#362 Full Guide to Exercise for Longevity - New Study Outlines

Siim Land (0:00)

We know that exercise is good for you, and any amount of exercise is better than nothing at all. But there was a new 2023 systematic review of recent studies outlining the training strategies to optimize life expectancy and cardiovascular health. So in this video, we're gonna take a look at this study and talk about the most optimal ways to train for longevity. But do you want to slow down aging and live longer? If yes, then I'm looking for more people who want to reverse their biological clock. If you're interested, then email me the word health to info at siimland.com, and I'll send you the details. Do it. So the study is called Training Strategies to Optimize Cardiovascular Durability and Life Expectancy, published by James O'Keefe and others. And they pretty much took the most recent studies between the years of 2011 to 2022, which is a very broad spectrum or a whole lot of studies involved. The first, the most important thing, I think, that they discovered was that physically active lifestyle and cardiorespiratory fitness itself are the most associated with reduced mortality and being sedentary and being leisurely is associated with increased risk of mortality. They found that moderate physical activity had a greater reduction in mortality and cardiovascular mortality than vigorous physical activity, which means that, of course, both moderate as well as vigorous exercise will have a positive effect on reducing mortality risk. But the more moderate physical activity, the lower your risk of mortality was, whereas the vigorous physical activity plateaued after a certain point. And as you can see from this graph, then the more minutes per week you did of moderate physical activity, which includes things like walking, hiking, and let's say some aspects of swimming or this leather more leisurely physical activity that isn't super intense, that was like in a linear dose dependent manner, that the more you did it, the lower your risk of mortality was. So if you did 800 minutes or 850 minutes of moderate physical activity per week, you had a minus 35% in the risk of mortality. In terms of vigorous physical activity, so this includes gym, high intensity cardio, more intense sports, those kind of things. So the benefits of that plateaued around 150 minutes per week. But even if you did 700 minutes of vigorous physical activity, it was still associated with a 17% reduction in order to cause mortality.

So the 700 minutes still gives you some benefits compared to doing only 100 minutes. For example, so 700 minutes is better than 100 minutes, but there's no huge difference between 150 to 600 or 700 minutes of vigorous physical activity per week. To get the 700 minutes of vigorous physical activity per week, then you would have to train an hour and a half every day, which obviously most people aren't. But if you did, let's say, one hour of vigorous physical exercise per week, then that puts you around 360 minutes per week.

And that already is pretty very beneficial still. In terms of cardiovascular disease mortality, there was still the linear dose dependent matter for the moderate physical activity. So the more moderate physical activity you did, the lower your cardiovascular disease mortality risk. So doing 850 minutes of moderate physical activity reduces your cardiovascular disease mortality by 40%. With the vigorous physical activity, however, after 150 minutes or 200 minutes, that's where you had the lowest risk of cardiovascular disease mortality, 15% reduction. And after that, it started to go into more of like a J curve. If you know hormesis, then J curve hormesis is that the lower level of let's say activity is increasing your mortality risk. If you don't exercise at all, if you don't do any vigorous physical activity, then that's bad for your longevity. But if you exceed a certain threshold, if you start to do too much, then it actually also starts to increase your cardiovascular disease mortality risk.

And now I personally think that is very subjective. This is an epidemiology study, which means that, of course, they didn't control for many factors.

But I do think that there's no point in doing over an hour of vigorous physical exercise every day of the week. There's just no point.

You do become super fit, et cetera, but it doesn't have longevity benefits beyond what you necessarily need. Moderate physical activity still appears to be much more important after a certain threshold. There's no threshold for doing moderate physical activity. The more moderate physical activity you do, an hour and a half every day of walking slash hiking slash yoga or whatever, then that is linearly associated with reduced mortality risk. But with vigorous physical activity, which includes high intensity cardio and more prolonged endurance, then there is a certain threshold effect. And I personally think that, yeah, maybe 200 minutes doesn't necessarily apply to a healthy fit individual already who takes care of their other aspects of health as well. But let's say if we do 800 minutes, which means an hour and a half of vigorous physical activity every day, then that's not, first of all, is not needed for the longevity benefits.