← Rena Malik, MD Podcast
Rena Malik, MD Podcast
This One Habit Could Protect Your Brain, Sex Drive, and Independence
01:24:31
In this episode, Dr. Rena Malik, MD sits down with journalist Michael Gross to uncover the vital role of muscle strength in health and aging. They explore the surprising history and science of strength, dispel common misconceptions, and share tips for incorporating strength training at any stage of life. Listeners will discover how building muscle can support longevity, mental health, and resilience.
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- [00:00]
A
One of the biggest surprises to me when I started to look at the history of muscle was how late we began to understand it in the way that we do today. Ancient Roman doctors believed that if you built more muscle, you could actually smother your soul. If we would build up our kids, encourage our kids to get strong, not just the athletes, but every kid, not just the boys, but but every kid, this whole society would be in a much better place.
- [00:32]
B
If there's one thing that can boost your sex drive, improve your mental health, prevent Alzheimer's, and allow you to live well into your 90s doing all the things you love, it is maintaining your muscle mass. But for centuries, medicine overlooked its true potential. Why and what does this mean for your health and longevity? Welcome back to The Rena Malik, M.D. podcast, your trusted guide for leveling up your health and sex life and relationships with evidence based tools. I'm your host, Dr. Reena Malik, urologist and pelvic surgeon. And today I'm excited to welcome Michael Joseph Gross, a renowned journalist and author whose groundbreaking book Stronger reveals muscle's huge impact. From ancient civilizations to cutting edge modern medicine, we'll cut through the misconceptions about muscle, explain why doctors historically got it wrong, and provide concrete examples into how cultivating your strength can fortify your body and your mind against the challenges of aging. This isn't just about exercise. It's about living for a healthy, robust and disease free future. And if you want a future that includes better sex, check out my Better Sex app. It is an AI powered app that's customized to whatever your goals are for your sex life. You get daily lessons, health practices, weekly intimacy challenges, and Most importantly, a 24.7ai coach that is trained in my voice to help guide you through the process. Check it out today@studio.com Rena or Michael. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [02:00]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [02:01]
B
You are a journalist. What prompted you to write a book about strength?
- [02:05]
A
Actually, you were right the first time. Was a journalist.
- [02:07]
B
Okay.
- [02:08]
A
Was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair for a long time doing investigative reporting. I started to write a lot of stories about technology and national security, and it was pretty dark stuff. I realized at a certain point that I had to do something to get out of my head and into my body a little more. So I decided to learn a sport that scared me. I decided to learn whitewater kayaking.
- [02:32]
B
Okay.
- [02:33]
A
But I knew that before I got into the river, I had to be a lot stronger than I was. And so I started working out seriously with the trainer. Really for the first time in my life, and I couldn't believe how much it changed me head to toe. I got really curious about those changes. And I also noticed that my workouts started to seem like one of the most useful things I was doing for other people in my life. Because most people I knew didn't make training a habit the same way we brush our teeth.
- [03:06]
B
Right.
- [03:06]
A
You know, and when they saw me doing that, they were curious about it, and some of them started too. So I just realized that all these changes, both the science of strength training, what it was doing to our bodies, and also the culture of strength training. Like, who gets to participate in this? Why is it only certain people? How could I not have known about all these changes until I was about 40 years old? The science of strength training and the culture of strength training both need a much closer look.
- [03:43]
B
Yeah, they need a rebrand, actually.
- [03:46]
A
They really do. Yeah. Have you read any of the books about food by Michael Pollan?
- [03:51]
B
I have not read them, but I know of them.
- [03:54]
A
So the Omnivore's Dilemma in Defense of Food. These were some of the only models for the kind of book that I wanted to write about strength training. I wanted to write really interesting stories, stories that would also communicate the best research. One day I was reading one of the books by Michael Pollan. One day I was reading a book and I came across this line. What if we started to think about food less as a thing and more as a relationship? And what that was getting at was, let's involve an awareness of all the supply chains of value that bring the food to our table as part of our habits of eating. As soon as I read this question, what if we started to think about food less as a thing and more as a relationship? And there was a light bulb moment for me, a light bulb went off in my head and I thought, what if we started to think about strength less as a form of self assertion and more as a form of connection? Yeah, strength is a form of connection. And when we start to look at it that way, it turns out to be a useful lens through which to see everything from the basic biology of strength to the linguistic etymology for how we talk about strength. Like, if you strip our whole neurological neuromuscular system down to the beams, what you have is the motor unit, the basic unit of connection between our muscle cells and our nerve cells. And motor units, as, you know, create motor patterns. Neurological stimulus involves increasing numbers of muscle cells, teaches them what to do, connects them. And it's those connections that enable us to learn how to walk and how to bench press. And if we go back to ancient Greece and look at how they talked about strength, they had eight words for different kinds of strength. So not as many as Eskimos supposedly had for snow, but a whole lot. And only two of those were solely human forms of strength. Six of them were types of strength that were collaborations between humans and the gods.
- [06:32]
B
Interesting.
- [06:33]
A
Strength in ancient Greece was not considered an individual accomplishment, but based on individual effort. It was something that people made in collaboration with the gods to exercise in athletic competitions as tributes to the gods, to bring the community together.
- [06:53]
B
Yeah, that's fascinating. And speaking of history, there's actually been. Obviously, the Greeks looked at some part of strength as being in relation to the gods, but there's also been sort of a variation on how society viewed muscular strength in a human. And whether that was good, good, or bad, that sort of varied over history. And you talk about that a lot in your book. Can you give us sort of a rundown of what, you know, what. How that's evolved over time?
- [07:18]
A
One of the biggest surprises to me when I started to look at the history of muscle was how late we began to understand it in the way that we do today. For ancient Greeks, muscle really was considered to be nothing more than insulation or padding. They'd been running races at the Olympics for hundreds of years before they had any idea that muscles had anything to do with movement.
- [07:46]
B
Fascinating.
- [07:47]
A
In the beginning, ancient Greeks thought that muscle was just insulation or padding. Later, in ancient Rome, there was a connection between the fleshy part of muscle and movement. That was understood, but it wasn't how we understand it. The fleshy part of muscle, they thought, was just a factory for producing the tendons. And the tendons, they thought, were what moved us, but the tendons moved us because of a portion of hot air that was trapped in our bodies that got warmer as we moved toward things that were good for us and colder as we moved toward things that were bad for us. So as we are, or rather as we're drawn to things that are good to us, so we see something that's good for us, and it makes the air inside us warmer. The air increases the size of these tendons, which pulls on our bones like marionettes. Not going to believe this, the 17th century, that the fleshy part of muscle is understood to be what moves us. It's Vesalius, who writes the first big anatomy textbook, who discovers that. And there's a great coincidence here. Scientists did not understand that muscle moved us until the same year that Copernicus published his theory that the Earth revolves around the sun.
- [09:17]
B
Wow.
- [09:18]
A
Those really, I think, are discoveries on par with one another. Because that breakthrough, understanding the place of central place of muscle in everything that we do, in the whole way that we act upon the world, that opens the door for us to begin to understand, very slowly, how muscle is connected with every other system in the body. And eventually, now we know strong muscles make strong bones, strong muscles make for better cardiovascular health, strong muscles make for better mental health. But it's taken us thousands of years to come to those breakthroughs.
- [10:01]
B
It's fascinating. I think that also the other thing is the way people viewed more muscular individuals compared to less muscular individuals has also changed. Tell me about that.
- [10:12]
A
That's a really great point. In ancient Rome, there was a professional competition between doctors and trainers to see who would be in charge of health care. And in the elite gymnasium schools where young Roman men were educated. And so there were big debates between doctors and trainers about the best way to take care of the body. And doctors found that pointing to trainers and trainers who specialized in building mass for athletes. So making them big and muscular, as we would say today, were doing the worst possible thing you could do to young people. They believed. Ancient Roman doctors believed that if you built more muscle, you could actually smother your soul. Ancient Roman doctors believed that if you built muscle, it would make it impossible for you to think.
- [11:08]
B
That's so fascinating. That's really crazy.
- [11:12]
A
And it's. I mean, crazy is the word because all of the newest neurological, psychological, psychiatric research shows that it's exactly the opposite.
- [11:27]
B
Yeah.
- [11:27]
A
There was a finding at the University of Sydney in Australia that heavy weight training actually increases the size of the brain's posterior cingulate cortex, which is the part of the brain that is a seat of empathy and emotional memory. It's the first part of the brain to atrophy in Alzheimer's patients, even before people show any other symptoms of the disease.
- [11:54]
B
And we know muscle training is going to help prevent, you know, reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease.
- [12:00]
A
That's right. That's right.
- [12:02]
B
It's fascinating to me because, I mean, look, doctors have been on the wrong side many times throughout history. I mean, we used to literally put leeches on human bodies to treat them and, like, drain their blood, which was like the opposite of things that you needed to do. So we've certainly been on the wrong side of history, and we will continue to be on the wrong side of history well into the future, over and over. Again, right, because we're going to learn new things.
- [12:25]
A
Would you tell me about what you learned about muscle and exercise in medical school?
- [12:31]
B
Nothing.
- [12:31]
A
Tell me about all the classes you took on exercise in medical school.
- [12:34]
B
We learned about the importance of aerobic exercise for cardiovascular health. So moderate intensity aerobic exercise that's drilled into you. Try to get 150 minutes a week that is sort of, you know, taught in terms of resistance training. It may be mentioned that it's good for you to some degree, but it's. There's no, like, depth discussion about it. And to be quite honest, that's where I think. I wish we spent more time on preventing disease than we did on treating disease. Now, the issue is that there's so much to teach and the large majority of patients that are coming to you have already got a disease. Right. And so you have to learn how to treat those things and reversing those things. There are like fellowships that do do prevention as their primary care, primary care doctors who go into specifically prevention type areas, but it is not a central tenant of medicine and it's a failure because to be honest with you, I spend a lot of time talking to my patients about what's the one thing you can change right now that you can do before you see me the next time? And let's change one thing and let's get there. And it might take two, three, four years, but that's time invested in improving your health. And I wish that that was something every doctor did.
- [13:47]
A
I do too. I think if more doctors did what you're doing asking this question, what's the one thing or even what's the first thing, you'd all be in much better shape. There's been a real shift, especially in geriatric medicine, in the specialty of the treatment of older people in recent years to recognize the priority of different types of exercise that older people need to be implementing in their own lives. And according to the World Health Organization, the order in which people should be prioritizing the different types of exercise really follows the sequence of capacities that we need to stand up from a chair. So what do you need to stand up from a chair? You need strength. What do you need once you're standing up? You need balance to keep yourself on your feet. And it's only after that that aerobic capacity comes in. So strength, balance, then aerobics. That's what the World Health Organization is saying old people need to do if they want to stay as independent and happy as they can be for the rest of their lives.
- [15:00]
B
Right, but we need to be starting that at, you know, in your 20s, in your 40s. Right. Not waiting till you're older to start implementing those things. And that's the problem.
- [15:11]
A
I think we actually need to be starting even earlier than that because it's now recognized that sarcopenia, the name for age related muscle loss, actually begins in early life. Take that in. Like we, we, we think of old people who are bent over and wizened as having taken a wrong turn somewhere in the middle of life. But really, if we would build up our kids, encourage our kids to get strong, not just the athletes, but every kid, not just the boys, but every kid, this whole society would be in a much better place.
- [15:54]
B
And I think it's more important now than ever because with devices, with, you know, kids are indoors watching devices, they're not getting outside, they're not playing like we used to when we were kids. And even when we were kids, there was tv and then, you know, it's, it's so. But ask my parents, they were outside all day. Like you couldn't bring them inside. They were playing, running, doing things. But yes, I think it's so, so important. It's interesting. My son this morning woke up, he said, mommy, I feel strong today. I think I slept well and he had worked out this week. And he said, I think I feel strong this morning. I said, that's great, boy. Yeah, because we also talk about how important it is to get your sleep so your muscles can grow. But yeah, I think, you know, it's so important at every age, right. To build those habits, to make it a priority to enjoy the act of building your muscles. Right. In whatever way you deem appropriate and enjoyable, but just continuing to do that throughout your life. But I think at least my view is that if you don't start in your four at the latest, in your 40s, you're headed down the wrong path.
- [16:57]
A
That's right.
- [16:58]
B
That's. I mean, I can't, there's no science that I know of that would back that up. But I mean, I would say that you need to start, you need to start and start whenever you can. And what you've, what you've alluded to is that you can really start at any age. At least that's what the WHO thinks.
- [17:11]
A
There are a lot of. And it's not just the who. I mean, no, I think, I think one great resource for a lot of people listening that I'm always surprised people don't know about are the position statements or position stands by Large medical and in some cases athletic organizations like the American College of Sports Medicine or the National Strength and Conditioning Association. And just continuing to talk about kids for a second. There are so many concerns traditionally about safety and resistance training for kids. A lot of that used to be based on the idea that it would stunt their growth. That's been definitively debunked. But there remains a big concern about safety in the gym for kids, and the research just does not back that up. There was a 2014 international consensus statement on resistance training for youth that found that more than 70% of. Of injuries of young people in the weight room are purely accidental. I mean, really mainly the result of just dropping weight. Yeah, that's right. And all of the risk can be mitigated. Much of it can simply be reduced by making sure that kids have good guidance when they're in the gym, just taking time to teach them. I mean, really make this a part of their education. The same way ancient Greeks integrated physical and what we would now call intellectual academic instruction in their schools. But for them, that dichotomy wouldn't have made any sense. If you tried to talk, if you asked Homer what was more important, physical or mental strength, he wouldn't understand the question. If you asked an ancient Greek what their high school experience was like, what were the relationships between the eggheads and the jocks? That wouldn't make any sense to them. There was simply no separation.
- [19:22]
B
You know, it's interesting because there's obviously the stigma that 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 or. Why do you think that's come about?
- [19:38]
A
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 could not then be used for mental work. There was no sense of the systems of our body being interconnected.
- [20:24]
B
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.
- [20:35]
A
To tell you about George Barker Winship, I want to tell you a little bit about the person who taught me about George Barker Winship. 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 heavyweight training among women. She went on to get a PhD and become an academic historian. She single handedly redistribute discovered 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.
- [21:52]
B
This is a guy that's so funny.
- [21:54]
A
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 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.
- [23:05]
B
I think I saw a picture of it sort of like a squat, right? Like one of those pulley, squat pulleys.
- [23:10]
A
It's a little more like a, 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.
- [23:51]
B
I love that. I wish we had more of that now.
- [23:54]
A
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.
- [24:26]
B
It is, absolutely.
- [24:27]
A
But. But we are still not getting the message. You know, it's still not getting through.
- [24:33]
B
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, 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 clothes, 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.
- [25:26]
A
Totally. I mean, you know, hey, billionaires out there listening. If you could just put like 10, 20, 30 little installations like this in our airports.
- [25:38]
B
Oh yeah, that'd be great.
- [25:40]
A
And you know, just pay a couple trainers to be there, like to, to be in each one. The.
- [25:47]
B
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.
- [26:00]
A
Yeah, yeah, simple. You know, I'm pitching to the billionaires so they can afford to hire the trainers for us.
- [26:08]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No I think it'd be great.
- [26:11]
A
Yeah.
- [26:11]
B
In, you know, just, just making 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.
- [26:23]
A
That's right, that's right.
- [26:25]
B
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 like 5 minute break to go do this lift or whatever. Something simple. Right?
- [26:52]
A
Men from the front row.
- [26:53]
B
Yeah, yeah, right. Like, wouldn't that be great if you got that habit from a young age?
- [26:57]
A
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 functional 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 and loneliness. And loneliness. I mean, my dad, who has severe diabetes which has had all of the 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, 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.
- [28:51]
B
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.
- [29:07]
A
Yeah.
- [29:08]
B
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.
- [29:15]
A
Not normal, surprisingly popular.
- [29:18]
B
Popular.
- [29:18]
A
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.
- [29:30]
B
Okay.
- [29:31]
A
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 in a school for girls. 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.
- [32:01]
B
Isn't that like the general statistic of how many people can do a proper pull up is like 5%, is it?
- [32:07]
A
I didn't know that.
- [32:09]
B
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.
- [32:20]
A
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.
- [33:01]
B
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, you know, 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.
- [33:34]
A
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 medication. 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.
- [35:04]
B
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. But it's a serious issue, right? 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. Your blood 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, 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.
- [36:16]
A
That's right. That's right.
- [36:17]
B
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.
- [36:36]
A
That's right.
- [36:37]
B
That's crazy.
- [36:38]
A
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.
- [37:09]
B
659%.
- [37:11]
A
That's right.
- [37:12]
B
I mean, there are more aging people, but that's still quite a high number.
- [37:16]
A
Yeah. And you and I probably both know a lot of people who are having to have these surgeries now, even in their 50s.
- [37:28]
B
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.
- [37:37]
A
And Maria Fiataroni 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. You know, 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.
- [39:08]
B
Yeah, it's true, it's true. And you know what's so interesting about kids? I wanted to bring this up earlier, but the PE programs around the country are very varied because I've lived in different states now. And I will tell you that the program here in Korea, California, is much more robust than where I used to live. And like, our kids run the mile every week. They do. My older son does like, they do like sort of interval training and they do like these little stations and they'll do like really genuine, like resistance type body, body resistance training type things every week. And so it's so impressive to me that they are instilling this sort of exercise in these children at a, at a young age. And, and they're, they say, like, look, we really encourage all of our boys to be running a mile at this rate and our girls running a mile at this rate. And they literally give you numbers, benchmarks that they want your kids to meet. I think that's great. Whereas where, when I grew up and we did the mile like once a quarter, right? Or like, whatever, there was like a one time you had to run the mile and you know, they would time you and that was it. And then you would do like, you know, play some sports, but it wasn't ever like real training of any kind. And you do jumping jacks and push ups and maybe push ups if you're lucky, but more like jumping jacks and some stretches and that was it. Right? And so I was like, it's very interesting to me that it, it varies so much from where you live. And then you look at like, okay, well, California is a healthier state if you look at rates of obesity, right? Like, California has less. Colorado is the, actually the lowest. And then there's some states that have, you know, low numbers. And there's some states obviously, like in the Rust Belt that are higher. And so it's fascinating. And I wonder if someone has looked at that or will look at that, can see, like, the difference in PE programs in those areas.
- [40:54]
A
I'll bet they can. And for parents or aunts and uncles, other interested adults who want to try to smooth out some of those inequalities by helping to create their own micro cultures of strength, a couple of other good resources are. There's a good American Academy of Pediatrics position stand that summarizes the research on strength training for young people. There is also a series of papers by Avery Fagenbaum in Massachusetts, who really is the preeminent expert on weight training for young people.
- [41:37]
B
Yeah, yeah. And I would add that it's a huge bonding experience for me and my kids to go to the gym together and to work out together. And so it's something we do, we enjoy as a family. And so that's been really nice.
- [41:48]
A
That's something we see our friend Gabrielle Lyon doing all the time, too. You know, videos of her working out with her kids. I was with a couple of orthopedic surgeons in Los Angeles a couple days ago. One of them told me that whenever his kids turned five, that's when he started taking them to the gym. And so it just became something normal, something regular for them. And his daughter, who's now in finance in New York, just called him on the telephone. She's in her 20s now. And she said, dad, I just had to call you today to thank you for taking me to the gym because now, you know, like, I just like your son this morning, now I can do what I want. You know, I feel like I can just do what I want because I'm strong.
- [42:38]
B
You mentioned Maria Fiataroni. And she also did a study on elderly patients. And I thought that was so compelling because. And she did on frail elderly patients and put them through resistance training. Tell me about that study.
- [42:52]
A
Maria Fiataroni did a study published in the Journal of the American Medical association that is really the equivalent of a classic Bruce Springsteen album in the field of weight training research. Now it's called High Intensity Strength Training in nonagenarians in 90 year olds. The original pilot study involved nine people at a nursing home called Hebrew Rehabilitation center for Aged. The residents and staff affectionately nicknamed the place Hebrew Rehab. So everybody at this nursing home had grown up in the Depression. You know, these were not people who thought of themselves as gym people. They never made time for exercise. Many of them were Holocaust survivors. They started a program consisting of just one exercise. It was just the knee extension. Three sets of 10, three times a week, basically eight weeks. And within that very short time, the average strength gain was 174%.
- [44:02]
B
Wow.
- [44:03]
A
The maximum strength gain was 374% and the minimum was 67%. Not only did they get stronger, but they were able to walk better. In some cases, they were able to go from walking with a walker to walking with a cane. In one case, a man was able to throw, who walked with a cane, was able to throw his cane away. And when they moved on from this pilot study to a full scale randomized controlled trial with instead of nine people, 100 people, they found that these dramatic increases in, in strength also just spontaneously increased people's activity. In the nursing home, they put activity monitor bracelets on their ankles and just getting stronger made them 35% more active. So there's a lot of talk about functional training, as if everything we do needs to mimic the movements of daily life, but it's simply not true. Especially for the oldest people, if you simply give them the wherewithal, the strength to be able to get up and go, they're gonna do it. You don't have to waste a lot of time working at low intensity out of a misguided idea that you're gonna hurt them by lifting weights. Because as long as weights are appropriately selected, respecting the relative quality of strength based on a measurement of an individual's own capacity, working hard is not going to hurt you.
- [45:58]
B
So let's break that down a little bit. If you're an elderly person and you have worked out and you're frail, how do you decide what your capacity is? If you don't have a trainer or you don't have, you know, the settings.
- [46:08]
A
Of a research study, you, you have to have help. You have to have, if not a trainer, everybody can't afford that. You just have to find somebody who knows how to lift to, to help you. And, and when I say knows how to lift, that may just be somebody who can put your, your ankle weight on and, and hold your lower femur between their legs to make sure that when you do your leg extension, it's going to be straight. But people need help. It can actually, it can even be help by phone as long as people have access to videos and, and they're, they're able to have conversations that are, you know, clear enough about the biomechanics of what, what they're doing.
- [47:00]
B
Yeah, and I will say most gyms, they will support you in terms of, if you do get, like, if you have silver sneakers, let's say, in The US and you have Medicare. Go to the gym and say, hey, can you show me how to use this machine at any gym? And the people there will show you and help you through that. So it doesn't, you know, you don't need to. It doesn't need to be a very challenging. Oh, who do I ask? What do I do? You just go to the gym where you have your free membership as a senior and ask for help.
- [47:25]
A
That's right, yeah. Another thing they found in those very first studies of weight training for the oldest, frailest people was they learned a little bit about the role of nutrition. So in that second study we were just talking about, the significant average strength gain was increased by 50% more if people took just a basic nutritional supplement. I'm not even talking about increasing protein intake. I'm just talking about something like ensure to make sure they're getting vitamins and minerals. But for older people who often don't eat well and many of whom become malnourished, just that couple dollars a day can boost strength by half again as much.
- [48:15]
B
Yeah. Do you know why she chose the knee extension?
- [48:18]
A
At that time, understanding of biomechanics was that the quads were critical in standing up. And of course they are critical as part of the apparatus of standing up, but I think we've come to understand the posterior chain as playing a bigger role. Now. It was probably also a simple matter of equipment. You know, they were rigging up their own equipment at that time. This was like a homemade cable machine.
- [48:52]
B
Yeah.
- [48:53]
A
And after that first study was published, Dennis Kaiser, who runs the Kaiser Corporation, which manufactures pneumatic resistance training machines that can be adjusted from like 0.1 pound up to 1200 pounds just by pressing a button, adjusting the air pressure. He gave them one of his knee extension machines, but then also a leg press, which would involve more of the muscles and. And so then they were off to the races.
- [49:24]
B
I think a leg press is a great place for an older person to start. I think that's a great. Because it's. You can get a seated one that's, you know, you can. You multiple points where your body is touching, sort of, you know, positioning yourself and keeping you in the right position and versus like trying a deadlift or something. You know, I think, I think that's a really good one to start with. It's, it's, it's pretty. If you don't go too heavy right away, you won't hurt yourself.
- [49:49]
A
Yeah.
- [49:49]
B
You know, I think, you know, I worry about modern society being set up for failure. Like, we spend a lot of time sitting, we spend a lot of time indoors. And the gluteal muscles and the posterior chain, as you've alluded to, are so, so important for just being able to do regular functions, like, you know, standing from a chair, standing from the toilet, like, all the things you need to do. But, I mean, you could go a whole day without really engaging your gluteal muscles. So we actually probably should be targeting these muscles in the gym, or we might have to, if that's your lifestyle.
- [50:27]
A
No question. The person who did the most to help me understand strength in ancient Greece and Rome, who's another of the central figures I write about in Stronger, is Charles Stocking. Now, Charles Stocking is probably the only Homeric scholar who also holds a California junior state powerlifting record in the squat. In his early, early twenties, he squatted almost triple his body weight.
- [50:55]
B
Wow.
- [50:55]
A
He's kept up the training, and now, at 45, he's even stronger than he was then. He's probably the only person in any university anywhere who teaches both classics and kinesiology, the study of human bodily movement. And he also worked his way through classics graduate school at UCLA as a strength and conditioning coach for varsity Bruins teams and for individual Olympic athletes. So he would study the biomechanics of every sport and then come up with training programs, like in the case of women's soccer, to reduce the risk of ACL tears. As far as he knows, actually, nobody ever tore an ACL on his watch.
- [51:42]
B
Wow.
- [51:43]
A
Right?
- [51:43]
B
That's impressive.
- [51:44]
A
I know. And he applies his training knowledge now even to his work as a scholar. So to write the books about ancient language that he writes, like the book about the eight different words for strength, a whole book about the eight different words for strength that we were talking about earlier today. To write these books, he has to sit in his desk so much that the. The muscles, you know, they wither from lack of attention during the day. So he came up with a workout that I called the desk proofing workout, because he gave it to me when I was writing this book. I was telling him about what it was doing to my back, and he said, okay, before. And this really goes for anybody with a desk job. Before you sit down at your desk for the day, you just load up some tension in the muscles that for the rest of that day are going to be starved for attention. In this case, it's really just two movements. It's a hip extension or a hip thrust. It doesn't even have to be weighted. You Know, you and I could get down on these chairs, put our shoulder blades on the edge of the chair and just raise our butts up and squeeze them, Add some weight, add a hip circle, you know. Yeah. If you want to, but even that's not necessary. Just get the tension into your butt and get some tension into your back, maybe by doing a row or by doing a reverse pull up. Just going back to specifically the gluteal muscles, they are so central to who we are as human beings that there were a couple of evolutionary biologists who wrote a big paper calling the glutes a hallmark of humankind.
- [53:47]
B
I love that.
- [53:48]
A
Now, no other mammal even has a gluteus maximus.
- [53:52]
B
Really?
- [53:52]
A
Yeah. In all the other primates, it's called the gluteus superficialis.
- [53:56]
B
Okay.
- [53:57]
A
But it's the biggest muscle in our body. And if we don't in our daily lives, jog, run, do much squatting or stair climbing, then they can actually get no activation at all. If all we're doing is sitting and walking, our glutes are going to end up starving. And there's even a clinical term for this. It's called gluteal amnesia. Stuart McGill has written about this.
- [54:32]
B
Interesting.
- [54:33]
A
Aristotle said that the center of movement was the soul, but biomechanically, it's the glutes. So Charles Stocking thinks maybe the soul is located in the glutes.
- [54:47]
B
You know, speaking about the glutes, I mean, obviously there's a lot more attention, tension now in. In growing the gluteus muscles, especially for women. It's interesting because I think in the 90s, that was like the opposite. Right. Like you wanted to have, like a small buttocks. But I. I'm excited. I'm happy that it's more of an. Attention is also seen as an attractive feature by men. And I wonder if that is sort of evolutionary. Like, okay, you are a strong woman, meaning you can have babies and. And without issue. And, you know, you'll maybe be more of someone who can bear children without complication because you're strong.
- [55:21]
A
I think there's a lot to that. I mean, if you even go back to look at ancient art, like the Venus of Willendorf, you know, the figure was. It was very voluptuous. Voluptuous, top and bottom. The work of Jan Todd actually speaks to this, too. She found that in the 19th century century, there were a lot of illustrations in women's health manuals, women's hygiene manuals, talking about how unhealthy the restriction of the corset on the middle of the body was, and how the Venus de Milo, who had much fuller, more rounded buttocks, was the model of beauty. Jan Todd calls this majestic womanhood a model of beauty based on strength and size. And like, going back to sort of function and tying this to the work of Maria Fiatironi Singh. I mean, Charles Stocking points out that all of the glute work that we see women doing in the gym right now may lower the incidence of. Of osteoporosis and hip fracture, like in older age. I mean, we'll probably, probably have a lot fewer hip replacements among women who are right now doing hip thrusters just to make their butts bigger. You know, they think they're just making themselves more attractive, but they're also making themselves more resilient in the most lasting way.
- [57:03]
B
Well, there are sort of reasons why people see the other gender as attractive when they're more muscular. And there's some research on that that I think you shared with me. So let's talk about it a little bit. What do we know in terms of how muscular physiques are perceived as attractive based on gender?
- [57:19]
A
One of the most interesting things in this research is that there's a theory that's become very popular that there's a reverse U curve in terms of the attractiveness of muscularity in men. There's been a lot of research based on cartoon illustrations of bodies that shows that women are attracted to bodies that become more muscular to a point, but then the attractiveness falls off when the muscularity becomes perceived as excessive. But in the very few studies that have used photographs of men instead of cartoon illustrations of men, they have not actually found any drop off in the attractiveness of muscularity. It just. It's on a steady upward course. The more muscular, the more attractive. I don't actually think this body of research is mature enough, is extensive enough for us to draw a lot of conclusions from it. But that one fact did strike me as pretty significant.
- [58:31]
B
Yeah, I mean, I've looked at the research too, and what I found was that generally speaking, upper body strength was very attractive to women, unquestionably. And. And it makes sense because you wanted someone who was, if you think about evolutionarily, you wanted someone strong who could protect you. And so upper body strength signals that. And it's easier to visualize a V shape, which basically signaled lower body fat, which again, sort of was an indicator for metabolic health, was more attractive to women when looking at men. And I think this is. This is. I mean, this is just our Bodies saying like, look, this is healthy, right? This person is going to live long, protect you and, and be healthy and have good genes for your kids if you decide to have children with them. And the interesting part about this research that I found was that it's different between if you want to have a short term relationship versus a long term relationship. So short term relationships, those physical attributes are much more enticing. And then long term you look at other factors also, like kindness and reliability and trustworthiness that become also part of it. Where it doesn't seem solely rely on muscular physique or attractiveness physically.
- [59:40]
A
This research dovetails in an interesting way with psychological research about the importance of perceived muscularity to a man's psyche and to a man's own sense of self worth. The importance of seeing oneself as muscular. Muscular is really just, it's beyond question. Like for men from boyhood on, perceiving yourself as muscular really is important to self esteem, to feeling like you're okay. And interestingly, participating in resistance training improves a man's perceptions of his own muscularity, even if it doesn't objectively improve his physique. So men who lift weights think of they see themselves as more muscular even if they haven't changed the shape of their bodies. And seeing themselves that way probably makes them sexier too, right?
- [60:45]
B
Confidence, obviously, I think it's an un, it's probably not studied very strongly, but confidence makes a big role in how you perceive another person, whether it's male or female, right? If nobody wants to generally be with someone who carries themselves without confidence because it makes them feel doubt themselves, right? You sort of transfer your emotions a little bit, right? I mean strength training in general, I think any sort of like thing where you're investing in your health, you feel good, right? You feel good. And that, that, that general positivity that you feel from the weightlifting and about yourself. Transcendental furs in every aspect of your health, in addition to sexuality.
- [61:23]
A
That's right.
- [61:24]
B
I want to shift gears a little bit. So a huge barrier for people who are thinking about starting in the gym is that they're super intimidated, right? They're like, I see these people in the corner lifting weights and I don't look like them and I don't know what I'm doing and I might hurt myself. Especially for older people. What have you learned through all the interviews you've done and the experts you've interviewed and the research you've done? What are good ways to overcome this intimidation?
- [61:49]
A
So first to the issue of safety. We talked about safety in young people earlier. Now you're asking about safety in older people. And the research on that is very similar and equally compelling. In the National Strength and Conditioning association position statement on strength training for older people, they did a review. They cited a review of 20 studies involving more than 2,500 people aged 60 to 72 taking part in weight training studies for falls reduction. And in all of Those studies, those 2,500 people, there was exactly one case of shoulder pain.
- [62:33]
B
Wow. That's 2,500 people.
- [62:36]
A
Just one case with no injuries. As long as people had proper supervision, correct technique, exercise selection and setting appropriate weights.
- [62:50]
B
Well, that's a lot of parameters.
- [62:52]
A
It is a lot of parameters. But this goes back to the need for help. We just need to insist both for ourselves and for the older people in our lives on finding appropriate help. We talked earlier about how trainers are expensive and trainers are expensive, but injuries are more expensive. And if you can't afford a trainer, you can figure out somebody in your social circle, somebody in your friends or family who knows how to train, do this and you can get some help. I wish there were a hack for that, you know, but.
- [63:35]
B
Well, we do have social media and I do feel like, you know, you can join local Facebook groups and sort of, you know, there are, I mean, I think older population, very much of it's on Facebook and so you can sort of try to find if you don't have one. I just worry, I think, I think our parents generation is very good about having social media networks. I think it's becoming smaller and smaller in terms of how big your social networks are as the sequential generations are getting, as people are getting younger and younger because of social media, because of Internet, because of video games, whatever. Right. I do think that we, you can look to your social circles, but I think that like asking for help is something that we just have to get over and you have to be okay being vulnerable.
- [64:24]
A
Yeah.
- [64:25]
B
Because that's what it is. Right. It's feeling vulnerable and like there's sometimes you got to put your big boy, big girl pants on and just do it.
- [64:32]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [64:33]
B
For your, for yourself.
- [64:34]
A
There are also a few gyms that specialize in lifting for older people that are creating resources on social media that can probably not serve as soul guidance, but it, it would be a good way to start building a set of concepts like, you know, in your, in, in mind as you, as you approach this. Like there's a, a little gym in Australia called Groundwork Fitness that does some amazing stuff on Instagram?
- [65:11]
B
Yeah. And there are new things like at, at our gym they have something called an E. GY which sort of is like I don't think it's perfect, but I see a lot of older patients on it and it's better than them having nothing. Right. It sort of guides them into like the tempo of exercise and gives them like a goal. It gamifies weightlifting. I think for a new person, something like that could be nice.
- [65:32]
A
Maria Fiataroni Singh, again, the sort of Bruce Springsteen of weight training research for older people. She has some resources, online resources too that I can give you links to that people can share.
- [65:45]
B
That's awesome. And you know, I know we talked about sarcopenia a little bit and it's defined as age related muscle loss. I hate that because it means that it's inevitable. Right? Like why? But it's not inevitable.
- [66:00]
A
It means that it's inevitable if you don't do anything about it.
- [66:03]
B
Right? Right. Yeah. And I think that's the key is like we don't want to get to that point. And I think that is the real key here is like learning about strength training, understanding all these things from your book that tell us like, look, this is why strength training went through these ebbs and flows of like people promoting it or dissuading it. And I mean history does tend to repeat itself to some degree. So I think it's always good to sort of see that and then understand the science and then say, look, sometimes you just have to be the contrarian and you just have to do what you know based on the science versus what you might hear from your colleagues or friends or whatever. And so I think it's so important for all people listening is like, we don't want to get sarcopenia and it's not inevitable. It's not going to happen to everybody if you put in the work with strength training.
- [66:58]
A
That is absolutely right. We right now are at a crossroads in the history of exercise and medicine. We right now have a greater set of resources, a better understanding of what we can do to slow the process of aging, to make it less painful to have a thriving life as we get older. And we right now have to start telling our doctors that they need to pay attention to this. Maria Fiatironi Singh was part of a very recent international consensus statement on exercise as a prescription for all of the chronic diseases of aging. Something like 34 physicians in something like 15 countries. It is a great starting point for people who want. There's never been a single resource that brings together all the research on exercise as treatment for every chronic disease, like actionable guidance for physicians. And I'll give you a link to this too, because if we all printed that out and read the parts of it that are relevant either to the problems we're dealing with or the problems that our parents have had and that we know may be waiting for us around the corner, and when our doctors say, oh, I see this coming up for you and I'm going to give you this pill, we can say, okay, let's talk about that. But I also want exercise to be part of my treatment. And even if they say, well, I don't know about that, you can give them this so that they will know a little more about it.
- [68:46]
B
Well, you know, I loved when we used to have prescription pads and we would write out prescriptions because you could write like resistance train two times a week and sign it. And then it felt like I was giving you something, right? And I could still do it on a piece of paper, but. But it used to be something. And I'll share an interesting story. So when we were in, in like sort of before my time, when men would come in with prostatitis, some older urologists would prescribe masturbation. And so they would write like, masturbate three times a week and sign it and give it to the patient. But tongue in cheek to say, like, look, if we literally said resistance train with a trainer three times a week and signed it and gave it to the patient as a prescription, I think that would even just that movement saying, I don't know anything more, but you got to do this would be valuable, right? And a lot of us do. We will tell our patients to do it or we'll send them a written note or we'll write it on a piece of paper. But there should be a relationship between medicine and in an ideal world, there should be a doctor who handles, you know, the ailments, right? But then in that same office, there should be a trainer, there should be a psychologist, there should be a nutritionist, right? And there should be all those things that contribute and there be should be maybe someone who specializes in sleep and someone who specializes in stress reduction. And that would be the ultimate care package, right? To take care of the whole person.
- [70:12]
A
I love that thought. It's not exactly the build out in every specification that you just gave, but one of the greatest things I got to do in the whole eight years I was working on, on this book was spend a couple weeks at a place called the center for Strong Medicine. In suburban Sydney, Maria Fsing's husband, Nalan Singh, created this clinic to implement the academic research they were doing in a clinical setting. So every patient who comes to this doctor's office gets a prescription not just for the medication they need, need, but also for the exercise that will help them. And this doctor's office has a 2,000 square foot gym in the center of it with 30 Kaiser machines, 30 weight training machines. So you have, you were talking like earlier about how much you'd love to see older people coming in or just people coming in in street clothes, getting a little bit of lifting done and going on with their day. That's what's happening in this doctor's office. There was one woman who was working on the tricep extension and she was wearing a long scarf that she'd bought at the Picasso Museum in Paris. White hair, 75 years old, and her scarf kept kind of getting stuck in the machine, but she would turn it back and she would just keep doing her lift.
- [71:45]
B
That's so sweet. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think that we need. I think it needs to be education. Right. Like there needs to be nutrition education and strength education in early life. Right. And stress reduction is such a huge one too. You've done obviously a lot of work on this and you've been strength training for decades. So what is the most harmful advice you think that you've heard about strength training?
- [72:09]
A
I think the most harmful approach to strength training is to strive after a perfect program. There's no perfect program. The only thing to do is to do the right thing for your body today. And a lot of the time that's going to mean lifting at a high level of intensity relative to, to your capacity. But since strength is relative and strength is cyclical, you're going to have to back off a lot if you want to go far. And I think it is very difficult to remember that if we considered training to be a form of wisdom, instead of considering it to be a math problem that we could solve, we would all be able to be stronger, longer. The idea that athletic training is a form of wisdom is actually the fundamental principle of the one and only long piece of writing about athletics that survived antiquity. Charles Stocking has translated this text. It's called the Gymnastics by a man named Philostratus. I was really excited because I was able to write the first description of the gymnasticus in any popular book that's ever been published. Only ever before have academics written about this. But let us consider athletic training a form of wisdom. Inferior to no other is the first sentence of the oldest long book about athletics we have. It's putting athletic training on par with mathematics, philosophy, music, navigation, all the arts and sciences that we consider to be important as core parts of our lives as human beings. It's saying athletic training is up there with all of them. It's. And if you treat it as wisdom, it will yield immense benefits.
- [74:26]
B
Yeah, that's great. How do you think writing this book changed your relationship with strength training?
- [74:31]
A
It made me patient. I think that when we learn about the culture of weight training, one of the best reasons to learn about the culture of weight training, learn about the history of weight training, is to see that in our own lives and in the world as a whole, this is all, you know, this is a long game. I'm going to the gym now to make sure that I have a good house to live in in this body when I'm 90 years old. Maybe a better way of saying all this is that I have a different experience of time now than I used to. You know, I'm not just training for today, I'm training for my future. And I'm also training to connect to the powers that I had when I was younger. You know, I'm trying to live in the past, the present and the future all at the same time.
- [75:28]
B
That's. That's great. That's so good. So looking forward, what are you most excited about? What do you think is coming in terms of strength? Muscle research, shifting ideas about strength?
- [75:40]
A
I think more and more we're seeing the best strength training. Researchers look at the relationship between muscle and mind. I think the research on strength training and mental health, strength training and dementia is going to continue to advance. And I think just very specifically, more doctors are going to be recognizing the importance of exercise as part of their own work. The data shows that doctors know they need to know this. The data shows that doctors want to know this. There was one survey of deans of medical schools. 96% of them said that they thought the students graduating from their medical schools should be able to prescribe exercise. Exercise. But only 6% of those schools required any kind of instruction in exercise. There's another great study showing that something like 90 or 90 plus percent of medical students graduating believed they should be able to prescribe exercise, but only 15% believed they had any real capacity to do that. So there's just a big disconnect between what doctors and medical school faculty know they need to be doing and what they're doing. And the research is finally giving them the resources they need to bring their ideals more in line with their practices. So I'm just really hopeful that more people are going to make those connections and be committed to making those connections.
- [77:25]
B
I hope you're right. I do fear that the healthcare system needs to change to allow for it to work out in practice, unquestionably, because in 15 minutes we can't go through all that. Right. And that's how much time doctors get to see patients in the current system of insured health care. Because there's just not. It's the only specialty where we've actually got reducing payments over, you know, every year compared to other, you know, where inflation causes other prices to rise, we see reducing reimbursements from insurance. So it definitely needs to change. I definitely want it to happen, but it needs to be like a concerted effort.
- [78:04]
A
It does.
- [78:05]
B
You know, if someone listening today forgets this whole conversation, what is the single most important thing you want them to take home? From this, from. From your book, from this conversation.
- [78:15]
A
Strength is a form of connection. And this is not just about you. Your workouts are not just about you. They're about being able to be with the people you love for as long as you possibly can. And when we start to make that shift, we start to see muscle in a whole different way. I mean, imagine what the world might look like if every time you heard the word muscle, the first person you thought of was not only some big guy, but also your grandmother.
- [78:56]
B
Yeah. Or you. Where can our listeners find your book and learn more about your work?
- [79:01]
A
The book is available anywhere you get books at your independent bookstore on the big retailers, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. An easy way to find it is to go to my website, michaeljosephgross.com which has links to a bunch of retailers, including the ones I just mentioned. And please follow me on Instagram. It's Michael Joseph Gross. And so those are the places.
- [79:31]
B
Amazing. So we end our podcast with four questions we ask everyone. They can be about your work, they can be not about your work. So. So what is something that you know now in life that you wish you learned earlier?
- [79:41]
A
I need to not skip workouts.
- [79:45]
B
That's good. That's a good one. What's a non negotiable? I guess it might pick a different answer than working out. What is a non negotiable something you have to do every day?
- [79:54]
A
I have to start the day by doing something that doesn't have that's not required for work and just gives some pleasure.
- [80:07]
B
That's great. That's a good one. So give me an example of something that you would do.
- [80:11]
A
It started with just deciding that I had to spend some time reading stuff that just satisfied a curiosity that existed for no other reason that it existed. So just that kind of impulsive, you know, I want to know this stuff. I just let myself follow that for like the first hour of the day.
- [80:32]
B
Yeah, there's that book, the. I forget what it's called, but it's about like the first hour of the day and how to use it effectively. And one of the things the author says is like, read for 10 minutes of that hour on anything. But just. So that's interesting.
- [80:46]
A
But I read for an hour of that hour.
- [80:47]
B
Yeah, well, that's fine. I think. I think the. The big thing is like not. And I'm guilty of it at times. Like, don't waste your morning like scrolling the Internet or doing something. Something else. Like just start. Start moving forward and whatever that is. What's a health hack or life hack you'd share with everyone?
- [81:04]
A
It's definitely the hip extension that, you know, the glute exercises to start the day and then also interspersing. If you've got a day when you're at the desk all the time, actually have a beautiful hourglass, like a big glass hourglass. And I keep it right next to my desk and every hour when I see it's empty, I have to get up and do something and I try to do another set of the glute drive.
- [81:35]
B
Well, there was that one study that became very popular about doing 10 squats every 45 minutes. Right. So, yeah, I think that's great. I like the hourglass idea. I might steal that. If you couldn't be a journalist or an author, what would you you be?
- [81:49]
A
I mean, there's no sane reason to do what I do unless you simply can't do anything else. So it's hard for me to imagine another existence. But the only other thing that really ever tempted me and not tempted me, the only ever other thing that ever really drew me and that I felt like I had a great, you know, a good gift for was acting when I was younger.
- [82:13]
B
Yeah. So, yeah, that's awesome. If you had to suggest a guest or two that could be good for this podcast, who would you suggest?
- [82:22]
A
Charles Stocking, Jan Todd and Maria Fiataroni Singh.
- [82:26]
B
Okay, well, I have all those names here already. I'll write them down again. Well, thank you so much. It's been such an honor to have you.
- [82:35]
A
Thank you. This has been so much fun.
- [82:36]
B
If you guys like that conversation and you've been enjoying this podcast, do me one solid favor and it's completely free. Take one minute right now, go to your Apple podcast or your Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts and hit subscribe or follow the podcast. This is a signal to the podcast networks that, hey, this is a great podcast and we want other people to hear it. I would really appreciate it. And as always, take care of yourself because you are worth it.