Four Pillars of Strength for Longevity | Dr. Peter Attia & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | So one of the pillars of strength training is eccentric strength, which is breaks.
00:00:08.360 | So you know, you're going to hurt yourself 10 times more likely, I'm making that number
00:00:15.420 | up by the way, I don't know if it's 10 times, but experientially it seems to be, you are
00:00:19.680 | 10 times more likely to hurt yourself stepping off something than stepping onto something,
00:00:25.160 | right?
00:00:26.160 | Stepping down versus stepping up.
00:00:29.280 | Because when you step up onto something, you are concentrically controlling the muscle.
00:00:34.760 | When you step down, you have to apply the brakes and that's where most people falter.
00:00:40.680 | Much harder to walk downhill than uphill.
00:00:42.800 | Uphill is taxing your cardiovascular system, but if you slow down enough, you're fine.
00:00:47.000 | But a lot of people don't have the ability to slow themselves down when they're walking
00:00:50.500 | downhill.
00:00:51.500 | And so when an older person steps off a curb and can't fully stop themselves, and that
00:00:57.200 | results in a fall.
00:00:58.920 | So you know, I like doing things like a broad jump.
00:01:02.160 | Broad jumps are a fun little test set I like to do every once in a while.
00:01:05.480 | I always want to make sure I can broad jump six feet, that's kind of my arbitrary number
00:01:08.640 | that I've chosen.
00:01:10.120 | And the reason is, on the takeoff, that's a very explosive movement, but the landing
00:01:15.080 | is just as important.
00:01:16.080 | If I can't stick that landing, it means I don't have the brakes.
00:01:19.800 | So those are kind of some of the tests I want to be able to do to make sure that I'm utilizing
00:01:24.640 | that system.
00:01:25.640 | Because I do think, you know, look, I've watched my mom.
00:01:29.160 | My mom fell, gosh, probably been about four months ago, just fell in a typical way that
00:01:35.440 | people fall.
00:01:36.440 | By the way, it could have happened to anybody.
00:01:38.000 | It's not like, you know, my mom walks around and moves around just fine.
00:01:41.320 | But on this particular day, she just tripped on a uneven stone and fell and landed and
00:01:48.440 | broke her hand.
00:01:49.440 | And she's really lucky she didn't break her hip.
00:01:51.360 | And I told her that because my mom was, you know, probably in her mid-70s.
00:01:53.560 | And I said, look, you know, if that was your femur, I'd give you a 30% chance of dying
00:01:59.840 | in the next year.
00:02:00.840 | I mean, it's just an... those are such difficult to recover from injuries.
00:02:05.240 | Because first of all, you're dealing with the immobility of, you know, the hospitalization
00:02:10.920 | and immobility that follows that.
00:02:12.600 | And the amount of muscle loss that occurs could easily be, you know, four or five pounds
00:02:20.120 | of lean tissue lost, that for most people that age becomes almost impossible to get
00:02:24.440 | back.
00:02:25.440 | And that says nothing about sort of the acute causes of death, like a fat embolism that
00:02:29.360 | results from a broken femur, a blood clot from laying in bed.
00:02:32.240 | Those things are also catastrophic.
00:02:34.400 | But what happens is a lot of these patients just never get back to the same level of mobility.
00:02:39.720 | And you know, now I think in many ways, we're kind of pivoting from what kills you to what
00:02:44.100 | ruins your quality of life.
00:02:46.560 | And we've spent so much time talking about what kills you, but I think you might as well
00:02:52.600 | be dead in some ways if you can't do the things you want to do.
00:02:56.240 | And if playing with your grandkids, or gardening, or playing golf, or going for a walk with
00:03:01.520 | your spouse, or think of any of the things that we all do today and take for granted,
00:03:05.760 | if you can't do those things, I don't know, you sort of lose the reason to be around.
00:03:11.840 | And oftentimes, the inability to do those things is associated with pain, which is psychologically
00:03:19.640 | and obviously physiologically so distressing.
00:03:23.360 | You mentioned the four pillars of health.
00:03:24.960 | Maybe just list those off for people.
00:03:26.880 | Of lifting?
00:03:27.880 | Well, the four pillars of longevity through physical.
00:03:31.800 | Oh, yeah, sort of the exercise pieces of them.
00:03:36.320 | Yeah.
00:03:37.320 | Health, health, health, stability, aerobic efficiency, and aerobic peak output.
00:03:42.760 | So aerobic peak would be like VO2 max.
00:03:46.320 | And zone two.
00:03:48.120 | In my analogy, your zone two is how wide the base of your pyramid is.
00:03:54.320 | And your VO2 max is how tall the peak of the pyramid is.
00:03:57.320 | So the best pyramid has a wide base and a high peak.
00:04:01.320 | So you could have a reasonably wide base and a shallow peak.
00:04:05.380 | If you just did zone two training, you're going to get a reasonable peak, but it's not
00:04:08.560 | going to be that high.
00:04:09.560 | You have to do some of that specific training.
00:04:11.160 | If you just focus on high intensity, you might drive up that VO2 max, but you're actually
00:04:15.160 | going to have a relatively wide, narrow aerobic base.
00:04:17.880 | So you think about just maximizing the area of that triangle, widest, tallest.
00:04:23.140 | Stability and strength.
00:04:25.140 | Stability of course encompasses everything we're talking about in terms of reactivity.
00:04:30.560 | You know, I dedicate a chapter in the book to this concept because it is so foreign to
00:04:35.580 | most people and for understandable reasons.
00:04:38.860 | It's just, it's not sexy.
00:04:40.820 | It's not, it's the hardest one to train.
00:04:43.380 | It's the hardest one to understand, but it's so important because it's the thing that I
00:04:47.180 | think differentiates people who age well and people who don't age well.
00:04:51.060 | And I should perhaps throw in there, please correct me if I'm wrong, but also most of
00:04:55.900 | the machines that are in typical commercial gyms that allow people who are not very experienced
00:05:01.900 | to start doing some resistance training don't really tap into the stability factor terribly
00:05:07.020 | much.
00:05:08.020 | So while there's value to leg extensions and leg curls and, you know, chest presses and
00:05:11.880 | shoulder presses done with machines, certainly for a number of reasons and can often be safer
00:05:16.620 | than free weights, especially for people who are approaching it at a later time or new
00:05:20.060 | to the whole thing, they don't really lend themselves to real life stability.
00:05:26.100 | Walking down, as you mentioned, walking downstairs in the absence of a handrail or movements
00:05:32.340 | in kind of odd planes, you know, having to step aside to avoid a bicycle at an angle
00:05:39.900 | as opposed to just moving, you know, linearly.
00:05:42.260 | Yeah.
00:05:43.260 | And by the way, a lot of things that don't involve machines still don't give you that,
00:05:48.060 | right?
00:05:49.060 | If you're doing a deadlift, you have to be stable to lift a heavy weight like you would
00:05:53.500 | a deadlift without hurting yourself.
00:05:55.420 | That requires an unbelievable capacity to harness intra-abdominal pressure and to be
00:06:00.260 | connected.
00:06:01.260 | You know, if you're going to lift 500 pounds off the ground, you're stable.
00:06:04.600 | But that still doesn't prepare you for what you just described.
00:06:07.820 | So stability is multifaceted and it involves doing a lot of things.
00:06:13.060 | You know, today, for example, I finished my...
00:06:14.940 | Yesterday was a cardio zone two day, so I did my cardio zone two and, you know, had
00:06:20.100 | an extra 10 minutes before I needed to kind of get moving.
00:06:23.280 | And so all I did was step ups for 10 minutes.
00:06:25.740 | I just did single leg, very slow step up and insanely slow step downs off a box in a gym.
00:06:35.020 | So two second up, four second down, two second up, four second down with, you know, and I
00:06:40.380 | would do them with ipsilateral loads, contralateral loads, all sorts of different things.
00:06:44.920 | And, you know, basically that's just a stability game for me.
00:06:47.340 | It's like I'm building that concentric strength in a movement where it's easy to cheat.
00:06:55.200 | But can I do it without cheating?
00:06:57.360 | It's terrific.
00:06:58.360 | And it's terrific that you covered all of that in the book.
00:07:00.720 | Thank you.