Stay Extra Alive with 30-Second Death Struggles
By Tom Kagy | 24 Jul, 2025

Intervals of intense exertion are what keeps bodies youthful by releasing human growth hormones.

How much do you exert yourself each day?  The answer to that question determines whether your inner sloth or your inner tiger is ascendant.

For human beings mental exertion is important to vitality and goals, but the dynamics of optimal mental exertion differ from optimal physical exertion, though both types originate in the brain, the god of effort.

When it comes to physical exertion, what matters most is intensity.  A threshold level of intensity is required to trigger changes in your body through the release of human growth hormone (HGH).  The release of HGH and HGF-1 is needed to build muscle, bone density, cartilage thickness, regrow skin and hair, and elevate your overall metabolic capacity.

For the hormonal release to be meaningful the exertion level should be about 92 - 98% the intensity of a life-or-death struggle.  Obviously this is a subjective measure, one only you can feel based on your level of actual vitality.  One person's death-struggle intensity may look like the lamest of play-acting to another.

Why not 100%?  Because that kind of adrenalized exertion would leave you too exhausted to do much else for the rest of the day while shutting down your immune system, leaving your body exposed for hours to viral and bacterial surges.  Also, you wouldn't be able to sustain and repeat that degree of intensity long enough and enough times to change your physique.

But why not, say, 65%?  Because 65% is too little to release HGH with brief exertions.  At 65% you're getting a cardiovascular workout but only if you sustain it for a minimum of 10 - 15 minutes.  To get significant HGH release at 65% effort would require sustaining that level for at least 25 - 30 minutes.  That type of cardio is essential for overall fitness, but doesn't provide the same benefits as bouts of intense exertion.

The most efficient activities for releasing HGH are those that make you huff and puff within a few seconds of starting: squats, windsprints, pullups, gorilla jumps, handstand flexed-arm hanging leg lifts, pushups, dumbell or barbell rows, bear crawls,  etc.

By contrast walking or cycling at normal speeds (i.e. about 65% of death-struggle) would need to be sustained 20 - 30 minutes to release significant growth hormones.  And the level of hormones released by cardio activities is low relative to the total energy expended, making cardiovascular activity fairly inefficient for changing your physique even as it improves your overall cardiovascular efficiency.  

So what's special about 30 seconds?  It's a rule of thumb that optimizes intensity and duration.  Mercifully the effective duration of intense physical exertion is measured in seconds, not minutes and hours the way cardiovascular workouts and intellectual exertion are measured.  Even a few seconds of intense effort is helpful but meaningful results would require between 30 seconds and 1 minute of sustained intense effort.  You would have to find a duration that lets you get intense while leaving you energized rather than devastated.  I tend to shoot for about 45 - 50 seconds for my intense exertions.  

How many exertions per day?  That's a function of your fitness, mental toughness and what else you're doing that day.  The number of death struggles (that's how they feel to me) I might do ranges from zero, when I'm feeling sick or fatigued, to two or three when combined with a significant amount of cardio, to six with a modest amount of cardio that day.

Daily death struggles are the most efficient way to live young and toned.