How much time should a person spend exercising?

so I want to talk about um something I hear a lot and so honestly I've heard it so many times that I I actually think it's just worth kind of making a short video to explain it so here here's here's what I hear I hear a lot of people say you know there is no evidence that increasing more than 30 minutes you know three to five times a week provides any benefit and therefore all this talk about exercising you know to quote unquote extreme level uh is actually harmful or you know at best not even beneficial and what say you Peter well let's take a look at how people arrive at these conclusions so whenever you hear somebody saying something like all you need to do is move 30 minutes a day you know three four times a week um what they're typically referring to is the type of data that one gathers by you know looking at surveys right so you know just as we've talked about food frequency questioners when you call somebody up and you say hey Billy can you tell me what you've eaten over the last month or the last year and they sort of recall based on their impression what they did and you sort of look at those data and then you ask the question well based on that dietary pattern how are you going to do healthwise for the next X years for the rest of your life okay well similarly when you ask people you know to sort of give you a sense of what they do for exercise um you get what I would uh colloquially recur to as garbage in data right because you know frankly if you ask somebody what are you doing for exercise you you're not really getting Clarity around the intensity of exercise you're not really understanding the ins and outs of what they're doing um so I by the way don't have a better solution to that problem and that's why I instead choose to focus on the outputs because the outputs are less subjective obviously more objective and the data are much clearer as to what the outputs suggest so when you look at the input-based data it's true when you look at these subjective assessments of how much people exercise you are indeed going to get kind of a flattening of the effect right it's like H does it really matter if you're doing more than 30 minutes a day more than four or five days a week no not really but when you look at the Hard data right when you look at the objective measures of things like V2 Max strength and muscle mass what do you find well you find a monotonically increasing benefit with more the higher your V2 Max the longer you live the more muscle mass you have the stronger you are the longer you live and by extension the better you live so what explains this discrepancy well I think what explains it is that one of these must be better than the other and I'm arguing that the latter is much better than the former and the reason for it is that the latter is less ambiguous so if a person has a V2 Max of 50 milliliters per kilogram per minute and they're 50 years old you know everything you need to know about them that person wasn't born with a high VO2 max that V2 Max isn't dependent on their socioeconomic status it's not dependent on their education it's dependent on one thing and one thing only and that is how hard they exercise that's a person who does quite a bit of aerobic training and at least some of it is at a high level of intensity and that is infinitely more valuable than asking somebody how many hours a week of cardio do you do because if you go to a gym you know what I'm talking about right if you survey all the people in the gym and said how many hours of cardio do you do well you're going to see one woman on the StairMaster who's killing herself you're going to see another guy on the treadmill who's watching the news and yeah they're both doing cardio but they're getting a very different training effect so again rather than looking at the inputs which are much more noisy you look at the outputs right if a person could dead hang off a bar for 2 minutes you know they are strong they weren't born that strong uh they didn't luckily find their way into being that strong they had to do something to get get that strong and that something turns out to be far more predictive of their longevity so whenever you hear somebody saying that you know you don't really need to exercise that much um I guess the answer is or what right I mean the question is what are we talking about here so when people say to me well Peter how much do I need to exercise I don't have an answer to that question because it depends on the quality of the exercise it is clear to me that you could exercise 30 minutes a day 3 and half hours a week and Achieve exceptional results but you're going to have to be very focused in what you do and I will say that I can't imagine a scenario by which only 30 minutes a day is going to produce exceptional results if those 30 minute sessions are you on the treadmill at the gym watching the news humming and ha smoking and joking no those 30 minutes a day are going to be H are going to have to be very uh focused and they're going to have to be at a high degree of specificity for whatever it is you're trying to achieve so when you're lifting you're really lifting and you're going to you know one to two reps in reserve on every set and when you're training it is real zone two not Zone one and it is zone five not zone three um so again this is you know obviously a pet peeve of mine and that's why I'm you know sitting here to make this video uh but the point is don't look at the noisy subjective dirty input data look at the very objective output data look at the signal that's been processed and look at the output of the signal the hard metrics are the best predictor of lifespan and healthspan and whatever you need to do to achieve them is fine and and someone like me you know I'd have a hard time getting there if I was exercising less than an hour a day um and again that doesn't mean you have to exercise an hour a day if you're going to exercise less it's fine but you just have to be very focused about way you do and you'll have less time to to sort of um recreate as you're exercising

Channel: Peter Attia MD

Views: 312,341

Keywords: Peter Attia MD, Dr. Peter Attia, Early Medical, The Drive Podcast, The Drive, Longevity, Zone 2

Id: iGzEB3Ka39o

Length: 6min 36sec (396 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2024