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The Benefits of Exercise: Insights from Dr. Jordan Peterson
The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s conversation with physician and longevity expert Peter Attia about the benefits of exercise, even from just three hours a week. You can listen to or watch the full podcast episode on DailyWire+.
Start time: 04:07
Jordan Peterson: A long while back I was looking at interventions to improve people’s lives, and I knew at that point cognitive decline was a major problem, especially in terms of productivity and general competence. It is a pretty pronounced linear downhill trend on the fluid intelligence front from about the age of 25 forward, and that can decline precipitously in the late 70s and early 80s, especially with the onset of degenerative neurological diseases. I was looking at the literature on cognitive remediation. This was about 10 or 15 years ago when there were a lot of online sites that purported to run you through cognitive exercises that could increase or maintain your IQ. There has never been any evidence for that, by the way. It is pretty damn dismal literature. But what I did find, and I think this is extremely solid, is that if you want to maintain your cognitive function, both cardiovascular exercise and weight lifting seem to do a pretty damn good job. Maybe that is because the brain is such an oxygen demanding organ. It is energy demanding and resource demanding in other ways, and if you can keep yourself cardiovascularly fit, interestingly enough, that is the best pathway to cognitive health.
Then I looked on the psychological side and found there were interventions that helped people get their story straight. Of course, psychotherapy is one of those, but there are also written interventions. If people write about their past, about their past traumas, and if they write about their future plans, they reduce general uncertainty that reduces their stress, and that seems to produce a relatively pronounced physiological benefit. So there is an interesting interplay there in terms of the emotional and the physical. It is pretty funny that if you want to improve your cognitive function or maintain it, you should exercise rather than think, and if you want to improve your physiology, you should straighten out your story and face your traumas rather than, say, exercise.
Peter Attia: I think that exercise is empirically the most valuable tool we have for both the cognitive and physical components. So let’s start with the cognitive because I think it was less intuitive. So about 10 years ago when I really went down this rabbit hole, I had one of my research analysts spend a lot of time going through the literature, so we created a framework where we were going to look at every single intervention and how it impacted executive function, processing speed, short-term memory, and long-term memory. Those were the four metrics we cared about because, as you point out, those are all bits of intelligence that decline with age.
We looked at everything. We looked at every molecule. We looked at every possible thing that you could think of. And after about nine months of this, the thing that stood out above all else — beyond any diet, beyond the importance of sleep, and other things that certainly mattered, controlling blood pressure, lipids, et cetera — was exercise. And even though I was a lifelong exerciser and love to exercise, I just couldn’t believe it. It seemed so trite that exercise could have such a profound difference on the state of cognition, not just in terms of its performance as effectively a no trophic, but also in its ability to delay — if not outright prevent — dementia.
Once we dug into the mechanisms, I think it became clear why exercise is so potent, and it’s basically that it is acting on so many different levels. So as you pointed out, it’s acting at a metabolic level. The brain is such an energy demanding organ, as you know and maybe your listeners do, it weighs about 2% of your body weight and it’s responsible for 20 to 25% of your energy consumption. Therefore, anything that disrupts that is catastrophic. When you look at the improvements in glucose disposal, insulin sensitivity, and all metabolic parameters, exercise is the most important tool we have there. When you look at the reduction of inflammation, vascular health improvements, again, exercise stands alone. When you look at the production of neurotrophic growth factors such as BDNF, again, exercise is basically a drug for neurons.
I think I eventually came around after a year or so to realize that, again, as simple as it sounds, exercise is such a potent tool. And you look at the brains of people who exercise a lot and you can see far less damage, not just microvascularly, but in terms of brain volume lost over time.
Jordan Peterson: So let’s talk about exercise from the perspective of a behavioral psychologist. One of the things you learn as a behavioral psychologist is that it is very difficult for people to change their attitudes or their actions, and it is very difficult for people to change their lives. We all know this because we might tell ourselves, for example, to exercise, and we might be well supplied with arguments for why that is a good idea, but that does not necessarily mean we learn how to incorporate an exercise routine into our lives.
There are many reasons for that, one being that exercise is difficult, but it is also often the case that people do not form a strategy and break the problem down into steps that are simple enough to actually implement. They think things like, “Well, I’ll go to the gym two hours a day, three times a week, and I’ll start that next week.” The truth of the matter is they do not have six hours to spend, and they cannot tell themselves what to do anyway.
So as a behavioral psychologist, you look at the simplest possible change that produces the maximum possible benefit. For example, if people want to begin to implement an exercise routine, like maybe a daily walk of 10 minutes in the morning, where would you start someone?
Peter Attia: So it completely depends on their baseline. But based on your question, I’m going to take it as we’re talking about someone who’s doing no exercise. The good news is, first of all — and I accept the fact that not everybody is swayed by data, but I at least want to put it out there — if you’re a person who’s in the “doing zero exercise per week” camp, the very good news is the benefit you get from going from zero to three hours a week is a greater benefit than anyone gets along the exercise curve. So taking someone who’s at five hours and taking them to 15 will produce less relative benefit than going from zero to three. So in other words, I want that person to see some real incentive for making this change.
Secondly, I’ll put some numbers to it. So going from no exercise to three hours a week approximately reduces your all cause mortality — that is to say, death — by every cause by 50% at any moment in time. So if you’re standing there asking, what’s the probability I’m going to die this year? Well, we can sort of actuarially figure that out. You get to cut that number in half by simply going from zero to three hours of exercise a week if you’re a non-exerciser. So again, there’s going to be a subset of people for whom that’s a very powerful piece of information they didn’t know.
Then what I would say is, how do you do that? I agree with you that you’re much better off trying to do 30 minutes six times a week than three hours once a day or two hours, you know, in whatever fashion. What I would say is the most effective way to do that is probably about 90 minutes of low intensity cardio. And for a person who’s not particularly fit, that’s going to amount to just brisk walking. Rather than tell them what to do, I tell them how to feel when they’re doing it. So what you want to feel is out of breath enough that you can barely carry out a conversation, but you could if you had to, but not so out of breath that you can’t carry on a conversation and not so easy that you can speak easily. So there is that sweet spot in there. Physiologically, we call that zone two, but I’m not going to bore them with that nomenclature. It’s just basically 90 minutes to, say, three times 30 or two times 45 a week where you’re just out of breath enough that you don’t want to talk, but you could if you had to. That’s part one.
Jordan Peterson: So you push yourself past, or slightly past, your simple level of comfort. Then let me push on you a bit with regards to three hours a week, again, from the perspective of taking someone from zero to somewhere. You talked about the benefits of walking, something approximating 20 to 25 minutes a day, that can be dispersed out various ways. You also mentioned two 45-minute sessions or three 30-minute sessions. What would happen if someone goes from zero to like 10 minutes a day or an hour a week? Where do the benefits of that 3 hours kick in?
Peter Attia: Yes, that’s a great question. I don’t think we have the fidelity of the data at that level because you generally don’t push enough of a conditioning benefit. But I think what you’re getting at, and we do this as well, is you want to separate between the behavior change and the physiologic change. James Clear has written a lot about this, but I think a lot of people have come to the same conclusion with any behavior change. If it’s a person who’s never done anything, you’re right; the answer might be for every day when you wake up in the morning, rather than your normal routine of jumping in front of the computer, I want you to go and walk around the block once. It’ll take four minutes. I don’t want to represent [that] you’re going to get a physiologic benefit from that. You probably won’t.
But what you will get is, you’re going to start to reset a behavior which is, “Aha, the first thing I do in the morning now is this other thing,” and we’ll slowly increase that and at some point you will get a physiologic benefit. But what we’re doing is planting the seed of how to change the behavior.
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To hear the rest of the conversation, continue by listening or watching this episode on DailyWire+.
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now listen to or watch his popular lectures on DailyWire+.
Does exercise not only help prevent cognitive decline but also improve cognitive function
Nefits start to kick in and how do they compare to the benefits of three hours a week?
Peter Attia: I think there is a little bit of a dose-response curve. So the fact of the matter is if you were to just go from zero to any positive number, even if that positive number is two minutes a day, three times a week, you’re going to get some benefit. And exactly where that bends over into a plateau where you’re not going to get a whole lot more additional benefit is unclear, but I can tell you that there is no doubt that going from zero to three hours a week will give you the biggest relative reduction in both all-cause mortality and cognitive decline. I would say that for most people, it is a relatively ideal minimum to shoot for. And within that, we could certainly put priority on certain types of exercise because, as you point out, there is definitely a dose-response relationship to different types of exercise.
Jordan Peterson: And what about lifting weights? You mentioned cardiovascular exercise, but what about the benefits of weight lifting?
Peter Attia: The beauty of lifting weights is that it comes with a lot of the same corners being cut. If you want to have muscle strength, hypertrophy, and all the factors that go into not just looking better but also preventing sarcopenia, there is probably no substitute for actually lifting weights.
But I will qualify that and say that for most people in most phases of life, I think it is a superior prescription to just go for a walk or go for a jog. The metabolic benefits and the benefits to the brain of aerobic exercise, at the dose we’re talking about, is just so disproportionate to the benefit of lifting weights that it is hard to really envision a person who would be better off doing that instead of exercise. That’s not to say that there aren’t situations where someone may want to lift weights, such as if they already have a high level of cardiovascular function and they’re looking to optimize aesthetics or they’re trying to prevent sarcopenia. But again, for most people, in most phases of life, I think the answer is that it is virtually impossible to get to the point where you’re on a solid aerobic exercise−only platform and not get benefits from exercise as we’ve talked about it so far. So I just don’t see a tremendous amount of neurocognitive benefit or metabolic benefit that you can spartanize from lifting weights. You’re often left with a situation of having to supplement that with some level of aerobic exercise, no matter what.
Jordan Peterson: So what you are saying is that, for the brain and cognition, cardiovascular exercise is the most important. If you want the metabolic benefits and muscle strength, lifting weights is important, but cardiovascular exercise can provide those benefits as well.
Peter Attia: Absolutely. And let’s not forget about stretching. I think stretching has kind of gotten a bad rap because the way stretching has traditionally been done − just going over to the corner and touching your toes and holding that position for 30 seconds − has been shown to be pretty ineffective at preventing injuries. But stretching done in the context of a good dynamic warm-up or a cool-down where you’re actually doing some movements in all the different planes of motion that are going to be called upon in whatever activity you’re doing, I do think there is some benefit to it, both as recovery and as injury prevention.
So I would say, if you had to go in order of three things, I would say the absolute most important thing is getting the aerobic exercise. That should never be skipped or replaced in the favor of stretching or lifting weights. Secondly, I think as many people as possible should be getting some effort into their life to lift some weights, but it could be very minimal − a couple of movements done perfect and heavy, almost like high-intensity interval strength training. That amount of effort done with correct form a few days a week is all you need to get the maximum benefit. And lastly, I do think there is some merit to a little bit of a cool-down that incorporates stretching and movement and that sort of thing. But certainly, the most important thing to be doing routinely if you can is aerobic exercise.
Jordan Peterson: And going back to the cognitive benefits, it’s important to highlight that exercise not only helps prevent cognitive decline but can also improve cognitive function, right?
Peter Attia: Absolutely. Exercise is essentially the most powerful nootropic, which is a type of drug that enhances cognitive function. It increases blood flow to the brain, improves neurogenesis, elevates levels of growth factors that enhance learning and memory, and reduces inflammation, among other things. So not only does exercise maintain cognitive function as we age, but it can actually make us smarter.
So, if you’re looking for an intervention that can improve both your physical and cognitive health, exercise is the key. Whether it’s cardiovascular exercise or weight lifting, incorporating a regular exercise routine into your life can have tremendous benefits. From reducing the risk of cognitive decline and improving cognitive function to preventing chronic diseases and improving overall well-being, exercise is truly a powerful tool. So, let’s get moving and experience the transformative effects of exercise on our lives!
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