Exercise

How many of us have dreamt of living better longer? I know I have.

Today, voluminous research has shown that mortality is an inevitable companion of aging and chipping away one disease at a time is futile, like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The good news, though, is that exercise is the most potent pro-longevity "drug". I was introduced to this strategy by Peter Attia in his eye-opening book Outlive. In short, medicine's biggest failing is in attempting to treat all the conditions at the wrong end of the timescale - after they are entrenched - rather than before they take root.

The beauty of maintaining health by exercise is to make us functionally younger. If anything, we exercise to live longer with good function and without chronic disease, and with a briefer period of morbidity at the end of our lives. The upside of training to improve our VO₂ max during physical exertion is huge. One study found that boosting elderly subjects' VO₂ max by about 25 percent was equivalent to subtracting twelve years from their age.

What better drug can give us such payoff?