Transcription
If you walk for exercise, I want to challenge something that you probably heard your whole life. 10,000 steps. 10,000 steps. 10,000 steps. Steps do matter. I'm not saying that they don't. And movement is good.
But something interesting became really clear. The people who lived longer weren't necessarily the ones who walked the most. If you stroll slowly for an hour, your heart rate barely rises. Your arteries feel very little mechanical stress. Your metabolism barely shifts. You're moving, which is still better than sitting, but your body may not be adapting to much at all. You're probably walking wrong. Just missing the one small thing that determines whether walking actually improves your arteries or not, or simply just makes you feel productive. Today, I'm going to show you that one thing. It turns out how you walk matters far more than how far you walk.
When you at least start to walk briskly, things begin to change. Your heart rate rises. Your blood flow through your arteries increases. Your muscles demand more energy. Your body begins burning more fat and using glucose more efficiently. Your cells begin adapting. You're not just burning calories at this point. You're training your metabolism to support a new stimulus, a new stressor, a good stressor.
But what does brisk walking actually mean? Well, it means walking fast enough that the effort is noticeable. Your breathing should increase. Talking should become a little bit more difficult. You should feel like you're working but still able to keep going. For many people, that's somewhere around 3 to four miles per hour. The exact speed matters a lot less than the effort. You want a pace that pushes you a little bit outside your comfort zone. That small change dramatically increases the benefit you get from something as simple as walking.
Now, here's the important part. Walking is a fantastic foundation for health. what we call zone two for many people. But walking alone isn't the entire exercise plan. Think of it as the first layer, a very important layer, but only the first layer. Because a good longevity exercise plan usually has several pieces working together.
The first piece is movement, walking or another steady, what we call zone two, steady activity. The second piece is intensity, short periods where your body works harder, intense intervals. The third piece is strength, building and maintaining muscle because muscles, metabolically healthy muscles are your best internal safety valve against the inevitable uh increase of metabolic disease that comes with aging. The fourth piece is frequent muscle activation throughout the day. Now, that becomes more important. This fourth piece, the frequent muscle activation, that becomes more important for those of us 60 and older.
If you're less than 60, you can go to the gym, get a good workout once or twice a week, and usually that's going to help. And you can usually do well with that. But those of us that are 60 and older have a thing called anabolic resistance. our muscles just don't recover and grow and stay there as well as a 40 or 20 or 30 year old. So, we need more frequent muscle activation.
Now, together, these four pieces support your metabolism and therefore your arteries and your independence as you age. There's a reason that intensity and and strength matter so much. As we get older, two important systems in the body begin to decline. insulin receptors and mitochondria. Insulin receptors help move glucose out of your bloodstream and into your cells. Mitochondria are the small structures inside the cells that produce energy. Both aging and metabolic disease damage these systems. When insulin receptors become less responsive, blood sugar rises more easily. When mitochondria lose their efficiency, your cells produce energy less effectively. they burn that glucose less effectively. So that combination drives many of the problems that we see with aging metabolism.
But exercise, especially exercise that includes some intensity, reverses those changes of aging. Those changes of aging also happen to be the changes associated with type 2 diabetes. Hm. Wonder why such a correlation. Your body responds to challenge. If you never challenge it, these systems just slowly weaken and go away.
You can have your diet we completely dialed in. We have uh tons of people coming to see us to develop a longevity routine to get healthy and stay healthy into their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and more. Most of these people find it a lot easier to get that diet. You can have your diet completely dialed in and if you don't do these things, you're still going to have major problems. You're still going to lose muscle. You're still going to lose that safety valve and you're still going to be at risk for cardiovascular disease.
If you challenge your systems with the things that we're talking about, they adapt. That's why adding even short periods of higher effort can make such a difference. Intensity signals to your muscles and your metabolism that they've got to improve. They've got to support themselves.
Strength training plays a role here, too. Especially when it focuses on the largest muscles in the body, your legs, your hips, your thighs, the groin muscles. These muscles contain huge networks of capillaries and a large share of the body's insulin receptors. When these muscles are strong and active, they act like an internal safety valve for glucose. Don't need to remember the part the term insulin receptors. Don't even need to know what they are. Just need to know that that's the weak spot in our metabolism as we age. That's what leads to grandma having high sugar. When your muscles are are active and strong, they help pull sugar out of the bloodstream and store it safely. So, you don't want grandma to be a cute little old lady. You want grandma to regain those leg muscles. That's one reason muscle mass, especially in the legs, is strongly linked to metabolic health.
Another helpful concept is what some people call resistance snacks. Short bursts of muscle working during the day. For example, a wall sit for one minute followed by deep lunges for each leg. Just a few minutes of effort, but major discomfort, burn in those muscles. I'm not going to say no pain, no gain because people react negative negatively to that. But you do have to have some burn. You have to have some discomfort in those muscles to stimulate them to gain their health back. Short bursts like these one minute wall sits and these one minute um low lunges stimulate mar large muscle groups and remind your metabolism that these muscles are still active and are needed and they need metabolic support.
When you combine these pieces, steady movement, some intensity, strength work, regular muscle activation, you create a much stronger exercise plan than just walking alone. Let me show you how this developed in my own life. My routine didn't start where it is today. In my 40s, I was a runner, distance runner. I ran multiple marathons. If I ran about a dozen uh formal marathons, but then several dozen uh when you start looking at the prep, I even ran a an ultramarathon, 40 miles at the Land Between the Lakes ultramarathon. That race was brutal. Snow, ice, mud, rutdded trails full of roots, frozen puddles, water everywhere. Not an experience I would recommend for longevity at this point in time.
Eventually, I learned something important. Long slow distance alone didn't keep improving performance. If you wanted to improve, you had to add intervals. Short bursts of higher intensity. That was my first real lesson, that intensity matters.
In my mid-50s, I ran my last marathon. And around that same time, something else happened that changed how I thought about exercise. I discovered I had pre-diabetes. When I challenged my blood sugar, I saw readings climb to around 200 at after a few years of this. That discovery forced me to rethink exercise. Walking slowly just wasn't going to be enough. So, I began adding interval work. One minute hard, 85% effort followed by a one minute recovery. That's one interval. I tried to accumulate about 20 of those intervals each week. Now, sometimes that was two sessions of 10. Sometimes that was three sessions of seven intervals.
Later, I discovered a shorter protocol called rehed exertion highintensity training. It's got some great evidence behind it in the science in the science. Instead of a lot of intervals, you just do two. The intense phase only lasts 20 seconds instead of a minute. But those 20 seconds are all out. By about 15 seconds, you're wondering whether you're going to make it to 20. The entire session can take about five minutes, but it delivers a strong metabolic signal without leaving you exhausted the rest of the day.
Along the way, I also added resistance training. about an hour in the gym twice a week. I focused very intentionally on the largest muscles in the bodies, the legs. These muscles play an enormous role in metabolic health. As I said, they regulate blood sugar, support insulin sensitivity. I then began adding short resistance snacks during the day. And that was because I was getting into my 60s where we all most of us at our 60s start having problems with anabolic resistance. Our muscles just don't grow back as well. They don't maintain. When I started the wall sits, the deep lunges, the small bursts of muscle work on a regular basis. My routine day today looks very different than it did when I was just running long distance. It follows the same structure we just talked about. Movement, intensity, strength, and regular muscle activation.
Now, your version may look different. Your pace may be slower. Your intervals may be shorter or faster. Your strength work may be lighter or heavier. But the structure works at almost any age. If in the walking part, get some brisk walking in there. Add some intensity. Build strength in your legs. Stay consistent.
If you're trying to get your health back, maybe you've been frustrated with your current care or overwhelmed by conflicting advice. If that's true, you're not alone. You know, years ago, I had to dig deep and figure out what was happening inside my own arteries when I discovered that diabetes. Well, that's why I built our clinical team to help people take control of their health before a heart attack or stroke takes control of them. If you're ready to take care of the next step, call us at 859-7211414 or click the link below. We'll walk you through options and help you find a plan that fits your goals and your decisions. And if you're not quite ready, that's okay. Start with our free sevenstep heart attack prevention guide. It's linked below or you can scan the QR code on your screen.
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