---
title: 'The Best Exercises That Keep You Young for Longer (Most People Miss This)'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=QA_smK1lBEU'
video_id: 'QA_smK1lBEU'
date: 2026-07-30
duration_sec: 770
---

# The Best Exercises That Keep You Young for Longer (Most People Miss This)

> Source: [The Best Exercises That Keep You Young for Longer (Most People Miss This)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=QA_smK1lBEU)

## Summary

This video explores the often-overlooked components of longevity exercise: speed, power, and cognitive challenge. It argues that while strength and cardio are important, incorporating explosive movements, speed-of-processing training, and social sports like tennis and gymnastics can significantly improve healthspan and reduce dementia risk.

### Key Points

- **Speed and Power: The Underappreciated Foundation** [00:01] — Muscle strength and cardiorespiratory fitness are important, but speed and relative muscle power are even more critical for longevity. Power relies on fast-twitch fibers, which decline disproportionately with age and are tied to frailty.
- **Training for Explosiveness** [01:07] — To maintain fast-twitch fibers, you must train explosively—sprinting, lifting fast, and performing plyometrics. Slower training does not activate these fibers effectively.
- **Speed of Processing and Dementia Prevention** [02:26] — The ACTIVE study found that speed-of-processing brain training reduced dementia risk by about 25% over 10 years, while memory and reasoning training did not.
- **What Is Speed-of-Processing Training?** [03:43] — It involves quickly identifying and locating visual targets under time pressure, akin to the useful field of view test. This trains divided attention and reaction time.
- **Best Physical Sports for Cognitive Training** [04:23] — Ball sports (soccer, basketball) and racket sports (tennis, badminton) naturally combine speed, explosiveness, coordination, and speed-of-processing, making them ideal for longevity.
- **Copenhagen City Heart Study Findings** [06:12] — Tennis (+9.7 years), badminton (+6.2), and soccer (+4.7) were linked to the highest life expectancy gains, while gym exercise (+1.5) had the least.
- **Why Social Sports Excel** [07:34] — These sports also provide social interaction, which is a known longevity factor. They require coordination with others and cognitive engagement.
- **Top Sports for Longevity in Athletes** [08:26] — A 2024 study found racket sports (+5.7 years), pole vaulting (+8.4), and gymnastics (+8.2) had exceptional longevity benefits, likely due to body awareness, explosiveness, and low body weight.
- **The Incomplete Gym Model** [10:26] — Traditional gym workouts lack cognitive challenge, speed-of-processing, and body awareness. Adding handstands, tumbling, gymnastics rings, or team sports fills the gap.
- **Practical Recommendations** [11:17] — Start speed and power training in your 20s. Incorporate sprinting, plyometrics, racket sports, and body-awareness exercises. A balanced week includes 1-2 gym sessions with the rest dedicated to these holistic activities.

### Conclusion

A complete longevity exercise routine must go beyond strength and cardio to include speed, power, cognitive challenge, and social interaction. Adding explosive movements and fast-paced ball or racket sports can significantly boost both physical and brain health.

## Transcript

longevity. You should have both higher muscle strength as well as good cardiorespiratory fitness to reduce your risk of long-term diseases and extend your health span. But, there are some specific types of training that are very
under-appreciated and even neglected by most people. These activities not only improve your overall workout plan, but are also quintessential components to healthy longevity and they might literally save your life in the future.
the exercises and sports that you should add to your workout routine. I want to start off with something that most sports hinge on and that's speed and then relative muscle power appears to be
than relative strength. That's because power requires a lot more than muscle size. Power depends heavily on fast-twitch fibers, specifically type two fibers, such as their size, quality, and speed of contraction. These fibers
are disproportionately lost and impaired during aging. Since type two decline is strongly tied to frailty, falls, slower walking speed, and loss of independence, maintaining power becomes a very sensitive biomarker of biological aging.
fibers is that you can build and maintain them by developing speed and power. You're not going to become faster by training slower. You need to be activating these type two muscle fibers at near-maximum intensities, which
entails doing it fast and powerfully. It's been seen that the elderly people who do just endurance training have much fewer fast-twitch muscle fibers, whereas significantly more. So, you should always have an element of explosiveness
and speed in your training. At the bare minimum, you should train some sprinting at least once a week, ideally a little bit more frequent than that. And in a lot of cases of strength training, you shouldn't try to lift things slowly. You
would want to lift things explosively and fast. Some of the most impressive athletes in their 80s can sprint very well for their age. They can run as fast as a regular 30 or 40-year-old, which is just insane. The reason for that is
because they have a fast and explosive nervous system. In addition to that, sprinting is not just about explosiveness and being as fast as possible, it also requires full body coordination. That's why sprinting is
longevity. You maintain the speed and power that decline the most during aging, and you also need to maintain good muscle coordination and balance why bodybuilders who are very strong and powerful suck at sprinting. They're just
too stiff, and they lack the skill of sprinting. So, the missing piece for a lot of people's workout routine is speed and power. But, the idea of speed training is also relevant to brain aging and neurodegeneration. A recent study
looked at if episodic cognitive training could postpone Alzheimer's and other related dementias. The answer is yes. They looked at older adults from the famous ACTIVE randomized control trial, a large cognitive training study in
older people that followed them for 20 years. The goal was to see whether or of dementia. The participants were assigned to three kinds of brain training, memory, reasoning, or speed training. Memory training was about
trying to remember stuff. Reasoning training involved solving patterns and problems, and speed of processing training was training for your brain to notice and react to visual information more quickly and efficiently. Standard
reduce the risk of dementia. Speed of processing training alone didn't either. processing training and received years had about 25% lower risk of
this study is that a specific type of brain training, speed of processing sessions, could reduce your risk of dementia. Other regular types of brain training, like memory training and reasoning training, don't do that. In
the ACTIVE study, speed of processing training was designed to make older information quickly, dividing their attention, and spotting something while also noticing things in the periphery. A simple way to picture it is
that participants would see very brief visuals on a screen and they had to identify or locate targets faster and faster as the task got harder. The if they did well, the program shortened the display time or made the task more
difficult. It's closely related to something that's called the useful field of view test. Basically, how much visual information can you take in accurately at a glance while under time pressure. In the context of training for
processing training can be implemented into your workout routines. You'll be The best type of speed of processing training in a physical sense are various ball sports like soccer, baseball, basketball, as well as racket sports
like badminton, tennis, pickleball, etc. These sports require more than just physicality and athleticism. They also require hand-to-eye coordination, foot-to-eye coordination, and overall body coordination and body awareness.
your body, they're also mental sports because you have to use your brain. And these sports also incorporate explosiveness and power and speed. In soccer or tennis, you also need to be explosive to react to the ball moving.
So, to succeed in tennis or soccer, you need to also have good explosiveness, good eye-to-hand coordination, and good speed of processing for your brain. Before we continue, I want to tell you about Top 1% Health. Most people don't
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assessment today. All right, back to the video. An interesting finding from the Copenhagen City Heart Study also supports this idea. They found that some sports were linked to increased longevity than others. The researchers
followed 8,500 Danes for up to 25 years. They discovered that, compared to being sedentary, the biggest life expectancy gains were seen from tennis, plus 9.7 years, badminton, plus 6.2 years, soccer, plus 4.7 years, cycling, plus
3.7 years, swimming, plus 3.4 years, jogging, plus 3.2 years, calisthenics, activities, such as weightlifting, treadmill running, and going to the gym, plus 1.5 years. That's fascinating, because the physical activities related
to the highest life expectancy were all team sports and ball sports. And the most generic forms of exercise, like going to the gym and cycling, were linked to a lower increase in life expectancy. Now, of course, a lot of
confounding variables can explain this, namely, that tennis players are more status, and thus have access to better health care, etc. But, the authors of variables. They also controlled for smoking, education, drinking, and
diabetes, as well as the weekly volume of how much time was spent on with the highest life expectancy, tennis, badminton, etc., these are explosive, speed of processing type of training. They incorporate speed and
explosiveness, and they also incorporate the brain aspect of speed of processing. You need to react to the ball, not just sit on a bike, zone off, turn your brain off, listen to music, and just go on for an hour. Yes, it's better than nothing.
It's still going to increase your life expectancy, but it lacks the cognitive chaos of speed of processing. There's These are sports you need multiple people to play with. You can go to the
gym or ride a bike alone, but you can't play tennis or soccer alone. And the social element is another underrated component of health and longevity. to live longer than people who have bad or relationships. So, incorporating some
physical activities, some sports that also involves other people, like tennis, gym with your friends, is better than doing it alone. We can also look at professional athletes and see which sports appears to be the best for
longevity, and we can draw some conclusions from that. In this 2024 study on international athletes, they found that racket sports was associated with a 5.7 year longer lifespan. It was in the top five of all sports. The
above, such as speed of processing, explosiveness, and the social element. into this, but racket sports like tennis or ping pong are also challenging both physically and cognitively. In addition to racket sports, it's worth noting that
there were two sports that had an exceptionally high life expectancy, and they were pole vaulting and gymnastics. Plus 8.4 years for pole vaulting and plus 8.2 years for gymnastics. These sports don't have an exceptionally high
payout compared to some other sports like boxing, soccer, tennis, or track and field. Yet, they scored highest. Now, there are several factors that can influence these results. Gymnasts and pole vaulters have to be lean and
lighter in body weight. The heavier they are, the harder it is for them to succeed in their sport. Gymnastics also incorporates a lot of power and speed of processing training by default, but both pole vaulting and gymnastics train body
awareness or proprioception in space. Check out this clip of Dr. William Bell, who at the age of 90, cleared a height of 218 cm. That's an enormous feat for someone in their 60s, not to mention in their 90s. Even at age 95, he cleared
135 cm, breaking the world record again. Dr. Bell died in 2020 at the age of 98, which is an exceptionally long lifespan. The reason why gymnastics and pole vaulting appear to be good for longevity is because of the body awareness and
proprioception. You need to be able to control your body in space, which requires a lot of cognitive effort. It requires good flexibility, good body composition, and a lot of explosiveness. A good example is a cat. The cat always
lands on its feet. If you drop a cat from a table, it will still land on its mind when training body awareness and proprioception. You need to be able to control your body in space as it travels through the space, which is quite
difficult. But, if you master it, you have exceptional physical awareness and exceptional physical condition. That's why the linear gym model that you just sit on the stationary bike or you go on the treadmill, you just go zone out for
an hour, or you at the gym you go up and down with the weights, is incomplete. It doesn't incorporate enough of the brain component. It doesn't incorporate speed of processing. It doesn't incorporate body awareness that much. Of course, to
a certain extent does, but it's nothing in compared to gymnastics or some other type of sport. You want to train things like handstands, throw a cartwheel or a handspring if you can, do some tumbling, train on the gymnastics rings, train on
the parallel bars, incorporate some animal flow exercises, play team sports are unpredictable and chaotic. All right, let me give you some bullet this video. Speed and power are the foundation to athleticism and
maneuverability. They start declining sooner than strength and cardiovascular dedicate some time for speed and power training already when you're young, ideally starting in your 20s. However, it's not just about training speed and
just shut down your brain while doing cardio on a treadmill. It's about also incorporating your brain into it and being forced to apply speed and power with full body coordination. Things like sprinting, plyometrics, speed sports
tennis, badminton, pickleball, paddle, basketball, soccer, and general body awareness training like tumbling, gymnastics, calisthenics, monkey bars, your standard strength training up and down with a barbell or just, you know,
bad thing. Of course, these type of activities also have their place. The most effective way to increase your cardio is to zone out on the treadmill. strength is to do strength training with a barbell. You should still incorporate
these things, but you shouldn't neglect the holistic full body awareness type of thing. You shouldn't neglect speed and power. You shouldn't neglect speed of awareness and proprioception. So, the way I approach it is that I still go to
the gym maybe once or twice a week, but the rest of the week I try to incorporate activities that train these components that we discussed in this awareness, and proprioception. I do calisthenics. I do some handstands. I do
sprinting. I do plyometrics. I do some gymnastics exercises, etc. All right, discover your health percentage and get your road map to top 1% of health, then join the community using the link in the description. I'll see you there.