Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Why Muscle Predicts Your Cancer and Heart Disease Risk | Ep 482

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Why Muscle Predicts Your Cancer and Heart Disease Risk | Ep 482 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you lift weights mostly to look better, to fit your clothes, to see a little more shape in the mirror, I want to show you something today that will help reframe how powerful muscle is, because there is a pile of research, hundreds of thousands of people, that shows us that muscle and strength do much more for us than just our physique and just our function.
• 0:23
  Philip Pape: They change how long you live and how well you live.
• 0:26
  Philip Pape: It is a longevity lever, probably the biggest one we have.
• 0:30
  Philip Pape: Today I'm going to walk you through the actual mortality data on muscle and strength, including how it lines up against cancer and heart disease, why grip strength predicts your risk better than blood pressure, and a part that should make you feel really good, which is how little training it actually takes to get most of the benefit.
• 0:54
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today's episode comes from a very, very common question I get from everyone I talk to, clients, listeners, people who email me, they start lifting for how they want to look.
• 1:16
  Philip Pape: And let's be honest, 90% of us maybe, I don't know if it's 90%, but most of us get into fitness or exercise or health or whatever, driven by how we look initially, because we're not happy with it.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: And yeah, we might kind of trick ourselves into saying it's about longevity or playing with our kids or whatever the deep value why is that we talk about all the time.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: But it often starts with we're just not happy in our skin.
• 1:40
  Philip Pape: And there's nothing wrong with that.
• 1:41
  Philip Pape: I wanted to start with that up front.
• 1:43
  Philip Pape: Wanting to look good, wanting to feel strong in your own skin, that is a completely valid reason to train and improve your nutrition and walk more and all of that.
• 1:54
  Philip Pape: It's usually the reason that gets people into this in the first place.
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: But then what happens for a lot of us is we treat everything else, like the health stuff, the wellness, the living longer, the longevity, as kind of a nice bonus, as a side effect, right?
• 2:07
  Philip Pape: It's like this thing that's an extra thing in the background that happens, and ultimately we're still chasing the aesthetic goal.
• 2:14
  Philip Pape: I see it in the questions, I see it in the decisions like modifying how I train, the hypertrophy, you know, trying to do fat loss, maybe when you shouldn't, et cetera.
• 2:22
  Philip Pape: There's a lot of things going on there.
• 2:24
  Philip Pape: And I know it's often driven by vanity, even when you don't say it is.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: So let's be honest, just me and you in your AirPods or your headset or whatever or car, maybe you're working out now.
• 2:33
  Philip Pape: Good for you.
• 2:34
  Philip Pape: But I want I do want to flip this around, and I know I've covered this topic in the past, but I think, I think we're getting it backward, and I think it's more serious and important than we often talk about.
• 2:46
  Philip Pape: More folks in the industry are talking about the importance of muscle and strength, but the data, the data on how long you live, on the longevity piece, on health, on cancer, on cardiac disease, is one of the strongest, most replicated bodies of evidence we have in all of health science.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: I can't repeat that enough.
• 3:03
  Philip Pape: We're talking studies with hundreds of thousands of people, some cases over a million, that point to something I think most people who lived, us, I hope, or if you just came across this podcast, you're going to be motivated to do that, have never really thought too much about.
• 3:18
  Philip Pape: And that is look, muscle is not just the side effect.
• 3:21
  Philip Pape: Muscle itself might be the main event.
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: The, I hate to say it, the UFC fight on the White House lawn.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: And I say that as a joke.
• 3:29
  Philip Pape: Hopefully it's a joke to all sides of the political spectrum.
• 3:32
  Philip Pape: And then the way you look, that's the side effect, believe it or not.
• 3:37
  Philip Pape: And a lot of you, I think you kind of know this, and you're like, okay, here's another episode about the benefits of muscle.
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: But I really want you to internalize this because if I see someone who doesn't lift weights, who doesn't use resistance training, I feel terrible for them.
• 3:53
  Philip Pape: I wish I could just grab them and say, you've got to understand that that is the thing that's between a healthy, long, aging life and sickness and mortality, death, frailty, injury.
• 4:07
  Philip Pape: I am serious.
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: That is the dividing line right there.
• 4:11
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're listening to this and you're you're getting older, you're over 40, you're over 50, right?
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: I'm 45.
• 4:16
  Philip Pape: I still consider myself pretty young, to be honest.
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: And I feel young because I act young and I live young in terms of the resistance training, but also how I eat and walk and all that.
• 4:26
  Philip Pape: I know you want to do that as well.
• 4:28
  Philip Pape: And I know plenty of 75-year-olds and 85-year-olds who also feel like they're 40 because they're living this way and who wouldn't want that.
• 4:36
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 4:36
  Philip Pape: And then we have, you know, the women in this audience going through peri and postmenopause, where hormones are changing.
• 4:43
  Philip Pape: And this stretch of life into our 40s, that is where muscle and strength start to slip at a very rapid pace if you don't defend what you already have, let alone build more of it.
• 4:53
  Philip Pape: And that's where the health payoff exists.
• 4:56
  Philip Pape: That is where it is.
• 4:57
  Philip Pape: Okay, so that's what this episode is about.
• 4:59
  Philip Pape: I'm super passionate about this topic.
• 5:01
  Philip Pape: I've seen too many people just die when they didn't have to, or get injured when they didn't have to, or go on medications when they didn't have to.
• 5:09
  Philip Pape: And it makes me sad.
• 5:10
  Philip Pape: Okay, now that's what this episode is about.
• 5:12
  Philip Pape: If you stick around, I always give you a nice little treat at the end.
• 5:15
  Philip Pape: We're gonna talk about, you know, the science in the episode.
• 5:17
  Philip Pape: And then at the end, I'm gonna give you a very classic test you could do at home to tell you where your strength is.
• 5:23
  Philip Pape: And you can test it anytime.
• 5:24
  Philip Pape: If you're over a certain threshold, like you're good.
• 5:27
  Philip Pape: Uh, if you're below it, you know you have some potential.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: But no matter your age, this is gonna be a super helpful test to just check it out relative to what the longevity research says.
• 5:35
  Philip Pape: Okay, today we are going to talk about why lifting just for looks and getting health as a bonus, it's kind of the backward frame, and it it may be causing poor decision making as well, which is why I wanted to address it.
• 5:48
  Philip Pape: Then we're gonna talk about the numbers, the mortality data, the cancer and heart disease part of it, which is kind of how I framed, I think, in the title of this episode, because it's so important.
• 5:58
  Philip Pape: It's so correlated with mortality and shorter lives and health spans or yeah, health spans.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: Um, we're gonna talk about grip strength and then the fix that I to all of this, okay, which is gonna seem so simple.
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: It's gonna feel like a letdown, but in a good way.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: So let's get into it.
• 6:15
  Philip Pape: All right, let's start with what people believe.
• 6:18
  Philip Pape: What do people believe?
• 6:19
  Philip Pape: Well, that if you lift to build muscle, muscle is gonna make you look better and move better, right?
• 6:24
  Philip Pape: It's gonna improve function, which is not just looks, it's function.
• 6:27
  Philip Pape: I get it.
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: And that somewhere down the line, in some vague way, it's probably good for your health too.
• 6:31
  Philip Pape: A lot of people truly believe, like they don't quite understand why muscle is important.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: It's one thing I go on other podcasts to talk about all the time.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: And when someone asks me on the podcast and they're not sure exactly what we're gonna talk about, that is what I pitch to them because it's so important.
• 6:44
  Philip Pape: Where we think of health or even wellness, I hate that term, wellness, because it's kind of a dirty term these days, is tied into like influencer culture as well.
• 6:53
  Philip Pape: But health and wellness, longevity, let's say, is thought of as the side effect or the background of all of this, but really it should be in the front.
• 7:02
  Philip Pape: The reason this matters is practical because the way that you frame what's important in your priorities, is health more important than, say, strength and function or something like that, affects your decisions.
• 7:14
  Philip Pape: So if you're always training for looks or for PRs or strength, then you might skip other aspects of the program, let's say, especially when it's not convenient, right?
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: We need something that drives us, that motivates us.
• 7:29
  Philip Pape: You might deprioritize recovery again, especially as we get older, our connective tissue gets a little less pliable.
• 7:35
  Philip Pape: We get a little more prone to injury and we take longer to recover and things like that.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: You might bounce around from program to program because you're chasing something when something doesn't change fast enough, like let's say how you look or certain measurements.
• 7:48
  Philip Pape: You'll question whether things are working.
• 7:50
  Philip Pape: And of course, let's be honest, health and longevity is the long game.
• 7:53
  Philip Pape: It's very, very hard to measure that in a motivational way, knowing that it's so far out, it's so many years out.
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: So the mirror obviously can't show you a lot of different things.
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: The body measurements and weight trend can't show you what's happening with your risk of mortality, of dying.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: It can't show you what's happening to your odds of getting cancer, can't show you how your heart is going to do 20 years from now.
• 8:15
  Philip Pape: But all of that is being shaped right now by the muscle that you're building.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: But it's kind of invisible.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: So it doesn't get the attention or the vote when you're making your decisions.
• 8:26
  Philip Pape: So that's the cost of all of this misprioritization.
• 8:30
  Philip Pape: You end up training or eating or moving for the outcome in the short term.
• 8:35
  Philip Pape: And then you ignore the outcomes that determine, you know, how long and how well you get to live.
• 8:39
  Philip Pape: Now, before you think I'm gonna go down some weird path of longevity foods and inflammation and cortisol, I'm not because none of that really matters.
• 8:49
  Philip Pape: Okay, especially for today's episode.
• 8:51
  Philip Pape: So the thing that you can measure in the short term, ironically, is downstream of the thing that matters in the long term.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: So we kind of have it flipped around.
• 9:01
  Philip Pape: And I know that sounds confusing, but it's because to put it another way, you can have suboptimal, say, physique outcomes in the short term, but it's because you're doing things that are beneficial to you in the long term.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: And there, and there's different elements of that we'll get into.
• 9:17
  Philip Pape: So the frame today is not, okay, I'm gonna lift for looks, health is a bonus.
• 9:21
  Philip Pape: It's hey, muscle is medicine and looking good is the bonus.
• 9:24
  Philip Pape: Muscle is medicine and looking good is a bonus.
• 9:26
  Philip Pape: And I don't know how powerful that statement is for you.
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: I don't think it's a mic drop moment.
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: It's just the way we're gonna frame it.
• 9:31
  Philip Pape: Okay, so let's get into numbers.
• 9:33
  Philip Pape: Let's get into objective facts.
• 9:34
  Philip Pape: I love vibes as much as the next guy, but we can't live off of vibes, right?
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: So there is a study called Pure, P-U-R-E, and it's probably the first one I'd look at.
• 9:43
  Philip Pape: It followed 140,000 people across 17 countries, and they found that grip strength, that's just how hard you can squeeze, predicted your risk of dying.
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: And by the way, when I've had physical therapy, they sometimes will at some point measure my grip strength.
• 9:58
  Philip Pape: I think they stopped doing it.
• 9:58
  Philip Pape: They're like, Yeah, yeah, you're you're strong.
• 10:00
  Philip Pape: We don't have to worry about that.
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: But it predicts your risk of dying.
• 10:03
  Philip Pape: So for every roughly five kilogram drop in grip strength, all cause mortality goes up by 16%.
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: Cardiovascular death goes up 17%.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: That's powerful, guys.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: Okay, in the data, grip strength was a stronger predictor of death than systolic blood pressure.
• 10:21
  Philip Pape: Stronger than blood pressure.
• 10:23
  Philip Pape: Now, your doctor measures blood pressure every time you go in, and maybe you measure it at home.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: But do you ever get your grip strength measured?
• 10:30
  Philip Pape: I've heard people talk about like having grip strength as a normal thing that you measure.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: Now, maybe older folks get it measured.
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: I don't know.
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: Maybe in different countries they do, but I haven't heard about it around here in the US.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: Then we have the UK biobank.
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: Now, thank goodness UK has all this data for whatever you think about the national health system.
• 10:44
  Philip Pape: They have a ton of data on half a million people and they found the same thing.
• 10:49
  Philip Pape: And the effect between the grip strength and mortality was a little bit stronger, pun intended, in women.
• 10:55
  Philip Pape: A large meta analysis that had two million people found 16% mortality increase per five kilogram drop in grip strength, just like we said before.
• 11:03
  Philip Pape: And then they, when they compared the weakest group to the strongest group, the difference in mortality risk was 40%.
• 11:09
  Philip Pape: So that's like taking the the two extremes.
• 11:12
  Philip Pape: Now, always want to have nuance.
• 11:14
  Philip Pape: I always want to be honest on this show and not overclaim because a lot of people in the longevity space get loose with the claims.
• 11:21
  Philip Pape: And I hope I don't do that.
• 11:22
  Philip Pape: And if you please call me out on it if I do, you'll hear things like low muscle is worse than smoking.
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: Now, maybe I've said that, I don't know, just to get attention.
• 11:31
  Philip Pape: I I again I don't recall.
• 11:33
  Philip Pape: Put me on the stand and I'll say I don't recall.
• 11:35
  Philip Pape: But I did dig into it for this episode because I wanted to know if that holds up.
• 11:39
  Philip Pape: And honestly, per unit, it doesn't.
• 11:42
  Philip Pape: Smoking is just so terrible.
• 11:44
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 11:44
  Philip Pape: Somebody who's a current smoker versus a never smoker has two to three times the risk of dying.
• 11:49
  Philip Pape: Like smoking's just terrible.
• 11:51
  Philip Pape: It's awful.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: And so that's a huge fact, a huge like single effect factor from like one variable compared to this five kilogram change of grip strength.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: So if someone tells you weakness is worse than smoking, that is definitely overstated.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: But, okay, now this this is the thing that is actually wild and true.
• 12:08
  Philip Pape: When you compare the extremes, when you compare the weakest people to the strongest people, the gap actually gets up toward the smoking range.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: Okay, that is actually supported by the evidence when it comes to fitness.
• 12:22
  Philip Pape: Cardior respiratory fitness, when that is measured in the lowest fitness group versus the highest, it's been measured at five times the risk of death.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: And the researchers themselves have said that is comparable to or greater than smoking.
• 12:37
  Philip Pape: So the whole family of things, the muscle, strength, fitness, it lives in that neighborhood of risk factors, of huge, huge, huge risk factors like smoking that we know about.
• 12:47
  Philip Pape: That's kind of where I wanted to take that.
• 12:50
  Philip Pape: Oh, yeah.
• 12:51
  Philip Pape: So at the end of the day, could you make that claim?
• 12:54
  Philip Pape: It's probably not far from the truth, to be honest, which says something that, you know, strength specifically is a smaller per unit effect than smoking, but it's a bigger predictor than blood pressure.
• 13:03
  Philip Pape: And when you take account for fitness overall and the gap between the weakest and strongest, it's a huge risk factor.
• 13:08
  Philip Pape: And that's still something.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: That's something profound, I would say.
• 13:12
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 13:13
  Philip Pape: That is very, very profound.
• 13:14
  Philip Pape: I feel like this is something nobody's talked about, what was talking about, let's say five, even five or 10 years ago.
• 13:19
  Philip Pape: And a lot of people are still not talking about it.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: I read newspaper articles, I see things online, people send me, and article, you know, and I see new studies that come out on things like osteoporosis, let's say.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: And they'll say, Well, we tried this new medication and it didn't seem to work.
• 13:35
  Philip Pape: So we're still trying to find what is going to help with bone loss.
• 13:38
  Philip Pape: And then they don't even mention strength training.
• 13:40
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 13:40
  Philip Pape: Actually, I did see one article recently that says, so we're going to keep advising people to do the things that we know already work, like resistance training.
• 13:46
  Philip Pape: I was like, okay, kudos for you for actually saying that.
• 13:48
  Philip Pape: But how many times have I seen it not even be mentioned?
• 13:52
  Philip Pape: And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is either a massive missed opportunity or a massive lack of education, at least among you know the media and reporters who have to go and find this information from experts.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: Okay, so let's get specific here because cancer and heart disease is kind of the frame in the title of the episode.
• 14:09
  Philip Pape: And I think it's really important.
• 14:11
  Philip Pape: I want to start with cancer.
• 14:12
  Philip Pape: There's a landmark meta-analysis.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: Almost 8,000 people who had solid tumors, cancer tumors, and they found that people with low muscle mass had significantly worse survival.
• 14:24
  Philip Pape: So they had worse overall survival, worse cancer-specific survival as well.
• 14:29
  Philip Pape: And the mechanism is that when you have a serious illness, your body is going to draw down its protein reserves.
• 14:38
  Philip Pape: And now you're like, okay, now I see the connection potentially to muscle, where muscle is literally the reservoir of amino acids that your body pulls from to fight, to heal, to recover from surgery, and to tolerate treatment.
• 14:53
  Philip Pape: So we're talking about cancer survival.
• 14:56
  Philip Pape: Chemotherapy, okay.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: Chemotherapy is often dosed by body surface area.
• 15:01
  Philip Pape: They give you a dose basically based on your size.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: But we know that two people the same size can have different amounts of muscle, different body composition.
• 15:09
  Philip Pape: So the person with low muscle effectively gets overdosed relative to their lean mass and toxicity goes up.
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: In there was a study where serious, like what they call serious chemo toxicity showed up in 50% of the low muscle patients, but only 20% of the other patients.
• 15:28
  Philip Pape: So it was, you know, the same, the same drug or the same treatment, but because of the different amounts of muscle, one fared much better, the group that had more muscle.
• 15:36
  Philip Pape: Now, I don't want to scare people, I'm trying to approach this with the right nuance.
• 15:40
  Philip Pape: There's a difference between having less muscle and there, and something called, it's a syndrome called cachexia, C-A-C-H-E-X-I-A.
• 15:48
  Philip Pape: And that's the muscle wasting that's driven by the disease itself.
• 15:52
  Philip Pape: And you can't fix that by lifting weights.
• 15:54
  Philip Pape: So I just want to mention that.
• 15:56
  Philip Pape: We're talking about the reserve of muscle that you've built before you know you get cancer, you have treatment for cancer.
• 16:01
  Philip Pape: It's kind of like when we talk about surgery.
• 16:04
  Philip Pape: I I always recommend people get as strong as they can before they go into surgery because you're gonna have to stop lifting and recover afterward.
• 16:10
  Philip Pape: And it's gonna give you a much better chance to handle the treatment and the recovery.
• 16:13
  Philip Pape: So when it comes to cancer, more muscle in the bank, more muscle on your frame before you get diagnosed or before you start treatment means more to draw down from if you ever need it.
• 16:24
  Philip Pape: And I mean, I guess this this goes for anything in the future.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: Having more muscle is just gonna help.
• 16:27
  Philip Pape: It's just gonna give you extra buffer, a massively extra buffer in some cases.
• 16:31
  Philip Pape: And that's very, very empowering because we know we can build muscle at any age, we can increase muscle at any age.
• 16:37
  Philip Pape: That's gonna be part of the outcome of this discussion.
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: So that's cancer.
• 16:40
  Philip Pape: It has to do with survival rates, chemo treatments, survival, you know, coming out of it healthier because you were stronger and had more muscle to begin with.
• 16:47
  Philip Pape: Now, heart disease is this is kind of where I guess the engineer in me lights up because the mechanism here is really, really crisp.
• 16:55
  Philip Pape: Your skeletal muscle is the single biggest place your body disposes of glucose.
• 17:00
  Philip Pape: After you eat something like 80% of the glucose that gets pulled out of your blood, right, from the carbs that you eat, goes into muscle.
• 17:07
  Philip Pape: So muscles, this glucose sink.
• 17:10
  Philip Pape: More muscle, bigger sink, better blood sugar control, less of the metabolic chaos that drives heart disease.
• 17:16
  Philip Pape: So we're talking about things like insulin sensitivity.
• 17:19
  Philip Pape: We've talked about this on the show before, but this could be one of the biggest, most important reasons to have more muscle.
• 17:25
  Philip Pape: You can handle more glucose, have better blood sugar control, less blood sugar issues down the line.
• 17:31
  Philip Pape: Now, that's independent of your body weight, which in it which is its own risk factor, right?
• 17:37
  Philip Pape: We don't want to carry too much body fat, but we're talking about muscle.
• 17:41
  Philip Pape: I think it goes further than that as well, because muscle isn't just passive.
• 17:45
  Philip Pape: It's not just a passive tank or storage tank for glucose.
• 17:48
  Philip Pape: When you train, when it contracts, I mean, not even trained, even when you walk and just use it on a daily basis, it acts like an organ.
• 17:55
  Philip Pape: That's why we call it an endocrine organ.
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: It releases signaling molecules called myokines.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: And during exercise, one of them, interleukin 6, IL-6.
• 18:05
  Philip Pape: Look it up, IL-6.
• 18:06
  Philip Pape: It can spike up to a hundredfold, like a hundred times when you're exercising.
• 18:11
  Philip Pape: Kind of like blood pressure goes up when you exercise, these acute responses.
• 18:14
  Philip Pape: So that's an inflammatory marker, myocine, a good one.
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: And this is it's anti-inflammatory.
• 18:21
  Philip Pape: It's anti-inflammatory.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: That's why I say a good one.
• 18:23
  Philip Pape: It helps damp down the chronic low-grade inflammation that is underneath things like heart disease and diabetes and a lot of the things that ages us.
• 18:31
  Philip Pape: So every time you train, your muscles sending out chemical signals that are protective.
• 18:36
  Philip Pape: So the and let's talk about this because this is the part that connects everything.
• 18:40
  Philip Pape: The same tissue you build when you're trying to get those big shoulder caps, when you're trying to get those big glutes.
• 18:46
  Philip Pape: It is also a metabolic organ that is actively defending your heart health.
• 18:52
  Philip Pape: And it's doing these jobs all at once, but you really only can see, you know, you only see your muscles getting bigger, but you don't see all this wonderful stuff going on underneath.
• 19:01
  Philip Pape: So you see what I mean?
• 19:02
  Philip Pape: Muscle is not just something to build for function or strength or or muscles in and of themselves.
• 19:08
  Philip Pape: It's the health piece, it's the health intervention.
• 19:11
  Philip Pape: It is the prescription for aging.
• 19:12
  Philip Pape: It's probably why John Sullivan created his book called Barbell Prescription.
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: He actually goes into a lot of the fascinating benefits of health and avoiding what's called a sick aging phenotype, which is anybody who doesn't lift weights is going to get sicker and sicker as they age, period, bar none.
• 19:28
  Philip Pape: Now, I know you guys want to get practical, right?
• 19:30
  Philip Pape: And I know you're sitting thinking, okay, I'm convinced muscle is medicine.
• 19:33
  Philip Pape: How do I know if I'm building it?
• 19:35
  Philip Pape: How do I know if my training and recovery are pointed in the right direction?
• 19:39
  Philip Pape: And I want to quickly tell you about my app, Fitness Lab, because it's designed for exactly that.
• 19:43
  Philip Pape: Fitness Lab, which we talked about in the last episode, which is all about AI.
• 19:47
  Philip Pape: Go check that out if you haven't.
• 19:49
  Philip Pape: This is the provides a coaching intelligence layer.
• 19:52
  Philip Pape: It's always hard for me to explain it, but it's effectively like a coach.
• 19:55
  Philip Pape: It's not a tracking app, even though it can track lots of things, it can pull in all your data, but it can really work well alongside other data you have and other tools that you already use, including just having conversations with it.
• 20:07
  Philip Pape: And the whole point is it looks at that data, tells you what it means, right?
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: Which normally AI can't do that as well unless you really feed it the data and kind of prompt it over and over and spend hours chatting with, you know, ChatGPT or whatever.
• 20:21
  Philip Pape: My app can just spit out, okay, I know what this means because I'm trained in evidence-based body composition, training, nutrition, the whole gamut.
• 20:31
  Philip Pape: And it can say, look, are you recovering enough?
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: Is your training producing the signal that you need to build muscle?
• 20:36
  Philip Pape: Are you actually progressing?
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: Is your feedback trending the way that you want across the metrics that matter for your goal?
• 20:42
  Philip Pape: So it is a lot like having a coach in your pocket.
• 20:44
  Philip Pape: People joke that it's like having Philip in your pocket when they talk to the chat tab.
• 20:49
  Philip Pape: And it's like paying attention to what's happening to you.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: And the more you use it, the better it gets because it's learning from you.
• 20:56
  Philip Pape: So if you if you use Fitness Lab, if you've already got it, I would give it a good three or four weeks to start really learning who you are, and it's gonna pay off big time.
• 21:05
  Philip Pape: As you're listening to this episode come out, we have a promo going on as well.
• 21:08
  Philip Pape: So just to put more skin in the game, 20% off.
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: I'm throwing it your way.
• 21:12
  Philip Pape: It ends tomorrow, Friday, as this comes out, witsandweights.com slash app.
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: You can take a free quiz and get a plan that shows you what it will help you with over the next, say, three to six months before you even decide to buy the app.
• 21:24
  Philip Pape: So totally zero risk.
• 21:25
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash app.
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: The link is also in the show notes.
• 21:30
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're listening to this after July 3rd and it's gone back to full price, I want you to reach out to me.
• 21:36
  Philip Pape: Uh, one way to do that is go to Instagram at wits and weights.
• 21:40
  Philip Pape: Another way is to go to wits and weights.com slash email.
• 21:42
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 21:43
  Philip Pape: So with Instagram at wits and weights or wits and weights.com slash email.
• 21:46
  Philip Pape: I know I've thrown a lot of links at you, but essentially go grab the deal right now for fitness lab, wits and weights.com slash app.
• 21:54
  Philip Pape: Link is in the show notes, 20% off wits and weights.com slash app.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: Okay, so we've covered why that's Health piece is so important.
• 22:01
  Philip Pape: We've covered some of the data.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: We've covered mortality numbers, cancer, heart disease.
• 22:04
  Philip Pape: There's so much data under there.
• 22:06
  Philip Pape: I barely scratched the surface, but I think I gave you the essence of it.
• 22:09
  Philip Pape: Now, what is the fix?
• 22:10
  Philip Pape: I have to warn you.
• 22:11
  Philip Pape: This is this is my trigger warning for you.
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: It's gonna feel too simple.
• 22:14
  Philip Pape: So if you don't like simple things, just stop listening right now.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: But that is the point of the show to try to get to what is the simple fix?
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: Okay, here it is.
• 22:24
  Philip Pape: I want you to train for muscle the same way you would if you only cared about how you look.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: Oh boy, oh boy, that's it.
• 22:30
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna ruffle some feathers, right?
• 22:32
  Philip Pape: Because earlier I kind of implied that doing that could lead to some wrong decisions, didn't I?
• 22:36
  Philip Pape: All right, stick with me.
• 22:37
  Philip Pape: Stick with me.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: I'll get to that.
• 22:39
  Philip Pape: There is not a separate longevity program you need to go buy.
• 22:42
  Philip Pape: There's no GLP1 program.
• 22:44
  Philip Pape: There's no menopause hormone program.
• 22:46
  Philip Pape: There's no cycle-based training program that you need to buy.
• 22:49
  Philip Pape: You get what I you get what I'm saying?
• 22:50
  Philip Pape: I hope you feel what I'm putting down.
• 22:52
  Philip Pape: There's no special anti-aging protocol that is different from just lifting hard and progressively over time, because the mortality benefit is the byproduct of doing the things that you are already going to do.
• 23:05
  Philip Pape: Now, why I said it's going to cause poor decisions is because a lot of people are training for looks.
• 23:10
  Philip Pape: And because of that, they pay attention to the wrong things anyway, even when they're training for looks, because they're thinking short term, they're measuring the wrong things, they're looking at body weight instead of, let's say, body composition, or they're looking at their pump or the sweat or the soreness or the size of just their biceps instead of how their numbers are progressing, and so on and so forth.
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: Now, I want to give you the actual dose here because specifics matter.
• 23:32
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: I want you to train for muscle.
• 23:34
  Philip Pape: And the research on resistance training and mortality is very encouraging here.
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: Any resistance training at all compared to none is associated with a 15% lower risk of death.
• 23:45
  Philip Pape: The sweet spot, okay, this is the this is the point of maximum benefit, lands at around 30 to 60 minutes a week, a week.
• 23:54
  Philip Pape: After that, the curve starts to flatten out.
• 23:56
  Philip Pape: So when we talk about dose response, what we mean is the more you do, the more benefit you get.
• 24:00
  Philip Pape: But the but the caveat being the benefit becomes more incremental or marginal, right?
• 24:05
  Philip Pape: To where it's not worth, it may not be worth it to you given the amount of time in the gym and the amount of stuff you have to do, right?
• 24:11
  Philip Pape: That makes that makes sense, I think, to a lot of you.
• 24:13
  Philip Pape: So you don't get dramatically more longevity benefit from training six days a week versus a couple focused sessions.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: Now, you might train more than that for other reasons, like to build more muscle because you enjoy it, to get stronger.
• 24:25
  Philip Pape: All of that is phenomenal, and that's a lot of what we talk about.
• 24:28
  Philip Pape: But the floor for the health payoff is that shockingly low amount of 30 to 60 minutes a week.
• 24:36
  Philip Pape: So practically, here's what that looks like.
• 24:38
  Philip Pape: I want you to train all your major muscle groups at least twice a week.
• 24:43
  Philip Pape: Use progressive overload, meaning you're trying to do a little more over time, more weight or more reps.
• 24:49
  Philip Pape: Get enough protein to support it.
• 24:50
  Philip Pape: I'd aim for the minimum of 0.7 grams per pound of body weight, and you can only go up for that from there depending on your goals.
• 24:56
  Philip Pape: And by the way, even that minimum, if you're nowhere close to it, you can get to it over time, you know, over a short period of time.
• 25:02
  Philip Pape: You don't have to do it instantly.
• 25:04
  Philip Pape: And then recover enough so you can keep showing up in the gym.
• 25:06
  Philip Pape: That's that's the whole thing, right?
• 25:09
  Philip Pape: Squat, hinge, push, pull, carry, whatever, twice a week, getting a little stronger over time, fed well, and recovered.
• 25:16
  Philip Pape: There's a reason I call my program Eat More or Lift Heavy, because essentially the essence of it is that.
• 25:20
  Philip Pape: Now, the other piece, which could be the most encouraging thing today, it's never too late to start.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: There's a famous set of studies done with nursing home residents.
• 25:29
  Philip Pape: Their average age was late 80s.
• 25:31
  Philip Pape: Some of them were in their 90s.
• 25:32
  Philip Pape: They were frail.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: Come on, you've been to nursing homes.
• 25:35
  Philip Pape: It is very depressing.
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: It's very sad.
• 25:37
  Philip Pape: I've known people who basically lived the rest of their life in a nursing home for one reason or another, died there.
• 25:43
  Philip Pape: It was very, very sad.
• 25:44
  Philip Pape: And all I thought is if I could just spend an hour a week with them, like as a personal trainer, and maybe I should volunteer to do that if they would have let me and get on a resistance training program, you would have gotten the benefit that these people did in this study.
• 25:58
  Philip Pape: So they put them on a program, actual progressive lifting, where they increased the numbers over time.
• 26:03
  Philip Pape: And guess what?
• 26:04
  Philip Pape: Their strength went up an average of 174%.
• 26:07
  Philip Pape: Now that is people in their 90s.
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: Also, the speed that they could walk increased.
• 26:13
  Philip Pape: Their muscle grew.
• 26:15
  Philip Pape: New muscle, bigger muscle in your 90s.
• 26:17
  Philip Pape: Come on, this is incredible.
• 26:19
  Philip Pape: So if you're 45 like me right now, or 55 or 65, you're listening to this and you're like, I've missed my window.
• 26:25
  Philip Pape: Heck no, that is not an excuse.
• 26:26
  Philip Pape: I'm sorry, I'm taking that off the table for you.
• 26:28
  Philip Pape: The windows right now, it doesn't matter if you're male, female, what age you are.
• 26:32
  Philip Pape: By the way, I'll say it again.
• 26:34
  Philip Pape: Women build muscle at the same rate as men.
• 26:37
  Philip Pape: They have less to start with.
• 26:38
  Philip Pape: That is what it is.
• 26:38
  Philip Pape: That's puberty, testosterone, whatever.
• 26:40
  Philip Pape: It doesn't matter.
• 26:41
  Philip Pape: But once you start growing your muscle, it's the same rate as men.
• 26:44
  Philip Pape: And it doesn't matter the age.
• 26:46
  Philip Pape: So your body will respond to that signal.
• 26:48
  Philip Pape: It's not like anything changes.
• 26:49
  Philip Pape: You're still a human being till the day you die.
• 26:51
  Philip Pape: So it will respond.
• 26:52
  Philip Pape: Now, listen, I'm not saying lifting makes you immortal.
• 26:55
  Philip Pape: That would be awesome.
• 26:56
  Philip Pape: Like if everybody lifted weights and we lived to be 200 years old.
• 26:58
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying muscle cancels out terrible behavior like smoking or bad diet or never sleeping.
• 27:04
  Philip Pape: Of course not, right?
• 27:05
  Philip Pape: You've got to do those things.
• 27:06
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying you should panic about grip strength or go get a death risk score and like start to spiral about it or rant and rave at me.
• 27:14
  Philip Pape: Please don't do that.
• 27:15
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying the research proves adding muscle directly causes you to live longer.
• 27:19
  Philip Pape: All this research, most of it is observational.
• 27:22
  Philip Pape: There's a chance that some can go the other way, that like being sick makes you weak rather than weakness making you sick and stuff like that.
• 27:31
  Philip Pape: But good studies try to account for all of that.
• 27:33
  Philip Pape: And the overall signal has held up so well.
• 27:36
  Philip Pape: You know, I'd be lying if I told you anything was a closed case in science.
• 27:39
  Philip Pape: Like that is science.
• 27:40
  Philip Pape: You can never fully prove anything, can you?
• 27:42
  Philip Pape: So nuances everything.
• 27:43
  Philip Pape: What I am saying though is across an enormous body of evidence, muscle and strength track with living longer and surviving all the things that kill most of us.
• 27:53
  Philip Pape: The mechanisms behind them make biological sense at the human body level, not just in a rat, right?
• 27:59
  Philip Pape: Or in a petri dish.
• 28:01
  Philip Pape: And the intervention is simple and something that you have complete control over.
• 28:06
  Philip Pape: And hopefully we're going to do anyway, since you listen to wits and weights.
• 28:09
  Philip Pape: So you might as well train like it matters, because it absolutely does.
• 28:13
  Philip Pape: And you don't have to change a thing about your program to collect the benefit.
• 28:16
  Philip Pape: You just have to keep lifting.
• 28:18
  Philip Pape: In fact, adding more and doing more and trying to optimize really benefits the other things like the muscle and the physique and the strength.
• 28:25
  Philip Pape: So just know that the health stuff is a pretty low threshold.
• 28:29
  Philip Pape: So there's no excuse not to get in the gym.
• 28:30
  Philip Pape: All right, before we wrap up, remember I'm going to give you a 30-second strength test you can do at home to just kind of give yourself a wake-up call in case you need to get in that gym.
• 28:40
  Philip Pape: If this episode has hit you, if you're walking away thinking, okay, I really need to train and I need to approach my life differently because this is more, this is more important than anything right now, especially if you don't train.
• 28:52
  Philip Pape: It's not just for vanity.
• 28:53
  Philip Pape: It's the single most controllable lever you have on how long and how well you live.
• 28:58
  Philip Pape: If you want to make sure that lever is moving in the right direction, that your training and recovery are producing the muscle you think they are, just to know that you're doing the right thing, even if you do it for a few months.
• 29:09
  Philip Pape: That's why I built my app Fitness Lab.
• 29:10
  Philip Pape: I want you to just check it out, see if it's right for you.
• 29:13
  Philip Pape: I think it's helping a lot of people.
• 29:15
  Philip Pape: It is a daily coaching layer.
• 29:17
  Philip Pape: It looks at your data and tells you what to do.
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: It's very empowering and helpful and holds you accountable.
• 29:22
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash app.
• 29:24
  Philip Pape: We have a discount through Friday, July 3rd, 20% off.
• 29:28
  Philip Pape: Witsandweights.com slash app.
• 29:30
  Philip Pape: Okay, here's the test.
• 29:31
  Philip Pape: It is a classic test to test your strength.
• 29:34
  Philip Pape: You don't need any equipment.
• 29:35
  Philip Pape: It is called the sit to stand test.
• 29:38
  Philip Pape: You sit down in a normal chair, you cross your arms over your chest.
• 29:42
  Philip Pape: So, you know, you can't use them, you just pin them to your chest like a mummy.
• 29:46
  Philip Pape: And then you stand all the way up and sit all the way back down as many times as you can in 30 seconds.
• 29:51
  Philip Pape: Now, you might want to do this alone.
• 29:53
  Philip Pape: If you think people are gonna look at you askance, like my kids do when I tried it, or you might make it a fun family experience.
• 30:00
  Philip Pape: Up to you.
• 30:01
  Philip Pape: You're gonna count your reps.
• 30:02
  Philip Pape: You're gonna stand up, sit down as many times as you can in 30 seconds, count them.
• 30:06
  Philip Pape: For most adults who are in this midlife range, you know, 40s, 50s, 60s, somewhere in the low teens is average strength.
• 30:14
  Philip Pape: The higher you go, the better your lower body strength, and the better that tracks with longevity.
• 30:19
  Philip Pape: And people who are who just lift weights on a regular basis can like slam out dozens of these.
• 30:24
  Philip Pape: Like there, there are no issues, like no question whatsoever.
• 30:27
  Philip Pape: But if you're in the teens, low teens, so like let's say 15, 10 to 15, that's average strength, meaning you have a lot of potential to get stronger.
• 30:36
  Philip Pape: And if you're lower than that, then you're pretty darn weak.
• 30:38
  Philip Pape: And that's okay to acknowledge that.
• 30:40
  Philip Pape: That's what the data is telling you.
• 30:41
  Philip Pape: And that's even better reason to get in the gym.
• 30:43
  Philip Pape: And that's okay.
• 30:44
  Philip Pape: Like just admit it to yourself, okay, I need to do something.
• 30:47
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 30:48
  Philip Pape: It's it's a place to start.
• 30:49
  Philip Pape: Wherever you're at, it's a place to start.
• 30:51
  Philip Pape: And what's cool is if you do it and it's really low and you start going to the gym and do it just like a week later or a month later, see how fast that number goes up.
• 30:59
  Philip Pape: That itself could be really, really empowering.
• 31:02
  Philip Pape: So do it today, write the number down, retest it, I'll say in four weeks and eight weeks.
• 31:07
  Philip Pape: And if the number is going up, then you're basically getting stronger.
• 31:10
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 31:13
  Philip Pape: And remember, the muscle you build for the mirror is the same muscle keeping you alive for a long, healthy life.
• 31:19
  Philip Pape: So train it, train it, train it like your life depends on it because the data says it just might.
• 31:25
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.