AMA #39: The Centenarian Decathlon, zone 2, VO2 max, and more

**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 another Ask Me Anything episode. Here we are at number 39, and I'm joined once again by Nick Stenson. In today's episode, we answer a lot of questions that have come in from subscribers based on all of our recent exercise content. Given all those questions that we've been saving, and coming off our last AMA, which looked at the J-curve data and the question around if you can exercise too much, we decided to do an AMA with more of a rapid fire style question follow-up on those topics. So in this discussion, I answer a lot of questions around the centenarian decathlon, which many of you have heard me discuss, and exercising with the goal of longevity, meaning lengthening your life and improving your health span, in addition to how I'm personally thinking about that.
We talk a lot about the follow-up questions around various types of cardiovascular training. This gets into everything from partitioning to methods to comparing different ways in which one might go about trying to get that cardiorespiratory benefit.
We then get into nuances around VO2 max training versus zone two training, the ideal breakdown in terms of time and intensity for each and specific follow-up questions around VO2 max in general. So if you're a subscriber and you want to watch the full video of this podcast, you can find it on the show notes page. If you're not a subscriber, you can watch a sneak peek of the video on our YouTube page. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy AMA number 39

**Nick Stenson** (2:03)
Peter, welcome to another AMA, how you doing?

**Peter Attia** (2:06)
Feeling good, man.

**Nick Stenson** (2:07)
How's the heat out there?

**Peter Attia** (2:08)
I don't mean to sound like that guy who's like just too cool for school, but it's just not phasing me, and people just can't stop complaining, and I don't know why. And it's interesting because I'm normally the, my nickname in one phase of my life, maybe it was residency or medical school, my nickname was Bubble Boy.
If it was below 72 or above 76, it must have been med school. I was like, yeah, it's just too cold or too hot.

**Nick Stenson** (2:31)
California does that to you though, just getting those bubbles, and anything outside of that feels good. You mean, you saw it in San Diego, 60 degrees and people would be in North faces walking around.

**Peter Attia** (2:41)
My thermostats definitely clicked to the much higher end.
Again, we'll probably talk about rucking, but rucking, I always pick the hottest time of day to do it. So usually about somewhere between four, 5 PM. And it's just moved my thermostat higher. So it's been 106, 107 every day for as far back as I can remember. And it's looking like it's gonna be that as far forward as I can see.
But I was in California three, four weeks ago, and I had dinner with a friend. We ate outside. I was in a t-shirt and I was freezing. And it was about 65 I thought I was gonna die. It wasn't that bad, but I was amazed at how cold I felt. So clearly I've lost my comfort level at the extreme low end of temperature.

**Nick Stenson** (3:25)
The Canadian in you is just sad to hear that, just the freezing cold at 65

**Peter Attia** (3:29)
Well, that's so pit.

**Nick Stenson** (3:31)
All right, so I think what we're gonna do for this AMA is, the last AMA, what we did is we took a lot of questions and answered it looking at the various literature to understand some of the confusion around if there's such a thing as too much exercise.
But what we weren't able to do is, with all the exercise content we've been putting out lately, we've gotten so many just follow up questions. And so coming off the last AMA, what we thought is it'd be a good time to just do a little more rapid fire style of those questions, not necessarily a heavy deep dive and just really look at answering all these different questions around exercise. That's what we're going to do today. If all goes well, we'll cover all four pillars of questions that have come in. And so it should be good, well-rounded AMA on all things exercise. There should be something for everybody. So before we get to the first question, anything you want to add to that?