AMA #55: Exercise: longevity-focused training, goal setting, improving deficiencies, managing emotional stress, 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 Ask Me Anything, episode number 55 I'm once again joined by my colleague, Nick Stenson. Given that it is now officially the new year, today's AMA is focused all around exercise. This is a topic we speak about a lot, and it's not only because of how important it is, but also because of how many questions we see come through from our audience around it. And the majority of these questions revolve in one way or another around how someone can improve their cardiorespiratory fitness, increase their muscle mass, increase their strength, or all of the above.
As such, in today's AMA, we cover the importance of having a goal in your training, and why, for myself and a lot of my patients, it's training for the centenarian decathlon that provides the structure. How can we help identify the pillars of exercise where people are most efficient, and from there, how can people use periodization training to not only make the most improvements in those areas, but also create some variety in training?
Through this, we look at case studies of different phenotypes and what a typical workout might look like for different types of people. For example, those who come to exercise with a strong background in one area, but not in another, or people who show up without any exercise training at all. We then focus on how stress can impact training, and by that, I mean emotional stress. This is something I think we can all relate to, that we go through periods of our life when we're under great emotional stress. The question is, how should that factor into the decisions we make around training? If you're a subscriber and 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.

**Nick Stenson** (2:32)
Peter, welcome to AMA. How are you doing?

**Peter Attia** (2:34)
Very well.

**Nick Stenson** (2:36)
I think we're going to get right into it because we got kind of a big one today. So with it being the new year, we know a lot of people are going to start to either take their exercise more seriously, start to exercise thinking of switching up their exercise routines. And we see so many questions around exercise come through. We thought this would be a good time to make it kind of an all exercise AMA.
And some of the questions we see from people are, they're wondering how to improve their cardio respiratory fitness, how to increase their muscle mass, their strength, oftentimes how to do both. And so we pulled questions that are going to look at how you solve these problems with clients in your practice. And this includes first really identifying and clearly defining what the goal of training is. Because as you often talk about, if you don't clearly identify the goal, you don't really know what to do. And then from there, helping people understand how they can identify the area in their life that they need the most help in when it comes to exercise. And then we'll start to get into more technical questions on how people can use periodization training, how they can make improvements in areas that are most needed. And we're even going to look at some case studies of what a different weekly workout could look like for a few different types of people.
From there, we're then going to step back and also look at some training questions that apply to everyone, no matter what level of expertise they're at. This includes how stress can impact a workout and also how people should look at wearables and the data from wearables as it relates to making decisions on training.
So, we got a lot. So with all that said, anything you want to add before we get into it?

**Peter Attia** (4:17)
No, I like your ambition, man.

**Nick Stenson** (4:19)
We'll see what we can do.
I think we first need to start a reminder for people on how you look at training and the goal of training. Because for you, you're not training to run a marathon, be a powerlifter. Instead, you're training for something else. And you've talked about this before, but I think it is important to just kind of lay that foundation for people so they know why you're making the recommendations, why you're doing what you're doing. So do you want to remind people quickly what the Centenarian Decathlon is and why you use that as your training goal?