[Starts mid-sentence] …think that the big thing here is that there has been a lot of discussion about what type of exercise to do. I think you should do what you can and what you’re going to do. It is probably good to do both.

I do a lot of Tabatas. I go between all-out efforts and zone 3, and sometimes zone 2 when I taper down before going all out again. I do that for 10 or 15 minutes a day, five days a week. I also like resistance training.

Muscle mass and maintaining muscle mass are so important. You want to build up that muscle reserve earlier in life, because you have to build it up. Once you reach a certain age, it becomes very hard to gain muscle mass, although you can still gain strength. You have a harder time gaining mass, but you’re losing it. The more you start with, the losses aren’t quite as large. Resistance training is very important for that as well.

You have to find something you can incorporate into your daily routine and that you will do. You want your heart rate to go up. You want to sweat. You want to feel tired afterward. Whatever type of exercise you do, you should at least get your heart rate up, become flushed in the face, and reach a point where you can’t talk while working out, to some degree.

I think exercise can forgive a lot of sins. When I was a new mother and my son was a newborn, through his first year, there was so much disruption to my sleep, and there was nothing I could do about it. We all know how important sleep is for health, brain function, blood pressure, and everything else. I can only speak as a mother, not as a father, although I think fathers’ sleep is also disrupted somewhat. Mothers who are breastfeeding have to feed their babies. There’s nothing they can do.

When you think about all the detrimental effects, it can be very discouraging. You think, “I’m doing terrible things to myself, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” I was wearing a continuous glucose monitor at the time, and my fasting blood glucose levels were through the roof. It was crazy. I was eating the same diet.

At that time, I was doing many spin classes. It wasn’t until I got back on the Peloton or exercise bike and did high-intensity interval training that my blood glucose levels suddenly normalized, even with the interrupted sleep.

I then went into the literature and found studies showing that high-intensity interval training can ameliorate the negative effects of sleep deprivation on blood glucose regulation. There was scientific evidence, and I had anecdotal evidence as well.

A fairly recent study examined sleep and all-cause mortality. There are many such studies. People with disrupted sleep and much shorter sleep durations have higher all-cause mortality. However, this recent study also examined physical activity. Lower sleep quantity was associated with higher all-cause mortality, but only among people who were not physically active. In other words, physical activity forgave the sleep disruption and poor sleep.

If there is a message here, it is that the most important thing you can do in your life is sweat and become physically active. Nothing is going to be better for you. No aging drug—nothing—is going to be better than what exercise can do at the moment.

That is the main message. If you care about aging, including skin aging, there was a study showing that physically active people were 20% to 50% less likely to have collagen breakdown. It was amazing. Brain health, cardiovascular health—everything. Exercise is the most powerful longevity drug you’re going to get, in my opinion.