Most Replayed Moment: The 7-Day Training Blueprint To Live Longer! Peter Attia

Steven Bartlett (0:03)

When you think about all those things you want to accomplish, if we were then to codify them into a bunch of exercises or areas of your health that you had to now be thinking about, that I needed to be thinking about, what are the most important things? So I'm a 32-year-old, what are the most important parts of my health that I should be thinking about if I want to achieve all the things that I said to you in my final decade?

Peter Attia (0:25)

No one in the final decade of their life ever said, I wish I had less strength and I wish I had less endurance. So you cannot be too strong and you cannot be too fit. The only time that one would throttle back on the pursuit of those is A, if doing so is coming at the expense of something else, either with respect to your health or your life, and two, if the pursuit of that at such an extreme level produces risk of injury. Okay, so in other words, could I be stronger than I am today? Yes. I'll give you an example. We know that in resistance training, the sweet spot for pure strength is one to five reps.

When your goal is to maximize strength, you need to be pushing one, two, three, four, five reps. Once you start thinking about hypertrophy, muscle size, we're starting to think about seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 reps. Once we start thinking about muscular endurance, we start thinking about north of 15, right? Those are the general patterns of resistance training.

Steven Bartlett (1:34)

So if I want to build my muscles because I'm going for aesthetic goals, then I need to be aiming above five reps, I need to be 10 or 12 If I'm just purely thinking about strength, bigger weights, but lower reps.

Peter Attia (1:44)

That's exactly right.

Steven Bartlett (1:45)

Okay. And then if I want muscular endurance, we've got to be even higher reps. Okay. Lower weight.

Peter Attia (1:50)

Yep.

Steven Bartlett (1:51)

Okay.

Peter Attia (1:52)

So again, we could go into much more detail around that. But just to finish the point here, why do I not do much training at one to five reps? In fact, these days, I don't do any training at one to five reps anymore.

Steven Bartlett (2:03)

Why?

Peter Attia (2:04)

Because to train at one to five reps comes at a risk, especially for heavy compound movements.

So, like, I'm okay getting a little bit less of a strength benefit while still, of course, getting stronger, but training at a higher rep load. So I'm typically, so I'm targeting eight to twelve reps with one to two reps in reserve, is basically how I'm doing my resistance training.

That means every set I'm doing, I would expect to get to within about one rep of failure somewhere. So today, when I lifted, I don't think I did less than seven. I didn't do more than twelve. And the weight was always titrated so that I was either failing, almost failing, or one rep away from failing somewhere in there. And I was adjusting the weight constantly on every exercise to get there, with the exception of one exercise. I did pushups was one of the things I did. Pushups are kind of more in the muscle endurance. Obviously, I'm doing more reps when I was doing pushups. But pretty much everything else was in that range. So again, I'm not fully maximizing strength anymore because the cost of it might be a little bit high in terms of injury risk. Similarly, I'm not strength training 24-7 because I need to make time to do my endurance training and other types of training.

Steven Bartlett (3:26)

How often do you train resistance training?

Peter Attia (3:30)

I resistance train three times a week.

Steven Bartlett (3:32)

And how often do you train generally?

Peter Attia (3:35)

I train every day.

Steven Bartlett (3:36)

Every day? Why?

Peter Attia (3:37)

Because again, the intensity of my training is not that high, at least three days a week. So the three resistance days are pretty hard because I'm really only doing each body part once a week. So when I'm doing it, I'll spend that 90 minutes really hammering those body parts. Three of those days are just zone two. So three of my four cardio days are zone two days where I'm on a bike and I am riding at a level of intensity that actually allows me to still talk.

Not talk like I am now, but talking in a sort of a strained way. So for me, that's about a heart rate of 140 beats per minute. And that's just not taking a huge toll on me. Like those are almost like recovery days for me. And then one day a week, I do a really, really hard VO2 max day. And that's a really hard day. That burns a lot of matches. That's tomorrow. Not looking forward to it already.