Everyday Longevity Collective
"Everyday Longevity Collective" is where applied longevity meets everyday life. Dr. Shoma Datta-Thomas and Dr. John Thomas combine two decades of expertise in movement science and functional medicine to help people move better, age stronger, and live longer - with intention.
Approachable science, lived wisdom, and repeatable systems from a husband-and-wife team redefining what modern healthspan really means.
Everyday Longevity Collective
How Cardiorespiratory Fitness Drives Longevity and Functional Aging at Every Decade of Life
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Welcome back to EVERYDAY Longevity Collective! In today’s episode, Dr. John Thomas and Dr. Shoma Datta-Thomas dive into one of the most overlooked but essential pillars of healthy aging: cardiorespiratory fitness. They reveal how your body ages at the speed of your conditioning, not your years, and why modern lifestyles secretly accelerate deconditioning. Forget old notions of cardio as punishment; true conditioning is about building energy, flexibility, resilience, and independence through every decade of life. Whether you're navigating your 20s, managing midlife stress, or aiming for lifelong mobility, the hosts break down the latest research, practical strategies, and actionable routines that go beyond aesthetics to support real functional health and longevity. Get ready for a thoughtful guide to optimizing your fitness capacity at any age!
Timestamps:
00:00 Cardiorespiratory fitness importance
05:09 Peak fitness in your 20s
06:55 Finding the right workout balance
12:18 Health checkups in 30s and 40s
14:58 Understanding Zone 2 training
16:43 Importance of varied workout routines
21:04 Importance of fitness in aging
23:10 Practical longevity fitness routine
Show's Website - https://everydaylongevity.co/
Dr. Shoma Datta-Thomas LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shomadattamd/
Dr. John Thomas LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-thomas-8543426/
Podcast Partner - TopHealth - https://tophealth.care/
“Disclaimer: Informational only. Not medical advice. Consult your doctor for guidance.”
One of the most important things that people need to hear is this your body ages at the speed of your conditioning. The modern lifestyle destroys conditioning. You live under chronic stress, and then you expect one workout to fix it all.
SPEAKER_01The reality is people often don't notice the conditioning loss immediately because daily life is happening and we're adapting going forward. And they're just thinking, oh, you know, I feel tired because I'm just getting older. And what we see is most people are not just aging, they're actually deconditioning.
SPEAKER_00Your energy level is often a conditioning problem before it's a hormone problem. You do not need to stop moving because you age. You age faster because you stop moving.
SPEAKER_01And I'm Dr. Shomadata Thomas. I'm also a 20-year physician, board certified OPGMYN, and minimum lead invasive surgeon. I now practice as a longevity physician, and I am the VP of medical operations for a two national companies.
SPEAKER_00Today we're going to talk about what may be the single most underrated marker of longevity and functional aging, and that's cardiorespiratory fitness. Your conditioning, your aerobic engine, your VO2 max, your capability to recover, move, and sustain life physically. And honestly, this topic has exploded recently because people are finally realizing that cardio is not just about burning calories anymore. The research now consistently shows that cardiorespiratory fitness is one of the strongest predictors of all-cause mortality and long-term health.
SPEAKER_01And we're going to frame this differently than the old school just do more cardio conversation, because conditioning is not punishment, it's not just sweating, it's not trying to just survive boot camp classes. It's really a very important mix of creating your energy, recovery, supporting metabolic health, building stress resilience, protecting your cognitive function, your independence, and basically how capable you feel in your body.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. We're going decade by decade for both men and women, what changes physiologically, what actually matters, how conditioning should evolve, and what the newest longevity research is showing. And we'll make this practical because most people do not care about the physiological terms. They care about not feeling exhausted, keeping better body composition under control, and staying athletic and not feeling old at the age of 52.
SPEAKER_01So let's just start with the term cardiorespiratory fitness. This is essentially the body's ability to take in oxygen, deliver oxygen to our tissues, and use oxygen the most efficiently during activity. So the higher your cardiorespiratory fitness, generally measured through what's very commonly known now as a VO2 max or exercise capacity, the lower your risk for cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, frailty, and premature death are.
SPEAKER_00One of the most important things that people need to hear is this your body ages at the speed of your conditioning. This is the reality. You can be successful, busy, still young, and still strong. But if walking stairs crushes you or recovery is poor and your energy is low, physiologically your system is aging faster.
SPEAKER_01So this is where today's audience connects strongly because people are starting to realize skinny does not equal healthy. Body weight alone means very little. We really have to go just beyond the number on the scale. And fitness capacity matters more than just the aesthetic. There is now strong evidence that high cardiorespiratory fitness can substantially reduce mortality risk, even in those individuals we would consider in the overweight or obese ranges.
SPEAKER_00What that really means is fat but fit beats skinny and deconditioned. That statement upsets people sometimes, but physiologically, conditioning changes everything. The modern lifestyle destroys conditioning. It's people who are sitting constantly, drive everywhere, they never reach sustained heart rate zones or sleep poorly. You live under chronic stress, and then you expect one workout to fix it all.
SPEAKER_01And I'll be honest, women, especially that I speak with are really trapped in this old teaching of eat less and do more cardio. Meanwhile, especially with prescription-based weight optimization, we're definitely seeing muscle mass drops, recovery is worsening, hormone shifting is affecting our metabolism, especially through peri and menopause, and essentially the bodies are becoming less resilient. So exercise programs for middle-age and menopausal women are now specifically recommended to include aerobic fitness, resistance and weight training, and balancing the work together.
SPEAKER_00Right. The goal here is not exhaustion. The goal is cardiovascular efficiency. You want recovery capacity and definitely metabolic flexibility. Conditioning is not about the calories, it's about your capacity.
SPEAKER_01So looking at our capacity over the different decades of life, in the 20s, the cardiovascular fitness really is near its physiologic peak. This is where we don't know sometimes how good we have it, but this is really where we see VO2 max potential is high. We tend to see recovery is faster, even if we're not perfectly fueled or perfectly doing our stretches and mobility work. And in general, people can tolerate more training stress. But we know this is where also people can create these bad habits that are hidden because of youth, but eventually lead to dysfunction.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Young people can survive bad sleep, binge drinking, inconsistent exercise, and terrible recovery until they cannot. This is the decade to build. Build your aerobic base. You want to build your movement efficiency, recovery habits, and your cardiovascular reserve.
SPEAKER_01So, especially for active women, this is also where underfueling becomes a big issue. And we talk about this with patients constantly because it's very easy to overlook. And we're noticing a lot of young women are really starting to train hard, which is fantastic. But eating too little or overdoing the HIIT exercises, underrecovering, and that combination will eventually backfire both hormonally, metabolically, and energetically.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we see this a lot. Ladies and men get, you know, caught up in these group fitness programs that are high-intensity hits, but that becomes the only part of their exercise program. And that type of high-level stress doesn't uh manage well for a total program.
SPEAKER_01Do you find also sometimes the programs that are, you know, titled as HIT classes are really more kind of putting us in this not high intensity, but moderately high intensity and kind of trapping us even in a less desired cardio zone?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think a lot of the times you end up in a cardiovascular zone that you're not getting the best cardiovascular benefits and not getting the fat burning that you're necessarily looking for, but it does end up being just high levels of neurologic and stress on your tissues. You're trying to find a balance of getting both good cardiovascular stress that gives you the benefits that you're looking for. I would say with a lot of these group classes, which can be a great mix in, but if they end up being a lot of your only workout, they don't give you the zones that you're looking for. Either the cardiovascular intensity is either too long in too moderate a level. So you're not getting the fat burning benefits of like a zone two, where your heart rate's a little lower, but you're able to take in oxygen, or you're not getting the high intensity benefits of a short-term hit where you're really gassed out at the short, all-intense out exercises. What you want to remember here is you cannot biohack your way out of bad conditioning, right? You want to make sure that you're giving yourself good habits. The idea of biohacking should be a complement to other good habits, right? You're not going to be able to correct for those with these biohacking methods. In your 30s, and this is where life starts competing with your fitness. Things like your career, kids' stress, less sleep, less time. This is usually when conditioning quietly falls apart. People stop moving consistently and become weekend athletes. That's what we want to try to avoid. We want to really try to maintain. I know time becomes a limiting factor as we have children, as we hit our 30s, as work becomes busy. But we really have to build these routines that become, you know, long-term habits. And even again, we may have to minimize that time and be more efficient, make them shorter, punchy add-ons in your health program. Taking those little bites, whether they're 10, 15, 20 minutes throughout the day, that's the way to manage those shorter when you have less time at any one time to exercise.
SPEAKER_01Right. You've talked about those exercise snacks before, sometimes just having to be, you know, the accepted reality versus, you know, the perfect hours-long workout. So we all, we all try to balance that out. But the reality is people often don't notice the conditioning loss immediately because daily life is happening and we're adapting going forward. And they're just thinking, oh, you know, I feel tired because I'm just getting older, I'm just that at that age, I'm really busy, but not realizing that there's actually lower aerobic capacity and reduced movement volume along with poorer recovery and really that less mitochondrial activity.
SPEAKER_00That's one of the big benefits when we talk about your cardiovascular conditioning is really keeping up your mitochondrial efficiency. You know, and that really happens in like again in this zone two type training where you're developing a lot of that mitochondrial dexterity and conditioning and efficiency. So this is where I tell patients you should still be able to walk aggressively uphill, recover quickly. Like these are the practical things, play recreational sports, carry luggage easily, and tolerate physical life stress. So if these things start to become more difficult, it should be a good gut check that we need to start keeping a focus on making sure we get regular cardiovascular conditioning within our movement. And if basic movements feel disproportionately hard at 38, that's not normal aging, right? That's you're aging prematurely.
SPEAKER_01And I think we've both discussed how even with our patients, we can really see those who kept conditioning and movement in their routines and those who've kind of fallen off and the differences in their capabilities just in the daily stuff, like the luggage in the overhead gets mentioned a lot. And it's really amazing that how the groups start differing pretty right before our eyes.
SPEAKER_00Right. I mean, we can see definitely groups coming in. Your 30s can look very different from a group who kept active, you know, participated in group sports, you know, even adult group sports, and kept a regular active regimen to those who let life overwhelm their time and let those limitations obviously lim limit their movement. Again, incorporate your family, your kids into your movement. It's a good way. And again, it doesn't, you don't have to dedicate a full hour. Try to again, again, get those little small bites. It can be mixed in with your kids. It could be chasing your kids around, letting them chase you, doing physical things will all benefit that overall total conditioning.
SPEAKER_01And what we see is most people are not just aging, they're actually deconditioning, and that's exactly the differences we're talking about. So moving on into our 40s, this is where we really see conditioning very strongly tied to our overall energy, and that's where it's going beyond the scale. It's really relating to our body composition, our cognitive performance. This is a big concern I know patients come in with either if they have certain genetic risks or have seen family members go through dementia. This is something that conditioning really ties into. Our sleep quality is a huge tie-in to our conditioning, and of course, our stress tolerance. And that's physical stress, but also situational, emotional, and hormonal stress. So this is especially important for men and women entering those midlife years like the 40s. There's a lot of fluctuation happening. And research is increasingly showing that exercise improves both physical and metabolic symptoms just during these transitional years.
SPEAKER_00So these transitions from your 30s and 40s are should be times, you know, we usually wait too long to take account of our health, right? Instead of waiting till things go wrong, and our 30s and 40s should be when we're going back to our other episodes where we're starting to do blood work, starting to take real inventory of where we are conditioning-wise, activity-wise, and health-wise. So that by the time you get to your 40s and 50s, you're not having to make major corrections. For men, the 40s are often where we see visceral fat increases, recovery worsens, your VO2 max starts declining more rapidly if your training falls off. And you really start to lose that explosiveness, that first step quickness. I see this a lot in our athletes at that age. They're like, because of it, they feel less want to have to compete because they feel like they've lost that step. The reality is all those things are training, right? If you continue to train your fast twitch fibers, your quick response, your quick reaction through your training and your exercise, mix it in. That's a good way to keep you competitive and explosive and having you enjoy the sports that you like doing through your 30s, 40s, and 50s. Well, your VO2 max naturally declines with age, but inactivity accelerates that drop substantially.
SPEAKER_01And again, we are all living busy lives. The goal is not to only train like an elite athlete, but you do need to figure out how you can incorporate zone two work, some higher intensity exposure, and again, getting that good mix that we talked about instead of just maybe like the same class over and over. Where to incorporate strength training. Obviously, we know muscle is a really a longevity organ, how we often we are moving, so our movement frequency, and then of course, the important phases of recovery to follow that up.
SPEAKER_00Your energy level is often a conditioning problem before it's a hormone problem. I think that's what you often find, right, Doc? You know, a lot of people will first thing they'll ask is like, is it a hormone issue? And a lot of it, it's they end up going hand in hand, right? Is if you're not taking care of yourself, if you're not keeping up your conditioning, this will lead to that cascade where your hormones will drop off. What we notice a lot with our clients is that the ones who kept more active, who maintained more muscle through these years, have less of a hormone drop than those who allow themselves to be deconditioned.
SPEAKER_01No, I always like to bring up the reminder that muscle, lean muscle is not just strength and structure, it is its own metabolism. So our insulin sensitivity, our energy expenditure, it's really such a big function in how we are our total body metabolism also really relies on that lean mass.
SPEAKER_00So let's talk about zone two and why everyone is talking about it. This has become the new social media buzzword. Zone two is essentially it's sustainable aerobic work, right? And it's it should be at a conversational pace, but still working. Even if you're going for a walk with your friends, keep at a pace that you should be able to maintain a conversation, but it should feel like you should be riding the line of it should have some difficulty doing that. One of the big workouts that has become, you know, all the rages, and which is really efficient, is incline walking on a treadmill at an incline of somewhere between 10 and 15, depending on your capability, and a speed of somewhere between 2.5 to 3.5 miles per hour, again, depending on where you can comfortably move. Ideally, what you're trying to do is stride through this without holding on. And if you need to grab on to, again, maintain your balance or to recover, totally fine. But through most of the workout, try to have your hands free in a natural gait. And within that, what you'll notice is again, it's an efficient way to burn fat because you're oxygenating, it'll be great stress on your muscles. You'll be developing your posterior chain, a lot of glute work. So it's a great, efficient way to get zone two cardio and it's going to feel like you really worked.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's those are great tips. And I often will say it is a pace that you can still maybe talk to your workout buddy, but not sing. So it can kind of put things in perspective. But this is really the training we look for, where again, on a cellular level, we're talking about that mitochondrial efficiency, that powerhouse of the cell, where we are building up our aerobic base and utilizing the fat tissue and that getting that fat burn, also building our recovery capacity and again supporting the metabolic health. So it's really a way to truly build our foundational health.
SPEAKER_00And what people sometimes misunderstand is that zone two is not magic. You still need to do the other components. You still have to have a strength part of your program. You want to have mobility mixed in, occasionally some higher intensity, some zone five type movements, so 30 to 60 second high intensity increments. You want to have movement variability. We don't want to always just be moving in one plane front to back. We want to also incorporate lateral movements. Because those, again, if we don't have them in our mix or quick response movements, quick steps, footwork, or agility, that's where we're gonna fall into injury, right? It's that first time you have to run for a bus or run for your child or pick something quickly up, that you're gonna end up getting injured because you're not incorporating it into your regular routine. So zone two builds the engine and then strength builds the chassis.
SPEAKER_01For me, especially, I really want to emphasize this for women. Um, when you're thinking of how to continue your workouts and your fitness through perimenopause and menopause, that doesn't mean you should stop training hard. It can be more challenging because we know that the whole list of symptoms during this time can make it more challenging, feeling more fatigued, having disrupted sleep, you know, just a lot of challenges and just even feeling motivated to get to the gym. But we do want to adjust for some facts and we are becoming especially less tolerant during this time of excessive HIT under recovery, chronic, again, caloric restriction and stress stacking. So, for example, intermittent fasting on top of a really intense fitness routine. I see that all the time, and it's actually really working against us more than actually healthy habit stacking.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this is where the smart conditioning really matters. We want to be building our aerobic base. We want to incorporate interval work, real good, you know, high-quality, progressive resistance training. You want to increase your walking volume. So again, repetitive, but try to get in those 10,000 steps and try to vary the speed and length of that time. So it's just you're not continuing to do the same walk. Try to mix it up. Mix in walks where you're a little bit more up and down, add parts of that walk where you may be increasing the pace, add that variability, and just make sure that you have a good recovery balance in that mix as well.
SPEAKER_01And we want to adjust for this period of natural aging because we are seeing that men and women during this time can notice poorer recovery or more challenging recovery or things taking longer to recover, changes in the fat distribution, so especially that midsection fat, and we know that that's related with higher chronic disease risk, especially increases in visceral fat, those fatty layers around the internal organs. Midlife is a time when those can shoot up if we're not paying attention to our metabolic health. Our lower exercise tolerance can usually surface at this time, as we discussed, and sleep disruption. We will be talking about sleep and follow in an upcoming episode, but this is obviously a huge tie-in for our recovery and building our respiratory, cardiorespiratory fitness. And what we see is still the research supports exercise is one of the most powerful interventions we have for physical function and metabolic health during this natural aging transitional period in our 40s and even going into the 50s. So both when men and women don't need less training in midlife. We need smarter recovery.
SPEAKER_00And as we move through our into our 50s, 60s, and beyond, conditioning is more for independence, right? We're talking at this stage about independence in regards to still being able to move on your own, not having to rely on any other, whether it be a cane or walker or anything like that. We're trying to avoid that. We want physical resilience, we want physical recovery and preserving our physical freedom. So the key questions we ask ourselves are: are we still able to walk through airports comfortably? Can we recover from illness relatively quickly? Our ability to tolerate travel, climb stairs easily, play with grandchildren, and keep doing life physically and enjoying the things that you like doing physically. If we don't keep these things active, we are doomed to do less of the things that we enjoy. And we keep creating limitations for ourselves instead of enhancing, you know, the quality of our life as we move forward.
SPEAKER_01And I know both of us were when we do our kind of initial intakes and understand the goals of our patients, it's really very oftentimes wanting to keep up with children, grandchildren, you know, stay active and engaging in life and their family and community in the way that they want to. And this is really where we see the difference is made in those who can stay independent and you know fully mobile and functional. But this is the work that has gone in over decades. So we do see this supported by the research where cardiorespiratory fitness becomes one of the strongest markers of healthy aging and mortality risk in older adults. And it can be very basic movement, really can go a long way. But the great thing that we talk about is no matter what age, how early you're starting, if you're recovering from injury, if you're just getting started, maybe in the later decades, fitness remains trainable. And people dramatically underestimate how much conditioning can improve even in later decades of life.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. This is where we say the biggest mistake our older adults make is becoming overly cautious and underloading their cardiovascular system. Again, the fear of getting injury, which is understandable, but because they've been slowly becoming more and more deconditioned through the years, their fear increases and they continue to limit what they're willing to do and how far they're willing to push themselves. So we make smart incremental improvements and add smart stresses to both our loading and when we're doing loading exercises, in doing slow incremental increases in our cardiorespiratory training. You want to constantly be challenging yourselves if you want to keep improving and not because anything, even if you continue to do the same thing year after year, your body just becomes more accustomed to it and more efficient. And if anything, you actually become more deconditioned. So continue to mix up your training, whether it be again the pace, the intensity, the load, all of those changes will make big adaptations for your body. You do not need to stop moving because you age. You age faster because you stop moving.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so thinking of this full discussion, what is the framework for practical longevity conditioning? And so typically this will look like a weekly foundation. So 150 to 300 minutes of weekly aerobic movement, two to four resistance training sessions, and we know that that can vary, but making it a priority. Daily walking, this is something that hopefully is accessible in short spurts or at longer periods of time. One to two higher intensity sessions weekly, if appropriate, and don't forget the mobility and balance exposure.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and your conditioning should support your life, your energy, your body composition, recovery, and your function. It's just not about calorie burn, it's about all doing all these cardiovascular training to benefit the rest of it.
SPEAKER_01So, what all of this means is that the modern longevity conversation is finally shifting away from just aesthetics, looks, and actually towards building capacity. So remembering the priorities of trying to make sure you move well, recover well, tolerate stress, and sustain life physically in the way that you want to. That is real health span.
SPEAKER_00And conditioning is one of the biggest drivers of that outcome. Again, not punishment cardio, not endless exhaustion, not chasing calories, but building an aerobic engine that keeps you energetic, capable, resilient, and independent, uh, especially through every decade. So this is our real goal.
SPEAKER_01We'll be continuing the discussion of our longevity pillars. Thank you for joining for this episode.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for joining us for this conversation. We look forward to the next. Have a great day.