Stop Walking 10,000 Steps/Day (do this for 10 minutes instead)

What are your thoughts on exercise and the current suggestions and recommendations around exercise?

Well, I'm glad you asked this question. I think I've been thinking about this a lot. I did a podcast on the current exercise guidelines, and I think they need to be updated. I think they're not good enough. And it's important for people to realize how these exercise guidelines were formulated and what they mean. So typically, you'll hear exercise guidelines, 150 to 300 minutes a week of moderate-intensity exercise is good for optimal health, or 75 minutes to 150 minutes a week of vigorous intensity exercise, right? So they're basically a 2:1 ratio, right? Twice as many minutes for moderate intensity as vigorous intensity. What is defined as moderate versus vigorous? That's also important, 'cause it's different across different studies. In these guidelines, it's basically moderate intensity is you're walking, you're moving with intent, but not really, really fast. You're walking at maybe a fast pace, but you're not jogging, you're not running. That kind of activity would be considered moderate. Vigorous would be considered jogging, running, swimming, cycling. So the, the kind of activity where you're actually moving fast with intent. Why do we have this 2:1 ratio? Where did it come from? Well, it all came from energy expenditure. You burn twice as many calories if you're doing vigorous intensity exercise as you do if you're doing moderate intensity, right? So if you're Walking 1 mile, you'll burn X amount of calories. If you jog that mile, you'll burn twice as many calories. That's where these guidelines came from, the 2:1 ratio, right? Weight loss, energy expenditure, but that's not necessarily what's important for reducing cancer mortality, reducing cardiovascular-related mortality, reducing all-cause mortality, right? These guidelines use that data, this 2:1 ratio, ratio of energy expenditure, and then they looked at other studies and said, "Okay, how much exercise is required to reduce cardiovascular-related mortality or all-cause mortality?" And they kind of, like, connected the dots. By the way, these studies also were using questionnaires. They weren't actually measuring how active people were. A new study came out, and I did a journal club podcast on it because it is a study that I felt was so important that I wanted to break down all the components of the study with another scientist and talk about them because it's very important. So journal clubs, typically in science, you have them, in my career, it was, you know, sometimes it was once a week, other times it was once a month, and someone, you choose a study that's important and you break it down and you talk about the results and you talk about the methods and talk about what the findings mean. That's what a journal club is, and it's essentially you choose a journal and a publication within that journal And it's a club. You have different scientists that are talking about it.

Why did this warrant a journal club?

Because I think this study basically is strong enough data that it's implying we need to change our exercise guidelines, at least the messaging of them, at the very least. And I'll tell you why. Because I talked about these, you know, these guidelines, how they're formulated. They're using questionnaires, they're not measuring anything. Well, a new study came out. Not only did it measure physical activity through these accelerometers, it was able to measure how active people were people were and the type of activity, whether it was— I mentioned moderate versus vigorous. They also meant— they also measured light physical activity. That would be considered walking around your house, kind of doing that kind of light activity, not necessarily going for a walk or going for a run. And they looked at deaths from different causes of disease. They looked at deaths from all causes, so all-cause mortality. They looked at cancer-related deaths. They looked at cardiovascular-related deaths. They look at type 2 diabetes, they looked at heart attacks, right? And what was so profound was that what we found, what they found, and what we now know is that everything changes in terms of how important vigorous intensity exercise is. It's so much more valuable than we thought. It's not 2 to 1. So if we're looking at all-cause mortality, you know, dying from all causes, cancer, respiratory, anything related that's non-accidental, For every 1 minute of vigorous intensity exercise, you had to do 4 minutes of moderate intensity, and you had to do like 100 to 150 minutes of light exercise to get the same reduction in all-cause mortality.

For every 1 minute?

For every 1 minute of vigorous intensity exercise. It gets better, okay? For every 1 minute of vigorous intensity exercise to reduce your death from cardiovascular disease, you had to do 8 minutes of moderate intensity and 200 minutes, of light exercise for every 1 minute of vigorous-intensity exercise. It's huge. To reduce your type 2 diabetes risk, for every 1 minute of vigorous, you had to do 10 minutes of moderate intensity, or you had to do, again, you're in the 150 minutes to 200 minutes of light exercise. To reduce your risk of dying from cancer, for every 1 minute of vigorous-intensity exercise, you had to do 4 minutes, about 4 minutes of moderate intensity. And for light, it was like, it was almost not even happening. I mean, it was like 250, 300, like you had to just, a ton of minutes, unbelievable amount of minutes, okay? The value of vigorous intensity exercise is so much more than this 2:1 ratio based on energy expenditure, based on burning calories that our guidelines were based on. It's time to rethink 'em. It's time to tell people, hey, if you're getting out, and you're going for a run, it is worth way more than you think it is in terms of reducing your disease risk and your death from that disease, right? Also, what was really interesting about this study, and this goes back to this exercise snacks that we talked about before, last episode, is that because there are people, participants were wearing these accelerometers on their wrist, they were able to measure all physical activity. Let's say you have a new puppy and you're sprinting in the yard and playing with them for a minute or 2 minutes or 3 minutes or whatever. Not 30 minutes in the gym, right? Or not 30 minutes on the treadmill, but you're just a short burst, or you're playing with your grandkids or your kids and you're playing tag, whatever. Those moments count. They really add up. And that is also a take-home from this study and other studies is that you can actually get massive benefits from the sprinting, the vigorous exercise. 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes. Women that did 3.5 minutes of just this vigorous types of exercise per day lowered their cancer risk by 40%. Yes, 3.5 minutes a day. This was in women. Now, there's bigger studies showing men and women that exercise 9 minutes a day, the short vigorous types of exercise, adding up, not 9 minutes altogether, but like a minute here, a minute there, a minute here, right? It adds up, 40% lower cancer-related mortality, 50% lower cardiovascular-related mortality. And that's another big take-home from this study that I really want people to know about because Some people don't like spending 30 minutes or putting out, blocking out a 30-minute time or an hour-long time to go to the gym. They should. I mean, if they want their peak span, that's what you're gonna have to do. But if you're just wanting to avoid disease and be in your healthspan, you know, you can get that by doing these short moments of short bursts of physical activity, and those count. And some people are like, "Oh, thank God. Thank God I can do that because I hate going to the gym." I'll, you know, they just won't do it. They won't do it.

A lot of people as well are caught up with this 10,000 steps a day thing.

Yes. 10,000 steps a day.

What's that facial reaction for people that can't see your face? She looked up into the corner like I personally offended her.

Yeah, I look, any exercise is better than none. I want to just get that on the table. Okay. That's important. I don't want to totally diss the 10,000 steps a day, but I think that we need to ditch it. I think we need to ditch 10,000 steps a day and say 10 minutes a day. 10 minutes a day of getting your heart rate up. You can do bodyweight squats, you can, you know, play tag with your kids or your grandkids. You can do shorter bursts of it, but it needs to be 10 minutes. And if you get to that 10 minutes a day, 50% lower cardiovascular-related mortality, 50% lower all-cause mortality, 40% lower cancer mortality. That is what you're going to get. 10,000 steps a day is not gonna get you that. We just talked about it. It's not going to get you that, right? It's a different ratio. It's not 2:1 ratio.

I imagine there's people thinking— you used 3 terms there, vigorous, moderate, and light. We probably need to quite clearly define those definitions. Like, what is vigorous?

Right.

Heart rate, is it?

Or vigorous intensity exercise can be heart rate, and it is heart rate in a lot of studies that are done. In terms of the exercise guidelines, they don't use heart rate. They're using movement. Like, when I say accelerometer, I mean moving fast. So they're able to measure the acceleration of your movement. And so the way that they're talking about it in these exercise guideline studies is moving fast. Moving fast would be jogging, running, swimming, biking. You're moving.

The stepper?

Stepper, with stepper, we'd be moving fast. Even weights are moving fast. That's part of it too. Weights, you're doing weights. Wait. 'Cause they're on your wrist. And so if you're doing bicep curls or you're doing, you know, something with your wrists that are fast, it's part of that equation as well.

Heart rate isn't the thing they were measuring, but that's a consequence of moving fast, typically.

It is, it is.

So you want to be thinking about getting your heart rate—

Personally, when I think about it, and if I'm talking about it in the context of these exercise guidelines, I would say that vigorous would be probably considered 70% or more of your max heart rate would be considered vigorous. Previously, in my, when I'm talking about vigorous, I also talk about high-intensity interval training, and that's more like 80% of your max heart rate or higher. Very important for improving VO2 max and cardiorespiratory fitness. But in these studies, heart rate is more like a 70% your max heart rate or more, 'cause that's, you can be jogging at that rate, right? Jogging or running, that's a big, that's vigorous intensity exercise. If you're below that, if you're like, 50% your max heart rate, that's considered moderate intensity. And then, you know, maybe even lower than that, if you're just sort of, you know, walking around the house, I mean, that's not even going that much at all. That's light, that's considered light.