summarize this "Several years ago, my friend John Griffin pinged me with a
question about how he should be exercising: Should he be doing more cardio
or more weights? What did I think?
“I’m really confused by all the contradictory stuff I’m seeing out there,” he
wrote.
Behind his seemingly simple question, I heard a plea for help. John is a
smart guy with an incisive mind, and yet even he was frustrated by all the
conflicting advice from “experts” touting this or that workout as the sure path
to perfect health. He couldn’t figure out what he needed to be doing in the
gym or why.
This was before I had gotten back into the full-time practice of medicine.
At the time, I was immersed in the world of nutrition research, which if
anything is even more confounding than exercise science, rife with
contradictory findings and passionately held dogmas backed by flimsy data.
Are eggs bad or good? What about coffee? It was driving me nuts too.
I started typing out a reply and kept on writing. By the time I hit SEND, I
had written close to two thousand words, way more than he asked for. The
poor guy just wanted a quick answer, not a memo. I didn’t stop there either. I
later expanded that email into a ten-thousand-word manifesto on longevity,
which eventually grew into the book you are holding in your hands.
[*1]
Clearly, something about John’s question triggered me. It’s not that I was
a passionate devotee of strength training over endurance, or vice versa; I’d
done plenty of both. I was reacting to the binary nature of his question. In
case you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m not fond of the way we reduce
these complex, nuanced, vitally important questions down to simple eitherors. Cardio or weights? Low-carb or plant-based? Olive oil or beef tallow?
I don’t know. Must we really take sides?
The problem, and we will see this again in the nutrition chapters, is that
we have this need to turn everything into a kind of religious war over which is
the One True Church. Some experts insist that strength training is superior to
cardio, while an equal number assert the opposite. The debate is as endless as
it is pointless, sacrificing science on the altar of advocacy. The problem is that
we are looking at these hugely important domains of life—exercise, but also
nutrition—through a far too narrow lens. It’s not about which side of the gym
you prefer. It’s so much more essential than that.
More than any other tactical domain we discuss in this book, exercise has
the greatest power to determine how you will live out the rest of your life.
There are reams of data supporting the notion that even a fairly minimal
amount of exercise can lengthen your life by several years. It delays the onset
of chronic diseases, pretty much across the board, but it is also amazingly
effective at extending and improving healthspan. Not only does it reverse
physical decline, which I suppose is somewhat obvious, but it can slow or
reverse cognitive decline as well. (It also has benefits in terms of emotional
health, although those are harder to quantify.)
So if you adopt only one new set of habits based on reading this book, it
must be in the realm of exercise. If you currently exercise, you will likely
want to rethink and modify your program. And if exercise is not a part of
your life at the moment, you are not alone—77 percent of the US population
is like you. Now is the time to change that. Right now. Even a little bit of
daily activity is much better than nothing. Going from zero weekly exercise to
just ninety minutes per week can reduce your risk of dying from all causes by
14 percent. It’s very hard to find a drug that can do that.
Thus, my answer to questions like the one my friend John Griffin asked
me is yes and yes. Yes, you should be doing more cardio. And yes, you should
be lifting more weights.
At the other end of the spectrum, if you’re someone like me who has been
exercising since kindergarten, I promise you these chapters will offer you
insights about how to better structure your program—not to achieve a faster
marathon time or bragging rights at your gym, but to live a longer and better
life, and most important, a life in which you can continue enjoying physical
activity well into your later years.
"