Weekly Workout Routine with Dr. Peter Attia To Max Out Your Longevity

- Morning, Motivators. I went on a ride the other day, listened to a podcast, you might have heard of it. It was a guy named Bro Jogan, something along those lines. And he had on Dr. Peter Attia, who is one of the world's leading experts in longevity research. How do you age well, how do you stay alive longer, and how do you stay healthy longer so that the time that you're alive is much more enjoyable. If you don't know Dr. Peter Attia, he started out as a cardiac surgeon. He has a background in mathematics, so at one point he ended up leaving and going into investment banking and finance, has a really big background in crunching data, crunching numbers, analyzing studies, and sifting through data to come to conclusions. Found out that he's genetically predisposed to having heart problems, and with the understanding that the number one cause of death in adults is from heart failure, he started looking very deeply into how do you reduce the chance of heart failure, which then expanded into how do you live an overall better life. He now has a practice where he consults with people privately, taking care of their lifestyle, of their strength training, of their cardiovascular training, of their overall health. And he does so with this background of what does the data show us in mind. It's been really interesting to follow him because he is so data-driven that over the course of just three, four years he's even changed what supplements he takes, how he approaches exercise. And that's why I am so intrigued because I want to know what the data says, what is he actually doing day to day? And now we know, so let's dive into what the podcast actually said. - I think exercise is the single most important longevity drug we have, bar none. Like if you were, if you said like, "I want to go deep down the rabbit hole of living longer, what do I need to do?" It's like a super well-crafted exercise program that is geared towards strength, muscle mass, and cardio respiratory fitness. - So it's super general to just say, well, you've got to have strength, muscle mass and cardio-respiratory fitness. I knew that that's what he believes in, but I didn't know what he actually does. - All right, so I do my four days a week. I do four sessions a week of the 45 minute zone two, so I'm titrating my wattage to keep lactate at two millimole. I do one session a week of a higher end anaerobic exercise. I typically do it on a stair machine, you know, those rotating stations where I just do like, I'll do a one minute sprint, a two minute easy climb, one minute sprint, two minute easy climb, or four on four off on a bike. - What particular exercises do you think are the best to achieve that result? - So we start with a base of zone two. So this zone two is that lactate thing I was talking about, so your zone two is defined as the highest level of aerobic output that you can generate while keeping lactate below two millimole. So I think a bike is the easiest way to do this because the... - Stationary or? - Stationary, just because you can keep it steady state. You know, when you're on the road, you're all over the place. So if you're on like a stationary bike and also wattage is such an easy metric for people to understand, so how many Watts are you putting out, right? The first thing we would do is say you probably need to be doing at least three hours a week of that zone two, which is building an aerobic base. So four 45 minute sessions at zone two, constantly driving it up. And honestly, one session of VO two max training per week. - So from a cardio standpoint, the vast majority of what he's doing is zone two, exactly what we've been talking about. Whether you use the math method or your aerobic threshold, or we use the Karvonen heart rate method, a low intensity training zone keeping your lactate levels low so that your stress hormones are nice and low. But then one little session of a pop of really big intensity. We're just talking hard, in that really intense kind of training zone. What does he do about strength training though? - And then four sessions of strength a week, four strength sessions a week. And that's it like, I mean, this is the least I've ever exercised in my life. - So then four strength sessions a week, and that's it. If we total it all up, we're looking at three hours of low intensity zone two, probably somewhere between about 40 and 60 minutes of a workout that is high-intensity, then four, again let's say it's 40 to 60 minutes, of strength so somewhere around eight to nine hours of work, largely focused on low intensity training and strength training with just a little pop of intensity is what he does for health longevity. And if you look at him, he's a super fit guy. He's not just somebody who writes about this stuff, but how do we translate this sort of thing to those people that want to do endurance sports? Well, oddly enough, I didn't plan on this. I didn't know this, but it mimics a lot of what the motive method is. Let's explain. Broadly speaking when people aren't training for a specific race, so outside of three months before most races, we're recommending that athletes train somewhere in that eight to nine hours of maximum total training throughout the week. Past that point, you start getting diminishing health returns, diminishing performance returns. So just keep people up at that seven to nine hours sort of a week, which is going to keep you healthy and it's going to keep you ready to go and do any sort of endurance event. Within that seven to nine hours a week, we're spending the vast majority of the cardio training time at a very, very low intensity at that zone two. We do have one or two sessions of high intensity, but it's not a huge amount. It's 15 to 60 second bursts, so you're not spending a ton of time with very high lactate levels, with very high stress levels. This is going to keep the body's ability to move quickly to recruit a whole bunch of muscle groups to actually go and fire really well by just having tiny little bursts. So you're going to have that nice base of low end cardio aerobic fitness, and then the ability to push really fast when it's time to move fast and start doing the fast training for the race. But during that seven to nine hours of training per week when people are outside of a race specific training plan, I want them to load up on strength training. So during this period, we recommend as much as four strength sessions a week, being about 30 minutes in length. I recommend three of them as actual strength sessions and one as a yoga session, because I do believe that mobility makes a big difference, being able to bend and twist in different ranges of motion. The super interesting thing about this is that I didn't come up with the motive method based off of what Peter Attia or really anyone else has said. But what I've experienced is that the more you go down the rabbit hole of Pub Med and looking at research reports, all signs kind of point to the same thing, that if you want good performance and you want to have health at the same time, you need to spend a fair amount of time doing strength training, a fair amount of time doing low-intensity training, and then a tiny little bit of time at high intensity training. But the endurance sports culture and what most coaches give is unfortunately, workouts, workouts, workouts, lots of intense, let's challenge it every single day. And then when we come down, eh we'll come down just a bit, maybe give you a rest when you need it. And that is not good for performance, and it's not good for health. If you want an endurance sports training plan that accomplishes all this, our app that you can try at app.mymotive.com is what this is all based around. It's how do you get to your races and accomplish all these goals and perform really well while staying healthy. So all the workouts are given to you, all you have to do is put in how much you want to train every single week, when your races are, and all the workouts will appear every single day for you to keep you healthy and get you ready for those races. So check that out at app.mymotive.com, really cool that we got to see a peak inside what Peter Attia is doing. And if you found this really helpful and insightful, hit the like button below. Love it if you did. Later, Motivators.