Training for The Centenarian Decathlon: zone 2, VO2 max, stability, and strength | Peter Attia, M.D.

**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 wanna 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 wanna 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. For this week's episode, we're going to release the live AMA that we recorded celebrating the release of Outlive, which was recorded in April. We received a good bit of feedback from those who were invited and able to attend this episode live. So we decided to make it more widely available.
Our AMAs, of course, are typically reserved only for our subscribers. So if you're not a subscriber, this might give you a bit of an idea what our AMAs are like, although this is not the typical format. Usually our AMAs go a little bit deeper into content than this one, but nevertheless, hopefully this gives you a sense of what we're up to. In this episode, we really focused the entire conversation around the centenarian decathlon. We speak about the events in my centenarian decathlon and how I decided on them and how I work with patients to create their own list. We then talk about how people can know if they're on track for their centenarian decathlon across a variety of ages and the various fitness tests that can help determine that. We focus the rest of the discussion around training for the centenarian decathlon, including what that training should look like, whether you're older, younger, new to exercise or a veteran. And we talk about some questions that came up around zone two and VO2 max training. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy this special episode of The Drive.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:11)
Never done a live event, never done a live AMA.
Everything has been recorded. So how you feel?

**Peter Attia** (2:16)
Ready.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:17)
You feel like there's more pressure on this because there is, you can't screw up. Everything you say is officially written in stone.

**Peter Attia** (2:25)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:27)
We'll see how it goes. So what we're doing tonight, today, depending on where you're at, is kind of an AMA that's all focused on one thing, which is the centenary and decathlon.
And so what we did is for everyone who pre-ordered, they could sign up for the event, they submitted a bunch of questions. We went through, I mean, there was thousands of questions. So right off the bat, we'll apologize to anybody who we can't answer the question, but we tried to group them together, kind of organize them a bit, really to try and get through as much as we can. So if anyone has heard our AMAs before, they'll probably know sometimes we can go into a little bit of detail, and sometimes one question can take a while.
But the goal for this one is more of that rapid fire. Let's see how many we can get out, and it should be good. So anything you wanna add or say before we get rolling?

**Peter Attia** (3:19)
No, but feel free to interrupt me if I'm being too long-winded.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:22)
All right, we'll just point at the watch and say we gotta speed it up.
So I think what would be helpful is, because we did get a lot of questions around, hey, what's the best thing you can do for longevity? Like, if there's only one thing, you know, you have five tactics in the toolkit, but if there's one thing people should focus on, what would that be? And maybe it'd be worth just kinda giving a little piece on that, just as we set the stage on why we decided to focus on the centenarian decathlon and kinda why you think that's so important for people's longevity journey.

**Peter Attia** (3:54)
Yeah, I mean, look, it's an impossible question to answer because if you got a person who's sleeping four hours a night, if you don't fix that, nothing else will matter. If you have a person who's malnourished, you sort of have to address these issues. But generally speaking, if everything in your life is a six or seven out of 10, taking your exercise to a 10 out of 10 is gonna have a greater impact on both the length and quality of your life than any of the other domains that I can think of, perhaps with the exception of emotional health.