Dan's Journey Back to Health & Fitness

I have a new goal and I would like all of you to join it if you are willing to achieve it. It's not about seeing how fit I can get in the space of 10 weeks. It's not about running a fast half marathon or doing my best in a gran Fondo or spor Eve, there is no fixed date for this goal, in fact the ultimate goal is the end of life and I take it as far as possible, learning about the changes we can. They all move the end of our life even further away, whether it's exercise, food, sleep or just general lifestyle changes that should make a difference and allow us to live the longest and

health

iest life possible.

How much difference can these things make over time? Over the course of this series over the next 6 months or so, my goal is to find out what difference they can make. There are a number of key markers that doctors and physiologists can look at with which they can make a fairly ACC estimate of how long it lasts. Let's live so in no particular order are V2 Max a maximum amount of oxygen that your body can use during high intensity exercise muscle mass so the total weight of the muscles in your body leg strength that will allow the mobility in old age and will prevent unnecessary mobility Fool's balance, which is related in many ways to overall strength and ultimately grip strength is a bit strange, but many studies show a strong correlation between grip strength and a greater falsehood and some doctors even say that it is a better indication of life expectancy than blood pressure.

Anyway, it's time for me to find out through a series of tests where I stand on all of these key markers before moving on to those tests, although I will give you a brief snapshot of where I am now and how I got here as an active child. practicing a multitude of sports but I ended up focusing on cycling where I was lucky to have a professional career. That career ended when I was 32 and my relationship with exercise has been sporadic since. I'd say if I'm being generous, I've dabbled in a bit of bike running and very occasional strength sessions, but there have been very long periods where I've done little to no exercise, I just had no goals.

Basically, though, what I've been very consistent in doing without any goal or purpose is drinking a lot and burning the candle at both ends and being completely honest with all of you and I've never mentioned this publicly before. I also smoked. quite a bit between 2012 and 2020, I finally managed to quit, thankfully, but I've been taking nicotine replacement since, which I would also like to quit in the very near future. Now the point of giving you this

back

ground is really just to show that I have my own vices despite my early years as a full-time athlete and clean living.

Now some of you watching this will have never smoked in your life or never drank alcohol in your life, but maybe you have a hard time getting things right with food or sleep. or motivation or anything in between, the point is that most of us have something we would really like to change for the better right now, don't get me wrong, I don't think I'm in a bad place, at all. I've just reached a point in my personal life where I'd like to do better. However, I assure you that this series will not be about living like a monk or becoming perfect, but rather about making a series of fairly small and simple lifestyle changes that should add up and I assume will compound in the coming years and decades, hopefully to make a big difference so wherever you are in life I'd love for you to come on this

journey

with me and if you know anyone who's watching.

To make some changes in your own life right now, why not share this video with them? Sometimes you just need a little push, a little encouragement, to get you on the right path and along your path, oh, just one last thing. 43 Now, for some of you watching this it's going to sound very old, to others it's going to sound very young either way. I'm not as fit as I used to be and I feel the need to do something about it right now. To find out where I am personally at physiologically, I came to the Manchester Institute of Health and Performance, operated by Neld Health, which is the UK's largest not-for-profit

health

care charity and aims to is to build a healthier world.

It seems perfect for this video series. I'm going to meet a guy named Connor who will test me on my Paces to see where I am and what I need to improve on the most and then we'll have those baseline numbers. so I can see how much I improve in the next 6 months or so it's going to be painful but interesting so first thing is a blood test and a urine test which I will get the results of at a later date both are there just to find out if there are any major issues you need to address.

Now I would like to introduce you to Connor, who will perform the rest of the tests for the rest of the day, the first of which is a Dexa scan, yes. A DEA scan is kind of the gold standard measurement for body composition, so we get a really good measurement of body fat, uh, visceral fat, we can even do things like bone density and things like that as well, does it measure general muscle mass, yes, yes? Yes it works, you won't get a much more standard test than this for body composition, so it's a really simple test: basically you just take off your clothes, lie in bed for 5 minutes and let a small amount of X-rays simply scan your entire body at the easiest part of the day and then, by sound, relax.

The difference between visceral fat and body fat is that they are used for slightly different things, so your body fat can be used as your general measure of your health, whereas we know that your visceral fat tends to have a risk slightly older with most diseases, so you can use that in combination with other body composition measures, like your BMI, like your waist size, to give you a more general picture of your health and your overall disease risk brief interlude. It's time to introduce you to a sponsor of this series before we do, though I just want to say how important our partners are to us in what we do here at gcn.

Without them, there's just no way we can do all the free content we do, but I really want to emphasize to all of you that we only work with great companies that make products we actually want to use, so on that note, this series is sponsored by whoop uh, who do this. Wearable physical activity and

fitness

training tracking device. Personally, I've used mine non-stop for over two years and it really has been quite enlightening in a number of ways, in particular I will say in highlighting how much alcohol affects my sleep and just about everything else.

Another recovery parameter, like many people, I literally and verbally feel like the lights go out when I go to bed after a night of drinking, but the reality is that my resting heart rate is about 10 beats per minute higher than it normally would be. . My breathing rate is significantly higher and my sleep quality is significantly lower. My heart rate variability has also plummeted, which hasn't stopped me from drinking completely. I still love going out with friends, but it's certainly made me scale

back

a bit and be a lot more conscious of what I do. It's making me, so I'm going to use my whooop to track everything I'm doing over the next few months and actually monitor any positive changes that occur.

I'll also be talking to a whoop expert in one of the next episodes we'll see what they do with my data from the last few years that I've been using it, but in the meantime, let's get back to the testing, yeah, so your body fat percentage total is 19.1%. Is it really Christ? You will like the reference. The ranges for how healthy you are depends on your age, but we would expect that for most people, especially like younger people, your body fat would be below 22%, yes, so yours is definitely within a healthy range for someone your age in gender, which is great, so next we're going to do your waist size, which is a really very simple measurement but actually very important for your health.

I don't like the sound of this because while I haven't gained much weight in the last 12 years, where I put it is out there, yeah, so I think it's a blessing and a curse, as you say, some people find it It's scary because okay, if my wa side is elevated, then all these others. things are also going to increase, but you can also apply the reverse logic, so that by making some very, very small changes in things like waist size, blood sugar or blood pressure, suddenly you can reduce the risk of disease quite a bit and quite quickly, okay, that's fair, we can now take a look at your force plate data.

Let's do an ikd too, it's a kind of mental accumulation, right? Yeah, hey, I'm just doing some. minutes of warming up on the bike and a couple of machines here because the next test I'm going to do I have a maximum strength test or a maximum strength test. There is a real risk that you could knock something over even with a warm-up, but I hope that's less likely. Dan, so what we're going to do here is an isometric half group. Your task is to basically break through the floor with as much Strength as possible and it allows us to take a look at the Force production capabilities of your lower extremities, so when I say 3 2 1 come on, you're going to break the bar up, you drive up. down through the floor and you're going to have maximum Force output for about 5 seconds, okay, I'm already nervous, cute, pull, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, up. up up up up up up up up up and relax, yeah, much better, so next time we'll do an ISO kinetic dynamometer.

It allows us to observe your maximum Force production in your quadriceps and your hamstrings on both sides. right and left leg, so you will kick and pull as hard as you can, but now you are comfortable and safe in this chair and we are going to measure your Force output when you are doing the push-up. and extension and we can take a look at the data and see how the limbs differ in both the quadriceps and the hamstrings and then we can take a look at their total Force output relative to their body weight, which is actually very useful. it measures how well you can produce force and how many reps, so you'll do a warm up set of five reps where you'll start at 50% and then slowly work up to 100 and then when we do the working set, five reps total , push and pull as hard as you can, okay, happy, I think so, so if you extend up as far as is comfortable for you and then if you pull the heel all the way up.

Back to the chair, yeah, two, one down, come on, ki, ki, kick, kick, pull, pull, pull, pull, good good start, push all the way, pull, pull, pull, Max eff, here down, come on, kick, kick, kick, kick, come on, two more, two more, two more. keep going keep going down keep going like this keep going like this push push push push push down the last pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, yeah, good effort, we would expect people's deficits to be within 10%, um in your quads. , your deficit is 5% is fine and your flexion is 4%, so yes, your hands and quads are very, very symmetrical, but in any case, the overall production could be improved a little, but there are still really good values, Well, I hope that improves in the next one. 6 months, that is the GOAL.

We want you to start with a cadence of around 85 to 90 um. You may find yours a little higher. It's absolutely fine, we'll figure out what's most comfortable for you in the first few minutes once I found out that Cadence just hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it every 15 seconds, the power is going to increase by 5 watts, sorry, yeah, that it's the other way around and then it's basically 20 watts every minute, and you just keep going until you can't do it anymore or until we see that W the Cadence Dro at 10 I think it's probably going to be around 80 absolutely fine, whatever's comfortable for you and then, once we find out that in the first few minutes I'm just asking you to keep it, okay, we'll start the test.

You are now pedaling 75 Watts for one minute. Yeah, Cadence looks like she's around 80, so she's absolutely fine, so there's only 15 seconds left in the warmup. Go cycling at 80. WS will now feel a little bit more resistance through the pedals by three 2 1, so it increases by another five, that's 95, that's 100, so that's 20 watts in 1 minute. Okay, the cadence is very good there around 82 83, very good down, that's 9. minutes, really good stuff, very good, I can see it's getting difficult, but Cadence is still holding up, so let's keep moving forward very okay and down, up, up, up, come on, let's raise that cadence, up,Up, come on, Dan, come on, Dan. drive, drive, drive, come on, as much as you can, push now, push, push, push, push, keep going down, the last little bit, come on, keep going down, drive, drive, drive, drive, come on, push, push , push, go down, the last little bit, come on, keep working, keep working.

Keep working going up up up up and stop there really good stuff mate well done good job mate well done thank you God it just bites so fast in the end you forget that yes nature you're not honest, in You actually peaked a long time ago, like your aerobic capacity at that end point, you were working aerobically, which is fine, that's why you can continue, but on the bike we just let you go until you can't go anymore because it's good that try it, but yeah, you can see we're looking for this crossover and we want this V2 to be here to go out to Plateau.

You can see that it did it quite a while ago and even your re value, so we normally say you maxed out when you have a re of more than 1.15 and you did it at minute 9, what is the re R3, for What your re R is your air exchange rate? Basically, the contribution of similar fats versus carbohydrates that you are using, so an n value greater than 1.15 implies that you are using purely carbohydrates and no fats, so so we have some termination criteria, for example, to say you've reached V Max, we want this V2 Plateau we want to test back above 1.15 and we want your blood lactate and your heart rate to be close to the maximum as well. , so without me getting into the data, I can probably say pretty confidently that we've hit its V2 Max and we'll need to actually just dive into the numbers in the Exel spreadsheets, figure out what that is, but we'll put it in The report.

Excellent thanks, Conor. I think there's no problem, yeah, good job, really good job, so I haven't done one in a while. Now 13 years old I'll make two in the space of six or seven months, lovely, uh, it's the last one. I took a shower. I recovered. The V2 Max results, yes, they look very good, so your maximum V2 value for a man your age is 52.2 milliliters per kilogram per minute, which puts you in the excellent category, which is the highest that exists, given the kind of relationship between

fitness

and illness, and along with all the other metrics that we looked at today, it puts you in a really good place and what kind of room for improvement there is.

I think my last V2 Max test, obviously, during my time was as a full-time athlete and it was under 70 somewhere, so it's obviously going to drop from there given that I've done it. Large amounts of excise taxes have not been levied in recent years. What do you imagine there is in terms of cushioning space at the top end? Yes, your V2 Max, the absolute value will unfortunately reduce with your age, but in relative terms you still can. To improve that I would say your result is 52.2, the excellent range starts at 51, the lowest range, so although it is still in the excellent range, if you wanted to improve it even further by just doing a little more general exercise, then I .

I'm sure you can increase that a little more. Okay, that's good to know. I would try to do that for the next 6 months and breathe now. I'm not going to go over the results of those tests in great detail, am I? Now I'll save that for episode two, but as a quick recap, I'm not in a bad place and I think a lot of that is probably due to the foundation I had from being a full-time athlete until my 30s. In the 12 years since then, I now have four times more body fat than when I retired and my V2 Max has dropped 20 points, so there are already things I want to improve and things I want to reduce. slow down in terms of my aging maybe even stop maybe even reverse it you never know now if you're watching this video on a cycling channel chances are you're already exercising more than the average person in the population but maybe Maybe you're not working hard enough.

Depending on your overall strength or your muscle mass or your sleep isn't very good, whatever it is, there are always things we can work on to give ourselves a better chance of living longer and, more importantly, living a better life. really happy life. I finished episode one by answering a question that I think some of you might be asking, why now, why not, 5 years ago or even as soon as I left my cycling career, is a good question. I think I quite enjoyed rebelling against life. I used to live it was nice not having to think about performance 247 or everything I put into my body every day I had no fitness goals I had no reason to think about Fitness I TI that part of my life was out and B I I've given myself Note that the average male life expectancy here in the UK is 82 years.

If I die, it means that I have already lived more than half of my life. I think I'd like to do everything I can to make sure I have even more. half of my life coming up, the other thing is I've been reading and hearing a lot about what we can all do from a mental and physical standpoint to make sure we prepare for later in life and it's that kind of things we will go through in future episodes at the end of the day, although it doesn't matter when you start, it's never too late or too early, the important thing is to just start, so here I am starting and I really hope that as many as possible join They will join me.

I'll see you all in episode two.