The exercise protocol that reversed 20 years of heart aging

You can take a 50-year-old person who is sedentary, so they're not physically active, but they don't have any other markers of disease. So they don't have type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease or hypertension, and put them under a pretty intense exercise protocol for two years. And basically, you can reverse the aging of their heart by almost 20 years. So this study was done by Dr. Ben Levine out of UT Southwestern in Dallas. And what he showed was, you know, so as we age, our heart structure gets...it changes with time. So it gets...our heart gets stiffer and shrinks, and that plays a role in increasing our cardiovascular disease risk. It plays a role in, you know, affecting our aerobic capacity. So what he wanted to know, he asked the question, can I take these people that have essentially been sedentary their life, their whole life, but they're otherwise not, you know, they don't have any identifiable diseases, and can I make their hearts look better? And so his group put them on a pretty intense exercise protocol for two years, and it was a progressive loading. So, you know, it wasn't like right out the gate they were doing five hours of exercise a week, you know, which is essentially what they were doing at the end of the two years. They were doing about five to six hours of a lot of vigorous intensity exercise, moderate as well, but they were doing high-intensity interval training. They were doing something called the Norwegian 4x4 protocol. This is, you know, you're doing four minutes of, you know, as hard as you can maintain for that four minutes. So, you know, most people are probably doing 80% their max heart rate or something like that, or they're not going all out, obviously. And then you recover for three minutes, and that's really...you're really going down to let your heart rate go down, and then you do that four times. They did that once a week on top of just doing a lot of aerobic, you know, training. And they were able to reverse the structural changes to their aging heart by 20 years, which is incredible. You know, absolutely incredible. You take a 50-year-old and make their hearts look like a 30-year-old, but who wouldn't sign up for that? You're not going to get that with beta-hydroxybutyrate or Lactaid.