How to Live Longer (and BETTER)
The Amplified Impact Podcast
May 17th, 2023
A long time ago, I found myself in a pretty bad spot. Life was not going my way, and I was deep in debt with a recent breakup.
But I refused to let my circumstances dictate my future. I knew I had to take control of my life and start making some changes.
One of the concepts that helped me turn things around was the four spheres of influence. And today, we’re going to dive deep into one of those spheres, exercise.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Exercise? Yawn.”
But trust me, this is not your typical “go to the gym and lift some weights” kind of episode. We’re going to break down the three levers that can change your life: endurance, VO2 max, strength, and stability.
We’re talking about getting in the best shape of your life, living a long and healthy life, and feeling incredible every single day.
And let me tell you, it’s not going to be easy.
There are a lot of temptations out there, pulling you in different directions, but if you’re willing to put in the work, the results will blow your mind.
We’ll be discussing how to increase your health span, not just your lifespan.
You don’t want to live to 100 if you can’t enjoy it, right? So, are you ready to transform your life one workout at a time?
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“If you want to live a good, healthy, long life and be able to do those things that you enjoy later in your later years, you need to build up the strength now, because you’re going to lose ten to 15% of your strength every decade.” – Anthony Vicino
LEAVE A REVIEW if you liked this episode!!
Let’s Connect On Social Media!
instagram.com/theanthonyvicino
Join an exclusive community of peak performers at Beyond the Apex University learning how to build a business, invest in real estate, and develop hyperfocus.
Learn More About Investing With Anthony
Invictus Capital: www.invictusmultifamily.com
Multifamily Investing Made Simple Podcast
Passive Investing Made Simple Book: www.thepassiveinvestingbook.com
Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
Hey, what’s up everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. So one of the concepts that’s been so impactful in my life is the the four spheres of influence. If you remember a long, long time ago now it’s about eleven years ago, my life was in the, was in the shit can. Things weren’t going super well. I was in the back of a van, fiance just left me super in debt. Life wasn’t going great. And a lot of it was the result of not doing the things that I knew I needed to do but just couldn’t self motivate myself to actually do those things. But the other part of the problem was that there were so many things that I could do that I knew I should do that I was pulled in a million different directions and I really struggled to get clear on, okay, which path should I follow? What order of operations should I go through these activities to really have the maximum effect on changing my circumstances? And one of the things I like to say is that I’m inherently lazy.
Anthony Vicino [00:00:55]:
I don’t like to work harder than is necessary to achieve my task. I like to work towards poised perfection. This is a concept that I think about a lot in my sporting life was how do I climb that wall? How do I perform that maneuver in a way that’s perfectly poised and so it looks easy, it feels easy. I love that concept. I don’t like gritting my teeth and digging deep into the pain. Well to do a thing that’s not how I am personally and it exudes into all areas of my life where I just don’t like to work hard as necessary. So I’m just kind of a lazy guy. Now this is why I named my publishing company one Lazy Robot, because on the one hand, the robot is lazy, but it is a robot.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:42]:
So the robot does what it does right and what it’s programmed to do. And that’s how I kind of think about myself. I do what I’m programmed to do. Now at the beginning of my journey on this personal development path, I sat down and I said, okay, what’s the programming? What’s the protocol that I, as the lazy robot, just need to execute? And this led me to figuring out what are the fewest number of protocols I need to operate or areas of my life that I need to positively affect to have the maximum impact. And that led me to my four spheres of influence, which are your mindset, your health, wealth, and your skills. So those are four domains that you have complete control over developing. And if you do, if you control your mindset, if you can develop your health, your wealth and your skills, you’re probably going to make very positive progress towards your ambitions. Now within those, there’s countless ways that we could subdivide mindset.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:37]:
There’s countless ways you could subdivide wealth and same with skills. But when it came to the health side of the equation, one of the things I found really interesting is that there’s really only three levers that you got to pull and you could add a fourth one, which I’ll explain here in a second, but really it just comes down to your sleep, your exercise and your nutrition. And the fourth one that you could add is maybe supplementation. But if you just focused on those three things, your sleep, your exercise and your nutrition, you would be in really good shape. You would have a really healthy life for the most part, like Barring disaster or Barring unforeseen. But generally if you control those, you get ample sleep every night, you eat clean and you exercise in the right ways, then you’re going to be doing pretty good. And so it’s really interesting that of all the domains, this is kind of the most straightforward and the simple. Straightforward and simple does not necessarily mean easy, though it could also be one of the hardest because it’s the one that you got to show up every single day and pay the dues.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:50]:
And there are a lot of temptations in life that are pulling you in directions that would lead you from getting a full night’s sleep or from eating healthy, or from getting that hard work out in right. And what I want to talk about today in this podcast is just drilling down even deeper. Let’s forget the other three spheres of influence. Let’s forget mindset, wealth and skills for now. Let’s drill even deeper and forget even two of the levers. Let’s forget sleep and let’s forget nutrition. Let’s just look at exercise today and try to figure out what are the fewest number of levers that we have to pull within exercising. Because this is a very complex domain and I do not prescribe or pretend to be a professional on this.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:35]:
I do not have any accreditations. So just take this as the ramblings of a person who is very interested in these topics and that is about it. And you’ll want to do your own research. Some really great books on the topic is this one Outlive by Peter Ratia? I think this is a great book. But just for context, I’ve been a professional athlete for much of my life and I would consider myself to be in peak physical condition compared to my age group in all domains. And so these are the things that have been impactful for me. I’m just going to share them with you so that maybe you can get some benefit out of this. But when it comes to longevity and living a long life.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:11]:
Living a long, healthy life. This is something that Peter Atia talks about in his book outlive is it’s not just about increasing our lifespan but also increasing our health span. Which means I don’t want to live to 100 if the quality of my life when I’m 80 to 100. Those last 20 years is I’m decrepit and I can’t get out of bed and I can’t move and I can’t do any of the things that bring me joy in life, right? That’s not the life that I want. I don’t want to live a long time if I can’t use my body in the way that I want to. So the goal is to increase our health span, which is I want to live to 100 and all the way up to there. I want to be able to enjoy life and do the things that bring me joy and fulfillment with my body, right? It I want to be able to go on walks. I want to be able to walk upstairs.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:52]:
I want to be able to open jars. I want to be able to pick up whatever my cat off the floor. I want to be able to do these things. And what Peter Atia found is very well, puts together very well in his book, is really four areas that they found a lot of research to support that if you were to develop these four areas, they’re going to have the very positive impact on your health span. So let’s take these from the top. They are strength, Vo two, max stability, and endurance. Actually, these are in a weird order. Let’s rework these.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:30]:
Let’s go. Endurance, Vo, two, max, strength and stability. Let’s talk about them in that order. So number one is your endurance. This is the foundation. This is the base of the building upon which everything else is going to be constructed. And one of the concepts that was drilled into me when I was a cross country and track runner in high school and in college was that you think about your performance or your ability as a runner as a pyramid. And the quality that’s going to dictate how high that peak of your pyramid is, is how wide your base is.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:09]:
So the wider your foundation, the wider your base, the wider the base of your, your pyramid, then the higher the peak can be. So instead of focusing a lot of time and energy on the, on the trying to get faster, faster, faster, we need to lay the groundwork as as broadly as possible, the foundation. And the foundation is your endurance, your aerobic capacity. And there’s a lot of ways of doing this, but ideally, the goal is to spend as much time and when I say much time, we want to spend maybe two to 3 hours a week in Zone two. There’s a lot of ways that you could identify zone Two from heart rate perspective, but really it’s just the area where as you’re exercising, you’re out of breath, you’re not wanting to have a conversation. You could if you were forced to, but you don’t really want to. It’s that type of work. It’s not very hard.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:02]:
You’re not getting lactic acid building up in fact, that defeats the purpose. You want to stay in this zone where your heart rate is elevated, you’re out of breath, you could have a conversation if you chose to, but you don’t really want to. And for me, when I was climbing as a rock climber, people were amazed to know how much of my time was spent in this zone, where I was actually working very hard to stay under what’s called our anaerobic threshold, or where you start to feel that pump of lactic acid building up in your muscles. As soon as you get to that point, you’re no longer aerobic. And what we’re trying to do is train our body to use a particular type of energy source to move us forward. And so focusing on endurance or focusing on aerobic capacity is a zone two work. This could be going for light runs, light bicycle ride, not light, but depending on where you are, it might be very hard, could be very easy. One of the activities I really enjoy these days is rucking.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:53]:
This is just getting a backpack with a lot of weight in it, like somewhere between one 6th and one third of your body weight. So for me, at 175 pounds, I like to ruck with somewhere between 30 and 50 pounds. And you just go for a long walk and you try and find a place with hills, and you try to keep your heart rate elevated for an extended period of time. And this is going to lay the foundation of our pyramid. The next part of it then, is to start thinking about that peak. And this is where V o two max comes in. And there’s really interesting studies that show the tight correlation between V o two max and longevity and increasing that health span. This is like one of the number one health factors to determine what the later years of your life are going to look like if you have a high Vo two max right now.
Anthony Vicino [00:09:38]:
And so Vo two max is just how efficiently does your body process oxygen and its ability to turn it into fuel? And our goal, this is a number that can consistently be improved throughout the years. And the way that we do it is freaking unpleasant. I’ll be honest. This is the crap work nobody likes to do, and this is why they don’t do it. This is not a full out sprint, but this is zone five on the heart rate monitor, where we’re going from three to five minutes of just very high max output effort. And then you rest for three to four minutes, and then you do it again, and you rest, and then you do it again. And for me, in my rock climbing career, we would do what were called four by Fours, which were you’d do four boulder problems back to back to back to back. Then you would rest for a minute.
Anthony Vicino [00:10:28]:
Then you would do four more back to back to back to back rest. And you just keep doing that until you got this insane pump, this lactic acid accumulation in your forearms. That was excruciating. It’s incredibly uncomfortable, but this is possibly the most important number when it comes to determining your long term health outlook. So, vo. Two max work. You only need to do it once, maybe twice a week, but definitely carving out some periods of time where you can get on the assault by the rowing machine, the treadmill, whatever it is that you’re going to use as your way of improving this. But this is going to pay massive dividends, people.
Anthony Vicino [00:11:09]:
And the next area is strength. And this isn’t just strength and trying to get big muscles and move a ton of weight, it’s moving a particular type of weight. So, humans, what’s really interesting about us is that we have evolved and we are designed as a carrying creature. We are really freaking good at carrying things. That’s why we have thumbs, right? We can pick things up, we can carry them on our body. We stand on two legs, we have long femurs, we have the ability to carry our body weight. That’s an insane fact. Pretty much no other animal is able to do this.
Anthony Vicino [00:11:48]:
And if you think about, like, our chimpanzee orangutan brethren, we are still more efficient on two legs, carrying like, 40% of our body weight than they are walking on two legs with no additional weight. So it’s insane that we are able to carry such incredible loads. Which makes sense if you think about our ancestors. They would go out on these long hunts or even gathering. They would go out, they’d kill the thing and then they put the elk on their shoulders. I don’t know how they would do it. And they would carry it back, right? And so they would have to go very long distances carrying heavy, heavy loads. And there is a strong correlation between your strength, your ability to carry loads, and again, your long term health outlook.
Anthony Vicino [00:12:32]:
And again, this is where rucking comes into play. But when we’re in the weight room, what we’re really trying to do is stimulate muscular adaptation and response under strain. And so we need to be lifting heavy things, like deadlifting, squatting, single legs, like really trying to work complex motions throughout our body to lift heavy things. And if you’ve never been in the weight room, you’re afraid of bulking up or whatever. Listen, if you want to live a good, healthy, long life and be able to do those things that you enjoy later in your later years, you need to build up the strength now, because you’re going to lose ten to 15% of your strength every decade. And so if you think about where you are right now, and if you’re just barely strong enough to do the things in life that are bringing you joy and pleasure, then you can extrapolate out what it’s going to be like in 30, 40, 50 years when you are half as strong as you are currently. Is that going to be strong enough to do the things that you want to do in life? Probably not. So get into the weight room and actually start building that strength.
Anthony Vicino [00:13:29]:
And an interesting side note, one of the most positively correlated metrics with long term health outlook is grip strength. This is crazy, but what they found was that as grip strength declines in life, there is also a strong correlation with neurodegenerative diseases, with metabolic disease, like just general life expectancy drops through the roof as grip strength grows down. I don’t exactly understand what the mechanism is underlying this, but the correlation is so strong that it should not be ignored. So definitely be working on your grip strength as well. As a general rule, they recommend that you should be able to if you are a healthy male, for example, you should be able to carry your body weight in a farmer’s carry for at least two minutes. I think it’s a minute. So for me, 175 pounds, I need to be able to carry 175 pounds in my hands with dumbbells or a kettlebell for a minute or is it two minutes? One of those two. Or be able to dead hang from a bar, which is like a pull, but you just straight arms doing that for two minutes.
Anthony Vicino [00:14:37]:
I think the dead hang for two minutes and the farmers carry for 1 minute. If you’re not anywhere near those numbers right now, get on that baby because those numbers are only going to continue declining as you get older. The last one that we’re going to talk about when it comes to your exercise is stability. And what’s really interesting about this one is it’s possibly the most important, especially as you start to age, because balance and your ability to control your body in space and time is the first thing that goes away as we get older. And so you need to be working very hard on your flexibility, your stability, so that you can avoid injury is really what it comes down to because what they found is the mortality rate for an individual who is 65 years or older. Once they’ve incurred, say, a broken leg or a broken hip, it goes down precipitously. It’s pretty much a death sentence if you’re over 65 and you break your hip. Not that you’re going to die from the hip injury, but within the next few years as a resulting cause of the decline in strength, the muscular atrophy that results, all of these things are probably going to kill you in some way, shape or form.
Anthony Vicino [00:15:49]:
And the reason most people end up breaking a limb like that is because they trip, they fall, they’re walking down the stairs and they don’t have the ability to control their body and descent. And they fall and they break something. So falling injuries become a very real thing, which seems like a very silly thing to be thinking about when you’re 20 or when you’re 30. But these things are so important because your health is compounding indefinitely throughout your life, right? And so the work that you put into the piggy bank now, the lifting, the vo two exercise, the work, the endurance, aerobic capacity, the stability stuff that you do now, they pay dividends throughout life because the higher your peak, the higher your capacity now, the more you can afford to lose throughout life and still be a fairly high functioning individual, right? So we want to build up our capacity as high as we can while we’re young, knowing that we’re going to lose some of that. And there’s also very interesting neurodegenerative protections that come into place here as well. Exercise and your fitness, your capacity. Aerobically and anaerobically are protective against a lot of things like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. And there’s a strong correlation then between building up your capacities now and even if you then suffer from, say, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, the rate at which you experience cognitive decline is less given your capacity now.
Anthony Vicino [00:17:08]:
So build it out as robustly as you can. These are the years to be doing the work and it’s not too late, regardless of where you are on your journey. So that is one of the four spheres of influence that is just a subsection of one of the three levers of energy we have again, sleep, nutrition, exercise. And I think exercise is potentially the most important, maybe second to sleep, because if you don’t sleep, you will die real quick and your life quality will go down. So maybe we’ll put it behind that. And nutrition is important too, so maybe they’re all really important. Maybe we can’t actually get into saying one is better than the other, but exercise is pretty damn important too. So hopefully this brought you guys a little bit of value.
Anthony Vicino [00:17:47]:
Let me know. I’m curious, what are you doing right now to put money in the bank for future you or not? Physical money. I don’t want to about your investing. Oh, I do want to hear about that too, but from the physical. It’s a metaphor, people. It’s an analogy. Tell me, what physical health currency are you putting in the piggy bank right now? Do you like to run? Do you like to lift? Like, what’s your game? Let me know. I’d love to hear about it.
Anthony Vicino [00:18:09]:
And as always, I’m looking forward to seeing you back here tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused.
This Week On YouTube
These 3 Daily Habits Made Me A Millionaire in 3 Years
Whenever you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help you:
1. Unleash your hyperfocused mind to dominate life, business, and everything in between? Here’s how:
→ The Hyperfocused Masterclass: the exact system I used to overcome ADHD, write 12 books, build 4 businesses, and acquire $70M of real estate.
There are a handful of spaces left in The Hyperfocus Masterclass for those who want to snag the early bird preorder special discount of $49.
Email anthony@anthonyvicino.com to let me know you want on the waitlist.
2. Learn to passively invest in commercial real estate with better returns, less risk, and zeo hassle.
→ Invictus Capital: my real estate private equity firm.
→ Multifamily Investing Made Simple: Top Apple Podcast.
→ Passive Investing Made Simple: Amazon Best Selling Book with 100 5 star reviews.
3. Want more like this? Check out these 3 popular articles from the vault:
