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Episode 90: Capacities for Longevity Part 1: Strength
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We start off Season 6 with Part 1 of our 3 Part series on Longevity. What are the capacities we need to retain or develop in order to continue to live the lives we want to at the end of our lives? In Part 1, hosts Sarah Court and Laurel Beversdorf dive deep into the capacity of strength. We discuss the difference between strength endurance and maximal strength, and the myriad benefits of heavy strength training at any age. The episode includes discussions on common functional mobility tests for seniors, the neural adaptations resulting from heavy lifting, and practical guidelines for transitioning from endurance strength to heavy weights. Sarah and Laurel emphasize the long-term advantages of incorporating heavy lifting into regular exercise routines.
00:00 Welcome to Season Six
00:19 Couch Recording Fun
01:14 Notes from the Bone Density Course
04:59 Three-Part Series Introduction
06:09 Strength and Longevity
21:52 Strength Endurance Explained
35:03 Maximal Dynamic Strength vs Isometric Strength
42:44 Functional Tests for Seniors
51:04 The Timed Up and Go Test
54:29 Understanding Grip Strength and Its Importance
01:11:42 The Five Times Sit to Stand Test
01:13:38 Building Strength Endurance
01:18:16 The Benefits of Heavy Strength Training
01:33:53 Improving Bone Density Through Strength Training
01:39:28 Enhancing Metabolic Function with Strength Training
01:42:26 The Value of Strength for Longevity
01:45:27 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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Transcript
Introduction and Mission
00:00:00
Speaker
season six season six season six we are here was precious that's opening to this episode I'm Laurel Beaversdorf, strength and conditioning coach. And I'm Dr. Sarah Court, physical therapist. With over 30 years of combined experience in fitness, movement, and physical therapy, we believe in strong opinions loosely held. Which means we're not here to hype outdated movement concepts.
00:00:35
Speaker
or to gatekeep or fearmonger strength training for women. for too long women have been sidelined in strength training oh you mean handed pink dumbbells and told to sculpt whatever that means we're here to change that with tools evidence and ideas that center women's needs and voices Let's dive in.
Informal Setting and Course Announcement
00:01:06
Speaker
Welcome to season six of the Movement Logic podcast. I'm Sarah Court, and I'm here with my co-host Laurel Beaversdorf. And I'm quite literally here because I'm in Alabama. I'm in Laurel's house. I'm on her couch. We are recording together, which is always such a joy. We're couch recording. Yes. This is new. This is the newest thing. That's true. Tell the people. You've been here before. Yes. But we've never recorded an episode sitting on a couch. Paint a picture for us. Usually when we record, we're sitting at a desk.
00:01:35
Speaker
But this time, we are recording on my L-shaped couch from Lazy Boy. We're wearing slippers. We're in our daytime pajamas, which is a phrase I learned from Sarah. There are two types of pajamas. at Nighttime and daytime. We're in our daytime pajamas. Can I explain the qualification of what makes a daytime? The daytime pajama is one that you could wear to the store.
00:01:59
Speaker
Anyway, that's an important distinction. Thank you. You're welcome. I'm excited because I'm going to be teaching my bone density course class, my live class that I teach this week from Laurel's studio in her house. And I'm mostly excited to have all the participants turn on their cameras and be like, where? are What's that? What? Am I so disoriented? They'll be like, wait, did that is this the wrong day? What day is it? What workout are we doing? What? So that's I'm pre-excited for their confusion.
00:02:28
Speaker
I was thinking about some of the stuff that I've been seeing in
Course Benefits and Strength Skill Development
00:02:30
Speaker
classes. We just started our fourth month. One of the things that I'm really enjoying is now that they've got that kind of basic understanding of the compound lifts, of what the shape is that you're trying to make, all of that kind of stuff, and we're really fine tuning stuff. They've gotten to the point where they can problem solve with me instead of me having to provide the solution. So for example, there's a person doing their front squat.
00:02:56
Speaker
and she was using a bench just as a reminder marker just to be like make sure she's getting low enough but she was doing this really interesting maneuver like when she was starting to stand up for her squat where she like she would go backwards and then up it was it looked i was like there's some extra work happening here that is actually getting in the way so together we problem solved was it that the level that she was trying to get to was a little bit too low was it that she actually had put too much weight on the bar and so we played around with those two things and it turned out that it was too much weight on the bar but I love doing stuff like that with the students because
00:03:35
Speaker
And the whole purpose of this course, from our perspective, is we're the training wheels. We teach you how to do this, and then this is a skill for life that you go do. But part of the skill in life is being able to problem solve that for yourself. If you're like, wait, this feels weird, or something's off, or I'm not sure, let me figure out what are the parameters I can play with to make this move feel
Misconceptions in Strength Training
00:03:55
Speaker
right again. Yeah, it's what we were just talking about a couple minutes ago about how strength training, we're not born knowing how to strength train. We're born knowing how to utilize our strength.
00:04:04
Speaker
But we're not born with an understanding of how to systematically progress our own strength. And it's not all intuitive. But when you undergo a process like bone density course, a lot of it becomes very common sense. Very logical. right To the point where it does become intuitive. And you leave with this life skill.
00:04:23
Speaker
which is our, that's our goal that is our goal. And if that's something that you're interested in, you should get on our wait list because the next cohort starts in May, which is only a few short months away and it's gonna be badass, I can't wait. You can sign up for the wait list via the link in the show notes and you will be joining our special wait list where you will also periodically receive really cool free like exercise videos, post tutorials, yeah information that is maybe delivered in a slightly more and detailed way than our regular main you email list. If you like the content in these episodes, you'll probably like the content you get on the special wait list too. Right. And also just to point out, just because you're on our mailing list does not mean you're on this special wait list.
00:05:10
Speaker
Right, those of you both movement logic, podcast, episode listeners, and movement logic main list email subscribers, you need to become waitlist people. It's a third location. I heard you should never go to a third location. Oh, sure. But that's never go to a second location when you're kidnapped, right? But we're not kidnapping you. No, we're not. We're taking some of your attention. And time. And time. All right, good
Podcast Season Overview and Longevity Goals
00:05:40
Speaker
talk.
00:05:40
Speaker
We like to do every season a three-part series where we discuss one topic in a lot of detail. And so we're doing another three-part of this season. The focus of this series is your physical capacity, your physical capability to continue to do things for your entire life.
00:06:01
Speaker
things we need to work on so that we have longevity right we have a long life but that there's quality also with that long life because we want both there's a lot of people who end up with some longevity but their quality of their life is not great yeah the marvels of modern medicine make it so that people with serious diseases and or physical limitations or what have you are able to live for considerably much longer than they were in the past. And that is a good thing.
00:06:32
Speaker
Yeah. But we might also want to consider what are we doing for all those extra years that we're alive? Are we able to participate fully in our lives to the extent that we want to? I laughed because I thought you said the marbles of modern medicine. The marbles? There are many marbles. So this is the first part of the series. And so today we're going to be talking about strength.
00:06:56
Speaker
It's a huge topic. We're doing our best to consolidate the most important things for you to know. As they pertain to longevity. Yes, thank you. So today we're going to be talking all about strength and particularly what different types of strength capacities we need in order to be as healthy as we can and participate in our lives in the best ways that we can. And what are these and like myriad ways that strength contributes to your overall longevity and health, some of which might surprise you. And they surprised me when I was researching for this episode.
00:07:28
Speaker
So we're going to understand the difference between aerobic endurance, maximal strength, and power as different capacities. This episode is going to focus mostly on maximal strength benefits. We're going to be looking at power and aerobic capacity in our following three-parter episodes. So I've been thinking a lot lately about this concept that I first read about in Peter Attia's book Outlive.
Envisioning Last Decade and Independence
00:07:51
Speaker
And this is the question. What do you want the last 10 years of your life to look like? What do you still want to be able to do in the last 10 years of your life? So Laurel, what do you want the last 10 years of your life to look like? What do you see yourself do? If you had to imagine a typical day, what what would you imagine it contains?
00:08:13
Speaker
Yeah, thought about this and I think a good thought experiment for me is to flip this on its head and go, what do I not want it to look like? okay What I don't want it to look like is having to ask a whole bunch of people to do stuff that I used to be able to do. I don't want to have to ask my husband or the younger male neighbor, that nice young man, to come and lift my garden.
00:08:41
Speaker
ah People are very nice in Alabama. They're a nice young man over there to come and lift my garden dirt into the wheelbarrow or to hire a gardener to do it. I don't want to have to ask someone who is physically capable to move the deck furniture down into the garage during the winter or to carry in the multiple cases of seltzer water that we can't simply not stop drinking in this house up the stairs from Costco into the kitchen. I don't want to have to ask people to do
00:09:13
Speaker
that basic weekly work for me. Additionally, I would potentially love to compete in some senior track and field events and do some sprinting. Amazing. And win. Yeah. I of course want to keep doing distance running and of course continue to string train but those are the means to the end of these bigger, more, I would say,
00:09:42
Speaker
High level displays of capacity. okay Which could look like weekly activities or monthly or once in a year type big heavy lifting activities that I do occasionally have to do from time to time when like moving furniture and things like that. But also ah things like sprinting at maximum speed or maybe I'll compete in a strength competition. I don't know but I love competition. I love taking care of my own home and living independently in all of the physically demanding ways that entails. I also have a child who might have children, in which case I'm going to be a grandparent, and have children to handle and play with and take places and
00:10:29
Speaker
I want to be able
Societal Norms and Realizations on Aging
00:10:30
Speaker
to do all of that. What do I not want that to look like? I don't want it to look like me saying, I'm sorry. I can't play softball with you because I might get hurt or I feel too unstable. or And all of this to say too is that if I do for some reason end up in this period of my life where I'm not able to do those things for whatever reason, because as we know, any number of things can happen to us.
00:10:55
Speaker
in our lives to prevent us from being as physically capable as we were, and it doesn't all come down to just being strong enough. I'm not saying that I won't still have a wonderful fulfill fulfilling life, but if there is some control I have over it, and if it's something as frankly as simple and as accessible as strength training, you bet your bottom dollar. You bet your sweet bippy. I'll be doing it.
00:11:21
Speaker
That was great. I think as well, I would say probably for the average person, which I do not put you in that category. Blushing. Somebody listening to this might be like, well that's not me. I don't want to compete at and go right in a marathon when I'm 80. But you might say, I have this vision. And who knows if it's going to happen. But I have this vision that involves buying a farmhouse in Europe and creating not a commune in the creepy sense, but like a lot of people living together. In all fairness, you would be a great cult leader. I think so. Really compelling. So charismatic. Very charismatic, very good with words, highly influential. That's right.
00:12:08
Speaker
Very opinionated. So I think I guess what I'm saying is I'd like to start a cult So I would like to be strong enough to start a cult. No, but I have this this idea of I would love to have a life that involves physical activity like tending a garden ah Growing my own food that kind of thing. Maybe there's some chickens or a goat goats are adorable Yes, and hard to handle. That's what I hear Maybe I start a goat yoga class. I don't know. But I want to have a life that is physically active. So many people. off with If I say starting a goat yoga class.
00:12:43
Speaker
fine okay i don't care all right well who the goat yoga people know the people who don't think that you should combine goats and yoga oh well i'm joking i'm not gonna actually start a goat yoga class i'm glad that you said that okay just for the record just for the record i have no plans of starting a goat yoga a puppy yoga a wine and yoga chocolate and yoga i don't even teach yoga anymore anyway we're getting a bit off the point in this vision that i have i ride my bicycle to town and grocery shop and bring it back i want to have just basic physical capacity beyond the sort of thing that we typically or see as someone in their 70s being able to do, right? I don't want to lose the ability to do those things. I want to be able to enjoy my life. And so for all of these activities, whether it's laurels competing in a race or whether it's tending a garden,
00:13:34
Speaker
there are basic movement capabilities that we have to retain. And as we age, there is a natural lessening of these capabilities. We can turn it around, but you have to do some work to turn it around. For example, if I want to tend a garden, it means I have to be able to get up and down from the ground repeatedly. I have to be able to pull weeds out of the garden. I have to be able to shovel dirt, right? All of these kinds of things.
00:13:58
Speaker
If you want to still be moving deck furniture, you have to be able to handle a really heavy, cuber unwieldy, cumbersome kind of a thing and walk, right? So that's the idea here is that we have to maintain some basic capabilities. And if we have already started to lose them, which some people start to notice as they get into their like 40s and 50s, then now is the best time to start working on them. It's never too late, but now is always the best time, right? What I see with a a good chunk of my older patients is that they weren't, and I think some of this is just societal, especially for women, they weren't educated on what they need to do to maintain these capacities. And as such, they end up no longer able to do the things that they like to do and surprised by it. It catches a lot of people by surprise.
00:14:48
Speaker
And there's also like a lot of misguided beliefs or understandings around how we should treat older people, right? We tend to think that they're already weak and that we need to like, oh, you sit down, i'll I'll do this hard thing, right? And as a result, it becomes this kind of vicious cycle where the person becomes more and more frail. And as a result of that, there's a shrinking of the things that they can do, right? but And this can also be very internalized. I have a patient who's 92, God bless her.
00:15:17
Speaker
Her general, she's a handful. Because she's not always happy to see me. And that's minute one of her hour. I'm like, oh boy. But her general attitude towards exercise is, I'm 92. Leave me alone. I get to rest now.
00:15:34
Speaker
which can make it very challenging to get her to do what I want. Laurel, do you have, I don't think you have anyone that old that you work with, no but what are the people that older, let's say like over 40 people or maybe like menopausal, post-menopausal people that you work with, what do you see with them? Yeah, I see that they will often come to me after some period, whether it's an acute event or a longer period of time where they realize that they don't have what they used to have.
00:16:03
Speaker
that it went away somehow, right? And usually they're post-menopausal or perimenopausal. And they just noticed, you know what, i I'm not as physically capable. Things that weren't hard for me are suddenly becoming harder for me. I had a client who loved to backpack and she'd go on a backpacking trips and have no problem when she was younger. And she attempted to do this in her late fifties and found that it was too much and she hurt her back.
00:16:31
Speaker
And she was like, I don't understand why would this hurt my back because I used to do it all the time. And recognizing that she had probably lost a lot of the strength that she had when she was younger that allowed her to be able to backpack without incident. I have clients who have physically demanding jobs. I work with a veterinarian and I'm sure she has to handle some fairly large animals in certain ways from time to time.
00:16:53
Speaker
and she's started working with me and she hasn't said it explicitly but I know that based on her age and kind of general things that she says is like she's noticed that she needs this and she's been intending to do it for a while and she's finally doing it and there's this feeling of I'm glad I'm here because I know I need to do something about this and so it's that or it's often women who've just had a baby. I'm working now with a number of postnatal clients which I love and they recognize that their bodies are different after having a baby and their bodies are different after carrying a baby and maybe the pregnancy wasn't easy and maybe it was the period leading up to the pregnancy was one in which they weren't as active as they wanted to be and now they're at a state where they're even more
00:17:40
Speaker
perhaps physically deconditioned or just less capable than they were and they realize I want to make this change because I also now have a baby that I'm taking care of and I'm raising a child that will continue to get bigger and will want to do things and so it's a perspective shift that I think is really positive because it means that the person knows that they have control over their situation and they're taking responsibility for that. yeah Far too often we have either that a person doesn't know that they can make the change, or they do, but they're unwilling to take responsibility. They're unwilling to set aside the time. They're unwilling to set aside the money. Even though they set aside time and money for other things, they're unwilling to set it aside for the purpose of strength training. This is very complex.
00:18:31
Speaker
And I'm not a sociologist and I'm not a psychologist, but basically it seems to come down to what we are often communicated to think we should be doing with our lives as women, which often does not include strength training. And especially as we get older, in the category of people that where you said that people don't know that it doesn't have to be like that, I think people discover, oh, I can't do this thing I used to be able to do. I guess I just don't do it anymore. This is no longer available to me. I'm too old. Yeah. Yeah.
00:19:01
Speaker
Okay, so we don't like that story. And it's not an inevitable story. And it's even, you can make changes to your strength at any age. There's research around working with people who are considered frail, which is like a medical term, it's like the most deconditioned you can be, where they're doing progressive overload strength training with them. That for those people means maybe a one pound weight and then a couple weeks later, it's a two pound weight. I know there's also strength research out there showing that the rate of change in terms of strength development is not that much different for people in their 80s and 90s than it is for people who are younger.
Research and Benefits of Strength Training
00:19:37
Speaker
That's so cool. In other words, the percentage of increase is very similar. Now, the total amount of strength is very different, but you can make as much change to your strength as an 80 year old as a person can in their 20s. Think about that.
00:19:52
Speaker
That message is not out there. That is amazing. Now, hopefully I said that right. I'd like to find that research because, how about this? If Laurel didn't say that right, stick it in a review of our show. Yeah. There might be some detail about if you isolate out hypertrophy changes. If you take the hypertrophy changes out of it and just look at, I don't know how they would measure that, but it might not be as good as it sounded.
00:20:20
Speaker
But here's the thing, there is actually a lot of research showing that people who are the oldest old, what is the term? Oldest old. Old and the oldest old. oldest What is the oldest old? Oldest old is over 85. An older adult is over 65. Is that right? Let me look, because there's another one in between. There's older adult, which sometimes people in their 50s think they're an older adult, but you're not technically. According to science, you're an older adult when you're 65 and older. okay There's tons of research showing that you can make changes impressive changes to strength at the level of older adult and oldest old there are three terms to describe oldness there's young old
00:21:04
Speaker
Which doesn't make any sense at all. Is that me? I feel young old. I know, right? We're not young old yet. Young old is 65. We're just young. We're just young. Young old refers to people between the ages of 65 and 75. I love that. Middle old. Middle old. Is 75 to 85. It's like Middle Earth. Exactly. Oldest old is people who are 85 or older than that. Okay. Yeah, that's pretty funny. Just oldest old always makes me laugh because it's like I feel like they're saying you are ancient and decrepit. list of you You're like the crypt keeper, right? like you're just But technically they have longevity. They have longevity, but they may not have quality. right But our point that we're trying to make right now...
00:21:47
Speaker
What was that again? I know that you can make changes to your strength at any age. Yes. That's the point. Yes. Okay. So let's get back to what we're supposed to be talking about, which is we're going to start by differentiating between strength endurance and maximal strength and what kinds of exercises fall into each category. And then we're going to talk about some physical therapy tests that are routinely given to older people, both the young old, the middle old, and the oldest old.
00:22:12
Speaker
to test various capacities what they can and what they can show us about our strength. And then we're also gonna discuss what other aspects of your health might be improved with heavy strength training, which there's so many. We're not even covering all of them. We're covering like some of the biggest ones, but it's it's really massive. Laurel, what is strength endurance? Strength endurance is the ability of a muscle or a group of muscles to sustain repeated contractions or maintain a static contraction, so dynamic contractions or isometric contraction over an extended period or extended repetitions without significant fatigue. The focus is on sustained performance of contraction rather than maximal strength. So the resistance which you're working with over that period of time or those multiple high levels of repetition would be submaximal.
00:23:12
Speaker
It has to be. It must be. Whereas when you're working on building maximal strength, you are working with a resistance level that is maximal or near maximal. okay So that's strength endurance.
00:23:27
Speaker
come contrasted with strength but then we can also contrast both of those forms of strength with another form of strength which is called power which also has a time component associated with it. It is time dependent meaning that power is the performance of strength that is done as quickly as possible, right? So it's strength with speed. that We're gonna talk about in the power episode that are distinct from each other. so
00:23:59
Speaker
strength endurance since the focus is on the length of time that you are able to continue doing an exercise or since the focus is on um doing as many repetitions of possible the load must be light and the better you get at a prolonging effort and keeping fatigue at bay, the more strength endurance you have. So an example of this would be in yoga, yeah being able to hold warrior two for maybe 45 seconds and then increasing your strength endurance to be able to hold warrior two for maybe two minutes. And so the reason that's strength endurance versus strength is because you're not under a heavy load. Right, now if you were holding warrior two with a heavy barbell on your back,
00:24:47
Speaker
And then maybe straightening and bending your knee a few times. Sounds terrible. Then we actually would be talking about building maximum strength capacity in Warrior II. Yeah. But we don't tend to see that. No. So yoga typically is body weight only. Some yoga classes put hand weights in, but this is also- Resistance bands. Resistance bands.
00:25:07
Speaker
Some people don't like that, they put that in the same category as goats, right? I wouldn't, obviously neither would Laurel. But anyway, I'd pay Sarah to say that. But so we we could also put something like Pilates, both on the reformer, even though there is some resistance, it does not qualify as heavy resistance, technically, not for most people. And also during a class, you're not trying to be like one rep max straightening your leg. If a spring for one person in a Pilates reformer class is a one repetition max, whereas for an another person it's a strength endurance level of resistance, the person who's working with the one repetition max level of resistance strength would just be giving a given a lighter spring. right They wouldn't be told, like okay, Sally, you're gonna work on your run one rep max, and Andrea, you're gonna be working on your strength endurance. Now, Pilates is probably gonna have you doing like how many reps of exercises do you do on the reformer, typically? Like between six and eight, typically. But then you do a ton of variations. So you'll do six to eight with your legs straight, six to eight with your knee bent.
00:26:08
Speaker
six to eight circles one way six to eight circles the other way and there's a lot of crossover in terms of the muscle groups that are yeah you're basically using mostly the same muscles i honestly think they give you different stuff to do just so that you don't punch somebody yeah or get bored but also like movement varieties yeah and it probably feels better to move in a variety of ways here it might be helpful to tell people like what this means on a rep range level so like strength endurance rep ranges yes if you are reaching fatigue at the end of a set fatigue in this case would probably be you could only do one or two more reps, maybe no more reps and but by the time you end the set. If you're working in a strength endurance range, you're doing more than 13 reps, but not more than 30. If you're doing more than 30 reps, you're probably working with a very lightweight. Is this like youngest old?
00:26:58
Speaker
Lightest light. Lightest light. Where you may not be building strength endurance even, depending. It all comes down to how close to failure you take the exercise, but basically when you're working on strength endurance you're doing more than 13 reps. If you're working on strength you're doing less than 13 reps. yeah However, if you're working on maximum Force production, maximum strength, you're probably doing less than six reps. yeah So then there's this interesting rep range between six and 12 that nobody knows what to call. It's a very useful range to work within. I call it moderate. yes Moderate load, moderate rep range has a lot of value. It, yes, can build strength. It won't be as good for maximum strength as heavy loads. It's probably not gonna build a ton of bone density, but it has its place. And I spend most of my time training myself
00:27:47
Speaker
in that range and my clients in that range knowing that you can achieve a lot in that range, but no one knows what to call it. right It used to be called the hypertrophy range, but then they were like, well you can build muscle in any of these ranges. right So we can't call it that anymore. The thing about that middle ground from six to 12 reps is that's a better range to build maximum strength than the higher rep ranges, but it's not the best. See, it's a spectrum. The thing that I think is maybe best to know about that moderate rep range of six to 12 reps is that it is often called, I don't know if I'm saying this right, but like the time efficient range. What does that mean? It means that you're going to be able to make significant changes to your strength in that rep range in a more time efficient manner. And the reason is that you don't have to rest as long after the set. yeah
00:28:38
Speaker
That's it, you save time on rest periods. And you can fit more volume in because of that. And that's why it might be accurate to call it the hypertrophy range. Because you will be able to build more muscle with more volume. In fact, the biggest driver of muscle mass is volume. So if you can do more with less time,
00:28:58
Speaker
because you're not resting as long, you're going to build more muscle. yeah The other thing about this lighter weight slash larger rep range load selection is that it often produces, if taken close enough to failure, more muscle soreness the next day than the moderate or heavy loads, which is very counterintuitive.
00:29:19
Speaker
And what that means is that if you're so sore for a day or two after doing a light weight, high rep range is close to failure workout, sure you may have achieved some hypertrophic changes, but now you can't work out for two or three days because you can't sit down. So the six to 12 rep range is very valuable. Maybe we should do a whole episode just on the six to 12 rep range. I think we should trademark the name of it. Six to 12 rep range? We should copyright it. What are we going to call it? I'm just kidding. I'm joking. Oh, I was like, okay. Bulk the folk up.
00:29:54
Speaker
All right. So back to the topic of strength endurance, which is going to be that higher rep range. Other types of exercise. We talked about yoga. We talked about Pilates, both on the reformer and on the mat, bar classes, or those classes that are aimed at women that are called like sculpt.
00:30:13
Speaker
Can you hear the sneer in my tone when I said, picture like scoped knives and blood and people cutting chunks of flesh off of me and I'm like, I imagine a statue. Yeah. I imagine like a block of marble and you're like sculpting away at it to make the perfect body. Yeah. Those classes generally, you're it's a pretty lightweight. it's and You're not lifting anything heavy because again, you're doing a lot of repetitions. So it can't be heavy.
00:30:38
Speaker
I have a strong bias against those classes. I really hate them. Mostly I hate them because I hate the way they feel. I never noticed, just based on how you talk about them, that you dislike them. I'm surprised. It's subtle. It's subtle. You have to really listen closely yeah to pick up on it. yeah I'm sure you've been to a class like that. whats What's your experience of those kinds of classes? Very few. So I went to a bar class and I couldn't sit down for two or three days afterwards.
00:31:02
Speaker
We did so many like quadruped leg kicking up in the air. Oh yeah. That I thought I was gonna have a sore lower back the next day because of how much lumbar extension I was ending up in. My ass was like hot to the touch. Wow. Which sounds like a good thing. But not sexy to the touch.
00:31:24
Speaker
I don't mean outside to see the touch. Get the fuck away from me. In fact, I'm going to lay face down for the next three days. So yeah, you know and i think I think women in particular, we have a misguided sense of what that's doing for us. This idea, I'm so sore the next day. You're like, oh, I must be getting stronger because I'm so sore. But that's not necessarily what's happening. And I was just trying to remember.
00:31:50
Speaker
that sometimes after runs, long runs or faster runs, I'm sore the next day. yeah Does that mean I got stronger? No. No. It means your muscles be tired. My muscles are tired because they had to endure for long repetitions, yeah like long duration high repetitions, this very repetitive movement. Yeah. Okay.
00:32:11
Speaker
So that's one type of strength endurance, your ability to do something. And that has relevance to your longevity and quality of life. Absolutely. Because there's a strength endurance component of spending an hour in the garden. I have to be able to handle that amount of work. Yes. It's not all one rep max activities. Yes. and I would hope it wasn't because then I wouldn't be able to do it for very long. Yes.
00:32:34
Speaker
But so that's that endurance part, right? And there's a biomechanical aspect to strength endurance that we cannot get away from yeah just by living our life that we need. Yeah. Like running requires a lot of strength endurance. Yes. Getting yourself to the gym to work on your strength requires quite a bit of strength endurance. Right. There's crossover. If you take someone who hasn't strength trained ever and get them to be able to do reps of 20 or 30,
00:32:59
Speaker
they are going to also have a higher maximum strength level as well. It's just that they will get an even much higher one if you then start progressing them to heavier weights. And vice versa. Say somebody is a power lifter, they only do deadlift, back squat, bench, and they only work in rep ranges of three to five. Good luck to you. But let's say that's all they do. Their strength endurance will also be at a much higher level,
00:33:29
Speaker
Were they to just sit on the couch all day? So there's tons of crossover. It's really about how fast do you want to reach a particular goal type of question. And the thing I'll say about running, which is very counterintuitive, which I'm very interested in in the moment is that runners have this very repetitive sport and there's a biomechanical cost to that. What is the best way for runners to train? When you might go, they should do a lot of strength endurance training.
00:33:55
Speaker
It's the opposite. They should do probably higher intensity strength training, lower volume, so that there's more recovery because the demands of running give you the endurance you need for running.
00:34:10
Speaker
Now we need strong bones to avoid stress factors. Now we need stiffer tendons to avoid tendinosis type issues. Now we need better balance, right? So now we need to be probably squatting in that six to eight, three to five rep range. And that is wildly counterintuitive to runners. i getting more and more into the running community here in Huntsville and I see their workouts, I see their strength workouts. Sometimes I see what they're doing on Strava and I notice a lot of them are doing like 30 reps of abs.
Runners and Strength Training Misconceptions
00:34:42
Speaker
I talk to them on the runs and they're like, yeah, if I do 40 reps of glute bridges, is that enough? I'm like, let's talk about what this word enough means. We gotta take a step back. yeah So it's interesting. Yeah, definitely. I noticed for myself when I started heavy lifting that then when I would go on a hike,
00:35:00
Speaker
I was not getting gassed as fast as everybody else. right I hadn't been working on my aerobic capacity, but I had improved it a little bit. You can improve your aerobic capacity with strength training as well to an extent, yeah not but maybe the biomechanical demands of hiking right were more easily recovered from because of your increased strength. yeah
00:35:23
Speaker
So that's strength endurance. Now, if we talk about maximum strength, we've got a couple of different things that come under that category. There's something called maximum dynamic strength, and that's what we get at with heavy weightlifting.
00:35:38
Speaker
Heavy weightlifting are strength training exercises performed with a high level of resistance, challenging your body's maximum dynamic strength capacity, meaning the heaviest thing that not only that you can hold, but that you can move with, right? That's an important part of it. That's why it's why it says it's dynamic. It's not static. You could put a barbell on your back for a back squat and take it out of the j-hooks and stand there, but that's a lot different than than doing a squat. And so this is talking about the ability to to then do the squat, right?
00:36:09
Speaker
So heavy lifting typically involves weight that is at or above 80 to 85% of your one rep max, right? Your one rep max, again, is the maximum amount of weight you can lift one time only. In terms of rep ranges, that looks like a six to eight. Right, it's the inverse, right? Because it's so heavy, you can't do as many repetitions. And you need more rest between sets because it's so heavy. When we get into that heavier stuff, sometimes two, three minutes. Right, and so heavy lifting would be like If you can lift it more than eight times, it's probably not so heavy. yeah yeah And some people even say if you can lift it more than six times. There's some disagreement here. yes But it comes also down to how close to failure you're taking it. So if you're doing six reps with two RIR, technically you could have done eight reps in reserve. right So if you stopped at six, but you could have done eight,
00:36:58
Speaker
So technically your limit is eight. There's some disagreement here, but basically if it's more than eight reps, it's not heavy. Right. Okay. So that is a measurement called maximum dynamic strength. Laurel, what is maximal isometric strength? Maximal isometric strength is the greatest amount of force you can push or pull against something that doesn't move. So imagine trying to shove your wall down in your house. Good luck. It's sometimes called pure strength because it isn't tainted or it isn't affected or confounded by the ways in which changing joint angles will influence how much leverage your muscles have. In other words, in a squat, which is a dynamic movement pattern, we will have greater leverage to move our body against resistance at the middle or top of the squat than we will at the bottom. And this just comes down to physics.
00:37:58
Speaker
Whereas with maximal isometric strength, we're not moving our joints. That is the definition, right? Which is that there's a static position where you're exerting force against an immovable object. And so it's called pure strength because we really get a sense for just how much force can this person produce in this one position? It doesn't then have to take into account how long are their bones and where do their muscles attach? Do you know what I'm saying? To test it, people push as hard as possible for a few seconds, two to five seconds, usually in a mid-range position because we tend to have better muscle leverage. In mid-range positions,
00:38:33
Speaker
and typically it would happen in a position like a squat or a pull. There's something called a mid thigh pull where they will attach a barbell to a rack so that it doesn't move and you'll stand with the barbell at about mid thigh height right next to it and you'll just pull up on the bar.
00:38:49
Speaker
like you're almost completing the top of a deadlift and then they use lab equipment to measure how many pounds or kilograms of force you're exerting on the bar and then there's something called a dynamometer where you can squeeze it and it will test your grip strength in a similar way. There's all kinds of fancy equipment that measures to a high level of accuracy people's maximal isometric strength. And this can be used for diagnostic purposes or just to get a read on how strong someone is. However, I think it's good to know that unless you're an elite strength athlete, you can't extrapolate how strong someone will be in a maximal dynamic strength context based on how strong they are in a maximal isometric strength scenario.
00:39:32
Speaker
While there is some crossover, there's I think between 15 and 50% crossover. So if someone's, let's say, above average in terms of their strength in a maximal isometric context, they might also be above average in a dynamic context, but not necessarily. However, when we look at elite strength athletes, really strong people, there's almost a one-to-one transfer. wow So you'll test their maximal isometric strength and be able to very accurately predict how strong they will be in dynamic scenarios. And this makes sense if you've ever watched people lift a really fucking heavy load. You'll see them start to come up out of the squat and then just stop for a long time and not move.
00:40:16
Speaker
until they eventually either have to drop the bar or they stand it up and you'll see it in the deadlift where their whole body is like shaking and they're like turning purple in the face and the bench press where it's like the bar and that while it's not technically a definition of maximal isometric strength because the object is not immovable you are watching them display an enormous amount of isometric strength because their joints aren't moving. And this is funny because I just learned this five minutes ago talking to Sarah because I was like, well, isn't yoga some scenarios in yoga testing your maximal isometric strength? I was like, I remember when we had to hold chaturanga and Sarah was like, oh, because it's not an immovable object. I was like, the floor is immovable. And I was like, wait, she's right. And I was like, well, isn't there, we don't push against the wall. No. this maximal isometric strength is something that like sarah you mentioned trying to open a jar like if there's a jar that you cannot open you are exerting your maximal isometric strength it's supposed to be openable yeah is that a word but for the pressure from the air
00:41:24
Speaker
something atmospheric. I just grab a knife and whack on the side and pound the lid on the floor and it'll open. I put it on hot water because that expands it a little bit. Or I was thinking as well as about the legend of King Arthur pulling the sword out of the stone. Everyone else who tried, that was maximal isometric strength. Or if you've ever just been really cocky and put too much weight on the bar for a deadlift and you go and you're like, nope. I've had that. That feels more like a whoopsie than a test of anything.
00:41:53
Speaker
Okay, so this is probably not a spoiler, but Laurel and I are very much in favor of heavy lifting, in particular for women, because women are often relegated to the tiny dumbbell classes, and either overtly told that barbells and heavy lifting is not for them, or there has been enough messaging subliminally. Subliminally? That's a word I struggle with too, though. It's hard. You're right. It's covert. It's covert, but covert feels like you're a spy. It's more just the internalized- Pass it.
00:42:23
Speaker
Yeah, societal suggestion. I like that. yeah That they should not do heavy weightlifting. And meanwhile, women experience this profound cessation of estrogen production in their body starting around age 48. Menopause. Whenever. Para menopause starts through menopause. And one of the best ways to maintain bone density is heavy lifting, not moderate, not light. It becomes more specific. Yeah.
00:42:50
Speaker
But we're gonna talk more about that in a moment. First of all, before we get into that, we're gonna look at some of the common tests that are given out for seniors to test their functionality, like how functional they are, right? It measures things that come up often for people when they have not been working on these capacities, things that start to decline, like their balance, their endurance, their strength, mobility in the PT sense.
Functional Movement and Mobility Assessments
00:43:15
Speaker
But yeah, what's your question? Probably you're gonna answer it.
00:43:18
Speaker
But I just want to put a pin in this word functional. What does that mean? So there's a lot of people they're talking about like like you have to do this kind, this specific exercise because it's a functional exercise or something, right? It's got co-opted for marketing. Yes. Functionality in the PT world is associated with something called your activities of daily living.
00:43:39
Speaker
So when we say functionality as a PT, in the PT world we're talking about are you able to just do your day-to-day activities or has your strength declined, has your balance declined such that you can't?
00:43:53
Speaker
So there's something called ADLs. ADLs stands for activities of daily living. There's actually two categories of them. So there's activities of daily living, and then there's another sort of subcategory called instrumental activities of daily living, IADLs. And these are both terms used to describe basic tasks that you need to perform just to take care of yourself on a daily living. Laurel, what's something that would be considered an ADL?
00:44:22
Speaker
standing up from a chair, walking up and down stairs, getting out of bed, getting into your car, getting out of your car. Yeah, getting dressed, doing all of your grooming and gaming. Getting down on the floor to look under the couch because you dropped the remote control. My dad's favorite thing to say is when he gets down on the floor, he also checks around in case there's anything else down there before he gets up because he can't do it very well. Yeah, that's efficient. It is, but I'm also like,
00:44:50
Speaker
ah Shouldn't be that hard. I think you should say, dad, next time you have to get down on the floor to get one thing, I want you to count how many things are down there, and then you have to do that many reps. That many trips up and down. You're only allowed to bring one thing up at a time. So IADL's, Instrumental Activities of Daily Living, are considered a level more complex.
00:45:08
Speaker
Like you could get through your day bathing, dressing, toileting, eating, right? You don't have to do anything more complicated than that. But IADLs would be things like going to the store buying groceries and bringing them home, cleaning your house. Laundry. Laundry, driving your car. And some of it also has a cognitive component. So are you remembering to take your medications every day at the right time? Are you able to independently manage your own finances? Bringing the deck furniture down. Bringing the deck furniture down. Keep coming back to that. It's a big one for you. Yeah. I'm feeling.
00:45:38
Speaker
yeah I think because it just happened recently. Do you know why? my Because I remember it being really hard ah and now it's not. Oh good. To the point where I was like we have to bring the table through the house and then wheel it down the driveway. And then we picked it up I was like no we don't just go down the deck stairs. Nice. I can't remember if it's because my memory is bad or I got stronger.
00:45:59
Speaker
I'm going to go with the second one. The other thing I want to, well we already got to the problem with functionality as a word or the the issues around that word functional movement. There's another one in the world of PT, which is mobility, which is not like the kind of mobility you might do at a CrossFit session or like doing cars. Cars or like in yoga where you'll work on your active range of motion and then your passive range of motion and those are Flexibility versus mobility. It's all very ill-defined and mobility isn't really even a research term. No
00:46:31
Speaker
Not one that's used in science. But we use it all the time. We do use it all the time. But in the PT world, it has more to do with these ADLs. Can you get off the toilet? Or do you need somebody to help you? That's a mobility issue. Got it. So just your ability to move through the world against varying levels of the resistance that your ADLs require of you. Yes. And it would also include taking the deck furniture down. Yes. Thank you. I feel very satisfied.
00:46:58
Speaker
mobility yeah so i i know i follow some pts on online and they talk about how important mobility is and i don't know what they're talking about because we know that actually you need a sufficient amount of range of motion at your joints to accomplish your adls okay but they make it sound like it is more important than strength. And I'm like, well, isn't strength the thing you're actually talking about? And they call it mobility, but I wonder if there's just this gap in terms of like the context that they're using the word in and the context that I understand. Yeah, you know what I think you should do.
00:47:33
Speaker
I think you should go on their Instagram page and comment and see what they... Should I explain them? You should explain. But now I know the context in which they're using it, I think. I mean, you could also ask, in what context are you using the word mobility? Are you using it in the like cars and rails and pails? Stretching context or are you using this in the... I can physically move my body through this range of motion against whatever resistance I have to. Why don't you go ahead and do that and then get back to us.
00:48:01
Speaker
and we'll record a separate follow-up to this episode with their response. I'll get right on that. Okay. We're going to look at some of these tests that happen in PT clinics. Full disclosure, I never do any of them. The reason I don't do any of them is because I work at a cash-based clinic. A lot of the reason that these tests exist is it's so that they can really quantify very specifically the individual person's need for physical therapy which if you work in a clinic that takes insurance you have to continually prove to the insurance company. So to be able to say on their timed up and go they did it in 20 seconds that automatically puts them in a category of not moving very well and so that in itself is proof that they still need to come to PT. But you wouldn't do these tests like no
00:48:50
Speaker
Necessarily how to work with the patient because you've probably already decided that right if you look at someone you're like you need to be stronger Do you need to then give them a test to decide if you're gonna help them build strength? Honestly, I don't necessarily and this sounds like a brag. Maybe it's a tiny brag. I can read their intake form.
00:49:09
Speaker
and know that they're not strong enough. Well, pretty much isn't it the case that like most of the people you're seeing probably could benefit from strength training? Yes, but I know it for sure because they have to list what exercises they regularly do. And especially for women, it'll be like Pilates, yoga, and hiking, something else, stretchy, tennis. And I'm like, where's the load? It's not there.
00:49:31
Speaker
And also, most PT, any good PT, the patient's gonna walk in the door, you're gonna have a pretty solid idea of like how they navigate the room. How hard is it for them to sit down, put their bag down? You're already getting a picture of what's going on with this person. That's why I don't bother to take the time to do these specific tests because I don't have to prove anything to anyone. The only thing that I do sometimes is Let's say someone had a knee replacement. I might very specifically measure their range of motion because we want to show improvement in their range. I want to see that it's improving. Yeah. But that's... Is that mobility?
00:50:05
Speaker
Now I can flex my knee further, do I have more knee mobility? In what category? you're It's like how would you use the word in PT? Would you call that range of motion? or You'd call it range of motion. so But it contributes to their overall mobility. But in a more mobility class, I'm a mobility coach context. If someone can move their joint into more range of motion, especially if it's done actively, they've achieved more mobility. I think this is interesting for me, maybe hopefully listeners to understand that this word mobility is potentially confusing because of the different ways that it's used and what it's meaning in those different contexts. Yeah. Okay. So the first test that we're going to talk about is called the timed up and go test, or as it's known, the tub. And it's a really simple, easy to perform, easy to set up test. It evaluates their mobility in the PT sense, not in the CrossFit set. It's not just CrossFit. I don't know why I keep saying CrossFit, not in the
00:51:02
Speaker
movement sense as well as their like balance and really whether they are at a risk for falling because a lot of time people getting up and getting up out of a chair or trying to land on a chair is when they fall. So it's asking the question, can you get up and down from a chair safely and can you walk this relatively short distance without losing your balance? And so the way it goes is The person starts sitting in a chair, you start the timer, they stand up, they walk three meters, they turn around and walk three meters back, and they sit down. And then you stop the timer. And then that's their score.
00:51:32
Speaker
I'm just getting super competitive listening to this. I really want to race okay someone. Okay. Well, here's the thing. I think you and I are going to, not on air because that would be wildly boring to listen to the two of us standing up from a chair and walking, but we're going to try it and see what our times are. So for this test, they're saying a normal amount of mobility would be to be able to do the timed up and go in 10 seconds or less.
00:51:55
Speaker
Which is a lot of time actually if you think about it. And I would expect that Laurel and I both can do it in well under 10 seconds. Even if we're not trying to run. Like even if you're just doing regular walking speed. I can see that Laurel is going to want to run and that's fine. I'm trying to think of the ways that I can do it just on the edge of cheating without cheating. They're saying a regular healthy person you can do this in under 10 seconds. Someone who has like some moderate mobility issues would be between like 10 to 20 seconds. This might just be that their gait has slowed down because they are older. It doesn't automatically mean, oh, something's wrong.
00:52:29
Speaker
If it's over 20 seconds, it means that they are at a higher risk of falls. And if it's over 30 seconds, typically that means this person is not independent, meaning they're walking with a walker. They were not able to get to the PT clinic on their own. Someone had to drive them, right? So that's ah someone who's not, they're dependent. They're not independent. I also want to say we're talking about functionality and the ability to live independently and do the ADLs, right? But this the fact that this exercise has a time component associated with it means that what is being measured of course includes strength because there's the get up but it also includes the capacity of power which is the ability to produce force quickly and both strength and power are heavily correlated to fall risk right yeah so we're going to talk more about the power and time component aspect of exercise in the power episode i just wanted to say that okay
00:53:23
Speaker
And ideally, this is not like a one rep max test, right? This should not be like, I could do this once and then I have to call it a day. like Standing up from a chair should not be a one rep max. There's a lot of things that shouldn't be a one rep max. Hopefully very few things in your life except what you do at the gym and maybe when you're moving furniture are. Yeah.
00:53:45
Speaker
And the more things that start to become one rep maxes, you want to take a look at that. Yeah. It's a slippery downhill slope. All right. So our next test is grip strength. Laurel, will you tell us about grip strength? Grip strength is commonly tested using that hand dynamometer that I mentioned earlier. It's a device that measures the maximum force applied by an individual's hand when squeezing into a grip and usually they'll give you a couple seconds to generate that peak force and they'll do it three times and get the average and the measurement is spit out in pounds or kilograms. The more the better, right? Now, when I say the more the better, I did an episode about grip strength called a Mythmas special because it was right around Christmas and it was two strength myths busted in that episode. We talked a lot about how people incorrectly assume that there's this causality
00:54:42
Speaker
to grip strength and longevity. In other words, they think that grip strength causes longevity or grip strength causes you to be stronger somehow overall, but it's more of an association. It's more of a relationship. And what that means is that people who have higher levels of grip strength on average tend to also live longer, tend to also have greater overall physical capacity. They tend to have also been more physically active in their lives.
00:55:12
Speaker
And there's lots of research showing this. Research has shown individuals with stronger grip tend to have better strength in their leg and core muscles. And even people with stronger grip tend to have better cardiovascular capacity, which Sarah will talk about with some research later.
00:55:30
Speaker
There's also the fact that grip is involved in a lot of basic human movements, functional tasks, or lifting weights at the gym, such as barbell deadlifts, or any type of deadlift, pull-ups, carrying groceries, carrying kettlebells, pulling things like pulling a heavy door open. Have you ever gone to go into a bank or a somewhere where there's this like suction effect in the corridor and encountered an older individual unable to open the door. Yeah, that's grip strength, that's also pulling strength. We can make our grip stronger by engaging in these types of exercises that involve grip strength, but that is not necessarily
00:56:20
Speaker
what grip strength in a research sense is suggesting. What it's suggesting in a research sense isn't that someone has engaged in lots of deadlifts and pull-ups and cable rows. It's suggesting that they've simply been more active, which has probably involved using their hands more. Yeah. So there's some really interesting, I think, correlations for grip strength. So for example, grip strength and falls w risk So there's a study that looked at 8,000 people between the age of 50 and 80. So that's our young old, middle old, and oldest old. They found that grip strength was a significant correlate for falls in all age groups, right?
00:56:59
Speaker
Grip strength and just basic functionality, right ability to do ADLs, 550 people, all 85 years or older, the oldest old, they tested their hand grip strength over time, lower baseline grip strength correlated to reduced independence in their ADLs. Grip strength is something that is really easy to measure and research.
00:57:22
Speaker
they could also measure other forms of maximum isometric strength in other parts of the body and make probably the same correlates. The thing is that while you're walking around being more physically active and lifting things and getting higher baselines of whole body strength, you're also getting higher baselines of grip strength and higher cardiovascular capacity. It's just that the thing they selected out of all the things they could measure was grip strength. And so it all comes together.
00:57:50
Speaker
with this lifestyle of being more physically active and hopefully not just being physically active in ADLs, but also exercising. Yeah. ah Grip strength and longevity. There was this huge longitudinal study. It was over four years. They measured grip strength in over 100,000 people. That's a massive study.
00:58:09
Speaker
and they found that there was an inverse correlation, meaning the weaker your grip, the more likely you will have any mortality. The sooner you will die. The sooner you will die. Heart attack, stroke, and it was actually a better predictor of cardiovascular mortality, meaning dying from something that has to do with your cardiovascular system. It's a better predictor of it than your blood pressure, which is wild. Here's one that I also thought was wild, grip strength and cognition.
00:58:39
Speaker
They studied 708 people between the ages of 40 and 86, and they found that reduced grip strength correlated with decreased cognitive function over the age of 65. Well, there's a lot of research emerging that shows that exercise is one of the most important things you can do for cognitive health. Yeah. Exercise. yeah Which you don't think of like exercise being particularly cognitively demanding. and Nobel laureates are not Nobel laureates because of how much they can squat.
00:59:09
Speaker
that's all this is what i mean okay but you have to think about your brain as an organ what if they were anyway your brain is an organ your brain is an organ it requires i don't know i'm not a brain person i have one i don't know that much about brains yeah but it needs blood flow. It needs oxygen delivery. It needs your entire body that carries your brain around, your nervous system around to function well. If it's all connected, it's all connected, right? One of my patients who's a doctor, I remember talking to him one time, sometimes we just get into a lot of like shop talk. And I remember said to him one time, apart from very specific medical conditions that have specific requirements,
00:59:58
Speaker
Is there anything better than exercise for people's health? And he said, no. No, it is low hanging fruit. It is from a cost perspective. It is also from an accessibility perspective. You can exercise anywhere. You really can. You can't do every type of exercise everywhere, but you can exercise everywhere. You can do something. And you can exercise for free. There's always some form of exercise you can do for free.
01:00:23
Speaker
where I think it's not as low hanging fruit in some people's minds. It's the hard sell is when we talk about the comfort component of exercise. It's easier to take a pill. It's easier even to focus on food.
01:00:37
Speaker
because it doesn't require that physical discomfort that you get with exercise. That's where it's hard for us to do our jobs because we, as people who are trying to encourage other people to exercise, have to somehow convince them that the benefits outweigh the downsides of exercise, which in the moment can sometimes be that physical discomfort of working a little harder, being out of breath, or having that muscle burning sensation, or even being a little sore the next day.
01:01:07
Speaker
That's all felt acutely. This is the other thing too, which I find very interesting. It's like all of that discomfort is felt acutely and it's very temporary. The benefits are delayed. You have to wait sometimes a while. And that's when you start to reap the rewards and that's when the rewards compound.
01:01:28
Speaker
It really is like investing money. When you put money in the bank, you no longer have as much in your checking account to spend on going out to eat, going to performances in bars or whatever you like to do or like buying stuff for your house. So that's that acute pain of I don't have as much money in my checking account to spend on these little things that I have, these urges to spend.
01:01:50
Speaker
but that money is now sitting in hopefully an index fund where it's earning a minimum of seven to eight percent a year, compound interest. And you are gonna benefit from that, but the benefits are delayed. It's not gonna be for another 30 years that you get to spend all that money.
01:02:07
Speaker
but there's gonna be so much more of it. And then if you hadn't done this. That's what strength is though too, is like when you make your body stronger, you can do more things like cardio. Cardio doesn't hurt as much anymore. Power doesn't hurt as much anymore. You can go on those vacations. You can go and renovate your house. And to our to our point with this conversation, you retain the ability to do those things in the later years, right? I think that's why I am so drawn to this question of what do you want the last 10 years of your life to look like?
01:02:37
Speaker
Because people don't like thinking about death. yeah And they also don't like thinking about being whatever their oldest old is.
Aging Perceptions and Life Planning
01:02:42
Speaker
yeah But if you do think about it, and I think it's a very potent question for you as well, because most of us can look around, and it's either someone we know or yeah a family member, a friend's parent, something like that. And we're seeing them go through, especially for those of us that are in our 40s, 50s, 60s. Our parents are are getting up there. right We're seeing them start to go through some amount of decline.
01:03:05
Speaker
we're seeing some people like really declining and we're like well I don't want that and that's very clear that I don't want that the same way that you don't want to have to be living on the street when you're 80 and that's why you're saving money right you also don't want to have this physical frailty at that point because that's just no fun at all none of the patients that I work with that have decreased movement ability are happy Yeah. About it. Yeah. And a lot of them aren't happy. Because you can't participate in the things that brought you happiness. Exactly. I feel like there's this Venn diagram that we exist within and movement logic headquarters. So we've got women that we work with. Yes. We also have a fair amount of older women, young older. Yes. Younger or older, young old. Any of those will do. Yes. Women that we work with. Yes. And we talk a lot about the societal stigma
01:04:00
Speaker
ah surrounding bulky muscles for women or lifting heavy barbells or just that's so aggressive and manly and I don't want to look like a man and a lot of this internalized misogyny. But there's this whole other avenue of societal stigma around getting old.
01:04:19
Speaker
around being older, yeah where I don't think people even think about it. I think they push it out of their mind. They don't want to think about it. Because they're like, I will never get old in my mind right now because I can't face that reality because it must be so horrible. Because if you don't do anything about your physical capabilities, it is horrible. Also, it's just horrible if you listen to messaging in our society around what it means to be old. And what it means especially to be an old woman. Exactly! That's the Venn diagram, right? That's where it meets, right? Which is that we suddenly have so much less societal value when we're older because we're no longer of childbearing age and our looks change and we are not as quote-unquote whatever society deems beautiful anymore.
01:05:11
Speaker
maybe our body shape changes. And so I feel like it's a fear to imagine. It's a fear of imagining being old. I'm afraid of even thinking about that because what does that mean for my place in society when I am old? Will I matter anymore to any anyone other than the people that are my family?
01:05:30
Speaker
what importance will I have in the hierarchy of important people that when I'm older? So then I'm not gonna think about it. I'm not even gonna think about what I want the last 10 years of my life to look like, because I don't wanna think about being old. That's sad, but I actually, I wonder how many people listening can honestly say that they've had this, that they think about being old. Do you push it out of your mind? Do you try not to think about it? Are you so busy trying to be young?
01:05:56
Speaker
Are you so busy doing anything you can to look younger? Nothing wrong with that, by the way. I color my hair and I wear makeup. okay I don't wanna be a hypocrite here. But are you trying so hard to just be younger that you don't actually think about the realities of aging and how to do that in a way where you're gonna be able to live that part of your life to the fullest? Because I know a lot of older people who are having a ball.
01:06:25
Speaker
They're having a blast. Being old is fun. They get to do all types of traveling. Yeah. and participate in the lives of their family members in ways they weren't ever able to and they've got all this expendable free time to do their book clubs and their clubs of clubs and all these clubs. It sounds fun to me. Totally. I've got people I run with who are in their 60s who are running marathons like multiple times a year. Amazing. And they've got tons of time to do this shit and the physical capacity with which to do it. Yeah. That's what I want. Absolutely. Absolutely. Have you seen this substance?
01:07:02
Speaker
Is that a movie? Yes. No. Oh boy. Are we gonna watch it while you're here? Oh, we could. What's it about? Eliana could not be in the room. I know. I'm glad that your first thought was like, save the child. Protect the child. The Substance is a movie, basically. It's about this issue. It's Demi Moore. She plays a woman who has been a very famous celebrity aerobics instructor. But she is now getting shitcanned because she turned 50.
01:07:31
Speaker
And so it's science fiction and basically it's about this substance that you can inject and essentially create a younger youthful version of yourself. But then there's all these sort of restrictions around how you can use it and the in the movie she starts to mess with that and it doesn't go so well, right? But that's exactly this, right? That's someone who has spent ah so much time on their external appearance and as it begins to change, is suddenly considered worthless.
01:08:09
Speaker
yep
01:08:14
Speaker
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01:08:30
Speaker
You might be wondering, how do I know if I'm lifting heavy enough to actually improve my bone density? How can I keep getting stronger without getting injured? What's the best way to modify lifts if I have joint pain or past injuries? How do I fit strength training into my busy life and make it a habit that sticks?
01:08:48
Speaker
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01:09:18
Speaker
about maybe five years ago something like that I started I started thinking about what do I want because I turned 45 five years ago what do I want the second half of my life roughly to be yeah and like what should I start doing now to make sure that's what it looks like I think that the question might also be enhanced by changing the word look like to Feel like what do you want the last 10 years of your life to feel like? Because we talk a lot about how there are aesthetic Outcomes to strength training you will change the way your body looks. Yeah, but I think what we're getting at in this episode What can what do you want to be able to do? yeah What do you want to be able to and what do you want those? activities to feel like and This is a question I have for you. How would the world change? if all of the money is
01:10:11
Speaker
that people took, that they spent on beauty or looking younger, was instead put into activities that would help them to feel younger. Which could include things outside of exercise. okay yeah Like joining a community theater could greatly enhance your ability to feel younger in my opinion.
01:10:32
Speaker
playing Dungeons and Dragons. My husband loves playing Dungeons and Dragons and I think he has this like childlike joy from that, which is wonderful. yeah But what if you took all the money you put into looking younger?
01:10:46
Speaker
all the things you do for your face and your body that don't include exercise, the cosmetics, the this, that, the other thing that can really be quite expensive and you instead put it toward investing in some form of exercise that you could get on board with and do and enjoy. People are so averse to spending money on the thing that is probably the most important for their health and longevity alongside nutrition and sleep and medical care why yeah i did an episode called are you trying to spend the least on exercise for that reason it's a it's a major mental block but definitely i also think it's it's a fear of imagining old age that prevents people from really taking this into consideration i think that's right but sometimes people don't like it when we go off on tangents but our tangents are related to what we're talking about they're not completely unrelated yeah people yes where yeah okay it was related
01:11:41
Speaker
yeah Yeah, write us a review if you don't like it. So we were looking at these three tests from PT. This last one is called the five times sit to stand test. Which is exactly what it sounds like. You stand up and sit down. You're not allowed to use your hands to help you. That's the big kind of piece that a lot of older people don't like about this test because they're used to just using their arms to help shove themselves up. So you're not supposed to use your arms. It's, you know, again, this kind of like functional mobility capability test for older people. What's considered normal results is to be able to do it under 12 seconds, possible issues between 12 to 15 seconds, significant impairment if it takes you over 15 seconds to do it.
01:12:25
Speaker
So when we do it, are we gonna do as many as we can in 12 seconds, or are we gonna see how long it takes us to do five? The second one. Okay. Do you wanna do it right now? Yep. Okay. I'll go first. Okay. I think we should use this chest. Okay. It's most like a hard chair, which I think you would have in a PT car. Yeah, it would be something like this. Okay, I have to do five? Yes. Count me down. Three, two, one, go.
01:12:50
Speaker
That was 3.8 seconds. Okay, your turn. is it Was it cheating to bounce off of the the chest? It depends. I don't know. This is where I get oddly competitive. I can tell you right now, I am not competitive. So I'm just going to do this in under 12 seconds. Not late a day.
01:13:11
Speaker
Okay. Oh boy. All right. On your mark, get set, go. I'm going a little fast. And I would if I didn't have to try. Under six. Nice. You did six. Great. You did 5.98 seconds. I'll take it. So that's what the competitive versus the non-competitive version looks like. She was so relaxed while she was doing it. You should have seen my face. I was like competing for gold in the Olympics. Can we talk about how endurance strength and maximal strength relate? Sure, yes. I think strength endurance, building strength endurance is an on-ramp to building strength.
01:13:48
Speaker
because when I work with clients who've never string trained before, I find for most of them, it's way more logical to start with a lightweight and have them working in a 12 to 18 rep range, depending on the exercise, because the first half of the set is going to feel quite easy.
01:14:11
Speaker
that's confidence boosting. So maybe they've stood up and sat down from a chair, but they've never done it holding a weight. So suddenly they're doing it holding a weight and they're still able to do it and they feel competent and capable of lifting weights now. So I haven't overwhelmed them with this weight that immediately feels challenging. Second is they get to practice the movement pattern and I get to spot what they're doing in the movement pattern and start to notice, okay, what might we have to work on a little bit more?
01:14:40
Speaker
Then, toward the end of the set, when even that light weight, plus her body weight, starts to feel challenging, they start to get a feeling for what exertion and strength training feels like with that nice long on-ramp. So then they get to the last part of the set where they're starting to slow down a little bit because of fatigue, maybe their heart rate has increased, and they start to go, whoa, this is, I'm exercising, this is tough. yeah We spend with some clients a couple months at that rep range, gradually increasing their strength within that rep range. So we don't stay with the same weight for 12 to 18 reps. The weight will go up, but the rep range stays the same. Then they get to a point where they're really confident, they're starting to experience the benefits of having that higher baseline of strength slash strength endurance.
01:15:37
Speaker
And the buy-in is there, and they're raring to go, they're ready for more. They might even have started to like change their body composition, see some more muscle on their body, and just feel better because exercise makes you feel better, typically. And that's when I'll typically then start to suggest heavier weights. A lot of times it involves suggesting they buy heavier weights. So now I'm sending them links to Amazon of heavier kettlebells or adjustable weights or whatever it is, sometimes barbells. and But the buy-in is there, okay? So they buy those heavier weights and then we start working in a more moderate rep range where now we might be doing 8 to 12 reps 8 to 15 reps and that's going well and then depending on the person's goals if They're telling me that they want to be able to canoe. Okay. I have a client who
01:16:25
Speaker
is sad because she can't go canoeing anymore because it involves portaging, which is carrying the canoe out of the water across land to another body of water and the canoe is too heavy. That's when I start to have conversations around heavy strength training. How much does a canoe weigh? It depends. Some canoes are light, aluminum, some are fiberglass and very heavy. And I didn't ask, but at this stage in her life, canoeing is untenable. It's unmanageable.
01:16:51
Speaker
yes Canoes can weigh anywhere from 20 pounds to over 90 pounds. Sarah just suddenly knows about canoes now. She goes with it. 90 pounds, right? So if you're if you're carrying a 90 pound canoe for half of a mile or whatever, like that's a significant amount of weight.
01:17:09
Speaker
then I start to tease them with the idea of possibly getting even heavier weights than they have or or barbells most of the time. I guess the benefit of strength endurance rep ranges or lighter weights is that it's a good teaching tool and it does establish that baseline to work from in order to start to lift heavier weights, and and a big part of that baseline is skill in the movement pattern, right? Because the heavier the weight, the more skill becomes a ah factor, right? So the most elite squatters, bench pressers, deadlifters, Olympic weightlifters in the world exhibit superior skill in the movement in addition to capacity. And they worked on that skill and built that skill
01:18:01
Speaker
a lot of it with lighter weights in the beginning. It just makes sense. You know what I mean? We're gonna turn the dial up one at a time. We're not gonna have you learning this new movement, which is hard, and lifting a heavy weight, which is hard. We're gonna take one of those hards away. And it's gonna be the heavier weight. oh Okay, so let's talk now about the capacities that are improved by heavy strength training. And listeners, there are a lot.
Heavy Lifting and Daily Life Applications
01:18:30
Speaker
there are enough to fill a book. that We might write a book at some point, we've talked talked about it, but at the moment we're just recording a podcast. So I picked what seemed like the four, I think four most relevant ones, most relevant to your interests. So the first one pretty obviously is that heavy lifting improves your maximal strength capacity. So the markers of this, how we know this are things like one ret max testing, your grip strength, which we talked about,
01:19:01
Speaker
In a more sort of general way, things like your balance, like strength does confer balance improvement, but balance is also has a lot of systems involved with it. And then also like anecdotally, people tell you that there some of their ADLs are easier. The groceries don't seem so heavy. I can carry them all in from the car in one go. Standing up from a chair is no longer a one rep max. Exactly. this What I love about this idea of things being easier is you could put it in the context of strength training, where like suddenly these I ADLs, yes and the ADLs, we have way more reps in reserve after we do them. Right. Reps in reserve is like, when you finish the set, how many more reps could you have done? Typically, we leave one, two, or even three reps in reserve when we strength train. When you're doing your ADLs, it's, I think, fun to ask, like, how many more bag bags of dirt could you have hoisted into the wheelbarrow before needing to rest for a significant amount of time? And but I think a goal might be
01:19:56
Speaker
to make it so that you have lots of reps in reserve for your ADLs but maybe more for people like our age, your IADLs. What are the heavy things you do? Do you want to feel like you could do them 20 more times? I do. Yes, I do too. I only want to do them once. That's fine. I don't want to take 25 trips to the car to bring my Costco groceries in, but I want to feel like the two or three trips I do take, I could do at least 30 more times. You don't want to have to go lie down because you
01:20:27
Speaker
carried two bags of stuff into the house, right? Like we just heard from a couple people in the Facebook group for bone density course that like now they can take that big unruly dog on their dog walking because they can handle that big unruly dog whereas before they couldn't or the woman who could lift the 50 pound bag of dirt up onto her shoulder and carry it down the stairs and had you know a little bit of trepidation but was like fuck this I'm gonna do it and had no issue at all and and the other woman who went to Costco to buy rugs she bought five rugs which will happen to you at Costco rugs are heavy you think you want one and you get five i mean you also end up a lot of time with a new flat screen tv and a few other kitchen gadgets that you didn't think you needed but apparently now you do yeah that giant cutting board Costco yeah
01:21:14
Speaker
I brought them all in, yeah no problem. yeah So one of the ways that you get stronger, obviously muscle mass is going to increase. You get muscle hypertrophy. But muscle hypertrophy, you can also technically get at a variety of different weight levels, right? It doesn't have to be heavy lifting. What I think is really fascinating is that a lot of the changes that are taking place are to your nervous system.
01:21:43
Speaker
I think it's so cool. So you get something called increased neural drive, which is your nervous system's ability to send signals to the muscle fibers to contract. So that increases. The way that increases is your heavy lifting enhances how you recruit motor units. Motor unit is a one motor neuron plus the muscle fiber or fibers that it controls.
01:22:12
Speaker
So in your body, you recruit these motor units in a specific order based on how much force you need, right? So if you're lifting a cup of coffee, you're not going to recruit the same number and size of motor units as you do if you were lifting a kettlebell. It'll be low threshold. Right. But if you're lifting a heavy barbell, it's those low plus the high. Right.
01:22:36
Speaker
And with the heavy weights, the nervous system learns to recruit these larger high threshold motor units. These activate your fast twitch muscle fibers, which are critical for generating high force, the amount of force that you need to do a deadlift. And so this increases your maximal strength because it's using more of the muscle's potential. Something that blew my mind when I learned about recruitment Is that if you're never engaging in high intensity slash heavy lifting Or very fast movements. Okay, so it's either high speed or high magnitude of resistance You're never achieving full recruitment of any given muscle or muscle group And what that means is that all the fibers that are attached to those high threshold Large motor units are never being trained. They're just sitting there
01:23:27
Speaker
and eventually they go away. yes Depending on the task, if it is a light or slow or both type of a movement. Like yoga or walking. Pilates with tiny weights or a class. coffee Lifting your coffee mug to your mouth. Your brain will recruit in order first the smallest motor units which have the least number of fibers innervated. So a very small percentage of your muscle will have to work.
01:23:57
Speaker
And that's good. We save energy that way. You wouldn't want to do full recruitment of your biceps to drink your coffee because you'd have a face full of coffee. It also would be highly inefficient for it and fish from a biological sense because you're wasting a ton of energy that you then won't have for the rest of your day. Right. And then as the loads go up or as the speeds go up, there's more recruitment happening. Right. So now maybe we've got like a higher percentage of the muscle being asked to work. But if you never actually reach those threshold levels, right? that We have to reach a certain amount of load or a certain speed of movement. Some of your fibers never get to, it's like being on a team and always sitting the bench. What I was thinking about was that we should do a social media post where we're talking about, because I think a lot of people think they are recruiting their muscles when they feel the burn. Yep, there's that fatigue perception gap there.
01:24:47
Speaker
and so I was thinking we should do a social media post about just like you're holding up something small and waving it around you're like oh my god I'm getting so strong but that actually you're not even recruiting probably the majority majority of the muscle fibers yeah the the cool thing too is like if you're working with a lightweight in the beginning of the rep range there'll be very low recruitment but toward the end recruitment does go up because the fibers that were being used prior start to fatigue, so other larger motor units take over, but you're never going to achieve full recruitment with a lighter weight. Yeah. You will maybe with a moderate weight, but probably not as readily as you will with a heavy weight. So the other thing I like to think about heavy weights is it's just the fast track to full recruitment. Nice. Should that be a t-shirt? Fast track to full recruitment? It would be like the I'm an army. Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like you're getting people in the army.
01:25:41
Speaker
I once did a temp job in San Francisco when I was super broke and doing really bizarre avant-garde theater for almost no money. And I got this temp job and they had me go and try to recruit people for the army. Oh my god. I know.
01:25:57
Speaker
I'm like a 22 year old avant-garde theater performer from New York City. but I'm now on, I think it was like University of San Francisco, was trying to recruit people to join the army. I would talk to people. I was wearing something. Ask me about the army? Yes, in fact.
01:26:17
Speaker
And they would come up to me, and if I got the sense that somebody was like really truly interested, and they wanted to be in the army, I was like, here's the information. But I was supposed to convince people. right And so I got into so many conversations about like how, basically I spent the whole time convincing people that I wasn't trying to convince people to join the army, because I felt so bad about it. That is hilarious. Oh my god, how long did you have that job for?
01:26:46
Speaker
A day? Really? Well, I think it was a one day gig. Oh, I see. Okay. All right. Let's get back to the neural changes. Okay. So we know that we're recruiting these larger high threshold motor units. We also see changes in your brain's motor cortex. That's the part of your brain that's responsible for planning and initiating voluntary movements. So heavy lifting increases the activation of your primary motor cortex. So it enhances its ability to control these more complicated high force movements.
01:27:17
Speaker
And it also enhances your brain's plasticity, allowing it to adapt to these greater demands. Maybe that's the cognitive benefit right there. Probably. Exercise and plasticity. Plasticity, definitely. There's also a reduction in something called neural inhibition. So your nervous system imposes a protective mechanism to limit your force output to prevent injury. It's like when you try to do the one rep max and it's too heavy. Your brain is just, no. no Because if I allowed you to go through with this, if I allowed all the tissues to go through with this, you would hurt yourself. We're going to rip a tendon or something like that. right But regular exposure to heavy loads decreases this inhibition. yeah right So it allows you, this is why you are able with progressive overload to have greater force production. yeah And it increases the muscle's ability to exert this maximum effort safely. Yep, that's so cool. And then this last thing that I thought, there's so many cool things, myelin. So your myelin is the insulating layer that goes around your nerves that keeps the message that's being transmitted in the tunnel. It's like the cover around the power wires. And it affects how fast the signal can be sent. Yes.
01:28:29
Speaker
Yes. So strength training can increase the myelination, which then improves the speed and the efficiency of this communication. Faster transmission leads to quicker muscle activation and improved performance. Nice. It's so cool. And that's just the impact on your nervous system.
01:28:47
Speaker
What I also think that's really interesting about strength training is that early on when you start working on heavy lifting, it's like of the first big chunk of time, the change is that you're getting stronger, but you're not necessarily making your muscles any bigger. You're improving your brain's efficiency. In that first period of time, you're getting stronger because your brain is getting better at using what you already have. So it becomes so much more efficient at recruiting your muscle fibers and generating force before we see bulk. The adaptation which just means change that happens first that creates that big jump in strength that we call newbie gains where beginners start their first workout lifting however much they lift and then the second and third workout it like sometimes doubles
01:29:42
Speaker
I've seen this. I've seen it even on the first set. Someone does a set of an exercise and they do 12 reps and then the second set they do 22. And some of that is learning limits and maybe they left too many reps in reserve because they're being conservative rightly. But a lot of it is coordination. yeah So that's that newbie gain jump is coordination. And as we know, that is neurological, right? yeah That is nervous system. The orchestra is playing better together type of thing.
01:30:10
Speaker
The conductor is organizing the orca. There is a conductor now, yeah where perhaps there never was one. Right. I have a person that I work with at the clinic who wanted to get into heavy lifting because she has osteoporosis. And when I was first talking to her, I asked people like, what what equipment do you have at home? And she was like, I have five pound dumbbells or something. that And I was like, yeah, okay, we're probably gonna have to increase that. And she's like, I might have to buy a 10 pound dumbbell. And in my head I was like.
01:30:35
Speaker
And out loud, I went, uh-huh. She's been doing barbells at the clinic with me twice a week for probably a month. She can deadlift 50 pounds. yeah Now, she might have been, she probably had more ability to do that than she'd thought. Of course. But there was this really interesting sort of stumbling block where the position of the deadlift, she couldn't figure it out in her body. So we ended up doing, i I just did this thing with her where I was like, okay, before you go to do the deadlift, you're just gonna do a few versions where you just get in the position and stand right back up. You get in the position and stand right up. So basically just body weight. yeah And I was like, when you feel comfortable, then you're gonna take the bar with you when you stand up. And something about that just got her out of the gully in her brain.
01:31:19
Speaker
Yeah, again, to the previous point, so much of this is that neurologic adaptation, your brain's ability to understand what it's actually trying to do. And so much of it is breaking through barriers, yes mental blocks, yeah like you did. yeah And I find that If you can establish a trusting relationship with someone, get them to like being in your presence and trust you, there's no rush. There's no rush. Yes, we can start with a dowel and we can use a dowel for as long as that looks like it's useful to you and you feel that it's useful to you. And as long as you have a positive experience and we get to know each other and establish a mutual relationship and you trust me,
01:31:58
Speaker
I know that eventually it's gonna be much higher than that, but I don't wanna push you to where I think you can go if that means that you're gonna have to be afraid while lifting the weight, if that means that you're gonna have to dread coming to lift the weight with me the next time because the first time was so scary, there is no rush. We send this message as often as we need to and think that we need to with the bone density group.
01:32:27
Speaker
which is that a lot of the times on the other end of the spectrum, someone is lifting a weight that is clearly too heavy for them. And we see it in the form check video. And I love the enthusiasm and I love that sort of go getter attitude because that is me. I'm watching myself. But sometimes those folks are harder to work with because they have this idea in their mind of where they think they should be. But in order to get there, they actually need to pulled back, I find that's a little bit harder. But there's no rush. And we've got all kinds of people in bone density course that stopped underloading after about two months. But then we have a whole bunch of people now in month four who have started taking weight off of the bar in order to be able to squat two inches deeper. And these folks are on different paths, but ultimately they're all going in the same direction. And this is a lifelong process we're establishing
Strength Training and Bone Health
01:33:25
Speaker
here. So there's no rush.
01:33:27
Speaker
Both ways are correct. It's all good. It's a yes and. It's a yes and. That's right. Laurel, we talk about bone density a lot, obviously, but will you now please just give a basic review of how bone density is improved by heavy weightlifting?
01:33:45
Speaker
Well, the good news is that in a couple of weeks, we get to hear from Belinda Beck, one of the investigators on the Liftmore trial, because we interviewed her, so cat's out of the bag there, and she's going to talk much more about this in a very eloquent detail. But basically, there's something called Wolf's Law, which tells us that bone responds to stress by increasing the mineral content of the bone by getting bonier or becoming more injury slash fracture resistant, but that stress needs to reach a particular threshold and it's quite high. So whereas we can make our muscles stronger at a lower threshold of magnitude, bones need something that's a bit higher. So we need heavy strength training for bone density improvements. And bone density is a big issue for women, specifically post-metopausal women,
01:34:45
Speaker
because of that physiological change that takes place during perimenopause and menopause where the body stops stops um producing as much estrogen. Estrogen is an anabolic or growth stimulating hormone and when we take estrogen away we don't have that same stimulation happening inside of our body to increase the growth of things like muscle and bone. So it becomes even more imperative that we start to send messages to the bone that it needs to keep up with the demands of our life. So we place those demands on the bone and that looks like heavy strength training as well as impact training.
01:35:25
Speaker
So when you hear from Professor Belinda Beck, she'll tell you a bit more about how this happens, sort of physiologically and biomechanically. But basically, if we're looking at longevity, which is the topic of this episode, the thing that is probably most relevant to the topic of longevity and bone strength is that when you fracture a bone, what happens a lot of the time is that you get put into a bed or you get put into a chair And then if you are already somewhat deconditioned, you become even more deconditioned. Because again, now you can't be physically active. And you cannot maintain all the other parts of your musculoskeletal system and cognitive system and cardiorespiratory system that you needed to be maintaining while you were up and about. And we see a precipitous decline. And in fact, there's some really sad statistics. You fracture a bone, you get put in a bed, and you don't leave the bed.
01:36:23
Speaker
and there's a certain probability under a certain age like one in five that if you fracture a bone at this particular stage of your life, you're this likely to never leave the bed again. I mean, if we go back to this idea of banking, right putting muscle in the bank, putting bone in the bank, right it's the same reason that you save money because yes, some of it is for not having to work your butt off until the day you die, but some of it's also for unexpected tragedies or rainy days, rainy days. fund the There was a big storm and it trashed your entire deck. And now you're going to have to build or buy or both an entire new deck. So we save money because we know that we want to have money when we're not maybe actively making money anymore. And we also want to have money in case something happens. It's unforeseen or
01:37:22
Speaker
ah crazy medical bills or whatever. Your bone is the same. You want to bank bone so that when you fall, because so much people talk about, oh, just improve your fall balance and then you won't fall. That's bullshit. People who are at falls risk, fucking fall. They do. And this is one of the things. People who are not at a falls wear risk fall. I fall. i'm i need to I run into things and I think I have pretty quick reflexes from riding the motorcycle. Yeah.
01:37:52
Speaker
often I don't actually fall, but I trip all the fucking time. yeah But I'm also strong enough and fast enough to catch myself, right? But people who are at a falls risk, this is one of the things that drives me nuts about the bone density grifters who are just like, well don't work on your bone density, work on your balance, yeah and then you won't fall. You will fall.
01:38:09
Speaker
yeah but I train people how to get up from the floor when they fall so that falling is not so scary. But a lot of the time if you I just got all ranty and now I forget when I get all ranty sometimes I forget what I was trying to say. But I think what I was trying to say was that just working on your balance and fingers crossed hope for the best that means you don't fall is not a strategy for not fracturing yourself. Not at all. Okay.
01:38:35
Speaker
So then our last category, oh I know, was the thread that like, if you do injure yourself, you will have banked strength so that when you do come out of the bed, you're starting from a higher baseline yes than the person who went into the bed at a relatively more atrophied or decontition state. So it's gonna be easier for you to get back into shape or go back into your ADLs. Yes, you'll have better tolerance of being bed bound for a few days. yeah You'll be able to tolerate it better because you've got money in
Metabolic Benefits and Life's Demands
01:39:03
Speaker
the bank. right So then one other thing that that we want to talk about that's improved with heavy lifting is your metabolic function. And this is really cool. So I think it's really cool. So the way that we look at your metabolic function, the marker is they'll test your, they'll do a blood test of your fasting blood glucose level.
01:39:22
Speaker
because what we want to have is something called insulin sensitivity. So just as a kind of quick high school biology, you process the glucose, the sugar that comes into your body with insulin takes it and it transports it into your muscles where it's stored as glycogen and some other things, but that's just our sort of overview for this.
01:39:44
Speaker
You want your body to be sensitive to your insulin, meaning that the insulin is able to take the glucose and get it out of your bloodstream. You don't want to be insulin resistant, which is when the insulin is in the blood and the glucose is like, whatever, I don't have to go with you. You're not the boss of me. And you end up with a lot of blood sugar, high blood sugar levels. And that's how you give yourself type 2 diabetes. Strength training improves your insulin sensitivity.
01:40:11
Speaker
by a few different ways. You're going to have more muscle mass, right? And that means you've just got more storage space, right? You bought a bigger storage locker at the U-Haul place. Cool. You're going to have better glucose transport because the production of something called GLUT4 proteins that are what transport the glucose to the surface of the muscle cell, right? So you got a better, you used to have a little shitty VW bus and now you got a Greyhound bus. nice You have better muscle glycogen storage because you're going to use that glycogen storage when you're using your muscles, right? And so then you're emptying out and now there's space for more to go in. That's so cool. Yeah.
01:40:55
Speaker
so if we go back to our this original concept which was about what are the things we want to be able to still do in the last 10 years of of our life we can see how all of these activities that we want to still be able to do benefit from heavy lifting in particular and we've talked about this like you want a really big buffer between what you can do and what the demands of your life ask for, right? Lots of reps in reserve. Exactly. So this idea of sit to stand should not be a one rep max. You want to be more than strong enough for the things that you enjoy doing, right? If you have this idea that you're going to retire and start traveling, which a lot of people do, you don't want the effort of getting from your home to Florence, Italy to be so hard that you then have to lay down for three days in Florence.
01:41:47
Speaker
You'd be enjoying the food. so beautiful But you would not be enjoying much more. You could be anywhere, right? So you want to have so much in reserve that you're not saying no to a wedding invitation because the effort of being upright and at a party that goes on for four or five hours is going to be too much for you. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess maybe to wrap it up, I think it's just important to remember that it it seems to all go be coming back to strength when it comes to longevity now There are elite runners who don't strength train and they're elite runners They're The best at the best right, but they're also in their 20s and 30s. Okay, so we have to remember that we're talking about longevity we're talking about living a long time with a high quality of life and the reason it comes back to strength is
01:42:42
Speaker
If you lack strength, or if you fall and fracture a bone and end up in a bed, or if you are getting injured all the time because the biomechanical demands of the activities that raise your VO2 max are too high for your musculoskeletal system to support, you're not going to be able to work on that either.
01:43:03
Speaker
So strength, while it doesn't necessarily improve your cardio endurance, is a baseline capacity you want to have to be able to engage in activities that do. Same with power, which we'll talk about in part two. The ability to move quickly against resistance. It starts with strength. People who are stronger are able to develop power more quickly than people who are no history of strength training, start training power. Not that you can't do that, but strength is this baseline. And if we don't have it, we don't necessarily have that foundation from which to be able to make our health and our quality of life and our capacity as good as we would like it to be able to continue to do all the things that we want to be able to do in our life without the consequences of things like fracture.
01:43:56
Speaker
the consequences of things like constantly being injured all the time without the consequences of just not being able now to do much strength either, right? If I'm not strength training and getting weaker, I'm then not also going to be lifting bags of dirt and lifting my dog and walking with my groceries anymore, which was also contributing to my strength. It's a downhill spiral to really keep it simple. Let's just start with strength. Let's do that ye and see what comes out of it because what I find comes out of it is that for folks who start strength training, the world starts to get bigger and bigger and
Engagement in Physical Activities and Hobbies
01:44:43
Speaker
bigger. yeahp They start to be able to canoe again. They start to be able to garden again. They take up running again.
01:44:50
Speaker
they get involved with CrossFit because that looks fun. That happened to me. Yeah, totally. I started strength training and then suddenly I was doing CrossFit and it was fun while it lasted. All right, I think we've made a compelling argument for strength training. I hope we have. If we haven't, I don't know.
01:45:10
Speaker
We'll have to do more episodes. OK. Because we're not going to stop. We're certainly not going to stop. That's true. You can stop the podcast, but you can't stop us. We're going to get a car that has a megaphone on top of it. And we're just going to drive around towns. And I'm going to be like, strength training builds bone density. Stop sitting down, bitches. Or something like that. I'll workshop it.
01:45:36
Speaker
All right, well thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Movement Logic podcast. We massively appreciate it. If you rate and review and subscribe, any of those three, feel free to review and be like, God, that episode was long when they were talking about strength or something like that. I might make an episode about your review. She's done it before, folks.
01:45:58
Speaker
Also, don't forget, if all of this is interesting to you, to get on the wait list for our next bone density course, the next cohort is going to start up at the end of May. And we want you in it. We really want you in it. And you want you in it. You also want you in it. Yeah. I think we're done. How do we end this? Should we pick our favorite song and sing See You in Two Weeks to the tune of our favorite song? And it every week is a different song? OK.
01:46:23
Speaker
H-O-T-T-O-G-O. We will see you in two weeks. I hope we don't get hit with copyright infringement.