Renowned Physician, Dr. Peter Attia is famously known for his longevity medicine. He vouches for leading a healthy and long life by staying fit. Attia sheds light on various fitness routines that help one lead a healthy life. Recently, the Canadian-American Physician was seen hosting a podcast along with physiologist Dr. Mike Joyner.
In the podcast, they discussed how one can improve their VO2 max to enhance health and longevity. According to Peter, VO2 max exercise should be a part of your fitness protocol. It is the volume of oxygen that your body can effectively transport and utilize to create energy while you’re pushing yourself to your physical limits.
While discussing with Dr. Mike on the podcast, he shares a protocol for those who want to boost their VO2 max effectively. This was suggested by Peter to his patients, and has found it to be an efficient way. He talks about the four on four routine. He then shares an example of how this four-on-four protocol works to improve your VO2 max.
Peter mentions that the easiest way is on a bike or on an incline which shouldn’t be too steep. The incline has got to be a 6 percent grade. While doing it, stay in the saddle, climbing against resistance for four minutes. While doing this exercise, Peter uses a power meter and a heart rate, which helps him keep the power as steady as possible, and invariably it dips in about the third minute and then recovers in the fourth minute.
When speaking of recovery, it means four minutes of doing absolutely nothing. You roll back to the starting line and repeat it following the four-on-four protocol. In addition, Mike Joyner adds to this point stating how people come up to him saying they want to improve their VO2 max to run faster marathons.
Dr. Joyner uses the same protocol as Peter but asks his patients to train for five minutes and rest for 3 minutes depending on how fit they are. Mike further added how he would tell people to do something that would be at their sort of 5K race Pace. Maybe a little faster or you would do the first one a little slower than your 5K race Pace, and ask them to increase pace gradually or jog in between.
5k race pace means the speed you can run consistently at for 5k. It rather means to run at the pace that you could keep consistently for that length of a run. The exact speeds will be personal to you but will be faster for the shorter runs.
“Depending on how fast you’re running, if you’re going pretty fast then you would just jog in between, and if you were not going so fast you’d walk in between.”
However, Peter Attia feels for an average person it would be difficult to follow this protocol. They would require some sort of coaching before getting into it as compared to experienced runners.
“We sort of know what four minutes all out feels. At 30 seconds in, you shouldn’t be hurting too much if you are you’ve gone out too hard. So it takes a little bit of work to coach somebody to understand what you’re going for.”
The four times, four minutes, is a good interval workout. The workout routine might sound masochistic, but if you can complete this routine, it means you have overcome the suffering. With this, you will be able to manage your suffering, which is important.
Another interesting thing about this type of training is the extent of experience people can have. Exercising at this sort of interval training is one way to achieve them. If you’re able to test your limits and that level of discomfort, you’re experiencing something beautiful in this protocol.
“If you’re able to maintain your rhythm and tempo while you do it that’s when you can have these sorts of experiences.”
When going back to the old school methods of training as well, the one thing coaches would talk about is interval training. They constantly talk about what is your rhythm and tempo. Therefore, is important to maintain your rhythm and temp while training and it will also help boost your VO2 max according to Dr. Attia.
“While it’s hurting, while it’s burning the goal was to not lose your form and not lose your tempo.”
Dr. Mike Joyner shares the importance of adding intense exercises to routines on Peter Attia’s podcast
Peter Attia asks Mike if doing four hard intervals once a week is sufficient to boost VO2 max. Mike responds that it can help increase it significantly. Adding to the insight, he said that we need to pre-train before training. This is backed by a study that showed that senior citizens in the age group of 60-70 have to do pre-training for around 3-6 months before they train hard.
He further shared, how Stan James, one of the pioneers of sports medicine worked with Oregon coach Bill Bowman. He noticed that after 5 or 6 hard sessions every 2 weeks, people asked for load management issues, stating fatigue or orthopedics. Mike, in conclusion, mentions how he added intense exercise into his routine, about 120-130 times per year. Hence, he points out that these intense workouts are good for overall fitness and the boosting of Vo2 max.
