The Beginner’s Guide to Longevity Training

Somewhere along the way, fitness became about Instagram-compatible before and after pics rather than living well. The industry optimizes you for your twenties, but what happens at forty, sixty? Seventy? In a culture obsessed with unrealistic body types, we’ve lost sight of what actually matters: how you’ll move, feel, and function for decades to come.

Maybe you want that Instagram-worthy booty or bicep everyone’s talking about. Or maybe your goals are more performance-driven: run a marathon next year, nail your first pull-up, master a proper push-up. I get it—whether it’s aesthetics or achievement, these goals sound great, look impressive, and are easy to talk or post about.

But is one goal actually a good indicator of your health? Partially.

For that, we need to approach goals differently. Besides asking “How do I want to look?”, we should ask the more important questions: What am I capable of right now, and what do I want to be capable of in the future? What’s my goal for ten years from now? Twenty years? How will I move when I reach my sixties and beyond?

This shift in perspective didn’t come naturally to me—it took years of getting it wrong.

Hunting for personal records kept me going for some years, but my results were all over the place—great when I was healthy and motivated, terrible when I wasn’t. To find consistency, I tried bringing in variety: skill-focused training away from the gym, yoga, movement practices. But eventually, injury struck again. I started doubting the whole endeavor: What am I doing here? Why am I doing it? What do I actually want to achieve?

After yet another injury, I found myself in my doctor’s office. “You’re in your mid-thirties,” he said, “sitting at a desk eight hours a day, then pushing yourself to the brink on weekends. It catches up.”

That’s when I rewrote my goals entirely—from looks and “showing up” to function:

• Be healthy
• Move without pain
• Be capable—run, jump, press, pull myself up when needed

In searching for the right training approach for my new goals, I stumbled on a podcast about “training for longevity.” The host asked: “What do you want to be capable of when you’re old?”

It hit me immediately. The answer was the same list I’d just written. I want to be healthy when I’m old. Pain-free. Still doing things. Living fully.

Thinking about that active, mobile, independent older version of myself gave me new motivation—the kind that doesn’t disappear when I’m sore or having a bad week. I’m willing to put in the work now for long healthspan, for quality of life at every age. For longevity.

Here’s the thing about this approach: training is always delayed gratification. If the goal is to be fit in your forties, it takes your thirties to build that foundation. And the earlier you start building a broad, stable base, the longer it lasts.

This isn’t about Instagram-worthy glutes or biceps. It’s not about being the best marathon runner or having the biggest bench press. It’s about a holistic, purpose-driven approach to training, movement, and progress. Done right, the physical development follows naturally.

A note on where this comes from

I’m not inventing anything new here. Peter Attia’s work on what he calls “the Marginal Decade” changed how I think about training. Huberman’s protocols gave me structure. Rhonda Patrick’s research shaped my understanding of the science.

What I’m doing is synthesizing the best research and figuring out how to actually implement it — while running a business, managing client work, and dealing with all the same constraints you have.

This isn’t about biohacking or living to 120. It’s about building the capacity to do what matters to you — for decades.

What does “longevity training” actually mean?

It’s not about living forever. It’s about the difference between healthspan and lifespan.

You can become 85, spending the last 10 years immobilised or bedridden. Or you can become 80, dropping dead mid-track running that marathon you planned to impress your grandchildren. Shorter lifespan, longer healthspan, better quality of life.

Ageing while doing what you love. Not achievable for everyone (genetics, prior lifestyle, external factors), but it’s a goal worth setting.

The pillars of a long healthspan:

• Strength
• Cardiovascular performance and health
• Mobility
• Stress management
• Recovery

If these pillars are equally developed, you are on the right track. But most of the time, people tend to have deficits in some of them. Additionally, we tend to focus on just one aspect of training or fitness. Being lean, being muscular, or being good at running or cycling. Doing yoga 4 times a week, walking 10k steps a day. All valid — but none of it creates the broad foundation I mentioned.

Different goals require different training.

Running trains your cardiovascular system, yes. Improving cardiorespiratory fitness from low to even below-average levels significantly reduces mortality risk. Research shows the biggest mortality benefit comes from moving out of the lowest 25% fitness category (Mandsager et al., 2018).

But how does this help you when stumbling over a stone, breaking the weakened bones in your shoulder? On the other side, how does this nice booty or bicep of yours help you not get a heart attack? Health is multidimensional. And we have to take this into account when planning what we train.

Other factors matter too: body composition, genetics, chronic disease. Some we can’t control. Others are tightly connected to the pillars above and improve when we work on them.

The reality check

Training for longevity takes real time and effort. It's multidimensional — you can't address it with a training monoculture.

If you want your training to have a considerable impact on your healthspan, it takes about 6+ hours a week of consistent training to get there. And there is no shortcut. Muscle decline and bone loss are facts, and the best way to address them is through training, which takes time. Training your cardiovascular system as well needs quite a high weekly volume, and all this following your day job, family life and social responsibilities.

A training regime would look like this, and there is no sugar coating to cover up how demanding this is:

• Resistance Training – 3 Sessions a week minimum
• Aerobic efficiency – 180 minutes of Zone 2 training (45 minutes min. per session)
• VO2 max – At least one session of “real” HIIT per week

The five pillars explained

Why train all of these dimensions? Maybe you’re already active. That’s good — but activity alone isn’t enough. Here’s what each pillar does and why it matters.

Strength Training

When ageing, muscle mass is the currency spent along the way. We should try to accumulate as much of it as possible. Muscle preservation and regular training are mandatory. Strength seems to be a bit more important for longevity than just mass, as the latest studies are showing. So it is important to prioritise strength training (how strong are you) over hypertrophy (how big are you).

But nevertheless, muscle mass serves a lot of functions. Metabolic health, for example. Also, it supports your skeleton, which is in favour of your joints. Through training your muscles heavily enough, you stimulate bone density, which literally provides the foundation you are walking on.

And latest science indicates that muscles produce myokines that support an increasing range of processes (Regulating metabolism, anti-inflammatory effects, improving insulin sensitivity and more) and are stimulated by training. And muscles keep you going. No muscle, no movement – ok, same for heart rate, but you get what I mean.

An important distinction to make here: strength training doesn’t mean going to the gym and attending a body pump session or attending a pilates class for core strength or lifting these 10kg 12 times like for the last 5 years. Strength training means a structured, progressive overload-focused training including compound movements and high intensity. Some people will achieve similar results with high-volume callisthenics, but this is more an exception than the norm.

Cardiovascular Training

Cardiovascular health and performance are one of the primary factors for all-cause mortality. Peter Attia, physician and expert in the field of longevity, even describes Cardiovascular Disease as one of the four horsemen of chronic disease. This includes conditions like heart attacks and strokes, which are leading causes of death globally.

So it is mandatory to train for cardiovascular health, and this includes aerobic efficiency training (moderate / Zone2 training), but also VO2 max training – these sessions where you think you pass out or puke or both.

You could imagine it like this: aerobic efficiency describes the size of your tank, while the VO2 max, the maximal output of your aerobic system, describes the power you can produce, utilising this hopefully large tank. The one without the other is, for our case, useless. That’s the difference to a sprinter, for example, who needs an extreme burst of energy but not necessarily a large tank when sprinting 100m.

Mobility

Studies show that low mobility is linked to an increased risk of all-cause mortality, particularly in older adults.

Increased mobility often comes with enhanced physical fitness, reduced obesity, improved metabolic health, and lower inflammation, all of which contribute to longevity. Better movers have better mobility.

Stress

Stress is a complicated one because it impacts health on so many levels. Knowing that stress is detrimental to our health, but at the same time knowing that it is hard to avoid stress entirely, the focus is on stress management. That means reducing stress where possible but also learning how to manage it — how to reframe stress in ways that are less harmful. Research suggests this is possible (The Telomere Effect).

Minimising stress is important because cortisol, a hormone and strong indicator for your stress levels, can undermine your strength training results when not kept in check and accelerate ageing when chronically high. Of course, stress is not always harmful, and there is indeed a certain amount of positive stress, and that’s the point – we have to balance those two kinds of stress to optimise healthspan.

Recovery and Lifestyle

Last but not least, recovery. Or put simply: sleep in most cases. Sleep, like stress, is tricky. Because the effects are not immediate. Yes, we all know the feeling of a short night, but normally we rebound after one or two days. But the effects accumulate.

Chronic sleep deprivation is something you can notice when you compare two individuals, same lifestyle, same age, but one looks more aged than the other. More wrinkles, grey hairs, more small health issues, etc. This often can be traced back to a sleep deficit or dysfunctional sleep patterns, sustained over years or decades.

So fixing sleep is one major thing to do, and surprisingly, it seems that sleep regularity is a stronger predictor for a longer healthspan than just sleep duration.

Recovery encompasses also recovery from training, managing fatigue and optimising training programs. Doing a heavy leg workout on one day and then doing a long run the other day may not be optimal for your recovery. And while a twenty-two-year-old will get away with this, you will definitely feel it in your thirties. So a structured program is crucial.

Building the habit

So, how should it be possible to press a 6+ hours routine into our already busy lives?

There is no one answer. And because I don’t want to lecture you on screen time or Netflix habits, I’ll suggest another approach.

Because we are not in pursuit of this 30-day body transformation that you could possibly make room for in your life, the more sustainable way would be to cultivate habits. And by incorporating new, healthy, longevity-focused habits into our lives, we piece by piece build our lives around these longevity-focused practices and protocols.

For most of us, it is impossible to just flip the switch and train 6 hours a week. We have to adjust to this, adapt mentally and physically and by slowly ramping up the volume, we build sustainable habits.

For example: start with one session of strength training and one Zone 2 session a week. Keep this up for 4 or 6 weeks and then integrate another session of strength training. Then you again get used to the routine, and step by step you build up to a full protocol.

And it is totally fine if it takes you two or three months to get there. Habits form over a span of about 60 days to stick and sink in. The most important thing is that you started.

A sample training week

When you ramped up your training and had a solid routine, a full week of training could look similar to this:

Monday - Full Body strength training

Tuesday - Moderate Zone 2 training (slow run)

Wednesday - Upper Body Strength training

Thursday - Short VO2 max Session

Friday - Full Body strength training

Saturday - Moderate Zone 2 training (bike)

Sunday - Rest day

Daily: 5–10 minutes of stress reduction or mindfulness practice, 5–10 minutes of mobility routine

If you follow a Split program or a full body program, if you prefer riding a bike or hitting the treadmill, this is your decision and comes down to what is accessible to you, what constraints there are, and most importantly, what supports training adherence the most.

The best protocol is worthless if you don’t stick to it. If you hate running, fine. Take the bike or go for a swim. Hitting Zone 2 is the important thing.

Also, I would highly recommend making an appointment with a trainer at your local gym. You don’t have to spend a fortune on personal trainers; often, gyms offer free consulting sessions or checkups. Make use of them. Learn the basic techniques. And use every occasion to get better and improve.

What’s next

That’s a lot to take in — and a lot to track. That’s why I’m building the25percent app: a structured system for longevity training that helps you implement all of this, not just understand it.

The app launches soon. If you want to be notified when it’s available, subscribe to the newsletter. Every two weeks, I share protocols, progress, and what I’m learning along the way.

Sources & References

Muscle Physiology & Aging

• Volpi, E., Sheffield-Moore, M., Rasmussen, B.B., & Wolfe, R.R. (2004). Muscle tissue changes with aging. Journal of Gerontology: Series A, 59(10), M1030–M1039.
• Cleveland Clinic. (2025). Sarcopenia (Muscle Loss): Symptoms & Causes.
• Nature Publishing Group. (2025). Prevalence and influencing factors of sarcopenia among older adults. Nature Aging, 2, 1025–1038.

Cardiorespiratory Fitness & Longevity

• Mandsager, K., Harb, S., Cremer, A., Nissen, S.E., & Juraschek, S. (2018). Association of Cardiorespiratory Fitness With Long-Term Mortality Among US Screenees. JAMA Network Open, 1(4), e186056.
• Attia, P. (2024). How does VO2 max correlate with longevity? The Peter Attia Drive.

Bone Health & Menopause

• Endocrine Society. (2024). Menopause and Bone Loss. Patient Education Library.
• Nature Publishing Group. (2025). Effect of different types of exercise on bone mineral density in postmenopausal women. Nature Reviews Endocrinology, 21(2), 105–120.

Exercise-Induced Myokines

• Severinsen, M.C.K., & Pedersen, B.K. (2020). Muscle–Organ Crosstalk: The Emerging Roles of Myokines. Biology of Reproduction, 103(2), 143–157.
• Brandt, C., & Pedersen, B.K. (2010). The role of exercise-induced myokines in muscle homeostasis. Journal of Physiology, 588(20), 4115–4125.

Cardiovascular Disease & Global Health Burden

• World Health Organization. (2021). Cardiovascular Diseases (CVDs). WHO Fact Sheets.

Sleep Quality & Longevity

• Windred, D.P., et al. (2024). Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration. SLEEP, 47(1), zsad253.

Stress, Cortisol & Biological Aging

• Colorado State University Healthy Aging Center. (2025). Does stress determine how quickly we age?

Strength Training & Lifespan

• Harvard Medical School. (2020). Strength training might lengthen life. Harvard Health Publishing.