Brain Fact Friday on ”Using Neuroscience to Improve Fitness, Longevity and Overall Health.”

It’s one of the Top 5 health staples that we’ve covered often on this podcast, but Dr. Peter Attia[i], Canadian-American physician, known for his medical practice that focuses on the science of longevity, says that “exercise might be the most potent “drug” we have for extending the quality and perhaps quantity of our years of life.” On this episode we will cover: ✔  What the current research says for improving fitness, longevity and overall health. ✔ Look at the workouts from Dr. Peter Attia and Dr. Andrew Huberman, who dive deep into this topic on their recent podcast episodes. ✔ Compare their workouts to mine, and look for gaps using the most current research to see if we can all improve our workout routines with longevity in mind. ✔ Use Attia's Rule in this process. Welcome back to The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast where we bridge the gap between theory and practice, with strategies, tools and ideas we can all use immediately, applied to the most current brain research to heighten productivity in our schools, sports environments and modern workplaces. I’m Andrea Samadi and launched this podcast to share how important an understanding of our brain is for our everyday life and results. Like you, I’m interested in learning and applying the research, to our everyday life. On today’s episode, I want to share the research I saw recently to improve fitness, longevity and overall health, with Dr. Peter Attia’s work who was recently featured on Dr. Andrew Huberman’s podcast. Dr. Attia, has a fascinating origin story, as he started his career as a cardiac surgeon, and then found he had a heart condition, so he began to dive into the research to see how he could improve the quality of his own life. On today’s episode #252, and this week’s Brain Fact Friday, we will take Dr. Attia’s advice, look at what he does himself, and what he recommends for others he trains, compare it to how others, like Dr. Huberman are training, and then how I’ve been training. I’m hoping we will find areas to tweak or improve, with Dr. Attia’s research in mind, that focuses on longevity and overall improvements in health and fitness. The overall goal with this episode is to have all of us use the research to inform our current exercise program, uncover our gaps, and see if there are any ways that we can improve what we are doing, with longevity research in mind. I wanted to cover this topic, as I’m always looking to improve what I’m doing, but find that when there’s so much to do, or so many different exercise or nutrition plans to follow, I notice I don’t do anything new at all, and just do the same thing, which changes nothing.  The point of this episode is to look at moving our needle even just a little bit, and see if there is something we can all do, even if it’s a small tweak, to build a better 2.0 version of ourselves, to make this year our best year ever, or at least give us a running start at 2023. Biohack Tip Advice For this episode, I plan on following Attia’s Rule[ii] which Dr. Huberman coined that basically addresses the ton of exercise and nutrition advice flying around out in the world. This rule says “don’t quibble about nutrition or supplementation until you’ve dialed in your own exercise/strength protocol,” and I wouldn’t even consider writing this episode, if I wasn’t putting my own health first, using Attia’s Rule as a guide. Dr. Attia says that nutrition and health arguments are a waste of your time until you’ve completed a certain set of criteria. He says don’t bother unless you can: Dead hang for a minute Wall sit for two minutes Have a VO2 max of at least 75th percentile for your age group. Before writing this episode, I wanted to be sure that I qualified for Attia’s Rule.  Here’s how I fared with his criteria.    Dead Hang[iii]: I had to find a park down the street from my house to try a dead hang, as I’ve never done one before. In Canada, I remember doing fitness testing for running in school, b