← Rena Malik, MD Podcast
Rena Malik, MD Podcast
Moment: The Science Behind Why Stronger People Feel More Confident
00:21:18
In this episode, Dr. Rena Malik interviews Michael Joseph Gross about the history and misconceptions of strength training. They discuss its surprising roots among women, the powerful benefits for mental and physical health, and new ideas for making exercise a more accessible part of daily life.
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- [00:01]
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- [00:17]
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Host
There's obviously the stigma that like the people who are very muscular, a very bodybuilder physique type are less intelligent, right? The gym bros. Or they're just so focused on their physique. Why do you think that's come about?
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Guest Expert
The myth of brain versus brawn really goes back to the debate between doctors and trainers in ancient Rome. It then developed in the 19th century into an idea that the body had limited reserves of a certain kind of energy that could be diverted in one or another way. And the energy that you put into mental work was, or rather the energy that you put into physical work was, could not then be used for mental work. There was no sense of the systems of our body being interconnected.
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Host
So in medicine there was actually some figures who promoted strength training, one being George Barker Winship. So tell us a little bit about that. He actually encouraged patients to resistance train to avoid being in his office.
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Guest Expert
To tell you about George Barker Winship, I want to tell you a little bit about the person who taught me about George Barker Winchester. That person is Jan Todd. Jan Todd was widely considered to be the strongest woman in the world for about 10 years, from the 1970s to the 1980s. She really is the person who more than anyone was responsible for popularizing heavy weight training among women. She went on to get a PhD and become an academic historian. She single handedly rediscovered a forgotten history of heavyweight training among Victorian women. She now runs an archive of the history of strength and sport at the University of Texas at Austin. It's like a 30,000 square foot facility. It has a great museum. It's in one corner of the football stadium Anybody who goes to Austin has to visit this place. It's really one of the great small museums in the country. And you can see some stuff about George Barker Winship there. But Jan Todd has done a huge amount of research about him, and the story that she reconstructed really frames him as kind of the original 98 pound weakling.
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Host
This is a guy that's so funny.
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Guest Expert
Yeah. This is a guy who in the 1850s, showed up as a freshman at Harvard and was just relentlessly picked on for being so tiny. He was something like, I don't know, 5, 7, 5, 8. Never weighed more than 150 pounds in his whole life. But he got strong so that he wouldn't be picked on so much anymore. And the kind of strength that fascinated him was what he called main strength. Now, main strength was from the 16th, 17th, 18th century. Sort of fades out in the 19th. Later on, it's the strength of the truckman or the porter. It's the strength that allows a boxer to pick up somebody in the ring and just throw him across the ring. And he saw that to build that kind of strength, you really had to lift heavy weights. And what he specialized was in was a kind of early version of the partial deadlift. He made a machine for this that he actually had in his doctor's office. So patients who came in would do this lift eventually. That lift was called the health lift.
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Host
I think I saw a picture of it. It's sort of like a squat, right? Like one of those pulley, squat pulleys.
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Guest Expert
It's a little more like a partial deadlift. There's a handle that you squat down a little bit and grab and then you stand up. And it is designed to strengthen the whole posterior chain, really. It wasn't just for men either. In 1871, on Broadway alone in New York City, there were four health lift parlors where men and women would walk in in their street clothes, women wearing their bustles. And they didn't have DJs, but they did have a grand piano. So somebody's playing music. You could have refreshments and do your lifting for the day and then go back to your work.
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Host
I love that. I wish we had more of that now.
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Guest Expert
And for women, it was marketed as something that would make pregnancy easier, make the pains of childbirth much less. It was also marketed as a treatment for their understanding of depression, neurasthenia. And the marketing of the health lift went under a banner phrase, exercise a medicine, which today is what exercise minded physicians are still saying. Exercise is medicine. It is absolutely but we are still not getting the message, you know, it's still not getting through.
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Host
I mean, there's so many points that I want to make, but I think, you know, it is, it is. Also, we live in a much different society. People aren't walking around past heavy lifting parlors. It's not part of like normal society to go and just in your regular clothes and do a couple lifts, which I think would be convenient. Right. If there was like, if there was a thing where you were like in every, every place you normally go, there was something you could go in your regular cloth, do a couple things and it was routine. Like, it wasn't like, oh, you're going to the gym and there's all these people who are really serious about weightlifting and you're going in to just do a couple things and leave. I mean, I've heard of many lifters who, who, they would like work at a gym and then like they do a few lifts and they'd go back to work and they just, that's how they built their body. They didn't have time to do like 45 minutes. They just did like 10 minutes here or there. And I wish that was more normalized because it would be a lot easier for people to sort of grab onto that.
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Guest Expert
Totally. I mean, you know, hey, billionaires out there listening. If you could put like 10, 20, 30 little installations like this in our airports.
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Host
Oh yeah, that'd be great.
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Guest Expert
And you know, just pay a couple trainers to be there, like to, to be in each one. The.
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Host
You probably don't even need trainers anymore. You can do some AI sort of or like, you know, like something that. Because hiring a person is expensive. So it could be very simple where there's like instructions, but just something where it's so easy for people to just do something.
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Guest Expert
Yeah, yeah, simple. You know, I'm pitching to the billionaires so they can afford to h. The trainers for us.
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Host
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, I think it'd be great.
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Guest Expert
Yeah.
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Host
In, in, you know, just, just making it a normal part of the day. Right. Like everyone instead of going out for lunch before you go out for lunch, it's just normal for everyone to go do a quick lift or a quick like five minute thing. That's right.
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Guest Expert
That's right.
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Host
And it's, it's, it's something that many people do, right. Who are really in tune with their fitness. But it's not like a national thing. Like maybe we should be, as you mentioned, maybe should be implemented in school where like, you know, obviously in elementary School, there's recess, they run around. But I think once recess goes away, there should be like a, like every. Between every couple classes. It's just like normal for kids to have this two, like five minute break to go do this lift or whatever. Something simple, right?
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Guest Expert
Amen. From the front row.
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Host
Yeah, yeah, right. Like, wouldn't that be great if you got that habit from a young age?
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Guest Expert
And think about all of the possibilities for, I mean, going back to this idea of strength as connection, all of the possibilities for partnership or mentorship or even a kind of national service program. Remember Teach for America? Think of the Peace Corps like the problem of chronic disease, the problem of functionality. Immobility in older age is so gigantic that if we trained some young people to go out, even if we were just concentrating on the older population, we could save just untold amounts of money, but also untold amounts of suffering.
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Host
And loneliness.
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Guest Expert
And loneliness. I mean, my dad, who has severe diabetes, which has had all of the, you know, kind of comorbidities that you can imagine, has been really unable to stand up or walk now for several years. And the struggle of being able to get any kind of physical therapy, much less a physical therapist who is in any way strength minded, has been insurmountable for him. It shouldn't be that hard. The knowledge is there and the willingness among people who practice this regimen and care about it, the willingness to share it is there. There's just no system. There are no policies in place yet. And what we need is for the big public health organizations, the big public health philanthropists to recognize this as a problem since so many of them are lifters themselves. I just haven't been able to understand why they're not picking this up.
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Host
Yeah, I mean, they do have the Silver Sneakers program through Medicare, which I think is great. It offers the ability to go to the gym, which is wonderful. I don't know that everyone uses it or when they do use it, do they actually use it to train at the gym. But I think it's a really great program that they do have. It's a step in the right direction.
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Guest Expert
Yeah.
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Host
I wanted to circle back. You said something about how heavy weightlifting was actually normal in Victorian women. Tell me a little bit about that.
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Guest Expert
Not normal. Surprising. Surprisingly popular. I mean, it's. It's always been a minority practice. The story of heavyweight training among Victorian women, especially in the United States, really starts in 1825.
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Host
Okay.
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Guest Expert
So exactly 200 years ago this year, the first physical education program in the United States based on gymnastic training was not at a school for boys, it was at a school for girls. In Boston, Jan Todd discovered this. Everybody had always believed that gymnastics began with boys, but that's not true. Gymnastics begin with girls in the United States. The director of the school who implemented this program wrote a report on it saying that all of the girls strength doubled within just a few months and that the only negative effect was a few calluses on their hands. He said that the importance of strength training for girls, the effect, the renewing effect of strength training for girls was so dramatic that he hoped very soon there would be as many gymnasiums for women as churches in Boston. Jan Todd went on to find a lot of texts that simply hadn't been acquired by libraries because librarians hadn't recognized exercise, much less strength exercise, as being important enough to save these books. So I'm pretty sure it's true that There is only one copy left of a book published in 1828 in Dublin, Ireland, a book called A Treatise on Gymnastics or Calisthenics for the Use of Young Ladies, which shows young women in their bloomers doing overhand pull ups, the most difficult kind of pull ups. When Jan Todd wrote about this in her great book about exercise in the Victorian era, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful, she included a footnote that said that among the undergraduates at the University of Texas who she was teaching in lifting classes, only 5% of the women could do this kind of pull up after a 12 week course. So for women to be illustrated in a book doing this type of exercise showed that it was popular enough that it was probably more than 5% of them who could do it.
- [13:38]
Host
Isn't that like the general statistic of how many people can do a proper pull up is like 5%, is it?
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Guest Expert
I didn't know that.
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Host
I think my husband just told me the statistic from somewhere. He read it and again, I can't fact check. You can fact check me, but I think it was like 5% of people can do a proper pull up, like proper form pull up.
- [13:56]
Guest Expert
The statistics on participation in weight training are horrifying, really. Strength training, according to US government data, is one of the most popular, one of the fastest growing sports in terms of its popularity. I think it grew something like 34% in the last couple of decades. But when you look at the absolute number of people who are doing it, that's really a growth of only 3% to 4%. So it's a 30% growth in the phenomenon, but only a 1% growth in terms of the absolute number of people doing it.
- [14:37]
Host
Yeah, that's very interesting. I'm glad it's growing. I'm glad it's growing. I wish it was more. Certainly. You also talked about depression and how strength training was. It is actually known to reduce depression. So we know that there's evidence that strength training and aerobic exercise can reduce depression almost as good as, like, an ssri or even as good as an ssri. So I think it's interesting that these were observations that were made even historically, that it would be good for treating depression.
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Guest Expert
Yes, in an anecdotal way. But then the scientific research on that in the modern sense doesn't begin until the late 1990s. The first study of heavyweight training as treatment for depression took place in Boston. Nalan Singh was the lead investigator, and he found that a full body program three times a week treated depression for 75% of people, as well as the best antidepressant medications. It didn't work for everybody. For 25% of people, it didn't have any effect at all. But for most people, it was as good as drugs. And some psychiatrists now are starting to experiment with prescribing weight training as an adjunct treatment. So it's not either. Or if you lift weights while taking antidepressants, maybe you can take a little bit less of the drugs, and if you take a little bit less of the drugs, then you can maybe reduce the side effects. And the side effects, as we get older, in many cases, become more pronounced. The most concerning one is that they can affect our balance. And so if in our 40s and 50s, we're able to start reducing those medications, we can also reduce our risk of hip fracture in time.
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Host
Yeah, well, in my field, SSRIs can cause decreased sexual desire, and in some cases, that can persist for much longer than you've been on the medication. It's called a post SSRI syndrome, and it's not very common, but it is present. And so I tend to try to encourage patients to either try a different type of antidepressant if possible. Uh, but it's a serious issue. Right? I. I think, of course, balance is so important, but I think sexual health in general, so valuable. It increases intimacy, closeness with people. It means things are working right. Um, your blood is. Flow is good, your hormones are working right. Like, that's. It's really a marker of your overall health. And we know that, you know, not only does strength training help all the things that we talked about, but it also helps. We see now that Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, our Mutual friend wrote a paper that showed that there's increased in libido. Men who are, who have, who strength train, have less, have higher libidos, have less erectile dysfunction and just generally more sexual satisfaction. And so it is true that these things are, that strength training is not only just making your muscles look bigger, there's so much more beyond that.
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Guest Expert
That's right. That's right.
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Host
And to your point about hip hop, you know, avoiding surgery, there was a study that, that you wrote about that put adults who had hip arthritis through a 12 week exercise program and compared them to another group. And the ones who did the exercise program were 44% less likely to have hip replacement surgery.
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Guest Expert
That's right.
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Host
That's crazy.
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Guest Expert
It was a combined exercise program of strength, flexibility and functional movement and it took place in Oslo in 2014. This kind of program is going to become more and more necessary as time goes on. I think the Medicare prediction is that the demand for total hip replacement will grow by 659% between now and the year 2060.
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Host
659%.
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Guest Expert
That's right.
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Host
I mean, there are more aging people, but that's still quite a high number.
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Guest Expert
Yeah. And you and I probably both know a lot of people who are having to have these surgeries now, even in their 50s.
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Host
Well, I mean, we're seeing more obese kids, back to your point, which means that they're carrying a load on their body for much longer than they did in past generations.
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Guest Expert
And Maria Fiatoroni Singh has done some great research on weight training for overweight and obese adolescents. There were series of papers that came out of a study that took place in the country music capital of New Zealand, a little town where they randomized high school kids into either a full body lifting program or basically a health education program for something like 12 weeks. And the kids who lifted weights, their waist circumference stopped growing, their markers of metabolic health all improved, and of course their strength improved, which created improvements in self efficacy. I mean, it's like your son saying, I feel strong this morning when he says that. What he's saying is, I can do what I want to today.
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Host
Yeah.
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Guest Expert
You know?
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Host
Yeah.
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Guest Expert
Like again, strength is how we act upon the world. And for a lot of overweight and obese adolescents who maybe feel self conscious running or doing other kinds of aerobic exercise, lifting weights is something that they can be really good at. You know, just sitting at a machine and really pushing something heavy. And then seeing in comparison, like, I'm better at this than everybody else, I feel like I'm worse at stuff all the time. But look, I'm better.
- [20:44]
Host
If you liked that episode with Michael Joseph Gross, make sure to check out the full episode right here.
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