Michael Joseph Gross
Appearances
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Well, the reason we learned to think it wasn't important goes back thousands of years. At the very beginning of scientific medicine, doctors and athletic trainers were competing to see who could corner the market in what we now call healthcare. Now, the most famous doctor in ancient Rome, whose name was Galen,
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
He argued that trainers who encouraged athletes to build mass, what we now think of as building muscle, were actually making those athletes suffocate their souls. Now this idea of muscle as being both kind of superficial and the opposite of healthful continues into the modern era. Kenneth Cooper, who wrote the most popular book about exercise in the 20th century, the book called Aerobics,
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
which really put aerobic exercise at the center of our idea of what exercise is, said that building muscular fitness was just like putting a shiny new paint job on a car, when in fact what we needed to be doing was give the body a new engine, a better heart and lung system.
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Muscle is so much more than what most of us have grown up thinking it is. I think a lot of us have grown up thinking that muscle is mainly a matter of appearance. When we think about its function, we think about how it moves us. But muscle is performing a huge number of jobs inside the body. Let's start with metabolism.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Muscle is the main sink for disposal of blood sugar, making sure that our metabolism is healthy. Muscle is also the main reservoir of the proteins that do the work of healing us when we're sick or building our bodies when we're children and adolescents growing. Strength and muscle even shape our whole identity.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
There are connections between muscle and mind, muscle and mental health, that have only begun to be discovered in the past few decades. For instance, For many people in the first proper randomized controlled trial of heavy weight training as treatment for depression, for 75% of people in that study, lifting heavy weights treated depression as well as the best antidepressant drugs.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
And as we get older, muscle more and more becomes a matter of life and death. Our muscles are interacting with our bones all the time. And if we lift heavy weights, we're allowing the muscles to make more strain on the bones, which makes the bones stronger, which means that if you're an older woman and you fall,
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
you're much less likely to break your hip if you've been lifting weights for the past few decades. Heavy weight training is one of the best preventive measures for osteoporosis.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
No, it's now very well established that both weight training and aerobic training are effective as treatments for depression. That's recognized in the clinical practice guidelines for the treatment of depression in a number of countries, not so much in the United States yet, but the World Health Organization recognizes this. And there was very recently a big global consensus statement about
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
exercise and optimal health throughout the lifespan that really established definitively weight training is as important for mental health as aerobic training.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
By the time he turned 70 years old, Kenneth Cooper, the father of aerobics, had committed to a regimen of lifting weights. The Cooper Institute has longitudinal data on the health of thousands of people that they have been monitoring for decades. And when they went into their data starting a couple of decades ago, they realized that
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Over time, it turned out that strength training, muscular fitness was on par with aerobic fitness for long-term health.
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Strength is defined in most scientific literature as maximal force. The basic concept for measuring strength is called the one repetition maximum. A one repetition maximum, or 1RM, is the heaviest weight that a person can lift one time with perfect form. It's not a grunting effort. It's not... you know, wrenching your body around to see if you can get the weight up. It's one perfect rep.
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Now, to train for strength, it has traditionally been accepted that since about the 1940s, that training at about 80% of one repetition maximum will get the best strength response. We can go way down the rabbit hole on sets and rep schemes. Some people are going to say, if you're lifting anything lighter than you can lift for five or six reps, you're wasting your time.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Other people say you should really be lifting the amount that you can lift for eight or ten times. The truth is, for people who are just starting out, really anything they do is going to be building strength. But our muscles adapt very quickly. Muscle is one of the most adaptable tissues in the human body. And
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
After a very short period of time, a couple, three months, if you don't start moving into those higher ranges of weight, you won't continue to be building strength. And the basic principle of progression there, progressive overload, adding strength as you go on so that you can increase your capacity, that's the most basic principle of strength training.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Can I tell you a little story about that?
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
There was a young girl in California in the 1950s who loved to go visit her grandmother. They would turn on the Jack LaLanne show and do exercises together in front of the TV. And this little girl grew up learning to love exercise because of that.
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
now she gets older and her grandmother gets older and her grandmother has a bad fall eventually she breaks her hip she goes into the hospital she goes into the nursing home and it's just that that slope that we've all seen too many times
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Now by this time, the young girl has become a medical student and she decides that she's going to specialize in the treatment of old people because she wants to try to help older people avoid her grandmother's fate. Maria Fiatoroni Singh went on to become the first doctor to use strength training in the way that we've just defined it.
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Lifting heavy weights at about 80% of one repetition maximum for frail elderly people. The way she came to that idea was she went to a nursing home called Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for Aged in Boston. And she had a meeting with the residents and she said, I need to run some kind of a study here and I want it to be a study that's going to improve your lives. What would you like?
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
What can I do for you as a doctor? Would you like to live longer?" And a man raised his hand in the back of the room and he said, I'm 90 years old. I lived through the Holocaust. I don't want to live longer. I just want to be able to get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom and get back to my bed by myself. Now, that was the light bulb moment for her.
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
She thought, what if I came in and tested these people's strength and worked with them to lift weights at a high level of intensity, 80% of their one repetition maximum. Nobody had ever done that before because everybody thought it was dangerous for older people's hearts. But she ran the study, 12 weeks later, the minimum strength gain in these older people's legs was 64%.
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
The maximum strength gain was 374%. And the average was almost double, about 175%. She went on to run a bigger randomized controlled trial of strength training for the oldest malnourished people and had the same results. But it not only made them stronger in the sense of testing their strength, lifting heavier weights, it made them walk faster. It increased their spontaneous activity.
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They were just walking around the nursing home more than they did before, moving around the nursing home. Some of them actually were walking who hadn't been able to walk on their own before. They'd been using walkers or canes. A couple of them just threw those canes away. But for everybody, the result was an increased ability to act on the world in the ways that they wanted to.
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The list is long. Strength training improves bone density. It improves blood pressure. It even improves aerobic fitness as much as moderate intensity walking, especially for older people. A lot of people can't believe it when they hear that. It improves body composition. It helps treat type 2 diabetes, and that's especially true for older people. It reduces risk of cancer.
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
It actually reduces the risk of cancer mortality much more than aerobic exercise does. It reduces the risk of falls. It reduces the risk of osteoporotic fracture. It even helps with obesity and overweight. This is something that Maria Fiataroni-Singh often emphasizes for younger people who maybe are heavier and heavier.
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aren't very comfortable doing aerobic exercise, strength training is a great alternative and it's something that they can be really good at. And also something that at the same time is making them healthier, establishing a foundation for long-term health as well.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
It's a great question, where does a person start? The best thing, if you can afford it, is to hire a good trainer. And if you're on the fence about whether you can afford it, it's I think a good thing to remember that building our muscles and strength is really like saving for retirement. It is that important. There are some resources on YouTube
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
channels like Squat University that are really good about providing guidance on safe progressions and safe form. But when you're starting out, you really do need in some form, in some way to get some help. if you want to just maximize your chances of, of doing this as safely as possible for as long as possible.
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Most of the national and international exercise guidelines put out by government health departments or by the World Health Organization recommend strength training, full body program two or three times a week for some people. More is better for people who have depression. Greater frequency of training will help.
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
For people with type 2 diabetes, greater frequency of training, I think it's now acknowledged, will help. One of the most important things is actually probably the most important thing is consistency. You can't go heavy all the time. Sometimes you have to back off. Sometimes you have to just rest. But showing up week after week really on a regular basis is absolutely necessary.
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
The study of high intensity strength training in 90 year olds in the nursing home found about three months later that most of those people who'd made the spectacular gains in strength, the people who'd been able to throw away their canes and walk on their own again, had lost most of the capacity that they'd built. This is true of people of all ages. This is true of teenagers too.
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
You can train for months and then in a couple of months lose most or all of what you've gained. But it's also true that once you've built it, regaining it comes faster.
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When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Those fears are... almost completely unfounded. Gyms around the world are full of men who've been trying for years to get bulky without success, eating tons of food, showing up every day for workouts, trying to get bulky and they just can't do it. Now, Men have a hormonal milieu that allows them to build mass much more easily than most women.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
To the question of safety, all of the reviews of safety data have shown that with good form with proper progression, lifting weights is extremely safe. And in one study by the CDC, it was even shown to be safer than walking.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Maria Fiataroni-Singh, the geriatrician, often says that for her as a geriatrician, as somebody who's treating old people, weight training is the most powerful medicine we have. Full stop.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Strength training improves bone density, blood pressure. It helps treat type 2 diabetes. It reduces risk of cancer. It helps with obesity.