I don't think you can overstate the importance of strength training I I just don't think there's anybody out there who shouldn't be lifting weights I mean unless you're decidedly saying I don't want to live the the longest healthiest life I can if that if that's the case then by all means don't lift weights but if you're in the camp that says I want to maximize how well I can live and maybe even how long I can live what should I do then you you have to be lifting weights regardless of age regardless of sex you know you have to work around all of those things I think exercise is the single most important longevity drug we have bar none if you were if you said like I want to go deep down the rabbit hole of living longer what do I need to do it's it's like a super well-crafted exercise program that is geared towards strength muscle mass and cardiorespiratory Fitness and the data are unbelievable right everybody knows that if you smoke or have diabetes your risk of death goes up a lot but your risk of death from having high cardiio respiratory Fitness goes down by much more than your risk of death goes up from smoking or diabetes so smoking and diabetes will double or triple your risk of death depending on the time frame you're looking at having very high cardiorespiratory Fitness so having a V2 Max that is Elite we would Define that as the top 2.5% of the population compared to below average is a fivefold reduction in all cause mortality I mean we don't have drugs that have a 5x reduction in mortality and then when you layer in strength and muscle mass um we actually now have pretty good data as to to the fact that strength is more important than muscle mass we just use muscle mass is a good proxy for strength but if you just focus on strength that's the metric that matters it's about a three-fold reduction in all cause mortality when you compare high strength to low strength and the tests are you know we're talking it's not like how much you can Squat and deadlift it's like grip strength dead hang um how long can you do like an air squat you know like what's your quad strength how quickly can you do five reps up and down from a chair I mean it's relatively simple stuff but when you stratify people by those metrics and you compare the highest to the lowest performers there's just no comparison truthfully I haven't come up with a better analogy yet and it's really the analogy of saving for retirement if you could be talking to somebody who's in high school or college and and you were talking to them through the lens of you know being a financial adviser they their fiduciary what would you say well you would say listen there's this really magical thing called compounding that Einstein basically said was the eighth wonder of the world and you want to use it to maximum advantage and to do that you should start saving immediately you just you know if you put all of your savings into an index fund at the age of 22 the probability that you are not going to be set when you retire is so low but what happens if you're talking to somebody who's 45 and due to life circumstances like they just haven't been able to save they haven't they haven't made enough money to even have some disposable saving income or they've had you know they've saved and lost or invested badly or something like that would you say well you know too bad no of course you wouldn't so I guess the point here is it is never too late to start saving for retirement but you must understand something which is the longer you wait to start the more you're likely going to have to save the greater return you're going to need and therefore probably the greater risk you're going to take it's never too late to start saving and it's never too late to start exercising don't wait and amazing statistic is that the leading cause of traumatic brain injury in people over the age of 65 is falling 95% of hip fractures are driven by Falls so you know clearly Frailty is the leading cause of this um Frailty means poor muscle mass poor reactivity and low bone density those are probably the things that are driving the severity of the Fall which are so much higher in a person who's older than you know a person who's who's younger you know if you or I step off a curb we weren't expecting to be there or you know when you're stepping from one level to another and the level is different than you expected that immediately destabilizes you well the ability to react to that very quickly and get a firm footing that is a very power driven movement right that's not really about how strong you are it's actually about how explosive and Powerful you are that is a type 2 muscle fiber phenomenon and as you watch the atrophy of those two fibers you have far less reactive speed in your feet and therefore you're more likely to fall in response to that and so again the more we can train these systems the better we are going to be able to resist falling research is very consistent here in demonstrating that resistance training can increase muscle strength and muscle hypertrophy at any age even if you limit your analysis to people over the age of 80 which are people who are clearly in the in that in that area of um you know being on the downhill for strength and hypertrophy training can offset losses and in a in a deconditioned individual can actually make gains I don't think you can overstate the importance of strength training I I just don't think there's anybody out there who shouldn't be lifting weights I I can't I can't think of a case I mean unless you're decidedly saying I don't want to live the the longest healthiest life I can if that if that's the case then by all means don't lift weights but but if you're in the camp that says I want to maximize how well I can live and maybe even how long I can live what should I do um then you you have to be lifting weights regardless of age regardless of sex regardless of injury you know you have to work around all of those things there was a study that looked at people in their late '70s and early ' 80s and people in their 20s that measured three rep max for leg extension and then put them on a 6- week resistance training program and the people in their late '70s and early ' 80s had a seven 8% increase in their strength uh which is almost identical to the 83 84% increase that was found in the younger individuals again it's important to understand that yes these people were significantly difference in the absolute strength that they had but nevertheless this is an important point that is everybody has the capacity to improve and therefore everybody needs to be doing this I think we've talked about this with Andy Galpin on a couple of occasions the importance of type two fibers so one of the things that Andy said that has always stuck with me and I think it's just such a a great way to think about this he he he almost described it as a Hallmark of Aging is the atrophy of the type two muscle fibers so again you have type 1 fibers you have type two fibers the type two fibers are the glycolytic fibers they are the much more powerful fibers they have more contractile Force they're the ones that are responsible for power not just muscle size and not even just strength and clearly not muscular endurance and these are the things that basically Peak when we're in our 20s and so you know every day I'm sort of thinking about what am I doing to um preserve them and minimize their loss and again uh a study will link to demonstrates That Type 2 muscle fiber cross-sectional area um was increased by 27% in men aged 60 to 73 with 13 weeks of resist resistance training now again you have to train relatively heavy for your level of strength you have to push to make those results happen and remember training is a hormetic activity right it has to create a stimulus whether that be on the Aerobic System whether that be for the type 1 fiber the type two fiber like there there has to be a stimulus that comes from pushing outside of a comfort zone so we have to have that training stimulus but we know that if we do too much we're going to get injured and I hope that by now I've made the case for why injury must be avoided at all cost because injury means time to decondition and the older we get the more problematic that gets again you know I think about the back injury I sustained when I was 27 years old that basically left me unable to walk for 3 months and unable to do much of anything for 9 months well today if you look at me there's really no lasting effect of that but imagine that had happened to me when I was 70 that's that that's it my life is over like I never get back to where I was so it's probably safe to say that the most common reason for injury when you're starting out is is progressing along the intensity axis uh too soon so remember we talked about how you push frequency you can push duration you should you could push intensity I think you want to air on the side of again my my heuristic is move the frequency then the duration lastly the intensity so so that's clearly true on the cardio cardio training side but I think it's also true on the strength training side obviously another very important part of injury is just a lack of neuromuscular control so that accounts for many things from why people fall more frequently as they age to how people get injured when they can't let's if we're just limiting it to talking about strength training you know why are individuals getting hurt when they lifting weights well a lot of it is maybe they're moving a weight that they can't control you know we've talked a lot about the importance of being able to control the Ecentric phase of a movement and I think we've all seen someone in the gym who's just throwing weights around and getting away with it but that you're going to stop getting away with that the the older you get so we want to really make sure that people have the coordination they're doing the types of drills like agility agility ladders you know uh I high hand eye coordination exercises ball tosses such that they're kind of generating neuromuscular control in addition to strength probably the other big area where we see injuries is due to a lack of movement variability people say well you know should do I need to squat and deadlift and bench press and and I think the short answer is no I think a lot of those things can be done with for example squats and deadlifts you can accomplish many of those goals using single leg variants that are far less weight and even something like a bench press with a bar I would much rather substitute in um once you're ready for that floor presses and single arm floor presses so you'll have one arm you'll be laying on the floor with knees up feet flat on the ground one arm straight up the other arm doing the presses and again what's what's nice about that is on a floor press yet your range of motion is nowhere near what it is on a bench because you're obviously not going to be able to bring the elbow you know below your your back which you could on a bench so you lose a bit of range it's clear not as good you know quote unquote as good a PE exercise but there's also a very good margin of safety there think about how much harder it is to hurt yourself doing a floor press than a than a regular traditional bench press so you know these are these are just some slight examples of ways that you can think about minimizing injury [Music]