Why Weight Training Is Key to Longevity & Fighting Chronic Disease

Mark Hyman, MD

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Speaker 1
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Farmacy. Having and using muscle is one of the most effective ways to slow the whole aging process. Now after age 30, you lose as much as 5% of your muscle mass per decade, but muscle is the organ of longevity. It's the currency of longevity. Those with lean muscle tend to live longer.

Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at this scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out function health for real time lab insights. If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your routine, visit my website, supplement store, for a summary of my favorite and tested products.

Welcome back to another episode of The Doctor's Farmacy and Health Bites, where we take juicy little bites into current health topics. I'm doctor Mark Hyman. Today, we're gonna talk about an important topic that has transformative effects on your health, weight training. I'm not talking about being a muscle head in the gym and getting Arnold Schwarzenegger muscles. I'm talking about building strength and why that's important.

And it's important because we have this enormous rise in metabolic health issues. And it's so important to understand why our metabolism is busted and how strength training and building lean muscle Can Be A Transformative Game changer For Your Health. Now, Here's the Exciting Part. Weight training isn't just about achieving a certain look or fitness aesthetic. It's about creating a strong, healthy foundation that can protect you against a host of diseases like diabetes, heart disease, even Alzheimer's.

We're gonna explore how building muscle can improve your metabolic health, enhance your mental well-being, and help you age gracefully, and do whatever you want when you get older. Like, I just gonna turn 65 this year, but I did heli skiing for the first time in my life, and I could do it because I'm strong. And I want all of you to have that opportunity too, not to go, oh, I'm too old. I can't do that. That shouldn't be in your sentences that you use at all.

In fact, my favorite guy in Instagram is a guy called Alain Gustave who's, like, 78 and ripped. I'm I'm jealous, actually. Now the benefits of strength training are profound, and the science really backs it up. So coming up, I'm gonna break down the basics of resistance training, how to make it accessible and manageable no matter what your fitness level. I'm gonna also talk about practical tips and strategies to help you get started, to stay motivated, and see real results.

So stay tuned as we unlock the incredible benefits of weight training for your body and your mind. Now why is it important to focus on strength training or resistance training or weights or body weights where you have to build muscle. Why is that important? Well, we have a metabolic health crisis. That's why 93% of Americans have a busted metabolism or metabolic dysfunction.

6 in 10 Americans have one chronic disease, and 4 in 10 have more than one. Even worse, 1 in 10 Americans have type 2 diabetes, and probably 1 in 2 have 3 diabetes or maybe even more if you're looking at the 93% depending on how you define it. So that's terrifying. 43% of Americans who are adults here have obesity, which is terrible. That's frightening to me.

We also have a diet of too much ultra processed foods, about 60% of our diet. We also have those foods accounting for about 90% of the added sugar in our diet or about a £150 per person of sugar per year. That's a lot of sugar. Fewer than 23% of Americans are actually meeting the recommended amount of exercise, which is defined as a 100 and 50 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise per week. Our diet, combined with our sedentary lifestyle, is absolutely wreaking havoc on our metabolic health.

And metabolic dysfunction is the root cause of obesity, of type 2 diabetes, of Alzheimer's, other dementias, fatty liver, kidney disease, and early death. So it's just basically the thing that kills most of us, right, from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, kidney disease, many, many other things. Even high blood pressure is caused by this. Now metabolic dysfunction leads to certain things that go on in your muscle. It becomes filled with fat.

It's more like a rib eye than a filet mignon, which you do not want. Maybe to eat it, it tastes good, but not to have it in your body. Now intramuscular fat, which is basically what most of us have, it's called being skinny fat if you're not overweight or being overweight with marbled fat. It's really associated with this phenomenon of insulin resistance, which is the biggest driver of all age related disease and aging. It's also associated with lower amounts of strength and loss of muscle.

We call it sarcopenia, one of the biggest drivers of all diseases and aging, but almost never gets diagnosed. And we're going to talk about how to diagnose it and what to do about it. It also drives more inflammation. So the less muscle you have, the more inflammation in your body you have, and the more risk for heart disease and many, many other diseases like dementia, cancer, diabetes. All these are inflammatory diseases.

It also makes you more tired because your mitochondria aren't working. When you have this problem of insulin resistance in the skeletal muscle, it can often be there decades before you ever see a rise in your blood sugar or get type 2 diabetes. So what if building up lean muscle mass with resistance training could help us avoid this metabolic health crisis? Well, it can. Muscle is more than just about looking good or portraying a fitness aesthetic.

It's really a metabolic organ that's creates molecules that promote health or create disease depending on its health and functionality. There's something called myokines you probably never heard of. Maybe you never heard of them. You probably heard of cytokines, cytokine storm from COVID. Well, myokines are molecules that help regulate inflammation, and your muscles secrete their own messenger molecules.

There's over 600 peptides that have been identified to be secreted by the skeletal muscle. Muscle. This is huge. These are called myokines. They're messenger molecules that regulate everything in our body, and they're released in response to healthy muscle contraction.

And the good news is they exert health promoting and metabolism enhancing effects, and they're also anti inflammatory, and that's good for us. Myokines talk to our bones. They talk to our brain. They talk to our fat tissue. They help balance our hormones, our blood sugar.

They support our detox system. They help our blood flow and our mental health. Now many of the protective benefits of exercise in short and long term come from the secretion of myokines. Now, these myokines are particularly effective in the elderly. It's really important because they go down when you get older and you want to build up more of them.

So let's talk a little bit about muscle and longevity. I wrote about it in my book, Young Forever. It's a really important topic. It's something I actually didn't really want to pay much attention to till I was older, but I bit the bullet and I've done a whole effort for myself on strength training, which has really transformed my own agility, strength, stability, capacity to do things, and it's quite amazing. I wish I'd gotten into it earlier, but better late than never.

Now, after age 30, you lose as much as 5% of your muscle mass per decade. Most men will lose 30% of their muscle mass in their lifetime. That's a lot. But muscle is the organ of longevity. It's the currency of longevity.

Those with lean muscle tend to live longer. Those with more lean muscle tend to live longer. Having and using muscle is one of the most effective ways to slow the whole aging process. Now what else is exercise good for in strength training? Well, it's good for your brain.

Now one of the things we see a lot in people with Alzheimer's and dementia is sarcopenia and the loss of strength. And that's why, in studies, resistance exercise has been shown to improve cognitive function and memory in the elderly with cognitive clients. So what's the mechanism here? How does it actually do this? Well, it boosts something called BDNF.

That stands for brain derived neurotrophic factor. It's like miracle growth for the brain. Now in human studies, resistance exercise for about 12 weeks to about 6 months has been shown to increase this BDNF or brain derived neurotrophic factor. And that promotes neuroplasticity, which is the reorganizing, rewiring of your brain's neural networks, which is good connections between brain cells. It also helps simulate neurogenesis, which is the formation of new nerve cells.

So, basically, you get new brain cells and you get better connected brain cells that are smarter. One study found much higher levels of BDNF even just after one resistance training session. That's not bad. Now it also reduces the expression of pro inflammatory cytokines that are bad for your brain. Exercise also enhances the clearance of something called amyloid beta plaques, which is one of the known pathologies of Alzheimer's.

And it it doesn't just hold up for older folks. Right? We don't just want older folks to exercise. Everybody needs to do it. It also works on young people too.

A systematic review and meta analysis reported a small but positive effect on the cognitive and academic performance in adolescents who participated in resistance training and association between muscular fitness and academic achievement. So that's pretty interesting. If you're more muscularly fit, you do better in school. Not bad. The same is remembered for university students.

Resistance training is associated with improved attention, concentration, memory with enhanced language, and math skills. Not bad. And the way it works is it's regulated by the production of certain neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, things that affect your brain function that are resulting from exercise like lactate, BDNF, something called IGF 1 which is a growth hormone regulator, vascular endothelial growth factor or VEGF, which helps your blood vessels stay healthy, acetylcholine, which is a neurotransmitter, dopamine, epinephrine, serotonin, all these are neurotransmitters. So that's all good. It also increases blood flow in the brain.

Now there is something called the healthy user bias, so that may be a factor, but maybe it's the students who do resistance training tend to be more physically active. Maybe they eat healthier. Maybe that's why they're doing better in school, possible. But I I guarantee exercise is having a role. What else is strength training and exercise good for?

Well, your mental health. We know that resistance training has antidepressant effects, and research actually tells us that exercise is as or more effective than counseling or medication for alleviating depression or anxiety. That's pretty damn good. So better than counseling, which makes you cheaper, and better than medications, which often have side effects. In fact, one review published in the British Medical Journal included more than a 1000 randomized clinical trials.

There are about a 128,000 people in those trials. Was the most comprehensive study on mental health and exercise ever done. And what they found was modern intensity and we'll call hit training, which is high intensity interval training, offered more mental health improvements than lower intensity exercise. So workouts weren't long, just 30 minutes daily, most days of the week. And I did one this morning.

It was a super high intensity workout with bands and strength training where I also did cardio as part of it because I'm doing it very quickly. And you get your heart rate up, like, mine was up 167. All that counts. Now all types of physical activity were helpful, but resistance training offered the biggest benefit for depression. Now studies report greater self acceptance.

They report personal growth, flow state, social affiliations, and connections, and autonomy in your life from lifting weights. Not bad. What else is strength training good for? Well, the list goes on and on. It's good for your heart.

The American Heart Association recently released a scientific statement that resistance training can actually reduce all cause and cardiovascular mortality. It means death from any cause and death from heart disease. Now when you combine resistance training with aerobic exercise, you get double the benefits. A 40 to 46% reduction in all cause and cardiovascular mortality versus about a, 29% benefit from strength training alone or 18% from cardiovascular exercise alone. Our resistance training also improves other factors that relate to cardiovascular health like blood pressure.

It reduces your diabetes risk. It improves your triglycerides and cholesterol. It helps your mood, your body composition, your blood sugar control, inflammation, sleep, blood vessel health, the quality of your life, and overall level of fitness. So it's pretty darn good. And what else is strength training good for?

Well, sex. It's good for your sex hormones. Aging beyond 30 to 40 years is associated with a 1 to 3% decline per year in circulating testosterone concentration in men. So as you get older, your testosterone levels drop if you're a guy. Now this decline really results in a condition known as andropause, which is just like menopause but for men for men.

And studies show that immediately after resistance exercise training, your testosterone levels can increase significantly depending on the intensity and duration of that strength training. The acute spike is temporary, lasts about 30 to 60 minutes after exercise, but over time, resistance training and doing it regularly has increased resting baseline testosterone levels in men, especially when combined with adequate nutrition recovery. And that does a lot of good things for you. It improves your libido and sex drive, your blood flow, sexual performance. So when resistance training is combined with aerobic exercise in a series of trials, men experience a 50% improvement in their erectile dysfunction, which is great.

You don't need to Viagra. Resistance training helps counteract age related declines in testosterone because it preserves muscle mass and strength as men age. And maintaining lean muscle mass is really important to maintain and sustain healthy testosterone production because that's what happens when you exercise your muscle, you make more testosterone. On the other hand, endurance based exercises like steady state cardio don't really increase testosterone levels as much. In women, same thing.

Now resistance training stimulates the release of testosterone. It also helps increase estrogen which is important for maintaining bone health for postmenopausal women. And it balances the ratio of estrogen testosterone and improves insulin sensitivity which helps a lot of women's health issues like PCOS and irregular menstrual cycles. So in review on resistance training women with PCOS, which is common and causes infertility, irregular cycles, acne, facial hair, and a lot of things. Researchers found that resistance training interventions improved insulin sensitivity in these women, improve their functional strength, and led to fat loss around the belly we call visceral fat, which is really important for managing PCOS because it's really not an ovarian problem, it's a nutritional problem related to insulin resistance.

Exercise and strength training is also good for your immune system. Now resistance training boosts immune function. It helps the body better fight infections. It reduces inflammation throughout your body, so it's great. And it also has been shown to improve the function of various immune cells, such as your natural killer cells, which are roaming around fighting cancer and infections, and your t cells, which enhances your body's ability to fight infections and all sorts of diseases.

It also boosts your body's production of antioxidant enzymes, your body's own antioxidant system, like superoxide dismutase or SOD, glutathione peroxase. These are enzymes your body makes, but when you exercise with strength training, it increases their activity. And by enhancing these antioxidant defenses, resistance training lowers your oxidative stress levels. It protects your cells. It it helps your mitochondria stay protected.

It helps them from all the damage that can accelerate aging. Okay. So that's a lot of benefits, your heart, your brain, your mood, sex, pretty much everything, weight loss, metabolism. It's just kind of a panacea. Right?

It's amazing. If there was a drug that did all that, it would be a $1,000,000,000,000 drug. Trust me. And yet, you know what? It's available to you anywhere, anytime.

All you need is your body weight, and you can do it. I mean, you can do other stuff too, but it's easy to get started. So let's talk about how to get started with strength training. You don't have to lift like a bodybuilder to get the benefits. You don't have to be in the gym all day.

Studies actually show that people can maintain strength and muscle with as little as 30% of their one rep max as long as they push themselves to momentary fatigue. So you've gotta kinda get your muscles tired. So what is a one rep max? I Think of it as a point where you can't do another repetition with good form. You might be able to get the weight up 1 or 2 more times by sacrificing technique and contorting your body, but that's not necessary and it also puts you at risk for injury.

So you don't need to worry about the amount of weight you're lifting. That's why bands, light dumbbells, even your body weight can all be effective ways of working out. Now how much resistance training do you need to do to see results? Well, in terms of minimum effective dose, it's actually not a lot. If you just want to maintain the strength you have, research shows that just one workout per week, one set per exercise is gonna do the trick.

So it's really a minimum viable dose. I don't recommend that low dose, but that's just to maintain where you are. Now the caveat here is that the one set needs to be all out. So, again, you push your muscles to fatigue, so you can't do another rep. Or if you did it, it would be bad form.

Now if you're a beginner, you can just do a full body workout plan using all the muscle groups in your body, all the major muscle groups one day a week, and you can do more. And there's just common simple exercises. Right? Squats, push ups, called bent over rows, lunges, planks, dumbbell shoulder press, bicep curls, tricep dips, super simple set of things. You might not need to know everything about how to do them.

You can learn on YouTube. You probably wanna get someone to show you if you don't know what you're doing, but, it's really important. Now what about maintaining your muscles? So if you just wanna maintain your muscle, you know, basically one day a week for 20, 35 year olds is fine. But as you age, you're gonna need more.

It's just the way it goes. That's the bad news about aging. You can stay fit and healthy and strong, but you need to eat more protein and you need to do more exercise, so not less. 60 to 75 year olds will need 2 workouts a week with 2 to 3 sets per exercise, and I encourage people to actually do more, probably 3 to 4 times a week. One day, you can do upper body like bench press, bent over rows, overhead press, bicep curls.

One day you can do lower body like squats, dead lifts, lunges, leg press. What about increasing strength and muscle size? If you just wanna increase and not just maintain, for most people lifting weights 3 to 4 times a week is gonna help you significantly increase muscle and strength and give you lots of the health benefits that we talked about associated with resistance training. It's also a good strategy when you're trying to lose weight. Now some resistance training is better than none.

So make sure you set realistic goals that align with your life. Break down bigger roles into smaller parts. Where are you currently? Where do you wanna be? What's the best way to get there?

Take baby steps, and so forth. You know, I I actually never liked resistance training. I never liked the gym. I thought it was smelly. I was intimidated because I was kind of a skinny guy, and I didn't really feel good going to the gym with all the big guys with all the muscles.

So I kind of avoided it. But I started doing strength training. I joined the gym. I got a trainer. I learned the basic mechanics.

I worked, then with Dan's, especially during COVID, and I got really strong, just doing, 3 to 4 days a week at home. It took me 30 minutes in and out, really simple, and I I didn't have enough to drive to the gym. So I think encourage you to learn how to do this. It's it's critical, and there's just so many resources out there. There's just no excuse.

So how do you make resistance training work on your schedule? Well, I travel a lot. I bring my bands with me everywhere. They're basically a pound or less this big, and I bunch them up, and they sit in my suitcase even a day carry on or or a light suitcase. You can use bodyweight workouts, planks, squats, push ups, and also block out the time that works for you.

Even if it's only 15 minutes broken up into 5 minute chunks throughout the day, just do something. Right? Maybe you look at your roadblocks, work, your kids' schedule, events, holidays. You know, I wanna start doing push ups and I, you know, just was busy and I I just didn't like exercise and I'm like, okay. I'm gonna I'm gonna take a, every day, I'm gonna I take a shower.

And I and I usually takes a minute for the shower to heat up my house. So I have, like, couple minutes while it's warming up. And in those couple minutes, I would get on the floor and I would do push ups as many as I could possibly do. And and that was great, and it really helped me get into the restraint training in a very low friction level, or I would do tricep dips just in my bathroom on on the bench. So really simple stuff to get started.

So you just make sure you do a commitment to yourself and hold yourself accountable. Do something. Right? A fast paced walk around the neighborhood with weights on your body. Just do 15 push ups, 25 air squats, something.

Just do something. Okay? Now now what else do you need to do to build muscle? Strength training for sure, and and 75% of our muscle mass is related to strength training, but the other 25%, and this is a key 25% comes from our diet. Now we need to make sure we're eating enough protein to build muscle back up.

You need to eat muscle to build muscle. It's just how it goes. It contains all the building blocks to build muscle. You can get plant protein, but you have to supplement it with amino acids that you find in animal protein in order to act the right combination to build muscle and turn on the muscle building switch or what we call muscle protein synthesis. And you need about 1 gram per pound of ideal body weight if you're trying to build muscle.

You can do 0.7 if you're already there and maybe you don't need as much, but basically 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of ideal body weight is what you wanna do. If you don't like working out at the gym, which I don't really like, try other things. You can do rocking. It's probably the best exercise most people don't know about. That's putting a backpack on with weights.

It add loads for your muscles and bones, increase demand on your heart for a brisk walk. So it's great. And it's been shown to be helpful for back health and it doesn't require a lot of special skills. You just get a weighted vest or, something that actually maybe is better. You can throw weights in a backpack that can be a little hard on your body sometimes, and just go for hike somewhere where there's mountains or hills.

Yoga also can be helpful. I I did a lot of yoga for my life. I didn't find it to build a lot of muscle, but I if you're, you know, really aggressive with it, I think you can. Now does all this sound too intimidating? Maybe you don't have enough time in your schedule?

Maybe you can try exercise snacks. Now what are exercise snacks? Well, exercise snacks are isolated bouts of vigorous exercise and lasted about less than a minute and then performed periodically throughout the day, just like snacking. Right? But this is a good kind of snack.

Exercise snacks can help offset the effects of sitting all day. Now the feasibility and time efficiency of exercise snacks makes them really suitable for incorporating between activities of daily life. Right? And it you hit the need for planning and then equating all kinds of leisure time for structured exercise. So every hour, maybe you have 10 to 20 air squats.

Stand at your desk. Get your heart rate up by going for a brisk walk. Take the stairs. Bring resistance bands to your office. You know, do all those things.

It's all possible to incorporate into your life. So bottom line here, folks, is that if you're a human being, you got to build muscle. We evolved using our bodies. When we don't use them, they disintegrate and dissolve, and that leads to rapid aging and a whole host of diseases and adverse health outcomes. And it's entirely preventable.

Like I said, my my heroes on Instagram, I don't really look at Instagram that much, but my heroes are the the older bodybuilders and weightlifters. I'm just so amazed. I saw some 90 year old guy deadlifting, like, £400. I'm just blown away. So we have the capacity.

We just have to use it or we lose it. And if we we get the problem of sarcopenia, it's the beginning of the end for us. So so I hope you got the message, and you'll take it seriously. So that wraps up today's episode of health hacks. I hope you're excited as I am about the incredible benefits of weight training.

Remember, just incorporating a 150 minutes of moderate exercise every week can significantly impact your health. And thanks to weight training, you can improve your insulin sensitivity. You can reduce the risk of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease, and you can promote the secretion of these things called myokines, which are amazing. They have inflammatory effects on the body and many other things. And regular resistance training can help you maintain strong bones, supports cognitive function, boost your mood, and lots of other good things, even helps your sex life.

So keep tuning in for more insights into how you can take control of your health in ways that empower and rejuvenate. Thanks again for joining me today, and see you next Friday for another juicy episode of Health Bites. Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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