The #1 Workout Mistake Shortening Your Life (Most People Skip This)

Everyone already knows that muscle and VO2max are important for your longevity. You should have both higher muscle strength as well as good cardiorespiratory fitness to reduce your risk of long-term diseases and extend your healthspan. But there are some specific types of training that are very underappreciated and even neglected by most people. These activities not only improve your overall workout plan but are also quintessential components to healthy longevity and they might literally save your life in the future. So in this video I'm going to give you the exercises and sports that you should add to your workout routine. I want to start off with something that most sports hinge on and that's speed and power. When comparing strength to power then relative muscle power appears to be an even stronger predictor of mortality than relative strength. That's because power requires a lot more than muscle size. Power depends heavily on fast twitch fibers, specifically type 2 fibers such as their size, quality and speed of contraction. These fibers are disproportionately lost and impaired during aging Since type 2 decline is strongly tied to frailty, falls, slower walking speed and loss of independence maintaining power becomes a very sensitive biomarker of biological aging. And the thing with type 2 muscle fibers is that you can build and maintain them by developing speed and power. You're not going to become faster by training slower. You need to be activating these type 2 muscle fibers at near maximum intensities which entails doing it fast and powerfully. It's been seen that the elderly people who do just endurance training have much fewer fast twitch muscle fibers whereas those who do strength training have significantly more. So you should always have an element of explosiveness and speed in your training. At the bare minimum, you should train some sprinting at least once a week ideally a little bit more frequent than that. And in a lot of cases of strength training, you shouldn't try to lift things slowly. You would want to lift things explosively and fast. Some of the most impressive athletes in their 80s can sprint very well for their age. They can run as fast as a regular 30 or 40 year old which is just insane. The reason for that is because they have a fast and explosive nervous system. In addition to that, they also have good coordination because sprinting is not just about explosiveness and being as fast as possible. It also requires full body coordination. That's why sprinting is one of the best exercises for your longevity. You maintain the speed and power that decline the most during aging and you also need to maintain good muscle coordination and balance when you're actually sprinting. That's why bodybuilders who are very strong and powerful suck at sprinting. They're just too stiff and they lack the skill of sprinting. So the missing piece for a lot of people's workout routine is speed and power. But the idea of speed training is also relevant to brain aging and neurodegeneration. A recent study looked at if episodic cognitive training could postpone Alzheimer's and other related dementias. The answer is yes. They looked at older adults from the famous active randomness control trial, a large cognitive training study in older people that followed them for 20 years. The goal was to see whether or not brain training could reduce the risk of dementia. The participants were assigned to three kinds of brain training. Memory, reasoning, or speed training. Memory training was about trying to remember stuff. Reasoning training involved solving patterns and problems. And speed of processing training was training for your brain to notice and react to visual information more quickly and efficiently. Standard memory and reasoning training didn't reduce the risk of dementia. Speed of processing training alone didn't either. However, those who did speed of processing training and received additional booster sessions every few years had about 25% lower risk of dementia. So the main takeaway from this study is that a specific type of brain training, speed of processing training with additional follow-up sessions, could reduce your risk of dementia. Other regular types of brain training like memory training and reasoning training don't do that. In the active study, speed of processing training was designed to make older adults get faster at noticing visual information quickly, dividing their attention and spotting something important in the center of the screen while also noticing things in the periphery. A simple way to picture it is that participants would see very brief visuals on a screen and they had to identify or locate targets faster and faster as the task got harder. The training was adaptive, which means that if they did well, the program shortened the display time or made the task more difficult. It's closely related to something that's called the useful field of view test. Basically, how much visual information can you take in accurately at a glance while under time pressure. In the context of training for longevity, then this type of speed of processing training can be implemented into your workout routines. You'll be hitting multiple birds with one stone. The best type of speed of processing training in a physical sense are various ball sports like soccer, baseball, basketball, as well as racket sports like badminton, tennis, pickleball, etc. These sports require more than just physicality and athleticism. They also require hand-to-eye coordination, foot-to-eye coordination, and overall body coordination and body awareness. They're not just physical sports for your body, they're also mental sports because you have to use your brain. And these sports also incorporate explosiveness and power and speed. In soccer or tennis, you also need to be explosive to react to the ball moving. So to succeed in tennis or soccer, you need to also have good explosiveness, good eye-to-hand coordination, and good speed of processing for your brain. Before we continue, I want to tell you about top 1% health. Most people don't need more health information. They need to know where they stand, what's holding them back, and what to focus on next. That's exactly what top 1% health helps you to do. The process is simple. First, take the top 1% health assessment. The assessment estimates your current health percentage, identifies your biggest bottlenecks, and assigns you to the right program. Then you follow your program to reach the next level. Whether you're working towards top 20%, top 10%, top 1%, or even top 0.1% of health, you will have a clear roadmap and action steps to follow. As you progress, you'll improve your health percentage, unlock new levels, earn community rewards, climb the leaderboards, and move closer to exceptional health, fitness, and longevity. Inside a community, you'll get nutrition guides, progress tracking tools, weekly coaching calls, workout plans, and support from other members, as well as me. The goal is simple. Take the assessment, get your program, and progress to the next level. If you'd like to join us, click the link below and start your health percentage assessment today. All right, back to the video. An interesting finding from the Copenhagen City Heart Study also supports this idea. They found that some sports were linked to increased longevity than others. The researchers followed 8,500 Danes for up to 25 years. They discovered that compared to being sedentary, the biggest life expectancy gains were seen from tennis, plus 9.7 years, badminton, plus 6.2 years, soccer, plus 4.7 years, cycling, plus 3.7 years, swimming, plus 3.4 years, jogging, plus 3.2 years, calisthenics, plus 3.1 years, and health club activities such as weightlifting, treadmill running, and going to the gym, plus 1.5 years. That's fascinating because the physical activities related to the highest life expectancy were all team sports and ball sports. And the most generic forms of exercise like going to the gym and cycling were linked to a lower increase in life expectancy. Now, of course, a lot of confounding variables can explain this, namely that tennis players are more likely to have a higher socioeconomic status and thus have access to better healthcare, etc. But the authors of the study did control for these variables. They also controlled for smoking, education, drinking, and diabetes, as well as the weekly volume of how much time was spent on exercising. So the sports associated with the highest life expectancy, tennis, badminton, etc., these are explosive speed of processing type of training. They incorporate speed and explosiveness, and they also incorporate the brain aspect of speed of processing. You need to react to the ball, not just sit on the bike, zone off, turn your brain off, listen to music, and just go on for an hour. Yes, it's better than nothing. It's still going to increase your life expectancy, but it lacks the cognitive effort. It lacks the randomness, the chaos of speed of processing. There's also a social element to this sport. These are sports you need multiple people to play with. You can go to the gym or ride a bike alone, but you can't play tennis or soccer alone. And the social element is another underrated component of health and longevity. People who have good relationships tend to live longer than people who have bad or poor relationships. So incorporating some physical activities, some sports that also involves other people, like tennis, soccer, or maybe going to the gym with your friends, is better than doing it alone. We can also look at professional athletes and see which sports appears to be the best for longevity. And we can draw some conclusions from that. In this 2024 study on international athletes, they found that racket sports was associated with a 5.7 year longer lifespan. It was in the top five of all sports. The reasons might have to do with all of the above, such as speed of processing, explosiveness, and the social element. Of course, socioeconomic status plays into this, but racket sports like tennis or ping pong are also challenging both physically and cognitively. In addition to racket sports, it's worth noting that there were two sports that had an exceptionally high life expectancy, and they were pole vaulting and gymnastics. Plus 8.4 years for pole vaulting and plus 8.2 years for gymnastics. These sports don't have an exceptionally high payout compared to some other sports like boxing, soccer, tennis, or track and field. Yet, they score the highest. Now, there are several factors that can influence these results. Gymnasts and pole vaulters have to be lean and lighter in body weight. The heavier they are, the harder it is for them to succeed in their sport. Gymnastics also incorporates a lot of power and speed of processing training by default, but both pole vaulting and gymnastics train body awareness or proprioception in space. Check out this clip of Dr. William Bell, who at the age of 90, cleared a height of 218 centimeters. That's an enormous feat for someone in their 60s, not to mention in their 90s. Even at age 95, he cleared 135 centimeters, breaking the world record again. Dr. Bell died in 2020 at the age of 98, which is an exceptionally long lifespan. The reason why gymnastics and pole vaulting appear to be good for longevity is because of the body awareness and proprioception. You need to be able to control your body in space, which requires a lot of cognitive effort, it requires good flexibility, good body composition, and a lot of explosiveness. A good example is a cat. The cat always lands on its feet. If you drop a cat from a table, it will still land on its feet. That's what you need to keep in mind when training body awareness and proprioception. You need to be able to control your body in space as it travels through the space, which is quite difficult. But if you master it, you have exceptional physical awareness and exceptional physical condition. That's why the linear gym model that you just sit on the stationary bike or you go on the treadmill, you just go zone out for an hour, or at the gym, you go up and down with the weights, it's incomplete. It doesn't incorporate enough of the brain component. It doesn't incorporate speed of processing. It doesn't incorporate body awareness that much, of course, to a certain extent does, but it's nothing compared to gymnastics or some other type of sport. You want to train things like handstands through a cartwheel or a handspring if you can, do some tumbling, train on the gymnastics rings, train on the parallel bars, incorporate some animal flow exercises, play team sports like soccer, basketball, tennis that are unpredictable and chaotic. All right, let me give you some bullet points that you want to take away from this video. Speed and power are the foundation to athleticism and maneuverability. They start declining sooner than strength and cardiovascular fitness, which is why you need to dedicate some time for speed and power training already when you're young, ideally starting in your 20s. However, it's not just about training speed and power linearly, the same way you would just shut down your brain while doing cardio on a treadmill. It's about also incorporating your brain into it and being forced to apply speed and power with full body coordination. Things like sprinting, plyometrics, speed sports that require speed of processing like tennis, badminton, pickleball, paddle, basketball, soccer, and general body awareness training like tumbling, gymnastics, calisthenics, monkey bars, yoga, etc. Now, this doesn't mean that your standard strength training up and down with a barbell or just zoning out on the treadmill, that is a bad thing. Of course, these type of activities also have their place. The most effective way to increase your cardio is to zone out on the treadmill. The most effective way to increase your strength is to do strength training with a barbell. You should still incorporate these things, but you shouldn't neglect the holistic full body awareness type of thing. You shouldn't neglect speed and power. You shouldn't neglect speed of processing. You shouldn't neglect body awareness and proper reception. So the way I approach it is that I still go to the gym maybe once or twice a week, but the rest of the week, I try to incorporate activities that train these components that we discussed in this video, speed, speed of processing, body awareness, and proper reception. I do calisthenics. I do some handstands. I do sprinting. I do plyometrics. I do some gymnastic exercises, etc. All right, thanks for watching. If you want to discover your health percentage and get your roadmap to top 1% of health, then join the community. Using the link in the description. I'll see you there.