Supercharge Your VO2 Max & Protect Your Heart - Dr Andy Galpin

Talk to me about the metrics that matter most for health, in your opinion. We've got an unlimited amount of data that we can access from wearables and beds and, and breath work and CO2 tolerance tests and everything else. What are the ones that you think are most important?

Yeah, sure. I think the easiest way to start this is go over a very large picture and then to stop us from being very general the entire time, which is sometimes a bit boring, I'll let you pick whichever one you want to go hardest into, uh, there. So when we start looking at things, uh, from the perspective of how long you're going to live and how well you're going to live, most people are pretty keen on that idea now and those things are different and it's not just about living a long time and you want to live well. So what's that mean? Well, we actually can pull from multiple datasets here in the sense that it's everything from your sense of connection to the world, your sense of purpose, uh, social belongings. Those things are incredibly important and depending on the papers you, you pull from, some could argue those are the top predictors of how long. Now, mental health and such is not my expertise, so I, I will hopefully not spend all of our time on that. But we have to acknowledge those... The way you asked the question, that is a, a true and honest answer. It is the things that go into making you feel like a sense of purpose and belonging. That's great. Independent of that, in terms of your physical health, now we can just really run through the gamut of, what does your body have to do to survive and perform well, right? Well, it has to have some functionality of cardiorespiratory fitness. Easy metric we talk about here very often and people are, are really keen to this fact now which makes me smile because for 25 years when I've been screaming this and no one cared and, and like the Podcastistan universe took over about three years ago and I'm like, "Well great." (laughs) Now it's out there. So VO2 max is a, a very strong predictor of how long you're going to live, uh, from the, from that perspective. Other research, uh, is gonna look at things like physical strength, both your grip strength and your leg strength. Also very, very important. Backing down from that, now you have things like muscle quality, overall muscle size. Of course you have negative regulators. So what I mean by that are these are things you don't want to have. So as I've been going through this, I realize, realize I've been giving you things that you want to make sure are high, and you have a whole subset of things you want to stay away from. Obesity, you don't wanna have metabolic disease, you don't wanna have sleep disorders, you don't wanna have that. So I tend to leave that stuff. I, I always forget to mention that. But yeah, like don't have any of those, and then be fit, be strong and maintain a sense of, of proprioception. And so if you look at the research on things like brain aging, what's critically clear is you don't wanna lose your sense of smell. You don't wanna lose your sense of vision or your hearing because those are all tied into the global idea of proprioception, and that is a fancy way of saying your body's ability to understand where it is in space. This is translated often into things like balance. Okay, so if you were to, to look at the research on fall prevention, it's very clear you do not wanna fall and have an accident after the age of 60. That's... And I don't mean to be a bit dramatic here but it's, it's quite literally almost a death sentence, uh, if you fall and break a hip or something like that after the age of 60. Well, what causes that? Pure accidents. But then outside of that, it is things like loss of balance. Then once you lose the balance you have a lack of foot speed or hand speed to get your hand in the right position to brace yourself from a fall, and then if you do do that, it's the lack of eccentric strength to stop yourself from hitting the ground and collapsing and smashing a bone. And so I just sprayed you with a whole bunch of stuff to answer your question but from just the physical side of the equation, those are generally the things we're looking at in terms of an exercise scientist's perspective. I don't really spend much time in my career honestly on medical stuff. I'm not a medical doctor. Go talk to Peter Attia or Gabrielle Lyon if you wanna know about ApoB4. Like I don't care about those things at all. Uh, I, I look at the human performance side of the perspective on that question.