#295 DAVID SINCLAIR PULSING EXPLAINED - How to Balance Muscle and Aging

Siim Land (0:00)

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You can get a 10% discount with the code SIIM at selfdecode.com. Head over to selfdecode.com and use the code SIIM for a 10% discount on your personalized DNA reports. Hey, welcome back to the channel, my name is Siim Land and in this video we're going to talk about how can you balance aging and having muscle mass. So this is what David Sinclair calls pulsing, if you've heard about before. Before we get into the particular topic, then we'll play a clip from Huberman Labs podcast where Sinclair talks about this idea of pulsing, so yeah, let's just hear it.

David Sinclair (1:00)

So my view of longevity, the way I treat my body is I don't burn both candles, I have one end of the candle lit, I'm very careful, I don't blow on it, but I also do enough exercise that I'm building up my muscle, but I'm not huge, anyone who's seen me knows that I'm not a professional bodybuilder, but I try to actually, here's the key, and I haven't said this publicly that I can remember, I pulse things so that I get periods of fasting and then I eat, then I take a supplement, then I fast, then I exercise, and I'm taking the supplements and eating in the right timing to allow me to build up muscle sometimes, because you can't just expect to take something constantly and do something constantly for it to work, and that's why it's taken me about 15 years to develop my protocol.

Siim Land (1:34)

All right, here's my proof as well, I do, I think, know what I'm talking about. So I have taken the DNA age test as well based on the DNA methylation age that looks at your biological age, and when I took it, I was 25 years old, that was two years ago, and my biological age was 16, my chronological age was 25 And I do basically attribute that to my protocol, my health protocol, the diet I follow, and other things that I do. So I do think that it is what I do, and it's not something that, you know, this is my current physique, I weigh about 85, 84 kilograms. I'm not like, yeah, like a massive bodybuilder. I'm pretty strong, I'm stronger than 95% of people. I have more muscle than 95% of people. But you know, it's not that I maintain this muscle with my, let's say, prior practices of, you know, there's regular standard bodybuilding meals or whatever. This is actually built with the same protocol that I follow today with a very confined eating window and time consuming eating window. So let's say age 19, when I was in the military, I was eating, you know, three meals a day, 168 kilos and this now 26, 27 years old, I've eaten one meal a day for five years and I've still managed to build this physique. So I do think that, you know, my biological age is very, you know, appropriate for health and longevity. It's smaller than my actual chronological age, but at the same time, I'm also, you know, I can show that I have, you know, good muscle mass and strength. So I'm not like withering away from the chronic calorie restriction.

And it does go back to, you know, calorie restriction, you know, that this is the idea behind basically imposing some sort of nutritional stress on yourself. And we know that this kind of hormesis through calorie restriction is one of the few known ways of extending lifespan in many species.

And monkeys, mice, fruit flies, they all have this similar pathway, similar results and humans probably do so as well. There are many reasons why calorie restriction works, like it blocks inflammation, it promotes mitochondrial biogenesis, it reduces insulin and ITF1 levels that then suppress mTOR, it activates autophagy, that is kind of the cellular recycling, removal of all material, it increases antioxidant defenses, glutathione and SOD, it increases r2ins, increases AMPK that promotes r2ins and promotes DNA repair. So yeah, calorie restriction works because of these reasons.

There's also the evidence that, you know, autophagy, the process of cellular clearance is associated with human longevity and human anti-aging. So centenarians, they have basically enhanced autophagy lysosomal function and seroamyls of the autophagy biomarker Beclin-1 are associated with increased health in centenarians.