Integrating vigorous activity into daily life

This interview with Prof. Marie Murphy was recorded on July 11, 2024.

00:00 Marie Murphy: If during the course of a normal walk you see some stairs or you can take a route where for a short period it becomes more challenging, that’s exactly what we mean. Vigorous intensity and it’s intermittent because you can only do it for a short period. I believe walking is the cornerstone of the solution to population level physical activity

Peter Bowes: VILPA is an acronym that stands for Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Physical Activity. Even spelling it out like that doesn’t adequately explain what this term is all about. But when you dive into it, it makes a lot of sense, and that’s what we’re going to talk about in this episode. Marie Murphy is a professor of exercise and health at Ulster University. Her research focuses on the effect of physical activity and exercise – walking in particular – on our health. 

Hello again, welcome to the Live Long and Master Aging podcast. My name’s Peter Bowes. This is where we explore the science and stories behind human longevity. Professor Murphy, it’s good to talk to you

Marie Murphy: Nice to see you, Peter.

Peter Bowes: Yeah, you too. VILPA it is a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? Could you give me a more of a real-world definition of what it means?

Marie Murphy: Yeah, so vigorous intermittent activity is the type of thing that you might do during the day in short bouts, just as part of your daily life. So I’m thinking you’re late for a bus and you run a little bit or you come to a flight of stairs and you walk briskly up them or you’re perhaps doing some heavy digging in the garden. So you’re not doing any of these things for a long time. They’re short and therefore they’re in short bouts at various times during the day. And that makes them intermittent. They’re also kind of opportunistic. They’re things that you’re doing as part of daily life. So you’re not going to the gym to do these. You’re not doing squat thrusts or burpees or anything like that. You’re not setting out to try to get fit. But inevitably you’re improving your fitness and you’re getting some more physical activity as a natural part of your day. But crucially you’re getting some vigorous activity. Whereas most of the time when we talk about accumulating activity, we talk about walking, we talk about moderate or light activity. This is the vigorous stuff in short bouts.

02:25 Peter Bowes: Understood, so we’re going to dive into that in a little bit more detail. And it’s interesting that there is scientific research, there is data backing up the benefits of this kind of exercise. Before we do that, maybe could you give me a little summary of your career so far? I mentioned briefly what you do and your focus in terms of where you focus on with your research, but what brought you to this point in your career?

Marie Murphy: Yeah, I mean, I was a physical education teacher initially. So when I finished university, I taught physical education for a while. And then when I did postgraduate work, my master’s and my PhD at Loughborough University in England, I was largely looking at exercise physiology. And my interest, particularly for my PhD, was how can you take, or is it possible to take a single bout of exercise?

My history is that I grew up in, academically, I grew up in the 80s and 90s when we used to say you needed to exercise for 20 or 30 minutes continuously in order to get the health benefits. And around the mid 90s, led by the American College of Sports Medicine, they began to say, okay, you could take that 30 minutes and you can split it into shorter bouts. And I was interested in finding out a little bit more about that. Does change the benefit that you get and how. And so my PhD work was looking at splitting continuous bouts of exercise into short bouts and looking at the physiological effect. So looking at the effect on blood pressure, the effect on blood lipids. Then we drifted into looking at, okay, if you eat a meal, normal meals during the day, is it better to do three 10-minute bouts or maybe just do a 30 -minute bout the way we traditionally would have exercised?

That then led me, guess, over the course of 30 odd years to think about all of the health benefits that we get. And as you said in your introduction, I primarily have looked at walking and walking as we know is moderate intensity exercise. And whilst moderate intensity is good for you, we also know that vigorous intensity, if you can do it, gives you even more benefits with an even shorter investment in time.

So applying the same concept, this can you have short little bouts as opposed to prolonged bouts, my colleagues in University of Sydney, Manos Stamatakis came up with this term, this VILPA term, and we wrote a paper where we proposed that, in actual fact, just like moderate intensity, this vigorous intensity in short bouts could give you the same benefits as more traditional vigorous activity – the type of thing that you might go to a gym and do or you might do on a running track. 

Peter Bowes: Well, it’s interesting that you bring up that, because we were all brought up with certain attitudes towards exercise. And you mentioned being someone who grew up in roughly the 1980s. That’s my generation as well. When the prevailing attitude— and I think it still prevails today for a lot of people— is that if you do your bout of exercise every day, if you go to the gym or maybe go for a walk or go for a jog, you’ve done it, and that is going to be enough for you. But based on the signs that you’ve just referenced, attitudes are clearly changing,

Marie Murphy: Yeah, and I think it’s possibly based on the persistent number of people who are inactive, the persistence prevalence of inactivity. So we’ve had these guidelines about physical activity since 1978. ACSM were the first people to come out with their Center for Disease Control. And over the years, every country has guidelines. And despite the existence of these guidelines and despite the knowledge that that quantum of exercise is good for you, most of our populations have this inactivity problem. So about 40 to 50% of our populations in most of the Western world are still inactive. So this thing that maybe you like doing or I like doing, which is going for an hour, going to the gym or putting on a pair of running shoes, actually a lot of people don’t like that. They don’t want to do it. And no matter how much we try to persuade them, they’re not going to do it. So I suppose this intermittent and short bout and splitting up bouts was a reaction to the problem of population level inactivity. How can we make this thing called physical activity, which has such great benefits, how can we make it more palatable? And so researchers like me and others began to think about, we break it up? Will that make it more palatable? Perhaps it will. But we did that on the moderate intensity stuff. And it’s really only more recently that I think the tension has turned to, okay, well, there are opportunities in your daily life if you’re very busy.

to pick up, accumulate, like loose change accumulates in your pocket and then you throw it all on the table and it adds up after a while to a quantum that might be useful and we think that for vigorous activity that makes sense and of course vigorous activity you can’t do for long periods. know, when you do vigorous activity even if you do do it in the gym or on a track, you do it and you take a rest, you do it and you take a rest. That’s the nature of high intensity or high, high, or vigorous physical activity. So why not take that approach over the course of a day? So if the stairs presents itself and you can run up a couple of flights of stairs, you’ve added some vigorous intensity without going near the gym.

07:53 Peter Bowes: And I think one of the challenges is getting people to adopt the mindset that they can do that. In other words, identifying those opportunities during the day and just taking that opportunity. And I’ll just give you one example from myself. And I actually, I exercise quite a lot and it is spread throughout the day. So maybe I’m on the extreme end already of in terms of the number of hours a week that I exercise. However, it’s always good to do more from my perspective. So one thing that I’ve done for a long time is take a one hour walk with the dogs in the morning. It’s quite a vigorous walk. It’s up a hillside, quite a steep hillside, towards the middle of the walk, get to the top of the canyon, and then come back home again. So what I’ve started to do recently, just to add a little bit more, adding only maybe 15 minutes, is to go to the top and then go down the other side, which is quite a steep walk down, and then immediately come back up it, and then come back home. So basically I’ve added a little extra steep walk in the middle of my long morning walk. Does that come into what you’re talking about?

Marie Murphy: Precisely, precisely. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. is my thing. believe walking is the cornerstone of the solution to population level physical activity because most people who can walk, and that’s the majority of people, actually don’t mind walking. walking on its own is generally moderate intensity. As soon as you put it up an incline or hill or soft terrain or carry some weight, that suddenly increases the intensity. So if during the course of a normal walk you see some stairs or you can take a route where for a short period it becomes more challenging, that’s exactly what we mean. Vigorous intensity and it’s intermittent because you can only do it for a short period. Whether that’s lifestyle or not, yeah I think it’s lifestyle because you’re just out for a walk. You’re not there to exercise per se. You’re out for a walk and you’re finding an opportunity in that walk take some stairs or go up an incline or do something a little bit more demanding because it’s that demand and I think this is what we mustn’t miss about the vigorous message. We’ve kind of forgotten the vigorous message. That stimulus for a lot of the health changes that we get, that stimulus is raising the heart rate, increasing the circulation and that you do that more when you do vigorous activity than when you do moderate. So moderate is great. Some is good, more is better But moderate with a, interspersed with a bit of vigorous is probably your best mix.

10:19 Peter Bowes: So you mentioned raising heart rates. How do we quantify that? And what is high enough in terms of reaping the rewards? I hear a lot these days about zone two exercise, which for me is a brisk walk. You can still talk, you might not be able to sing a song and do other things vigorously while you’re taking the exercise, but it’s generally where you’re pushing yourself not to the absolute limit, but you’re feeling a little bit breathless.

Marie Murphy: Exactly. And I suppose it’s really hard to give people heart rates because heart rate, your maximum heart rate changes with age. So the physiology, the textbook would say if you take 207 and you subtract 70% of your age, so 207 minus 70% of your age, that is your theoretical maximum. And so if you then go down into the sort of 50 to 70% of that, you’re at that moderate intensity. And for you, you’re saying that’s a brisk walk.

And then when you’re walking up the hill, it probably shoots up above that. So somewhere between that 70% and the max. But I think that the words that you used are to me much more important. You said you got a bit warmer, your heart was beating, but you were still able to talk. And to me, that’s the crucial threshold. If you can talk, but you’re warmer and you’re breathing heavier, you’re probably doing moderate intensity. You can continue that for quite a period of time. If you go into the vigorous, then chances are you can no longer talk.

You can no longer carry on a conversation comfortably. You’re breathing quite heavily and you can feel your heart beating and you can’t do it for that long. So that to me, zone one, zone two, whatever you want to call it, the simple descriptor is, I can do this activity for a while. I feel that it’s working me. I can do it for 20 minutes, 30 minutes an hour. That’s moderate intensity. Or this is something that I can’t talk. I just have to do it. Yeah, that’s vigorous. It’s kind of as simple as that. There’s not much more to it.

12.12 Peter Bowes: Right, and one of the keys is whether you’re actually using a device to monitor the numbers or it’s just how you feel. One of the keys, I think you would agree, is how quickly we come back down to a plateau in terms of our heart rate. If we get to that peak and then we return home downhill, how quickly does it take for our heart rate to get to the normal sort of resting heart rate?

Marie Murphy: Well, that’s a key measure of fitness and has been for decades is the recovery of your body back to the normal sort of homeostasis and your heart rate comes back down, your breathing comes back to normal. And really that’s what fitness is, your body’s ability to cope with physical activity or exercise. And if you cope with it well, that means that you adjust to it. Your heart rate goes up quickly, your breathing goes up quickly to try to meet the additional demands of oxygen in your muscle and getting the blood, getting the blood, is filled with oxygen to the muscle to make the energy. But then when you stop that, that your body resumes homeostasis and comes back to normal quickly. So if your heart rate comes down quickly after exercise and recovers to a resting heart rate, then that’s a good sign of fitness. So I suppose the more you do those bursts of activity, the more you’re training your body to adapt to them and then recover from them.  That essentially is again what fitness is in simple lay language.

Peter Bowes: And how more generally are we benefiting from this level of fitness? We’ve referred to heart rate, but other aspects of our physiology and especially in terms of potentially preventing future disease.

Marie Murphy: Yeah, okay, well, I suppose the first thing, if we concentrate on the heart and what I should say is the physiology is one thing, we get lots of health benefits, but there is now a mass of evidence to show that we get many other benefits other than just our physiology, the psychology and so many other health benefits. So I wouldn’t want to deny those, but from the physiological point of view, creating the demand on your heart. If your muscles are crying out for more oxygen, then that puts a demand for your heart to beat more. And that changes a couple of things. It keeps the heart, the stroke volume of the heart, the amount of blood that is having to be pumped with each beat. the heart is big, because it’s been exercised, heart’s a muscle. When we exercise muscles, we can grow them or we keep them strong. If it’s a big, strong heart, then with every single beat, it pumps more blood.  Therefore, it needs less heartbeats to pump the same amount of blood. Yeah, if you’re with me. So the analogy is if you have a small bucket and you’re trying to fill the big bucket, it takes more trips. But if you’ve got a big bucket already, which is a big strong heart, then it takes less trips and therefore less beats of the heart. So that’s the first thing. You keep the heart ventricle, and you keep the heart muscle strong by doing that vigorous exercise. Yeah, so by putting big demands, the body is very plastic and if you put big demands on the body, it adapts. And this is the adaptation is to either improve the left ventricle and improve the heart muscle or at least to maintain it and prevent the natural sort of, or you won’t prevent it, but slow down the natural decline in the heart strength and the heart’s elasticity and its ability to be a good pump.

Second thing at the other end where the oxygen is being delivered is in the muscle. So the muscles have little, you know, have energy factories, mitochondria, and what you’re trying to do is make sure that the oxygen gets there, so it’s delivered to the muscle, that it gets into the mitochondria, and that the oxygen can then be used to make energy. And if you do that, if you push that to its capacity. In other words, you make it use as much oxygen as you can give it, then you maintain, I guess, the efficiency of that system, that metabolic system, the factory that allows you to make energy for the muscles to contract.

16:20 Peter Bowes: And more broadly, there’s weight control, providing you have a good balanced diet as well. And you mentioned mitochondrial health, which equates to muscular strength, which equates to fewer chances of you becoming frail as you grow older, and therefore chances of falling as you grow older. And that’s one of the great problems for people as they are less fit and get older is falling, which can sometimes be tragically the beginning of the end in terms of someone’s health.

Marie Murphy: Yeah, I mean the health benefits. So if you then take that was literally just a walkthrough of the kind of cardiovascular benefits. But of course there are the other benefits. First of all, you’re burning calories. You’re burning energy at a higher rate. And this vigorous intensity, you burn them at a higher rate. And whilst I would not be one to say that exercise can solve the obesity and overweight, we absolutely know now that those that do exercise…as well as monitoring their diet or by controlling their calorie intake are more likely to maintain weight loss. So exercise, if you want to get the weight off, then it’s probably a diet issue or is predominantly diet. But if you want to contribute to the increased calorie burning and the increased energy expenditure and to maintain it, then forming an exercise habit, a routine that you keep is good.

And then the other benefit of vigorous is it probably is causing the muscles to pull stronger on the bone. That is a stimulus for the bone to stay healthy, become healthy in younger age, but stay healthy and prevent the demineralization that we see in bone, which leads us, as you say, to sort of weaker osteoporotic bones, which fracture and we’re right, a fracture is often the first step in a cascade of events, which leads us to if not to death, it leads us certainly to needing to live dependently rather than independently. And I suppose that would be the other bit that I want to make sure we mentioned is that vigorous intensity is also good to keep the muscles strong and the muscles need to be strong so that we can continue to do activities of daily living. So, and I mean things as simple as getting on and off the toilet, in and out of the chair, in and out of the bed.

As soon as you can’t do those things, your quality of your life and your independence has to change because you need other people to do that. But that age related decline in muscle mass can at least be attenuated and slowed down by keeping those muscles strong, by doing strength type activities that allow us to maintain the muscle mass. It is on a decline from 30s onwards and we can slow that rate of decline and therefore live healthy for longer. And I suppose then the other bit of the muscle that I suppose neglected to mention is the muscle is using fuels. I mentioned that in the mitochondria we’re going to use up fuels. And the way in which we use fuels and particularly whether we regulate our blood glucose is better in muscles that are used to exercising. So exercising also regularly also helps us to protect us from type 2 diabetes which is very much a very much an adult disease because it’s a disease of many years of the muscle becoming too exposed and not able to deal with glucose. Well exercise gives you a great way of getting the glucose into the muscle and used for muscle contraction for exercise.

19:55 Peter Bowes: And just before we leave walking behind, you mentioned at the beginning, I think it was your last answer, of the much more broader impact of walking in terms of our mental health, our just wellbeing throughout the day. We’re understanding much better now, aren’t we? Just the pure, apart from the physical side of this, the mental benefits that we can get from just taking a long, whether it’s a solitary walk, whether it’s with a friend, whether it’s with the dogs, that there’s a real feel -good factor there, isn’t

Marie Murphy: Yeah, there’s so much evidence now to say that exercise in general has an effect on our mental health and our wellbeing and our mood and it can be a first line treatment for depression, has anti -anxiety effects. And if we kind of get into the subtlety of that, we know that walking in nature, walking in green space and blue space seems to…enhance that, but any walking seems to do it. Now, the mechanisms are many. There are many proposed mechanisms by how it does it, but certainly at least part of that is getting away from whatever it is you’re doing and getting moving in a different environment. You mentioned dog walking. Crucial. We know that people who own dogs accumulate more steps per day. So a dog is a great exercise machine because it’s sitting there beside its leash and the tail wagging lets you know that you’ve got to get up and walk. And I think we learned lots of lessons during COVID. I know certainly here in the UK and in Ireland, it was one of the first times we had prime ministers, presidents, Taoiseachs, heads of state on television in the evening telling us we could leave our house to do what? To go for a walk. And I think we all, it became our thing because you were so locked up. We were almost caged animals for a while and it became the thing predicated your day. was the exciting bit of your day getting out for a walk. So think people then realized the power of this thing that is so simple. Walking, the power of that on our psychology and our mental wellness. I don’t know that we’ve retained it after COVID, but I certainly think that people recognize that walking is a good thing to do to feel healthier and happier as well as a lot of the physical physiological benefits.

Peter Bowes: It was certainly one of the positive messages to come out of Covid and aside from that the message also that underlying medical conditions, the phrase that we heard all the time, those conditions can be mitigated through something as simple as going for a walk. For those people who maybe for whatever reason don’t want to go for a long walk during the day, let’s talk about some of the other vigorous intermittent exercises that we can adopt and one that immediately comes to mind as I standing in front of my desk here, is that we can spend two minutes and do some squats, if we’re able to do some squats. It is vigorous by its very nature, but it doesn’t take very

22:54 Marie Murphy: Yeah, think squats would probably be, if I had to pick one exercise, it’s the one I often go to. And the reason for that is easy. First of all, we know that sitting for long periods of time is not good. It’s not good for our health. Our metabolism slows down. And certainly when you get to a certain age, as I’m beginning to experience, your joints begin to get a little bit sore if you sit for too long anyway. So we know that we want to break up sedentary time. And so that means generally going from sitting to standing.

But above and beyond that, if you do that several times, so if you stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down and do it 10 times, know, an alarm goes on your computer or you hit the hour or in between meetings, we know that that has the capacity to keep some of the biggest muscles in our body strong. So our quads and our glutes, so that’s the muscles in our thigh and the muscles in our butt – they’re the ones that are the big muscles and so to try to keep them strong is really important because they’re our postural muscles, they’re what’s going to allow us to get in and out of our chair, in and out of our bed, in and out of our car in years to come. so squats to me is a lovely easy one. As you say, it can be done indoors, you don’t have to go out. I guess what I would say is that if you’re going to do it, try to make sure you do it right. So in other words, keep your feet hip width or wider apart, keep your knees pointing over your toes and then stand and sit down but don’t quite sit down. What I would say to folk is just rest your bum to the chair and stand back up. Better still if you can do it in a lower chair, so better still if you’re doing it from your armchair rather than your desk chair and certainly without using your arms. So try not to use your arms to get out of the chair, arms in front of you and stand up and sit back down and I certainly use that one as my go -to during the day. On a day like today where I’ve had back -to -back meetings, in between meetings, doing 10 or 15 or 20 or if you can’t do that many maybe it’s only five. Doing those squats are good. If you’re super good and actually your balance is quite good and you’re quite fit, do them on one leg. Yeah, do what we call pistol squats. So put one leg and see if you can do them on one leg to challenge yourself. I think you couldn’t really get a better exercise to do on the spot in your house without needing any extra equipment.

Peter Bowes: And are other aspects of daily life that we might not even consider to be exercise. They’re more like lifestyle attitude interventions. And I’m thinking of— I mean, it’s age -old advice, but use the stairs instead of the lift. Just make the effort to run up the stairs. Find the door that says, and run up the stairs if you’re going to a public building. And the other one that I talk about a lot, again, it’s age -old, and that is when you’re driving somewhere to the supermarket park at the back of the car park as opposed to cramming around, which Americans do a lot, more than I come from England, more than British people seem to do, but really seeking out those spaces right close to the front door. It’s much easier to make life easier for yourself in terms of parking the car, but it gives you bit of exercise as well

25:55 Marie Murphy: Yeah, yeah, a colleague of mine had a very good slide, Professor Steve Blair, who actually sadly died last year, but a very prolific physical activity researcher from the States. He had a lovely slide where he had a fitness center and the fitness center had an escalator and stairs going up to it. Yeah. And people were on the escalator. And he used to say, well, chances are they’re going down to get on the step machine. And likewise, you know, we tried to close as we can to the door of the gym doesn’t make a lot of sense when you think that you’re going to go into the gym and probably walk on the treadmill. So I’ve always seen the stairs as an exercise opportunity. It’s probably your best exercise machine and I know we’ve done several stair climbing interventions in office buildings.

where we say, you know, how many flights of stairs can you accumulate? And that can be done intermittently. So, you know, I kind of have a rule unless it’s over a certain number of floors. For me, that’s six. I always say, unless it’s over six floors, I’m taking the stairs rather than the lift or the elevator. But you might, maybe six is too much, but you might say, okay, if it’s only two floors, I’m definitely, that’s my new room. I’m only gonna, not getting in the elevator for a journey of less than two floors or three or whatever, because the stairs are sitting there. And most of the time, as you rightly kind of indicated, you’ve got to look for the sign. And that’s to me is a shame. think it’s changing over time with new buildings, but in a lot of the buildings you go into, you have a glossy, shiny elevator, a bank of elevators right in front of you. And they are at eye level and they’re where you end up. So if you don’t know a building, that’s where you end up. If you try to look for the stairs or ask for the stairs, very often it’s at the very far end or in a hotel, it drives me crazy. You have to ask. It looks like it’s a fire exit. So you kind of think if I press this, maybe there’s gonna alarm gonna go off and I’m not meant to be here. And then even if you persevere, it’s breeze block and concrete. There’s nothing attractive about. And yet you go into the lift and it’s beautiful. There’s artwork, there’s mirrors, it’s gleaming, it’s glistening. And I do think we could, when we’re thinking about buildings, we could make stairs a much more attractive. And we’ve seen lots of evidence of that where you put a sign on the, right near the elevator where you say, do you realize the stairs are just there and you could benefit your health or you could burn this many more calories. Or in the building that I work with, working in Edinburgh, they say that by doing the stairs, coming to here every day, five days a week, you will have climbed Everest or X mountains in certain number of days. So little nudges or prompts to get us to use the stairs, I think is a perfect way of incorporating some vigorous intensity exercise into your

28:37 Peter Bowes: And one thing that I do is try to set myself a few sort challenges throughout the day. one, a challenge that eventually becomes a habit so that you don’t actually have to think about it as a challenge. And one that I adopted a little while ago was just in terms of parking going to the gym. There are plenty of options. There’s one right next to the gym, right in front of the front door of the gym. And there are multiple for the next half a mile. And I choose the one that’s half a mile away, which is a multi -story parking lot, I usually go to the third or fourth floor, come down the stairs and literally walk half a mile to get to the gym. It only adds about 10 minutes to my, well 20 minutes there and back. But you arrive at the gym actually already warmed up. And again, the fact that you achieve it and it becomes a habit, there’s a certain motivation factor there as well.

Marie Murphy: You’ve hit on two things there. think first of all, you are warmed up and you’re cooled down. Couldn’t get better than a walk for both warming up and cooling down if you want to do formal traditional exercise. But this habit thing to me is really important. And I often say to people, know, students, if I was talking to them, I said, you remember brushing your teeth this morning? And most of them don’t actually remember. They know they did it, but they don’t actually remember doing it because it became, it’s habitual. You do it. You go into the bathroom and it’s part of whatever you do and you put your toothpaste on and there you go.

And if we could make physical activity habitual for you, whatever that means, for you that’s that walk, for me it might be getting off the bus to stop early, or it might be taking the bike to work, or for someone else it might be using the stairs on that to go to visit somebody in an office. But you’re right, making it the habit and becoming the thing that you do means that all of a sudden you’ve accumulated it and you haven’t really even thought about it. You haven’t had to put any conscious effort into it and I think that’s probably those little tricks are what we need to get people who don’t currently do activity and don’t, you know, don’t really maybe like the traditional exercise, you know, the kind of gym based old school, I suppose, exercise.

30:43 Peter Bowes: Well, think that’s a good point, because for some people just the word exercise isn’t appealing. if you phrase it as movement, just incorporating movement in your day… And for some people that can be as simple as maybe washing the dishes by hand as opposed to using a dishwasher. It’s incorporating a little bit of extra… You could almost say old-fashioned movement into your day. Pulling a few weeds out of the garden as you see them sitting there every day. It’s just adopting that habit of doing things the old way, of doing things that involve a bit of physical effort.

Marie Murphy: Yeah, move more, sit less is definitely, and some is good, more is better, are two good adages. But I guess, like you’ve summed it up there, our ancestors didn’t need gyms and they didn’t need to do exercise during the day because they were active as part of their daily life. They didn’t need to call it exercise. They didn’t need to plan it into the day. It was the absolute essential. It was the necessity to either collect food for their family or to work or whatever it was, or to take the kids to school or to get to wherever they were going. So our development as a race or as the human race over many, many centuries has actually conspired against us in some ways. It’s made it possible to live a successful life without being active, I suppose. And yet genetically we’re not much different than those hunter gatherer ancestors who survived survival of the fittest. They survived because they were good at this thing called activity. So I agree, we probably have formalized something called exercise. A lot of people don’t like that. So I think it’s the movement or physical activity and it’s every opportunity. So you talked about standing at the sink doing the dishes, stand on one foot.

Can you do side leg raises? Because we know as we’re all living a bit longer, it’s not just physical activity or just strength, it’s also balance. Because balance helps maintain, our balance is declining. If we maintain our balance, we’re less likely to fall and have all of the other implications of that. So things that maintain your balance or challenging your balance. I don’t know if you’ve seen, there’s been some social media posts which I love is seeing people get on and off the floor. Just active challenges where you try to get yourself down onto the floor and get back up off the floor. That’s a real indicator because it has mobility in there, it has mode of control to figure out which way you’re gonna get up, and it has strength to contract the muscles to raise your 60 or 70 or 80 kilos from low to high. And so something as simple as get down on the floor and get back off the floor a couple of times a day under a controlled condition rather than fall over and have to get up. It’s a great little exercise to do.

33:37 Peter Bowes: Marie, you’ve provided us with some really inspiring ideas, some pointers in terms of movement and exercise. Just in closing, this is a podcast about human longevity. I talk about living longer, but aspiring to a great health span as opposed to lifespan. Maximum health, optimum health without those chronic diseases that creep on us after the age of 50, 60, 70, depending on the individual, but trying to maintain the best of health for as long as possible. For skeptics still who rebuff the idea of taking any more exercise than they’re doing at the moment, what is your inspiration to seek a great healthspan, to keep on going and maintain… I mean it seems obvious even as I’m phrasing the question the reasons why we would do this, but how would you explain it?

Marie Murphy: I don’t have a desperate desire to live to be a hundred so it’s the longevity to me is not the thing I want. Having seen elderly relatives be dependent upon care and lead many years very ill before they eventually died. absolute aim is to whatever years that I’m going to be given on this earth to have as many of active and independent as possible. And I know that being active, the strength training, the balance, the getting on and off the floor, the walking every day, the moving, they are the absolute center pillars of trying to live healthily. I don’t mind. The day that I’m not dependent is the day I don’t want to be here anymore. So I really do want to try to keep as independent and as mobile and as fit as I can be right up until the end. whatever that end it

Peter Bowes: But if you could get to 100 and still enjoy full health, you’d embrace it

Marie Murphy: Happy, more than happy, that’s the thing. I want to be able to get up in the morning and take care of myself. Obviously, I may not be able to do the things I do now, but take care of myself and get out my front door and walk and talk to people and engage. And that’s what I want to be able to do. And if I can do that at 100 or 110, oh, that would be wonderful. But what I don’t want is to be lying there requiring somebody to care and not being able to physically do anything for myself anymore. I think that that would be the thing probably most of us want to avoid if we can and for some people they can’t avoid it. Inevitably some diseases take you down that road but I think moving more will decrease the likelihood that you will end up in that position earlier than you need to.

Peter Bowes: Couldn’t agree with you more. Professor Marie Murphy really enjoyed this, as I say, packed full of inspiration and ideas. Thank you very much indeed.

Marie Murphy: Brilliant, thank you.