AMA #38: Can you exercise too much?

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey, everyone, welcome to a sneak peek, Ask Me Anything, or AMA episode of the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full, along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created. Or you can learn more now by going to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the Ask Me Anything episode.
Welcome to Ask Me Anything episode number 38 I'm joined once again by Nick Stenson. In today's episode, we dive in really deep to this question around exercise and if there is such thing as too much exercise. Obviously, we talk a lot about exercise on this podcast, and that's for pretty obvious reasons, namely it's perhaps the single most important tool we have to live longer and live better. However, we often get asked a lot of questions about the optimal dose of exercise for longevity. So it's a topic where there's a lot of confusion in the literature. And we've even had previous guests on the podcast who disagree with each other on what those answers ought to be with respect to the dose of exercise. So for this AMA, we compiled all the questions that you've asked around this, and we've now taken the hard look at this. So which studies say what things, how contradictory are the results? And we do this primarily by looking at the so-called J curve. The J curve meaning that as you go from being sedentary to being active, your risk of all-cause mortality declines. But then something paradoxical seems to happen, which is after bottoming out, it starts to uptick again, the so-called J, suggesting that once you go beyond a certain point, that is to say, once you exercise beyond a certain point, your risk no longer stays low, but actually starts to go back up.
Now this episode took a lot of time. In fact, we were going to record this episode about two months earlier, but I just didn't feel we had done a deep enough dive. So we delayed it.
And the reality of it is there's so much here that we just can't discuss in a podcast because the podcast would be too many hours. So what we do is we talk about everything in summary. We deep dive into a handful of studies. We discuss some of the illustrative critiques on all sides.
But really, if you want to see this at the deepest level, I would encourage you to look through our show notes where we're going to link to all of the analysis that's been done on each of the studies. So if you're a subscriber and you want to watch the full video of this podcast, you'll find that on the show notes page also. If you're not a subscriber, you can watch a sneak peek of this on YouTube. So without further delay, I hope you'll enjoy AMA number 38

**Nick Stenson** (2:46)
Peter, how are you doing?

**Peter Attia** (2:47)
I'm good, Nick. How are you?

**Nick Stenson** (2:48)
I'm doing good, man. You ready for another AMA?

**Peter Attia** (2:50)
Sure am.

**Nick Stenson** (2:51)
All right. Well, this one, I think, is on a topic you're a little more excited about than maybe the fruits and vegetables one. Looking at exercise. So there's been no shortage of things that you've spoken about exercise and how positive you are on it. You've often talked about how it's one of the most potent things we have in the toolkit for longevity.
And whenever you talk about it, we get a lot of questions from subscribers, a lot of people wondering, how should they think about exercise? Like, what is the optimal dose of exercise for longevity? And I think we see this anytime we do an exercise podcast, because you have your four pillars of exercise. And so people are always wondering, how do I get everything in? How much should I be working out? I think some of the confusion can also come from past guess, maybe having different opinions. I think when you look at the literature, it also doesn't quite agree with each other. So if you take someone like Alex Hutchinson, and you take maybe the AMA you and Bob did on VO2 Max, and you talked about how important that was, and then you have a podcast like we did with James O'Keefe, where he and his research talks about a J-curve, it's kind of hard for subscribers at times to understand the literature, right? How do you get an elite VO2 Max when some of the other research says the best thing you can do is play badminton? You know, those two things don't quite add up. And so what we did for this one is we compiled all these questions around this to really try and answer the core question, which is what is the optimal dose of exercise for longevity?