#385 How Many Calories for Longevity - Q&A While Working Out

Siim Land (0:00)

Hey, so I decided to do something new this time. Instead of having a regular Q&A, I decided to do the Q&A while I'm working out. So I'll just work out and add some commentary to what I'm doing and answer some questions in the meanwhile. The first question is, what am I doing in India? So yes, I am in India, Chennai, right now, doing a retreat with some other people who join me here. And it's a seven day biohacking retreat where we do different kinds of tests, 180 biomarkers, VO2 max tests, dexascan, calcium scan, MRI. You can do a lot of different kinds of tests to see, okay, what is my current state of health, and this is what I've been doing for the last few days. It's one of my last days here, and you can check out a future video about more in detail about what I did here and how you can join in the future as well. But before I answer the next question, I'll just start doing some lifting as well.

Usually, when I am doing resistance training, then my main goal primarily right now is to do strength-based movements, and this is going to just help me to maintain muscle tissue, muscle strength, and bone density. I did the DEXA scan. My bone density is super high. My muscle mass is also very high. And my main goal for body composition and training is strength. So I'm kind of doing a more power lifting style of training. And when I am doing resistance training, then I am focusing mostly on these compound movements, like bench press, squat, deadlift. Those are the biggest, most effective ways to increase muscle strength. And in this gym, it's a hotel gym, but it's a very nice hotel gym. It's much better than average hotel gyms. We don't have a regular bench press here, but we have this Smith machine. But I'm gonna just still use it to do a bench workout. So the first set of the workout is just warm up. I'm just putting here, so the bar is slightly lighter than the 20 kilo bar, Olympic bar. So it's maybe like 10 kilos. So on this both sides, we have 50 kilos in total right now. So this is just a regular warmup. I'm gonna do a few, like, you know, 10 reps or something to just warm up lightly.

Warming up the muscles. And the way I structure my workouts is to do reverse pyramid training. So I do very little sets up until my working set. So like the warmup sets are very few reps just to not exhaust the muscle. And then when I'm reaching the top working weight, which I guess today I'll try to get like 130 kilos, and yeah, I'll just progressively increase the weight slowly. Before we add some weight, let's answer some questions. The first question is, how many weekly sets do you do per body part? So per body part, let's say legs, or chest, or shoulders, or back. I usually do one workout per muscle group per week.

So I do like chest once a week, legs once a week, back once a week. And how many sets do I do per body part? It's gonna be like five to six sets per body part. So like today, when I'm doing the bench press, then I'll have five working sets, and the reps are gonna be around three to six reps. For me, I like to do like lighter reps and heavier loads. But sometimes, I'll just do like eight reps as well.

Let's add a bit of weight.

So these are 20-kilo plates again. It's gonna increase the weight of the bar to 90 kilos, if I'm not mistaken.

And yeah, we're gonna just do a few reps again.

Okay, so that was four reps.

Before adding the next 20 kilos, I'll just add some lighter weight.

For now, 10 kilos. So that's gonna be 110 kilos in total on the bar. Next question, benefits of carb cycling. So I think carb cycling as a baseline default is very useful for making it easy to lose weight and also improving blood sugar levels and other biomarkers. So the way I do it is that my default food is gonna be like vegetables and some protein, but based on my physical activity, I'll increase the carbohydrate intake. So today, after my workout, I'll probably have some more higher carbohydrates like potatoes, rice, or fruits and stuff like that. And on the other days, when I haven't worked out, then I'll try to reduce the carbohydrate intake, and I'll stick mostly to vegetables and proteins. I think that's, especially for a person who isn't super physically active, then the carb cycling makes more sense. Whereas if you're already athletic and very lean and healthy, then you have less to gain from carbohydrate cycling, but it can still be a useful strategy to lose weight and make it easy to maintain lean body composition. Okay, another set.