How does the Aristos Program increase longevity?

The goal of our program is to increase longevity. 

We are concerned not only with lifespan – the length of our lives – but also with health span; the duration of life we spend free of pain, physical limitation and disease. 

Through targeted training and lifestyle interventions, we aim to decrease the threat of the “big four” age related diseases; cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and neurogenerative disease, while building a large foundation of strength and aerobic fitness that we can fall back on in later years. 

Research has highlighted several exercise-based interventions that drastically reduce the risk of falling victim to one – or several – of the big four and reduce the impacts of aging. These will form the three pillars of our training methodology.

Pillar 1 - Strength

Strength, and its relation to force production, muscle mass, bone health, range of motion and joint integrity, is incredibly important to longevity. 

Strength has been consistently linked to an increased lifespan, with research demonstrating that when isolated for grip strength alone, those who performed in the 25th percentile experienced a 72% higher incidence of dementia than those in the 75th percentile (Esteban-Cornejo et al., 2022).

Although correlated with strength, muscle mass offers distinct metabolic benefits. Increased muscle mass results in a larger glycogen storage capacity, thus lowering the risk of diabetes. 

A meta-analysis by Liu et al. (2017) found a 60% increase in the relative risk of death for people with Sarcopenia (a decline of skeletal muscle tissue with age) compared to those without. 

As such, strength training will form the foundation of our training methodology. 

Pillar 2 – Stability

While stability is partly informed by strength, we feel that it’s important enough in its own right to justify its inclusion as one of our exercise pillars. 

In our definition, stability comprises proprioception, coordination, balance and flexibility. It significantly decreases our risk of injury while exercising - and navigating daily life - and makes us far less susceptible to falls as we age. It also dictates our ability to apply the strength we already have to a specific task. 

For example, consider the leg extension machine; a perfectly acceptable method of strengthening the legs and building muscle mass. Now compare it to the front squat. Anybody who has tried both exercises will know that they are not created equal. Like the leg extension, the front squat will strengthen the legs and build muscle mass, but it will also demand motor control, improve mobility, challenge balance, and require excellent core strength.

Strength is only part of the equation; we need stability in equal amounts to truly maximise our chances of living better for longer. 

Our new framework will monitor balance and flexibility independently, but most significantly, our pursuit of stability will strongly influence the delivery of our strength programming. 

Pillar 3 – Aerobic Health

Our third and final pillar is aerobic function, boasting improved heart health, and increasing the oxygen carrying capacity of our blood. 

We are concerned with two key indicators of aerobic output; the first is VO2 max, with the second being aerobic efficiency. 

Perhaps no other metric is more closely correlated with living longer than our VO2 max. Put simply, our VO2 max is a measurement of the maximum amount of oxygen we can utilise during exercise. The more oxygen we can inhale and distribute to working muscles, the higher our VO2 max, and therefore the bigger our aerobic capacity. 

Elite endurance athletes will typically register a VO2 max of over 70, while for most people anything over 50 would be considered very good. 

One particularly famous study by Mandsager et al. (2018) - featuring 122,007 participants - tracked each person’s VO2 max over a period of ten years. The results were perhaps unsurprising; the higher a participants VO2 max, the lower their risk of mortality over the ten-year period. 

What was surprising however, was just how much of an impact VO2 max had on mortality rates. 

Moving from the 25th (low) to 50th (below average) percentile would result in a 50% reduction in all-cause mortality over the ten-year period. Moving from the 50th to the 75th percentile would result in a further decrease of 20%, which means an overall 60-70% reduction in all-cause mortality!

If you compared the 25th percentile with the 97th, you would find a 5x difference in mortality over just ten years. For context, smoking – typically seen as a death sentence for our health – results in a 41% increase in all-cause mortality over the same a ten-year timeframe. 

Consider that this study only takes a ten-year window into account, and imagine these results compounding over the next thirty or forty years; the health benefits to be gleaned from increasing VO2 max are incredibly powerful. 

Yet despite the compelling evidence, VO2 max isn’t the only aerobic marker we are concerned with. Aerobic efficiency is equally – if not more – important for most of us. 

We define aerobic efficiency as maximising the amount of work we can do in a primarily aerobic state; before lactate accumulation exceeds our body’s ability to clear it in time. We refer to work done just below this threshold as “Zone 2”. 

While VO2 max is linked to aerobic efficiency, training in Zone 2 does offer distinct benefits on a cellular level. 

Zone 2 training drives fat oxidation capacity and improves the function of our mitochondria. Poor mitochondrial health is directly linked to the processes of aging, and is a concern with regards to cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease and metabolic syndrome. Indeed, improving mitochondrial function through Zone 2 training improves insulin sensitivity and may reverse or reduce the risk of prediabetes. 

Research clearly suggests that exercise is the single best tool we have at our disposal to increase longevity. 

We believe that by creating our program based on these three pillars of longevity; strength, stability and aerobic function, we are minimising the risk of disease and maximising our chances of living well for a long, long time.

Next, we’ll take a closer look at the Aristos Longevity Roadmap and examine how these principles inform our exercise framework.

References

Esteban-Cornejo, I., Ho, Ho., F.K., Petermann-Rocha, F., Lyall, D.M., Martinez-Gomez, D., Cabanas-Sánchez, V., Ortega, F.B., Hillman, C.H., & Gill, J.M.R., Quinn, T.J., & Sattar, N., Pell, J.P., Gray, S.R. & Celis-Morales, C. (2022). Handgrip strength and all‐cause dementia incidence and mortality: findings from the UK Biobank prospective cohort study. Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle. 13(3): 1514-1525.

Liu, P., Hao, Q., Hai, S., Wang, H., Cao, L and Dong, B. (2017). Sarcopenia as a predictor of all-cause mortality among community-dwelling older people: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Maturitas. 103: 16-22.

Mandsager, K., Harb, S., Cremer, P., Phelan, D., Nissen, S.E. and Jaber, W. (2018). Association of Cardiorespiratory Fitness with Long-term Mortality Among Adults Undergoing Exercise Treadmill Testing. 1(6).