Exercise and Longevity - Insights from Paul Taylor - The Paul Taylor Podcast | Expert in Hardiness and Mental Fitness

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Many of us have been taught about avoiding stress. What
if this attempt to escape stress is not the solution.
Paul Taylor is going to talk to us, share with
us how to embrace discomfort. That doesn't sound good to me,
to not actually survive but thrive in the modern world.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
I hate this whole misis thing.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Ah go to pain to get benefit. It makes sense,
but I wish it didn't. Paul's a former British Royal
Navy Air Crew officer, former adjunct professor of the University
of San Francisco, a neuroscientist, exercise physiologist, nutritionist, currently completing
a PhD in Applied psychology where he's developing and testing
resilient strategies with the Australian Defense Science Technology Group in

(00:50):
the University of Newcastle. He was voted Australia's Fitness Industry
Presenter of the Year twice and in twenty twenty two
published a book Death by Comfort, Oh God, I hate that,
which won the Australian.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Business Book Award. There's so many.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Massacres out there and it turns out there right, which
is bloody. Annoying ladies a little, but open your minds
fast than you see both, Doug get too comfortable, obviously
insert your pins at the origin of the talk and
please join me on welcoming Paul Taylor.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Thanks Mark. I've got to talk about the impact of
exercise on longevity, and I am here to convince you
that nothing that has been talked about at this conference
has anywhere near the impact on longevity as exercise does.
The stuff that I'm talking about that is within our choice,
and hopefully that will become quite clear as we go through.

(01:51):
And so for me, the problem statement is that we
are currently the most overweit, most depressed, medicated, and most
addicted cohort of adults that there's ever been, not necessarily
in this room, I would hope it's not representative of the
Australian population. But think about this, the most overweight, the press, medicated,

(02:13):
and addicted cohort of adults has ever been, and life
has never been so good. So clearly something is wrong
with the way that we're living modern life. And for me,
a lot of it comes down to this picture. This
is what your genome and my genome is wired for
being a hunter gatherer. And I'm going to give you

(02:34):
my favorite quote in any research journal I've ever read
from the Journal of Applied Physiology in twenty twelve by
Professor Frank Booth, a legendary exercise physiologist. In this research paper,
he was talking about the human genome. Here's what he said.
The human genome has not changed in over forty five
thousand years. The current human genome requires and expects us

(02:58):
to be highly physically active for normal functioning. Nope, the
way he didn't say optimal functioning. He said normal functioning.
Yet we don't move very much at all, which we
will unpack. So a lot of it. As I said
this about modern life, and I want to show you
a little five second movie about modern life, and I

(03:19):
just want to see if anybody relates to this. Oh back,
who is on a day like that? Like almost every
day like that?

Speaker 1 (03:35):
Right?

Speaker 2 (03:35):
So the number one excuse for not exercising is a
lack of time, and it's basically the craziness of our
modern life that comes into it. But let's talk about
the guidelines. So what's the physical activity guidelines in this country?
And I know shout it. So it is actual one

(04:01):
hundred and fifty to three hundred minutes of moderate physical
activity a week or seventy five to one hundred and
fifty minutes of vigorous or a combination thereof, spread over
at least five sessions and incorporating at least two strength
training sessions. And for kids and teenagers it's sixty minutes
of moderate to vigorous physical activity a day. So how

(04:24):
do we track well? When you look at in terms
of age groups, we don't do very well at all.
More people do better of meeting the one hundred and
fifty spread over a week, but then those who do
it five days or more is a little bit less.
And then in terms of the strength graining training guidelines,
it's pretty pathetic. And then when you combine them all,

(04:48):
you're looking at and our breads up about twenty percent
of people who meet the physical activity guidelines. You know teenagers.
Guess what percent of teenagers meet the physical activity guidelines?
Have a guest shout it out. One percent, ten percent,
fifteen two, two percent. Right, So let's unpack this a

(05:12):
little bit. When we look at the impact of sees
so socioeconomic status, we see that the most disadvantage actually
do more of them do nothing at all, And the
impact of century behavior. I'm just going to talk about
one thing because I'm talking about exercise, but who sort

(05:34):
of the Dallas bed rest story. When I when I
read this, that just blew my mind. So they took
a bunch of people, Now this was done fifty years ago.
So they took a bunch of young males and they
put them in three weeks of complete bed rest and
looked at their VO two max, the impact on their
VEO two max, their fitness, and their left inentricular stiffness.

(05:56):
And it basically they had a twenty seven percent I
think was reduced reduction in VIEO two max at about
twenty six percent increase in left ventricular stiffness right, which
was an interesting study. Then they trained them for eight
weeks and not only did they get all that back,
but they improved significantly. But the beauty of this is
that they traced them up thirty years later and brought

(06:17):
them back in and they had been normal individuals for
those thirty years, and then they did their their their
their VIEO two max again and their stiffness, and it
turns out that three weeks of bad rest was worse
for the heart than thirty years of aging. That after
three weeks bad rest, their hearts were worse than what

(06:38):
they averaged people and what they were in their fifties.
So that just shows you the impact of sedentary behavior.
And now let's talk about our genome. So a lot
of people debate about whether those recommendations are optimal for me,
they're minimal for me. Optimal came from this study and

(07:00):
a bunch of Harvard researchers went and studied the Hadza,
one of the last true hunter gatherer tribes left on Earth.
They live in East Africa and Tanzania, and ninety percent
of all the food that they at at the time
of the study they got from hunting and gathering. So
what they did is they put physical activity trackers on
to measure their steps, but they also put heart rate
monitors on them to measure their moderate to vigorous physical activity.

(07:24):
And here's what they find. So the black is and
the black lines are data from one hundred and eleven
and different nations modern societies, and what they find is
that hads of women and girls basically move twice the
amount of steps of women and girls in modern society.
Hads of men and boys do three to four times

(07:45):
the amount of steps of men and boys in modern society.
But the big thing came when they looked at their
moderate to vigorous physical activity. Remembering that vast majority of
Australians don't do one hundred and fifty minutes of moderate
the HADSA do nine hundred and forty five minutes of
combined moderate to vigorous physical activity every single week. They

(08:10):
move in terms of intensity seven to ten times the
amount of the average Australian or average American or average
brit And when you understand the impact of exercise on
our biology, which I will now start to go through,
and it starts to become very clear why we're struggling
with such chronic diseases, both physically and mentally. So many

(08:32):
of you will have seen this seminal paper, the Hallmarks
of Aging. I'm sure lots of you are familiar with it.
I'm not sure how many people then, so that that
paper at the bottom coming out looking at exercise attenuating
all of the major hallmarks of euging. So I'm going
to go through this quite quickly because I've still had
a lot. So there are the different hallmarks of aging,

(08:53):
and basically I've summarized each one, so let's go through it.
So in terms of genomic stability, our instability. Exercise enhances
our DNA repair and oxidative damage by enhancing those endogenous antioxides.
And he's talked about that earlier on superoxide dispature catalyas
glutotharion perioxid is for me, they are the special forces

(09:16):
of your antioxidant defense system, right whereas supplemental antioxidants it's
like your dad's army. I can't really avoid the military comparisons,
being ex military, but it's thinking about who you like
guarding yourself. Then, in terms of that intracellular environment, we
know that exercise reduces inflammatory side of kinds and increases

(09:39):
anti inflammatory side of kinds. When it comes to telemere attrition,
we know that exercise increases telomerius activity and actually reduces
oxidative stress. So it works on both sides of the ledger.
And then from epigenetic alterations, it actually influences our epigenetic markers,
potentially reversing those age related changes. When it to cell

(10:01):
your sinescence, it actually reduces the accumulation and their pro
inflammatory secretions, so it actually helps us maintain tissue health,
and there it actually supports our stem cell health and
proliferation through the activity of Mayer kinds, which we will
do a deep dive on in a second, and then
loss of proteostasis. Exercise actually boosts the function of protein

(10:24):
quality control systems such as heat shot proteins, Work's Crysta
Wilshe Here, I was just thinking, which she was doing
that presentations warning where have you been all my life?
That was awesome? That home mito or makes it. We
need to do it double act at some stage, and
then dysregulated nutrient sensaling and atal sensitivity gets improved, regulates

(10:49):
m TOR. I will have stuff to say about m
tor too. Many people from me are trying to suppress
m tour. M TOR inside muscle cells is very different
gravy then m tour outside right, And I think we're
going to see negative effects of people doing too much
fasting and calorie restriction. And I'll expand on that later on.

(11:11):
And then in terms of your mitochondria, exercise is manna
for your mitochondria. It is just the best medicine for
your mitochondria. So that's a bit of a summary of that.
And then I just put this in. This is out
of the paper and for those who want to get
a little bit geek here and do a little bit
of dive into it. I'll let you do that on

(11:34):
your own. But aghi, and I'm just looking at some
of the ways that exercise actually exerts its effects on
all those different hallmarks of eugene. So let's not talk about,
for me, exercise as a magic pill. So this research paper,

(11:54):
these are two of the word's greatest exercise physiologists, Peterson Insulting,
and they produce this mark paper showing that exercise predents
and or treats twenty six of the most common chronic
diseases that we suffer from. Can you imagine if the
pharmaceutical industry produced a pill that could do all of that?

(12:15):
Who take that shit, anybody? I'll be all over that
like a spider monkey. But exercise has been shown to
do that, and we know that it exerts some of
its effects because it actually controls our gene expression. So
Professor Frank Booth showed more than a decade ago that

(12:37):
every time we exercise there are three positive waves of
gene expression, and the first is about these stress response
genes heat chuck proteins and other classes of stress response genes.
So I've spoken to thousands of people about exercise over
the years, and some people say to me, yes, I'm
into it. I love it. Other people say to me,

(12:58):
I don't like it because it makes me un comfortable.
And my response to them is, it's supposed to be
bloody uncomfortable. That is why exercise is good for you,
because it's a stressor and it activates adaptive mechanisms that
actually make us function better. Exercise is good for you

(13:20):
because it is the best hormetic stressor that we know of,
and it's evolutionarily conserved. We see it across species and
across timelines, and sorry, let me just go back. Because
there are these stress response genes. They get released, these
heat shock proteins get released inside your cells, and they

(13:40):
run around and they mop up the damage and then
they hang around the cell looking for further damage. But
they then also trigger the activation of hundreds of metabolic
priority genes that just improve your entire ecosystem, both your
body and your brain. And then we have another wave
of gene expression, your mitochondrial enzyme genes. It's been now
been demonstrated that exercise not only improves mitochondrial health and function,

(14:04):
but can actually induce mitochondria biogenesis right, and particularly high
intensity interval training right is very very good at inducing
mitochondrial biogenesis. And we know that he heat shock proteins
that I talked about, they're released in the brain and
the peripheral and the immune testues. They're just released all
the way throughout your body and have these positive effects.

(14:28):
But if we think of exercise as medicine, we now
know the ingredients, and the ingredients are called myocints. And
when I did my master's degree in exercise science nearly
thirty years ago, we were told that what they knew
about myokines, and they told us that maocines basically help
break down energy glucose and fat to provide energy for

(14:51):
the sale, and then it helped to remodel the muscle,
help to make it bigger, faster, stronger. We now know
so much more about my and there's multiple, multiple MAO kinds.
And back when I was did there was a handful
of marakinds that have been identified. We have now identified
more than six hundred MIO kinds and we only know

(15:15):
what about sixty of them do. But they have positive
effects throughout all of our organs. Right, So if we
look at this, we know these maya kines get released
outside of the contracting muscle cell. So it doesn't matter
whether you're running, lifting weed, its gardening, doing yoga, dancing,
anything that you're doing that is creating muscular contraction is

(15:37):
producing marakinds and they're produced in proportion to the intensity
of that contraction. And we now know they get outside
of your muscle into your circulation, have a positive impact
on your immune system, positive impact on your entire stress
response system. They have a positive impact throughout your gastrul
testo system, even improved the structure, the diversity, the function

(16:00):
of your gut microbiome. They help your pancreas to secreate insulin,
your liberty, dispose of glucose, and they help remodel bone
and blood vessels throughout your life. And then in the
brain they do extra special work. So a number of
different male kinds end up in the production of BDNF,
which most people will be a word of brian to
rite neurotropic factor, which helps you to grown your brain

(16:23):
cells and create connections between brain cells and protect your
brain sales against damage. So these MIO kinds for me
are one of the frontiers of medicine. And part of
the issue becomes as we get older. As we get older,
we become more and more anabolic resistant. Right. And there's

(16:46):
a couple of things that happen as we get older.
So who here has noticed that they're pretty gone with
it and blame der metabolism? Anybody tell the true and
shame the devil? Or had heard their clients talk about it?
Anybody heard that? Right? Yeah? Okay. What we know is
that as you age from your twenties and your thirties
and to your forties into your fifties sixty seventies, there

(17:07):
are people's metabolism slows and one hundred percent of the
decrease in metabolic rate up until the sixties is explained
by loss of muscle. So people get fat not because
their metabolism goes, it's because they lose muscle that then

(17:27):
drives down their metabolic rate. And as we get older,
we become more anabolic resistant. Right. And there's lots of
debate about protein intakes and again that some of the
longevity crowd trying to reduce enptor and keeping protein low.
If you keep protein low, it is an absolute disaster.
What we now know is that the guidelines around protein

(17:50):
the RDAs rdias, which haven't been looked at for fifty years,
we're based on very flawed nitrogen balanced studies, and recent
research suggests that they're less than half what they should be.
We're actually not recommending, particularly for people older than fifty
one point six to two grams of protein per kilogram

(18:12):
of body weight, right, which is a bucket load of protein.
And what happens is people the age is they eat
less protein rather than more protein, which then compounds this
anabolic resistance. And when you lose muscle, you lose miokinks
this is as simple as that you lose the ability
to produce the world's best medicine. I think that's that's

(18:33):
how I like to simplify it to people. And it's
not unusual for somebody to hit the age of seventy five,
are really and they have lost fifty percent of all
of their muscle mass. Now I don't know does that
have an impact on miokinds, but it also has an
impact on daily function. Right. And if somebody of the
ADS is sixty five trips and falls and breaks a

(18:55):
hipper of pelvis because they don't have muscular power that
ability to recover because we lose our fast twitched fibers. First,
they got a fifty percent chance of being dead within
the next five years. So falls are the sixth biggest
killer of people the age fifty five, sorry, sixty five,
and they're the fifth biggest killer of people the age

(19:15):
of seventy five and older. And then what happens if
people do have a fall, They stay indoors more and
then they completely destroy their brain function, and that the
whole cycle gets worse and worse and worse. And for me,
the trigger is losing muscle, or one of the big
triggers is losing muscle. And so let's talk about that
whole aging process and anabolic and catabolic hormones, and we

(19:38):
know that exercise is basically the best way to counter this.
So typically as we get advancing age, we get reductions
in testosterone and DHA free testosterone, and we also IGF
one EH human growth hormone insually goes up. Steroids, our
cordico steroids, cordisole goes up. But exercise, if you look
up the top pretty much hunters all of those things, right.

(20:03):
And it's a combination of cardiovascar chain which has been
talked about ad nauseum for years. For me, there's been
nowhere near enough emphasis on lifting heavy shit. And every
person in this room needs to lift heavy shit. It's
as simple as that. I don't know if I can

(20:24):
put it any clearer. So let's not Let's talk about
direct studies and longevity. So all these observational studies I'm
very skeptical of, particularly when they ask people about exercise
and what they eat. Why is that flawed? Because people
lie right, They overestimate their exercise, and they underestimate their nutrition.

(20:45):
And actually Prentice at Alan nineteen eighty four to the
study with w labeled water that basically showed that normal
way people would underreport their calories by about fifty a
day and obese people would underreport their calories by about
one thousand a day. Right, So people lie right, and
they forget, but mostly they lie. This for me was

(21:07):
a great study because they all had done twelve EATEDCD
stress testing on their hearts and had votwo max testing,
So it's not about how much exercised you. It's a
hard outcome, right, So your vHIP max somebody familiar with
that term, your cardio respiraty fitness how much oxygen you
can take in and use with your muscles, and it
is the gold standard measure of your cardio respiratory fitness.

(21:30):
So all these people were in their fifties and sixties
at the time in the study was one hundred and
twenty two thousand of them just over and then they
followed them for fifteen years, right, so a pretty good study, right.
And they looked then at after fifteen years, the bunch
of them died and a bunch of them didn't. And
then they came back and they looked at the hazard
ratios on the data fifteen years previously, and they wanted

(21:51):
to know did their cardio respiratory fitness fifteen years ago
influence the risk of death? And did it ever? Right?
And what you say is a dose response. You don't
see a dose response in medicine. You very rarely see
a dose response in supplements, right. But there was basically
no upper benefit. So they put them in this is
the lowest twenty five percent of vio to max. Then

(22:14):
twenty five to fifty, fifty to seventy five high was
the top twenty five elite. They carved out the top
three percent, right, So the hazard base. It was basically,
people could cut the risk of death in the next
fifteen years in half by going from the lowest category
to below average. Now, if there's anybody in the audience

(22:37):
that has found a supplement that can reduce the risk
of death in half and with a very small dose,
I'd be very keen to hear about that supplement right now.
Here was looking at the hazard racaris. And what I
liked about this study is they looked at a number
of cole morbidities that people had as well. Look at this,

(22:58):
having end stage renal disease kidneys are packing up was
about the same death risk as somebody going from above
average to low levels of fitness. That's how powerful it is.
And if you look at low to below average right
just below the second green line that I've got this
thing is not very clever at this, but anyway, ninety

(23:21):
five percent increased risk of death. This is like having
corniardy disease, diabetes and hypertension and a fairy comes along
with a magic wand and makes all that shit disappear.
That's the impact. And that's just going from low to
below average right And when they compart low to elite,
the people in the lowest twenty five percent had a

(23:44):
four hundred and four percent increased risk of death in
the next fifteen years versus the elite. Right, you could say, well,
that study is a little bit flawed because those people
had some sort of issue that they went to get
checked out. But let's take this study here, which was
a massive study on three quarters of a million people

(24:07):
that followed them for many, many years and find pretty
much the same thing that looking at the survival risk
and there is basically the lines, but we see the
exact same dose response in terms of survival. Okay, so
let's not talk about The next most important thing after

(24:31):
your cardio respiratory fitness is your muscle strength. I don't
know if anybody's seeing very recent study comm out of
the UK Buyaback showing that your grip strength in your
fifties is highly predictive of whether or not you're going
to get dementia. And it's not just that grip is
doing something specific, it's it's a proxy for overall muscle strength.
It's one that we often use in the different studies.

(24:54):
But what we see is that both muscle mass and
muscle strength are highly predictive of longevity. So I'll just
show you a little thing on here, and this is
looking at people and whether or not they hit the
physical activity guidelines and their hazard reissues of all cause mortality.
And you can see that's very significant and you get

(25:16):
the best when you meet both guidelines. That's why they're there.
We need to not only do our cardio respiratory stuff,
but we also need to do resistance training to preserve
that muscle and particularly the fast twitch fibers that start
to decline first. Now this is this is a study,

(25:37):
and you gotta love academics. They talked about vigorous intermittent
lifestyle physical activity VILPA. I call them movement snacks, but hey, academics,
you gotta love them, right. But this was just looking
at the impact on having these little movement snacks throughout
the day, lasting for one or two minutes, just doing

(26:00):
little bursts of vigorous physical activity, running up and down
the stars or doing a thirty second sprint something like that,
and looking at the impact on all cause mortality down
the bottom right, and so again very significant. So it's
not just about the time in the gym, it's about
doing these little bursts throughout the day. That actually have

(26:23):
a massive, massive impact over time. Now let's just dive
into a little bit into the brain and look some
of the neurobiology. So we know and that sycopedia is
very strongly associated with Alzheimer's disease, cognitive and permit and

(26:44):
cognitive decline. And here you can see the impact on
both mild and severe syclopedia and the hazard ratio for
Alzheimer's disease. And then looking at the impact and high
skeletal muscle mass. Having low scaltal muscle mass is actually

(27:05):
contributing to this. So what happens is when we lose
muscle mass, if you look on the left, we get
much more systemic inflammation because of two things. Number one,
milkinds are going down which are very anti inflammatory, and
we're getting the inflammatory side of kinds going up right.

(27:27):
And then we have the whole impact on insulin metabolism,
which I'm sure people could do an entire talk on that,
and the impact on your cognitive function you have heard
of Alzheimer's disease being called type three diabetes. And then
over on the right and looking at the mitochondrial function
as well. So there are three and very strong pathways

(27:48):
that contribute to all forms of dementia that are impacted
by muscle, and having low scletal muscle mass is actually
a huge risk for these things just because of how
important muscle is, and we need to really start to
think about muscle as a hugely important endocrine organ and

(28:10):
that activates many different pathways. And this actually just looks
at the impact on briant health and mental health, and
exercise has actually been shown to either prevent or treat
all of those mental health and brian health conditions. And
this just looks into some of the mechanisms. So there's
a couple of different mechanisms. Who was the guys today,

(28:35):
Gusto gust what was his name, sorry, right, Gustav Gustaff.
He talked yesterday about caurine in, And so what we
know is that muscle contractions actually mop up caurine in,
helping to prevent neurope degeneration. And then if we look

(28:55):
over on the left hand side here, we know that
exercise produces cathetes, which we think then independently triggers BDNF.
And then there's two other mechanisms, so lactate, so you
know that heavy feeling that you get in your arms
and legs when you're exercising intensely and it feels really uncomfortable,
and your brain says to you, why are we doing
this shit? We can just stop right here, right now.

(29:18):
That's what you need to tell your brain to suck
it up. We used to think that all lactate did
was in per muscle contractions. We know it's not the lactata,
it's the hydrogen i in. We know that lactate is
actually a fuel source. Your liver uses lactate, your heart
uses lactate as an energy source, and your brain uses
lactata as an energy source. We know it crosses the

(29:39):
blood brain barrier and then it triggers the release of BDNF,
as does a risin, which is a mayer kind produced
from both exercise and cold water immersion. We get a
riss release that crosses the blood brain barrier and triggers
the release of BDNF. So there's three independent mechanism five words.
Exercising creases BDNF, and there's a way that it actually

(30:03):
reduces neurodegeneration from impacting upon that cairn in pathway and
this soul. Let's talk about mood and that mark. What
was his name again, Horowitz. I interviewed him on my
podcast about this. Anybody read this paper. This paper completely

(30:24):
debunked the serotonin theory of depression, and they believe that
it's basically stress that causes a whole heap of adopt
depression and mood disorders. And we know that exercise is
very good for your mood. Who knew that? Why? What
is exercise release in your brain that is good for
your mood? And dolphins? Everybody talks about in doorphins, but

(30:47):
your moder mains doing most of the heavy lifting. Dopamine, serotonin, nora, adrenaline.
You also get into orphins, you get endocannabinoids, you get enkephalins,
you get all of these. The way I like to
describe it is, every time you exercise, there is an
orchestrass going on in your brain. There is a neural
sympathy of neurotransmitters that make your brain function better. And

(31:09):
most people get that exercise improves your mood. But I
want to take it back to the quote from Professor
Frank Booth. The current human genome requires and expects us
to be highly physically active for normal functioning. Nowhere is
that more true than in the brain. Most people get
that exercise improves your mood. They don't get that if

(31:31):
you're not highly physically active, you deprive your brain of
the neurotransmitters that it needs to function normally. Right, That's
the key thing. And this other thing I want to
talk about this research paper that basically showed this is
a basically a thirteen minute stress battery, non psychological stressors

(31:54):
that reliably release cortisol. In the dark blue you see
fit active people, and in the light blue you see unfit,
inactive people. What's your take out from that? You don't
need to be a research scientist to decode that fit
people handle psychological stress better, right, and then it has

(32:16):
that knock on effect. So if you can handle the
psychological stress better in your life and then you're not
self medicating all of those things, you're more likely to
exercise more and it has this snowball effect. So we
need to look at exercise not just as a stressor,
but as a modifier of stress. I think that is
pretty key. Now let's talk a little bit about the

(32:40):
gateway behavior. And when I saw this research paper it
was released probably a dec year ago, I nearly paid
myself with excitement because it is the world's greatest neuroscientists
and exercise physiologists at the time collaborating. They did a
big symposium exploring the impact of exercise on neurobiology. Here
is the stuff they come up with, right, So I

(33:02):
just wanted to follow this from the bottom level. When
you exercise, it impacts on all of those brain structures. Cognitive, emotional, executive, motivational,
and motor controls all become improved. Then it positively impacts
your autonomic nervous system and your endocrine system. And at
the same time, throughout the central nervous system, you get

(33:24):
all of this stuff happening repair plastically, neurogenesis, all of
these different neurotransmitters released, all those different growth factors that
improve your learning and memory, directly reduce your risk of
Alzheimer's disease, but also improve your behavior on a whole
haste of things. And we've known for decades that exercise

(33:44):
is a gateway behavior that when people regularly exercise, if
they're unhealthy, and they regularly exercise for three to six months,
they then start doing other healthy behaviors. Right, And so
what happens as the psychologist came along and went, ah,
we know what's going on. It's self concept, right. So

(34:04):
let's just take somebody who's overweight, right, hard, drinking, hard smoking,
has a tattoo, live fast, die young, and their whole
self concept is just you know, I drink and smoke
like a Hell's angel and all of this. Right. Then
somebody convinces them to exercise and they maintain that for
three to six months. What we very often see is

(34:26):
they then start doing other healthy behaviors. So the psychologists
came along and went, aha, it's self concept, right. So
we had this person, let's just call him mister Nirkinferkin,
who has this live fast, die young mentality and that
is his self concept. Then somebody has convincing him to exercise.

(34:47):
Now he's got a different self concept. Oh and the
fit mister Nirkinferkin, and the psychologist said, he has ambivalence
in his self concept which he has to resolve, and
he does it in one or two ways. Stops exercising
and reverts to his old set health which we see happen,
or starts to adopt other healthy behaviors to align with
his new self concept. And they were very happy with

(35:08):
themselves as psychologists and then the neuroscientists came along and
stuck mister Nurgnferkin in a MRI and a scanner pre
and pulsed and find that he actually grows volume in
his front to lobes, preferentially the right front to lobes,
which are the seat of willpar. So when people exercise regularly,

(35:28):
they improve their will par and their self control. Self
control was shown from both the Marshmallow experiments in the
nineteen sixties, but then more robustly in the Dunedin study
that's ongoing. Self control is the single biggest predictive factor
of success in life, way more than intelligence, way more

(35:51):
than socioeconomic status. It is self control and exercise builds
the self control muscle, if you like. So we see
this gateway behavior happening over and over and over again,
and we know that when people exercise they handle stress better.
When they don't exercise, they become more stressed, and it

(36:13):
then impacts upon their sleep. And when people have bad sleep,
their hunger hormone grelling goes up, but leptin goes down,
which drives voluntary physical activity in the brain. So then
they're less likely to exercise, and then they're more likely
to self medicit and then it goes on and on,
so we get either a nasty vicious cycle dragging people down,

(36:33):
or that can be an upward spiral. But for me,
exercise is right in the middle of that, whether it
goes up or whether it goes down. So let's not
talk about some suggestions that I've talked about all the science.
This is from that research paper looking at cartive respiutey
fitness and longevity. Everybody I will work with, I say,

(36:57):
try to get in the yellow, right, But if you
are forget about METS. That's us GigE. Physiologists just talk
about METS. That's your VIO two max. If you've got
a smart watch, it will give you a pretty good estimation,
probably within about five percent of your true VO two max.
For me, what gets measured gets managed right, So know
your VEO two max. And if you're done here, you
will get tremendous health benefits by just getting into the

(37:21):
next one. But ultimately all the exact sideworkers, I say,
try to get into the yellow. If you can get
into the green, that's awesome, But it's really really hard
to get into the green. But just at least try
to get above average for me, that's key. Here are
my recommendations around strength training, and again, what gets measured

(37:41):
gets managed. So know and what you are physically capable
of right now and be working on it, and particularly
things like squats and deadlifts, and they're very very good
indicators of overall strength. And for me, everybody in this
room should be able to deadlift their body weight ten times, right,
and that should be the goal, right, But it's about

(38:04):
working up to get there, right, So whatever you're starting
on is just getting a little bit better. Now, let
me just talk about the rule of three. So given
all that I've just said, who I guess they could
eat art three hours in their day or three hours
in their week, sorry to exercise right, here's how I
recommend you spend it. One R of cardio, one R

(38:26):
of resistance training, and one R where you're moving and thinking.
Because when you move and think, you get holby and activation.
So running on a treadmill is good, Running outside is better,
Running on a trail is even better. Right, Riding a
bike indoors is good, Riding outside is better. Anybody ever
done mountain biking downhill? Right? Were you when you were

(38:49):
mountain biking downhill. Were you like daydreaming about shit? I guardee,
you weren't right, So you got to be completely mindful.
This is where doing exercise classes where you're having to
mimic someone doing yoga, pilarateis dancing, is freaking brilliant for
the brain and the body. So something where you're thinking

(39:10):
while you're moving right, and lots of movements, snacks, getting
off your arse, lots and moving lots and so here
is mar and I'm going to pull all this together
in a slide. So cardio programming and some steady stated sessions.
Somebody talked about it yesterday Zone two. Zone two. Basically

(39:30):
I can talk about I can't sing it's sixty to
seventy percent of your max heart rate. But you need
to know your max heart rate if you're going to
use heart rate training, right, that's the key thing. But
just talk, but can't saying thirty to forty minutes plus.
And you can do any type of it. So one
to two sessions a week of CHICK if you're coming
off a low base, helps your back to chondria. And

(39:50):
actually the research shows that if you're going to do
strength training, if you do six weeks of this first
and then do the exact same strength training program. You
get bigger improvements in strength and muscle matter because you've
prepared your amountochondria to actually do it. And then we
need to do some of the hard stuff. This is
how you move your veal to max needle as quickly
as possible. It's high intensity intervals. Intervals three to four

(40:14):
or five minutes long. You can two to three minutes,
recovery three to three to five times. One of the
most evidence based is in Norwegian four by four protocol.
Anybody familiar with it. You do four minutes of very
bigger as physical activity eighty five to ninety five percent
of your max heart rate. That's going really, really, really hard.
Then you recover for two to three minutes and they
do that four times, right, or are you going to

(40:36):
do shorter intervals thirty to sixty seconds? I like the
minute one minute on, minute off, do that six to
ten times. But you are going all out. This is uncomfortable.
This is the stuff that Mark really does not like. Right,
that's the very uncomfortable stuff. No, and there's just some
of the heart rate zones and looks so for me,

(40:58):
if you want health and gevity, benefits as quickly as
possible zone two and up into zone five. Right, But
if you're an athlete, you will want to be doing
three and four as well. Right, So different conversation if
you're an athlete or you have a sport in mind.
And then for me resistance training, I don't like individual

(41:19):
muscle parts. I like movement patterns pushpend, rotate, squat, pooh, lunch.
I'll show you what some of those exercises will be
at a minute, and then just think work to rest,
rashow and time under tension. You don't need to think
so much of reps. The ecentric How often in the
GMDC people doing bicep codes and they do and then
you just drop it, and then they drop it. They've

(41:42):
just wasted the best part of the exercise. We know
ecentric contraction where your muscle is contracting. Why lengthening that
actually is the best way to improve strength and overall
muscle size. And most people wete the eccentric portion. Right,
you want specific strength, it's got to be high force.

(42:03):
You gotta lift heavier and heavier shit if you want
to develop strength. Hypertrophy. We used to say it's eight
to twelve reps. Now it's eight to twenty plus what
I see and you can actually do it. Hypertrophy is
a volume game. Strength is an intensity. It's a load game. Right.
And then for muscular power, you want reasonably light weights

(42:25):
but moved quickly. So here are some examples just that
I have put of different exercises that people will be
aware of and under those different movement patterns. The seventh
recognized movement pattern is gate, but we covered that with
our cardio if that makes sense to everybody, right, And
so for me, then here here's just some of my training.

(42:49):
So there's just there's always been this distinction between cardio
training and resistance training, right. So this is using heart
rate monitor. There's a zone two. I had a little
interruption and you can see is mostly in the blue.
Here's the Norwegian four by four and you see the
first one. It's kind of hard to get right into
the red, but then I'm right up into the red

(43:11):
as you get into it and then you recover. Right,
that's telling me I need to hurry up or I'll
piss mark off like everybody else. But check this one out.
This is me doing resistance training, right. This is the
one that I talked about doing those six different movement
patterns thirty seconds work, ten seconds recovery repeated four times,

(43:34):
so that's twenty four sets in about what sixteen and
a half minutes. But look at it, and I, stupidly,
as an old person, didn't do a warm up. If
I'd ha done a warm up, I'd have been right
into the amber straight away and amber and red. That
is a veal to mac session. But I'm doing strength training.
Does that make sense to everybody? There's a CrossFit session

(43:54):
and that's an r and there's a bit of movement
prep and stuff. So there's the real work, so really
getting up in there. But this is traditional strength training
doing heavy dead lifts and heavy squats with a bit
of a rest. So we don't have to separate out
cardiovascular from strength. If you're doing high intensity strength circuit
based training, just go for thirty seconds, rest for ten

(44:17):
or fifteen, go on to the next one. You will
get a cardiovascular workout and they strength workout at the
same time. Right, no, right, here is my recommendations for
basic benefits on the left hand side. And then if
you want real health span and lifespan benefits, we have
to up it. It's just as simple as that. The

(44:41):
one hundred and fifty minutes a week I don't think
is going to cut it. If you want to optimize
your health span and your life span and you've got
to do some of the hard stuff and you've got
to lift heavy shit as well, it's just as simple
as that. And so I know that somebody's going to
come along and go that landmark paper that you talked
about with the Landmarks of Aging has actually been updated

(45:02):
and three others have been added onto it very recently.
Well there's the three others and there is exercises impact
on chronic inflammation, exercises impact on glut health, and then
exercises impact on autophogy as well. So exercise covers all
the bases in terms of longevity. And so I think

(45:24):
given all that I've just said that ACNEM should actually
be renamed as ACE name the Austraight Alien College of Exercise,
Nutritional and Environmental Medicine, because I will just leave it

(45:45):
at that. Thank you.

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Exercise and Longevity - Insights from Paul Taylor

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