Exercising for longevity: strength, stability, zone 2, zone 5, and more

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe.
Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
Welcome to a special episode of The Drive.
Now that we've released over 200 episodes, we realized we've covered a lot of stuff across various topics and in a lot of detail that I think frankly for people can be very difficult if you're not someone who started listening four years ago. I think even if you were listening from the very beginning, it can be really hard at times to kind of piece together all of the information.
So we thought about trying an experiment for today's episode. We've decided to pull a variety of clips from previous podcasts, but around a given theme. And in this episode, we're gonna focus on clips that discuss exercise and my framework for it. So we put these clips in order of what we think is the best way to listen from top to bottom. So think of this as kind of a mashup of a whole bunch of things on exercise, but they're organized in a way that I think should make frankly a lot of sense and hopefully provide even more value than if you were to listen to each of these podcasts in their completeness. So the hope here of course, is that this is gonna allow you to understand this topic better, but also to identify some previous episodes if you now wanna go back and dive really deep into those. First set of clips we're going to look at is what I'm optimizing for with my exercise and why I think training for the centenarian Olympics or centenarian decathlon, as I more commonly refer to it these days, is so important. The last thing to note here is that some of these clips are actually from AMAs. And so if you're not a subscriber, hopefully this gives you a sense of what lives behind that paywall and why we think there's a lot of value there. Additionally, for the stability and DNS content clips, in our episode with Beth Lewis and Michael Runtala, we actually filmed a lot of instructional videos of them showing us how to do these exercises. I recommend you spend the time to go and look at those videos because I think seeing here is probably better than just hearing. So this is the first time we're doing this. So we'd love your feedback. So tell us what you think about this and tell us if this is the kind of thing you'd like to see more of. And tell us if you think it sucks because it's a lot of work to do this. And if you think it sucks, I'd be happy to not do this anymore. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy this special episode of The Drive.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:56)
Yeah!

**Peter Attia** (3:01)
Everything we're talking about, Bob, right now is based on longevity. And that's very different than if you were asking this question through the lens of performance.
Does that point kind of make sense or should I expand on that a bit?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:12)
Yeah, I think you should expand a little bit, maybe on the performance, health and longevity, particularly performance and longevity and the possible trade off between the two.

**Peter Attia** (3:21)
If someone said to me, Peter, my goal is to break two hours and 40 minutes on the Chicago Marathon next year, I would be talking about this in a totally different manner. That is a very difficult performance goal. And that requires training at an energy system that I'm not even really going to talk about in the context of longevity.
If someone says, I want to break 10 hours on the Ironman. If someone says, I want to deadlift three and a half times my body weight. If you start to really look into the far recesses of amazing physical performance, everything I'm saying needs to be modified, and I'm not going to talk about what those things look like. What I will say is, they are generally not collinear with longevity, and at times they can be outright orthogonal. And I realize as that's coming out of my mouth, it sounds pretty freaking stupid if you're not a math person. So let me explain what that means in English. Something is collinear when it's directly in line with. Something is orthogonal when it is completely at odds with, or at 90 degrees to.