Fitness

RFK Is a Big Proponent of Exercise as Medicine. We Agree.

Published

1 year ago

November 21, 2024

RFK Is a Big Proponent of Exercise as Medicine. We Agree.

IT’S GREAT TO see Robert F. Kennedy Jr elevating exercise in the national conversation, and at Men’s Health we’ve been saying exercise is strong medicine for 35 years—because nothing advances health and can’t be patented by Pharma as much as consistently working out.

We’ve been reporting on the styles of strength and fitness that you need to optimize your health for years—and the pandemic, which saw those who struggled with fitness suffer more than strong, healthy people, put a spotlight on that. Since then, gym memberships are booming; 2023 saw with 72.9 million people with gym memberships.

These days, healthspan (the portion of life during which you’re able to do what you want instead of being frail and weak) is a buzzword, as we’ve covered in our stories with Peter Attia, M.D., author of Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity. According to Attia: “Exercise is by far the most potent longevity ‘drug.’ The data are unambiguous: Exercise not only delays actual death but also prevents both cognitive and physical decline better than any other intervention. It is the single most potent tool we have in the health-span-enhancing toolkit—and that includes nutrition, sleep, and meds.”

Over the years MH has covered the ideal amount of exercise people should do, and, like Dr. Attia, MH recommend more exercise weekly—ideally 7 to 10 hours— than the government’s regulations. Currently, the CDC says:

Adults need at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity a week. There are multiple ways to break this up, but an easy way to think about it is that you should fitness 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week.

Adults also need 2 days of muscle-strengthening activity each week.
The CDC does also note that you’ll gain even more health benefits if you go beyond 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity or week – or if you have 75 minutes a week of vigorous-intensity activity (think: a pickup hoops game).

The latest research reveals that you need a combination of different intensities of cardio, as well as consistent strength training and stability exercises to be your best self. Here’s how much you should get to be at your best.

Your Cardio Goals

4+ Hours/Week

Dr. Attia says your VO2 max is a good proxy measure of physical capability: It indicates what you can—and cannot—do. Studies suggest that VO2 max will decline by roughly 10 percent per decade after your 20s and up to 15 percent per decade after age 50. Increasing your VO2 max makes you functionally younger. So having average or even above-average VO2 max has long-term ramifications. Dr. Attia’s goal for his patients is to be at an excellent level for the decade (or two) below their age. Many smartwatches can estimate VO2 max, but a real test (e.g., the Cooper 12-Minute Run) is better and VO2-max charts are easy to find online.

The good news?

You can improve VO2 max by as much as 17 percent per year. But you need to put in the work. Dr. Attia advises that patients do at least three 45 to 60-minute cardio sessions per week in zone 2 of their heart rate (57 to 65 percent of max heart rate, a gentle intensity during which you can say a complete sentence). They can involve running, cycling, rowing, even rucking. This is optimal for the health and efficiency of your mitochondria, the factories that burn fat and glucose to power your muscles and that decline as you age.

Along with cruising in zone 2, Dr. Attia recommends that patients do a weekly 30-minute VO2-max effort, such as high-intensity intervals that last anywhere from 3 to 8 minutes. For instance, you can run, ride, row, or ruck uphill for four rounds of four minutes, with four minutes of rest in between. “This is a much higher level of intensity—a hard, minutes-long effort,” he says. By testing your VO2 max and committing to cardio, you can nudge up your score and win in the long run.

Your Strength Goals

3+ Hours/Week

Age-related muscle loss—which starts insidiously in your 40s and picks up the pace in your 50s—is called sarcopenia, from the Greek words for “poverty of the flesh,” says Dr. Attia. Think of strength training as a form of retirement saving, he says. Just as you retire with enough money saved up to sustain you for the rest of your life, you want to reach an older age with enough of a “reserve” of muscle to protect you from injury and allow you to continue to pursue the activities that you enjoy. That muscle also acts as a buffer against the natural age-related decline in muscle mass. The larger the reserve you build up early on, the better off you will be over the long term. And, there are many categories to train:

Grip Strength

New research reveals that American adults have far weaker grip strength—and thus less muscle mass—than they did even a generation ago. In 1985, men ages 20 to 24 had an average right-handed grip strength of 121 pounds, while in 2015, men of the same age averaged just 101 pounds. Dr. Attia notes that many studies suggest that grip strength predicts how long you are likely to live. In these studies, it’s acting as a proxy for overall strength, but it’s also a broader indicator of general robustness and your ability to protect yourself if you slip.

Try These: Weighted carries, dead hangs, and plate pinches. Your goal: Do a farmer’s carry with a quarter of your bodyweight in each hand for one minute.

Concentric and Eccentric Loading

You need strength when your muscles are shortening (concentric) and lengthening (eccentric) under load. In other words, you must be able to lift the weight up and put it back down, slowly and with control. In life, especially as you age, eccentric strength is where many people falter.

Eccentric strength in the quads is what gives us the brakes required when we are moving down an incline or walking down a set of stairs. It’s really important to keep us safe from falling.

Try These: Focus on the “down” phase of lifts, whether doing pullups, curls, or deadlifts. Practice slow stepdowns—can you step off an 18-inch box in three seconds or more?

Pulling Motions

Pulling motions help bulletproof your shoulders against injury, and they’re critical in other underrated ways, too, driving your motion when you open car doors, lift boxes from the floor, and give somebody a hug.

Try These: Practice pulling at all angles. Start with dumbbell rows and progress to overhead moves like pullups.

Hip Hinges

You bend at the hips—not the spine—to harness your body’s largest muscles, the glutei maximi and the hamstrings. It is a very powerful move that is essential to life. If you are jumping, picking up a penny off the sidewalk, or simply getting out of a chair, you are hip hinging.

Try These: Deadlifts, hip thrusts, and kettlebell swings.

With all this exercise, your body may need more TLC. And that’s where stability and mobility training and low impact things like yoga and walking come in. These kinds of activities help your body recover and you can target weak areas to build your overall strength.

If you need somewhere to start and aren’t sure how to get going: Try this simple bodyweight workout: Set a timer for 10 minutes. Start by doing 30 seconds plank walkout, then do 30 seconds of alternating reverse lunges, then do 30 seconds of jumping jacks. Rest 30 seconds, then repeat until time is up. This simple session fires up your core and burns calories, and it gets you moving in multiple planes, an underrated quality you want to preserve for longevity. It also challenges many of the key functions we’ve already listed above. A bonus: As you gain fitness, this can become a warmup drill for any workout you do.

If you’re looking for exercise guidance, check out our Men’s Health MVP Training Lab, which is full of month-long workouts that can help you improve your VO2 max, build total-body muscle and strength, shed excess pounds, and get into optimal shape.

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Fitness

The exercise more important than walking – especially if you’re older

Published

5 hours ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

The exercise more important than walking – especially if you’re older

Walking is brilliant. It’s accessible, affordable and enjoyable, plus it comes with many health benefits, which is why it forms the backbone of most government exercise guidance.

But it is strength that underpins all movement. If you don’t have the strength to get out of your chair and put one foot in front of the other, what good is being told to walk more?

This was the key takeaway from recent research led by Dr Michael LaMonte and his team at the University at Buffalo, which shows the immense value of building skeletal muscle with strength training. It found that, in more than 5,000 women aged 63 to 99, greater strength levels were strongly linked to a lower risk of death from any cause.

Maintaining muscle should be seen as a savvy investment. Muscle allows you to stand, move and remain independent, all while offering further perks that extend far beyond physical function. It powers our breath, regulates blood sugar levels, emits anti-inflammatory myokines and constantly chats with other bodily systems to keep things running smoothly. In short, muscle is the medical marvel you already own.

Here is how to maintain your body’s largest, and in some ways smartest, organ for decades to come.

Why strength training matters

There is a wealth of research on the merits of aerobic exercise, such as walking, running, swimming and cycling. This is a major reason why it dominates government physical activity guidelines. There is far less research into strength training, and much of the data available centres around young, fit men.

By looking at the impacts of strength training in previously understudied demographics, such as women aged 60 and above, studies like this one from the University at Buffalo could change future exercise recommendations for the better.

“When women go through menopause and lose their body’s own secretion of oestrogen, the loss of skeletal muscle mass increases rapidly,” says Dr LaMonte. “We typically see a change in their body composition, where they start losing muscle and holding fat in the belly area, particularly. That’s not healthy.”

Both men and women also tend to become less active as they grow older, which can contribute to sarcopenia – the age-related loss of strength and muscle. Both menopause and sarcopenia are inflammatory processes, Dr LaMonte says.

Read more: Sitting all day wreaks havoc on your hips and spine – here’s how to stop that from happening

There is limited research around strength training in older populations – but that is changing (Getty/iStock)

This shift impacts fitness. “Muscle strength is fundamental for getting the body from point A to point B, especially when you’re working against gravity.” But it also throws off chemical signalling between skeletal muscle and other systems in the body, such as the heart.

“Fat tissue tends to secrete chemicals called cytokines that are pro-inflammatory,” Dr LaMonte explains. “There’s quite a bit of evidence to show that, when skeletal muscle contracts, it secretes counterbalancing cytokines that are anti-inflammatory.

“This was discovered by a scientist named Bente Pedersen in the 2000s. She published a compelling series of papers showing that these cytokines, which she called myokines, had regulatory functions outside the muscle itself.”

Exactly how skeletal muscle interacts with other crucial systems in our body is unclear, Dr LaMonte says. But it is constantly in deep discussions with them, and it is looking to help out where it can. For this reason, if you can keep your muscles strong and healthy, they can be a powerful force for good.

Read more: Expert warns why this daily habit is shortening your life – even if you exercise

Maintaining healthy muscle not only ensures independence and physical capacity, it can also lead to deeper-lying health benefits (Getty/iStock)

3 simple ways to gauge your strength

Dr LaMonte’s research used a series of simple tests to assess the strength levels of 5,472 women aged 63 and above:

Grip strength: a dynamometer was used to assess grip strength, with people asked to hold their upper arm at their side, elbow bent at a right angle, then squeeze the machine as hard as possible. This is an indication of upper-body strength.
Sit-to-stand: people were timed to see how quickly they could stand up from a chair, then sit back down again five times with their arms across their chest. This is an indication of lower body strength.
Gait speed: a timer was used to see how long it took subjects to walk 2.5m.

Women with greater grip strength – a good signifier of overall strength levels – and faster sit-to-stand times had a “significantly lower death risk over an eight-year follow-up”, the study discovered.

“Gait speed is another one of the most potent predictors of mortality,” Dr LaMonte adds.

“I’d like to see the health care profession embrace functional health as much as they do the things they can prescribe drugs for – because you can’t prescribe a drug for this. It’s a behaviour, and I think that’s why it probably doesn’t get the same kind of attention. Nobody makes money from this, but people do die from it.”

Dr LaMonte also suggests another bonus test anyone can use as a sign they need to work on their strength levels:

The pickle jar test – this is a proxy for any everyday task. If you notice it starts to feel more difficult, this is a good indication that your fitness has decreased, and it would be beneficial to gain strength and muscle through exercise.

“When you can’t open the pickle jar any more, don’t just assume they’re making the jars harder to open,” Dr LaMonte says. “That’s a good indicator that you might be at a phase of life where your strength levels have changed unknowingly.

“The same applies when you go to pick up a grandchild or climb the stairs, and you find you’re huffing and puffing – it could simply be that you’re getting more out of shape, or in the worst case scenario, it could be indicative of disease.

“Be mindful of your body. It’s going to tell you where you’re at, and we don’t want an injury to be that indicator.”

Read more: Four things you can do to reduce inflammation and cut heart disease risk, according to the experts

When daily tasks such as climbing the stairs start to feel markedly harder, it could be a sign that your strength levels are decreasing, Dr Michael LaMonte says (Getty/iStock)

How to start strength training at any age

The human body is a representation of the life it has lived, informed by genetics and altered by myriad interventions along the way. A robust life, filled with challenging physical tasks, often builds a robust body. As a result, someone who has always been active will likely find it easier to remain more active as they age.

“I wouldn’t want to convey a message that age becomes a constraint for people doing what they enjoy,” says Dr LaMonte. “I know people in their late, late years who still enjoy going to gyms and lifting weights. It’s effective for their strength goals, and the social aspect keeps them healthy in other ways.”

However, if you are new to strength training and exercise generally, you need to start more conservatively. As with any new skill, there is an obligatory learning curve that allows your mind and body to adapt to the fresh stimulus without being overwhelmed.

“You can use simple bodyweight exercises like press-ups against a wall or sit-to-stands – US adults in their 70s and 80s spend around nine-and-a-half hours each day sitting down, so you could break this up by doing a few sit-to-stands every hour, or each time there is an advert if you are watching television,” Dr LaMonte says.

“Resistance bands are another good option, or even using soup cans or books as a form of resistance provides stimulus to skeletal muscles.”

The common denominator behind these exercises is the act of overcoming resistance. That resistance needs to be slightly challenging, relative to your individual strength levels, to trigger an increase in muscle and strength levels. By consistently doing a task that requires you to be stronger, you are telling your body you want it to adapt to handle it better. If the task feels easy, the body has no reason to make any changes.

“If someone finds that lifting a soup can or book [for example, pressing it overhead 10 times] challenges them, that’s probably the level they should be working at, and they should not be trying to do more,” says Dr LaMonte. As you grow stronger, you can then gradually progress to slightly heavier items to continue to increase your strength levels.

“Older adults in particular should consult with their health care provider about the safety of beginning muscle-strengthening exercises,” Dr LaMonte adds.

In short, building and maintaining strength is important at any age. And if you do fall below this study’s 63-99 demographic, any strength and muscle you can develop now will likely serve you well for the rest of your life.

“We want to live as long as we can healthily, and I think resistance exercises are a part of that,” Dr LaMonte concludes. “When we can no longer get out of the chair and move around, we are in trouble.”

Read more: After 50, you need to train smarter – the eight rules for strength training in midlife, according to experts

Read more: The science-backed two-minute daily workouts for improving heart health

Fitness

How much exercise is enough? A local doctor says you only need 15 minutes a day – WTOP News

Published

17 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Press Room

How much exercise is enough? A local doctor says you only need 15 minutes a day – WTOP News

Exercise is part of a healthy lifestyle and its benefits are well known and have been for a long time. What is only recently proven by doctors is just how much exercise makes a difference for one’s longevity.

By now, most people understand that exercise is part of a healthy lifestyle; its benefits are well known and have been for a long time. What is only recently proven by doctors is just how much exercise makes a difference for one’s longevity.

For most people who sit at desks or behind the wheel all day, the problem is often finding time to work out. The good news, according to Dr. Julie Chen, an internal medicine and lifestyle medicine doctor at Kaiser Permanente in Gaithersburg, is that a daily exercise routine can be broken down into brief segments.

“The general recommendation is for 150 minutes of moderate activity per week,” Dr. Chen said. “So that is roughly about 30 minutes a day, five days a week. But the important point is it does not have to all be done at once. You can break it up into shorter segments of exercise and still get the same great benefits.”

And those benefits can be tremendous. Chen said that studies have shown going from no exercise a day to only 15 minutes of total exercise a day can “can actually decrease their risk of death, death from all causes, by about 14%.”

“Any movement is actually better than being sedentary,” she said.

Movement can be divided up into short segments throughout the day instead of in one long, strenuous workout and it can still offer the same reductions in the risk of certain diseases.

Now, you might understand there are benefits of exercising for short periods of time, several times per day; but you might be wondering how you can get in the gym several times a day.

Chen advocates for what she calls “exercise snacks” — “small bursts of physical activity that you can get in, two to three minutes at a time throughout the day.”

For example, taking the stairs or doing squats while putting groceries away, walking around the office on a phone call or planking while your dinner is in the microwave. Chen said try to do whatever it takes to get a few minutes of movement in a few times a day.

Chen is also a big fan of fitness apps, including the ones that come built into our smartphones and watches: “Studies have shown that that is really motivating that you can actually track your progress in your app. You can see your trends.”

“Consistency is a really big goal of this effort, and so if you look at your trends over time, that’s going to be a really rewarding aspect of trying to improve your health,” she added.

Beginning an exercise regimen doesn’t need to be complicated or time-consuming. You don’t need to splurge on workout clothes or a gym membership; you just need a few minutes, several times a day, to start reaping the benefits.

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Fitness

Adults hop on viral ‘rebounding’ trend to make exercise fun again — ‘I feel like a kid’

Published

1 day ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Adults hop on viral ‘rebounding’ trend to make exercise fun again — ‘I feel like a kid’

Forget boring home workouts, on-demand HITT classes and cold winter runs.

The latest wellness trend bouncing around TikTok involves a workout you might not even realize you’re doing, and that’s the point. It’s called rebounding. This low-impact exercise involves jumping on a mini fitness trampoline — called a rebounder — to get your heart pumping and support lymphatic drainage.

On Amazon, this best-selling model is currently on sale for just $129. It measures in at just 40 inches, making it ideal for small spaces while still offering room for an adult to jump, squat and jog in place. Users swear it gives them a seriously effective full-body workout, and many remark that it’s “so much fun” to use.

Clinical trials also back the benefits: a 12-week rebounding program for overweight women showed significant improvements in body composition as well as a decrease in diastolic blood pressure.

Ready to jump on the rebounding trend, too? You’d better hop on this Amazon deal fast.

Amazon

This sleek rebounder by BCAN is sturdy and easy to set up, thanks to pre-assembled bungees and simpel video tutorial.

Reviewers say it’s completely changed their workouts, with one remarking they “feel like a little kid again.” Others have also noted it’s much easier on their joints than higher-impact exercises.

“It absorbs impact well and allows for a nice, smooth rebound that is gentle on the joints, making it perfect for a low-impact cardio workout,” one person explained. “Whether I’m doing high-intensity intervals or simply bouncing for fun, the movement feels fluid and responsive.

The BCAN model features an upgraded handlebar for added stability. It’s 8mm premium bungee — with a durable woven outer layer and a 350-strand natural latex core — delivers smooth, quiet bounces, so you can enjoy your workout without disturbing others.

This article was written by Miska Salemann, New York Post Commerce Writer/Reporter. As a health-forward member of Gen Z, Miska seeks out experts to weigh in on the benefits, safety and designs of both trending and tried-and-true fitness equipment, workout clothing, dietary supplements and more. Taking matters into her own hands, Miska intrepidly tests wellness products, ranging from Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint Longevity Mix to the viral Oura Ring to Jennifer Aniston’s favorite workout platform – often with her adorable toddler by her side. Before joining The Post, Miska covered lifestyle and consumer topics for the U.S. Sun and The Cannon Beach Gazette.