The Best Exercises For Muscle Building, Health & Longevity - Dr Peter Attia

so you've got four pillars strength stability VO2 max zone two yep strength and stability talk to us about that um so strength is probably the easier one for people to understand um you know that's basically your ability to generate Force um and of course within strength you have different you know different areas of strength so I don't do a lot of maximal stuff anymore so in other words I'm rarely If Ever I don't think I really ever go below three reps so the the heaviest I will go is five reps stuff so I'll do you know I'll do dead lifts 35 ish um that's why you've done that you don't get one RM because you're not doing it but I can sort of predict it because I do use a velocity tracker so have you seen these yeah the bus speed things yeah yeah so I do measure bar speed um so I can have a prediction of it I can have a prediction of one RM um but yeah usually I'm sort of in the 5 to 15 rep range when I'm training so I'm basically but but what I'm always trying to do is make sure I'm somewhere between zero and two reps in reserve so that's I'm really training off reps in reserve okay that's my overarching principle of training is so so even if I'm at five I'm probably training to one to two rep in reserve if I'm at 15 I'm still one to two reps in reserve this the bodybuilders out there that want to do supersets and drop sets to failure that are tearing their hair out at the moment yeah I'm sure and again I there are absolutely sets where I do go to failure but the truth of it is it's very hard to go to failure all the time I I think I think if people are being brutally honest with themselves like they still had another one or two reps left every time yeah I don't I I mean I I I know what it's like to go to failure um and you don't you you only have so many of those matches every day um so I don't even try to play that game I just sort of say like I know I've learned that I've got if I stop now there's only two more I would get before I would violate my form so badly that I would either injure myself or you know just effective transcending ego lifting is uh one of the most difficult things that you can do forget about the consistency and all of that it's transcending ego lifting um strength formulating a strength protocol across the week what are you prioritizing you're prioritizing large lifts are you prioritizing session length etc etc yeah it first of all there's quite a bit of um variability in my in my training um but generally I'm doing four days a week and not generally I'm always doing four days a week and it's two days lower body two days upper body now I I used to I've for Years also done three days of mixed longer sessions but I prefer what I'm doing now I prefer doing two lower body days two upper body days and uh yeah I prioritize big lifts and I'm sort of working on like so today I had 24 working sets uh of of upper body uh you know on Monday I had 18 sets of lower body 18 working sets of lower body and probably on Friday it'll be a little bit more volume it'll probably be 22 to 24 sets of lower body uh working in that five to Fifteen yes uh which is Ish RP 8 e eight eight eight and a half yeah yeah sometimes maybe as little as seven on some things especially if you've had the night's sleep yeah the night before yeah um what when you're looking at movements for instance what was your session this morning can you remember in terms of exercises yeah so uh I did floor presses uh dumbbells yep yep I did um pull Downs I did incline press I did row I did um um like incline curl uh overhead tricep extension and um and then a preacher curl you know it's not a true preacher bench but hanging over a bench doing a preacher to create the same angle yep and then uh laying tricep extension and then always in between them I'm doing stability work so we didn't come to stability but I'm doing I do two dedicated days of stability a week so Tuesday Thursday I do a full dedicated hour of stability training and then on the off days it's not Tuesday Thursday I'm getting in at least 20 minutes of stability per day on on either side of the exercise like throughout the workout so the stuff that we've gone through so far the gym Bros will still understand what cardio is the cardio Bros will still understand what lifting is nobody understands what balance training is yeah no one understands what what are the principles behind this no one's ever thought about stability training before uh how do you integrate it into your workouts and then also what does a dedicated session look like yeah it's very difficult to explain um it's actually I think it was the hardest chapter in the book to write truthfully um because it's it's not it's it's hard enough to show people in videos or to have friends over who want to work out with me and put them through the exercises that's actually very difficult um so you know I lead with an analogy in the book where I talk about the difference between streetcars and track cars because I'm a car nut and I being on the racetrack is probably one of my favorite things to do and um so so the analogy I give is is this which is um if you took if you take a street car with very high horsepower and you put it on track and you let it race against the track car which is lighter less horsepower typically for a given engine size or for a given class size slick tires on it which one's going to be faster I mean it's no comparison right the track car rips the streetcar into Oblivion even though by the way the street car will go faster in a straight line so the example that I use in the book is a real example I compare at the time this is you know seven or eight years ago my streetcar at the time was like a an actually a modified e92 M3 so nice I've modified it changed all the airflow that thing was putting out 475 horsepower big German based yep and at the time my track car was a spec E30 M3 I'm sorry not even an M3 just a spec E30 okay right but everything's stripped out roll cage is in stiff as hell 165 horsepower engines in it oh this is the stock engine yeah it's a six in line right okay yeah yeah so so you've got the this the stock 165 horsepower engine it's very light the car weighs like probably 2 400 pounds versus the M3 is 3 400 pounds m3's got street tires on it this one's I'm running you know probably Hankook slicks on it but to your point the chassis stiff as a button suspension super stiff and yeah I was going faster in the straightaways in the M3 but my lap time was two seconds faster which on a track is might as well be a day yep um in the spec E30 and of course what does it come down to it's cornering speed what does cornering Speed come down to it comes down to of the 165 paltry horsepower in that engine every little bit of it is making it where it belongs remember what is the name of the game in driving a race car it's all about friction it's all about power loss it's all about transmitting what's happening in the crankshaft to the tire tire to the street that's it you only have four points of contact with the outside world nothing else matters and so again we're not talking about aerodynamics because these aren't Aero cars right so in the in the streetcar first of all I have much more slippage at the tires because I've got I'm not running slicks secondly the chassis is so loose right swallowing all over the place I've got all this all this energy loss with energy leaking out of that car not making it to the surface of the track it's like having laxity in a joint that's right so every time you're hurting your knee you're hurting your elbow something's hurting that's an energy leak so again even if one doesn't care about performance just from an injury perspective this is something we want to avoid we want to avoid it and again my introduction to stability only came the hard way it's not like I was born out of the womb realizing this was an important thing I mean I had to go through horrible injuries to finally arrive at this place where I said you know I'm tired of being in pain I'm tired of the fact that my elbow hurts when I do pull-ups and you know oh like half the time I deadlift or squat my back hurts you know my SI joint hurts the next day like it was just kind of tired of that and then I got very fortunate and that I landed um in the in the company of a guy named who I write about in the book briefly his name is Michael stromsness and um he's a practitioner of something called DNS Dynamic neuromuscular stabilization and very first time I met him you know at the time I was like my main complaint was uh basically my right SI joint and my right elbow I had tennis elbow having never played tennis and he said all right you know take your shirt off and hop up on the bar and do some Pull-Ups so I I did and rattled off you know 15 pull-ups or something which I could do easily at the time um and he's like oh that's horrible like those are those are and by the way these are good form pull-ups I'm not doing like bro pull-ups where I'm like jerking up and down I'm doing like full extension up like everything perfect and he's like yeah you have no capacity to control your scapula so your scapula is winged and in doing so you are transmitting all of that Force into your elbows you cannot retract your scapula you don't have the control you don't have the stability in the scapula so you're leaking energy through your scapula in your arm so to make a very long story short that that which started in 2017 um just took me so far down the rabbit hole of not just DNS but other other schools of thought I would later go on to meet someone named Beth Lewis through Michael who um you know has has her own expertise around um other other disciplines and we basically just started piece by piece rebuilding my movements and by the way that meant spending a year not doing pull-ups and not dead lifting as I re-learned how to how to align my body again and so today I'll still spend two days a week working with a guy here in Austin named Kyler Brown who's amazing um working on just dedicated DNS things and again if you watched the exercises I was doing you would be thinking what is he doing you know like why is he doing you know why is he in these baby positions like moving in these odd ways but a lot of what DNS is based on is the idea that up until we were about two years old we all moved almost perfectly most of our movement patterns that are corrupt which we all have as adults only started to kick in once we were about two uh maybe one but but generally about two so so there's a very predictable you know neuromuscular set of or sequence of movements that are genetically programmed into us the ability you know the way a child reaches for something the way a child rolls the way a child stands the way a child you know gets into a bare position all of these things are basically hardwired into us and the goal of this type of training is to basically provide a software update on the crappy software we've ins you know we've we've overridden that system with let's say someone doesn't live in Austin doesn't have access to your very smart friend there are lots of DNS practitioners across the country but you would advise doing this with instruction I think so yes I think the complex and nuanced and yeah I think DNS is um is very difficult to learn um I shouldn't say that I haven't tried to learn it off you know videos and online and there might be ways to do it but but I think you know trying to find a practitioner is a good way to start um and then once you have it going it's it's always great to to to you know continue on your own and there's a lot of stuff I do with my friend Kyler that's not DNS I mean you know one of the issues I've been having injury-wise I have very flexible ankles I think a lot of former swimmers do and so one of the drawbacks of that is when I do freaks I love doing box step-ups we're both Cut From the Same Cloth I knew that you were a massive fan of these they're my favorite movement for the lower body I absolutely love I love doing them in all regards I love doing them very very heavy I love doing them very very slowly all these things well because my ankles are so flexible and I can really really dorsiflex I have a tendency sometimes when I'm because like as you know when you're when you want to do a step up the real key to it is pre-loading the glute and the ham correct not bouncing off the floor that's right so so to pre-load you want to be able to shift forward and glide the femur back that creates an enormous stretch eccentric stretch so that that front leg is loaded boom you pop up okay well in doing so I often will drive my knees so far over my toes because I have the flexibility of my ankles but sometimes I'll develop a little bit of discomfort there in the front so one of the things I'm working on with Kyler is Soleus strengthening to actually counteract that move movement bring it back yeah and so the amazing exercises that he has come up with for me to do these you know to do solely a strengthening which um again you have to you have to be very deliberate about doing that it's easy to strengthen your gastrocs uh the Soleus requires more effort I learned this intimately during my Rehabilitation absolutely I overshot it actually it was hilarious so um this is not a good time to snap an Achilles but during Cove it wasn't bad um and I overshot it on my right leg which is the one that snapped and I ended up having to then work on my left more aggressively to catch it up because I'd ended up building up a a calf that was bigger I mean I learned so much man from that the first thing was I had a 13 day wait period because I was doing it on the NHS although I managed to find uh one of the top three surgeons in the entirety of the UK through a friend who was on the NHS to come and do my reattachment which was really really great it felt like being um fitted in at the end of the day with a barber that needs to do the haircut and I was waiting around all day all day all day and then it got to the very end and we he had to run it back and I had to go back tomorrow I've been fasted all day because I was going to go into General and it's like blah blah blah anyway um a bunch of the things that I learned from that coming out the other side were how important it is to be able to deal with not just strength but plyo especially for that ankle position but what I'm thinking here when when you're talking about your challenges with box step ups there's a guy called Dr Eddie Joe PhD on Instagram now he took a massive Hiatus for like three years but he did these really great breakdowns of academic literature in infographics which lend themselves to Instagram very nicely and I'll never forget this one from nearly four years ago I think and there'd been a study done looking at muscle fiber recruitment for glute exercises and you know you look at the glute Factory bum lab things for girls that want big glutes or me that's increasingly realized that my back gets better the bigger that my bum gets um and glute Bridge donkey Kickback side raises all manner of Fantastical exercises that that girls do and he'd ranked them by uh the amount of muscle fiber recruitment the top five exercises were step UPS or step up variations it's like Step Up cross body step up like lateral step up something something something and then maybe hex hex bar deadlift was in the sort of upper middle uh deadlift another one and then you get down toward like glute Bridge Kickback and it's at 25 and I think it's 95 on this particular scale of this number would Step Up So for anybody that wants to improve like lower body power I just I absolutely adore that movement and it's so easy to do we um you know in the first iteration of writing the book I had intended to put so much detail in about instruction on like kind of the most important movements in the end it was getting too long so what I did is I ended up creating videos for a handful of them and one of them is the step up so there's a pretty good video um on this like the book will Point people to where to go on our site to see it and it's I just watched it yesterday it's a pretty good instructional video is it you doing it it's me doing it with Beth and I talking through how to do a step up cool uh weighted unweighted low box High box the whole thing eccentric concentric what are the pitfalls how do you you know how do you unload the ribs to you know you know do them incorrectly and all that stuff so what's happening people if you enjoyed that then press here for the full unedited episode and don't forget to subscribe peace