Podcast hosted by the Longevity Forum
Norman Lazarus was interviewed for this podcast by Declan Doogan, Chief Medical Officer of Juvenescence, about why it's important to find an exercise you enjoy, the benefits of weight resistance, and how to optimise your exercise heart rate.
What we think of as diseases of ageing are really diseases of exercise deficiency - these include heart diseases, hypertension, vascular disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes... all gnawing away at the root of our lifestyle. Most of them are preventable. To reduce your risk, you've got to change your lifestyle. Exercise was intrinsic to the survival of the human species back in the cave days, and it's no different now.
Removing exercise has a very negative impact on your health. So, people can be split into exercisers and non-exercises - two pathways that lead to very different outcomes: health, and disease.
The good news is, it doesn't have to be hard. You don't have to be a champion. It's not about winning anything.
What exercise is best for longevity?
Not all exercise is the same - and the 'best' exercise is different for everyone. There is no particular best exercise for longevity. Don't do anything unless you enjoy it, because if you don't enjoy it, you'll eventually give up - it feels too much like medicine. Try different things: cycling, swimming, aerobics class, badminton, dancing, team sports, group or individual exercise- until you find something you look forward to doing.
What intensity should I exercise at?
Easy! Get yourself a watch with a pulse monitor. Then accelerate your heart rate to an effective level and you're all set. (Sauntering around the block isn't enough!)
Whatever exercise you do, you need to optimise your heart rate so that you're working at 60% of your maximum heart rate.
Calculate your optimum heart rate using this simple formula:
Maximum heart rate = (220 – your age)
So step one, work out 220 minus your age: If you're 20, it's 200. If you're 50, it's 170.
Your want to aim to work out with a heart rate that is 60% of that figure. (Cheat the maths by multiplying by 0.6 on a calculator.)
Examples:
Age 20, optimal heart rate = 120
Age 50, optimal heart rate = 102
Age 70, optimal heart rate = 90
Whatever exercise you're doing, you want to accelerate your heart rate to this number. As we get older, we can do less - we drop down all the time and can't get our maximum pulse back up - but the workout will be just as good, the effect is the same.
How does weight training help you live longer?
Resistance training is important for everyone - but it is particularly important for women, because their bones lose strength after menopause. A fall with weak bones can be catastrophic in older age. You want to avoid that at all costs. But building muscle capacity helps to strengthen your whole musculoskeletal frame against the forces of gravity, and keep you upright.
This is not about weight lifting, though. We don't want to go full-on Schwarzenegger. It's to maintain lean muscle mass. Push those muscles! See how far they'll go - this is something you can build up, and you'll be surprised how fast.
Give your muscles some resistance to work against - whether resistance band, gym weights or pushing against your own body weight; look for anything that you can do 10 reps within a minute, but only just. It can't be too easy and it shouldn't break you.
It's not the speed that is important, it's the resistance. Keep those muscles on the edge of what they can do.
What happens if you don't exercise?
If you choose the other path – not to exercise – you are on a pathological pathway, in a sub-optimal body. Pathology and physiology are dictated by your lifestyle. They don't really cover this in medical school; they're about treating disease, not encouraging health. These diseases of exercise deficiency that I mentioned earlier.
Imagine at 50 years old, you decide not to do exercise and instead choose the pathway towards disease. You will then eventually become a burden to your children when you reach that disease stage.
We're all going to get old and suffer from something that kills us – but we want that to come quickly, right at the end, not to be drawn out for decades and load it onto our loved ones, just because we didn't want to exercise. And yet, so many people take this path.
It's important to raise awareness about this. It's so simple and it could change the whole shape of society. Why not start today?
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