The Simple Exercise Routine That Will Extend Your Life w/ Helen Messier | EP #77

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August 2024 My dad was getting out of his bed at night, tripped, fell, broke his pelvis ended up in the hospital. And a lot of times what happens next is you develop a pneumonia and then it's a slow glide to the end of your life. Which happened with him.

Diet and sleep and all of the things kind of the lifestyle pillars of longevity and optimal health. If you have to choose one of them, it would be exerc.

If you're over 60, if you exercise.

At least once a week, you reduce.

Your chance of cancer threefold and you reduce your chance of all cause mortality by 50%.

Most important, just move, move every day. If it means just getting up and walking, that's better than nothing. In fact, the research shows that the biggest benefit of exercise happens for those that have nothing to doing something.

Let's dive into one more topic in this segment of our series here, which is exercise. Because I think if I were going to say that if there was one thing you could do that has the biggest impact on longevity, if you could bottle up and sell it, it would be a trillion dollar blockbuster drug. It is exercise. Yes.

Yeah, no question.

Oh my God. So important and yet people. Yeah, let's talk. Let's, let's, let's dive into exercise.

I was just gonna really confirm that really. If, you know, people ask, what if you had to choose between diet and sleep and all of the things, the kind of the lifestyle pillars of longevity and optimal health, if you have to choose one of them, it would be exercise. I think that by and far can doesn't mean go and eat at McDonald's every day and then exerc, guys. But it's so critical. The evidence, I think is overwhelming. There's really no question, you know, yes, there's controversy on what the perfect diet is. Yes, there's controversy, but I don't think there's any controversy on the benefits of exercise. And so, you know, definitely different types of exercise. You want to get cardiorespiratory fitness, you want to get muscle mass and building. So strength training are really important. And you know, muscles are like we talked about at the beginning, so critical for overall longevity and they predict mortality. And exercise also keeps those little mitochondria, the power plants of your cell healthy, which is fundamental for longevity.

Yeah, the number I remember recently I was with the team from Tonal, which is a, one of the products I use to get my daily exercise in, and the CEO was sharing some stats that I found impressive. If you're over 60 and you're listening to this podcast, if you exercise at least once a week, twice preferably, you reduce your chance of cancer threefold and you reduce your chance of all cause mortality by 50%. I mean, it's a huge, huge difference. So that's, that's pretty amazing.

It's, it is amazing. And I think a lot of that benefit comes from the muscle mass. And I think muscle mass, a lot of the benefit of having the muscle mass is because muscle contains a lot of mitochondria. So every cell in our body contains mitochondria. Right. The power plants. But muscle, brain, the tissues in our body that need the most energy are the brain, the muscles, and they are the ones that contain the most mitochondria.

Wouldn't it be great if you could.

Like make more brain, just make more brain connections, but not more brain cells. The other thing that muscle contains a lot of is stem cells.

Yeah.

Which are important.

Absolutely.

So let's talk about, you know, when I, what we wrote in, in longevity Practical playbook is A focus on muscle, overall muscle mass and then also VO2 max and your sort of your cardiovascular side. So let's dive into muscle mass. So I'm on a mission to add 10 pounds in this calendar year and I've gotten about plus six and I'm pushing hard to get there by a 360 next year. And I don't think there's any substitution for building muscle mass other than really working out. I mean, I wish there was a pill. Maybe someday there will be a pill. I've made a few investments in startups that are against sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is the, is the term for muscle loss. As you age, you lose muscle mass over time. We've just announced an X prize. One of the parameters that teams are working on is reversing your muscle loss by as much as 20 years. But it comes down to actually doing the work. Yeah, yeah, you can supplement that. You can make it easier for yourself. But let's talk about what it takes.

Yeah, you know, you can. There's some really innovative biotech startups now, as you know, Peter, that are, I think from stem cell secretions to, you know, the really amazing work being done that is shown to increase muscle mass. Now even in those cases, it's still important to use your muscles to stimulate them. Right? So it, no matter what you have to move, if you sit on a, in a bed, bed rest or sitting on a couch, you're going to lose muscle mass quickly. So most important, just move. No matter what you do, move every day. If it means just getting up and walking, that's better than nothing. In fact, the research shows that the biggest benefit of exercise happens for those that have nothing to doing something right. So from 0 to 1, 0 to 1, just getting up off the couch, you're going to get huge benefit. Then you know, obviously you get more benefit incrementally more as you, as you work harder. But doing weight training I think is really important. You know, we can talk about how we really build mitochondria and make them more efficient by doing zone two training. So the way I like to think of how much to exercise, what you should do is think of your base, your foundation as that zone two. Now zone two is the rate of exercise. It's typically a fast walk for most people. It's where your heart rate is such that when you're at rest, we mentioned that your mitochondria like to burn fat as you start to work out and you demand more energy. Right. So when you're burning fat, you're using oxygen to burn and make that energy. As you start to work out more and you have more demands for more energy on your body needs, your muscles need more energy that more ATP, your mitochondria can't keep up and so they're going to switch from oxygen and fat to burning glucose, right? So something called glycolysis and carbohydrate, that point at which they switch from fat to glucose burning, you know, sort of without oxygen, that's what makes lactate, right? We've all heard of lactic acid in our muscles when we work out too hard. So that lactate threshold, so to speak, when you start making lactate switching, that's your Zone two. Now, Inigo San Milan has published some amazing research on this, and he's shown that that's what increases mitochondrial efficiency. So doing that for about four hours a week, that Zone two, it's really easy to do, right? You can do it on your treadmill, in front of your desk if you need to, and then on top of that, you want to do some weightlifting.

So let's continue on Zone two. One second. Because I have. I'm staring here at a technogym bike that I take my Zoom meetings on. You know, I'm sitting on too many boards and I have these boring board meetings. And so unless I'm presenting, I'm going to be on a bike doing something else or, you know, during COVID I took all of my meetings as walking meetings. You know, I live in Santa Monica. I'm going to take advantage of the situation and it's, you know, but for me, you can calculate your zone 2 heart rate. You can get it, there's ways to do it. But your zone 2 heart rate, for me, I'm just going to read this out loud here. So first of all, calculate your maximum heart rate. It's 220 minus your age. So for me, I'm 62, so my maximum heart rate is 158. I think that's reasonably stands up to my experience of my maximum heart rate. So 220 minus your age. Then calculate your lower limit of zone 2, and which is your maximum heart rate times 60%. So that comes out to 100. And then calculate your upper limit, which is your maximum heart rate times 70%, which is 110. So I find 110 as that level where I'm having a little bit difficulty talking on the bike. And so my technogym bike has a heart rate monitor, or I'll wear one and I'll get myself There and keep myself going. Now, what happens at zone 2, besides the switch from fat to glucose? Are we stimulating the growth of more mitochondria or making the ones we have more efficient?

Both, actually. So what you're doing is you're sending a signal to the cell, to your body, to say, I can't keep up with the energy demand. Right. And so that's. That's the purpose of exercise, the purpose of. We can get into the phytonutrients, too. It basically, sometimes they're negative stimulators, meaning your body has to respond in order to meet the demands that you're making. Even with weight training, you're inducing small tears in your muscle, which actually that when your body repairs, it makes you stronger. Right. So exercise can be damaging. So what you're doing is you're stimulating your body to make more mitochondria, and you're stimulating them to be more efficient when you do that. So your body's just trying to meet the demands. Now, if you go too far, and you know that's important, too, to get to that VO2 max, and we'll talk about that in a minute, but you don't want to do the vast majority of your training at that level. You know, that intense, intense VO2, sort of that level of maximum consumption of oxygen. It's important to do that because the VO2 Max does correlate with longevity, there's no question. But you do also cause a lot of those free radicals, a lot of oxidative damage. So you don't want to do that too often, but you want to get that foundation of just stimulating enough, but not too much to damage everybody.

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So you mentioned the amount of zone two, not to be confused with VO2 max zone two exercise. Right. And for me it's 110, you know, beats per minute, how many hours and how much chunk at a time. So what do you, what's the minimum there you need to be hitting?

Yeah, you, you really want to strive for about four hours a week. You know, you can divide it up into four one hour sessions, you can do 30 minute sessions, 45, whatever works. It doesn't really matter that it's all in one, but if you can get about, you know, three, but ideally four hours a week is really what you want to strive for, for the zone two.

Okay. And then there's one other layer which you've talked about, which is interval training. So what's that mean?

Yeah, the interval training or the HIIT training, that's when you push your heart rate really to its maximum or close to its maximum, you know, 80% of its maximum. And that again, that also stimulates cardiorespiratory fitness, that's really important. And we do know that VO2 max, when you work out at that level, you increase your ability to work out harder and faster at that level, you increase your VO2 max over time. So that, again, has been associated with longevity. People that have a higher, better VO2 max have a much lower risk of dying. There's no question about that.

You know, one of the reasons, unfortunately, that people who've got sarcopenia reduced muscle pass. And it's something unfortunately, I suffered with loss of my dad, and many people have, which is, as you get older and you've lost muscle mass, it becomes easier to trip and fall and break your hip or your pelvis. My dad was getting out of his bed at night to go to the restroom, tripped, fell, broke his pelvis, ended up in the hospital. And a lot of times what happens next is you develop a pneumonia, and then it's a slow glide to the end of your life, which happened with him. And the numbers are staggering. For people who, after the age of 60, I think, end up breaking their hip or pelvis, there's a large percentage that don't make it back. And what you really want is have the strength to catch yourself, the strength to not trip and fall.

Absolutely. It's all far, far too common. People, they get sarcopenia or loss of muscle mass, which goes along with loss of bone mass. Right. Osteopenia or osteoporosis. And when you do fall, slip and fall, you end up breaking a bone. And again, that is the end for, you know, kind of that long, slow decline for far, far too many people. And so, you know, you definitely need the muscle mass, but also it's important to work on kind of flexibility and remember that it's our nervous system that controls our muscles as well. And so, you know, before you start working out, you really want to assess whether you have any dysfunctional movement patterns as well. So if you're moving in a slightly, you know, pattern over time, if you're walking a lot or doing something that can lead to injury, and once you get injured, it's really hard to keep up that exercise. So really, you know, important to assess that, get a, like a functional movement screen done. I think that's really important for most people. And then just get that neurological connection from your brain to your muscles and your body. A lot of us have lost that. You know, as we're kids, when we learn to move, we start crawling, right? That crawling is such a great neurological muscle integration. A Lot of times I get people back on the ground starting to crawl again. There's a great book called Original Strength that really talks about that. And even kids that have skipped the crawling phase, you know, they go from the bum scooching to the walking right away. They tend to have problems later in life because they didn't actually do that. Neurological integration. Sometimes we get people back to rolling. Right. Just basics. Try rolling on the ground without using your arms and see if you can do that. A lot of people have lost the ability to hold on.

I'll go check right now. Yeah, but, you know, getting. Getting up without using your hand to a standing position is something you lose fairly quickly along the way. I think one of the points that is really important for people to hear is the biggest challenge we have as we age is, is injury. You may be in great shape, but you fall, you tear a ligament, you break a bone, and it ends you up in bed rest and sarcopenia. And it is difficult to recover after that. And so minimizing injury is super important. And that comes from flexibility. It comes from, like you said, just coordination. And like I say, we'll talk about this later.

Not doing stupid things and not doing stupid things. Yeah. And one of the things I think that people also confuse sometimes is flexibility versus stability. And this was a great example of. I took a functional movement screening course a number of years ago, and there was a. There was a physiotherapist there that could not bring his hand up his back. He couldn't touch his shoulder blades if he put his hand behind his back and lifted it up, and he thought it was a flexibility problem. So he spent years doing towel stretches and trying to get him more flexible with assessment. It turned out it was a stability problem, and he actually wasn't. His brain was not stabilizing his shoulder blade before he could move his arm. And once we taught five minutes of teaching his brain to stabilize, he had full range of motion again. So, you know, sometimes it's surprising, and so that movement patterns are really important.

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Anything else on exercise that you want to. Let's talk about one last element here, which is if you're trying to build muscle mass, let's talk about the supplements or what you recommend for building muscle mass. Right, so we've talked about protein, talked about 0.8 to 1 gram per body pound weight. So I'm 150 pounds. I'm taking 150 grams. I'll do that with a nutrient shake and then a kachava shake and then some fish and then some chicken. And I attack my protein. I don't go. I don't eat red meat. For a number of reasons, we can not talk about that right now. But what are the other elements? Creatine, other supplements, Protein. I mean, amino acids. What are your thoughts there?

Yeah, so, you know, definitely, like we talked about, get enough protein, your muscles are made of protein. There's other things you can do, like creatine. Creatine is an energy source for your muscles. Your body is going to make creatine because it's so important. But when it makes creatine, it uses up a lot of capacity. So we've probably all heard of methylation, right? The ability to add methyl groups to a lot of different things in our body, including DNA, which controls DNA expression. We use methylation to make neurotransmitters, to make new DNA and RNA and new cells, essentially. And so we also need methylation to make creatine and when your body, if you're working out a lot, you are going to be using up quite a bit of creatine. And so you need, if you, it's fine, your body will make it, but then it uses up from other areas where you need that methylation capacity. And so taking the creatine supplies that very, very safe and it frees it up for your body to do other things with the methylation.

How much creatine should you take in terms of.

Yeah, around five grams or so.

Five grams.

And again, creatine is really easy to get. It's kind of flavorless. You can add it to any shake, put it in water. Very one of the easiest things you can take.

Great. What else?

We want to do that. Yeah, you know, looking at, you could do free form amino acids if you want, but I think if you eat enough protein, you're probably good with that. And then the other things to support your mitochondria, I, you know, that will help you build muscle and help you exercise more as well. And your mitochondria need a lot of support. They need your B vitamins, you need your antioxidants, coenzyme Q10. Magnesium is a big one. A lot of us are magnesium deficient if we get that tightness in our muscles. You know, if you get a tightness in your neck or tightness, that's often you're not having enough magnesium because calcium helps your muscles contract and, and magnesium helps them relax. And so I'd say 85% of us are deficient in magnesium and we need it every day. And the more stress we're under, the more we need it.

And we'll talk about peptides when we get to meds and supplements and peptides a little bit later. But there are some peptides that can support muscle growth as well. How about testosterone for men who are.

Yeah, so, you know, definitely keeping your hormones in an optimal range as we get older. Testosterone for men, estrogen, progesterone for women, I think are really low hanging fruit when it comes to longevity. Both of them support muscle mass, bone mass, brain health, cardiovascular health. So that's really a no brainer.

Helen, thank you for this conversation on diet and exercise. When we get together next, we'll jump into sleep, what we call our annual fountain upload. How do you image and diagnose yourself? What can you know about what's going on in your body? We'll dive into meds and supplements, we'll dive into mindset and then we'll talk about what's different for women's health as well, which is an important subject because for way too long women have not had the differential attention and it's been way too male oriented. But that is changing and changing rapidly. Thank you for your brilliance. Thank you for being one of the most extraordinary medical leaders in my life. And those of you who are interested in learning more, you can get a free copy of my longevity practices if you go to dashmandness.com longevity you can also get a daily AI email. There is an AI I built that searches the world for the latest longevity breakthroughs. And if you go to longevityinsider.org you can sign up for free. You get, you know, sort of what are the latest breakthroughs occurring today? Because it's just an amazing period. And then please check out fountainlife.com awesome helen. Take care my friend.

Thank you Peter. Such fun. Really enjoyed this. Bye bye.

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