Welcome to the final week of hacking exercise for health. At the beginning of this course, we pose a question. Do you remember? Which is better for you cardio training which builds cardio-respiratory fitness or strength training which sees you gain muscle mass and strength? Do you want to be current marathon World Champion, Dennis Kimetto or Mr. Olympia, Phil Heath? Current women's marathon world record holder, Paula Radcliffe or Miss Olympia, Juliana Malacarne? What do you think? What's the better option for long-term health and fitness? Make your choice at the following poll. Wait, wait. Hold on just a second Dr. Gabbalah. Isn't this a false choice? I mean, people have other options besides just performing cardio or strength training, right? Like what? You could do both. You could also do nothing. Yeah. That's the choice a lot more people make than I'd like. Okay. So let's provide four options for this poll. What's better for your health? Is it cardio training? Strength training? Performing neither of them? That is doing neither cardio nor strength training. Or the final option, doing both? Performing at some point both cardio and strength training. Choose one of the four options. Great. Now that you've made your pick, we'll tell you what the science says. The science suggests the answer is both. The best thing for your health to ensure that you live a long and healthy life is to regularly perform both strength and cardio training. The best thing for you isn't cardio or strength training. It's cardio and strength training. In this video, we'll tell you about the science that proves this. Then in the next several videos, we'll teach you some workouts that will help you to do both in less time than you ever thought possible. We'll also teach you to design your own workouts to combine cardio and strength training. We'll discuss some unexpected benefits of exercise and we'll make some predictions on the future of physical fitness. Finally, we'll leave you with the top 10 tips and tricks for how to become a lifelong exerciser. Now let's get to the science. My favorite part. One March 2018 study used UK data on about 80,000 unique participants. Regular people who researchers followed for years to track their health, their cardio and strength fitness, whether they died and if so, how? Now as you might expect, higher cardio-respiratory fitness was associated with a smaller risk of dying from either all-cause death or cardiovascular disease or cancer. The more in shape you were, the longer you live basically. Something similar happened to people the stronger they were. The strongest people tended to also be the ones least likely to die from all-causes. But the people who were least likely to die from all-causes as well as cardiovascular disease were the ones that were both in shape and strong. The point is that strength and cardio fitness both were important. The same results have been replicated time and time again in different sorts of studies called randomized controlled trials. For example, a 2012 Australian study put several groups of overweight and obese people through 12 weeks of training. One group did all cardio, one did all strength training and the third group did a combination. The combined group saw greater benefits for weight loss, fat loss and cardio-respiratory fitness. Another Australian study found that combining strength training with aerobic training featured something of a multiplier effect in populations with coronary heart disease. Essentially, the finding was, cardio will make you fit and strength training will make you strong and both cardio and straight training together will make you even more fit and strong than either alone. We began this course with something of a false question. Which form of training is better for you? Cardio workouts, strength training and the answer is a little of both. The best thing to do is both. Stewart and I do both ourselves. But we recognize that the prospect of doing both might sound difficult to a lot of people. We expect the beginning exercisers might have all sorts of questions. How exactly do you do both? Should you go running while bench pressing? Swimming with barbells? Cycling while conducting upright rows? No. If you have questions that occur to you, feel free to tweet them at the hashtag hacking exercise for health. Meanwhile, note that lots of ways exist to conduct both strength and cardio together. We'll discuss some of the ones that we like best in our next video. But before we get to that, we'd like you to think about the practicalities of combining strength and cardio into your exercise routine.# That's right. Spend some time coming up with a weekly plan that combines elements of the two types of exercise. Describe it in a video that you record and post it on our Flipgrid space. Later this week, we'll ask you to reassess your plan.