You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson.
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Welcome to The Model Health Show.
This is fitness and nutrition expert Shawn Stevenson, and I'm so grateful for you tuning in with me today.
On this episode, we're going to be talking about the number one key, the number one fitness and functionality key to aging gracefully, burning fat and staying fit for a lifetime.
And today you're going to hear from six of the world leading experts in longevity, in fitness, in functionality, specifically tied to extending your lifespan and your health span.
And up first, we've got one of the icons, one of my role models.
This gentleman is over 70 years old and he is one of the fittest people I've ever met.
He's running circles around people that are decades younger and he wasn't just born this way.
Shout out to Lady Gaga.
He developed through trial and error, trial and success, some of these insights.
And to be able to learn from somebody like him is absolutely priceless.
and he's a New York Times bestselling author and founder of one of the most popular fitness, nutrition, and lifestyle websites in the world, Mark's Daily Apple.
I'm talking about the one and only Mark Sisson.
In this segment from our conversation we had together, he's going to be sharing the often overlooked, dare I say secret impact that your muscle has on keeping your vital organs like your heart and your lungs youthful he's going to be sharing at what age he advocates for you to start making fitness your number one job and more check out this first segment and see if you can identify again we're looking at what is the number one key to aging gracefully and burning fat and being fit for a lifetime see if you can pinpoint what exactly that number one key is.
And enjoy this first segment from the one and only Mark Sisson.
The muscle mass thing people don't quite grasp, like why would muscle mass be so integral to longevity?
I know old people who are skinny and they've lived a long time and they don't appear to have much muscle mass.
Well, muscle mass, that part of the equation combined with strength and power is what causes the rest of the organs in the body to have a reason to keep up with the muscles so it's it's a little bizarre but you the brain says I'm gonna go to the gym and I'm gonna lift weights and I'm gonna do curls I'm gonna do squats and then the signal goes to the body to build these muscles up to get stronger to keep up with the amount of work that the brain is choosing to do but in the process the body is trying to figure out how best to utilize all of the organs to achieve this goal so when you say I'm gonna lift
a heavy leg dig the heart goes I guess I got a beat faster to keep up with the demands that this clown is putting on me right now in the gym so the heart has to beat stronger or if you say I'm gonna go for a hike or whatever the heart has to beat stronger if you are doing intervals if you're doing high intensity intervals the lungs have to breathe deeply and so they have to inspire they'd have to take in oxygen to provide that oxygen to help fuel the muscles to do the work that you're choosing to do the liver has to process fuel more efficiently and so by choosing to do the work and by choosing
to use muscle mass and muscle strength is sort of a focal point everything else comes into play here and you get this complete individual that is now not just strong and able to move around the world and do the things that that people who are older want to do travel the world and have access to memories but is also in a situation where you get up in the middle of the night to take a leak and you trip and if you're strong you trip and you laugh it off and you walk over and you do when you go back to sleep but if you're if you don't have the muscle mass if you don't have the balance if If you haven't
worked all these systems, the typical sad scenario is that the old person gets up in the middle of the night, trips, falls, breaks a hip.
The hip breaks, by the way, because the bone is not strong enough.
The bone density has been compromised because the person didn't do enough weight -bearing activity to cause the body to want to build stronger bones.
You know, you've got to dig that if you don't go to the gym and you don't do this work, the body goes, hey, don't need to build muscle, don't need the heart to beat that fast, don't need the lungs to breathe in that much, don't need the bones to be that strong.
Why would I waste valuable resources building strong bones if we're not going to do anything with it?
So now the person winds up with a broken hip in the hospital, and the sad trajectory is typically they get pneumonia in the hospital, and they can't cough well enough to, you know, to get get rid of the sputum and and then that the heart can't beat enough to keep up with the demands of the infection because you've only been working at 10 percent of capacity for the last 15 years and so you die of congestive heart failure, you die of pneumonia, and it and ultimately people die of the you know basically organ failure.
People don't die of old age, they die of whatever organ says I'm out whatever whatever organ taps out first so longevity is really this sort of game we play of how to maintain muscle mass how to maintain aerobic capacity how to maintain liver strength we call vital capacity of the different organs and vital reserve and if you if you understand this basic concept then it makes sense that you would go to the gym and do squats once a week and do pull -ups and and do some a little bit of sprinting sorry for the long -winded explanation fantastic I mean because you know our culture is so focused just
on the aesthetic part of it and not really looking at the fact that in it we should have known this decades ago and I think our ancestors did that muscle is really an endocrine organ yeah and it's releasing all of this chemistry And now we know things like myokines for example that when you mentioned somebody You know going in and falling ill with pneumonia And we think about how our muscle even influences our immune system You know the list goes on and on and on and the coolest thing about is this is something that we can create Yes, like we actually can make more of it and we can maintain it
and care for it, but it becomes even more in a sense Important as we age.
Yes Yes. Yeah, no, it like it becomes your number one job as you age.
I would think anyone over the age of 45 would be well served to consider fitness and health job number one.
And, you know, you hear these stories about all these people who spent their prime years from 25 to 50 building a business and making a lot of money and sacrificing their health and sacrificing their relationships with their families.
And I'm like, dude, life is about enjoyment in in the moment.
And the number of people who, you know, you ask them if you could like people spend a lot of their lives making money and losing their health.
And then they're like, I would give out all my money to have my health back.
Well, that's not necessary.
And that's so. So you should really think of your health as job number one after the age of 45.
five and and that means when somebody says well i can't i can't get to the gym every day because i just don't have the time i'm working too hard no job number one is to get to the gym or go outside and walk and make your business calls while you're walking uh or do micro workouts throughout the day where you drop and do 50 air squats or 20 push -ups um every once in a while or do a plank for two minutes all that stuff counts but if you cast it all aside and say i'll wait till later to do that sometimes i'm not going to say it's too late because we see a lot of people turn around at age 50 and 55
and and and start to get healthy again but but the good news is i know you know this is a as a former you know athlete you can coast on the the years that you spent working out between the age of 20 and 45 you can coast you have to do the work but you can coast for the next several decades right so but health has to be it has to be job number one all right i hope that you enjoyed that first segment we've got so much more goodness in store for you now did you identify what that number one key is and hopefully you did that number one key is building and and maintaining, protecting at all cost our
valuable muscle tissue.
And in our next segment, you're going to be hearing from one of the world -leading experts in muscle, specifically muscle -centric medicine.
And she's going to be sharing why muscle is the organ of longevity.
I'm talking about New York Times best -selling author, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon.
She's going to be sharing why building, maintaining, and protecting our muscle is absolutely critical to longevity and healthy aging.
She's going to be sharing nutrition tips to build and maintain your valuable muscle tissue and much more.
Enjoy this next segment from the one and only Dr. Gabrielle Lyon.
So let's dive in deeper today and really talk about this connection with muscle and longevity.
Yeah, I can't wait.
And I really appreciate this conversation.
Because what we're hearing right now is that in terms of longevity, we should reduce our protein intake.
And that seems to be the overarching narrative.
And what is so surprising to me as a trained geriatrician, and for people that don't know what that is, that's specializing in individuals over the age of 65 and end of life.
part of my job is managing individuals in nursing homes and part of my job as a fellow was looking at their brain health running a brain clinic at washoe that is no small task as a geriatric fellow and one of the things that we always look at is strength capacity and activities of daily living when we think about that arguably we think about skeletal muscle.
So right now the conversation is geared towards longevity, which by the way is not defined.
When we talk about longevity specifically as individuals talk about reducing dietary protein, are we talking about reducing longevity by six years?
Are we talking about living six hours longer?
There is no hard end point in this nebulous concept of longevity when we think about survivability you have to think about skeletal muscle and skeletal muscle in an aging population is critical it is the pinnacle it's not the peripheral discussion it's not you know we should eat this maybe our carbohydrates are too high it's none of that skeletal muscle is an endocrine organ it is our body armor you have to protect as you age okay you just said something that really jumped out and you said body yeah so I've been thinking about this from an evolutionary perspective like why would we have the capacity
to build and put muscle on our frame muscle is the amino acid reservoir every time you are not eating your tissues your brain your liver your kidneys all require amino acids a steady state of amino amino acids in a fasted state.
The place you're going to get that is skeletal muscle.
The body is constantly going over a process of turnover.
It's not, you know, you don't stimulate muscle and that tissue stops being active.
This is a constant process.
Skeletal muscle is really what is going to maintain you in times of fasting.
It's going to maintain you in times of injury, illness.
illness, we know at cancer, we know that survivability of cancer is increased with the amount of skeletal muscle you have. I mean, these are really big factors and we're totally avoiding the fact that skeletal muscle is the primary organ system of protection.
So this is looking at what's happening internally.
What about externally?
You know, Like if I think about it, when there was a time I'm conjuring up images of swords and shields and these kind of things.
And so when you said body armor, that really jumped out as like literally kind of like a protective mechanism.
Like why am I able to grow these pecs to maybe protect my heart or something like that?
Well, I think that the concept of skeletal muscle is really all encompassing.
we can never say i mean listen take out the bodybuilding community which perhaps is a bit at that cusp end of intensity in terms of skeletal muscle but the body was designed for movement and right now we have an opportunity to not move but we're a human machine the human machine was designed for hard physical labor does that protect us it definitely protects us us in a multitude of ways.
Balance, strength, flexibility, survivability.
If you go back to the times of swords, I'm sure the guy that had the most well -conditioned muscle was the individual that was going to survive.
I mean, I, of course, wasn't, this is just my perspective.
I wasn't around during that time, but when we think about survivability, skeletal muscle, while not easy to put on requires time and attention and dietary changes right you can't eat the way you did in your youth when you are primed for anabolic growth that does transition which we will definitely talk about and that goes to the point of why protein restriction is so dangerous for an aging population because as we age as we think about protecting our body our body armor that amino acid reservoir and And there's so many things that we're going to talk about as it relates to skeletal muscle.
Number one, the fact that it allows us to aid in protein turnover, which is ongoing.
But also, skeletal muscle, there's so many things.
Skeletal muscle is one of the primary sites of insulin resistance.
And we cannot go one day without hearing about insulin resistance.
Yeah, it's epidemic.
Absolutely epidemic.
And we think about it as it relates to obesity.
obesity. But insulin resistance, there is evidence that insulin resistance begins in healthy 20 -year -olds that are sedentary.
A decade before we're seeing changes in liver abnormalities, a decade before we're seeing changes in triglyceride levels, blood glucose, insulin, insulin resistance of skeletal muscle is one of the primary defects of I don't want to say all, but nearly all the diseases that we're seeing heart disease cancer obesity skeletal muscle needs to be our focus as opposed to looking at the periphery which is adiposity this brings us back to you mentioned cancer earlier and being a protective mechanism there so I was just wondering in my mind like what are all the pieces that could make that possible I'm
sure that of course insulin is going to be one of of those factors well obesity is a known risk factor for cancer and cancer is very broad cancer is a disease of the genome there are multiple different kinds of cancer but the things that we can do something about really relate to getting our body composition in check not only that not just that skeletal muscle is going to protect you with cancer cachexia which is you know cancer can be a very highly catabolic state and we've seen you know individuals who are going through chemo or who have cancer, in a clinic when someone has rapid weight loss,
I mean one of the things that you think is cancer.
It is a highly catabolic state, it destroys skeletal muscle, and an individual's survivability is going to be better if they have healthier skeletal muscle.
I also want to mention something else.
Not just that skeletal muscle is protective from the mechanical aspect from the amino amino acid reservoir, but exercise.
Exercise is, I don't want to say, you know, broadly anti -cancer, but it definitely can interface with the immune system and it can definitely help protect against certain kinds of cancers.
Exercising skeletal muscle increases natural killer cells.
It increases an interface with the immune system and with the inflammation in the body.
it counterbalances inflammatory mechanisms in the body it's so powerful and it's so simple it's so simple and you know what we really need to do is how do we bridge the gap between fitness professionals and medical professionals right now when we think about skeletal muscle often times we think about physical fitness physical fitness is incredibly important and the way I think that we think about it is a bit simplified because we really need to bring it and to an interface of medicine movement is medicine muscle is medicine do we have an obesity crisis yes but what we really have is a muscle crisis so with the longevity
conversation the idea of number one reducing diet so I want I want to just put that out there number one the idea of reducing Using dietary protein to protect against longevity is essentially saying muscle doesn't matter.
But we know that skeletal muscle improves all survivability.
And by the way, anyone who has ever worked in a nursing home will tell you how important muscle is.
I was reading this morning, you know, I was rereading one of my favorite papers.
and with an in a female who perhaps isn't the healthiest falls and breaks a hip she has a 50 % chance of never walking again wow i mean that's nuts that is insane do you understand that trickle -down impact that's going to have on her family on herself on her well -being everything So, again, when we are talking about longevity and mTOR, we must phrase it in real life application.
Skeletal muscle, nobody can argue, requires dietary protein.
This is a non -arguable fact.
Whether you get your dietary protein from plants versus animals, one is obviously easier, the other is more difficult.
Can it be done? It can absolutely be done.
I will set the stage to tell you that the RDA, which we have known has not changed over the last 40 years as it relates to protein, is 50 % too low to maintain health and wellness.
So the RDA, and I'm setting this up for a very specific reason, the RDA is set at 0 .8 grams per kilogram based on nitrogen studies of 18 -year -old men that was extrapolated from from animal data, that we know that in the literature there is not one study that doesn't show improvement in endpoints, whether it's body composition or biomarkers, of nearly double that.
Higher protein always does better than baseline RDA.
We have not changed that recommendation in the last 40 years.
you mean to tell me that there has been no increase in knowledge of dietary protein in the last 30 to 40 years?
That's not true. So we have to ask, why is that not being addressed?
So the literature clearly supports double the RDA for overall survivability, especially as it relates to an aging population.
We are talking about survivability, longevity, activities of daily living, body composition, protection against insulin resistance.
How are you going to do that on a low protein diet if you do not have optimal muscle mass?
All right, I hope that you enjoyed that segment.
Again, we've got so much more in store for you just to keep stacking so that we understand truly and deeply in multiple dimensions why, again, muscle is the organ of longevity.
And keep in mind that yes, strength training provides a signal for our muscles to grow, but our muscles are literally made from food.
If we don't eat, we don't grow.
And that means that muscle is truly made in the kitchen.
So as Dr. Gabriel Lyon is illuminating for us, we've got to make sure that we're getting in adequate amounts of high quality protein.
we're not talking about ultra processed garbage we're talking about having high quality food that we're preparing ourselves more frequently of course doordash is out here heavy uber eats is out here heavy but there's something really special about making our own food and having literally a hand in food preparation and although this is something that we evolved doing right now there's is a resurgence of individuals, of families who are more adamant and strategic about procuring and preparing their own food on a regular basis.
Now, there's a lot going on.
There's a lot of changes, a lot of new insights that have taken place because in recent decades, even that act, the very healthful act of preparing our own foods, little did we know, in particular here in the United States that our cookware specifically non -stick teflon coated cookware was poisoning people when they were trying to prepare their meals for their family.
One of the most notorious compounds used to make teflon cookware is a chemical called perfluoroactanoic acid or PFOA.
It has been found repeatedly in peer -reviewed studies to contribute to higher rates of infertility, liver disease, and a variety of cancers.
For instance, a study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute concluded that PFOA is a strong kidney carcinogen with risk increasing in tandem with levels of exposure.
And keep in mind that only recently, we're talking about just 10 years ago, even though this was in circulation for decades, It's about 10 years ago.
Some regulation was really driving these companies, in particular DuPont, to pull this chemical and this chemical complex out of their cookware.
And of course, they reluctantly obliged after years of skating around regulation, of deflecting the science.
But with companies like that, what they tend to do is what they did, which is they replaced that chemical PFOA with another chemical called Gen X, which was found to be, of course, years later, similarly toxic, according to a report from the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency.
So the bottom line is, how do we break free from this nonsense?
sense how do we make sure that we're utilizing cookware that is not harming our health and harming the health of our family members cooking is supposed to be one of the most healthful things that we can do and so for my family for over a year now we've been enjoying even this morning when i was preparing breakfast we've been using the real safe beautiful non -stick cookware one of my favorite gifts to give my family members and friends for you know birthdays and things like And I'm talking about the incredible cookware from Our Place.
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Now, moving on in this compilation dedicated to the number one key to aging gracefully, burning fat, and staying fit for a lifetime.
time, we've got phenomenal research scientists and muscle building expert, Alan Aragon.
In this segment, he's going to be sharing why muscle is the metabolic engine of the body.
And he's going to be answering the question, can you protect against or even stop the muscle loss that's associated with aging?
Enjoy this segment from the incredible Alan Aragon.
We want to be protective of lean body mass, muscle specifically, because you can look at muscle as the metabolic engine of the body.
So the metabolic blast furnace of the body where all the fuels are used and partitioned and directed to where they need to go.
And, you know, if we lose muscle tissue, then you can reduce your resting metabolic rate.
You can get reduced functional capacity.
and a just a reduced capability to metabolize incoming fuels from the diet and so the importance of muscle and maintaining muscle mass it just can't be overstated now there's another and there's there is truth to this but there's a huge caveat you know um we get blasted with a lot of information around muscle loss right as as just degeneration as as we get into older age brackets but there's a huge missing piece because yes obviously that's that's an aspect of of this conversation but the missing piece is it doesn't have to happen that way that you think it happens because there's a lot of things
that can be done to even build muscle later in life yeah so can you talk about this whole paradigm, should we be afraid of we're just going to lose our muscle?
It's the end of the story.
There's nothing we can do about it.
Or is there something that we can do even in our 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s to actually support our muscle mass?
Yeah, for sure. Okay.
So at the general population level, 40 is kind of a treacherous turning point for the average person, sedentary person out there in the world who isn't really conscious about health and fitness and training.
The average person in the general pop loses about half a percent a year of their lean body mass starting from the age 40.
And at age 50, that can double.
And that can double yet again at 60 and up.
and so it's this acceleration of lean body mass loss as people get older and there's always this looming threat of sarcopenia when people reach their their advanced ages like like 60 and up sarcopenia really starts becoming a threat the good news about that is that it's all preventable i mean we all have to die at some point and we all kind of slow down at some point and we all lose the motivation to maintain the same degree of muscle mass as uh we have right now you know in our prime yes um but the fact of the matter is there's research showing that people in their Their mid -80s can grow muscle.
If somebody's deconditioned for a number of decades and they're in their mid -80s, all you need to do is just start them on a progressive resistance training program.
And their muscle reacts just like a young person's muscle would when you start them training at college.
Now some people are a little bit more banged up by the time they're in older age.
They some people have some metabolic issues and some orthopedic issues that you would have to kind of tiptoe around When you're building that resistance training program, but nevertheless It's Literally never too late to wake muscle back up with training get it stronger cause muscle hypertrophy or gains and muscular size and and function.
There's no age at which it's too late to do that, even in people's 80s, 90s.
All right, next up in this team up of experts that's dedicated to the number one key to aging, gracefully burning fat and staying fit for a lifetime, we've got the phenomenal Dr. Andrew Huberman.
He has one of the top podcasts in the world, and he's a research scientist out out of Stanford University.
Incredibly insightful.
And in this segment from our conversation, he's going to be sharing with you a major key specifically to brain longevity.
All right, we don't want to just have a fit functional body for a lifetime.
I want to make sure that we're keeping the lights on upstairs to go along with it.
He's going to be sharing how strength training makes you smarter and makes you more resilient against stress.
Enjoy this next segment from the one and only Dr. Andrew Huberman.
If you look at brain function and longevity, it's very clear that the body is informing the brain about the status of your entire being.
Okay. And I truly mean that in the non -mystical sense.
When we do load bearing exercise of any any kind, could even be air squats for some people.
But if they're doing any kind of resistance training with weights or machines or body weight, they're actually hormones that are secreted from our bones.
This is wild. There's things like osteonectin is an example of one that are secreted that go to the brain that enhance the survival and the function of neurons, of nerve cells in the brain.
And at first when I heard this, I thought, this is crazy.
The bones are making hormones, but it makes perfect sense.
sense. The skeleton is a very important system in our body.
How do the areas of the brain that control movement, how do the areas of the brain that control learning, how do they know whether or not you are still moving or not?
Well, they could know because your heart is beating, but maybe your heart's beating really fast because you're stressed out about something.
The only way that your brain knows that your body is being used and that your brain needs to continue to adapt and to stay strong is if you're increasing the load on your skeleton and if you look at cognitive decline and loss of memory and things over time and you look at bodily function and the loss of certain functions what you find is that there are these weird things that are correlated with brain longevity and some of them include for instance the ability to jump and land all right I was talking my mother's in her oh sorry mom she's in She's in her mid -70s now, and we were talking about this because she
said, you know, I want to stay healthy, I want to keep my brain healthy.
And I said, well, can you jump up and land?
And she said, what are you talking about?
That's crazy. And I said, can you jump up and land?
I didn't want her to hurt herself.
And we were talking about this.
A lot of people, as they age, get injuries, hip injuries that take them out of commission.
The ability to jump, not huge distances, right, but just to jump and land and be stable doing that.
Obviously, you don't want people harming themselves.
that's correlated with brain longevity and body longevity.
What is it? Well, it's not just about shuffling around, it's because the bones are taking that impact.
So when we weight train, we provide load forces onto the bones, the bones send signals to the nervous system and to the brain and so there's brain longevity.
So that's a kind of a...
It's a round about but very mechanistic way of answering your question that indeed, when our body is strengthened, our brain gets better at the neuronal health level.
Now, in terms of resilience, which I think, and our capacity to deal with stress, this is an interesting one.
I think there are several places where exercise carries over to an enhanced ability to deal with stress.
First of all, is all the indirect stuff, like it improves our sleep.
It reduces inflammation in the body, provided that exercise isn't too intense or too frequent.
So there's all the indirect ways that it supports us and makes us more capable.
But then there are the pain points of exercise.
And those come in different forms. One of the less discussed pain points of exercise is the one where you don't want to exercise and you do it anyway.
That's making yourself mentally stronger.
And here I'm sort of paraphrasing in a much less entertaining way than the great David Goggins, right?
Not his whole thing, he's about many things, but a lot of what David's about is about taking yourself from way back on your heels, don't want to get out of bed, don't want to do something getting into that forward center of mass.
That is a very valuable brain function to be able to take yourself from a place of, I don't want to do it at all.
It's the last thing I want to do and I'm going to lean into this.
That carries over. And then the other one is the pain that you experience, healthy pain, during the exercise itself.
The burning of your lungs, the burning of the lactic acid buildup, the straining under a rep or something like that.
And there your your cognitive or your thoughts about what you're doing.
I'm here because I chose to be.
I might not want to be, but I chose to be.
Those are two different things, right?
I chose to be here, no one's forcing me to do this.
I don't have a gun to my head.
I'm doing this and this is going to benefit me.
Over time, that will change your relationship to effort.
And the holy grail of life, I believe, is when effort feels good.
and no one gets to be in that state all the time but i think that when we push ourselves physically we get multiple opportunities to learn to go from the i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to i'm kind of that's my voice in my own head i don't want to and then doing it anyway and then you have to remember to reward yourself and that reward should not be in the form of an external reward this is very important it's tempting to say I'm gonna reward myself with the meal I'm gonna you can still enjoy all the things you enjoy but the reward has to be one that you give yourself mentally because when you
start to give yourself external rewards you're teaching your brain that rewards only come from the outside when you give yourself internal rewards and you can even make this a one -minute meditation practice at the end of a particularly hard cold shower or you get out you just sit there and tell yourself this is good for me.
I chose to do this.
This is benefiting me.
Those messages, actually, I know it sounds a little hokey, but those messages actually help reinforce the whole process that you just forced yourself through.
Next up in this compilation dedicated to the number one key to aging gracefully, burning fat, and staying fit for a lifetime, we've got New York Times best -selling author and fitness icon, she's actually in the fitness hall of fame.
I'm talking about the amazing JJ Virgin.
In this segment, she's going to be sharing with you why you need to be focused on muscle first. In particular, again, if we're looking at weight loss, if we're looking at fat loss, we need to be focused on building muscle first. She's going to be sharing why muscle is like metabolic spanks or skims. all right and this and much more enjoy this segment from the amazing JJ virgin everything really is about holding on to our building muscle mass and I look at and go alright 30s 40s 50s this is like primo building years and you look at people who are so focused on weight loss and they want to lose
weight fast there's no way you're losing fat primarily fat if you're losing weight fast right and ideally you're focused solely on muscle first like if you look at what I'm working on right now or norms and what I haven't been able to really find I don't think the research is there yet is how much muscle do we want to have like what is the ideal muscle mass for someone with when you looked at height and frame right and really got the weight ideal that way and then if you looked at your weight and went, all right, I'm actually maybe 30 pounds overweight, but I'm five pounds under -muscled.
I would never focus on the fat loss first. I would solely focus on the muscle because if you're putting on muscle, you know, everyone wants a faster metabolism.
It's like, well, as long as your thyroid's working well, the big controlling factor is always going to be muscle.
Put it on, right? And plus, muscle's like metabolic Spanx.
It holds everything in tighter and boosts your your metabolism and improves insulin sensitivity and it provides this little sink for when your drink you know getting in some sugar it's going to go into your muscles right so it's just the perfect solution but we have to and I'll tell you a very funny story about this we have especially women we have to look at weight differently so I decided to you know really change my workout up like I've gotten in a rut at the gym and I thought you know what I want to see if I can put some muscle on I've been working out since I was a teenager with with the football team.
Because there were no, like, I went to high school in Richmond, California, there were no gyms, right?
I'm in the football team, like the little football team room with all the big dudes lifting weights.
And so I literally have lifted weights my entire life.
Even when I would have an injury, I would lift around the injury.
So I've always worked out.
And I decided, I'm gonna see where I can go with this.
So I went in and I really pushed it.
And I started gaining weight.
and then I had this whole mental thing going on of like and my clothes are still fitting right everything's fitting if anything might be a little tighter around the arms well that's okay you know but it's fitting but it's like I'm searing having to do this mental game of oh my gosh I'm gaining weight holy smokes its muscle this is what you want the end of this whole like bang but but women do that right so often I had a gal Vicki when I am to Jim who wanted to lose 10 pounds and we worked together and she dropped two clothing sizes she looked amazing she lost no weight now instead of celebrating
that she'd actually write dropped five pounds of fat put on five pounds of muscle and looks like an entirely different person cheese I was like do you want to look the same like a small fluffier version of yourself here right it's just a mindset shift we have have to get to i want to ask you about this because what i'm really hearing is instead of saying like if we could change this metric even in medicine you know where a physician is saying hey you really need to lose 30 pounds shifting it to saying you need to gain five pounds of muscle what are the things that is going to be entailed in gaining
that five pounds of muscle so we can start to shift this because i would imagine it's going to help with the weight loss piece too, but what are some of the things we can do to add on that muscle?
So first of all, like the doctor's office should have a DEXA or an in -body, like forget ever stepping on a regular scale again.
That is like looking at total cholesterol.
It is a meaningless number, right?
I mean, if it's high, you're going to go, gee, we need to pull it apart.
But you could have it be normal and be sarcopenically obese, not have enough muscle.
so that's the first thing so they have to be able to look at this this has to be part like to me it's one of the biggest changes we can make in metabolic health quickly because it will take it us out of this diet mentality that sets everybody up to fail right even when I go on I'm like oh I'm gonna go on a diet and then I get into this like I've been done it for years but you immediately start to think of all the stuff you can't have and then you want to have it right because that's just human nature so we want to put on five pounds of muscle now if someone is not working out at all it's gonna be
so much easier to start right it's kind of like cleaning a really dirty window it looks amazing and you just a little bit so there's an advantage to being out of shape because you're gonna see big changes quickly and you can do something called recomping where you can lose fat and put on muscle at the same time but let's assume most people have been doing something and now they're coming in first thing they need need to do is make sure that their whole diets focus protein first. And it's going to help with blood sugar control, it's going to help with satiety.
When you focus first on building your plate and building your day around protein and bumpering your breakfast and dinner around protein, you actually will start to get full and not over eat.
We were just in Italy this summer and we went out to some restaurant to have steak Florentine and it was like this big, right?
You know, and we eat this whole thing.
We were so, I thought, we're probably not going to be able to eat for a couple days.
I mean, we had to go take this like three -hour walk afterwards because we were like, you know, wanting to go curl up in a fetal position.
But when you eat protein, you're full.
And so the first thing is to sit down and go, okay, let's design your diet based on what you really want your ideal body weight to be.
And if we could really do it, it would really be based on your muscle mass.
but you know to keep it simple at least 0 .8 grams per pound of ideal body weight and then divide that over three meals one of the challenges I think with intermittent fasting is you just simply can't get the protein you need in two meals so and I do believe we need to eat during the circadian rhythm so I'm not a like lunch and dinner person I think we need to eat earlier in the day probably two hours after waking is good you know cortisol has come up melatonin has come back down pancreas this can work.
Um, but focusing on that and then getting to the gym and start to focus on lifting heavy things.
And people always say, how much weight should I lift?
I go as much as you can in good form until you can't and do it hard. Um, and do big movements.
Don't focus on little, little vanity movements like bicep curls and tricep extensions.
I never do them. That would surprise the out of people because you got the, I know they're always rude.
You You must do like, Oh no, I never do that.
I do pull -ups, I do pushups, I do bent over rows, I do big stuff that is going to require my whole body.
So there's stability in there too.
Right. And you know, I might, if the end, if I want to throw a little bit in there, but usually I'm too tired.
Yeah. That's so much muscle recruitment that you're doing.
You know, and that's, again, it's getting back to how our bodies are really designed is a lot of things working together.
Right. I love their, uh, I'm trying to remember who said said this, I think it might've been Paul check of like our bodies weren't, you know, bolted to the floor.
So like do things standing up, do things that require balance.
So cables, free weights, body weight, do those things.
Yeah. All right. I hope that you enjoyed that segment with the incredible JJ Virgin.
JJ is somebody who truly walks her talk.
I've known her for years and she's somebody that I'm grateful to say that I've got to spend a lot of time with and being in her her 60s again when she takes off her jacket because she goes sleeveless a lot a lot of sleeveless outfits dresses whatever if we're out to eat the jacket comes off you you see it crowds start to gather around just impressed that how did this beautiful woman get so shredded and you know she's somebody who is never withholding her insights her secrets she's always seeking to to help.
She's always checking in on myself and my wife.
And she's just got a huge heart and just truly a great person.
And even most recently, we were out having dinner with some friends and JJ really helped because my wife was just like, I'm trying to really focusing on the fitness, the longevity and building, protecting my muscle.
And JJ is like, you got to make sure that you're getting that adequate amount of protein in.
And then, you know, my wife went with the obligatory, well it's just you know just all the reasons why it's not doable for her and so JJ really helped my wife with her mindset around getting in adequate protein now you'd think maybe she listened to me but no that's not how it works sometimes especially in relationships and many people listening know what I mean there's a statement you can't be a prophet in your own land And I get it.
All right. But this is the benefit of having other voices and even a platform like this to share with our friends, with our family members, because sometimes that proximity, it it blocks in a strange way the ability for the information to be absorbed to make an impact, especially on initial impact.
impact. And this is not to say that people around us in our lives and family members, and my wife, my amazing wife, all right, she's, I'm just going to say, I'm going to say the P word. She is perfect.
She's perfect. And I know that having other voices like JJ to talk with her, to share her insights, to help her to get where she wants to be is priceless.
And so again, I'm grateful to be able to share her insights with you.
And by the way, one of the insights, one of the tips that she gave my wife was, you know, for years, my wife has been doing intermittent fasting.
And so again, just having that fasting window being too long, it's just blocking out her ability to get in the protein that she's targeting.
So she doesn't necessarily want to quote eat something in the morning.
And so what she's been doing is having either, you know, adding some protein along with her coffee, whether that's some collagen protein, but what she's really been been loving is like throughout the day, throughout the morning is she's been having the 100 % grass fed bone broth protein from Paleo Valley.
And in particular, they have a savory original version that's kind of like a bone broth, but it's very, very dense in proteins, in particular collagen.
Now this has been affirmed in numerous studies to boost metabolism, to support healthy healthy joints tendons and other tissues for healthy hair skin and nails reducing cellulite the list goes on and on and so there's about 17 grams in a serving right there and just being able to sip on that throughout the day or in the morning you know it's one of the things that she found to be very helpful but they also by the way that bone broth protein they have a salted caramel version they have a chocolate they have a vanilla so you could use it kind of the traditional way way that you use a protein powder.
But again, Paleo Valley is in a league of their own.
It's grass fed, grass finished, 100 % bone broth protein.
There truly is nothing else like it.
Head over to paleovalley .com forward slash model, and you're going to get 15 % off their incredible bone broth protein, plus all of their amazing snacks.
They're grass fed, grass finished meat Meat sticks, superfood bars, all their phenomenal supplements.
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Incredible people, incredible dedication, and their standards are so high.
And I just truly, I trust them.
I appreciate them. And again, head over to paleovalley .com forward slash model to get 15 % off store wide.
That's P -A -L -E -O -V -A -L -L -E -Y dot com forward slash model for 15 % off.
And now we're going to go to our final expert in this compilation dedicated to the number one key to aging gracefully, burning fat, and staying fit for a lifetime.
This is with another one of those people who is truly an inspiration for me personally, but he's impacting the lives of millions of people.
but every time that I've spent time with him I've taken something away that I've added to my life and added to my fitness to my longevity because he's done it all from being a literal world record -holding powerlifter to transitioning into because being a world record -holding powerlifter at the level he was at he had to be pretty heavy all right so we're talking knocking knocking on the door of around 300 pounds, all right?
So, and then getting incredibly lean and fit and getting into sprinting and all kinds of different things.
And in fact, he even ran the Boston Marathon. So I'm talking about my friend and again, one of the most insightful people in this field, the amazing Mark Bell.
He's gonna be sharing with you why strength is never a weakness.
He's gonna be sharing some other overlooked ways that strength and building muscle leads to longevity.
longevity, he's also going to be sharing some insights on how to build our muscle long term, all right?
Some tips on like, how do we do this?
So we're going to close this out with the one and only Mark Bell.
I've been doing this for so long and now to finally get confirmation from every single podcast that talks about anti -aging or reversing your age or trying to stay young and fit and healthy so much of it comes back to muscle mass so much of it comes back to strength people hear me say all the time i say strength is never a weakness and weakness is never strength and i think that uh we should keep our eye on strength not necessarily you don't have to necessarily bench press something that somebody else bench presses however pretty much every every person should start to, every person that lifts,
and if you don't lift, you don't count.
That's the saying of mine as well.
Sorry for everybody that doesn't lift. You got to get out there and lift. But when you're lifting, you should have an idea of like what kind of weights you can do on particular exercises.
And so maybe it's normal for you to be able to bench press one plate for a couple of reps.
Well, why don't we try to just keep that around for as long as we possibly can, because that's going to show us a sign of some sort of youthfulness.
That's going to show us a sign that you are still sending your body a signal.
And if you just think about each thing that we're trying to do, all the biohacking, you know, getting some sunlight in the morning, and cold plunging, and all these different routines, and all these things.
What are we trying to do?
We're trying to send a particular signal to the body.
So, with strength never being a weakness and weakness ever being a strength i think we owe it to ourselves to try to keep a certain level of fitness keep a certain level of strength x amount of push -ups x amount of pull -ups how you lift or how you exercise is kind of up to you there's a lot of different things you can do and i say lift you know if you don't lift you don't count but some form of resistance you know if if you're doing rock climbing it's like i don't think you really need to spend a ton of time in the gym as you have a different approach. But, uh, you know, I learned so much, so many
great things from powerlifting and powerlifting is let's see what you can do for a one rep max.
And a lot of people are scared to do things like that.
A lot of people are scared to go out and just give it hell and just go and sprint as hard as they can.
Uh, they're, they're fearful of trying like a heavy squat and you should be because you can get hurt.
And so there's really not, I'm not encouraging people to go in the gym today and go and try a one rep max.
However, what I am encouraging someone to do, learn the skill set of a squat, and then maybe over a period of time, you just say, like, let me see what I can hit and still have my form be just dead on.
I'll have somebody else watch it.
I'll record it. I want to make sure that the technique is really there.
So I'm not going to put on three plates when I barely made two plates look pretty good, right?
We see that a lot with people and they end up doing these reps that are just atrocious.
So you want to try to when you're working on your strength and just even working on yourself in general, you want to make sure that your reps always look really clean, that your reps always look really good.
Something that I share with people often is that your last rep of your last set should look like the first rep of your first set.
So that's a really practical thing.
So if you do three sets of 10 of something, your 30th rep, your last rep of your last set should look a little bit similar.
Now, OK, there's going to be a little wiggle.
You got some fatigue.
I totally understand.
And I'm not saying that you have to train that carefully all the time, but that's about what it should be.
So now when you go to do a bench press or now when you go to do a squat, you don't with textbook technique.
And kind of back to the sprinting and stuff too, you'll hear people say, oh, you know, I think everybody knows sprinting is the best, hands down.
There's not even, it's not even close.
It's just not even remotely close.
There is nothing like sprinting.
There's nothing that mimics a sprint.
But if you can sprint, you can probably fight.
If you can sprint, you can probably get away.
You can sprint, you can just, you have access to so many things.
If you can sprint, you can probably jump.
And if you're really good at sprinting, you're probably can run pretty far too like someone like hussein bolt who probably never really trained to run longer distances i'm sure him running eight miles or something is even though he'd probably hate it it's not like his thing that he likes he would probably still uh be pretty damn good at it so get try to figure out a way for your body to sprint you know if you're listening to this and you're 50 years old and you're like well my knees and my back and i don't can you sprint on an airdyne bike you might say no can you sprint on an elliptical can you
can you sprint with a curl can you sprint with an overhead press like maybe you can figure out like a certain amount of weight maybe 40 pound dumbbells pretty heavy to you again with good technique and good form maybe you can bring the weight to here and maybe you can figure out a way to like press it overhead i think that that some of those things i just mentioned right there i think those are more of of the key to our health and our longevity, more so even just even something like jumping down from something.
I don't know if other people did this in school, but I remember like jumping down from the back of the bus in school in case there was an emergency or whatever.
That would destroy most adults now, to jump down like that.
But I remember being excited about that.
Now I'm sure I would probably shuffle over to the edge and I'd probably look down and be like, and maybe go to my butt and then, and then go down.
So your ability to jump, your ability to sprint, these things are, they're so crucial because of the signal that it sends to your body.
It's showing a sign that you're still youthful.
Even something like getting on the ground.
You say, hey man, get on the ground and do some of these exercise with me.
If I circle around and I move around a bunch like a cat, trying to like you know get comfortable on the ground that tells you immediately that I'm in pain but I was like okay and I just pop right down in the ground it tells you something a little different so I just wanted to mention all that and I know is a little long -winded but I wanted to mention all that because I think in the era that we're in right now people think they have to be muscular I don't agree with that I don't think I don't believe so even though I'm muscular This is what I like to do.
And what you like to do is actually in a different category of things, because what you like to do is massively important to your life as well, and massively important to your health as well.
I just worked out yesterday with Mike O 'Hearn.
He's 253 pounds. He's probably like 55 years old.
I don't necessarily agree with him staying above 240 or something like that all the way into his late 50s and 60s and stuff.
But if he really enjoys that, if he really likes to do that, I could see the argument of like, I got to kind of back off of that and say, I think he's probably healthier doing what he really enjoys as long as not clearly to his detriment.
Yeah. I love that you're talking about the signals, giving our body these particular signals, whether it's being able to spend time on the floor, whether it's being able to jump off of something.
And here's the the thing.
A lot of times we lose these capacities because we stopped doing them.
Right. I was just thinking about my youngest son.
We were walking somewhere and he's 12.
And so we were walking and he climbed up on something just to jump off of it.
Right. And that's what we do.
But then we stopped doing that stuff because we get the idea in our head.
Usually it's before any type of injury happens, we just stop doing the thing.
And then we get to a place years later that I shouldn't do that thing remember when your son was seven right oh man he he didn't even just he didn't walk to another room he ran my daughter jumped all the time my son ran all the time and so i think that might be hard to like start to figure out how to microdose that right into our own lives when you're 45 years old but just can you start to think about that can you start to look at that out a little bit and say, every time I park my car, I'm going to make it a goal to like literally get out of the car as quick as I can.
It sounds like so silly or so foolish.
When I get up from the dinner table, I'm not going to use my hands.
I don't want people trying stuff and doing stuff that they're, they're going to hurt themselves, but maybe it's something that you work yourself towards.
Um, a friend of mine, Joel Green, he actually will just, he's 57 years old and he will actually just sprint down the street randomly and when he was on my podcast he was wearing like nice shoes and he was he was dressed uh nicely and i was like even in those shoes you know he's like it doesn't matter man i just take off just like a little kid he's like because again that's the difference between a young body and an old body so the inputs that we give ourselves they it can't just be the gym's not enough this is what i'm trying to basically say here going and doing a lifting session and growing
out and just getting like muscular that might have some benefits and it might chew up more glucose and it might help us to be able to eat more and to be more lax with a diet or something like that it can help us manage our body weight there's a lot of cool things that it can do but it can't really mimic that youthfulness that we're looking for and so therefore i think you need other strategies yeah the youthfulness is associated with moving quickly, right?
We think of growing old as slowing down, right?
But are you proactively doing things to stay quick, to stay fleet of foot, right?
And so I love, also, you guys have been sharing some content around just like jump rope, for example, you know, and these are things, again, these are like, they can be in the background of our awareness.
But my wife told me, because this is one of the things that we do often, but she told me when she was in Kenya little girl that they would jump rope and I had no idea this first time she told me I've known her for 20 years and she told me that she used to jump rope when she was a kid for me people would do double dutch you know the girls in the neighborhood whatever and these are all like fast twitch quick quick off the ground yeah and these are things there's even today there's jump ropes that don't connect you don't even have to have the whole rope to jump over you could just do the action and do
a jumping motion that feels comfortable.
It's great for people who do, you know?
And so it's just like, where can I get this input, send this signal for youth?
And also we know today, and you've talked a lot about this, is that muscle is the organ of longevity.
And so you're not saying that we got to walk around with a honking amount of muscle, but adding some muscle to your frame is going to help you to age better.
And so having you here, I want to talk about training.
I want to talk about how do we most efficiently build build some muscle.
All right. So I love, I love, you know, I love this kind of stuff because I love, you know, we can get like philosophical and we talk about all kinds of different things, but it's great to just give people straight answers.
And so there's many ways to get muscle.
You know, some people get it from, they wrestled in high school and they got a big neck and, and they got a big, yeah, they got big arms. I have a friend that used to work for us He had these massive biceps, just amazing looking biceps, and he got it from sprinting.
It's like, you know, sprinters have nice shoulders, nice arms and stuff.
This guy had like 19 inch arms. It's crazy.
So sometimes people get hypertrophy from like particular sports.
But the easiest way to get it specifically is to go to the gym and do some resistance training.
And it's pretty simple.
You want maybe to utilize two to three exercises, two to three sets per exercise.
Now, as you start to do this more often, you might want to do a little bit more than that.
Two to three exercises, two to three sets, two to three body parts, maybe per week.
Maybe as you get more advanced, maybe it's two or three body parts per session, depending on how you want to do your split.
And it's just kind of old school, Joe Weider style sets of 10.
10. Something I've found to be super effective over the years is to do three sets of 10 and go light, medium, heavy.
So you're going to do incline bench press and you have a little experience with it.
So you know how to do the form and stuff and just grab whatever you consider to be light.
You know, each person can be a little different.
Whatever weight you consider to be like kind of a joke weight like that you can do you want to get that first set in because that is where you do a diagnostic and you do an analyzation of yourself where am i today like what's and and sure enough you pick the weight up and you move it around and you're like oh my god it's like something going on my wrist or something like i don't know that's strange and so what do you do from there well you're going to now audible and you're not going to go as heavy on the next two two sets you can kind of change your position.
Yeah, yeah, right. You change your position.
You're like, oh, well a barbell doesn't feel good today.
So maybe I'll try a dumbbell.
Right? And that's where you can kind of make these audibles as you go and you'll know how to do that a lot more as you move forward. But something like three sets of 10.
Light, medium, heavy.
Chest as the example.
You did incline bench. Now maybe you do.
It'd be nice to do maybe some pushups or some dips.
dips. Two to three sets, 10 reps.
Then move on to maybe like a cable crossover or something like that.
Two to three sets of 10.
That's a great chest workout.
Now, depending on how advanced you are, you might need to make it harder.
You might need to put your feet up on a box for the pushups.
If you are less advanced, you might have to do your pushups off your knees or use my invention, the slingshot, which assists you in bench press pushups and dips.
But that's kind of of the basics of it right there.
Two to three sets, 10 reps is a great start.
How often do you need to train?
What kind of frequency?
That's always a really interesting question, but just to flat out answer it, I would say just two to three times a week.
Something that I've found that might be of interest to people is that if you give yourself something that's too low, I like to aim low.
I think aiming low is crucial.
I was talking earlier about sprints.
The best way to do a sprint is to just go out and like jog real lightly.
Go as slow as you can and then speed up, speed up, speed up.
So, you want to kind of ramp yourself up into it so you're doing it in a safe fashion, right?
If we kind of take the same approach to weights, we're going to to kind of ramp ourselves up into these things slow and controlled.
And so, you know, the way to gain muscle mass, you know, over time is you're going to increase the intensity of the things that you're doing.
You're going to be brushing up against what I would call like a functional failure.
Like you're no longer able to do a technical limit, they call it.
You're no longer able to execute the exercise with good form and precision any longer and that gives you an idea of when to kind of discontinue the exercise but what the point I was trying to make about sometimes something's too low is that if I just said hey I you know Sean I want you to do a 10 minute walk you know once a day you might do it here and there but it's like there's like nothing to it you're like I don't know what the point in this is so I do think it's great to to aim low but you still need stuff to stimulate you so if you're in the gym and you're doing like these two to three sets
light medium heavy and you want to ramp it up a little bit more go for it like you're already at the gym you're already there you already spent the time to get yourself there and all these things and so that's where it might be a good idea to just say this feels good I like doing this instead of the three sets that someone recommended I'm going to to do five okay now you mentioned with the frequency so are we talking two to three sessions per week on a certain body part ideally yeah I think so the some people will say like on the smaller body parts that uh maybe two or three times a week would be
appropriate for those smaller body parts and some people say uh on you know legs or or chest or back or something like that that maybe you only need to do it like once a week the way i like to look at it is i personally like to do something almost every single day but i don't really recommend that to people that are new i think people that are new i think there's a lot of great things they could do i mean you could get an app and follow along with an app you could get a trainer something like that but to to commit to a trainer or to commit to this new time commitment out of nowhere is a tough
investment for people sometimes so while i enjoy exercising every day and i like to spread things out quite a bit um because i exercise so often i don't even really think about that question anymore but for people that are newer that are trying to like grow let's say their shoulders they want their shoulders to be a little wider they want their back to be a little little stronger, a little wider.
Probably looking at like two or three times a week for those particular body parts and maybe other body parts where you're like, I think my legs, my calves, or I think this or that like looks decent.
I'm not going to worry about it as much. Maybe only one time a week for those body parts.
Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today.
I hope that this was filled to the brim with insights and inspiration.
And that's what it's all about.
And of course, knowledge is not power.
Knowledge is potential power.
It's the application.
So take something that inspired you today and put it into action.
And one of those actions can be inspiring others around you, inspiring and supporting community transformation and community longevity.
So share this with the people that you care about.
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Take a screenshot of the episode and you could tag me.
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And as always, if you want to hang out in the studio with myself and all these phenomenal guests, you can hop over to the Model Health Show YouTube channel and spend time here here in the studio with us and to have that visual connection as well.
We've got some amazing masterclasses and world -class guests coming your way very, very soon, so make sure to stay tuned.
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