Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, a former cardiologist, starts each day without an alarm, journals for 30 minutes, then does cardio with an elevation mask before work at 10 am. He stacks weekly resistance training and mobility drills with monthly regenerative therapies like plasmapheresis and red-light exposure, tracking progress through VO₂ max testing to stay stronger and faster each year.
Hi, I'm Dr. Jeffrey Gladden. I was born in 1954. That technically would make me 72, but I wake up 27 every day. I'm an avid mountain biker, snowboarder, surfer, runner. I do anything I want to do. Let me tell you a little bit about how I go about my day and how I have a protocol that keeps me living young for a lifetime.
He went from saving hearts as a cardiologist to rewriting the entire aging playbook. Dr. Jeffrey Gladden believes 100 is the new 30, and he's got the science to back it up. This This is the Gladden Longevity Podcast.
My daily protocol. First, I don't wake up to an alarm. When I quit cardiology, I stopped waking up to an alarm. That was a gift to myself. So I don't wake up to an alarm. I sleep as long as my body needs to sleep. 2, the first thing I do when I get up is I take my thyroid medication. It takes about 30 minutes to be absorbed. During that 30 minutes, I sit down and I journal. And I put down 3 things that I'm grateful for, 3 things that I want to accomplish in that day that would make the day great. And then a couple of affirmations about how I'm going to show up that day. Sometimes those reflections are actually very pragmatic, and sometimes they're very deep, spiritual, very abstract almost in a way. But I love getting really in touch with where I am on that day. I find it very centering and very grounding. I also find that if I start with gratitude, it makes me present to the moment, and I can go through the day From a very, very good space in my head. Then I usually pick up the guitar. I've been playing the guitar since I was 10 years old. I pick up the guitar and I usually play whatever comes to mind. I write songs, I doodle on the guitar. It's a way for me to release emotional energy and also connect with just the flow of music, which I, I love very much. So after I do that, then I typically go put on my sneakers. Yesterday I went out and mountain biked before I came to work. I was in Colorado over the weekend mountain biking with my son and grandson and kids. It's Sometimes I'll go for a run. This morning I got on my elliptigo with an elevation training mask, rode out for about, I don't know, 5 miles. I'm building my lung capacity. I've noticed an improvement in my singing, also an improvement in my cardiovascular capacity when I'm out mountain biking. Tomorrow I'll probably go for a run. I'll do Vasper. I break it up. The idea is you don't wanna be doing the same thing over and over again. And I love being outside, so every chance I get, I go outside and do things. That's kind of my morning routine. Later in the day when I come home, typically I'll relax. I don't try to force myself to do something, but many times I'll do a sauna. And if I have time in the morning, I'll do a sauna after the cardio. That's a great way to stack those 2 together. So I'll start the sauna before I leave. I have a great sauna in my building. Go do my cardio outside, come back, jump in the sauna, take a shower, come to work. And I don't start my workday until 10:00 AM. I give myself that space, number one, to work out. Number two, it gives me a chance to actually prep for the day. I still have about an hour of time after I'm done working out to actually prep for the clients I'm gonna see that day, think about what I want to accomplish, answer some emails, and that's how I start my day. I try not to beat myself up with, I've gotta start work at 6:00 AM and end at 6:00 PM. I find that I work better if I take care of myself first. If I take care of myself first, everything else will flow. If I leverage my health for the sake of taking care of everybody else, that works for a little bit, but then I start to peter out. So it's like Prioritizing myself first. That's another gift I give myself. My weekly routine is to do something every day. So some days I'll be traveling and doing things like that. Maybe I just do some balance training or just some resistance training. I try to get in 2 days of good resistance training. I'm now getting down on the floor because I realize that mobility is basically built on the floor. So doing like burpees, doing some things crawling around on the floor, things like that. It's amazing how much mobility you can generate that way. Also doing deep squats, sort of sitting in African Bushmen, right? Whether in that deep squat, training myself to be able to do that. I couldn't do it initially. Now I can get down there. It's really, really cool. So maintaining mobility sometimes is part of it, not just cardio or just resistance training. On the weekends, I try to get outside. I try to mountain bike, get the elliptical, go around White Rock Lake. But the idea is to be outside and be active, and I try to do something every single day. My monthly routine is basically built on the days and the weeks, and yet I'll factor in some special things. It could be a trip someplace to mountain bike. It could be doing some therapeutic things in the office. I might do plasmapheresis on a monthly basis, which is what I'm doing now. Do Eboo every other month. I do the red light at least a couple days a week here. The ozone sauna a couple days a week. So these are things that I fit into my monthly routine, but they're kind of on a longer time frame. And if I'm out for a week, I don't fret. If I miss them, I just pick them up again when I come back. My yearly routine is basically based on the concept that I wanna be stronger, faster, fitter, sharper, more mobile than I was last year. And the interesting thing is that sometimes if I have an injury, it can set me back. I had an injury about 20 months ago now that actually set me back pretty hard. And I'm just now, believe it or not, actually starting to exceed where I was 20 months ago. I think one of the lessons to learn here is 2 things. If you have an injury, treat it immediately. Use the regenerative therapies. Use the peptides. Any time that you're disabled is time that aging is accelerating on you. So fix it as quick as possible. The second thing is you have to understand that as you go through the chronological decades, what you have to do to regain your strength and your function is different than what you did when you were 18. You have to be using peptides. You have to double down on working out hard. I find most people don't work out hard enough. They basically back off. Oh, this is starting to— this is— I'm getting shorter. This is starting to feel difficult. No, that's just part of it. And being a soccer player when I was in high school and in college, playing some basketball, things like that, I knew what it was to go to soccer camp and run all day, right? I know what it is to be in amazing shape. And I think that's actually served me well because when most people would say, well, Jesus, this is getting kind of tough, it's like, no, I know that if I lean into this, this is having a big benefit for me. And certainly it does. I can feel myself coming back now. I did a VO2 max test about 6 weeks ago. I'm excited to do one again in about another month. I think I'm gonna blow that one away because I'm making progress because I'm leaning into it. Right. And you have to do that if you really wanna get strong. Hey, let me know what your routine looks like. Leave a comment below, hit subscribe. We'll be happy to keep the dialogue going. It's always great to chat with you.
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