Strength training, endurance activity, yoga, or even a specific sport. What type of activity should everyone incorporate into their routine to improve longevity? What are the best exercises to live longer? That’s what Jonathan Bennion decided to find out.
jonathan benion is the co-founder, director of education and anatomist of the Institute of Human Anatomy. In addition to being an educational campus at the University of Utah, the Youtube channel It has a massive following of over 4 million subscribers.
Bennion studies human cadavers to exemplify ways to improve people’s lives. In a video, she talked about the best exercises to live longer. Check it out.
The best exercises to live longer
According to Bennion, the best exercises to live longer are those that make your heart work at or near its maximum capacity. This is because the efficiency and effectiveness with which you exercise your muscles has a huge influence on a person’s fitness and, consequently, their longevity.
Now, increasing the strength of the heart and improving the amount of blood it can technically pump can happen with almost any form of exercise. As an analogy to understand the best exercises to live longer, Bennion says that while walking every day would strengthen your heart, you’d only be challenging about 60% of your heart, but you can improve longevity by working at 90 or even 100%. of your heart, just as if you want to build more muscle, you need to work close to the capacity of that muscle and not just lift light weights.
The best exercises to live longer are those that increase the intensity and capacity of your heart. Bennion says that the best exercises to live longer are high-intensity interval training, or HIIT.
These types of exercises are incredibly demanding and last between 2 and 6 minutes at full strength.
The best part is that it is not a specific exercise that is one of the best exercises to live longer, but make that exercise a HIIT. It can be on a treadmill, biking, rowing, running uphill, or swimming. Just make sure you go as fast or as hard as you can for a short period of time; in Bennion’s opinion, 2 minutes is the minimum he recommends.
Whichever exercise you choose, give yourself the same amount of time to rest. For example, if you sprinted up hills for 2 minutes, take a 2-minute break before repeating the exercise again. You don’t need to get faster every round you do, but make sure you don’t have anything left in your tank at the end of that period. Do 4-6 rounds of that HIIT exercise.
“The goal here is to hit max heart rate or get close to max heart rate,” says Bennion. Maximum heart rate is, in simple math, 220 minus your age.
Ideally, you should do this type of training once a week, maybe twice a week, but you don’t need to do more than that if you’re looking to improve your longevity.
Bennion goes on to explain how much your heart changes when you do HIIT exercises often over a long period of time.
And those are the best exercises to live longer according to Bennion. If you’re interested in his full explanation and further discussion of other ways to improve your VO2 max, like steady-state cardio, click on the video below.
VIDEO – The best exercises to live longer
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