According to Dr. Peter Atiyah, smoking and diabetes can increase your risk of death by two to three times.

Improving your cardiorespiratory fitness can reduce your risk of death by five times, and increasing your strength can reduce your risk of death by three times.

Who is Dr. Peter Atiyah?

He's a physician that focuses on the applied science of longevity.

He helped Chris Hemsworth, the guy from Thor Marvel movies in the TV show called Limitless, and he's been on the podcast with Tim Ferriss, Andrew Huberman, and Rich Roll.

He has a new book coming out in just a few days called Outlive.

And today we're going to test out his fitness routine to see what it's like and how it actually works.

Why exercise?

He says it's the most potent drug to increase your health span.

Living longer, what do I need to do?

It's like a super well-crafted exercise program that is geared towards strength, muscle mass, and cardiorespiratory fitness.

And Dr. Peter Atiyah argues that if you do these four fitness pillars, you have massive control over how you can change your risk of ACM.

Define all-cause mortality.

Essentially death from any cause.

All right, time to put my shoes on because the very first thing is zone 2 training.

And Peter Atiyah defines zone 2 as keeping your lactate below two millimoles.

So how do you do that?

You have to prick your blood and be able to measure that with a lactate meter.

If you don't have that, the next best thing is a conversational pace.

I can spend the entire 45 minutes on a phone call.

It's not as comfortable as this discussion here.

I'm a little more strained.

But if I can't talk, if I feel like I can't talk, I'm too high in the intensity.

His favorite way is on a bike because you can actually titrate the wattage to exactly what you need.

You could also do a rower, swimming, whatever it is.

You just need to keep a consistent pace, consistent power, and potentially a consistent heart rate.

For me personally, using a chest heart rate strap is one of the easier ways.

I go ahead and I adjust the zones on my Apple Watch to kind of match what my RPE might be for like a conversational pace.

And we're going to do on the treadmill because that's the easiest way to keep a consistent pace overall.

And it's really easy with the zone two stuff to get confused.

There's zones for heart rates.

There's zones for intensity.

Some of these have six zones.

Some of these have three zones.

This zone two does not correlate with a lot of the other zone twos that people talk about.

Just be mindful and understand what kind of zone two is this person talking about.

We do 45 minutes minimum for three to four hours a week.

So that's four sessions of 45 minutes.

If you're just getting started, he recommends doing three sessions of 30 minutes.

So we're going to hop on one of these treadmills.

I like to use the ones where it integrates with the Apple Watch.

I'm going to put this heart rate monitor on and connect the heart rate monitor to my Apple Watch.

My typical zone two range is about 136, 140.

So I try to stay around that a little bit lower.

I don't obsess over the heart rate numbers.

Keep going how you feel because some days I might be extremely tired and I might need to stick around 132 heart rate.

Some days I might feel really good and I can go up to 140.

My zone two pace is approximately like 1030 minutes per mile, whatever that is, kilometers.

Yeah, I'm about to die.

I don't know how to run to be honest with you.

So while we do the zone two run, I'm going to talk about why he thinks zone two is so important.

Building aerobic efficiency means you're making your mitochondria more efficient.

And we all know when we learned in school, mitochondria is the powerhouse.

When you have really efficient mitochondria, you're able to uptake glucose into your muscles.

If you eat a lot of carbs, right, it's going to minimize your glucose spikes.

It's going to minimize your potential of getting type two diabetes, but having efficient mitochondria is a hallmark of good metabolic health.

I highly recommend you go check out the drive podcast, the Q and A.

He has some great videos in terms of what zone two should look like and why it's important to do that.

Oh man, I'm out of breath.

I'm going too fast.

Don't forget to tie your shoes when you're running.

And if you fall while running, you're going to be dead and you're not going to have any longevity.

I've been doing zone two for now like six months.

It's really easy.

I know 45 minutes I go out, I run at a steady pace and then I just come home and it's like, it's a great experience.

I love doing it.

The next part gets a little bit harder.

Anaerobic performance.

So this is without oxygen and he might also label it as zone five or VO two max training where aerobic and mitochondrial efficiency is like how efficient your engine is as producing power.

VO two max training is how big your engine is.

So let's head over to the air bike.

So this is all anaerobic exercise and anaerobic means without oxygen.

So my muscles are going to have to operate without oxygen.

And the reason that this is so or cardio respiratory fitness for their age group have a five times reduction in all cause mortality.

So they're five times less likely to die.

So if I do this once a week and I'm five times less likely to die, I'll take it.

And his protocol, sometimes he'll do this right after a zone two workout.

So as long as you get your minimum 45 minutes in, then you can head into a VO two max workout.

And he does this once a week.

You have two options.

Option one is the one by three.

So one minute, super intense, three minutes of zone two.

And the option two is four by four, which is four minutes as hard as you can go for those four minutes.

And then four minutes easy.

And the same thing, you can do this on a treadmill, on a Stairmaster or a bike.

It's all about whatever your choice is.

You just need to be able to hit those consistent times.

Pretty much essentially peak out your heart rate to your VO two max, your zone five range.

So I'm going to do one minute on three minutes off, let the timer begin.

So after about 30 minutes, you're done.

You're out of bed.

And if you need to batch process these, you could always do your VO two max zone five workouts right after a zone two, but never before.

Ideally different days or entire different parts of the day.

But Peter Atiyah recommends that you always do zone two first and then VO two max.

You're going to do strength right after, or at the same time, zone two first, then strength.

That just allows you to get the maximum benefits from your zone two workout.

Next up, we're going to do the last two pillars, head over to the weights and get a strength workout.

And maybe having lean muscle mass and strength is highly correlated with longevity.

Now, why is longevity so important to me?

I want to be able to live to a hundred, but I also want to be able to maximize my life up until that age.

And one belief that I resonate with is the centurion Olympics.

He coined this term because sometimes in life, you're not training for a specific event.

You are just training to live a long and healthy life.

What exercises do I need to do on a weekly basis for the rest of my life to maintain the health that I need?

So that way, when I'm 95 years old, I can play with my grandkids, my great grandkids.

I can travel.

I can be able to put my carry-on luggage into the overhead compartment.

God knows how much they're going to charge us for just putting carry-on luggage in the overhead compartment at that point.

Now, one thing he did mention in his podcast with Beth is that he likes to wear minimalist shoes.

So we're going to strength train minimalist shoes because we all know I'm a barefoot shoes fan.

To the weights we go.

Now at the age of 25, you start to lose a lot of your strength.

And I'm not 25 anymore, so I think I've peaked in terms of my strength.

You got to keep up these strength workouts so that way we can maintain our muscle and reduce the risk of falling or anything else.

All right, grip strength.

So we're going to grab obviously the heaviest kettlebells because I'm a very strong guy.

And we're going to do former carries with these kettlebells.

Cut out the kettlebells.

I'm going to grab the lightest ones.

Just don't show that I'm carrying the light ones, okay?

His biggest recommendation is doing four strength training every week, 40 to 60 minutes.

And he says that he never misses strength.

If he misses his cardio workouts, that's okay, but he almost tries to never miss strength workouts.

Increasing grip strength, squats, deadlifts, just having overall muscle size and muscle power is really important.

Dr. Peter Atiyah is trying to do the Centurion Olympics, which means at 100 years old, he wants to be able to carry four grocery bags in both hands.

So that's what I'm doing right now in these farmer carries.

There's a lot of different things in his life that he wants to be able to do.

We'll list them all here.

But just doing strength exercises to be able to maintain his ability to keep that at 100, 200 years old.

Now, I'm not a personal trainer, but there are some apps that make it super easy.

I'll have them linked below, like Fitify.

And you can just get a trainer to write you four workouts, 60 minutes each, effortless.

Go check them out.

Another thing that Dr. Atiyah wants to do is be able to pull himself out of a swimming pool without stairs.

And I have no idea what that has to do with deadlifts.

Always use protection.

For some reason, he likes to do wedge deadlifts to get a little deeper.

So we're going to do that today.

You got to do these things safely.

So have right form, really round your back.

It's a joke.

All right.

Well, it's the first time I ever deadlift.

What's really interesting is he says that exercise is more powerful than sleep and nutrition.

So you got to focus on exercise first.

And those things are totally secondary.

Now we'll move on to the foundational pillar, which is stability.

Some people might call it like mobility, flexibility, but Dr. Peter Atiyah likes to call it stability.

And he says to kind of sprinkle it in throughout the week.

This is definitely the hardest one.

I haven't been able to get a lot of information on what are potential exercises, workouts and the time period required to do this.

But he does talk about a variety of things on his premium membership website, as well as a podcast he had with Beth.

We have to train stability in a way so you can be malleable and reflexive, as opposed to just hanging on for dear life.

But I would almost consider this as going to a yoga class Pilates class where they do discuss and engage with how you need to breathe and how you need to move your body and which muscles you're kind of stretching and flexing.

Pails and rails.

I have to look this up, but essentially it's activating the muscle that you're trying to stretch, which is one of them.

And then the second one is activating the opposite muscle.

So if I'm trying to stretch my quads right now, I would activate my glutes or hamstrings to help the stretch, or I could squeeze my quad to help stretch my quad.

So that's one of the options.

Even rowing was one of the options, FRC.

So there's quite a bit of other things that you can do.

I'm going to do some more research, but I couldn't fully figure this one out.

Peter Attia has a book coming out called Outlive.

I'll have it linked down below.

What's really funny is he has Huberman Lab talking about how great his book is.

And he also has this guy Hug Jackman.

Not sure who Hug Jackman is, but they're also vouching for his book.

I want to get him to send it to him.

However, let's get him to comment on this video down below.

I just want to celebrate his new book that's coming out in just a couple of days.

Now, Dr. Peter Attia does have a fitness test for longevity.

So I'm going to do that with some of my friends.

If you want to see that video, turn on your notifications.

And since you enjoyed this video, go watch my video where I test a continuous glucose monitor to optimize my health.

Link right here.