Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D.

to basically signal to your body, hey, this is stressful, let's respond to that stress.

But it's not so stressful, it's not a heart attack kind of stress, right?

Like that's too much stress, right?

It's just enough to like give you these adaptations so that

When you have really stressful situations happening, your arteries and your vascular system respond better, right?

So I really like that you pointed that out.

Let's talk about how heart and lung function together, right?

Like the cardiorespiratory system and how vigorous intensity activity really plays a role there as well.

Yeah, I think for people with respect to like, why is it important to improve your VO2 max, you know, your cardiorespiratory fitness, that being a pretty important marker for longevity and, you know, for lowering your risk of death from all causes of mortality, right?

So essentially, like, we've talked about this before last podcast we did together, right?

People with the highest cardiorespiratory fitness as measured by VO2 max, they had,

a five-year increased life expectancy compared to the lowest people with the lower or lowest cardiorespiratory fitness, or they had 80% lower all-cause mortality, right?

So any way you look at it, you know, if you are in that higher cardiorespiratory fitness range, you are talking about, you know, a lifespan, life expectancy, you know, extension compared to if you were not in that range.

Yeah, and I think this is kind of important again, you know, I know people are going to be confused because we've talked about vigorous intensity exercise in such a different context than this study and also than the physical health guidelines.

And, you know, just going back to this study that Marty Gabala cited on the podcast a few years ago.

where you talked about, you know, 40% of people that are meeting the guidelines for moderate intensity physical activity, so that would be 150 minutes to 300 minutes a week, doing this, what is defined as moderate intensity activity, right?

They are unable to continue to improve their cardiorespiratory fitness, their VO2 max.

unless they're engaging in more vigorous types of exercise.

So again, in this regard, it seems as though the vigorous intensity exercises is not as vigorous as perhaps once thought.

What are your thoughts on that?