Nutrition and health expert Dr. Peter Attia continues to offer fans useful and enlightening tips for better living. In his latest undertaking, Attia revealed how much time individuals should train a day to build muscle and strength.
In addition to studying the body and its relationship with nutrition, Dr. Peter Attia is a leading voice within the online fitness community, regularly offering insight and wisdom into optimal living. He has collaborated with other titans in the industry, such as Dr. Andrew Huberman, and Dr. Rhonda Patrick, but has also made appearances on high-profile broadcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience.
Health and optimal living are among Dr. Attia’s greatest concerns. Although carving out time for exercise can be a challenging task for some, Attia believes it’s important that individuals not only take duration into account but also the quality of the training.
Dr. Peter Attia Breaks Down How Long You Should Exercise For Muscle Growth and Strength
According to Attia, determining how much someone should exercise is challenging due to various factors like physiology, lifestyle choices, and goals.
Level Up Your Fitness: Join our 💪 strong community in Fitness Volt Newsletter. Get daily inspiration, expert-backed workouts, nutrition tips, the latest in strength sports, and the support you need to reach your goals. Subscribe for free!
“I hear a lot of people say, you know, there is no evidence that increasing more than 30 minutes three to five times a day provides any benefit, and therefore, all this talk about exercising to quote-unquote to extreme levels is actually harmful or at best not even beneficial.”
“Similarly, when you ask people to give you a sense of what they do for exercise, you get what I would colloquially refer to as garbage in data. Because, you know, frankly if you ask somebody what are you doing for exercise, you’re not really getting clarity around the intensity of exercise. You’re not really understanding the ins and outs of what they are doing.”
Instead, Dr. Attia looks at ‘outputs’ which he relates to intensity and effort.
“I, by the way, don’t have a better solution to that problem. That’s why I instead choose to focus on the outputs because the outputs are less subjective, obviously more objective, and the data are much clearer as to what the outputs suggest.”
So when you look at the input-based data, it’s true, when you look at these subjective assessments of how much people exercise, you are indeed going to get a flattening of the effect. Does it really matter if you’re doing more than 30 minutes a day, more than four or five days a week, no, not really. But when you look at the hard data, right?” asks Peter Attia.
Taking VO2 max, strength, and muscle mass into account, Dr. Attia believes the higher those are, the longer you will live.
“When you look at the objective measures of things like VO2 max, strength, and muscle mass, what do you find? Well, you find a monotonically increasing benefit with more. The higher your VO2 max the longer you live. The more muscle mass you have, the stronger you are, the longer you live, and by extension, the better you live.”
He argues that exercise timing is dependent on one factor: intensity.
“It’s dependent on one thing and one thing only, and that is how hard they exercise. That’s a person who does quite a bit of aerobic training and at least some of it is at a high level of intensity.
That is infinitely more valuable than asking somebody how many hours a week do you do. Because, if you go to a gym, you know what I’m talking about.”
In addition, Dr. Attia underlined that strength was a major predictor of longevity.
“Rather than looking at the inputs which are much more noisy, you look at the output, right? If a person can dead hang off a bar for two minutes, you know they are strong. They weren’t born that strong. They didn’t luckily find their way into being that strong, they had to do something to get that strong. That something turns out to be far more predictive of their longevity.”
Dr. Attia believes it’s impossible to answer how often you should train daily because it depends entirely on the quality of exercise performed.
“When people say to me, ‘Well, Peter, how much do I need to exercise?’ I don’t have an answer to that question because it depends on the quality of the exercise.
It is clear to me that you could exercise 30 minutes a day three and a half hours a week and achieve exceptional results. But you’re going to have to be very focused in what you do.”
Muscle-building efforts and lifelong health have remained top priorities for Dr. Attia. He has offered fans the 10 exercises he would perform for longevity and fitness and has even touched on how to increase testosterone naturally.
Calculating how much time per day you should exercise comes down to individual preferences. Attia believes intensity is the best-determining factor for building strength and muscle within a fitness routine.
Watch the full video from Peter Attia’s YouTube channel below:
RELATED: Dr. Peter Attia Reveals The Best Time To Take Protein After Training for Muscle Building
You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and
YouTube for even more content.
