This is a chapter from my book, The Personal Health Tracking Blueprint. You can view the table of contents with links to the rest here.
The good news: we have a “drug” that is very effective at delaying the onset of death and preserving health span. This drug is called exercise, and nothing else rivals it.
The bad news: it takes more time and effort than ingesting any pill or employing any “hack.”
-Dr. Peter Attia
Once you understand the massive effect physical fitness has on human health span, you cannot ignore it.
There are two charts, in particular, that once you see are hard to unsee. Both are compelling because they frame physical fitness in the context of all-cause mortality (death independent of cause).
This first chart shows the relationship of low muscle mass and low muscle strength to all-cause mortality. What this shows is people with low muscular strength have a 2.34 times higher rate of all-cause mortality than people without low muscular strength.
The second chart shows the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and all-cause mortality. This data is even more striking. It shows people with low cardiorespiratory fitness have over a 5 times higher rate of all-cause mortality than people with elite cardiorespiratory fitness.
In other words, going from low to elite cardiorespiratory fitness decreases your risk of dying from all causes by 5x and even going from low to high cardiorespiratory fitness decreases your risk of dying from all causes by nearly 4x. In comparison, factors like reversing smoking and diabetes only decrease your risk of all-cause mortality by about 1.4x. There is simply no drug on the planet that achieves results like this.
But there’s more to physical fitness than life extension.
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