Training
4 recipes.
Skeletal muscle is independently protective against late-life mortality. Cardiorespiratory fitness — proxied by VO₂ max — is the strongest modifiable predictor of all-cause mortality in the literature. Sleep quality and duration are causally linked to nearly every chronic disease of aging. That set of findings is about as close to settled as the longevity evidence ever gets, and it dictates the shape of this chapter.
The fourth recipe — sleep — is in this chapter deliberately. Most programs treat sleep as recovery. I treat it as training. It outperforms most supplements ever marketed for longevity.
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Two to four compound-lift sessions a week, progressive overload. The biggest lever on long-term healthspan, full stop.
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Three to four sessions a week of conversational-pace effort. Incline walking counts. Builds metabolic flexibility.
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Four minutes hard, three minutes easy, four rounds. The cleanest dose-response on HRV we saw in Cohort 3.
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Across the cohorts participants gained 30–40 minutes a night. That alone outperforms most longevity supplements.
The quantified finding from Trial 3: men who pushed heart rate above 170 bpm for 30+ minutes across two sessions per week saw 20%+ HRV improvements. Women with a prior structured race history (>45 minutes, within the last three years) had less HRV headroom and were better served by strength and recovery work. Both findings are argued in the recipes above.