Is 20 minutes of exercise the new longevity recipe? This high-powered lawyer thinks so.

• A small study is testing a combination of exercise, supplements, and drugs for longevity.
• The first patient said he feels less stiff since he started the program.
• Researchers suspect the biggest effects come from about 20 minutes of exercise a day.

Robert Profusek likes a routine.

Every weekday, he rises at 4 a.m. That's enough time for the high-powered lawyer to get in an efficient exercise session before the workday begins.

"I'm sort of obsessive-compulsive, sort of a normal lawyer's personality," he quipped.

A former Cornell football player, Profusek has always considered physical fitness integral to his personal and professional success.

"Sports were the ticket for me to get out of the cow town I grew up in," the native Ohioan told Business Insider from his office in Manhattan, as stacks of legal paperwork continued to pile up on the desk behind him, even as we were talking. "I would never have been able to pay for college without sports."

Now 76, he had settled into a simple but consistent home gym rotation of treadmill runs, stationary biking, elliptical pedaling, and weight training to keep himself fit.

"I like the comfort of being regimented," he said.

So when a friend suggested he shake up his routine by becoming the very first patient in a new clinical trial testing whether exercise and a few cheap pills can improve healthy aging and longevity, Profusek said: "Well, I'll try it, but only if it fits within my regimen."

The results of the six-month trial — he said — have been habit-shaking. The septuagenarian is committed to a new set of simple, 20-minute daily fitness moves he learned during a new and unusual longevity study, called NYC-Vita, led by researchers at Mount Sinai in New York City. They're short exercises you can do at home with little to no equipment.

Researchers hope that these moves, in conjunction with one daily supplement and a cheap anti-inflammatory drug, can measurably boost human longevity.

"If there is a way to extend not your youth, but your wellness," he said, "that's a really pretty cool thing. We'll see."

It's about 20 minutes of activity per day

This longevity trial, part of the global XPRIZE Healthspan competition, which challenges teams to extend healthy years of life by 10 to 20 years, is a small safety-testing pilot study with only 20 participants.

The simple exercise protocol it uses, however, could be replicated almost anywhere. It is a program structured around five days of exercise a week that includes 160 minutes of exercise a week, or about 22 minutes of daily physical activity, on average:

• Two days of high intensity interval training (HIIT) a week

  • Duration: 20 minutes, which includes a warm-up and 90-second breaks between sets

• Three days of resistance training a week

  • Duration: 40 minutes, using resistance bands of varying difficulty.

That's it.

This is what Profusek loves about the program. He feels it's an efficient way to get fit.

"When I'm done with this. I'm kind of pooped," he said of the twice-weekly HIIT routine, which reintroduced him to the jumping jacks he used to do as a kid. He'd always thought of them as a simple warmup move, and something you performed maybe 10 at a time, but these new HIIT-style jumping jacks are a whole new beast.

"You didn't do 60 in 60 seconds," he said. "For a guy my age, you're really smoking if you do that."

On the other three workout days each week, patients work with bands, using their body weight and the rubber's resistance to build strength.

The trial also includes supplements and low-dose anti-inflammatories

In addition to the exercises, Profusek is instructed to take one daily supplement popular with the longevity crowd: spermidine, which researchers suspect may help with recovery and muscle building.

Finally, about once a week, he takes a low-dose prescription drug that's wildly popular with longevity enthusiasts called rapamycin. Investigators think it's possible that rapamycin, an immunosuppressant drug typically used in organ transplantation, may — at very low weekly doses — decrease inflammation and improve longevity.

"I think exercise probably is the most important component of our intervention," lead study investigator Dr. Thomas Marron, an immunologist and oncologist at Mount Sinai, told Business Insider, but he suspects that the pills may also contribute to any health gains researchers might see, in a synergistic way.

"We want to really see: Are these things working? And what exactly are they doing in the body?" he said.

For years, biohackers have been popping their own makeshift doses of rapamycin, hoping it'll help them age better. Could it be there's something to that?

With this trial, researchers hope to at least begin developing more reliable data on the idea.

He feels great: fewer aches, faster reflexes

Profusek doesn't know whether it's the exercise, the drug, the supplement, or some combination of the three, but he loves how he feels since he started this new program.

So much so that he said it's now a permanent part of his 4 a.m. gym sessions. Profusek still adds in some of his old standbys, like some treadmill time, weights, or a jog on the elliptical here and there, "but that's not the feature" anymore, he said. The longevity training program is the main event.

Profusek said it's been gratifying to see his quick progress. When he started six months ago, he was only doing 30 jumping jacks in 60 seconds. In the time since, he's doubled that record. He's up to one jack per second.

"I think making that progress made it much more interesting for me because it almost became a little bit of a competition with myself," he said.

He's not sure whether to attribute it to the exercise, the drug, the supplement, or just dumb luck, but he swears that he can spring out of bed better than he used to since he started this routine too.

"I feel better in the morning — I don't feel nearly as stiff," Profusek said. "I don't know if that's just that I'm in better shape. What does it mean?"

One of his friends, another former football player, has also started doing the exercises, and they now compete for the unofficial leaderboard position of who can do the most jumping jacks in one minute.

"Our ultimate goal is to get everyone to age in a much more healthy way," Marron said.

For Profusek, the trial has sparked a welcome change he plans to adhere to for the long haul.

"What makes this attractive is that it's not so disruptive," he said. "You can fit your life around it like nothing."