Vishen Lakhiani breaks down a 2.5-hour weekly routine for staying fit as you age: 150-300 minutes of aerobic activity, strength training twice a week, and three days of balance, flexibility, and agility work. Tennis, skiing, and racket sports count if they hit multiple categories. The payoff is better brain health and fewer falls.
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There's five categories of functional fitness that you want to train over time. Strength, stamina, agility, balance, and flexibility. If you want peak performance aging, not just general healthy aging, peak performance, you want to be at your best. It's 150 to 300 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous aerobic activity. For stamina strength, you got to train twice a week, two days a week, and then you need three balance, flexibility and agility days. Or you need to find sports that combine all those things. So when you use the term dynamic, dynamic is a single term that means it hits all five of those categories. Basically, tennis is a really dynamic activity. Skiing, snowboarding, a lot of the action sports are really good for this. A lot of the racket sports seem as well if you combine them together, like strength and balance and agility at the same time. So mogul skiing is a really good example of this, where it's an uneven surface, you're being bounced around, takes a lot of leg strength and a lot of stamina, but it also a lot of coordination. So that promotes the birth of new blood vessels in the brain and the birth of new neurons. So if you want to stave off cognitive decline, Alzheimer's, dementia, all that stuff. So if you're standing and you're doing a yoga pose, tree pose, or you're holding one foot, that's balance or ballet, that's balance. Agility is more dynamic. It's when you're using balance skills at speed. So when you're bouncing down a mogul field, if I'm jumping side to side really quickly, that's an agility training. You're training fast twitch muscle fibers. That's different than say, tree pose at speed, right? Like there's a slight difference between them. And agility matters because fast twitch muscle fibers decline over time. Balance matters because if you're not going to die of cancer or heart disease, you're going to fall down, break a hip, and die of a secondary infection like pneumonia. That's the major cause of death among people over 70. If, if you're not killed by one of the major diseases, you want to train them both. Fat agility is giving you the fast twitch muscle response that declines over time. Balance is, is giving you good proprioception, vestibular awareness, those sorts of things. There's slightly different things going on. Big fancy words in those sentences.
