← BETTER! with Dr. Stephanie Estima | Strength, Body Composition & Perimenopause
BETTER! with Dr. Stephanie Estima | Strength, Body Composition & Perimenopause
The Real History of Women Who Lift: From Cardio Bunny to Muscle Mommy with Michael Joseph Gross
01:34:37
Strength, particularly real muscular strength, and undertaking challenging tasks have been integral to women’s cultural history, a history we have only recently begun to acknowledge. Michael Joseph Gross explains how incorporating weight training into your routine can significantly enhance your quality of life, regardless of your age. Watch the full episode at https://youtu.be/FsR93SAPPeA
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- [00:00]
A
For 2000 years, we have all been caught in the middle of a giant game of tug of war between doctors and trainers. You've got doctors on one side saying that everybody needs to aim for stable, balanced health, and on the other side you've got trainers saying that you really need to be aiming for excellence. And that tension is really what created the myth of brain versus brawn. Doctors decided that a really effective way of building up their own authority was to put down heavy, meaty athletes. Point to those guys and say, that's what happens if you go too far with athletic training.
- [00:54]
B
Hello, welcome to another episode of better with Dr. Stephanie tis me, your host as always, Dr. Stephanie Estima. Today we are gonna go on a different geeky magic carpet ride. Together we are gonna talk about the history of muscle. Some of the myths from some of our early foremothers and forefathers around muscle building and which of those perseverate today. My guest is Michael Joseph Gross. He is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, New and the Atlantic. And his latest book, which is what we discussed today, is called Stronger the Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives. And this book is gonna tell us why muscle is more than aesthetics. It is central for our health, our independence, and even our identity. So who is this for? Why should you listen to this episode? Well, if you are someone who is new to weightlifting and you're a woman and you're scared of getting bulky, we talk about where some of these myths come from and why they still exist and persevere today. If you are someone who has been lifting weights and you're very, you know, loud and proud and you love the muscle that you've been able to put on your body. I think that this is going to orient you to the community of women and men who have come before you in a long way. Back to the Victorian era. Spoiler alert. Way back to the Victorian era where women were lifting weights. And I think that you're going to find yourself part of a lineage, if you will, of, of people who lift weight, weights. And I think that this book in general sounds a call, an urgent call for us to recognize muscle as the vital and inextricable, effective partner of the soul. I really was delighted by this conversation. I think you're going to get so much from it. Whether you are orienting yourself anew to weights or you are a seasoned athlete, you are. Everybody is going to find something here in terms of how the Greeks, how the Romans, how Arnold Schwarzenegger and all of the all of the images of muscle beforehand have shaped our our views around what this meat sack actually is. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Michael Joseph Gross. This is your year to look and feel younger, to have more energy and to be your strongest ever. And cellular health is the foundation to all of these goals. In order to maximize your cellular health, Urolithin A supplementation should be in your toolkit. Mitopure is a precise dose of Urolithin A which works by promoting an essential cellular cleanup process that clears out dysfunctional mitochondria that are not being as effective as they can be. Mitopure is the only Urolithin A supplement on the market clinically proven to target the effects of age related cellular decline. It literally makes you look and feel younger, have more energy and gain muscle strength faster. Several studies might appear has been shown to deliver double digit increases in muscle strength and endurance without changing anything in your exercise program. Yay. Win Win. I take two capsules daily to look my best, to feel my best and to maximize my muscle strength gains. I feel stronger in my workouts, I recover quicker from working out and I have more energy. Timeline is offering 10 off of your order of might appear. Go to timeline.com forward/better. That's t I M E L I N. Michael Joseph Gross, I'm so thrilled to welcome you to the show today. Welcome.
- [04:40]
A
Thank you so much for having me.
- [04:44]
B
Your book is fascinating. The book is called the Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives and I've read a lot of books on muscle. Certainly talk about muscle a lot on the show. One of the things that I think is so unique about the way that you've structured this conversation is this idea looking at the history of muscle, how we have viewed it in a historical context from the Greeks and the Romans, which we'll talk about. But then some of the we'll say perseverating views of muscle that are still true today. So I want to deconstruct that a little bit for the listener, particularly my perimenopausal menopausal women who are now being asked, okay, no more cardio bunny, now you gotta be a muscle mommy. And then all of the, and all of the sort of myth busting that I actually feel that I'm constantly doing with women around bulk and getting too big, too strong, you know. So I wanted to maybe start off by anchoring this conversation in a historical context, looking at the way that maybe the Greeks, the, the Greeks and the Romans viewed muscle. Certainly whenever I'VE been to trips to Greece or to Italy. You know, going into looking at some of the art sculptures of David, let's say, in Florence, the exquisite amount of detail around the muscle would make you think that they had a very strong understanding of the muscular system, maybe the neuromusculoskeletal system. But maybe you can anchor us in terms of how they viewed muscle. What did the Greeks think about muscle? And then afterwards, what did the Rome, how did that evolve in the Roman era?
- [06:26]
A
Well, the story of how we discovered muscle really shows what slow learners human beings are. If we go all the way back to Homer's Iliad, for instance, that's the first time we see the Greek word for an individual muscle in a text. And it's just a part of the, of the body of one soldier who's getting hacked up by another. And then that word totally disappears. So at the beginning, there's no sense of muscle having any kind of function. There's no sense of muscle moving us or being a part of stature or being associated with any kind of power. And then there's just silence. There's silence for about 400 years. And then Plato and Aristotle in the late classical period, both describe muscle as just a kind of insulation. Or they say your glutes, Aristotle says, are useful for resting the body. As if it's just like a built in bean bag chair.
- [07:38]
B
Like a pillow.
- [07:39]
A
Yeah, exactly. And your pecs are like pillows to protect the heart. And then again, there's not a whole lot of progress until the Roman period. I mean, there's a bit of a breakthrough when in Alexandria, anatomists start doing. You just start opening up the body and seeing a little bit of how it works. But they still don't connect the fleshy part of muscle with movement. They think it's actually the tendons, the stringy part of muscle that move us. And we actually have to wait until the 16th century, 1543, which happens to be the same year that Copernicus discovered that or published his theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. It's that year that we have a similar breakthrough about the body. When Vesalius, the anatomist in Padua, says that he considers the fleshy part of muscle to be the thing that moves us. But for the last, I guess, 14 centuries or so from ancient Rome until the Renaissance, it was believed that a special kind of hot air that had been trapped inside the body at birth, that then circulated through the body and passed through the brain and got turned into something called psychic pneuma. That psychic pneuma would then activate the tendons to pull on the bones and move us as if we were sort of marionettes. And, you know, scientists kept on looking for psychic pneuma until the 19th century. It wasn't until 1844 that there's a 20 year old medical student in Berlin named Hermann von Helmholtz who puts some little pieces of meat in flasks and looks at what happens when they decompose. And that's actually where the law of thermodynamics that says energy can neither be created nor destroyed, that comes from muscle research, that comes from von Helmholtz. And he says that the notion of a kind of vital force, this psychic pneuma, which has been called by many names by that point, should be abolished from all physiology. And yet it takes a while for that memo to get around. You continue to have doctors and scientists all through the 19th and even into the 20th century really talking about the way that the muscular system works as being based on this idea of scarcity, you know, the scarcity of a kind of fuel, you know, like a, like a battery. And I don't think that most people still have fully taken on that. It's exactly the opposite. That muscle is a demand based system. And the more we ask of it, the more it gives to us. We don't have, I mean, we can sit here and qualify that statement in all sorts of careful ways for the rest of the hour if we want to. But, but this basic tension between the idea of muscle being something you've got to be really careful about because it contains an energy that you can use up and muscle that you need to be a lot bolder about because you have to challenge it if you want it to give you what it's got and, and help make your life better. That's a tension that we're living in. And we really need to move away from scarcity and more toward courage and challenge.
- [11:59]
B
Well, this is why I wanted you on the show because I think that, I think that this message is going to really land for, especially for women, because I think that we have been, we're not new to the. Certainly women have lifted weights, you know, for long periods of time. But in terms of cultural acceptance, I think that we're seeing this more and more now where women are starting to realize that we need to challenge our muscle. It's not just lip like, it's not just the two pound pink dumbbells that we lift, you know, 500 times and maybe we feel a muscle burn There is really a strategy and you know, to use your words, muscle is a demand based system and you need to challenge it in order for it to give you essentially like this endogenous pharmacy, right? And we'll talk about all of the compounds and all the things that muscle does in a moment. But I think that this is so anchoring and so important for women because there are things that, let's say the Greeks, the Romans and even, you know, in 1543, that era of, you know, Copernicus, where we start to really begin to understand the true function of muscles. So I would love to just go back to the Greeks just for a second, because the Greeks and the Romans, because they would often talk about this idea that they had a belief that their inner goodness could be reflected in outward beauty. And they would, they would sort of have this linguistically and philosophically, they had this idea of beauty being linked to virtue. And they would talk about this in a, you know, if you look at the word kalogathia, this is my homage to the Greeks. Kalos, meaning beautiful, like physically beautiful. When you say someone's beautiful, it's like kalos, you know, or. And then morally good as well. And the two seem to be intertwined with each other. And I remember in university actually learning, I was taking, my undergrad is in neuroscience and psychology. And I remember in one of my psych classes learning about this idea that it's, it's, I believe it's called what is beautiful is good. So you can have people who are, let's say, physically attractive. And that might include having a certain amount of muscle to signal fertility or signal vigor. And people will assume that those, that, that aesthetic, that person might be, let's say in a Greek or Roman sense, militarily, like if it's a male, maybe they're, you know, they're strong, they can, they can, you know, they can participate in the military. And maybe for a woman, she's able to take care of her young, it's a signal that she might be, you know, fertile. So my question to you is a, am I on the right track there? Is that something that we still see in terms of our views on muscle today? And then the other piece to that is the, the idea of this brute strength like the others, maybe the opposite of that is that when someone is very muscular, when before we got started, you were saying there has been this, you know, thousand year battle between medical doctors or physicians and trainers where we sometimes we'll associate someone who we deem to be too muscular. To be almost intellectually dim. Intellectually, like, they're not smart, they're meatheads, they're muscle heads. You know, they're like bros, right? With a. With a Z. So talk to us about maybe those two different attitudes and how those may have evolved over time.
- [15:26]
A
Talking about beauty, a lot of our ideas of what the ancient Greeks thought about Beauty are actually 19th century romantic English and European ideas about what the Greeks thought about beauty. One of the big surprises to me was that I may be getting the term wrong. Kalo kagasse.
- [15:54]
B
But that's what I was trying to say.
- [15:56]
A
Okay, I wasn't sure which one of us had a wrong.
- [15:59]
B
It's Carlos and then Agathor, which is the. Okay, sorry, sorry to all my Greek.
- [16:04]
A
Listeners was that it just. It was not as totalizing and definitive an ideal of beauty as a lot of us learned that it was. For instance, Aristotle writes that the beauty of a man is different in different ages. And I'll get the details wrong here in summary, or this will be a partial summary, but in youth, beauty is for competition and winning games. In adulthood is for fighting and protecting the city. And in old age, beauty is being sufficient to the labors of the day. Basically, beauty is being able to take care of yourself when you're old. Beauty is also. It's a signifier of movement, as Charles Stocking has said. Charles Stocking is one of the three central figures in Stronger. He is a professor of both kinesiology, the study of human bodily movement, and of classics. He is probably the only person in any university anywhere who has a joint, a faculty appointment in both of those disciplines. He's at the University of Texas at Austin, and he actually worked his way through classics graduate school, got his PhD in the study of ancient Greek religion and sacrificial rituals by working as a strength and conditioning coach for UCLA Bruins teams and Olympic athletes. The opportunity to translate some of his research, including some of the things that he's found about beauty, like this idea that for the Greeks, beauty was really more a signifier of movement than we have understood up to this point, at least in popular culture. That opportunity was one of the great things for me about being able to write the this book. Now, moving on to the second part of your question. I love that you asked about this, because here is a story that we've all been caught up in for 2,000 years without even realizing it. For 2,000 years, we have all been caught in the middle of a giant game of tug of war between doctors and trainers. So You've got doctors on one side saying that everybody needs to aim for stable, balanced health. Calm yourself, take care, don't do anything. Don't do too much. And on the other side, you've got trainers saying that you really need to be aiming for excellence, because excellence is what wins victory. And that tension is really what created the myth of brain versus brawn. Doctors decided that a really effective way of building up their own authority in their debate with trainers was to put down heavy, meaty assets. Athletes that the trainers were training to build mass, point to those guys and say, that's what happens if you go too far with athletic training. You build so much mass that you become unable to think irrational, like the animals. They even said that if you built too much mass, it would smother your soul. So this myth has persisted all the way up to today. I mean, we're bedeviled by a worry that if we build too much mass, it will somehow harm us. And we've got all kinds of ideas of what that might look like. You know, if you spend too much time lifting weights, then you'll let other things go in your life and become a dull person. Or as you pointed out, for women, if you spend too much time lifting weights, your muscles will blow up like balloons, and you won't be attractive by certain standards. But that's. I have a feeling we're going to continue to talk about this for a while today. But that's really where that myth started, and you spend so much of your best energy myth busting. So I hope this episode can be a time when your listeners can really sit with this myth and see that it's not true. You know what? I'm just going to throw. I'm going to throw my biggest piece of artillery out right now. Like, you know, the sign that you want to save something for later is quite often the signal that you need to spend it now. But like neuroscience is showing us that there is nothing at all to the myth of brain versus brawn, that what's anabolic for the body is also anabolic for for the brain. And we have found over the last 30 years or so that lifting weights can be as effective a treatment for depression for most people as most antidepressant depressant drugs. We've found that lifting weights as treatment for mild cognitive impairment, the early stage stages of dementia, can be more effective than cognitive training and definitely more effective than the mix of cognitive and resistance training for slowing the progression of dementia. But here's the showstopper. The brain's posterior cingulate cortex, which is the part of the brain that is the seat of emotional memory, empathy. It's the part of the brain that atrophies in Alzheimer's disease patients first, even before they show any symptoms of the other symptoms of the disease. This part of the brain shrinks. The posterior cingulate cortex grows in size when you do weightlifting exercise, but not when you do aerobic exercise exercise. So this idea we've had, that lifting weights makes you a big, dumb jerk, that is the opposite of the truth. Lifting weights actually makes you more empathic, more connected. It can make you smarter. And when you look at your life, the long, long stretch of your life, lifting weights is one of the most effective things you can do to make sure that you can continue to show up for and be with the people you love as long as you want to do that.
- [23:43]
B
God, I love that. I love that so much. Okay, so what do you think keeps that binary alive then? Like, what do you think when we. When Western culture still, I think, treats muscularity and intelligence as, like, opposite ends of the spectrum? What do you. Because now, because in, you know, in 2025, you have doctors like myself who are talking about, it's like, so, you know, maybe you used to have, like, doctors and trainers at odds with each other, and now you have more and more doctors that are like, actually muscle, actually lift heavy, actually do it, you know, form over, you know, form before load, but certainly master the form and then start adding load. What do you think keeps that. That those two things on opposite ends of the spectrum?
- [24:28]
A
I think it's this simple. The myth of brain and brawn persists because it is a prejudice. And prejudice takes up residence in that dark part of our hearts that we don't let light in. We don't let thought touch. Prejudice really only changes when people get to know people. And you are absolutely right that more doctors like yourself, like Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, like Dr. Peter Attia, are all advocating lifting weights and recognizing the importance of muscle for every single one of us for lifelong health. But I think we forget those of us who are in this conversation, how small a conversation it still is, right? I mean, look at the data on lifting weights. On the one hand, if you want to accentuate the positive, you can Note that between 1988 and 2017, the number of people who told the CDC that weightlifting was their favorite form of exercise grew by 3, 34%. And that was the fastest growing measure of popularity of any activity of all the 50 kinds of activity, from fishing to bowling, to swimming, that the CDC.
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B
Tracks even more than pickleball.
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A
Even more. Well, yeah, I don't remember when pickleball broke, but I kid.
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B
I kid.
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A
Yes, but when you look at the absolute numbers like that growth of 34% is actually a growth of only 1%. It grew from about 3% to about 4% in that time. And the hard truth is that the vast majority of people, both here and in almost every other country in the world, do absolutely no exercise that can be described as muscle strengthening. None. In the United States, I think it's 60, I think it's 60%. It's probably between 60 and 70. One of the only things that can really change that. Again, according to the data, especially for the people who are least likely to lift weights. I'm talking about older people, people with chronic diseases and women. One of the only things that's really shown to make a difference for those people is social support. Now there are all kinds of inequalities that affect how and whether we lift weights. Racial, class, gender, but really just education. Actually, just two more little facts about this, if you don't mind.
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B
Please.
- [27:34]
A
The biggest inequality of all of them that decides whether we lift weights is actually our self perceived health status. So people who think of themselves as being very healthy are 14 times more likely to lift weights than people who don't think they're very healthy. And education is another of the biggest deciders of this question. People who have college degrees are more than twice as likely to lift weights as people who have not graduated from high school.
- [28:12]
B
Well, that was my other question as you were talking when I was thinking about why do we think intelligence and muscularity are this opposite ends of the spectrum? My thought was maybe this is also a class and labor issue where the view of intellectual work versus manual work. Like, you know, I'm a daughter of immigrants and so when we immigrated from Europe and the Middle east to Canada, where I live now, but the idea was always get an education, get an education, get an education. So the manual labor stuff, the mechanics and the technician, that was always frowned upon because it was at least from my, and this is my n of one immigrant family experience in North America versus get an education, maybe get a government job where there's benefits and it's secure, like some type of office job. And I think that, that, and I don't know if that is widespread spread in American and like North American culture, but I wonder if that also like manual labor, like the, the car mechanics and the plumber and the, you know, Whomever who are doing more physical labor, maybe there is like a stigmatism around the, let's say the intellectual capacity of those individuals who choose trades versus individuals who get a grat, you know, university degree and then a post post grad and masters and PhD and whatever. And this like, you know, using air quotes like intellectual pursuits where. But you're. What you're saying seems to be the opposite where individuals who are educated are more likely to work out. So is there.
- [29:57]
A
That's redirect me if I. Yeah, that's what the data says. I was really surprised by that too. I, I had exactly the same expectations as you and I and I've wondered how to make sense of that. One of the only speculations that I can come up with that seems sensible to me is that people who hold pens in their hands and type things that other people read are less likely than most other educated people, you know, than doctors or lawyers or bankers, other professionals to have this habit. And people who write and who provide us or have provided us the stories that we use to make sense of our lives. They were the kids on the playground who got picked last and they don't. Now that they've got a little bit of power in the world, they don't want to cede it. I mean I'm not going to talk trash about any publications in particular, but if you look at some of the most prestigious publications in our cultures and you look at the way they write about exercise and weight training still, I mean it's like it's from the 1950s.
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B
And sometimes there's even like a political. It's like, oh, if you lift weights you must be from this, this side of the spectrum. Like you must be from. I've seen it. Like you must be a far right wing extremist. Like I've actually seen that in more recent years, which I thought was really surprising as well. I don't know where that comes from.
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A
Right. And again, posterior cingulate cortex.
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B
Right. Perimenopause doesn't mean white knuckling your cravings, it means getting smarter with them. Protein keeps me satisfied and supports my training. So at night I turn dessert into a protein win with equip chocolate protein. It's chocolatey, mixes smooth and it's my base pretty much for everything sweet. Last night I had a 60 second chocolate pudding, one scoop of Equip in Greek yogurt, a splash of milk, tiny pinch of salt whisk and voila. Thick and silky and actually filling because it is a dessert that counts I sometimes even use it as a protein frosting. So I'll take a scoop of equip plus some yogurt on a rice cake when I'm in between between calls. If dessert is your love language like it is for mine, let it love your goals back. Head over to equipfoods.com better and from November 24th to December 1st use code better for 30% off site wide or 40% off a first subscription. Once a patient came into my office with a new complaint of a quote unquote sleeping injury. I had no idea what this meant, but she told me that now that she's in her 50s, she wakes up with new injuries without any real reason and hence the term sleeping injury. I thought this was hilarious because it is so true. Aches and pains can pop up somewhat randomly in midlife and it can be super frustrating. I have long been a fan of peptides for this reason and BPC157 is one of my favorites and probably the most famous one. Peptides are small proteins and BPC157 is one we naturally make ourselves. It protects, it heals, it restores tissue and upregulates growth factors by interacting with the nitric oxide system to promote the building of new blood vessels. I have used BPC157 for years, in practice for my own long standing knee injury that I sustained while ego lifting and of course various other sleeping injuries. Most peptides are injections, but the BPC157 from level up is taken orally and it is almost completely resistant to gastric juices and high temperatures, making it an effective alternative to injections. Go to leveluphealth.com drstephani and use code Dr. Stephanie to save 15% off of your purchase. That's L V L U P H E-A-L-T-H.com DrStephani to save 15% this is how I feel we've I mean you mentioned before, elderly, disabled or women like these are the three big groups that are unlikely to to take up weights. And this is where I feel like you had mentioned before, sort of off the cuff. Like it's still a small conversation. It's a conversation, but it's still a very small one. And this is where I do feel like we have failed women. Like the conversation is certainly not over yet because there is a lot of, you know, myth busting and so forth. So maybe my question to you here is in your research, have you found, let's say in the public health domain or in medicine or, or allied professionals, have we failed women by ignoring muscle as this key, like I'll say the muscular system, but maybe more broadly neuromusculoskeletal. I think that it's like brain bones. Muscle has to be sort of all together as one. By ignoring the MSK system as a key organ system, especially for women like, you know, the women who are listening to this are in perimenopause and menopause as well, you know, and so they're going. We see muscle loss accelerating in midlife if there's no strategy. Actually, I wrote this down. Muscle is a demand based system. So if we're not challenging the muscle, especially in midlife, it's like use it or lose it. Right? So what, where have you, if any, uncovered this sort of failing towards these three key groups that you, that you outlined?
- [35:37]
A
First, just because muscle is a demand based system is sticking so well. I need to credit Marcus Bamman, who's an emeritus professor at University of Alabama at Birmingham. That is his phrase. He has done tremendous research, especially on muscle and aging and a lot on resistance training for older women. His YouTube videos are really worth looking up. Great, great source of research there. Now, to the question of failing these demographics. Yes, of course we have. Medicine has. But I guess also let's say we have because just to finish that point about the importance of social support, that the real truth is that regardless of any other demographic factors, the research shows that people who have a lot of people in their lives who care about whether they lift weights or not are the ones who are likely to go to the gym. If people don't care whether you go to the gym, you're probably not going to go. That's what support, social support means. So I guess, you know, really, if people forget every other thing that we talk about today, the people who are listening to this, who do go to the gym and do lift weights, what I would hope they would remember is that we've got to share this with people. You know, there are people in our lives who really need this, this and it's not that we have to be pushing it on people in a, in a like evangelical way, but being there for people, being open. And you know, when your friend tells you that she's, she's just come back from the doctor and she's got knee arthritis and he says that the doctor says she's got to get a knee replacement and start taking painkillers, it's the time to ask, you know, did anybody bring up going to see an Exercise physiologist first. Did the doctor bring that up? Did the nurse bring that up? Because there are a lot of non surgical interventions for a lot of people that can make those bigger, life changing and riskier procedures unnecessary, at least for a while and in some cases forever. So that takes us right into this question about medicine. And that was another of the very most fascinating and I think the most important things that I had the opportunity to learn about while I was working on this book. About a third of the book is structured around the work of an extraordinary physician. Her name is Maria Fiatoroni Singh. Now, she grew up in California in San Francisco in the late 50s, early 60s. And her favorite thing to do when she was a little girl was go to her grandma's house after school and they would clear the furniture back from in front of the big boxy console TV that sat on the floor and they would watch this new show called the Jack LaLanne Show.
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B
I was gonna say, it's Jack LaLanne.
- [39:15]
A
And so Jack would come on and his wife Elaine would come on and their dog Happy. And Jack would say, I'm here for one reason and one reason only, to help you exercise so you can live long, longer and happier. And this little girl and her grandmother would stand there in front of the TV doing exercise together, as Maria remembers. She says, we were doing Jack LaLanne. And so here are the important things about that little scene. This girl had a model for exercise and strength and health in her grandmother. And they together had models in Jack LaLanne and Elaine LaLanne. And this is something that showed up again and again in every story that I researched for this book. The force of example. People need an example of how to exercise and be healthy. And the other really important thing is that Maria looked at her grandmother and Jack and Elaine and she said it wasn't like men do this or women do this. It was like, people do this, we all do it.
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B
Yeah.
- [40:39]
A
So flash forward. Maria gets into high school, she takes up the sport of fence fencing. She doesn't have time to go see her grandmother so much anymore. Her grandmother gets older, she has a bad fall, she breaks her hip. All of the worst possible sequelae to that that you can imagine happened. She's bedridden, she gets bed sores. And it's just a long story, slow slide to the worst possible outcome of a hip fracture, which is death. And Maria decides that she's going to become a doctor, she's going to become a geriatrician, and she's going to focus on doing Everything she can to save other older people from having to suffer the worst parts of her grandmother's fate. And she goes through medical school. She is registered as a geriatrician in the very first class of registered geriatricians. This is in the mid late 80s. We forget how new that medical specialty is, you know. And then she goes to Boston and she's at Tufts in a special lab. About that is studying aging and diet and exercise and what can be done to help people hold on to their powers for as long as they can. And they've been studying aerobic exercise up to this time. But there's a colleague in that lab, his name is Walter Frontera, and he was somebody who liked lifting weights. He had been a basketball player. When he arrived there, he looked around and he said, okay, you're doing great on aerobics, but why don't we try strength conditioning? Now at this time, late 1980s, it was believed, it was an article of faith in medicine, that people should not lift any weight that felt heavy to lift past about the age of 50. And that it was, was impossible to gain muscle once you were in your 50s or 60s, that any possible strength increase was owing solely to neural adaptations. But Frontera used a classic weight training prescription. Three sets of, I can't remember if it was eight or 10 repetitions at a high degree of intensity, 80% of a one repetition maximum, three times a week for, can't remember, eight, 10, 12 weeks, something like that. And he found that the men's quadriceps strength doubled, their hamstring strength tripled, and their muscles grew by about the same amount that a younger person would. Muscles would grow in doing the same program for the same length of time. Now, Maria Fiatoroni Singh looked at this and it was a big deal, this paper. She actually wasn't so impressed. She was like, those guys are healthy, they're young, old, they're in their 60s, they're not old. There was a nursing home called the Hebrew Rehabilitation center for Aged, where the really old people in Boston went. It was full of Holocaust survivors. People had grown up in the Depression, people who had like crossed the Atlantic in steerage, you know, in the early 20th century. And these were, these were people who had like four or five chronic diseases. Most of them couldn't walk without assistance. And she decided those guys needed it more. So for the very first time anywhere, she and a couple of colleagues put nonagenarians, 90 year olds through the same protocol. 80% of one rep max, three sets of eight to 10 again, I think it was eight weeks. And the results were just mind boggling. The biggest strength gain among those 90 year olds was 374%. The smallest gain was about 60% and the average gain was 174%. That's just a pilot study. It's 1990. It's really worth looking up in the Journal of the American Medical Association. High intensity strength training for nonagenarians. But then they used that to move ahead and do a much larger randomized controlled trial. 100 people instead of 10. They added some nutrition to the mix too. They gave them, it wasn't even protein, they just gave them something like ensure, just to make sure that they were getting all of their nutrients. And they again had strength gains that were average of 100% without the supplement, average of more than 150% with the supplement. And here's the most important part. Functional results didn't depend on functional training. Okay, these, these people were doing two machine exercises. They were doing knee extension and hip extension. They were working on Kaiser machines, those machines that use compressed air to, to adjust because that way they could go all the way down, you know, because so many of, you know, they were very sarcopenic, they had very little muscle mass, they were very malnourished, they were starting at a really low level. And their spontaneous activity increased, as measured by monitor bracelets on their ankles, by more than 30% just from doing these two machine exercises. So again, functional results don't depend on functional training. Just making people stronger alone gives them the wherewithal to do more of what they want to do and move around in the world the way they want to move around.
- [47:34]
B
Yeah, I mean this is, I mean first I just want to say how revolutionary this is because if she is in the mid-80s slash 90s, I mean this is like the cardio, you know, this is the cardio era. Right? So you have all of the. I'll totally date myself here. And this is for the Canadians that are listening. Like the 20 minute workout, you know, it's like with best model, it's like the three girls dancing right now. It's just a Canadian thing. But it was all just like, it was 20 minutes of like them bouncing around and like doing little. It was, it was car, it was cardio city. I mean that's what I, that's what I grew up on. It was like, I grew up on watching the 20 minute workout. I grew up watching all these, you know, it's like, I mean, the buns of steel and sort of that, that was, maybe that was the same, but it was like the firm and all of this kind of, all of this kind of messaging for women. It was always like cardio, cardio, cardio, cardio. Step started really big in the 90s there as well. So to be looking at muscle and weight training these 90 year olds when we, I mean I, I'm, I'm class of 2003. Okay, so I graduated from school 2003 and we were taught at the, you know, at the, just the turn of the millennium, we were still taught that it's very, very difficult, if not impossible for a menopausal woman to put on weight. Like to put on muscle mass. Like that was part of our teaching. So even my own education, I've had to relearn so much. I mean, as a woman now in perimenopause myself, I'm 47. Like, you know, I am, I am also seeing all of the capacity that my muscle has to, I can still put on. I still have not reached my, you know, the natty limit, let's say like my upper natural limit without taking any exogenous steroids or whatever. So I just want to say how absolutely revolutionary this is to look at strength training in the 90s when it's like the whole, you know, we were Talking about the MDs versus the trainers, you know, it was all about cardiac, it was already about cardiovascular health, it was all about aerobics. Aerobics, aerobics, aerobics. So to look at strength training in and of itself is just quite remarkable and special.
- [49:38]
A
Well, and if I can just drop a couple more pieces of the pop culture puzzle into there. The, the same week that Walter Frontera's first study of strength conditioning in 60 year old men is accepted for publication. That's the week that Hans and Franz debut on Saturday Night Live.
- [50:01]
B
We're here to bump you up that one, right?
- [50:03]
A
That's right. And then while Maria Fiatoroni Singh is working on the pilot study that's published in 1990 and the randomized controlled trial that comes out in 1994, some fireworks that are going off in the background are the steroid scandal at the Seoul Olympics involving the sprinter Ben Johnson.
- [50:25]
B
Ben Johnson. Oh, I remember that. And Carl Lewis.
- [50:28]
A
That's right.
- [50:28]
B
Yeah, I remember that.
- [50:29]
A
The first legal, legal attempt or the, the first legislation to criminalize the use of anabolic steroids in both the United States and the United Kingdom, maybe in Canada too.
- [50:43]
B
It was a national tragedy for Canada, I'll say that, because there's always this like there's always a little rivalry between the United States and Canada, especially on the track. And that was just devastating. It was like a Nash. It was a national embarrassment, I'll say that. At least from my perspective. I remember. That's what I remember. I was like, oh my God.
- [51:03]
A
And then also the birth of the idea of what we've now come to call muscle dysmorphia. Harrison Pope, who was a Harvard psychiatrist, did some studies of bodybuilders who took anabolic steroids. And he, he published a paper about what he called roid rage. And he published a paper about what he called reverse anorexia, which then later he decided to call muscle dysmorphia. So at exactly the same time that these massive breakthroughs are being made that show that challenging resistance training can change the lives of every kind of person, including the oldest and frailest among us, pop culture is just getting high on the idea that muscle is dangerous. Muscle is gonna make you crazy and want to take steroids in a way that is self destructive. And that is what gets the press. That's what, you know, this is the age before clicks. But that is still what got the eyeballs right. And I spent some time looking at, you're like really crunching the numbers of how many people are affected by muscle dysmorphia, how many people are affected by sarcopenia, age related muscle loss in a way that's functionally debilitating. And what kind of attention do these two things get in the media today? And the results of that process were really shocking to me. And the highest estimate quoted in the most recent statement by the American College of Sports Medicine on the use of anabolic and androgenic drugs, the highest estimate says that as many as 4 million men in the United States may be using them. And women's use of steroids is less studied. But it's estimated to be between 1/10 and 1/2 the number of men. So you put all that together and you're still in single digits of the population. The best estimates of the number of Americans who, older Americans who are at significant risk of functional disability due to age related muscle loss is something like 45 million. We're talking about about 10 times the number of people. And of course, not everybody who's taking anabolic steroids has muscle dysmorphia. It's just muscle dysmorphia is a subset of body dysmorphia. And the estimates on who, on how many people suffer from body dysmorphia estimates from The United States, Germany, and I think Sweden all range from like 2.5 to 3 ish percent. So again, single digits compared to massive double digits. And then I looked like just at the New York Times. For instance, how many times have they written about Harrison Pope's work in connection to muscle dysmorphia and anabolic steroids? Address abuse.
- [54:48]
B
The Adonis complex.
- [54:49]
A
Yeah, right. And how many times have they written about Maria Fiataroni Singh work on age related muscle loss?
- [54:55]
B
And it was, I'm gonna guess this many times.
- [54:57]
A
She was 6 and he was something like 30. Okay. You know, and, and you can say, well, so what? Like, does that really do damage to anybody? And I'm gonna say, absolutely, yes, because it keeps us in the habit of ignoring older people's physical potential and strength. Just because it's somehow more comforting for us to heap scorn on the vanities of young men than it is for us to appreciate the potential of older women.
- [55:42]
B
Mom, that's class. That was the reaction my son had when he tried Masa chips for the first time. And I always know I found a winner when it passes the teenage taste test. Now, Masa is a part of a growing movement to bring back real food. You know, the kind our grandparents ate before snacks were made in labs. Masa's chips contain just three organic corn, sea salt, and 100% grass fed beef tallow. That's it. No mystery chemicals, just real food. And these chips don't only avoid all the bad stuff, they just taste incredible too. Snacking on Masa chips is nothing like eating regular chips. With Masa, you feel satisfied, light and energetic. There's no crash. And that gross, bloaty, sluggish feeling afterwards is not there. And because these chips are made with real food, they're more satiating. So you're not going to find yourself in the pantry again uncontrollably binging, and still feeling hungry afterwards. My personal favorite of Masa is lime. And their sister company, Vandykrisp, have a herb de Provence chip that will make you proclaim mom, that's class. If you are ready to give Masa or Vandy a try, use code better for 25% off your first order@masachips.com better. That's M A S A chips.com better for 25% off your first Order. What you're saying is so important because maybe you can say, okay, so we have a researcher who's been cited six times versus talking about muscle dysmorphia, you know, orders of magnitude it's been discussed orders of magnitude more often than that. Is there any individual harm? Maybe it's going to be very impossible to tease that out. But as a cultural, when you bubble it up to the culture level, I think it becomes easier to see where the damage lies. Because you have in the 90s, you know, you have the, also the. We didn't talk about the sort of Schwarzenegger era, but you have in the 90s, these like big monsters, right? Like you have like the big, like the Ronnie Coleman's and you have these, we'll call them, like I'm gonna, you. I don't feel this way. But like, often they've been called like freaks, right? So these, you know, the Ronnie Coleman's, the Jay Cutler, he comes later on, but these massive, massive men. And you'll probably find, by the way, most of the muscle dysmorphia individuals, muscle dysmorphia, probably competing in bodybuilding to some extent. But I think that they're. So that is what my pre frame is. My question is, do you think as a culture, as a society that there is an unconscious fear around strong women? And I ask that because I think there is. I think that this whole idea of I don't want to get too bulky, I don't want to get too big, I don't want to take up too much space, I don't want to get too strong. I think that there's a fear either that this is going to put off a mate potentially like a, you know, a partner who's not as muscular as you. I see women who are friends of mine online are attacked all the time for, you know, you look like a man. You know, it's like you have too much muscle, you look like a man. Which of course the response is like, yeah, and if you lifted weights, you could look like one too. You know, it's usually men who are making those comments. But my original question is, do you think that there's an unconscious fear around strong women?
- [59:20]
A
Conscious and unconscious?
- [59:22]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [59:23]
A
And, and the research shows that really clearly. I mean, most of our conversations about that kind of fear and prejudice are in the context of personal narratives and personal experience. And those are important conversations to have. I, in this book, I approached that realm of experience in two ways. One is by telling the story of the third central figure and stronger, Jan Todd. Jan Todd was widely considered to be the strongest woman in the world. For about a decade from the mid-70s to the mid-80s, she, in her early 20s, took up weight training. And within the Almost unbelievable time of 18 months had set her first world record in the deadlift. But Jan Todd is also extremely articulate about how, I mean, she'd be worth writing about for the sake of her performance in world record alone. But she's also incredibly articulate about the internal transition that that entailed. And one of my favorite things she told me was that the way she really knew that she was changing when she had started to lift weights was that one day she went to the grocery store and she picked up a watermelon and the watermelon wasn't heavy.
- [61:05]
B
Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
- [61:08]
A
And from there it just opens up to, you know, a sense of possibility in all kinds of realms of life with her. She eventually told a reporter a couple years on when she had spent a summer working as a performing strong woman at the state fair. She said, before there was a sense that there were things I couldn't do, but. But now I don't have that anymore, you know, now I've lost my fear. So. So one way of approaching the question that you just asked is to look at individual experiences. And to me, of course, of all the stories I've ever heard, Jan Todd's story of transformation is really the most extraordinary one because she also, after she was an athlete, became a coach in the sport of powerlifting. She coached both the US Men's and women's teams to world championships. She was the first woman ever to coach any men's national powerlifting team to a world champion championship. And then she retired as an athlete and coach and got a PhD in history. And she single handedly rediscovered a forgotten history of heavy resistance training among Victorian women. But we can get back to that. The story of transformation that Jan Todd embodies actually held a lot more tension in it than it did in the way that I told it just a minute ago. I left out the fact that she was fighting all the way along against the opinions of many people in her life, especially female people. She said that what she was doing was dangerous. She would hear, you know, deadlifting is going to make your waist bigger. This is going to make it harder for you to have children. One person in her family even said, if you keep lifting heavy weights, your uterus is going to drop out. And in addition to that, there were all of the internal struggles because lifting weights, heavy weights, did change her body in ways that diverged from her ideals of feminine beauty. And there came a point as she told me that, and this is just a wonderful line, my concerns about my appearance fell away in the face of my own goals. So there was transformation in tension with these oppositional forces. And what I also found in researching this book was that there's a great body of research about those tensions going back to the 90s or so. One of the early, really great papers on this is called A Woman's Place is in the Cardiovascular Room. And that was a sociologist who spent time as a participant observer in a university gym in late 80s, early 90s. What was really amazing to me was to find that 30 years on, sociologists are finding exactly the same thing. I think it was 2015 that Molly George, the sociologist, did a study of. Of soccer players at a United States university somewhere in the West. This one is called Making Sense of Muscle. And she found that the. The players on that soccer team would intentionally do more cardio than they. Their trainers had told them to do because they wanted to try to stay thin, that they were worried about fitting into their jeans, that they were worried that guys wouldn't want to go on dates with them if their legs got too big. But they also found that there was one standout player on the team who was really big and really proud of it, and she used her size to help them win games. And they all loved this about her. Her name was Sharon and they called her Big Bird. And so, you know, I guess the bottom line is that just that it's complicated. It's. It's been complicated for a long time. It's still a lot more complicated than I think a lot of people would like to admit. Because we want to be past this. We ought to be past this.
- [66:35]
B
God, we ought to be past it. I know. I feel that. Yes, yes. Well, it's also like, there's so many examples. I'd love for you. I'd like to. I'd like to go back to the Victorian women as well, because from my own research, I know Marilyn Monroe, who is, you know, considered a, you know, sex icon, you know, goddess, also lifted weights. Like she. One of. She credits her figure to lifting heavy. Well, lifting heavy weights and eating a lot of meat. So she would eat steak and eggs and things. So this is not. We're not pushing, you know, the carnivore or any nutritious, you know, any nutritional sort of diet. But she. There's lots of images of her working out on the floor or on, like, a sort of makeshift bench with barbells. And, you know, I've seen images of. I think it was really like. I think it was the circus, actually. It was like strong women where they you know, they have pictures of them like flexing and you can kind of see like their biceps and stuff. And people will go and look at these freaks. So there's, it's, it's like, it's this, it's this never ending, you know, you have these extremes, you know, and you move from like you were mentioning Jack lalanne before and then we move through like the cardio era. But then you have women like Marilyn Monroe who are curvy and shapely, who are, who are lifting weights. Talk to us a little bit about the Victorian women. I want to know what I mean. I know that those women stayed out of the sun. That's sort of the extent of my knowledge of Victorian women. But tell me a little bit about their exercise habits. That is fascinating to me.
- [68:07]
A
Now, Jan Todd, when she retired from competitive lifting and from high level coaching, decided to get her PhD. She started out very consciously interested in finding out who had made her strength possible, who were the women, who were her athletic foremothers. She knew there was a tradition there. She didn't know really what it was. All she knew about was the, was the circus strong women that you just mentioned. Yeah, but she noticed something about the strong women that is a little different from what you just said. Some of them did display as beasts, as freaks, but some of them, and actually the very top tier of them, at least the very most famous of them, the Marilyn Monroe of the circus strong women was admired because she was both beastly strong and beautiful and feminine according to the most conventional standards of beauty of the time. Her name was Katie Sandwina and she performed with her husband Max. Katie was something around 6ft tall. Max was something like 5, 7. She would carry him across the circle. She was in the center ring of the revolution, Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus. She would carry him across the ring and perform the manual of arms with him. She would lift up a 500 pound cannon. But she also presented as your ideal lady. And Jan Todd wanted to know, like, how is this possible? Like the, the stereotype of a Victorian woman was that she knew her place was in the home. She was quiet and demure and small. But in Victorian times, people were lining up to buy tickets to admire the beauty of this very strong woman.
- [70:32]
B
Katie Sandwina, my new spirit animal. Yes, yes.
- [70:35]
A
And Jan Todd has written great, several things about Katie Sandwina, but there's one especially great paper in a journal that Jan and her husband Terry Todd co founded called Iron Game History. It's about physical culture history. It's the only peer reviewed historical journal about this world of strength. It's just a great place. It's fully online on the Stark center website, starkcenter.org But I'll pull that paper for you so that it can be especially easy for people to look at. And the pictures are tremendous. But that Jan Todd's interest in the performing strong women actually led her to become interested in what happened to make that happen. Right. She starts out by thinking, who are my athletic foremothers? Well, then she starts wondering, who are the athletic foremothers of my athletic foremothers? And she begins to find in early 19th century Exercise books pictures of women with dumbbells in their hands. And then she finds Things like an 1828 treatise on gymnastics or Calisthenics for the Use of Young Ladies published in Dublin, Ireland that shows women in petticoats doing dips between parallel bars. Women in. Or petticoats I think was the wrong term, sorry. I guess you can see at their ankles that they're wearing bloomers, but then their skirts come down from that and they're wearing, I mean we're 100 years on from Jane Austen, but just roll with me and let's say Jane Austen dresses, but they're doing dips between parallel bars, they're doing overhand pull ups. And Jan Todd, who at the same time is teaching weight training in the physical education department of the University of Texas, is reading these 19th century texts with her whole body. She looks at an illustration like that and because she knows what muscles are involved and she knows what it feels like to do those exercises, she can see, see things in these texts that other historians wouldn't be able to see. So her book about exercise in the lives of Victorian women, it's called Physical Culture and the Body Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American women, 1800 to, I think 1870. She notes that only 5% of her students at the University of Texas in the 20th century, 5% of her female students are able to do an overhand pull up. So for women in 1828 to be doing this and to be illustrated doing it in a book, it means that there were much larger numbers of women than we know who, who had the upper body strength to do something like this.
- [74:08]
B
There was a time that I just trained for the mirror. My world was scales and macros and check ins on repeat. Perimenopause was really my wake up. I realized that muscle isn't just about chasing lean, it's about longevity. And strong is a Love letter to your future self. That is why I built lift. It is a strength training program for women who want capability over comparison. If you are ready to build the kind of strength that spills over into every part of your life, join lift today. Head over to drstephanieestima.com Lyft and join today. That's what we got to get back to. We got to get back to 1828 and hearing from you.
- [74:45]
A
And we're starting that today, right, because the Bettys are starting that today, I hope. Because one of the things that everybody who's listening to this is, I hope, becoming more aware of, is that strength, like real strength, is a part muscular strength. Doing hard things is a part of women's cultural history in a way that we just haven't credited before. Everybody who comes from to this, like so many women I know who start lifting weights, who haven't been doing it all their lives, they feel like they're having to invent this whole world for themselves, you know, and if we could just keep remembering that we're all part of a tradition, that our great grandmothers and their grandmothers were all facing these similar challenges and some of them actually broke through, I think that can give encouragement that has real power.
- [75:57]
B
I couldn't agree with you more. And I think that when we. The reason why I find this conversation with you so incredibly fascinating is because it's for exactly that this is part of our heritage. This is not a new thing. Maybe it's new relative to our, like, you know, many women in menopause perimenopause now grew up in the cardio, you know, era of the 80s and 90s, and the skinny heroin chic of the, you know, early 2000s, et cetera. But this is really a time for us to kind of get back to our. To our roots. And so I guess my question for you. So there's a lot of mothers that are listening here, perimenopausal, menopausal mothers. How do we talk to our teens about this? So our teenage. Our beautiful teenage daughters who are maybe now very much entrenched in, you know, TikTok. And I mean, there's. There's just response videos that I'm actually recording this week, just some of the absolute garbage that we see on, like, what they call Skinny Talk, where it's like, this is like, you know, nothing feels as good as. How does it. What's the saying? Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. And how do we encourage our daughters and also our sons who are Also getting into this muscle dimorphia, maybe pulling dysmorphia, pulling into that Adonis complex that we mentioned briefly before. How do we start to begin to talk to our teens around the value of muscle, especially for girls, that this is not going to make you masculine, it's not going to make you gross, you're not going to suddenly turn into, you know, Jay Cutler or Arnold Schwarzenegger just by going to the gym a couple times a week. What is the conversation do you think that mothers and fathers, parents, caregivers should be giving the next generation that are coming up behind us?
- [77:46]
A
I think probably the most important part of the conversation is non verbal. I think it starts even before kids are talking. I think it's, it starts with the force of example in our own lives. I think it starts with parents and other adults just making training a really normal part of their lives, modeling that for kids. And if we do that and invite kids to join in, my friend Gabrielle Lyon often posts videos of herself and her husband Shane working out with their kids. You know, they're going to join in really critically. That has to involve not just kids who naturally take to it and you know, seem like they're athletes, but just as much and maybe even more so the kids who aren't athletes. Because muscle is at least 30% of your body, no matter how you think of yourself, whether you are overweight or thin, you know you are made up more of muscle than you are of any other tissue in the human body. It's true for everyone, it's true for, for every kid. And muscle is not just about how you look. Muscle is even more about who you are, it's about what you can do. Muscle is how we are able to act upon the world. And if we can make the connection for our kids between having strong and powerful muscles and being able to have the kind of fun they want to have and go the places they want to go, then that will stay with them their whole lives. Now, another aspect of the data on this that really surprised me me is that one particular kind of activity for children is most associated with maintaining activity levels into the teenage years and beyond. And that is object control skills. So that means throwing, lifting, basically being able to, to move the world around, elements of the world around in the ways that you want to. And kids with higher object control skills are much more likely to avoid what is otherwise a kind of inevitable drop off in activity that happens when they reach the teenage years. Girls and boys who have equal objectives, control skills are equally likely to Stay active. And otherwise, it's actually, as you probably know, according to most of the research, girls who become more inactive in their teenage years than boys. So because object control skills are so important, it means that lifting weights is one of the activities that can really help build the kind of sustainable good habits that we're talking about here.
- [81:39]
B
So in kind of closing, we have. We lovingly call our Betties. We put them on a spectrum. We call them light Roast Betties. I love coffee. So we have light Roast Betties, medium roast Betties, dark roast Betties. Our light roasters are like, just tell me what to do. I don't want to know any detail. No mechanisms here, please. And then all the way over to our dark Roast Betty's that are like, I need to know the enzyme. What pathway are we talking about? And in how much quantities? What's the chemical reaction? So if you have a light Roast Betty who still has made it this far into the conversation, she wants to get strong. She's never lifted weights. Seriously, it's. Maybe it's never been part of her family's culture. She never saw mom or dad working out at. But it's not normal for her. Where do you suggest that she start? And then the second, maybe part of that is, especially if that. If that Betty is now in perimenopause and menopause. So now she's starting to see hormones change, maybe her body composition is changing, her recovery needs are a little bit larger because she doesn't have that, you know, that cellular turnover is not quite as adept as maybe it once was. Where does she start? How do we orient her into the world of strength training?
- [82:53]
A
Two things. First, let's ask her to just think as hard as she can, do the most thorough inventory she can of the people she knows, and think whether there's anybody at all in her life who does this, who she likes and feels comfortable with, and just ask that person for some help. Ask that person to talk about this. Goes back to social support. People are going to lift weights if there's somebody in their life who cares whether they lift weights. And if there's anybody in her life who loves to do this, it's virtually certain that that person is gonna respond in a warm and positive way to that question. Because, you know, everybody who loves this loves to help other people find their way. So that's the first thing. And the second thing I'm ambivalent about saying just because I know it's high risk, but it needs to be. Weight training needs to be a Part of our conversations with our doctors and our healthcare providers. It just needs to be every time we go to the doctor, even if they don't ask us about exercise, we need to tell them what we're doing or what we're not doing, even if it only makes them uncomfortable for a couple of minutes because it reminds them that they don't know much about it. Like, we need to do that to do them a service. But for the light roast Betty, she needs to take a further step and say, I don't know if you really know much about weight training, because I know most general practitioners don't. But I, you know, from everything I've been reading and hearing, I know that I want to try this and I want to do it safely with the best possible help. Can you write a prescription for me to see an exercise physiologist? And he might say, no, but she might say, yes. No, I was just switching the gender. But asking the question is the most important thing we can do. Whether we ask it in a way that feels safe or we ask it in a way that carries higher risk, asking the question is the only way we're going to find our ways to being the stronger selves that we can be. Now, when you have this conversation with your doctor, if the doctor still says, well, he just doesn't know anybody, then I think you can be ready with your printed copy of the new global consensus statement on exercise recommendations for people, misremembering the exact title, but it's essentially, it is a guide to prescribing exercise for physicians. It's written by something like 35 co authors in something like 17 countries. One of the co authors is Luigi Ferrucci, who is the head of scientific director of the National Institutes on Aging. And one of the main authors was Maria Fiatoroni Singh. Now, this paper cites more than 700 sources. It really is the first full review of all of the best randomized clinical trial evidence about how both aerobic and resistance exercise and some other kinds of exercise like yoga can be used to treat essentially any chronic disease that you can name. Physical activity guidelines that just say people should be lifting weights twice a week and doing 150 minutes of medium to vigorous intensity aerobic activity. They don't really speak to the realities of our individual lives. If you have depression and you want exercise to help treat your depression, you need to be lifting weights more than twice a week. If you have type 2 diabetes and you want your weight training to help with glycemic control, you need to be lifting weights more than twice a week. But doctors have just never had one paper that they can look at to give them a starting point about how these prescriptions are work. And we're going to put this paper in the show notes. But it's something that every single person who has an older person in their lives or anybody in perimenopause or menopause should take a look at and see, like, here are my health challenges and here is what exercise might be able to do to help and not exercise in a general way, exercise in a specific way. Because different modes of exercise, as you are always talking about, have different effects on our physiological systems. And so weight training, you know, there's a lot of overlap between what you get with aerobic and resistance training, but there's a lot of distinction too. And aerobics is not going to build bone density. It's not going to reduce falls risk in the same way that resistance exercise is going to. And those two things are specific risks that for our listeners today are growing, you know, as every month and year passes. We need to get ahead of those things. And there are resources that we have for helping us with that and there are resources that we can give our doctors so they can learn to help us with that too. And I just think that's part of our responsibility in our relationships with them and in our relationships with ourselves.
- [89:48]
B
Yeah. Well said. Fantastic. Fantastic. This has been such an illuminating conversation. I have been making notes. I have Katie Sandwina, I have iron gain history@the starkcenter.org all these things are going to be in the show notes, but my own personal education and rounding out the history of, of muscle. And I just love, love, love that we talked about Jane Todd and really about her, like who are my foremothers and you know, four, you know, grandmothers and great grandmas that came before me that paved the way for me to be able to lift in this way. I just think that that is such a wonderful way to orient ourselves to muscle, towards muscle, marry ourselves to this idea of strength training. It's not new and certainly it is, you know, you might say it's our birthright. Certainly on all the, for all the benefit, we didn't talk about metabolic benefits and glucose disposal and BDNF and Myokines and all the things like my Betty's already know about that. But this is, this is so important for us to know from a cultural perspective that this is not new. So we kind of often joke and say cardio bunnies to muscle mommies and you know, moving now from the cardio section of the gym to the weight training section of the gym. But it's like women have been doing this for like at least from the victor Victorian era, women were doing pull ups, overhand grip, right? So like it's, it's time for us to, to, to really just get comfortable with this idea that weight training should, can and should be part of an everyday routine for health and health promotion. Thank you so much.
- [91:17]
A
You're welcome. Thank you for having me.
- [91:22]
B
Hey Betty. Welcome to the after party where we discuss the highs, the lows, the good, the bad of this episode in particular. And this of course, Michael Joseph Gross with Stronger Man. I gotta say, this was a really different conversation. So this is a bit of a departure. I mean, obviously we're talking about muscle, but it is a departure from the normal content that I produce. Insofar as if I'm going to talk about muscle, I'm like, hey, let's talk about myokines, let's talk about brain derived neurotrophic factor. Let's talk about this growth factor and that growth factor. This is really a history of muscle. And I just adored every single nanosecond of this conversation because what it does is it squarely puts women in a well defined lineage that this is not new for us. You know, when he was talking about these Victorian women doing dips in their petticoats, I don't know, petticoat with their bloomers or their pull ups, like overhand pull ups in the Victorian era or some of these, you know, you know, foremothers as he called them from, you know, referencing Jan Todd, looking at the Katie Sandwinas of the world, who is like the, you know, strong and fit and obviously had lots of muscle, but was also beautifully feminine. This is part of our lineage. It's not a new thing. So all the myth busting that I aim to do online, because Lord knows that there is a lot of part of my French, but, and I can say that because I speak French, like Lord knows a lot of shit. There's a lot of mert online around what weightlifting does for women, but it's also not new. Right? Like that's the thing that I think is really, really cool that we have, you know, even the Marilyn Monroe's of the, you know, the who is like the ultimate, you know, feminine icon, lifted weights. So I just absolutely loved that we talked about that. The other thing that I thought was really interesting was how intelligence and muscularity, historically and still today kind of Exist on a, from a cultural lens anyway, exist on a spectrum, like two opposite ends of a spectrum. Like if you have a lot of muscle, then you must be disabled intellectually in some capacity. And the other, the opposite is true as well. If you are an academic or you are incredibly intelligent and you're using your brain, then your body is basically just a carrier for your, for your cerebral, for your cerebral cortex. It just sort of carries your brain around. Nothing could be further from the truth, right? So being able, there's no distinction between the two. When your muscles are strong, when your body is strong, your brain is strong and vice versa. When your brain is strong, your body's strong, but you can't actually have one without the other. And I think, in fact people who lift weights probably are better thinkers, better critical thinkers, better decision makers because they have this flow of this, you know, this chemical cocktail of the myokines, the BDNF and all the things that happen. So I thought that that was really cool and I loved, I mean we said it a few times, muscle is a demand based system, right? So it is going to, in order for it to release its pharmacy of cocktails to you, you have to challenge it. Really, really love that. And then the, I think maybe the, the highlight for me, other than knowing that Katie Sandwina is my new spirit animal, she was the, she was the, the beautiful Marilyn Monroe type in the circus, like the one who was lifting 500 pound cannons and, and so forth. But maybe the highlight for me was when I asked him, do we think that society at large today in 2025, 2026, do we think that there is an UN fear of strong women? And his answer was an immediate. Oh, it's unconscious and it's conscious. Like we know, we are very much aware of it. And I thought that that was really, really poignant. Very, very pungent really, for me. So those were my big takeaways. I think the other thing that I really loved was the juxtaposition of the paper that Frontera, when he published with the 90 year olds, like demonstrating 174% increase average strength in JAMA in 1990. So that's coming out at the same time that we are seeing papers being written about roid rage and reverse anorexia and you know, Adonis complex and muscle dysmorphia. It's very, very interesting that the science and journalism often don't walk hand in hand and in many times they are running from each other. So very, very important to pay attention to the science and the literature and as you know, science, often whenever something's published, usually there's some kind of lag. It's like usually 20 to 30 years if we look at the Women's Health Initiative as an example. So I really loved this. Oh, the other thing that I loved is the last thing that he said, which was, if you are someone who's new to weight training, try to find someone in your social circle who's already doing it. Like, find a new gym bestie. So that's like step number one. And then the other thing is make your GP uncomfortable. I mean, he didn't say it that way. That's how I interpret it in my brain. It's like, take the new global consensus statement on weight training, bring it to your doctor, make them uncomfortable and remind them that they need to either write you a prescription or brush up on their science, because it's old science. So I thought that that was really, really, really fantastic as well. I hope that you enjoyed this. This was, you know, a slight departure, as I mentioned, from our regular content, but something that I am fascinated by, I think as someone who, you know, I openly talk about my love for the neuromusculoskeletal system in general and how I want to continue my own weight training journey in my, you know, midlife and beyond it. There's a. There's a certain comfort and peace knowing that there are many women that have come before me who have paved the way for me to be able to do this pretty freely and for me to, you know, to have. Yeah, I'm sure you get the odd stupid comment on Instagram, but for the, for the general, you know, for the part, muscle is now being celebrated on women because we know if, you know, if you're a gym girl and you are in the, in the gym, you know how hard it is to build. So we are proud. It's like we are loud and proud. And it really was very comforting for me to know about all these women all the way back from the Victorian era to, you know, the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, that are women that have come before me to pave the way. And I hope that you felt that same sense of belonging, hopefully, in gym culture and acceptance that, that I feel like gym culture in general, for those of you that know, is one of the most accepting cultures on the planet, with all the, with all the bros and the tank top and the big triceps, like, they're often the biggest teddy bears and there's no class system in the gym. You can't fake your way, you can't buy your way to build muscle. The only way you gotta do it, the only way you get there is through work and everybody's there cheering you on. At least that's been my experience. I've never found anybody to be to have mal intentions. Like, no one's ever shown me how to use the cable machine incorrectly because, you know, I bothered them or something. You know, I've never had an experience like that, and I hope that that's the same for you. Let me know what you thought of this conversation, what your big takeaways were, what your big aha moments were. Leave us comments, Spotify, itunes, all the places. Leave us a review and until next time, I bid you adio. Thank you. All right, all right. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and I must give you the obligatory legal and medical disclaimer here. This podcast, Better with Dr. Stephanie, is for general information only and the advice recommendations we discuss do not replace medicine, chiropractic or any other primary health care provider's advice, treatment or care in the consumption of of this podcast. There is no doctor patient relationship that has been formed and the use and implementation of the information discussed are at the sole discretion of the listener. The information and opinions shared on this podcast are not intended to be a substitute for primary care diagnosis or treatment. In other words, guys, be smart about this. Take it with a grain of salt. Take this information to your primary healthcare provider and how have a discussion with him or her to make the best choice. That is for you. Remember, I am a doctor, but I am not your doctor and these conversations are meant for educational purposes only.