You know what sounds better than living to 99 for me? Being able to ride my bike, run and hike in to the 80s.
Attia is not selling lifespan, he’s selling healthspan… HUGE DIFFERENCE, clearly you haven’t read or watched Attia enough to know that his whole philosophy is based on that distinction.
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@Dr.Bart - ’m not sure that I understand - I was trying to clarify that very distinction - my entire posts were about that distinction?
But perhaps we have a different view of when healthspan at earlier ages starts being crowded out by longevity, and hence healthspan at older ages gets crowded out by healthspan as “younger” ages.
Maintaining massive training might as I concurred with help one with mortality and healthspan from
an average 53 years of age to 63 as in the paper.
But decades of higher food intake, and likely higher protein intake, etc to fuel the massive training amounts + the higher IGF-1, higher mTOR, higher inflammation, perhaps higher ox stress, wear on ones heart and blood vesssels, etc, etc, might lead to age related things like cancer, cardiovascular disease having a higher risk than in someone that excesses a lot but not at the extremes - such it might not even be possible to ride a bike due to having died from eg the cancer or different a heart attack or disabling stroke.
I’m saying might because while I think the trade off is def is there, I don’t know at what age one crosses the lines.
But I would not be confident that it only kicks in around 99 years of age and not before the average life expectancy for one’s peer group, so perhaps 78 or so for us two as US males for example?
For me the goal is to ride my bike, run, hike, travel the world, go on vacation to mars and explore the asteroid belt, play with my great grandchildren and so on when I am 99 and 119 and possibly beyond, not just settling for a good ride (no pun) until I’m 80 and then leave this amazing adventure.
I workout 5-6 times a week, some weeks more, so not trying to say anything about training not being good and even great. But I do think there is a maximum dose at which point it’s decreasing one’s expected quality of life when it will matter the most in later ages and that the paper cites cannot speak to that because it did not evaluate that question.
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That was a response to medaura, that’s why I use the 99 YO reference. Strange I can see whom I am replying to the edit page but not on the main page.
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Ok, got it, probably just my bad. My apologies.
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You’d be surprised that I still eat quite moderately - about 2200-2400 calories, avg.130 gm of protein (less than half with BCAA), 50-70 grams of fiber per day on most days.
I raced last Saturday - 65 miles, 6600 ft ascent and 8 hours and I only had extra 700 calories in gels and hydration. I burned around 3500 calories.
Each pound of fat gives you about 4-5000 calories, so I still barely dropped one pound of fat.
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I used to think there was a difference but now I’m not certain. Why do you think there is a big difference in what leads to long life vs long health? To me it seems they are two sides of the same coin. On the other hand, maximum athletic performance now vs long health / life seem different to me.
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When he quotes the VO2max studies, he talks about lifespan, how higher values always confer an edge on longevity and apparently there isn’t even an upper limit to the gains. I’m pretty sure I’ve listened to him long and attentively enough to understand what he’s saying. The cherry on top seems to be that the increases in lifespan are high quality years, so extra lifespan via vo2max gains subsumes good healthspan, in his book. I’ve heard him say, make a list of what you want to be able to do in your “marginal decade” to reverse engineer how hard you need to train NOW in order to land there in the end, through the inevitable ravages of time.
Now I understand and sympathize with that way of thinking, but it’s really borrowed lock stock and barrel from business jargon—he reminds me of the way heads of sales speak when they try to optimize their pipeline to hit their quotas. Human biology is more complex than that. The longest lived people typically didn’t do anything remotely as intense as he suggest they ought to have to make it into their 90s or 100s at a functional state. There’s confounders that muddy the waters in the relationship between Vo2max and longevity, one of them being the role of weight in the denominator of Vo2max. Other factors are metrics of wear and tear that could be heading way beyond the hormetic zone while Vo2max is still improving, that undo or at least attenuate the extension which Vo2max confers on longevity.
And there’s also such things I can think of, though they don’t get into in the video, as being conditioned to being deconditioned. Anecdotally I see amazing athletes who keep going at a high level until injuries or the end of their sport careers put them out to pasture and their health just deteriorates—it’s as if their bodies don’t know how to BE without the constant stimulus of high intensity exercise. I know this may sound like an absurd parallel but from having had 5 full term pregnancies I know from personal experience there’s such a thing, for women, as being in “pregnancy shape.” The first time I went from naturally thin and of active metabolism to really overweight—it’s as if my body didn’t know how to handle the changes in hormones and appetite and everything that goes with it. Every subsequent time it was easier, I gained less weight and lost it faster on the other end. This time, even though I’m fine weight wise, many things are bothering me closer to how it was the first time, and I don’t think it’s because I’m older (because I’m not that old) but because my body had taken a break of 6 years from doing this and it had to find its bearings again.
There are people whose bodies are conditioned at being fairly deconditioned. I don’t mean being obese couch potatoes but being fairly active at a sub athletic level, just walking around places and carrying heavy objects now and then in everyday life, and they can maintain that level with very minimal drop off right till the very end. Some of it may be unknown mitochondrial adaptation at chugging along without rocking the boat in either direction. Some of it may be the prevention of wear and tear on joints. Who knows? It’s hard to argue with data on healthy centarians though.
We do know that the gains in adaptations form exercise are very short lived unless CONSTANTLY maintained—stop doing anything at all for 3-4 weeks and you lose most of it. 12 weeks and you’re considered deconditioned, same as someone who starts from scratch. And that’s no wonder, really, if Vo2max depends entirely on mitochondrial health and mitochondria turn over every few days.
As I said in my original comment, we should pursue exercise because it makes us fit and stronger and healthier and it’s a better way to live than lounging around. NOT under any delusion that it’s the best investment of effort for maximizing lifespan. I would make the same tradeoff as you about living only to my 80s but fully active vs petering off miserably at 100, but nowhere does Attia present that as a tradeoff in his analysis of what Vo2max does for longevity. He says you can have your venison stick and eat it too.
If you’ve listened to him longer to know otherwise, please provide a source.
All I see is the promotion of this metric as a holy grail of longevity.
Anyone pursuing aggressive exercise for life is doing it because they love that lifestyle and that’s great. Seems to be good for them too all things equal. But no one can outrun the grim reaper, whether the running be literal or figurative. Someone who hates that kind of lifestyle could probably reap the same life and healthspan benefits by other shortcuts and would be wrong to think he’s missing out by not investing many hours on end of serious training every week.
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You bet I will, 1-5m/h 100% for me. Why kill myself doing over 8m/h when I can do 4m/h and have 97% of benefits of running over 8m/h. I always felt (anecdotally) that doing moderate walks daily is best way to go. I however always run as fast as I can the last 100 yards of the walk, this in based on my school of thought which is to fool my body into thinking I’m running for my dear life (from a charging lion) so my body continues to think I need to be in tip top shape (and it does its own wonders), but trust me the last time a ran more than 200 yards must have been about 35 years ago playing soccer as a teenager, boy do I ever hate running lol. however, I do walk almost daily 3-5 miles.
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Very smart man. It is crazy to think/assume that our bodies have the same endurance level at 50 as we had at 20.
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Ideally that should be the goal though.
Also a bit more on the subject of VO2 max benefits on healthspan and lifespan. What I’d really like to understand is the impact of VO2 max on a rate of aging. Just a few data points would be helpful. Let’s take a few people like Joan Benoit who has the highest recorded VO2 max for any female Joan Benoit Samuelson, Olympic marathon champ in 1984, runs London Marathon at 65 - NBC Sports and apply a few different aging clocks as imperfect as they may be and see what her estimated biological age is.
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Ideally yes, but practically impossible, and IMO trying too hard (at 50) to become a 20-year-old will backfire in more ways than one. I am in tip top shape and have never been sick, never gone to a doctor (other than once I had a tooth infection which I called Teladoc) I’m very strong for my age, I’d say in the top 1% of my age category. I like to think that I’m the same as I was 30 years ago but when I look into it and compare myself at 25 with myself at 57, I know 100% that I’m only at best 65% of who I was at 25.
To this day there is nothing proven that can stop ageing no matter what one says. However, there is plenty of things you can do to prolong Healthspan and achieve maximum human life span, which i think is somewhere between 120-130, it might even stretch to 140. the reason i say this is because if a woman/man lived to over 120 years old without doing anything specific to live long (simply their lifestyle sort of matched their destined longevity) then I believe humans can gain up to 20 years on top of the 120 (proved to be reachable) by doing few specific things to extend lifespan. Of course, we are all different and even if we all did exactly the same right things, not all make it to 120 but my point is that we probably gain upwards of 15-20 above our genetically destined life span.
Unless some major breakthrough happens in science and longevity field this is most we can vouch for, and I’m totally fine with it. Asking for more would be “UNCIVILIZED” (as per an old commercial)
I also happened to believe that unless you are born with a birth defect every single human could live past 100 years if they did few right things, and honestly the main one being do not overindulge on food (basically don’t do what I do ) and do not drink alcohol (more than couple drinks per week). go for your evening walk and you are there.
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Anyway one thought the video teases out that’s more interesting than the ones with obvious “pick your camp and stick to it” implications, is that VO2max gains could probably have greater effects on longevity if achieved without landing in the chronically overtrained state.
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I do like your interpretation, but I have no problem with “pick your camp and stick with it” either. I love when people break it into layman terms for the MBA educated ones (like me, true btw) on these forums. I know it is off topic a bit, but I always excelled in school, and about 70% of it was strategizing on how to beat the system (reason for being here, trying to beat another system, much tougher one to beat though lol), and only 30% was real study. Probably, it is evident in my method of writing. Apparently, later in life I learned that there’s no free lunches, but at least I can still brag about my straight A’s
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That is absolutely false. I don’t think you understand exercise physiology very well. Maybe you are confusing peak form with adaptations. Adaptations such as increased bone density, muscle hypertrophy, heart remodeling, vascular adaptations, muscle fiber type conversion, motion efficiency - such as running or cycling form, etc. etc. etc. last for years or arguably lifetime.
In fact athletes often detrain for 2-4 weeks at least once a year to let their bodies rest. They certainly do NOT start from scratch and it’s part of their normal training.
Quite frankly most of your post are conjectures and sounds like rationalization for not exercising. The scientific consensus on exercise effects on health are pretty well established and you find the guidelines on CDC website. There are tons of studies that support exercise as essential part of healthy living.
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I am speaking in terms of Attia, he made it very clear that he is coming from POV of healthspan not lifespan. Medicine 2.0 has the lifespan already covered according to Attia.
I do agree with you, that probably by increasing healthspan one in theory should increase the lifespan.
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I actually peaked at 42 YO, however even now I definitely have more endurance at 50 than me at 20. I did high school sports but I took it easy in college.
Not sure if this will make me live longer but it’s helluva fun to smoke most of 20 year olds. 
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I was talking about Vo2max adaptations — not physiological adaptations. That’s what we were discussing on this thread. You don’t need to believe that it will help you live to 100 to want to exercise, and I said it in a couple different ways that even if there were a tradeoff, I’d take it, so how am I rationalizing not exercising when I keep saying exercise is good? But if you’re only looking at gains in longevity, there’s diminishing marginal returns (five year difference tops, between the most fit and the least fit). People should do it because they love it, not believing they HAVE to overtrain now in order to stand a chance of being able to travel to Europe and go sightseeing at 90.
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Another poster brought up her grandmother never exercising or doing anything special … and these sort of anecdotes really annoy me because they don’t tell you the full story.
My great-grandparents lived well in to the 90’s without any medical care, ate lard and never went to the gym. That’s a true story, but is lacking SO MUCH CONTEXT.
So let’s break that down. They were Eastern European farmers, that in my estimation did equivalent of doing daily CrossFit for 10 hour a day, six days week (obvious huge seasonal variation depending if it’s summer harvest or winter). They ate organic, pesticide free, PFAS/BPA/heavy metal/microplastic free, , lots of seasonal and pickled veggie/fruit and of course grain that they themselves grew, consuming grass fed dairy and occasional beef, organic chicken and pork, free ranged chicken eggs…
But let’s ignore all of that and go with THEY NEVER EXERCISED, DID NOTHING SPECIAL, they ate sweets any time they could, they smoke their own tobacco and ate lots of LARD !
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Well my grandmother was not your grandmother. Why jump to conclusions as to what context I’m leaving out? She was Eastern European but from a faded aristocracy—didn’t grow up in a farm or do much to stay active that would overlap with the regular functional movement we only get from gyms or deliberate training these days. Yes she had lifelong access to amazing produce in the Mediterranean but her own cooking heavily favored carb heavy, vegetable poor meals. She was rather overweight since her 40s and maybe earlier and had some osteoporosis from before I was born. Yet she could walk around and was remarkably mentally sharp. What context am I leaving out? I’d still rather live 10 years less than her but be in better shape throughout. That’s neither here nor there. My point is her Vo2max was likely abysmal, and while she might have made it to 110 with better eating and more physical activity, I am sure that if she’d been a Peter Attia devotee and tried to follow HIS protocol in her 50s or 60s in order to be where she eventually landed in her “marginal decade”, it would have killed her a long time ago.
Not sure why my anecdote is so annoying — does it produce cognitive dissonance perhaps?
There are stranger things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in thy philosophy.
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