10 Best Exercises Ranked For Balance, Agility, Flexibility & Stamina | Steven Kotler

I'm going to mention a number of different sporting exercises, and I want you to give it a rating for each on 0 to 10 on how effective these are for strength, balance, agility, flexibility, and stamina. And I think the audience understands you also want to pick something that you're not just going to look at this ranking number. You want to pick something that you really love that's going to put you on flow, that you have access to, that you can afford, that delights you. Okay, so let's start cycling. Scale of 1 to 10.

The Mayo Clinic did this. Did this work? I'm just, you know, I'm using their system. Cycling, road cycling or mountain biking? Road cycling, road cycling. 4. Mountain biking, 9 or a 10.

Wow. Massive difference. Massive difference. What's the reason for that?

Dynamic motion. Road biking is a very.

It's mountain biking.

You're going also. Yeah. And mountain biking, you're going up and down. You're moving all over the place. Much more novel environments. There's. There's more going on. There's more going on for the brain. There's much more fast twitch muscle response work, more dynamic agility. Okay.

Swimming, three. So that's really low.

Badminton, six, seven.

Tennis, eight. Wow. Tennis higher than badminton.

So I don't know and I'm not sure they know, but here I think this is it. Tennis tends to come with clubs. More social. There's more social around the tennis than I think around badminton. Badminton is a little social, but I think tennis is like these huge, big social structures. Skiing also in snowboarding, when you look at like the action sports, that'll give you like a social structures. Right, right. There's whole social structures around that.

There are rituals around.

I mean, horseback riding is probably really high as well, and there's big sort of social structures around. Around that as well.

So let's continue.

Horseback riding depends on what kind of riding you do and what kind of riding. No, I mean, but like, are you aggressive? Are you trotting? Are you walking and trotting? The more vigorous the better is sort of the point I'm making on that one. You could be sort of trail riding versus inside. Sorry, buddy. A nine. Nine.

Pickleball.

Pickleball. I think I've been asked this a bunch because it's so popular right now. It seems like it's going to fall in somewhere between like badminton and tennis, but with a bonus peak performance. Aging in a sentence. Right. You want to rock till you drop. You have to regularly engage in challenging creative and social activities that demand dynamic there's that word again. Deliberate play. And take place in novel outdoor environments. So pickleball isn't exactly novel outdoor environments, but it's a challenging, creative and social activity. It's dynamic. Right. It's all five of those categories, not ton of strength. So you probably want to add some strength training in and you want to be stretching before and after. Right. For flexibility kind of thing. But it's very playful. Like the whole thing about the big rackets, the whole thing about it, and play is incredibly important. So some of the activities that are higher up on the list, I think are there because some of them are more playful because we know play matters so much. Martial arts, I think martial arts are remarkably good. There's a lot of anecdote about martial arts being really supportive of longevity. And certainly I've got tons of friends who are involved in mixed martial arts on different levels. And you see amazing, amazing martial artists in their 70s, in their 80s, folks you would never, ever, ever want to go anywhere near a ring with. And they're, you know, 30, 40 years older than. Than you. So you see that all the time. And again, it's a very dynamic.

Right. So what score would you give it put.

I'd probably put it in the 10 category.

In the 10 category. Okay. Surfing.

10.

Surfing is a 10.

10. Well, ski. So skiing may get its own category. And this is. There was a. A Japanese team that was looking at the best sport for longevity, and he said skiing, and it's because of how it loads the legs in terms of bone density. So what's interesting is if you want to preserve bone density, you actually, you really have to put a lot of loading. And you can't do it all. It has to be like a gradual to heavy loading of the legs. So it. Skiing actually mimics the way the leg should be loaded for preserving bone density, according to this Japanese team. I haven't seen that duplicated, so from a scientific perspective, I'd want more information, but I'm sharing it.

That's.

And it is. It is biased sort of towards my book. So I like it.

That's incredible.

I mean, skiing from a bone. From the bone density thing. There are other hacks to bone densities. Like there's other other ways around it, but I found it fascinating.

Okay, so let's continue skateboarding.

Yes. The hesitancy is that, as a general rule, trouble with a lot of these, the combat sports, the action sports, you don't. You still don't want to get injured. Right, Right. Our recovery tools, our regenerative medicine, lung, those sorts of things are getting really good, much better.

So you want to avoid injury.

You do want to avoid injury and you can skate? No, I do. I think skating is a great activity, but it is a hard activity to learn.

So skiing has a lower injury rate than skateboarding.

It's just you're falling on snow instead of concrete. So if you're going to learn to skate those sorts of things, you. Body armor, right. Those sorts of like be, you know, be really careful with it. You know, all these things. Some of this is about flow science and there's a whole bunch of science that backs this up. But older adults, the M.O. you want to go slow to go fast, right. So whatever you're doing, you want to sort of see if you can start building with like an established motor pattern, something you can do all the time with, you know, not a lot of fear, no chance of good going wrong, and just build slowly on top of those things.

Okay, now a couple of popular ones. Yoga.

So I'm going to say something incredibly controversial and I'm by the way, I've done yoga for 30 years, so I'm. And I think yoga is foundational for peak performance aging and I will come out and advocate for it. But there are a lot of studies now that are looking at the benefits of yoga and they're not finding them in comparison to a bunch of other sports. And they're finding some dangers around like the slow stretching of muscles. A healthy body has fascia that rebounds quickly. Right? Right. And if you're doing second to a minute long stretches, you're sort of stretching out the fascia. A good body worker who works with fascia will say, never hold a stretch for longer than 15 seconds. So I don't know how to put a number on yoga because my number would be a lot higher than sort of.

So we're going to avoid where the.

Number on yoga right now in case.

The lululemon crowd comes after us. Just two more ballroom dancing.

So I think dancing is a great peak performance aging activity of any kind. It's combines a lot of different things. You may have to augment it a little bit with some strength training, some other physical stuff. And I said as part of the formula, if you really, really want to want to maintain physical and mental function, you want to regularly and do activities that take place in novel outdoor environments that is not going to be ballroom dancing. Novel outdoor environments quickly matter for a couple of reasons. One novelty is a flow trigger. So flow. We talked about how it matters for peak performance. Aging when we're novelty will help drive us into flow. Two, outdoor environments have two benefits for us. One, we know from positive psychology or at 20 minute walk in the woods will outperform SSRIs. Right? Improve serotonin levels, lower stress levels. There are nine known causes of aging, biological causes of aging. They're all what they have in common. Stress and inflammation. So anything that fights stress and inflammation is an anti aging tool. So nature really does that. So that's great. But as a bonus, you want to preserve cognitive function. You want, as I said earlier, the birth of new neurons and new neural networks. What's called synaptic plasticity. That stuff comes out of the hippocampus. Hippocampus is the part of the brain that does long term memory. Also does map making and location. So the, the brain is designed basically.

So if you had to give a score score to ballroom dancing.

Seven. Seven.

Okay. That, that's, that's not too bad. That's not too bad.

I don't know. I'm not really like a great scorer of these things and you know.

No, but, but, but you have the science background, right? And, and your gut is probably a pretty good indicator.

No. 1.

We're not saying that these scores are hard science.

Right.

But Stephen has gone through a ton of research. But what I find interesting about this whole conversation is it's changed my perspective.

It.