The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The 7-Day Training Blueprint To Live Longer! Peter Attia
10 Oct 2025
Chapter 1: What are the essential components of a longevity-focused training program?
When you think about all those things you want to accomplish, if we were then to sort of codify them into a bunch of exercises or areas of your health that you had to now be thinking about, that I needed to be thinking about, what are the most important things? So I'm a 32-year-old.
What are the most important parts of my health that I should be thinking about if I want to achieve all the things that I said to you in my final decade?
No one in the final decade of their life ever said, I wish I had less strength and I wish I had less endurance. So you cannot be too strong and you cannot be too fit. The only time that one would throttle back on the pursuit of those is A, if doing so is coming at the expense of something else, either with respect to your health or your life.
And two, if the pursuit of that at such an extreme level produces risk of injury.
Okay.
So in other words, could I be stronger than I am today? Yes. I'll give you an example. We know that in resistance training, the sweet spot for pure strength is one to five reps. When your goal is to maximize strength, you need to be pushing one, two, three, four, five reps. Once you start thinking about hypertrophy, muscle size, we're starting to think about seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 reps.
Once we start thinking about muscular endurance, we start thinking about north of 15, right?
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Chapter 2: How can strength and endurance impact longevity?
Those are the general patterns of resistance training.
So if I want to build my muscles because I'm going for aesthetic goals, then I need to be aiming above five reps. I need to be 10 or 12. But if I'm just purely thinking about strength, bigger weights, but lower reps. That's exactly right.
Okay.
And then if I want muscular endurance, which is even higher reps. Okay.
Lower weight. Yep. Okay. So again, we could go into much more detail around that, but just to finish the point here, why do I not do much training at one to five reps? In fact, these days I don't do any training at one to five reps anymore. Why? Because to train at one to five reps comes at a risk.
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Chapter 3: What is the importance of muscle mass for lifespan?
Okay. Especially for heavy compound movements. So like... I'm OK getting a little bit less of a strength benefit while still, of course, getting stronger, but training at a higher rep load. So I'm targeting 8 to 12 reps with 1 to 2 reps in reserve is basically how I'm doing my resistance training. That means every set I'm doing, I would expect to get to within about one rep of failure somewhere.
So today when I lifted, I don't think I did less than seven. I didn't do more than 12. And the weight was always titrated so that I was either failing, almost failing, or one rep away from failing somewhere in there. And I was adjusting the weight constantly on every exercise to get there with the exception of one exercise. I did push-ups was one of the things I did.
Push-ups are kind of more in the muscle endurance. Obviously, I'm doing more reps when I was doing push-ups. But pretty much everything else was in that range. So again, I'm not fully maximizing strength anymore because the cost of it might be a little bit high in terms of injury risk.
Similarly, I'm not strength training 24-7 because I need to make time to do my endurance training and other types of training.
How often do you train resistance training?
I resistance train three times a week.
And how often do you train generally? I train every day. Every day?
Yeah. Why? Because, you know, again, the intensity of my training is not that high, at least three days a week. So the three resistance days are pretty hard because I'm really only doing each body part once a week. So when I'm doing it, I'm really... I'll spend that 90 minutes really kind of hammering those body parts. Three of those days are just zone two.
So three of my four cardio days are zone two days where I'm doing, you know, I'm on a bike and I am riding at a level of intensity that actually allows me to still talk. You know, not talk like I am now, but talking in sort of a strained way.
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Chapter 4: How should one structure resistance training for optimal results?
So for me, that's about a heart rate of 140 beats per minute. And that's just not taking a huge toll on me. Like those are almost like recovery days for me. And then one day a week, I do a really, really hard VO2 max day. And that's a really hard day. That burns a lot of matches. That's tomorrow. Not looking forward to it at all.
Do you do cardio on your resistance training days as well?
No, I don't. So it's four days of cardio, three days of resistance. Now, that's going to change in the summer when I'm going to add three days of swimming. And I will end up doing some swims on some resistance days.
So before you do your resistance workout, you don't go on the stepper for 20 minutes or cycle for 20 minutes or something? I don't. Is there a particular reason why?
It wouldn't really serve a purpose. So I know a lot of people do that. I know a lot of people will say, hey, I'm going to do a little bit of a warm-up on the treadmill or the stepmaster before I lift. But I actually have a pretty strong point of view on how we should warm up to lift.
And I don't think walking on the treadmill or running on the treadmill or being on the stairmaster or on the bike is a great prep for the lift.
it's better to warm up for a lift doing movements that prepare you to lift so for example like if it's a leg day so monday's leg day right so what am i going to do i'm going to start by doing a bunch of core stabilizing stuff so i'm going to do a whole bunch of this dynamic neuromuscular stabilization stuff so you get into basically these baby positions and you really learn to activate your core as you move around in a six month position and stuff like that
I then do a whole bunch of, like do you know what a 90-90 is or a shin box exercise is, where you're kind of on the ground in a position where you're really, you know, you can start out doing it isometrically, but ultimately going through a slow eccentric and concentric phase of movement that's kind of activating glutes. So I go through basically a whole DNS sequence.
Then I get into a dynamic movement prep. So then I get into a bunch of bouncing, a bunch of footwork, and then I start with really light weights. So I'll go to a leg extension machine and do very, very light leg extensions, very, very light leg curls, come back and do more jumping and moving and lunging and go back and forth.
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Chapter 5: What are the risks associated with low-rep strength training?
Yeah.
Now that I'm 32, because when I was 30, 20, I could do almost anything it seemed and nothing would break. But I had a couple of injuries when doing like shoulder presses and things like that. And one of my friends had a similar injury recently, which took him out for three or four months where he did a shoulder press, pulled something in his back or something, it was like neck. Yeah.
And then he couldn't like turn his head anymore.
Yeah.
In terms of injury, if I wanted to get injured, am I right in thinking that the thing that leads to injury is basically just walking straight in and trying to lift something heavy? Or is there things further upstream that cause injury in the gym?
No, I mean, that's one way to increase your risk of injury for sure. But yes, there are other ways that it can happen. And I think about it a lot. I mean, one of the injuries I think a lot about are calf injuries, Achilles injuries, sort of tendon injuries. This is, I think, one of the things that becomes a real problem for people as they age. You know, you often hear about people my age
tearing an Achilles. It's a devastating injury. Now, again, it's not devastating in that you won't recover from it, but boy, it's going to take you out of commission for six months. So a lot of these injuries happen because the individual still has strength, but they've kind of lost some of the pliability in the tendon because they've kind of lost some of the jumping.
That's why I always start these workouts with low level of jumping because And I'll progress to higher levels of jumping. But jumping is actually a very important part of training. And it's one of the things that we take for granted. But boy, when your ability to jump is gone. And jumping, by the way, can mean like just initiating a jump.
But it can also mean jumping off something and stopping yourself. Those are really important skills. And so like something like jumping rope is really important, right? Your feet are just kind of moving like that. They're acting as shock absorbers.
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Chapter 6: How does Dr. Attia incorporate cardio into his training regimen?
Calves and Achilles have to constantly change in length. And that accommodation is a really important part of resilience. And I think that should be an important part of everybody's warmup at a minimum, if not part of their workout.
One thing I'd love you to do is to persuade people listening that muscle mass matters for longevity. Because- And also, if you can within that, that leg day matters. Because we all avoid leg day, including me. And sometimes I need to be told again why it matters for me to add it.
Well, I mean, I think, look, muscle mass... is probably the second most highly correlated finding or third most to longevity after strength and cardiorespiratory fitness, VO2 max. So why is that? So first of all, I think that muscle mass is both directly a proxy for strength. In general, the more muscle you have, the stronger you are. We all know exceptions to that.
We know wiry little people who are insanely strong. And I have patients like that. They're just naturally thin people. But when we put them through the testing protocols, You know, they're remarkable in terms of their strength. And I tend to not worry about the fact that they're slight in build when I see that they're strong across the board.
There is another benefit of muscle mass, which is it's the place where you dispose of glucose. So from a metabolic perspective, the more muscle mass you have, the more glucose buffering capacity you have.
And why does that matter as I age?
Because one of the hallmarks of aging is a reduction in the capacity to metabolize and buffer glucose. And so as glucose levels become less and less regulated, all sorts of bad things happen. Bad things happen to microvessels in the body. So if you think of the most extreme example of this is type 2 diabetes. So once a person has type 2 diabetes, what are they at risk for?
They're at the risk of reduced vision and ultimately blindness. amputations of their digits, impotence, right?
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Chapter 7: What role does grip strength play in predicting longevity?
The penis has tons of tiny blood vessels in it. And the more that, you know, glycosylated proteins accumulate there, the less they get blood flow and obviously damage to the small blood vessels of the brain as well. So all of these things are hugely problematic when glucose is dysregulated.
And again, the most important thing that you can do to regulate glucose, in addition to the obvious, which is eating in energy balance, not eating too much, is making sure you have large insulin-sensitive muscles, which means large muscles in the context of an individual who's sleeping well and exercising
And you're going to basically have a great place to put all of that glucose when you consume it.
And is that going to stave off me getting belly fat because my glucose is going to be stored in the muscles as opposed to somewhere else?
Again, it all depends on the total energy balance. But yes, it's clearly going to make a difference, right? So one of the surest ways to reduce your capacity to store fat is to add more muscle.
Okay. Okay. I did the grip strength test. I've done it twice now.
Meaning you did one of the grip meters or you did a hanging test?
One of the grip meters. I actually did it at Brian Johnson's house, but I also did it with Andy Galpin. And people tell me it's an indicator of longevity, but I've never really understood why. Is it just testing my strength?
Yeah. Grip strength, of all the strength metrics, it's one of the most highly correlated with longevity. We actually prefer to do it like a 10 squared where your colleagues tested yesterday. We prefer to do it on a dead hang. So we make them hang from a bar and we just time how long they can hang. So that's a really good metric of your grip strength because it's also normalized to your weight.
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Chapter 8: How can we train to prevent injuries as we age?
And if you have a strong grip, you have a strong hand, you have a strong forearm, you have a strong scapula that is connected to your rib cage. Like it goes up the whole chain. And that's another reason why we like the dead hang as a way to test it. Because the dead hang is testing everything. It's testing your actual grip. It's testing your scapular stabilization, the stability of your shoulder.
It's basically testing that entire chain. And then I also think there's a practical side of this, right? It's very underappreciated what frailty does to an aging individual. and what sarcopenia, loss of muscle mass, does to an aging person, and what it is about falling that is so devastating to an older person.
And the stronger your grip, the easier you're able to navigate a lot of those things, right?
It just seems unthinkable that falling is something I should be thinking about at 32 in the future. It seems ridiculous.
It seems ridiculous, yeah. And yet it is devastating. So once you reach the age of 65, which that ain't that far. I mean, you know 65-year-olds all day long. That's not a very old person. Once you reach the age of 65, your mortality from a fall that results in a broken hip or femur is 15% to 30%. Just think, it's such a staggering number.
So you're over 65, you fall, and that fall results in the break of a femur or hip. There's a 15% to 30% chance you'll be dead within a year.
What kills me?
It could be something very acute, like the fall that's significant enough to do that also bangs your head. It could be that you get a fat embolism, you get a blood clot. It could be that during the recovery process of this, you just never really get better. You never thrive again.
I think a more disturbing statistic is that of all the people who survive, 50% will never again regain the level of function they had before the injury.
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