In Okinawa, I heard that fishermen never retire, and I saw a woman over 90 dancing with a big bottle on her head several times a week. In the Calabria region, I listened to 10-year-old Caruso tell me how he used to walk to the “olive garden” every day and how hard he and those who had olive trees worked.
And in Roma Linda, Calif., long-lived seventh-day Adventists are known for plenty of exercise, including brisk walks and gyms. When Buettner asked the very long-lived Costa Ricans for the secret of their longevity, he found that they had enjoyed physical labor all their lives, and when he asked the famous Sardinian shepherds for the secret of their longevity, he found that they walked up and down the mountains at least five miles a day.
What kind of exercise is most conducive to a long and healthy life? It’s the one that you enjoy and can integrate into your daily life and continue to do until you are 100 or older.
Centenarians are key to longevity
- Walk briskly for an hour a day.
- Avoid escalators and elevators, even if you have to walk many steps.
- Try to walk far on weekends (avoid polluted areas).
- Do 150 to 300 minutes of moderate intensity exercise a week, with some vigorous exercise.
- Do weight training or weightless exercises to strengthen your muscles (take 30 grams of protein after weight training).
If you look closely at these centenarians or your distant relatives, you’re likely to find people who eat what they want, barely exercise, but live a very long time. My colleague Neil. Nir Barzilai, the Jew of Ashkenazi Jew in New York, has often said that the centenarians never exercise, but they live long lives.
As mentioned earlier in the discussion of diet, we know that genes are the biggest determinant of longevity. We know this for sure, because we have shown this in both mice and humans who have genetic mutations that make them resistant to age-related diseases.
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In addition, we have confirmed this view by observing that chimpanzees who live to the age of 50, eat the perfect diet and exercise do not live as long as humans, even though their DNA is more than 95 per cent the same as ours.
Since we don’t have much to do with our genes, exercise is the second most important determinant of health and longevity, after changes in diet. In fact, those who live to be a hundred are usually very active, or inactive until very old, even though most of them don’t know what exercise means.
In Okinawa, I heard that fishermen never retire, and I saw a woman over 90 dancing with a big bottle on her head several times a week. In the Calabria region, I listened to 10-year-old Caruso tell me how he used to walk to the “olive garden” every day and how hard he and those who had olive trees worked.
And in Roma Linda, Calif., long-lived seventh-day Adventists are known for plenty of exercise, including brisk walks and gyms. When Buettner asked the very long-lived Costa Ricans for the secret of their longevity, he found that they had enjoyed physical labor all their lives, and when he asked the famous Sardinian shepherds for the secret of their longevity, he found that they walked up and down the mountains at least five miles a day.
What kind of exercise is most conducive to a long and healthy life? It’s the one that you enjoy and can integrate into your daily life and continue to do until you are 100 or older. Many Okinawans practice martial arts, including tai Chi, a combination of martial arts and traditional Okinawan dance.
However, you won’t find many People in California or southern Italy doing tai Chi. Therefore, longevity has nothing to do with the type of exercise we do, but rather whether we try to exercise every part of our body for five to ten hours a week.
In my fifth pillar of longevity, I mentioned how studying complex systems like cars or airplanes can help us understand the human body. If you’re looking to buy a car, no one should want to buy a five-year-old car that’s 100, 000 miles old because it’s so worn out.
You can change a tire, you can even repaint it, but you can’t change everything, and if it wears out too much, it will eventually fall apart. The same goes for the human body: exercise is important, but don’t overdo it because your knees, hips, fingers, etc., will hurt, especially if you keep moving even though it hurts in a particular place.
Of course, certain types of exercise and diet allow certain tissues to repair themselves and regenerate, so the human body has certain advantages over cars.
Make good use of exercise for a long life
- Brisk walking for an hour a day:
Walk at a fairly fast pace for an hour a day. Humans are used to walking a lot. Now we have machines doing everything: cars, elevators, washing machines and dishwashers. To reach the goal of walking briskly for an hour a day, choose a coffee shop or restaurant 15 minutes away from your workplace and walk twice a day to and from it.
You can choose to walk to where you would normally take a car on a weekend. Every year, when I lead my students from USC in Los Angeles to Genawa in Italy, we walk around the city on the first day.
I also asked them to walk everywhere for the next three weeks. By the end of the course, they had gotten used to walking anywhere in the city and found it enjoyable and better than leaning on their cars.
- Bike, run, and swim for 30 to 40 minutes every two days and two hours on weekends:
The best thing to do is to have a stationary bike at home and a bike that you can ride outside. When circumstances permit, ride outside. If not, ride your exercise bike at home, but use pedals that require strenuous pedaling.
After ten minutes, you should be sweating like a pig. If you ride on the street, try to ride uphill for at least ten to fifteen minutes. About forty minutes every two days and two hours on weekends. Cycling is better than running because it reduces the pressure on your knees.
Yet, according to a long-term study, healthy older people who run regularly are unlikely to develop osteoarthritis. So injuries from long runs may not be as common as people think. In fact, another seven-year follow-up study of 74,752 runners found that running reduced both weight and the risk of osteoarthritis.
If we are from the perspective of the longevity and the pillar of complex systems, we may ride a bicycle than come running well, but if from the point of epidemiology this pillar, and running up looks is good exercise, but it may be in the decades after the benefits of change, and it may has the different effect for those injured people.
So for those with joint injuries, aches and pains and who continue to run, the results can be very different. Swimming is another great exercise, although we don’t talk about it as much as we do about running.
- Use your muscles:
We used to do everything ourselves. But modern people use escalators and elevators instead of stairs, sprinklers instead of pipes, dishwashers instead of washing by hand, and wheeled things instead of carrying them in totes.
Every muscle in your body needs to be constantly challenged as it grows and becomes stronger in response to an injury. For example, if you haven’t taken a quick, six-step leap in a long time, doing the same thing later could hurt or even hurt several of your leg muscles.
The muscle in your legs is obviously damaged, so a sufficient supply of protein activates the muscle satellite cell. As a result, just engaging in simple, challenging daily actions can cause muscle damage and reconstruction.
But, as with nutrition, a small injury can become a big one if you weigh too much, or if you repeatedly injure an already inflamed muscle or cartilage.
Therefore, muscle training must be balanced to avoid acute injuries, but also to avoid slow, long-term injuries. For example, athletes who often ignore pain and continue to put pressure on the injured knee will see such injuries in their knees and hips.
Duration, intensity and efficacy of exercise
How long should exercise time, to what extent, to get the effect of health and longevity? First, most studies of longevity and health have focused on epidemiology, so it’s hard to know for sure whether the results really reflect the role exercise plays in longevity.
Studies of active people typically ask them about their exercise habits and then follow them to see if they suffer from disease or death. One of the blind spots in these studies is that some people don’t exercise because they’re already sick, or there’s something wrong with their body that they don’t even notice.
Such a condition would screen out many unhealthy subjects and assign them to a non-exercise group. There are ways to correct such problems, but they can be difficult and lead to over-interpretation of the data. However, these studies do provide us with valuable information, especially as they follow up with a large number of subjects.
Australia has been tracking 24,542 people between the ages of 45 and 75 to understand the link between sports and all-cause mortality.
The group concluded that doing more than 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a week (see the intensity table below) could reduce overall mortality by 47 percent. Spending more than 300 minutes a week on moderate to severe exercise reduced the risk of death by 54 percent.
If these regular exercisers engaged in some vigorous exercise per week, the risk of death was reduced by another 9 percent. Moderate physical activity, also known as metabolic equivalent (MET), is when you are burning three to six times more calories than sitting still. Intense exercise is the kind of activity that burns six times more calories (more than six metabolic equivalents) than at rest.
In addition, a large, 14-year study in the United States and Europe followed 661,137 men and women with a median age of 62, of whom 116,686 died during the study period.
The study found that even those who engaged in less than 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week, or those who engaged in vigorous exercise for less than 75 minutes, had a 20 percent reduction in mortality compared to those who did not exercise. Those who engaged in more than 150 minutes of moderate or vigorous exercise per week, or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise, had a 31 percent reduction in mortality.
For those who did more than 300 minutes of moderate or 150 minutes of intense physical activity per week, there was a 37 per cent reduction in mortality.
People who spent more than the minimum 300 minutes of moderate and 150 minutes of high intensity activity per week had only very small additional benefits, but those who spent more than 10 times the minimum recommended amount found less beneficial effects over time.
Protein intake and weight training
Several studies have shown that an additional 0.72 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day does not increase muscle growth. In addition, consuming 30 grams of protein in one meal, along with a small or very small amount of carbohydrates, can improve muscle production.
Muscle synthesis works best if the 30 grams of protein are taken within an hour or two of resistance exercises such as weight lifting and pushups.
Muscle composition works best when lifting weights that are between 60 and 75 percent of what the athlete can lift (arm) or push (leg), regardless of age.
Overall, it’s ideal to get at least 30 grams of protein throughout a meal. For maximum muscle growth, this meal should be low-carb and followed by a fairly intense weight training exercise (up to 60 to 75 percent).
This chapter focuses on
- Walk briskly for an hour a day.
- Avoid escalators and elevators, even if you have to walk many steps.
- Try to walk far on weekends (avoid polluted areas).
- Do 150 to 300 minutes of moderate intensity exercise a week, with some vigorous exercise.
- Do weight training or weightless exercises to strengthen your muscles (take 30 grams of protein after weight training).
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