Scientists Uncovered the #1 Exercise for Metabolic Health (10x Better Results)

0:00 Um, okay. So, I think the biggest headline from this study was that vigorous intensity physical activity was it wasn't a two to, you know, it wasn't twice as better than moderate intensity, right? We're talking anywhere between four times better to almost 10 times better than moderate intensity exercise, which is pretty big. Um so first of all when it comes to all cause mortality it seems as though one minute of vigorous intensity physical activity was equivalent to about 4 minutes of moderate intensity activity. So basically in terms of reducing all cause mortality right so this is the death from all non non-acental causes right and um if you think about that you know vigorous intensity physical activity is

0:45 four times as potent in terms of you know you can get the bigger bang for your buck four times as potent at at reducing the risk of all cause mortality than moderate intensity physical activity. That's pretty big. Um but it actually gets even bigger when we look at cardiovascular related mortality. And this is a really really important point because you know cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death in the United States in many developed nations including many European nations. Um so it's something that's really really important and what I'm about to say will blow people's minds. I know it blew mine and that is that vigorous intensity physical activity in for every one minute of vigorous intensity physical activity you had to perform

1:31 7.8 8 minutes almost 8 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity to get the same reduction risk reduction in cardiovascular related mortality. I mean that is insane, >> you know. So it it kind of like you know if you're thinking about I'm spending 75 minutes doing mo sorry doing intense like more vigorous types of exercise you're running or cycling or whatever and you're thinking about that and go how much time will I have to spend doing moderate intensity physical activity to get that same benefit health benefit on reducing my cardiovascular disease mortality risk you'd have to you'd have to multiply it by essentially eight >> and that's huge right >> um Another big one is type two diabetes. So, this one isn't so surprising to me

2:18 either and probably not to you as well. Um, vigorous for every 1 minute of vigorous intensity physical activity, you had to spend about 9.4 minutes doing moderate intensity physical activity. So, it's almost 10 times as powerful at reducing the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. And it's really not it's it it's not that um surprising because we do know that exercise intensity really does drive a lot of the metabolic adaptations and benefits that occur from exercise with respect to improving insulin sensitivity and blood glucose regulation and whatnot. But I mean 10 times nearly 10 times right that's nuts. So why is that? And again, that is something that I've talked about a lot in I did a podcast like a solo cast on vigorous intensity exercise and talked

3:05 about, you know, why vigorous intensity seems to be really key uh for improving metabolic health. Um when you know when you are working harder, when you're working your muscles harder, um when you're when you're basically forcing your muscles to produce energy quicker, um what ends up happening is you're not using your mitochondria all the time. you're sometime you're going to be using your mitochondria, but you're sometimes going to be making energy without them as well. And so you're going to be making something called lactate as a quote unquote byproduct, which is not necessarily a byproduct. It's an active metabolite. And why is that important? Because lactate is not only a metabolite, in some in some ways it actually acts as a hormone. is a signaling molecule that's signaling to

3:50 you know other proteins to other organs to to basically work harder and like respond to this hard work that is going on. Right? So um with improved insul in insulin sensitivity we do know that vigorous intensity exercise for one it does cause your muscles to contract. Right? So you can actually just in and of that of itself if your muscles are um you know contracting you can basically cause 50 to 100 times more um contractions than at rest. That's a lot right and that actually forces glucose to come into your muscle. So your muscle is a big sink for glucose. Um but your muscle also has to transport that glucose across it. And that's where lactate comes in because when you're working hard, you are produc your muscles are producing lactate and that lactate um essentially signals to your

4:36 muscle to increase these glute 4 transporters. These are the transporters that are responsible for bringing glucose out of your circulation and pulling it into the muscle. And um and so lactate is actually what is responsible for that for that you know signaling to increase the glute 4 number or transllocation to the cell surface muscle cell surface. Um and so what happens is that you're basically with the more intense or the more vigorous intensity of the activity the more glucose you're going to bring in because you're having more of those transporters there and the transporters actually last around for a while. So there's a lasting effect. It's not like they just they're there when you're working out and then they go back. No, they stay active for quite a while, right? Bringing more glucose in. And so it's it's un it's

5:22 unbelievable to um to to actually think about how beneficial vigorous intensity activity is if you're thinking about, you know, a 10 times efficient. I've seen I know that um there's been a couple of studies showing that vigorous intensity activity, you can do like 15 minutes of vigorous intensity activity and that's equivalent to like 45 minutes of moderate intensity in terms of um glucose regulation. I would say there's even other studies out there showing like a 1:5 ratio as well. But this study itself, if we're talking about outcome, not just biomarker data, we're talking about outcomes, we're talking about new diagnosis of diabetes, it suggested a 1 to 10 ratio almost. It was 9.4, but almost 1:10. >> Um, so I really do think that this confirms that, you know, obviously we've

6:07 looked at a lot of biomarker data with these randomized control trials. We've had Marty Cabala on the podcast talking about, you know, tons of these the, you know, trials showing that if you do high-intensity interval training for volume matched moderate intensity continuous exercise, you will get improvements in insulin sensitivity and blood glucose regulation and a lot of different metabolic markers. Um, again, volume matched. Um, it wasn't necessarily 1 to 10, but it was there there were improvements whether it was like a 1 to three, 1:5, you know, whatever it was, it was definitely for volume matched, it was better. >> Um, but but we're talking about again even more than that if we're looking at the actual type two diabetes diagnosis. >> Yeah. I mean, I feel like it aligns with a lot of his studies that he's done because I mean, I know his group has

6:53 done some of these sprint interval training studies where they're doing less than 10 minutes of exercise per workout and then you compare that to a 45 to 60 minute. So, it's it almost kind of lines up with what we're seeing in this study, the 1:10 ratio with the in, you know, in some of his actual randomized control trials, that 1 to 10 sort of ratio between the sprint interval training and the moderate training too. Um, and one of the things though I wanted to mention, I think I think the signal here for diabetes risk was probably the most drastic, that 1 to 10 ratio of moderate to vigorous. And obviously, you know, exercise is important for it, but I think what's important, probably why this signal is showing up in this study is because the movement throughout the day is what I think is so important for glucose control. Yeah, if you do a workout in the morning and don't do anything the

7:40 rest of the day, you're going to be probably pretty insulin sensitive throughout the day. But what really is better is doing, you know, 10 15 minute kind of bouts of movement throughout the day if you're really trying to improve your glucose control. And so I think that's one of the reasons why in this study that objectively measured every single type of physical activity people were doing, the vigorous exercise was shown to be so beneficial because you're if you're just moving more throughout your day, you have better glucose control. You're definitely going to have better long-term outcomes than for diabetes risk and things like that. that you're going to have lower HBA1C, better in insulin sensitivity, lower fasting glucose. Um, and so I think that's sort of why that that's showing up here in in the actual outcomes like you said, which for most people are more important than the biioarker data probably, >> right? Yeah. And I also um just want to

8:25 add on to that like a couple of things. One, you know, that makes a lot of sense too, by the way. You know, doing the exercise throughout the day and the fact of the matter is this specific study that was published in Nature Communications did pick that up because of the accelerometer data. But I do want to emphasize the the the lactate signaling here and just knowing that as you are getting that vigorous intensity exercise that is really like it's not just a muscle contractions glucose in thing. It's a glute 4 transporter where you're you are for a longer period of time throughout the day and perhaps even the next day somewhat but definitely for 24 hours it's those transporters are active and ready. And so I think that's another really just powerful effect of you know the intensity of exercise on top of the fact that we also know that

9:13 when you engage in more vigorous intensity exercise the lactate also signals to another protein called PGC1 alpha which is responsible for the growth of new mitochondria. This is mitochondrial biogenesis. So this is happening in your muscle cells as well. Um and this is improving metabolism of not just glucose but you know other substrates like fatty acids as well. And so I think there's this long-term effect. And if we're looking at, you know, type two diabetes, we're not just looking at biomarkers. Like you I don't know you necessarily would pick that up on biomarker data if you're just looking at blood glucose regulation or insulin sensitivity. But if you're looking over the course of like, you know, several years, and you have better mitochondria, more healthy mitochondria on top of like, you know, improved glucose regulation through the glute

9:58 transporters and all that. Um, you probably also going to just see a healthier metabolic profile, right? I mean, that's something else to to >> for sure. I think unless you were measuring like with a continuous glucose monitor, you really wouldn't measure that. You know, I think sometimes these fasting I don't know how much stock to put in say like a fasting biioarker of your fasting blood glucose taken one time per year, like every single year like what does that really mean? But now that we have access to CGMs and technology like that, I think you could actually you would actually see it in that data, >> right? um especially well you know and we don't really have any good biomarkers for mitochondrial health like that's like not it's it hasn't been translated to the to the clinic yet it's something that researchers can and do in fact um looking at talking about some of the studies that Marty Gabbala cited on the

10:43 podcast previously for volume matched exercise highintensity interval training is better at increasing mitochondrial biogenesis than moderate intensity exercise again it has to do with that stronger stimulus causing the adaptation When you're forcing your muscles to work so hard that they can't produce all the energy they need from just using their mitochondria alone, they it forces them to also use just glucose. Without mitochondria, your your your muscle's like, "Dude, I need more mitochondria. This isn't working, right?" So, that's an adaptation that's happening and it makes sense. And so, I know a lot of people for for I've at least gotten a lot of questions from people talking about, "But I thought zone 2 training was the best for mitochondria." And you know, it depends on what we're talking about here. If we're talking about mitochondrial biogenesis, you know,

11:28 great zone 2 does in increase mitochondrial biogenesis, but you know, if you start to go a little more vigorous, you actually can get a stronger stimulus. And I know that's um what we're talking about here, vigorous includes zone 2, but I'm just saying generally speaking, um it the more it just gets back to this whole idea, right? The more intense the stimulus, the greater the adaptation to a degree. Obviously, you don't want to go to the complete extreme where it's like all you do is work out. Like, >> I'm not going to say that's all you do, but you definitely work out a lot. >> Sometimes it seems like that. My wife will tell you maybe sometimes it seems like