The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Your 1% Boost: Do This To Stop Premature Ageing!: Daniel E. Lieberman
Fri, 31 Jan 2025
In this moment, Daniel Lieberman, evolutionary biologist and author, reveals how staying active is key to aging well. He explains why resistance training can slow muscle loss, how physical activity impacts mental health, and the surprising evolutionary reason humans are built to stay active—even as we age. Lieberman also shares practical insights on breaking the cycle of inactivity and making movement rewarding. Listen to the full episode here - Spotify- https://g2ul0.app.link//vMtZ5jnnSQb Apple - https://g2ul0.app.link//jgJ5RiBIAQb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
The more I study the importance of resistance training and the more I study the importance of doing weights, especially as you age, the more I started kicking myself for being lazy about that. So now I try to do a good two strength workouts out of every week at least and take it more seriously because especially as you age, loss of muscle mass can be really debilitating.
The technical term for that is sarcopenia. Sarco is the Greek word for muscle, and penia is loss, so muscle loss. So as people get older, they tend to lose muscle. And when you do that, you become frail and you lose functional capacity. And then that starts off a vicious cycle, right? Once that happens, then you'll be less likely to be physically active.
And then, of course, when you're less physically active, your muscles begin to waste away more. And it's very debilitating. So I think as we get older, and I'm getting older, it's more and more important to kind of incorporate that. So I think that's the one thing that I've taken to heart.
From what you said there, it sounds like not doing resistance training, not lifting weights as you age, almost accelerates aging in any sort of superficial sense. But also in a physiological sense, you're increasing the speed of aging more.
Yeah, I'm not sure if I'd think about it that way, but I'd kind of reverse it slightly, which is that You know, aging is just the clock ticking on, right? There's nothing we can do about age. But senescence is the way our bodies degrade as we get older.
And what physical activity does, maybe the most important thing about physical activity, is that it slows senescence, especially for certain organs and systems. And there are different kinds of physical activity. So there's endurance physical activities, you know, like running, walking, et cetera, swimming.
and then strength or resistance physical activities and they have different kinds of ways in which they slow various properties of senescence which we you know colloquially call aging and all of them are important and i think one of the things is really interesting about humans in fact i think it may be the most important thing about this book and you asked about myths earlier the most important myth i think by far is this idea that as you get older it's normal to be less active
And that is just not true. We evolved to be grandparents. We evolved to live. One of the things that's most interesting about humans, maybe, is that we evolved to live about 20 years or so after we stopped reproducing. No other animal does that except orcas, maybe killer whales. But with the exception of killer whales, humans have this really weird life history. We evolved to be grandparents.
But grandparents in the old days weren't, you know, retiring to Florida or I don't know what they do in England or whatever, go to Mallorca or whatever, and kick up their heels and play golf or whatever with carts. Grandparents in the olden days, or in many cultures still today, are working.
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