Norwegian 4x4: Reverse Heart Age by 20 Years

Norwegian 4x4: Reverse Heart Age by 20 Years

Hello everybody, this is Dr. Aaron Seaton with The Chiropractic Place. And today's video is about these 4x4 Norwegian workouts. I wanted to talk about this because in my office, we tend to have a lot of conversations with our patients about longevity, about long-term health and well-being.

And the research on this type of training is pretty interesting. So what the study showed is they took groups that were in the 50-year-old range. And these are people who were exercising consistently already and they were measuring their heart, measuring things about their heart function and really objectively looking at how we can improve that.

So what they did was the one thing they introduced with these patients is that they put them on this 4x4 workout protocol once a week and they tracked them for four years. And the results of this were amazing. What they were able to demonstrate is that they were able to reduce their heart age by 20 years just by doing this once a week, meaning they were reversing the stiffness and damage in there, the early onsets of cardiovascular disease.

They were able to reverse these things by introducing this type of training once a week to these people, which is pretty amazing. The other thing that it showed is this is one of the best ways to actually increase your VO2 max, which is your lungs max ability to bring oxygen in. That is still the number one predictor for longevity when you age is how much oxygen you can take in through your lungs and get into your body.

So this is the best way to raise that up. And so how do you do this type of training? Well what you're doing are these types of intervals. You do it four times.

Typically you want to warm up. These patients were warming up, I think between five and 10 minutes, you know, get loose, get some sweat going. And then what you do is the first interval is a four minute at your 75 to 80% max heart rate in that range, right? So you're really working, but you have to be able to sustain that for four minutes.

So we don't want to be at 95 100% max heart rate because you're not going to be able to sustain that for four minutes. So you're trying to get it up. And then you're immediately following that with three minutes of recovery.

So if you're doing this on a treadmill and really running hard after your four minutes, you drop down for three straight minutes of just walking. Just let the heart rest, get that heart rate down. And so this is called a four by four because you do that four times, four minutes on, take your three minute rest.

Your next interval would be another four minutes. So you do that four times and then at the end you usually want to cool down. I would probably cool down for more than three minutes, more like five to 10 minutes of walking after the end of this.

But again, this group was only doing that once a week and they were tracking it for 20 years or for two years and they saw a 20 year reduction in the age of the heart. And what that means is as we get older, our heart tends to get a little smaller. It can get stiffer.

We become more prone to cardiovascular illness. So the group two that they did this on were in their fifties. And so when they measured after two years, their heart age was like that of somebody in their thirties, which is pretty darn tremendous.

That's a huge change. There's not a surgery or a drug out there that that's that effective. So if you're already training and you want to try incorporating some of these, you can look it up online.

It's called a Norwegian four by four. There's a lot of people talking about this like Dr. Peter Attia and then Dr. Rhonda Patrick. She's also discussing the Norwegian four by four training. Just another cool thing that you can do to keep yourself healthy and increase your longevity. I'm Dr. Aaron Seaton with The Chiropractic Place.

 

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