Dr. Peter Attia
speaker
5,258 appearances
36 recordings
6 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard Jun 2025
Dr. Peter Attia’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There are lots of exercises that are great for balance. Anything that produces instability is great because it's, you know, for lack of a better term, I've heard it described as problem solving for your foot.
Right? So if you think about being on any unstable surface, even if you're just walking on an unstable surface, so if you were to
look at a person's foot their lower leg actually as they're walking on a surface that's constantly changing so like a gravel path or something like that you're going to see like if this were my lower leg you would see the musculature of the lower leg constantly adjusting to it and so yeah i'm i really enjoy things that force that type of training do you do flexibility stuff
Yeah, so I'm actually naturally a pretty lax person. So I don't do any stretching, if that's what you're asking. But all of the sort of stability and dynamic stuff I do incorporates movement at end ranges. So I'll give you an example of why I think the notion of flexibility might be a little bit misunderstood here.
If you ask a person to stand up and with their legs straight touch their toes, most people would say that's a great test of flexibility in the hamstring, right? And most people can't do that. What they don't realize is everybody's hamstrings are long enough to allow them to do that. The reason they can't do it is their central nervous system will not release them to do it. Does that make sense?
Interesting. Their central nervous system won't release them to do it. That's right. It doesn't feel safe for them to do it. Now, how do I know this? Because if you take a person under general anesthesia, you can put them into almost any position possible. So if you took a person under general anesthesia, laid them on the operating room table, you could lift their leg up to here.
When they're awake, you couldn't get it past here. When they wake up from surgery, will they have a torn hamstring? Not at all. They won't even know their leg was moved. The difference is when they're under general anesthesia, their brain is not sending a signal to the leg that says, don't lift. So why is the leg, why is the brain doing that to the individual?
This is how I learned it on a personal level. So about six years ago, I had tweaked my back and had just done a unnecessarily heavy set of deadlifts and just pushed it a little too far. And I was kind of nursing this sort of you know, just very, very tight QL. I was completely jammed up.
And I came in to do some training with a friend of mine who's one of the guys that, actually, he is really the guy that introduced me to this thing called DNS, dynamic neuromuscular stabilization. And I mean, I was stiff as a board. I couldn't, you know, get past my knees bending forward. And I'd been hurting for like three days.
And we went through a series of exercises for 40 minutes, which included me laying on my back with my legs up, him leaning on top of me. So my feet are here on his chest and doing isometric pushes while working on generating intra-abdominal pressure. And after an hour, yeah, maybe 40 minutes of this type of exercises, I was palms on the floor.
Now, how do I go from not being able to get to my knees to palms on the floor in 40 minutes with three days of horrible back pain? The difference is when my back was hurting, my body was not going to let me go down. The body was saying, no way, your back, I'm protecting you because you are not stable. You're not gonna go any further.
And what we went through with this exercise and a series of exercises was basically, I mean, I'm oversimplifying this and sort of anthropomorphizing it, but letting my brain know it's okay, you're stable, you're stable, you're stable. The back is safe, the back is safe, let him go. And then, ah, I'm palms on the floor. So I love testing this.
Sometimes I'll just wake up in the morning and do five minutes of breathing exercises when I'm stiff as a board and just get into a position on the floor.
Because that's really how – the breathing is how I kind of create this cylinder in my abdomen to sort of push the floor of the cylinder down as the pelvic wall. The diaphragm is the cylinder top. And then the entirety of my abdomen is the wall of the cylinder. And so I kind of go through these exercises every single day, usually on my back, actually. That's kind of like part of my warmup.
And it's just a way to kind of ground myself around creating concentric pressure in the abdomen.
So on Monday, Monday is pure lower body. Okay. And Wednesday is arms and shoulders. And Friday is chest and back. Okay. Super simple. Like nothing, no rocket science. An hour? I mean, it's like an hour and a half of lifting plus maybe 20 minutes of the warm-up stuff. So on the chest and back day, how many chest exercises are you doing?
Yeah. Okay. And I'm just super setting them. And I'm going to do maybe five sets of each, so five working sets. So there's a lot of warm-up in there too. And I'll also do some other stuff like some med ball slams or things like that as well. Okay.
I don't know. I mean, I think it's a very net positive thing, though. I mean, I do think that there's more and more people that are taking up things like rucking and running and, you know, finding camaraderie in these things. The only thing I hope is that people are doing it in a manner that's sustainable and safe and allows them to do it indefinitely.
So, you know, I'm always hopeful that whatever thing that people are doing, they're not injuring themselves because, again, rule number one is don't get injured. The name of the game is to play the game as long as possible.
I think most people will be familiar with the idea that we are obligate anaerobes, which in English means we cannot survive without oxygen. Okay. So why is that? So oxygen is absolutely essential to catalyze the chemical reaction that turns food into a currency for energy called ATP. So everybody's probably heard of ATP. ATP is the money, the currency of energy in our body.
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