Biohacking 101: Exercise
Biohacking 101: Exercise
A revolutionary resolution.
This article is not medical advice and is intended for educational purposes only. Before implementing any fitness program, be sure to consult with your doctor.
Dear Fellow Biohackers,
With New Year’s fast-approaching, along with it, nagging memories of faded hopes and a mild fear of disappointment, birthing within us a jarring hesitancy to over-promise and under-deliver, yet again, by abandoning another New Year’s resolution. But all hope is not lost. We are not doomed to fail before we embark. In this third installment of my Biohacking 101 series, I will highlight some of the purported benefits of exercise and provide implementation strategies to aid in maintaining momentum long after the all-too-common initial burst of fleeting inspiration that accompanies most of our New Year’s resolutions.
Many years ago, I asked a friend who was just finishing up with med school, “If you could offer just one piece of advice to your friends and family, what would it be?” His reply was strikingly simple: “I would tell them to take a 30-minute walk every day.” At the time, I thought to myself, “How beneficial can a measly 30-minute walk really be?” Over the years however, mounting evidence continues to support his advice. A 2020 study published in JAMA, found that more steps per day was significantly associated with a reduction in all-cause mortality [1]—wow! A 2022 study, published in JAMA Neurology, concluded that taking more steps per day was associated with a lower risk of all-cause dementia [2]—this should come as no surprise as exercise has been shown to increase BDNF [3], which is a growth factor vital for optimal brain and nervous system function. The immense breadth of published science on the beneficial effects of walking provides us with a vast pool of supporting evidence for its many other acclaimed roles as well, including combatting depression, reducing stress, increasing energy, losing weight, and much more.
Walking is just one of the low hanging fruits available for us to tackle in the realm of exercise. High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is a time-saving training protocol which involves cycling brief periods of intense exercise followed by brief periods of rest; its health benefits are wide-ranging and include decreased cardiovascular disease risk—even more so than medium intensity continuous training (MICT), improved cellular health [4], obesity reduction on par with MICT, increased growth hormone levels, enhanced cognition [5][6][7], and drastically improved sleep [8]. Many variants of HIIT are demonstrably effective, and once you understand the key concept, devising a HIIT routine tailored to your needs is straightforward. An example routine to get you started may consist of cycling 20 seconds of intense sprinting, followed by 15 seconds of rest, for a total exercise time of 5-20 minutes.
Now, in an article about exercise, I’d be remiss not to mention the plentiful benefits of strength training. As our age increases, it becomes vital, yet increasingly difficult, to maintain our musculoskeletal health. It is widely accepted that resistance training, especially alongside a proper diet, increases muscle mass. But did you know it can also increase bone strength thereby lowering risk of osteoporosis and falling? [9] And that’s not all! It has a large host of benefits not unlike that of walking or HIIT, but I’ll leave that for you to research.
Now that we’ve touched on a small subset of exercise benefits, and you’re more resolute than ever to incorporate a consistent exercise regimen into your life, how do you effectively transition from inspiration to habit? Despite popular beliefs about habit-building, such as “it takes 21 days to form a habit” (and similar urban legends), the time it takes for a behavior to reach 95% of its possible automaticity can range anywhere between 18 and 254 days [10]! So, start slow as not to overwhelm yourself, and focus on making consistent and incremental daily efforts. The compounding effects will reveal themselves before you know it, and your routine, now resembling a momentous freight train, will be difficult to stop.
References