Name: Why exercising can be the key to longevity
Uploaded: 2023-09-14T09:30:00Z
Duration: 6 min 23 s
Description: The most active form of stress–exercise–is actually your best bet for a longer, healthier life. WSJ’s Daniela Hernandez goes on a 10-day exercise journey of intense workouts, tracking the results, to explain how stress is tied to longevity. Photo: David Fang

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The most active form of stress–exercise–is actually your best bet for a longer, healthier life. WSJ’s Daniela Hernandez goes on a 10-day exercise journey of intense workouts, tracking the results, to explain how stress is tied to longevity. Photo: David Fang

https://m.wsj.net/video/20230914/58144ddd-c558-4bda-a463-4a700206f310/3/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Why exercising can be the key to longevity

Oh my God. I cannot do a pull up. Sometimes it's really hard to find time to work out but decades of research shows that the stress that exercise puts on the body actually trains it to fend off major chronic conditions like diabetes, cancer, obesity, and heart disease. Here we go. This is hard, and it increases our ability to be independent as we age. But let's fact check that.

Heather: Go, go, go. You got it.

I took two clinical stress tests. Oh my God. And of course, did lots and lots of exercise. The goal was to see how much I could improve my chances of longevity with some pretty intense workouts. This is not fun. It is so fun out here. Let's see how it goes. Heather Milton is a clinical exercise physiologist at the NYU Langone Sports Performance Center and for this experiment, my longevity trainer.

So we're doing the stressor of the exercise but then allowing you the adaptation process and the lower heart rate in between, which essentially suppresses stressors.

Daniela: This first test is going to give us our baseline for my longevity-related metrics. First, we tracked my heart rate recovery or how quickly my heart rate came down from its peak. For that, we used a simple heart rate monitor. The other metric is VO2 max, which is the maximum rate at which your heart, lungs, and muscles use oxygen. That was measured with this sensor that ingested the air I was breathing into the tubed mask.

This is gonna be tighter.

Daniela: Oxygen consumption should be low for light walking because that shouldn't really take that much effort. Every 30 seconds or so, the treadmill got faster and steeper during the test and my oxygen consumption went up.

Give it your all. Where're you now? All right. Almost there, almost.

Daniela: After running for about nine minutes, I had to stop. My heart rate peaked at 167 beats per minute.

Stay on the treadmill. It's gonna come down. I'm gonna watch that heart rate response. You currently already have a nice VO2, so I wanna see that it's a above 26. Yours was 38.6.

Daniela: That's equal to the milliliters of oxygen consumed per kilogram of your weight each minute. My heart rate recovery was only seven beats per minute. Ideally, it'd be at least 12.

Recovery is really important because that's when we're allowing our body to process all of the stressors that we put in and then make the adaptations to become bigger, faster, stronger.

Daniela: On to test number two. I did a series of heavier and heavier leg presses.

Press, press, press, press, press, press, press. There you go.

I maxed out at 205 pounds. That gave us a sense of my muscle and joint strength, which directly relates to having good balance and having good balance helps avoid falls, one of the biggest factors for preventable deaths as we age. So with all that info, Heather put together this 10-day fitness plan for me, focusing on cardio and strength training. I expected a challenge and to sweat. That was hard. But even on this short 10-day fitness plan, I still ran into a few issues 'cause the weights I have are not optimal.

I wanna see the video.

My GoPro overheated. 86 degrees. I'm not gonna go outside because the air quality is terrible out there. I probably should have picked a better time to make this video, like when I wasn't traveling for work.

Captain: We wanna welcome you to Miami.

But I think that's the reality for most people. We squeeze in a workout whenever we can. And I'm done. Tomorrow I go back to NYU for my final stress test. Hopefully all of that hard work over the last 10 days has paid off.

All right. Ready to go? You're in control. You tell me when you absolutely reach that max. Otherwise, keep going. You got this. Everything looks great.

Daniela: My VO2 max didn't change, as expected. Heather says improvements in VO2 max take at least six to eight weeks. It requires a lot of complex cardiovascular changes, so things like heart tissue getting stronger, lungs taking in more oxygen, blood vessels becoming more elastic and new, healthier red blood cells to deliver oxygen to muscles. We did see other related improvements.

You're able to do a minute more, which means you're able to achieve more work and a faster pace without getting to your maximal exertion.

Daniela: And that meant my body got more efficient at using oxygen.

The higher your fitness level is, the lower the effort level is or the lower the ask for your body for those general tasks.

Daniela: Simple things like walking around, working, putting away groceries and cleaning.

And your heart rate recovery was much better too.

Mine went from seven to 21 beats per minute. I was a little less confident though about the leg press because for most of the experiment, I mean, I didn't have weights, right? I had my two laptops and children. I can only do five reps of you.

Heather: Two, three.

The first one felt like feathers.

Yeah, that's a good sign.

We started at 65 pounds and went up from there. I finished the test at 245 pounds, 40 pounds higher than before. I guess hard work pays off. Strength training is also important for improving insulin sensitivity and maintaining healthy blood glucose levels. That can stave off some of those big killers I mentioned earlier, things like diabetes and obesity. Scientists don't yet know what the optimal amount of exercise for each person is, but generally, they recommend 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week. A 10-year study of 650,000 adults showed that those who got at least 75 minutes of exercise lived 1.8 years longer than inactive adults. People who worked out five to eight hours a week lived more than four years longer. So I was in that range. There's no way to say how many years my 10 days of intense workouts added to my life but according to this study as sedentary people age, they did from being self-sufficient to dependent much sooner than active people. So if I keep up with my workouts, I could increase the time I'm healthy and independent by more than a decade. So what can you do if you wanna start working out towards a healthier, longer life but don't have access to fancy trainers and tests? Wearables are a good place to start. They can track metrics like VO2 max, heart rate recovery and walking steadiness pretty accurately. Heather said that your heart rate data is the easiest way to go. Your resting heart rate should become lower as your fitness level improves. Exercise is generally good for your health but too much can also be counterproductive. For me, the hardest part was just getting off the couch, though now that I'm not getting paid to workout, it is harder. So good luck out there.