Walking Is Great. Also It’s Not Enough.
The gold standard for keeping your body and brain young basically forevs isn’t walking 10,000 steps a day. (Wait, what?!)
It’s small bursts of discomfort-inducing intensity.
Kind of like what you might have experienced living on the plains with your tribe in prehistory: long periods of lull, followed by sudden physical stress — running from a sabertooth tiger, lifting, carrying, climbing, and thermoregulating your body temperature in the elements.
These small amounts of discomfort really matter. Especially if you’re over 40 (and really—like seriously—especially if you’re over 50).
Think about a typical workout: barre, yoga sculpt, pilates, dance cardio, lifting, running.
Challenging? Yep. Sweaty? Probably. Sore after? Possibly (depends on the specific workout, of course).
But if you never hit a point where you think, “I literally cannot keep doing this,” then you’ve got room for improvement, friends. (Discomfort = 85-90% of your max effort in this context.)
Sounds fun, doesn’t it? But wait — here’s the good news: you don’t need very much intensity in terms of duration to make a meaningful metabolic difference. A little dab will do you (!), as my friend Stacy says when she's doing my hair.
To get specific: aim for at least ten minutes of true high-intensity intervals (including recovery) twice a week (the minimum effective dose!). When done hard enough (again, 85%-90% of your max), that’s enough to kick your metabolism to new level of efficiency (meaning, better mitochondrial function, insulin sensitivity, VO₂ max, and glucose uptake.)
These short bursts of intense movement elevate your metabolic rate immediately, and the elevated afterburn can last 30 minutes to several hours.
Even better: your insulin sensitivity remains elevated for 24–48 hours, depending on intensity and how much muscle you’ve used. That’s huge.
Here’s why: after intense intervals, your muscles act like sponges. They scour your bloodstream for individual glucose molecules to be used as energy — storing them as glycogen in the muscle instead of letting glucose get stored (through a process) as triglycerides in your fat cells and liver.
When you're more insulin sensitive, your muscles step in to vacuum up the glucose before your pancreas has to overcompensate.
Translation: better blood sugar control, more efficient fuel use and storage, better metabolic health.
This is a key component in metabolic flexibility. And it’s all the rage in longevity circles for a reason.
In Backbody Project, this looks like powerful jump squat intervals and their many variations. We use the beat to help us climb the metaphorical mountain — and it works. Our jump sections are full-out for about 60–90 seconds, followed by roughly 30 seconds of recovery. We repeat that 2–4 times in a round, and about three rounds total in a class.
That’s it.
The rest of the workout is our four-part formula: strength, patterns, mobility, and steady-state cardio. All the fun stuff.
To simplify: when you push hard for short bursts, your system is forced to adapt.
And that’s the entire goal of exercise for longevity in one word: adaptation.
We want our bodies to ADAPT to applied force — and to keep getting better at adapting as we get stronger, fitter, and more coordinated.
Even — and especially — as we age.
So don’t give up on your 10,000 steps. There are profound mental and physical benefits there.
But if you want a more efficient metabolism, start layering in intensity.
XO,