Peter Attia

Just as with VO2 max, it is important to maintain muscle mass at all costs.

Exercise in all its forms is our most powerful tool for fighting this misery and reducing our risk of death across the board.

As Centenarian Decathletes, we are no longer training for a specific event, but to become a different sort of athlete altogether: an athlete of life.

particular regions of this continuum: long, steady endurance work, such as jogging or cycling or swimming, where we are training in what physiologists call zone 2, and maximal aerobic efforts, where VO2 max comes into play.

This is why it’s so essential to train VO2 max in addition to zone 2. I

Our goal is to become elite athletes of aging.

by supplementing our zone 2 work with one or two VO2 max workouts per week.

Where HIIT intervals are very short, typically measured in seconds, VO2 max intervals are a bit longer, ranging from three to eight minutes—and a notch less intense

The tried-and-true formula for these intervals is to go four minutes at the maximum pace you can sustain for this amount of time—not an all-out sprint, but still a very hard effort.

Then ride or jog four minutes easy, which should be enough time for your heart rate to come back down to below about one hundred beats per minute. Repeat this four to six times and cool down.