At just 22 years old, with more than 6.7 million followers on YouTube and one million on Instagram, content creator Eric Tro has been showcasing expeditions to remote places and a life dedicated to adventure on his channel for years. What many of his followers did not know is that, for the past four years, he has been developing an extreme routine aimed at delaying aging and optimizing every parameter of his body. It is known as health maxxing – an even more obsessive offshoot of so-called biohacking – which basically consists of “trying to achieve maximum longevity. And soon, if science continues to advance at this pace, also immortality,” Tro states.
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The YouTuber has decided to turn his daily routine, which he himself defines as “obsessive, very crazy,” into a documentary, which he will release on his YouTube channel and is titled I spent $100,000 to not age… and I failed. In it, Tro will show a day-to-day life marked by constant monitoring of health and sleep markers, a more than disciplined diet, physical exercise parametrized to the extreme, and maximum respect for circadian rhythms. “When the sun sets, I turn off all the lights in the house and put on red filter glasses. And I never, under any circumstances, leave the house after 9 p.m.,” he summarizes.
The phenomenon does not arise out of nowhere. In the United States, health maxxing has been gaining followers for some time thanks to figures like Bryan Johnson, the 48-year-old tech entrepreneur who invests millions of dollars annually in longevity protocols. His routine, which he shares in detail on his social media, has become an inspiration for thousands of people who monitor sleep, glucose, heart rate, inflammation, or physical performance in the hope of slowing aging.
All this can be seen in the Netflix documentary Don’t Die, The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, which shows how Johnson organizes his life around physiological metrics. His routine includes more than a hundred pills a day, strict sleep schedules, a completely controlled diet, monitored exercise, and experimental treatments.
Among the most striking practices are plasma transfusions performed together with his teenage son Talmage Johnson, who follows in his father’s footsteps and has also become a health maxxing guru on social media. Father and son also carry out light therapy sessions and use hyperbaric chambers aimed at improving cellular oxygenation.
For his part, Tro discovered this universe at 19 years old, at a time when, he explains, he was sleeping poorly and looking to improve his health. “When something interests me, I research thoroughly,” he says. He started with supplements and ended up developing his own protocols based on scientific studies, quarterly clinical analyses, and constant monitoring of biomarkers through a smartwatch.
His daily routine seems designed by a mix of laboratory and monastic retreat. He wakes up every day between 5:30 and 6:30 a.m., regardless of how many hours he has slept, because he considers maintaining constant schedules a priority. During the first hours of the day, he fasts, avoids training, and takes advantage of the time to work and concentrate, following what he calls the natural activation of morning cortisol. At night, he eliminates artificial lights, uses red glasses to minimize light exposure, and goes to bed at nine, wherever he is in the world.
Thorough analysis of everything eaten
Diet occupies a central part of the protocol. He not only counts calories and weighs all the products he consumes, which he rigorously chooses based on the physical activity designed for each day, but he personally selects each food after a thorough analysis. For example, after a detailed study of all extra virgin olive oils on the market, he chose Suerte Alta, from Jaén. “It has the highest level of polyphenols, which are natural anti-inflammatories,” he assures. He always carries it in his suitcase. “I tend to be away from home for weeks, so I try to bring my oils and other foods to be able to follow my routine.”
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The same happens with other foods, such as cocoa. “I chose it because it has a very low concentration of metals. I myself traveled to the Dominican Republic to select it personally and tested it,” he explains. He also consumes daily broccoli sprouts rich in sulforaphane, blueberries, and pomegranate juice, “whose polyphenols improve mitochondrial performance,” he explains. Additionally, his diet includes specific supplement blends aimed at improving the efficiency of cellular mitochondria and reducing inflammation: creatine, taurine, omega 3, vitamin D, glycine, aged garlic extract, or turmeric, among many others.
Exercise also functions as another layer of physiological monitoring. Tro does between three and five hours of zone 2 cardio weekly – a moderate intensity associated with cardiovascular and metabolic improvements – in addition to specific training to increase VO2 max, one of the most currently used markers to measure cardiorespiratory capacity and life expectancy. He adds strength work, mobility, and long physical sessions also aimed at better enduring the expeditions he documents on his channel.
The protocol also includes daily sauna combined with cold baths on the testicles, infrared light therapy, and even occasional tests with hyperbaric chambers, a technique based on high concentrations of oxygen that some studies link to cellular regeneration processes. “My goal is to be the person who ages the least in the world at my age. I believe that one day humans will be immortal,” he states.
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Much of these practices fall within the so-called biohacking, a discipline focused on “hacking” the body through nutrition, monitoring, and precision medicine to optimize health and delay physical deterioration. “The goal is to anticipate the onset of chronic diseases and optimize health to reach old age without multiple pathologies,” explains immunogerontologist Pedro Rodríguez, director of the Longevity and Biohacking department at Clínicas UME.
However, even within this field, many experts try to distance themselves from the most extreme and spectacular versions of the phenomenon. Nutrigenomics specialist Álex Giménez advocates a “natural biohacking” focused on improving sleep, diet, exercise, and circadian rhythms before resorting to invasive therapies or futuristic technologies. “It is absurd to implant a microchip to improve memory without having optimized sleep and nutrition first,” he points out. For Giménez, much of the problem is that the term has ended up becoming a catch-all where medical tools coexist with pseudosciences, very expensive gadgets, and promises of immortality that are difficult to sustain scientifically.
The constant hyper-optimization of the body can end up generating anxiety and an unhealthy relationship with health, according to nutritionist Núria Monfulleda
That is where voices like that of doctor and nutritionist Núria Monfulleda, from the Loveyourself center in Barcelona, introduce some skepticism toward the enthusiasm surrounding health maxxing. In her opinion, many of the practices presented today as revolutionary “are nothing more than healthy habits taken to an extreme level of control.” In her view, although aspects like sleeping better, reducing ultra-processed foods, or exercising have solid scientific backing, the constant hyper-optimization of the body can end up generating anxiety and an unhealthy relationship with health. “It shouldn’t be hyped up more,” she summarizes.
Here appears one of the great paradoxes of health maxxing: the obsessive pursuit of well-being can end up resembling more a discipline of total control than a healthy life. In this sense, Tro acknowledges that his lifestyle distances him from most people his age. “No one understands it,” he laments. Because maybe, deep down, behind health maxxing there is not only fear of getting sick or aging, but a much more contemporary idea: that the body, like a machine, can always be optimized a little more.
