The Healthy Ageing Doctor: Doing This For 30s Will Burn More Fat Than A Long Run! Sitting Is The Silent Killer! - Vonda Wright

Dr. Vonda Wright (0:00)

You only have to do that for 30 seconds. That will burn 40 percent more fat than even high intensity interval training.

Steven Bartlett (0:07)

Really?

Dr. Vonda Wright (0:07)

So it begins with...

SPEAKER_3 (0:09)

Dr. Vonda Wright is a renowned orthopedic surgeon and a pioneering researcher in mobility and aging.

Steven Bartlett (0:14)

Through simple methods, she enables people to maintain their strength all the way through till their later life.

Dr. Vonda Wright (0:19)

We have no excuse until our mid 70s for slowing down. These are MRI slices of a 40-year-old athlete. We have beautiful muscle architecture, but if we sit around for 35 years and have a desk job, and we don't go move our muscles, this is what happens.

Steven Bartlett (0:36)

jesus, my God.

Dr. Vonda Wright (0:37)

But this is a 74-year-old who had just invested in their mobility four to five times a week. So if you're an 80-year-old consistently lifting weights, you are functionally as strong as a 60-year-old person who doesn't.

Steven Bartlett (0:49)

But I worry about joint pain. Is joint pain inevitable?

Dr. Vonda Wright (0:51)

It is not, but one reason people have pain is because of how much we weigh. Small changes in our total body weight can have profound effects on the joint pain we feel. Let's say this rock is one pound. If you gain one pound, you would think that this is all the amount of pressure you're going to feel. But because of the mechanics, what you actually feel is the weight of these bricks. So you think gaining 10 pounds doesn't mean much, but imagine gaining 100 pounds of pressure. So how should you be investing in your mobility every day? There are four components that we should try to find time for.

Number one is...

Steven Bartlett (1:31)

Dr. Vonda Wright, you've been treating patients, learning about medicine, taking care of people, and working in the industry you've worked in for almost 35 years now. To do that, you must have a great deal of passion. You must be on a bit of a mission. My first question to you is as you sit here today, what is occupying your focus, your mind, your passion? What is that when you wake up in the morning and you think about the work you're doing and why you're doing it? What is the answer to that?

Dr. Vonda Wright (2:04)

The answer to the question of why I wake up every day and rush into my work, whether it's into the surgery or whether it's into taking care of individuals or writing, is because I have been working under the mantra of, I'm going to change the way we age in this country or in this world. because when I started, there was this steadfast belief. The national zeitgeist has changed now, but when I started, there was this belief that aging was an inevitable decline from the vitality of youth, down a slippery slope to frailty where we would spend 20 years of our lives dying, going to the doctor's office every three years. I never, ever believed that. I never believed it. Maybe it was because when I was a child, I lived in the 70s where you could just take your kid with you to a race, and my dad would do that. I mean, he'd take me to a 5K and say, wait here, I'll be back in 20 minutes, and I would see people in their 50s and 60s racing, and they would be celebrated.

Or maybe it's because I started as a cancer nurse, and I saw people fighting every day for their lives, and I believed that that was not the destiny that we were doomed to. So as I progressed through my career and I started doing the research myself, I realized that this myth we had in our country, that, or all over the world, that aging had to be this inevitable decline, was based on population studies. And what does that mean? Well, population studies just look at a cohort of people and see what happens over time. There's a huge study funded by the NIH in the United States called the Health ABC, for instance, and they looked at a population of 70-year-olds and just followed them over time. Well, what do we know about populations of people? Well, what we know is that up to 70 percent of them do not do one extra step of mobility a day. So what we know about aging has been what we know about sedentary living. And so I did not believe that we truly understood how the trajectory of our aging could be for people who remained active across the course of their lives. So my team and I did that original research, and we proved that you can be healthy, vital, active, joyful long into the foreseeable future, much more than we gave ourselves credit for. And it drives me because even over all these years, 35 years, 20 years of it as an orthopedic surgeon, it is only now that people are beginning to pick up the mantle of prevention and not only disease care.