Last week I talked about the importance of doing things that you don’t want to do in order to develop your willpower. If I could sum that newsletter up in a few words it would be, MOTIVATION FOLLOWS ACTION. If you want to be motivated, you have to start taking action first, not the other way around.
This week I want to reiterate what it is you need to take action on in order to become a Super Ager, which to me is someone that is able to live not only the length of their life but also the breadth of it. There is so much talk about life span, but a Super Ager is also someone concerned with health span. It is someone that wants to live not only a long time, but wants to live well during the vast majority of that time. In other words they also have a long health span. And the closer that health span and life span are to being the same, the better.
Which brings me to a recent interview that was shared with me this week of Dr Peter Attia on CBS news. Peter Attia is a longevity physician and he has dedicated his career to helping people live not only longer, but better. In other words, he is trying to help people become Super Agers.
Dr Attia has popularized the term ‘marginal decade’, which he refers to the last 10 years of a persons life. A period often characterized by a significant decline in physical and cognitive health, mobility and independence. He advocates for proactively training in earlier decades to build the strength and fitness needed to make this final decade as vibrant and functional as possible.
Although he advocates and uses a lot of medical testing, he feels that a neglected part of testing is finding out how strong a patient is, how fit they are, how well they move? And he believes that these tests are even more predictive of how long and well you are going to live than what you might get out of bloodwork testing for cholesterol or high blood pressure.
In fact, the data is pretty clear. He says that the key indicator to overall health and longevity is our muscle mass (how strong we are) and our VO2 max, or our capacity to use oxygen to power our muscles, heart and lungs.
Dr Attia says the best drug to delay physical and cognitive decline is exercise. Specifically “cardio to burn fat, intense intervals for VO2 max and weight lifting to maintain strength and muscle mass. “
He also gets his patients to eat a lot of protein, more than double what the current nutritional guidelines recommend.
The Exercise Program to Improve Longevity
As a recap, along with a high protein diet, the exercise program he recommends to improve life span and health span is:
1) Heavy resistance training
2) Low intensity, high duration (Zone 2) cardio
3) High Intensity, low duration (HIIT or SIT) cardio
And I can’t help but put in a little plug here for our studio. Dr Attia charges well above $100,000 to take a patient on and while we don’t have his degree, and no doubt we don’t have his fancy equipment or testing abilities we can definitely help you get stronger, improve your VO2 max and coach you on how to eat to get leaner and healthier in your older years so you too, can be the model for what an amazing ‘marginal decade’ can look like!
