The Ageing Doctor: These Are They Early Signs Of Arthritis! If You Run & Don't Do This, Start Now! The Secret Cause of Alzheimer's!

Vonda Wright (0:00)

Runners who only run are hurt a lot, and it's usually due to a motion imbalance. So I always do this test to show them whether your butt muscles are strong enough to keep your pelvis straight, and whether you're strong enough to keep your knee from falling into this position.

Steven Bartlett (0:14)

I look like I'm drunk or something. How are you doing this with your heels on?

SPEAKER_3 (0:17)

Dr. Vonda Wright is a leading orthopedic surgeon and longevity expert. Leveraging her expertise with elite athletes to revolutionize the way we move, eat, and train. To live longer, stronger, and better.

Vonda Wright (0:27)

I'm on a rampage to make bones sexy again. Because in the United States, at least 50 percent of women will get osteoporosis along with two million men. Now, osteoporosis is low bone density. And studies show that people with low bone density have higher cognitive decline. It increases your risk of fracture. If you break your hip, 50 percent of the time, whether you're a man or a woman, you will not return to pre-fall function. And 30 percent of the time, you will die. And there's a lot that causes bone fragility, such as aging, not building enough bone in our youth, it's our sedentary lifestyles, the myth that women have to be teeny tiny, and it's even things like a woman breastfeeding will lose 20 percent of her bone density in the first six months. But it's not inevitable. And I will lay out a lifestyle that I call unbreakable. It's about muscle, bone, nutrition. But the most important part is mindset.

Steven Bartlett (1:13)

I'm very, very excited. But just to pause that, is there a link between menopause and bone density?

Vonda Wright (1:18)

Yes. And it's because of the plummeting of estrogen, which is critical for muscle, bone, tendon, ligament, fat. And without it, it can have dire effects. So you need to know the following.

Steven Bartlett (1:34)

Dr. Vonda Wright.

SPEAKER_3 (1:36)

Yes.

Steven Bartlett (1:38)

For anyone that's unaware of what you do and who you do it for, what do you do and who do you do it for?

Vonda Wright (1:44)

So, you know, as a sports doctor over the years, we've learned how to take really high-performing athletes, you know, those are who are winning all the time, who need to continually get better and better and better at their craft. And over the 30 years of my career, we've gone from really focusing on how they train, the periodization of their training to the last time I was at the University of Pittsburgh, I was the medical director of the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex, which is where the Pittsburgh Penguins are housed. And it had gotten so scientific, they had a full-time chef. Every meal from breakfast, lunch, dinner, every meal on the planes were prepared, because when it comes down to split-second agility, top of brain thinking, every little bit counts. And so in the 30 years of my medical career, it's gone from just learning more about performance science of how to train, to how to feed people, to how to recover people. So instead of doing, for instance, I think Dara Torres was talking about her Olympic runs in her 40s, right? She trained much differently when she was 24, and in her 40s, after she had had a child, it was much more about recovery, not as much hours in a pool. So I take all those things that we've learned over this course of my career, and now apply them not only to athletes, but to people like you and me who were in high-performance jobs. I need to be tip top in every sphere of my life, as you do. And how do we eat better, recover better, take the principles of performance that we've learned from athletes into high-performers and even mere mortal athletes like me?

Steven Bartlett (3:30)

A lot of my work involves cognitive performance, making sure my brain is sharp when it needs to be. How much of your work crosses over into the cognitive realm?

Vonda Wright (3:39)

You know, I am not a brain scientist myself, but I am fortunate to be surrounded by people who are expert in that. So from my own perspective, I've come to appreciate at a much deeper level personally, as well as professionally, the role of sleep. In fact, we've talked about my previous books from the early 2000s before, and when I wrote those books, mobility was king. I wrote only about mobility. And then as I progressed in my career, I got deeper, deeper, deeper into nutrition. And then I would say, okay, nutrition is number one and mobility is second. But at this phase of evolution of sleep science and knowing how restoring the brain and providing adequate time and nutrients, I put sleep first, sleep and recovery first, because you can't do any of these other things without a well-recovered brain. In fact, somebody asked me the other day about timing of working out. And is it always necessary to do it in the morning? Like, that's the mantra, get up, go do your workout. And my answer to that was, you have to know how your brain works. For instance, my brain is best between 5 a.m. and 2 p.m. That is when I'm going to get all my deep work done. I'm going to be creative. I'm going to think. After 2 p.m., I could build you a house. I can continue operating. But if I'm going to write a book, it's going to be early. So I do not work out in the morning because I'm not going to waste that brain energy on physical activity when I need it for this deep work. So that's the way I apply brain science. But I'm so lucky to be surrounded in the place I am now with people who put EEGs on your head and map your brain and tell you which brain pathways you're too stressful on and which brain pathways we can train. And you can train the physical brain like a muscle.