go on

super alert. When you come down from that stress moment though, that's when the new learning gets set in stone. Physical learning, cognitive learning, all that. So it's the same thing. Really high pressure, really high fatigue, tons of stress in the system cognitively. Then when you relax, recover, new systems, new memories, new strategies get built in the brain. It's the same of all of them. I don't want people to think, by the way, everything in your life has to be to level 10. All these things I'm talking about, by far, the biggest benefit, by far, is going from the bottom 25th percentile to just the next level up. It is not level three to level one. It does not matter at all. Just going from, in fact, to get some level one. It does not matter at all.

Just going from, in fact, to get some words, just going from the bottom 15th percentile to one percentile group up is the biggest gains you're going to see in your health of all of these groups. And so if someone is, you know,

run 20 marathons and they're trying to get a PR the next one, they want to get more fit, that will make them a little bit healthier. Maybe, maybe not. They're going to get

more original gains, right? Going from- Doesn't really matter. It's not a huge deal, but you will have a, again, you'll put years on your life just being not the worst, least strong, least fit person in the entire city. And I'm very specific in all my examples to use percentages because everything is relative. I don't talk about the weight you have to lift. I don't talk about the, it's a percentage, right? So if you go to the gym and you don't know what

you're doing, you find one machine and you lift it and it feels kind of heavy. I don't care if it's six pounds. Kind of heavy is still kind of heavy. It is the same thing for you physically. So you're getting the same thing that I'm getting while lifting kind of heavy. If I have 600 pounds, it's irrelevant. It doesn't matter at all. And so it is always about just the individual person. And so when I say speed or when I say strength, when I say like as hard as possible, if you walk off that thing, go like that is the fastest I could possibly move it, then you're getting the exact same benefit I'm getting or anybody else's. It is always about your internal physiology and your internal system. If it's being challenged, it adapts. If it's not being challenged, it won't. You don't have to challenge things.

We always say this, you don't want to annihilate. You just want to stimulate. Stimulate progress, stimulate adaptation, but you don't have to annihilate. In fact, there's excellent research on annihilation gives you no more progress than stimulation. If you want to think about this in terms of muscle growth. So the amount of soreness you get after going through a hypertrophy or muscle growth training is not a predictor at all of how much growth you will actually get. In fact, if you go to what is called reps and reserves, so say you had a weight

on a machine and you did eight reps and you think, I had two repetitions, maybe I could have done like maybe like two or three more. Stopping right there is actually almost as effective

as doing those last two more reps. It is about basic stimulation. And this is why when we open up the conversation, but I'm glad we're kind of closing in the same spot is I really do want to let people like you have so many options. If you love going to the class and it's a group fitness class and you have kettlebells and you do some sprints and you lift and then you're all on the floor sweating everywhere, you rip your shirts off and you throw a great. If hate that stuff you don't have to do a day of that ever if you like

jogging amazing if you hate jogging great too if you want to do yoga in your in your apartment okay awesome like and you want to just follow along with uh on Instagram live. So the yoga, all of those are options. The biggest key that everyone has to get to though, like by far every single person, you want consistency over time. Adherence is the number one predictor of success with fitness and nutrition programs. Always adherence.

When you talk about this across the lifespan, you have to remember the benefits of exercise are so compounding over the decades. It's not about this month or this week or this day. You will need to be in this for the decade long thing. So if you can stay consistent over decades, you're going to be fine. It's people that go and they do things to a level

and they get hurt and then they miss it. Or they do, you know, they're so motivated to lose their weight or to, you know, change after a bad breakup. These are like very common reasons people start fitness programs. And then you get really hard and you go so hard and you go six days a week and you do two and a half hour workouts and you're there for six weeks and you're just like, okay, I haven't hung out with a friend. My company's going out of business. Like I can't this is not sustainable because it's not. And you don't need to do that. And so put yourself in a position where you just don't lose big chunks of training. A day or two, fine. You want to go on a

week vacation? Fine. No problem. I'm talking about months, right? Where it's like, oh yeah, I got to have it. It's been, well, no, it hasn't that long but i geez i guess it has been seven weeks now that i haven't worked out i didn't feel like and all of a sudden it's just it felt like oh because i hurt my back a little bit and then i had that trip and then i had to and then all of a sudden but then i got cold and there's always skip four days there now it's been seven weeks now you gotta get started all over again so you just don't want these big ones and so what i always uh another way to think about this is don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Just get something in. Just, just, just do something. If all you can do is get a couple of walks in. A lot of people listening will say by this point, they've got, they've accumulated quite a lot of injuries in their life. They're,

you know, they're not just going to feel that they can be let loose in a, in a gym. And so I think they often say, well, so I can't really do any strength training because like, I don't have the capacity to sort of just go and, um, you know, lift a heavy weight over my head or something. Does that mean, is it too late for them to do strength training? Does that mean that it's, it's impossible if you've, if you've accumulated injuries? No, it's completely possible. If you can stand up from a chair or a couch or toilet, then you're doing a leg extension. It's the same thing, right? You can do whatever. Work around your injuries for sure and do the parts that you can't do. Or if you just don't like the gym environment for a billion reasons, it's too far, too expensive. If there's another way you can do exercise that is not just walking,

get in a pool. Okay, great. There's going to be some contraction going on there. Put your back against the wall and just hold whatever angle you can hold for a while. That's going to be fine for this type of person you're describing. At the beginning, I said,

don't worry about the external part. It's all about the internal change. So if you need a machine to help you turn your quad on, great. If you can sit against a wall to turn your quad on, great. Your quad will not know the difference. It has no idea. It doesn't matter. I find that really motivating.

I love hearing that. One final question, because we're maybe imagining somebody different who doesn't have any injuries. But what they're saying is like, I'm really time constrained. So, you know, there's a lot of listeners here who have a whole bunch of small children and like they're trying to squeeze this in around the edges of their life or other things in their life, you know, that they're having to balance. So they're like, oh, I'd love to be able to have the time to spend, you know, three hours a week at the gym and go and do some running. But they're really constrained. If they were saying, like, I'd love to understand if I had 15 or 20 minutes, maybe two or three times a week, what are the sorts of exercise? What am I looking to do to make that have this best impact, given the way you're describing this huge impact it can have on my long-term health?

Yeah, well, for the record here, I have a five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son. I am a full college professor. I coach many professional athletes, and I have six companies. I'm in the same boat. I wish you said that at the beginning, because I had assumed that you were managing all of that exercise. So what do you do? Yeah, okay. So similar thing.

If you put those constraints on there, you want at least once a week, in my opinion, at least once a week where you can do a longer session with no bricks. Call this steady state, call it cardio, call it whatever. So for Natasha, she's going to go on the spin bike. Great. For me, a lot of times that's on a bicycle and I'm going to ride around outside on a bike, right? I'm going to hop on the bike. I'm not going to, I'm candidly, I'm not going to warm up. I'm not doing any breathing drill. Like I'm going to get on the bike and I'm going to go. I live in Southern California, so it tends to be nice

almost every single day. Okay. I try to do that for a 45-minute ride. I'm literally gone 46 minutes. I come back and I'm like, minute 46, I'm switching out, I'm grabbing a kid, I'm doing something, I'm getting back on a call. I'm not laying around and I'm getting right back after it. I'd love to go longer, but that's for this. So one session a week. Natasha does two. Candidly, I'll do one generally. I will then also supplement that with as much general physical walking as I possibly can. This is any call I can take on a walk. I will.

If I'm ever traveling, I will never sit down during a layover. If it's a four-hour layover, I'm probably going to walk for three hours and 40 minutes, right? I'm just going to get steps in. If I can, but I land the same thing, like walking, walking, walking as much as I can. I don't like walking at all, but that's just, that is what it is, right? So when can I just get basic steps in? And then one day a week, can I go a little bit longer? One day a week, I'm going to go very, very short, very high intensity. I've got a hair assault bike, which is like the hand crank

and the pedals in my garage, right? So I'm going to do that. That's probably looking like a 5-7 minute warm-up. And then 10-12 minutes of any kind of extremely high intensity max effort intervals. This could be 30 seconds, as hard as I can, 30 seconds off.

Could be 4 minutes hard, 4 minutes off, couple rounds of that. All kinds of stuff you can do. I might just go 10 minutes as hard as I possibly can and come back off of that. In addition, I will try to do some sort of strength training at least three times per week. So squats or swings or split squats, uh, process sit like movements, things like that. I know we're coming to the end. So I'd just love to try and do a quick summing up. And you covered a lot of stuff. So hopefully I will have caught the essence.

And please let me know if I get it wrong. I think we started by talking a lot about the fact that this idea of fitness is both cardio and strength. And there are ways we can measure this. And you talked about this VO2 max test and we'll put some links on the show notes, which actually is a better way to predict your long-term health and the quality of your life than most of the things you'll get when you go and see a doctor. And there's a sort of scale, I think you said from one to a hundred, like a super athlete's at 80, people are really fit at

60 to 70. And basically as a man, if you fall down to 20, or a woman down to 16, basically, you lose independent living. So you want to stay above that. But I think the really positive thing, because there's something depressing about it falling, is you're saying, actually, if you move just up from the bottom 15% to above that, or if you get out of the bottom quarter, you can have a really profound impact on your long-term health. And there's really things that you can do relatively fast to change your health. So that's one thing that's really interesting, which is sort of on the cardio. And then you talked about something, which I think will be even more of a surprise, which is on the strength, you can do something

as simple as just measuring your hand grip, that there is a machine, I think, did you call it a dynamometer? A hand grip dynamometer? A hand grip dynamometer. Hand grip dynamometer. So we'll definitely find some links to that. In seconds, you can basically, there's measurement, which is also this amazing predictor of your long-term health. But interestingly, you can actually use it also to reduce your blood pressure. So you can train yourself just with this device.

And that can genuinely, I think, again, you said in just a few months, reduce your blood pressure. So again, there's things you can really do there. We then talked about how surprisingly the work you do on strength directly affects your brain and that we tend to think about it as being like, you know, some brain puzzle or work will affect your brain. But actually, amazingly, just lifting a really heavy but static object is having all of this impact on your neurological system. And that can actually reduce your risk of dementia. And there's a set of other things that you can do

around dementia, and we'll share the link there. And then we talked about, okay, what about if you're not really, you don't have all this freedom of movement, does that mean that all of this is impossible? And actually what you said, which is great, is sort of wherever you are, actually, if you're doing something that is hard for you, you're really going to be having this impact. And that even if you have injuries, there's things that you're able to do. And I think we wrapped up with your own story where you do manage to put in, I would have to say, a very impressive set of exercises through the day. But you're interesting saying that actually these are in lots of pieces.

And again, coming back to this original story, like anything we can do across both this cardio or the strength is really going to have an impact on people's health. Nailed it. Thank you so much for spending the time with us. My pleasure, man. Thank you, Andy, for joining us on Zoe's Science and Nutrition today. We learned what the best exercises are to keep us healthy as we get older and how to incorporate being active into our busy lives.

If you want to understand how to support your body with the best foods for you so you can enjoy many more active and healthy years, then you may want to try Zoe's personalized nutrition program. You can learn more and get 10% off by going to zoe.com slash podcast. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolfe. Zoe Science and Nutrition is produced by Yellow Hewins Martin, Richard Willen, and Tilly Fulford. See you next time.