Sunday Science by Go UnPro 2026_08_09 Variety of Exercise and Longevity
- laartzy
- Aug 9
- 24 min read
Sunday Science: Longevity and Physical Activity Analysis
Summary Of Speaker Contributions
Dr. Brent Laartz: Led the session by reviewing multiple scientific studies regarding physical activity and longevity. He introduced the "five pillars" of movement—strength, cardiovascular fitness, flexibility, mobility, balance, and muscular endurance—and synthesized data from cohort studies and meta-analyses to advocate for a diverse exercise routine.
Key Points And Decisions
The Five Pillars of Movement: Dr. Laartz established that a comprehensive approach to physical health requires balancing strength, cardiovascular fitness, flexibility, mobility, and balance.
Hormesis and the U-Shaped Curve: The discussion highlighted that while physical activity significantly reduces mortality, there is a U-shaped "hormesis" curve. Moderate, varied activity is optimal, whereas excessive, high-volume training may lead to diminishing returns or increased injury risk.
Importance of Variety: Data from the reviewed studies confirmed that individuals who engage in a variety of activities (targeting five or more types) experience a greater reduction in mortality risk (up to 21%) compared to those who focus on a single activity.
Resistance Training: Dr. Laartz emphasized that resistance training is essential for maintaining lean muscle mass, improving insulin sensitivity, and preventing frailty. Combining resistance training with aerobic exercise was identified as the most effective strategy, potentially offering a 40% reduction in mortality.
Consensus on Activity: The speaker concluded that while specific sports like racket sports and swimming show high benefits, the primary decision for listeners should be to diversify their movement patterns to include both resistance and cardiovascular components.
Next Steps And Action Items
Dr. Brent Laartz: Committed to including links to all four reviewed scientific articles in the podcast show notes and description for further audience research.
Dr. Brent Laartz: Encouraged listeners to audit their current exercise routines to ensure they incorporate at least five different types of physical activity, with a specific focus on adding resistance training if it is currently absent.
Dr. Brent Laartz: Directed the audience to access the video version of the podcast on platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, and Substack to view the data graphs and figures discussed during the session.
Han H, Hu J, Lee DH, Zhang Y, Giovannucci E, Stampfer MJ, et al. Physical activity types, variety, and mortality: results from two prospective cohort studies. BMJ Medicine. 2026;5:e001513. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjmed-2025-001513
Oja P, Kelly P, Pedisic Z, et alAssociations of specific types of sports and exercise with all-cause and cardiovascular-disease mortality: a cohort study of 80 306 British adultsBritish Journal of Sports Medicine 2017;51:812-817.
Farzane Saeidifard, Jose R Medina-Inojosa, Colin P West, Thomas P Olson, Virend K Somers, Amanda R Bonikowske, Larry J Prokop, Manlio Vinciguerra, Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, The association of resistance training with mortality: A systematic review and meta-analysis, European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, Volume 26, Issue 15, 1 October 2019, Pages 1647–1665,
Shailendra P, Baldock K, Li L ... Resistance Training and Mortality Risk: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2022; 63, 277-285.
Announcer Lucas
Welcome to Sunday Science, where we dive into a few recent scientific articles and their translation into our modern lives. Here is your host, Brent W. Lartz, M.D.
Dr. Brent Laartz
All right, everyone.
Dr. Brent Laartz
Welcome to another day of Sunday Science. Here we are Sunday, and we're going to be talking about a variety of movement and longevity, and other physical activities and uh longevity.
Dr. Brent Laartz
This is Sunday Science where we delve into a few recent studies regarding longevity and one of our five pillars of an unprocessed life: diet, exercise, sleep, connection, and plastic-free living. All right, we all know that exercise is good for you, uh, and both resistance training and cardiovascular fitness are important for longevity, but what types of activities are most important? All right, so the first study we will review shows that it is a variety of activities and that my routine should have both resistance training and cardiovascular as well as some core activity potentially.
Dr. Brent Laartz
I maintain that there are four pillars or sorry, five pillars of movement that are all equally important. I used to have four.
Dr. Brent Laartz
now added five for muscular endurance. So four are the strength, cardiovascular fitness, flexibility and mobility, and balance. And then adding the fifth pillar of muscular endurance, which really comes along with all four of the others, right? But um, I think it's important to say here, and this is why the variety is important, is that the muscular endurance, let's say you're really cardiovascularly endurant because of running. And the only muscles you use are your running muscles.
Dr. Brent Laartz
let's say you need um to have a better muscular endurance of all of your muscles, not just the ones that are associated with running. This is why a variety of activities is important, okay? So, um, and there's also the concept of hormesis and the U-shaped curve and injury prevention. Hormesis suggests that a low amount of activity, zero activity is bad for you, right? And then as you increase your activity, you actually improve your longevity and or other health aspects of
Dr. Brent Laartz
the movements, okay? So then if you do too much of anything, too much of a good thing is sometimes a bad thing. You might get injuries, you might have other effects of too much activity. So, some of these will show in some of these uh graphs that we're going to show you has a U-shaped
Dr. Brent Laartz
curve
Dr. Brent Laartz
So, let's delve right into it. We're going to start out with this first one. This is an article in BMJ Medicine. It's called Physical Activity Types, Variety, Mortality: Results from Two Prospective Cohort Studies. The main, um, the main author is Yang Hu Ki Sun. Um and...
Dr. Brent Laartz
Alright. So let's start by sharing our screen here. Let's get to this.
Dr. Brent Laartz
All right, so
Dr. Brent Laartz
What this uh study was is it showed um it had a hundred and eleven thousand people mostly were white.
Dr. Brent Laartz
and mostly women and there were some men in this other uh cohort Okay
Dr. Brent Laartz
so they took the Nurses' Health Study, which was a study that was a cohort study. So it took nurses starting in 1976 and it goes all the way to the present time and has self-reported portions to it. And it follows different things, lab work and and that kind of thing. But this part happened to be a self-reported exercise and then using that to either parcel out the mortality or it also had cardiovascular disease mortality, cancer, and respiratory disease.
Dr. Brent Laartz
So, you can see from this figure here, um there is some dose-response relations between total physical activity and mortality. And you can see that um the blue line um here suggests that um there is approximately twenty-seven, twenty-eight, maybe thirty percent decrease in mortality once you get to at least twenty met hours per week and you can see it plateaus and maybe even comes up a little bit, a little bit U-shaped there.
Dr. Brent Laartz
And
Dr. Brent Laartz
The one uh area of this, so they took out cardiovascular disease as well, um and cancer and respiratory disease. You can see respiratory disease there. Um with this kind of activity, it continues to slope downwards, um as you have a approximately sixty, probably sixty sixty-five percent decrease in mortality from respiratory disease with this much activity. And that's uh stands to reason, right? And you're probably not going to be a smoker if you are uh doing this much activity and that uh obviously that's not always the case, but in general that's the case.
Dr. Brent Laartz
Um Johnny Carson famously was a chain smoker and was a great tennis player. Um all right so other causes of mortality you can see is a hormesis U-shaped curve. And we don't we can we can guess as to why that is. But um maybe the injuries could be a case or maybe if you're doing bicycling out on the road and you get hit by car, you know, something like that. You're getting out more. And so the more activities you make. All right so um there were eleven uh let's see so and let's go over the correlation.
Dr. Brent Laartz
So, in these self-reported studies from these cohorts, um, there are some studies showing what the correlation is to real activity. In other words, they not only took, you know, let's say a portion of these 111,000 people in the in the actual Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, I think that they had um hundreds of thousands of people in these studies. So, um, they have
Dr. Brent Laartz
gone back to see how that correlates and it does correlate about 0.6 to 0.7 correlation coefficient. So, that means that it is a relatively correlated self-reporting versus what actually happened in the study. All right, so then, um, they parsed out 11 to 13 different exercise categories between the Nurses' Health Study and the Professional Health Professionals follow-up study.
Dr. Brent Laartz
those two and varying as the years go on because they might have added one or two to the activities. I think they added stairs.
Dr. Brent Laartz
they added rowing. Um and so they took 11 to 13 different exercise categories and you can see here, this is the graph um showing that walking actually was the most consistently um showing a longevity benefit down to approximately 21% improvement. Um any exercise was 17% decrease in mortality, walking was 17%, um jogging was 11%, running was 13% decrease.
Dr. Brent Laartz
bicycling was four uh percent decrease. Uh let's parcel that out here or parse that out. Um you can see this cycling that's kind of the purple line here, you can see there is a U-shaped curve here where at 10 to 15 Mets it actually comes up here to one. And so that means that at a certain Met activity it it improves mortality at the beginning, um but as you increase it brings about
Dr. Brent Laartz
no benefit of mortality. It doesn't increase mortality, but it does come back up to zero and then starts to head back down a little more again. But um so that is the case for several of these curves here as you increase your net hours per week of activity. All right, so that kind of hormesis curve doesn't occur with walking, probably because walking doesn't have a lot of injury associated, probably because there might not be other types of um ill effects of of walking.
Dr. Brent Laartz
ahem So, um weight training and resistance uh training was 13%, okay? And stairs, using stairs, a certain Mets per week was actually um had some good effect. And
Dr. Brent Laartz
in the um 10% decrease in mortality. Tennis was 15%, swimming 15%. All right. However, all right, let's take this a step forward and say, what if you had X number of meta-hours per week and you were and they parsed this out again. My favorite word apparently is parsed this out uh this week. Um and you took that total activity and you
Dr. Brent Laartz
placed these people into a total activity either um and into three tertiles of of total activity T1 T2 T3. And then you took their variety of activity and parsed that out into also three categories V1 V2 V3. All right, we're gonna and then so that would get you into basically nine different categories.
Dr. Brent Laartz
Here is um the all-cause mortality in the upper left here is you can see that T1 T2 and T3 are in blue yellow and purplish pink.
Dr. Brent Laartz
And, alright, so if you have a low amount of total activity in the blue and blue, this low amount of activity is the reference range of the hazard ratio, so it's always going to be one, right? At the low activity and low amount of variety. And um so total physical activity, um sorry, T1 T2 T3 is the physical activity variety score. But the low activity in the left, you can see on the left with the low physical activity and low variety.
Dr. Brent Laartz
is always going to be the one because those people were the reference range or reference group for this study. So they had a 1.0 all-cause mortality. So you can see the the upper right upper left of your screen is the all-cause mortality at 1.0. If you even at that low physical activity of T um one
Dr. Brent Laartz
And you can see the total physical activity on the lower right there, you can see that each of these groups is is the T1, T2, T3, low total physical activity. And if you have low variety, T1 in the upper left, you can see that mortality is is 1.0. And you can see that at T2, T3, at an increased variety score.
Dr. Brent Laartz
and this variety score is approximately this. If you only do one activity, your variety score or maybe two, your variety score is going to be a T1. And if you are doing um somewhere between three and four activities, it's going to be T2. And if you're going to do five or more, that's the T3. Okay, so you can see here that as you increase your variety, you actually improve your
Dr. Brent Laartz
mortality risk
Dr. Brent Laartz
The more variety you have, regardless of whether you are in the low, middle, or high total physical activity. And so what this showed was that there was a 19% reduction in mortality when you parsed out at any activity, 19%, any level of activity, 19% reduction in mortality over and above the mortality improvement from that amount of physical activity, okay?
Dr. Brent Laartz
So, um, again, so going from group one to two, there's about a fourteen percent decrease in mortality and a twenty-one percent going from group one to group five, and this is when they they actually also
Dr. Brent Laartz
when took these variety scores and did a group one to five also. So, a little bit confusing there, but going from group one, the lowest variety, let's say you're running, and let's say you're low physical activity or your middle or upper. If you're upper physical activity, look at this score from T one, T two, T three on the on the right hand of the first graph. You can see that the mortality decreases about ten percent.
Dr. Brent Laartz
if you do one activity a lot Okay
Dr. Brent Laartz
But if you increase that activity's variety to a T3, doing four to five at least activities, it increases from approximately 10% benefit, um maybe 10 to 15% down to 21% decrease in mortality if you do a variety of different activities, okay? So, all right.
Dr. Brent Laartz
Right, so even at the highest tercile of total, there's a seven percent reduction versus twenty-one percent. And that's actually the uh the the true statistic number, just going based on the uh where that blue line is, uh looks about ten percent, but it's actually seven percent. Okay. So if you if you only do and perform and are active in one to two activities, your reduction is modest and it is real and it is palpable, okay?
Dr. Brent Laartz
But if you only do one activity, you're not getting all these benefits, right? So if you do only do one activity, that would suggest that you're probably only doing either cardiovascular or you're doing resistance training. And you're not probably doing both if you're doing one activity, most likely. I mean, there is some strength benefit to a lot of different types of activities, but it's not resistance training, okay?
Dr. Brent Laartz
So, um, so we all and we'll show another study here in a minute that shows that there is a benefit to having cardiovascular and resistance training, but the combination of the two actually improves the mortality benefit as well. Okay, so when we that's common sense, right? So if you only do one to two activities, your reduction is modest, but at high levels, more than four to five activities is even more beneficial. And this includes potentially resistance training, cardiovascular training, court activities, okay?
Dr. Brent Laartz
Core activities are those that are going to get you the side-to-side mobility, the the flexibility, the uh the great thing about core activities is that they send you all the way to the left-hand side of the court and you have to stop on a dime, hit a ball.
Dr. Brent Laartz
use upper and lower extremity mobility, flexibility, fitness, and it also takes cardiovascular fitness as well. So, and this is why there are a couple of studies that actually show that there is a benefit, um, a high amount of benefit for core activities. And and this, you know, I don't know if that translates into pickleball. I don't think that they really had uh pickleball um
Dr. Brent Laartz
in these studies per se because pickleball is a pretty relatively recent sport, right? But, um, you know, you don't really have to run that far. You don't, you do need some balance, you do need some of this, but but I'm not sure about the pickleball and whether that's going to be a benefit here, okay?
Dr. Brent Laartz
So, all right.
Dr. Brent Laartz
So, let's um let's uh let me go back to this. You can see that it has cardiovascular benefit the more you do, it has cancer benefit, respiratory disease, other causes at the higher end levels, right? Um at the lower end, there's a lot of variability for the high amount of variety because probably because if you are doing a high variety of almost no activity, how do you actually really do that as a variety and and and actually have a physical benefit of it?
Dr. Brent Laartz
So these pink lines here in the low amount of physical activity and the high variety have a lot of variability and their um 95% probability lines are are wide, right? So so it's difficult to show the benefit there, but if you um take all comers into this, 19% reduction in mortality in this set.
Dr. Brent Laartz
And this is that first upper left graph, a little better for you to see, so in case you're on a small screen, you can see it a little better. All right, so, um, that is, uh, we're gonna take this off of here because, uh, the rest of our articles really don't have any graphs associated with them that are meaningful.
Dr. Brent Laartz
Alright. So, this next study we're going to show is, um, from
Dr. Brent Laartz
British Journal of Sports Medicine and it is associations of specific types of sports and exercise with all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality, a cohort study of 80,306 British adults. So this was by Emmanuel Stamatakis et al. and um Alright, so let's delve into this a little bit, okay? So this basically was took the Health Survey for England and the um Scottish Health Survey, which um had about 80,000 people as I said in the title.
Dr. Brent Laartz
Um they had approximately five to six different uh activities: cycling, swimming, aerobics, running, football, and racket ball. And racket sports, I should say. And this study ran for over nine plus years. And this study showed that there was a cardiovascular benefit for most of these activities. And here is the data for that. That cycling had a 15% improvement in um longevity. Swimming, 28%. Running had zero.
Dr. Brent Laartz
it was a 13% improvement, but that was not statistically significant. Football and I'm assuming that since this is the health survey for England and Scottish Health Survey, they did not specifically say, but I believe this football is probably soccer. Um that had an 18% improvement, but not statistically significant. Um racket sports had a 47% improvement in long in mortality, okay?
Dr. Brent Laartz
and aerobic aerobic exercise, aerobics, which was a lot of different things, calisthenics related, we had a 27% um improvement in mortality. Um and this study um these are not as recent as the 2026 article we just went through. Uh I just took uh several articles showing different uh different differential mortality based on the different sports that are involved. This was actually from 2016, okay, so a while ago, but um
Dr. Brent Laartz
And this next article we're going to go through is, um, there are two articles and they are probably overlapping a lot. Um, but these are two meta-analyses that we're going to go through. The first one was in 2019 and had a meta-analysis that it took 1430 different studies, um, where it looked at resistance training and narrowed that down to 11 with 10 cohort studies and one resistance, uh, random controlled trial.
Dr. Brent Laartz
Um, and so this uh study is in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. It is titled The Association of Resistance Training with Mortality: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. This study um had um showed a 21% reduction in mortality if you had resistance training as a significant amount of activity, okay?
Dr. Brent Laartz
So, um and furthermore, there was also a borderline association with lower cardiovascular mortality also, probably because, you know, resistance training can, and I like to make my resistance training have a cardiovascular benefit too. I go through my um cycles pretty quickly and I don't have a lot of rests.
Dr. Brent Laartz
usually
Dr. Brent Laartz
My girlfriend would tell me that I'm spending a lot of time on my phone sometimes, but in general, most of my resistance training is going through the cycles through my different sets rapidly. And I go through a cycle. I do my resistance training starting with one exercise at a lower amount of weight and a high amount of reps, and I go through the entire cycle of approximately eight to ten different exercises. And I do upper and lower body on the same day. I don't have a leg day. I don't have a uh anything because my other days are cardiovascular days. Okay, I don't have just a leg day. I don't have an upper body day.
Dr. Brent Laartz
I don't have a back day or anything like that, which some younger people who want to bulk up and be, um, only muscular and less cardiovascularly fit might have these different things because they don't have as much cardiovascular activity. And they're young, right? So, as I get to middle age and I think I'm upper young age, really. Um, that these, um, these benefits could cross, um, react here, right?
Dr. Brent Laartz
So, this study, the nice thing about this study is they actually also added a portion of this that, um, at least several of the studies combined aerobic exercise in the self-reporting. And so what they were able to do was then look at that. And if you combine that resistance training with aerobic exercise at a moderate level or higher, that you actually had a 40% benefit to longevity.
Dr. Brent Laartz
If you combine both resistance training and aerobic exercise. Um, the the other part about this is the amount and um and potentially as with anything, there might be a hormesis type curve, a U-shaped curve. If you remember we said there was a 21% reduction in resistance train with resistance training. If you do one to two sessions per week, there is a 21% improvement in mortality. If you do more than two, there's a 13% mortality difference between baseline and zero, okay?
Dr. Brent Laartz
um, that is 13% and it's not statistically significant compared to zero, okay? Again, if you do three to five sessions of resistance training per week, you have a 14% benefit, but it's also statistically not significant. So there might be a trend toward, but statistically not significant. Maybe because of numbers or power of the study.
Dr. Brent Laartz
Also, greater than five sessions of resistance training, the odds ratio of or the risk ratio of dying is 1.07 compared to zero resistance training. And obviously that's not statistically significant and I guess I'd have to suggest that that is a trend toward a 7% increase in mortality compared to zero of having greater than five sessions of resistance training per week.
Dr. Brent Laartz
And we can't say that's a trend, we can't even say it is not statistically significant, and it does not even show a trend, okay? So interesting there. Kind of a hormesis type curve with one to two sessions being good, greater than two being probably good, three to five probably good, but more than five, if you're resistance training seven days a week, probably not good for you. Can't say this is just one study. Again, this is a meta-analysis of 11 different studies. One of them a randomized controlled trial.
Dr. Brent Laartz
tried to um bring that randomized control trial into here and I probably should have, maybe we'll look at that at some point. It is an older study. Uh but some benefit here is not with high amount of resistance training, it is getting that strength one to two sessions per week, three sessions per week, four sessions per week is probably enough. Okay, so um and again we talked about that four four out of those eleven studies include aerobic exercise in the reporting.
Dr. Brent Laartz
And again, 41% mortality improvement with aerobic exercise, 40% when combined with resistance training. Um it also included in this study cardiovascular mortality. Again, we mentioned that a little bit that there was not as a trend toward improvement, uh but not statistically significant.
Dr. Brent Laartz
All right.
Dr. Brent Laartz
Um, again with all of these studies, they exclude deaths within 12 to 24 months, which I don't really like, but I can see the reason to to improve bias. Uh, but I wonder, um, you know, within 12 to 24 months after starting in the study, if you die, what is the reason for that, right? So all of these studies do this kind of thing with uh excluding, and they also excluded people with actual cardiovascular disease and certain conditions already at the beginning already at the beginning.
Dr. Brent Laartz
So, um, this, all right, so that was in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. There's another one a few years later, 2022. This is a meta-analysis of 10 studies and at least a few of these studies are are in the same, uh, are the same studies in these two meta-analyses. This, uh, article was in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. These were different, um, authors. This is Terry Boyle. Um, Resistance Training and Mortality Risk: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.
Dr. Brent Laartz
With this study, they had ten studies and they were all cohorts. So obviously, that one randomized controlled trial was not included in this meta-analysis. For this study, they showed that resistance training at any amount improves mortality by fifteen percent and improves cardiovascular disease mortality by nineteen percent and was um just barely um statistically significant. The confidence interval included one point zero zero. And so, and it was actually just, I think just barely less than one point zero zero.
Dr. Brent Laartz
Um, and uh also improve cardiac cancer mortality by 14%. The dose response showed non-linearity also, again, a maximum risk reduction of 27% was observed at around 60 minutes per week of resistance training. And 60 minutes per week, um does that correlate also similarly to our one to two sessions? Probably does, right? So what is your usual resistance training? Um, 30 minutes, maybe an hour. So one to two sessions again, so...
Dr. Brent Laartz
that relative risk reduction at 60 minutes per week was at uh 26% or 27% actually, 27. The risk ratio was 0.74 but apparently must be just barely less than 0.74. They're saying a 27% risk reduction and it's um statistically significant at 60 minutes per week of resistance training. Mortality risk reduction diminished at higher volumes, okay?
Dr. Brent Laartz
All right, so here's this graph showing the dose response meta-analysis. So you can see here, you can see that it decreases at 60 minutes per week of resistance training and crosses the relative risk ratio of one and then goes up to like 1.2, probably 1.25 at 200 minutes. Again, can't say there was only four studies that investigated the duration of resistance training in the risk.
Dr. Brent Laartz
So, again, this could decrease the power, but it did show enough power to show statistically significant amount of mortality improvement at 60 minutes compared to zero. Um, so let's look at that, um, potentially at 200 minutes. So let's look at that as far as a number of, we said in the last study that they said that above, um, five was 1.07. Above five at 1.07 relative risk ratio on the 2019 meta-analysis. In this meta-analysis, we're looking at 1.25.
Dr. Brent Laartz
and probably not statistically significant either, but they're so that's greater than five. 200 minutes, would you say that's probably greater than five also at 200 minutes? Probably is.
Dr. Brent Laartz
if you do 40 minutes per session at five um episodes that would be about 200 minutes right so maybe we are at that level right So. All right. So. Alright. So let's uh bring that out there.
Dr. Brent Laartz
So again.
Dr. Brent Laartz
All right, so, um, and again, five of these studies out of the ten excluded deaths within twelve to twenty-four months. Um, this we know, so basically resistance training may be a hormesis U-shaped curve where a small amount is good, moderate amount probably is good, but a high amount may not be good for you. Okay, so again, what would that suggest probably if you're doing greater than five? Number one, that you're probably doing less variety.
Dr. Brent Laartz
you're probably doing a lot of activity and may have do maybe concentrating on one activity too much. That's one possibility. It could be that you may be injury prone if you're doing greater than five resistance training activities per
Dr. Brent Laartz
week, right? So if you're doing greater five, you're probably, let's say you're at seven, you're not giving yourself enough rest of your muscles for resistance training. And maybe you're doing it um as uh as a almost a profession and not a hobby, right? Or an or a or a or a an enjoyable activity. You're doing it as a maybe a little bit more of a
Dr. Brent Laartz
too intense of a concentration on it, right? A and maybe an unhealthy balance. We don't know exactly why that is, why there is this hormesis type curve for resistance training. Um, but of what we do know, the take home to this Sunday science is that increases in total physical activity is important, but also an increase in the variety of physical activity is important.
Dr. Brent Laartz
targeting about five to six different activities and and to me improving my resistance training and improving my cardiovascular training but also maybe other things also. And certainly bicycling improves your balance and improves when you're especially for me if I and I enjoy mountain biking more so than road biking, I find that road biking is a little bit boring. I've heard of many of my colleagues physicians who have been hit by drivers on the road in Florida.
Dr. Brent Laartz
Florida has a bad rap, um bad reputation for bicycles and safety because of the drivers in Florida. And however, um I try to get off the road. Uh even the road biking that I do is mostly on
Dr. Brent Laartz
um sidewalks. And so when I say sidewalks, it's sidewalks that are meant for wide sidewalks along uh Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa has um these areas or I try to do mountain biking, okay? So uh again, running, I do biking, great cardiovascular activity, yard work, tennis, some kind of court training, and resistance training, and then stretching, calisthenics important. And the importance here of injury, right? So
Dr. Brent Laartz
And this is why some of these lower amounts of a better variety is important is because you have that combination of resistance training and cardiovascular training, but you also have more than one muscle group. If I were just doing running and I am guilty a little bit of this in the past of only doing running and maybe bicycling as my cardiovascular exercise, and so that's just maybe a few different muscle groups.
Dr. Brent Laartz
and it's really just when you think about running, it is just one motion in one plane. You are running going forward and you're not using your um stretch, your calisthenics, your your movement from one side to the other. It certainly is some balance and certainly going up off curbs and everything. Curves is important, but um for balance with running, but it does not compare to the balance you need for tennis, right? Or the balance you need for other types of activities.
Dr. Brent Laartz
and it doesn't give you any resistance training. It is a lot of pounding on the pavement with your legs and does have some um improvement in bone density, but there are some studies showing suggesting that running is not adequate for bone density. Okay, so um both aerobic and resistance training, resistance training, resistance training, resistance training, resistance training. Can't emphasize that enough in all of my
Dr. Brent Laartz
all of my uh podcasts that I've done about resistance training. And my mother won't listen to me about the need of resistance training, probably because of her um past limitations that she's set on herself because of society or because of her upbringing, whatever. Resistance training is hugely important for longevity.
Dr. Brent Laartz
cardiovascular exercise and VO2 max is hugely important, okay? So grip strength, lower extremity strength, the reason that's important and to continue to develop it over your lifetime is because of decreasing your risk of falls and decreasing frailty and improving the amount of muscle in your body compared to non-lean mass. So in other words, fat. Having a high amount of muscle
Dr. Brent Laartz
And obviously this is a high amount in a, you know, that if you're a bodybuilder, you don't need that much muscle. It is about the amount of muscle that is moderate amount of muscle that you need to improve your insulin sensitivity, increase your glucose sink, that space where you can sink your glucose into when you don't need it. Okay, so it's taken up into muscle, it's taken up into liver, and when it's taken up into liver glucose, glucose is taken up into liver, it is turned into fat, which is not a good thing, right? But muscle is different. Okay, so this is why resistance training is important.
Dr. Brent Laartz
Cardiovascular training, VO2 max, again, this is showing that it is the VO2 max and it is the variety and the resistance training, all four of these studies. Again, thank you for joining us. The the four articles are going to be in the show notes and the description. Um and uh for this podcast, the uh again, you can find Sunday Science on video format, okay?
Dr. Brent Laartz
So again, if you are viewing this or listening to this on an audio-only podcast, there is a video podcast associated with this. Again, I explain this every week, I try to explain this, that the video podcast has a blue podcast artwork and the audio podcast has a purple artwork. So if you're listening to this on some um audio podcast only, it's in and you see the art uh artwork is in purple on your app.
Dr. Brent Laartz
then it is probably audio only on that particular app. Um and or the venue for podcasts, right? But the video is associated and available on Apple Podcasts. It is um and and it's also available audio only there as well. Uh but the uh podcast is available on video on Spotify. It's available on uh GoUnPro.com. It's available on Substack and YouTube, okay?
Dr. Brent Laartz
So look those places under Brent W Larks MD or Go Un Pro. Go Un Pro is G O U N P R O. So Go Un Pro um is also available on YouTube as well. So there's actually two different podcasts on um podcast locations that I upload this to on YouTube. It's on my Brent W Larks MD which also includes some other things and also on the Go Un Pro uh podcast page too. So uh check that out, check us out.
Dr. Brent Laartz
Check us out on our Instagram, on our Facebook, on our TikTok, on the uh Facebook and again, Substack and Threads. Everywhere you get your social media, we're available as well. So again, thank you for showing up and listening to me on Sunday Science. We'll see you soon.
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Announcer Lucas
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