Activate Autophagy For A Long Life But Don't Do THIS

Hello Health Champions! Today we're going to talk about autophagy and how to exercise to live longer. And why it is so important to understand that because it's completely different from how most people exercise. There's been a lot of talk about autophagy lately because it can help you live longer, it can help fight cancer, it can boost your immunity, and it can boost your brain health. The word autophagy means self-eating and that's not as bad as it sounds like and we'll get to that in a moment. But sometimes lack can be a good thing because autophagy is driven by lack and there's two factors of lack. One is if we have a nutrient lack and especially a lack of protein that drives autophagy. The other one we'll focus more on today is the lack of oxygen called hypoxia. So either lack of protein or lack of oxygen will drive this very powerfully. And when it's a nutrient loss then we're talking about fasting to drive this and when we are talking about hypoxia then we're talking about exercise to drive this. If the body senses a lack of protein then it's going to up-regulate its recycling because if we're not putting protein in through the food for a period of time then the body has to start looking harder for leftover protein in the body. And the first place we want to go looking is junk protein. Protein that there's something wrong with and this is often called misfolded protein. So how does that work? Well protein structure is pretty complex and at the primary level we have amino acid which are basically like pearls on a string and you can think of them as the individual letters and you have to put the letters in a very specific order. That's what DNA does inside the cell. If the order is correct then we start spelling out words and that is the secondary structure. And then you want to think of these amino acids as having different charges. They're kind of like magnets and these balls are a little bit different sizes and different shapes. So they're going to start attracting each other and this string we're going to start folding it and twisting it. So the secondary structure is an example of that but then in the larger scheme now we get into the tertiary structure and now you can think of that as sentences. And now the shape of the protein is held in place by these magnets or by these charges and if that doesn't work quite right now we get misfolded proteins. If maybe one amino acid was in the wrong place or if there was some stress that just twisted this the wrong way now that becomes a junk protein and up from tertiary we have quarter-nary and that's just where we put more of these subunits together. And if we don't have a topology if we don't clean up these misfolded proteins then they get left behind and they can start clumping together and form what's called aggregates protein aggregates. And that is a really bad thing or it can be a really bad thing. They can be very toxic. They can cause a lot of damage and the way they do that is they interfere with the organelles inside the cell. So your body has organs and a really really tiny organ inside the cell would be called an organelle. It's just like a little bubble but it does very specific things and if we have a lot of these junk proteins, these aggregate proteins sitting around eventually they can start interfering with the function and the communication and the normal flow of things inside the cells. And one example that I bet you've heard of is the beta amyloid plaques that causes Alzheimer's and those are an example of these misfolded these aggregates proteins. So what would happen if we didn't have any autophagy? Well they did a study where they manipulated the autophagy mechanism in some mice. So they basically had no autophagy. And what they found was these mice would pretty much all die prematurely but here's the deal. They all died from neuro degenerative diseases. This all affected the brain. So these misfolded proteins where they cause the damage is in the brain and that's why autophagy is so important for the brain and the neural health. And this is the mechanism for virtually all of the neuro degenerative diseases that people suffer from like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and ALS, Louie body dementia, frontal temporal dementia and Huntingston's disease. These are all examples of these protein aggregation diseases. So autophagy benefits us in three primary ways. One is that autophagy is the primary mechanism where why we can clean up these aggregate proteins inside the nervous system inside neurons. The second way is that it prevents cell damage by cleaning up not just these proteins but all kinds of different debris in all kinds of different cells in the body but especially in the brain. And the third is that autophagy activates survival mechanisms and promotes longevity. It helps cells survive in a crisis and the genes involved with this are called sertuins. And the two primary ways to turn on autophagy is exercise and fasting. So how do they compare? Well, if we put them side by side, the hormones, the beneficial hormones associated with autophagy are human growth hormone and BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor which is a hormone that's like miracle growth for the brain. It helps us make synapses. It helps us rewire. It helps us learn and improves neuroplasticity. And here both exercise and fasting will turn on these hormones significantly. But then they differ because when we talk about this lack of nutrients, this lack of protein, that is the fasting that causes that whereas the lack of oxygen, the hypoxia is purely an exercise driven mechanism. And perhaps the biggest difference between the two is that exercise causes a slight physical damage. And that can be a good thing because the body can adapt and repair but it can also be a bad thing. It can cause injuries and we can overdo it. But with fasting, we get the benefits without any physical damage. So again, it can swing both ways. And the next couple of benefits, we maintain muscle mass more so with exercise because we stimulate muscle growth and also we stimulate bone density and bone mass with weight bearing exercise. But also a huge difference is that exercise is a local effect. If you work out your legs, you're not getting autophagy in your arms. You're getting the autophagy in the area, in the body part where you're creating a lack of oxygen, where you're burning up the oxygen faster than you can supply it. And that only happens when you work a muscle group very hard. And by contrast, then fasting causes a global autophagy. So simply by fasting, then the lack of nutrients and the positive hormones, the growth hormone, they're going to reach every cell in the body. Now when it comes to the brain, there are tremendous benefits to the brain both from exercise and from fasting. But for very different mechanisms, exercise is the number one thing that keeps the brain alive. The movement sends signals to the brain that's juice, that's nutrients for the brain. And only exercise can really do that. But on the other hand, when we talk about the autophagy to clean up inflammation and debris and damage in the brain, then the autophagy from fasting is basically the only thing that can do that. And because the exercise stimulates the brain and a strong brain can control and manage and inhibit stress better, then exercise also provides tremendous stress relief and stress control. And one of the factors where there's some difference is in terms of reversing insulin resistance, they both can do it to some point, but the fasting is by far the most potent. In terms of changing the set point, in terms of really changing the hypothalamus and the set point for insulin resistance, fasting is the most powerful way to do that. Now exercise will help with insulin resistance, but it's more of an adjunct. It will help indirectly by using up some extra fuel, by using up some extra carbohydrates so that the body doesn't need to release so much insulin. So both of them have an effect, but the exercise effect is slight and the fasting is very powerful to reverse insulin resistance. Now if we really want to exercise for optimum health and to live longer, unfortunately most people get that wrong. And here's what we're looking for. We want to maximize autophagy and we want to minimize the damage. And what is that damage we're talking about? Well, here's the truth. Exercise, as much as I'm for it, exercise will break you down. Exercise is catabolic. The act of working out, of working, of punishing your body is breaking it down. It doesn't become beneficial until you have recovery. The recovery is anabolic. The recovery is building you up. So of course we need to have the catabolic. We need to have the breakdown in order to get the build up. But we have to understand that distinction that we're not getting stronger from exercise. We're getting stronger when the body can repair it. And a parallel to that has to do with stress. For the most part we talk about stress as all bad, as having too much to do and not enough time and feeling overwhelmed and feeling bad. But we have to realize that the stress is not the event. It's the body's response to it. And there is good stress called you stress. You, you means good or true. Whereas this is something bad. And here's the difference. Stress is really really good if it's short term. Exercise is short term stress. Getting chased by an animal and escaping is short term stress. But then we can adapt, we can repair and we can grow stronger. So this type of short term control stress is what drives autophagy and survival and longevity. The distress on the other hand is when stress becomes chronic. Now it breaks us down a little bit over and over and over. But because it's chronic and ongoing, we never have the time to repair in between the assault and the breakdown. So this type of chronic stress, which is often associated with cortisol, actually drives another process called apoptosis, which is kind of the opposite of autophagy. Autophagy is about survival. Apoptosis is about programmed cell death. So we said that exercise creates autophagy by creating hypoxia, a lack of oxygen. So how do you know if you have a lack of oxygen? Well, the first clue is that your heart rate goes up. If your body has a certain amount of oxygen, but it's senses that it's not enough, then the first thing that's going to happen is it's going to increase the heart rate to try to pump around that oxygen faster. The second thing obviously is that your breath rate will soon increase. Also, you try to take more oxygen in. And the third way you find out during exercise is when your muscles start burning. Because when they're burning, that thing is called lactic acid. And the lactic acid is a result of glycolysis breakdown. So when you have enough oxygen, now you're primarily burning fat in the mitochondria. You're burning a mix of fat and carbohydrate in the mitochondria. But as soon as you exceed the metabolic rate, as soon as your activity is more intense than what your oxygen can supply, now you need another source. You need an emergency fuel. And that is glucose. You start breaking down the glucose, which creates lactic acid. And it starts burning the muscles. But when it comes to this hypoxia and these three criteria that we just talked about, it seems to be much more effective in terms of creating a lot of autophagy to change it up, to contrast and alternate these factors rather than a steady state. So if we're exercising, then we might want to start off with a little bit of warm up, we drive up the heart rate a little bit. And then we hit it really hard and our heart rate goes up. But then we rest a little bit and allow it to come down. But here's the trick. You don't want to rest until it comes all the way back to where you were. You want to start another interval while it's still slightly elevated. And what happens now, let's say you go 15, 20, 30 seconds of intense and then it drops down. Now the next time you hit it for the same time, you get a little bit higher. And then it drops, but you don't let it drop. And each time you drive it a little bit higher. And this of course is called high intensity interval training. And the whole goal is just to increase the heart rate and the intensity and the fatigue. And all these factors we talk about, the hypoxia, so that you hit basically a maximum level within a short period of time. So what we want to understand is that it's intensity that drives this autophagy. And the intensity is directly proportional to the hypoxia and it's directly proportional to how much autophagy you're getting. So a little bit of intensity, if we have a little bit of intensity, we get a little bit of autophagy. If we have a little bit more, now we get double as much autophagy. And if we can really, really crank it out, now we get way, way more autophagy benefits out of it. The next question I always get is, well, how do I do this? What type of exercise can I do? And it's not that hard. You could do sprints, battle ropes, medicine ball, you could ride a bike on the road, you could do a stationary, you could do a recumbent, you could do jumping jacks or burpees. Pretty much anything that you would normally do, just do it high intensity. And if you want to do it more intense and you want to crank it up, then all you do is you increase the speed of whatever you're doing. You increase the resistance of whatever you're pushing or pulling or lifting. You increase the incline. So if you're on a treadmill, you increase the incline. If you're doing sprints, you do them uphill. All of that will make it much, much harder without really wearing on your body more. You don't increase your risk of injury. You just have that elevation to drive up your heart rate more. You can also increase the amplitude of whatever you're doing, which means large motions. So if you're doing battle ropes, for example, don't just kind of whip it around a little bit in the middle. You go all the way up and all the way down and you really push it with your legs. That's how you get more intensity out of it. And finally, you want to use the largest number of muscles possible at any given time. So you can do this on a stationary bike, but it's not my favorite because you're mostly using your legs. Whereas when you're doing sprints, you're pretty much using every muscle in the body. Same thing with battle ropes. If you do it all the way up and down, you're using almost every muscle in your body. And then it's much easier to create that hypoxia on a global basis in the body. The intensity should be hard enough that you basically fail if you keep it up for 20 to 60 seconds. If you could do the same thing and keep going for several minutes, then it is not intense enough. It's not nothing wrong necessarily once in a while, but it's not what we're looking for. This is something, if you can keep it up for several minutes, now it's more of a wear and tear type of exercise. If you're basing it on heart rate, you should be able to hit 90 to 100 percent of your maximum heart rate within that exercise within 4 to 10 repetitions. If you're doing sprints or if you're doing squats or if you're doing a rowing machine, it doesn't really matter. You should be able to get really close to your max heart rate, but that maximum heart rate is for your age and for your fitness levels. You never want to jump straight into this if you have an exercise than long time. Your maximum heart rate is roughly 220 minus your age. If you really fit, it tends to be a little bit higher than that. If you're 60 years old, 220 minus 60, you should aim for 160 as your max heart rate, but that is not the first time you work out. You might want to try to get to 130, 140 first and then as you get more fit and you get the hang of this, now you try to push it to that 160. When it comes to frequency, you want to do this often enough to prevent a loss. If you make some gains, you don't want to start going backwards and this could be your level of fitness. It could be your muscle mass, your body fat, whatever it is you're going for. Now if you're thin and your primary goal is longevity, then you'd be amazed how little you have to do. Your body isn't just going to forget what it used to be. It's not just going to degenerate spontaneously. You might be able to keep that up with as little as one high intensity exercise every two weeks. Now that's minimal and if you're trying to maintain. I will probably suggest you do a little bit more and probably somewhere around once or twice a week that will maintain it at a higher level and it will probably be able to provide some growth as well. And the reason you don't necessarily want to do more is that it is very stressful on the body and stress like we said breaks you down especially as you get older you want to do less of this and you want to make sure that if it's a hard workout you want to get at least 48 and probably 72 hours of time to recover between high intensity workouts. Now that's if you do like a whole body workout like an uphill sprint if you're lifting weights then you just need to make sure that you're getting 48 to 72 hours between muscle groups. But we also have to realize that people have different goals with different sizes with different fitness levels and so forth. So if you don't have a whole lot of muscle to start with and you're happy with that it doesn't take much to maintain it but if you are very fit and a little bit more heavily muscle then obviously you're going to have to maintain at a higher level. So then you might want to do two to three times a week especially if you're a little bit younger. And if you're at the elite level and you compete and it's important to you to perform now we're talking about a completely different category. Now you basically do all you can and you balance on that edge of performance versus injury but that's a different thing like I said and now we're not necessarily talking about optimal health anymore because top fitness and health are not necessarily the same thing. They can be pretty close but you are often sacrificing a little bit of health when you take the performance aspect to the extreme. When it comes to duration most people do too much. I often hear people say oh I did a 45 minute high intensity interval training and then it is too much. It probably wasn't intense enough and it was way too long. So basically you just want to go long enough to get your heart rate up. You might have a five or ten minute warm up and then the active portion probably should be no more than five or ten minutes. So an example would be that you do a warm up and then you might do some ten second sprints with a 30 second recovery. Now when I was an athlete and if I did a ten second sprint that could be maybe at 80% or it could be at 98%. If I did an 80% intensity then I could manage on 30 second recovery. When I did a 98% intensity now I needed probably three, four minutes even with only a ten second activity to be able to do it again. Another example would be a 30 second sprint and now depending again on how intensely how fast you go you could do a two minute recovery or you could do less if it's not that fast. If you're not running but you're lifting weights and you do really heavy squats then you might do a set of six or a set of ten and it would be pretty heavy close to failure. You make sure you have some spotters or some equipment that can grab the bar and you'd get a minute recovery or a little bit longer if you need to in order to be able to do it again. But it should be close to failure because that signals the body that it has to get better and then you would repeat that four to ten times depending on the activity and so forth. So you have to learn your body, you have to learn the exercise and use your judgment. But again none of that will do you any good until you get some recovery. So first of all make sure that you get enough sleep and that it's the right quality sleep. I've done a video on that you can check that out and also you want to get real food. Make sure that once you break your body down you get some micro-tares of your muscles and your bones and your joints and you want to rebuild them you need genuine replacement parts. So processed foods don't have that. Whole food, real food, nutrient dense food is what your body wants. And if it was an intense workout then you want 48 to 72 hours rest. So if you think about this if you do a really hard workout then you're a little bit sore the day after and you're way more sore the second day. And while you're still that sore it is too early to go do it again. You're not recovered from the breakdown so if you break it down again now you're getting into that vicious cycle of breakdown instead of building your body up. So for a whole body workout if you use your whole body like you worked out with weights and did every muscle group or if you did sprints that's how long you want to wait before you do it again. If you only did a separate muscle group like you only did legs you only did back or you only did arms now you could do a workout more often you just can't repeat the same muscle group within that time frame. So if you do a really hard workout on your arms you wait 48 to 72 hours before you do the arms again. So while it's high intensity that drives the autophagy we also want to remember balance though. So you want to do a little bit of high intensity and then you want to do a lot of movement. Why is that? Because your body is made to move. The purpose of your brain and your body is to move. The purpose of your brain is to control the body's movement through an environment so that you can function in this three dimensional world. And there is a category of living things that don't move they're called plants and they don't have a brain. They don't need one because they don't move. If you have a brain you want to move to support it. It's as simple as that. So a lot of people are aiming for something like 10,000 steps a day and that's great and it's probably a good start. But there's some indications that we probably need two or maybe three times that to be really optimal. So what I would suggest do the best you can. So maybe five, six days a week then you try to get at least 30 minutes of movement. And this could be anything that you enjoy. You can walk your dog you can walk in a park you can play frisbee you can play golf. It doesn't really matter it's just movement. If you want to dig a little bit deeper and start understanding your body at a whole different level I've created a blood workhorse. And the first time through these modules are delivered live we still have four modules left that you can still join us and catch those. But either way you're still going to have access to all the recordings afterwards. There's going to be nine modules total. And the first time through here it's kind of like a beta test and you're getting a discount because you're basically helping me figure out this course getting some feedbacks I can improve on the course and then all of that will be put into the recordings and you will have access for a lifetime. But the price will never be lower than with this beta test. So if you want to know your body better and really understand what the blood work is telling you I'll put a link down below you can check it out. If you enjoyed this video you're going to love that one and if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe hit that bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.