Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Are the Barbell Squat, Deadlift, and Row Actually "Unsafe" After 40? | Ep 489

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Are the Barbell Squat, Deadlift, and Row Actually "Unsafe" After 40? | Ep 489 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you've ever been told that the barbell back squat is dangerous, or that the deadlift is gonna wreck your spine, or that a bent over row is just asking for a back injury, and you should swap all of them for other movements or machines.
• 0:13
  Philip Pape: I want you to hear this before you give up the best lifts you potentially have in your arsenal.
• 0:17
  Philip Pape: Today I'm gonna walk you through why the case against these lifts falls apart under its own logic and why for anyone over 40, especially women going through menopause, heavy loading on those exact lifts is one of the best things you can do for your bones.
• 0:31
  Philip Pape: You'll learn the three thinking errors that make a safe lift sound scary, what the actual injury numbers say when you compare lifting to something like running, and the one variable that causes most lifting injuries, and it's almost never the lift itself.
• 0:48
  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.
• 1:02
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today's episode is based on a listener.
• 1:07
  Philip Pape: I want to give him credit right up front, Tim E.
• 1:09
  Philip Pape: He's a valuable member of our Eat More Lift Heavy program.
• 1:13
  Philip Pape: He came to me a little while back and he said, Hey, Philip, I was listening to another show.
• 1:17
  Philip Pape: And I'm not gonna give credit to this show.
• 1:19
  Philip Pape: We're gonna pick it apart, but I'm not, this is not a call out.
• 1:22
  Philip Pape: This is addressing some serious assumptions in that show.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: They ran this whole countdown of exercises that they called unsafe.
• 1:30
  Philip Pape: And I get it, social media podcasts, you want to be provocative, you wanna be counterintuitive, you wanna be contrarian.
• 1:38
  Philip Pape: But the problem is when it gets people to change their behavior for no good reason.
• 1:43
  Philip Pape: Number one on that list was the barbell back squat.
• 1:46
  Philip Pape: Number two was a conventional deadlift.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: And then a little further down the list was the bent over barbell row.
• 1:52
  Philip Pape: And Tim basically said, Hey, can you stress test this, Philip?
• 1:55
  Philip Pape: Because it doesn't sit right with me.
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: I've been doing these lifts, I've been successful, you know, building muscle and strength at these lifts.
• 2:01
  Philip Pape: Millions of people use them every day.
• 2:03
  Philip Pape: We talk about them all the time.
• 2:04
  Philip Pape: And what I want to know is there something to this claim that they are unsafe?
• 2:08
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 2:08
  Philip Pape: And they and the episode was like, you know, the three most unsafe exercises or something like that.
• 2:13
  Philip Pape: And I really love that because that's what I want you to do, what Tim is doing.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: I don't want you to just accept any claim.
• 2:20
  Philip Pape: I also don't want you to reject it because you don't like it, but just say, hey, what is my skepticism radar telling me?
• 2:27
  Philip Pape: Is the reasoning good here?
• 2:28
  Philip Pape: Does it make sense?
• 2:29
  Philip Pape: Does it pass the sniff test?
• 2:30
  Philip Pape: So, Tim, this one is dedicated to you.
• 2:33
  Philip Pape: Now, I want to be fair here.
• 2:35
  Philip Pape: As always, nuances is important.
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: This is not a hit piece on another show.
• 2:39
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna name them, as I said.
• 2:41
  Philip Pape: Some of the alternative exercises that they talked about are genuinely perfectly fine.
• 2:46
  Philip Pape: These sounded like two fairly intelligent guys who have a history training.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: One of them was kind of questioning the main host's list as it went along.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: So I did appreciate that.
• 2:56
  Philip Pape: That's not the issue.
• 2:57
  Philip Pape: The issue is the reasoning used to condemn the big lifts because it gets repeated.
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: It gets repeated like a game of telephone, and maybe it gets twisted here and there.
• 3:07
  Philip Pape: But you hear it from trainers, from physical therapists on social media, from articles telling men, you know, go ahead and trade your squats for goblet squats.
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: Men, women, whatever, people over 50 because you're old, whatever it is, right?
• 3:19
  Philip Pape: And it's kind of everywhere in the water supply of what you're fed through social media.
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: So we're gonna address that.
• 3:26
  Philip Pape: And then stick around to the end because after we get through all of this, I'm gonna share a study result that should change how really everyone over 40 thinks about lifting, but women in particular.
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: And then a question that you can ask yourself before you decide to swap, say, a barbell lift for a machine, before you give it up, right?
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: So I want to really help you make these decisions for yourself.
• 3:46
  Philip Pape: So here's where we're going today.
• 3:48
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna show you the three logical errors in thinking that run through every argument of, oh, this lift is dangerous.
• 3:56
  Philip Pape: I'm also gonna give you the injury numbers, which I'll say surprise me the first time I dug into them.
• 4:03
  Philip Pape: Um, and I want you to know what that looks like.
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: And then we're gonna talk about why axial loading, which is like a fancy way of saying load that runs down through your spine is specifically a feature, not a bug.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 4:16
  Philip Pape: It's a feature, not a bug, especially as we age, and you can actually take advantage of that rather than being scared by it.
• 4:22
  Philip Pape: So let's steel man the case first, uh, because I don't want to, I don't want to knock down a weak version of an argument.
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: I don't think that's helpful to you.
• 4:32
  Philip Pape: But the argument against these lifts usually goes something like this.
• 4:36
  Philip Pape: The back squats put a big compressive load right down through your spine.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: And that's risky, especially as you age.
• 4:43
  Philip Pape: The deadlift is the one that everybody talks about as well, where you're bent over, you've got a heavy bar, and if your form breaks down a little, you know, you round your back, oh, you're gonna herniate a disc.
• 4:53
  Philip Pape: And then we have the bent over row where you're holding that hinged over position under load while you're also yanking a bar into your torso.
• 5:01
  Philip Pape: So now your lower back is doing a bunch of work.
• 5:05
  Philip Pape: And the recommendation from that is okay, we need to find alternatives, like just the assumption that they're gonna most likely hurt you.
• 5:12
  Philip Pape: Alternatives or use machines, or use a leg press instead of squatting, use a chest supported row.
• 5:18
  Philip Pape: So your lower back is out of it.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: And look, if you use AI and ask AI these questions, it's probably gonna validate your concerns and suggest these things, especially the way you ask it.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: So we need to really dig deeper.
• 5:28
  Philip Pape: Or it's gonna say, oh, use a trap bar, or just do RDLs, or just do split squats, take the spine out of the equation, and then you don't you take the risk out of the equation.
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: Now it sounds reasonable, it sounds intuitive, and it tends to be generally wrong.
• 5:41
  Philip Pape: Not because the alternatives are bad.
• 5:43
  Philip Pape: Okay, though some of those are great, though, all those exercises I named, but the logic underneath is built on three specific errors.
• 5:52
  Philip Pape: And then once you learn these, you can't unlearn them.
• 5:55
  Philip Pape: Okay, here we go.
• 5:56
  Philip Pape: Let's walk through them.
• 5:57
  Philip Pape: The first thinking error is treating load as a hazard rather than the thing that you seek to help you adapt.
• 6:06
  Philip Pape: Load, the heaviness, right?
• 6:07
  Philip Pape: The weight.
• 6:08
  Philip Pape: This is the big one.
• 6:09
  Philip Pape: And I think it's kind of underneath the rest.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: It cascades into the rest, let's say.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: When somebody looks at a heavy squat, and it especially if you haven't done it before or you don't know how to do it, let's say, and you see this compression on the spine, and you're like, oh, that seems dangerous.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: You're looking at the load itself as a threat, right?
• 6:29
  Philip Pape: Something to minimize.
• 6:30
  Philip Pape: Oh, how why would you put all that compression on your spine?
• 6:33
  Philip Pape: Well, the problem with that is that load is the entire reason that the adaptation happens.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: The compression, the tension, the force running through the bone and the muscle and the tendon, right?
• 6:45
  Philip Pape: That is not like a side effect to be worried about.
• 6:48
  Philip Pape: That is the training signal, the stimulus, the adaptation that the thing that your body then responds to when you sleep, when you eat, et cetera.
• 6:56
  Philip Pape: Your bones get denser because they're loaded.
• 6:59
  Philip Pape: Your muscles grow because they're loaded, you know, through mechanical tension.
• 7:03
  Philip Pape: Your tendons and connected tissue get more resilient because they're loaded.
• 7:07
  Philip Pape: I've even had PTs on the show tell us this themselves.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: This is a PT.
• 7:12
  Philip Pape: People who are concerned with rehab and coming back from injury saying, look, load and oftentimes heavy load on the exact muscles and joints you're concerned about is often what is needed to recover.
• 7:23
  Philip Pape: So if you take the load away in the name of safety, you've removed the medicine, the prescription, let's say, in John Sullivan's words, the barbell prescription, right?
• 7:31
  Philip Pape: You've made the movement quote unquote safer by doing, making it do less of what it's intended to do.
• 7:37
  Philip Pape: Now, I had Chris Duffin on the show back, I think it was episode 456.
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: And if you don't know him, he's the guy that squatted over a thousand pounds in his 40s for reps.
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: He's a got a biomechanics and engineering brain, absolute legend.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: And he said something on that episode that stuck with me.
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: He said that we adapt to nearly any movement or stress that's imposed on us.
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: That is what's get getting stronger is, right?
• 7:59
  Philip Pape: And we've heard that, we've heard that description through starting strength and through plenty of good strength coaches and practitioners.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: That is what getting stronger is.
• 8:08
  Philip Pape: It's your body responding to load.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: So when you get afraid of a lift, if you're afraid you're hurt, you'll hurt yourself, you stop pushing and you stop adapting.
• 8:16
  Philip Pape: And you may not even pay as much attention to good, say, form as a result, which is the irony of it.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: And then you actually do not get stronger or more resilient, and the fear itself becomes the problem and manifests in potential further weakness and injury.
• 8:32
  Philip Pape: You've probably heard the phrase, I'd rather have a strong bad back than a weak bad back.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: And that kind of summarizes it nicely because the strength and the risk and chance of injury, they're two separate things.
• 8:42
  Philip Pape: We want the strength there.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: So error number one is that, you know, load is not the enemy.
• 8:48
  Philip Pape: Load is the stimulus.
• 8:50
  Philip Pape: And when you take it away to feel safe, you're throwing away the thing that's going to help you.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: Now you're just gonna get stuck.
• 8:57
  Philip Pape: Error number two is confusing muscle activation with muscle growth.
• 9:02
  Philip Pape: Now, this one's more technical, but I want you to just stick with me because it's it's all over the place.
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: And I still hear the term activation thrown out a lot where it shouldn't be.
• 9:13
  Philip Pape: So a lot of the content about this exercise is just as good or better than this is based on something called EMG, electromyography.
• 9:20
  Philip Pape: Basically, they stick sensors on your muscles, they measure the electrical activity during an exercise, and they say, look, the chest-supported row lights up the lats just as much as the barbow row.
• 9:31
  Philip Pape: So you might as well do the easier, safer one.
• 9:33
  Philip Pape: Or this machine activates the quads more than the squat does, so it's superior.
• 9:38
  Philip Pape: The problem with that is that is an acute activation signal, acute meaning like localized, the EMG number we're talking about, that electrical signal, it does not reliably predict how much a muscle actually grows over weeks and months.
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: And there's a good body of research on this.
• 9:56
  Philip Pape: There's a really sharp critique from a researcher, his name is Andrew Vygotsky.
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: And the point is basically that activation in a single session and hypertrophy over time are two different things.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: One does not, does not cleanly forecast the other.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: So stop paying so much attention to muscle activation.
• 10:19
  Philip Pape: And we have training studies where a heavier load produced more EMG activation, but the actual measured muscle growth came out about the same as a lighter load.
• 10:27
  Philip Pape: So it's not always correlated, is my point.
• 10:29
  Philip Pape: If so, if EMG doesn't track growth, then the argument of this exercise activates the muscle just as much as that is not a valid reason to call, for example, a barbell lift redundant and having no other benefits.
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: You're comparing the wrong thing, apple to oranges, right?
• 10:44
  Philip Pape: Like judging two cars by how loud the engine is instead of how fast they go.
• 10:49
  Philip Pape: It's like a distraction or a red herring, if you will.
• 10:51
  Philip Pape: And then there's a flip side here that favors the barbell lifts.
• 10:55
  Philip Pape: A lot of the recent research points to training muscle in a stretched, lengthened position as a real driver of growth.
• 11:03
  Philip Pape: And what do a full-depth squat and a full deadlift do?
• 11:06
  Philip Pape: They load your muscles at long lengths.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: They activate many muscles.
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: Uh and there I use the word activate, but they I should say they recruit many muscles.
• 11:14
  Philip Pape: And big compound lifts, by design, give you a ton of benefits in that sense.
• 11:20
  Philip Pape: Now, isn't that interesting?
• 11:21
  Philip Pape: But the very thing that makes them feel harder and makes you maybe want to avoid them is the thing that makes them work.
• 11:27
  Philip Pape: So that's error number two: that activation is not growth and not a reason to switch up your lifts.
• 11:33
  Philip Pape: Now, before I give you the third error, I want to take a pause because we're about to hit the most important one and it connects directly to something I do every day.
• 11:43
  Philip Pape: So many people think they need a different exercise.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: And what they actually need is someone to help manage their load and the fatigue and the recovery along with their nutrition so that the big lifts stay productive and you do them safely instead of them turning into a problem.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: And you then you build the confidence to do them and you gain the benefits from them.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: Now that's the whole idea behind our Eat More Lift Heavy program, exactly where Tim gave us this question.
• 12:11
  Philip Pape: This is our 26-week coach program where we teach you to eat enough to support your training, to fuel properly.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: We help you progress any of your lifts that you want to do with proper programming and adjustments and dealing with the recovery and potentially injury.
• 12:27
  Philip Pape: Look, we have a lot of folks that come in and they're like, I'm dealing with this injury or this rehab, or I had a surgery or this or that.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: You know, not from us, but they they they have it going on and then they want help.
• 12:36
  Philip Pape: And one of the things I like to say is look, if you wait till you're ready and everything is perfectly healed, let's say, and you're over 40, you'll never be ready.
• 12:45
  Philip Pape: We all have some level of pain or injury or something going on.
• 12:49
  Philip Pape: And so you kind of need that guidance.
• 12:51
  Philip Pape: And if you've been nervous about the big lifts or somebody talked you out of them or whatever, that is who this is built for.
• 12:56
  Philip Pape: So you can find information at eatmoreliftheavy.com.
• 12:59
  Philip Pape: That's eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: Now I bring it up right here on purpose because the reason people get talked out of be out of these lifts is our third error.
• 13:09
  Philip Pape: It's our third error.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: And I want you to really listen up to this blaming the lift for what is actually a programming problem.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 13:17
  Philip Pape: Blaming the lift for what is a programming problem.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: So I see the pattern over and over and over again.
• 13:24
  Philip Pape: Okay, it's just so predictable at this point.
• 13:26
  Philip Pape: Somebody's back starts hurting.
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: Honestly, I've been through this cycle in the past.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: Your low back starts hurting.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: They've been squatting and deadlifting.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: And the conclusion is it's the squat and deadlift are hurting my back, and those lifts are dangerous, or some level of that.
• 13:42
  Philip Pape: But then when we look at what actually happened when you dig in, it often wasn't the movement.
• 13:47
  Philip Pape: It was how the movement was loaded.
• 13:50
  Philip Pape: For example, jumping up in weight too much too soon, or too much volume, or training through fatigue.
• 13:57
  Philip Pape: And that could be the physical fatigue from a lack of energy, but it could also be because you're not eating enough or you're in a deficit or something like that, where your form starts to degrade set after set and you don't stop, or you get distracted, or you're listening to music when maybe you shouldn't, or you're talking to someone in the gym or scrolling your phone, and an and an.
• 14:14
  Philip Pape: You get all these things are forms of fatigue or distraction.
• 14:18
  Philip Pape: Not enough recovery between heavy sessions.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: You're going five days a week and balls to the wall, and it's super heavy.
• 14:24
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 14:24
  Philip Pape: These are all programming variables.
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: I didn't even mention the actual form of the lift, right?
• 14:29
  Philip Pape: That's also important too, but maybe overstated versus some of these other things.
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: And those are all dials that you can turn, right?
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: And then when you get hurt and you blame the lift instead of the dial, well, you're never going to fix the root cause.
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: And going back to, I mentioned Chris Stuffin, when he was on the show, he talked about people getting into lifting later in life and they get strong pretty fast, right?
• 14:50
  Philip Pape: Because they're very responsive to the stimulus.
• 14:53
  Philip Pape: And then all of a sudden their back starts hurting.
• 14:55
  Philip Pape: And the reason is your muscles tend to adapt faster than your skeleton does, and even your connective tissue.
• 15:00
  Philip Pape: And so your muscle can handle the load before your bones and disc and connective tissue have caught up, and you can outlift your own structural readiness if you rush it.
• 15:09
  Philip Pape: Again, also why we like to for beginners to be eating and not dieting when they first start, just to kind of be fully supportive of that process.
• 15:18
  Philip Pape: And again, it's not the lift itself, it's not the deadlift.
• 15:21
  Philip Pape: It's the progression being too aggressive for where the person is.
• 15:24
  Philip Pape: Because when we talk about lifting heavy, it's relatively heavy to what you're capable of, not just heavy in general or just trying to lift as much as you can or going up 20 pounds overnight on a lift.
• 15:37
  Philip Pape: So it, you know, if your body is tightening up, you're feeling pain, it's often not because you're squatting, it's because you're squatting like garbage, because you're squatting wrong.
• 15:46
  Philip Pape: The movement itself isn't the problem.
• 15:48
  Philip Pape: It's the way it's being loaded and executed.
• 15:50
  Philip Pape: And granted, there's a lot of fear-mongering, even with that, talking about sheer forces and all of these things that people are not understanding properly.
• 15:58
  Philip Pape: So I don't want you to be scared away.
• 16:00
  Philip Pape: Again, it's not the movement, it's how it's being executed.
• 16:03
  Philip Pape: So again, error number three is when a lift hurts, the culprits almost always load progression, fatigue, recovery, or technique, not the lift itself.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: Now, I want to connect all of these things.
• 16:14
  Philip Pape: Notice what they all have in common.
• 16:16
  Philip Pape: They all point the finger, these errors, I should say, these errors in thinking, all point the finger at the movement.
• 16:21
  Philip Pape: Like, okay, the movement's dangerous, the movement is redundant, the movement hurt me.
• 16:25
  Philip Pape: And sometimes I hear people say, well, yeah, it's because of technique, not the movement, but nobody can do it right, which is BS.
• 16:31
  Philip Pape: That's total BS because thousands, if not millions, of people do do it right.
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: And there's a lot of tolerance for, you know, having your own, I'll say version of the form that's still within the bounds of correctness and safety.
• 16:46
  Philip Pape: And so it's not the movement, it's the variables around the movement that matters.
• 16:49
  Philip Pape: And guess what?
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: You can control those.
• 16:51
  Philip Pape: And sometimes you need help, sometimes you need coaching, sometimes you need advice, YouTube videos, podcasts, whatever to figure it out because it's a process, right?
• 16:58
  Philip Pape: Now, let's talk about the numbers.
• 17:00
  Philip Pape: What do the injury numbers say?
• 17:02
  Philip Pape: If these lifts are so dangerous, you would expect the injury data to be pretty ugly, right?
• 17:07
  Philip Pape: You'd expect people who squat and deadlift to be getting hurt left and right all the time, you know, falling over.
• 17:12
  Philip Pape: Oh my God, everybody, you know, my aunt, my cousins, my parents, my my, you know, kids, whoever, all these people lifting are just just getting hurt left and right from their lifting.
• 17:21
  Philip Pape: But they're not.
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: They're not.
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: And it's not even close in the data.
• 17:24
  Philip Pape: When you look at the systematic reviews on injury rates in the barbell strength sports, powerlifting comes in somewhere around one to four injuries per thousand hours of training.
• 17:35
  Philip Pape: Weightlifting, you know, the Olympic lifts, that's in a similar range, roughly two to three per thousand hours.
• 17:41
  Philip Pape: That is really, really low.
• 17:43
  Philip Pape: Now let's compare that to running, which every, well, I'm not gonna say everybody thinks, but a lot of people think of as this like safe, gentle, healthy thing.
• 17:50
  Philip Pape: You should do more of, you know, strap on your shoes, anyone can do it.
• 17:53
  Philip Pape: Well, novice runners get hurt at a rate around 17 or 18 injuries per thousand hours, right?
• 17:59
  Philip Pape: Versus one to four for powerlifting, 17 to 18.
• 18:02
  Philip Pape: Recreational runners, which means they have a little more experience, still seven or eight.
• 18:07
  Philip Pape: So running injures people at something like two to more than 10 times the rate per hour of powerlifting, right?
• 18:14
  Philip Pape: And that's just running.
• 18:15
  Philip Pape: We know soccer is also up there, and that's also due to like contact injury and stuff like that.
• 18:21
  Philip Pape: So, from a framing perspective, when it comes to injury, barbell training, when you do it with reasonable programming for what we just talked about, is one of the lowest injury things you could do with your body.
• 18:30
  Philip Pape: And what matters for the whole argument about unsafe exercises is okay, well, what if what about when people do get hurt lifting?
• 18:36
  Philip Pape: Where is that happening and why?
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: Well, the most common sights are the lower back and the shoulder.
• 18:43
  Philip Pape: Sure, we we all can attest to that.
• 18:45
  Philip Pape: I can personally attest to that.
• 18:47
  Philip Pape: But the mechanism, we see this over and over again, is load and fatigue and technique.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: The beginner who jumped the weight up too fast, the person grinding through the form that's already broken down because of ego, and they don't want to rack the bar, they're ego lifting.
• 19:02
  Philip Pape: It's almost never, hey, they performed the squat properly, and but because it's a squat, they got injured.
• 19:09
  Philip Pape: No, it's how it's loaded, which is the exact same point as error number three, and we're just tying it to the injury data.
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: Mismanagement of the lift, that is the risk, not the risk, not the lift itself.
• 19:19
  Philip Pape: Now, I care about intellectual honesty.
• 19:23
  Philip Pape: So if you think about the argument from the podcast that I'm addressing, that fatigue degrades your mechanics, that is true.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: So there's a cascade.
• 19:34
  Philip Pape: When you're deep into a very tiring, fatiguing set, and then your form falls apart, that is a window where injuries can occur.
• 19:41
  Philip Pape: So they're not wrong that there can be danger when it comes to that, but it it happens upstream in the fatigue and the programming that allowed you to get to that point.
• 19:51
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 19:52
  Philip Pape: That allowed you to get to that point.
• 19:54
  Philip Pape: And it could go beyond that too, to like secondary and tertiary variables like your diet, right?
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: If you're not eating enough or if you're training fasted and you're just wiped out, that just enhances the fatigue.
• 20:04
  Philip Pape: You know, if you're not sleeping enough, that just enhances the fatigue.
• 20:07
  Philip Pape: All right, so why does this matter to you?
• 20:09
  Philip Pape: What do we do about it?
• 20:10
  Philip Pape: We've established that the lifts are not inherently dangerous.
• 20:13
  Philip Pape: Injury data backs us up.
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: And now I want to get on the positive side of things because this is specific to you, especially if you're getting older, you're over 40, you know, you're concerned about the injury and the health and the joint risk.
• 20:23
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're new to this, maybe you've never done this before.
• 20:26
  Philip Pape: And for example, women, you know, reach out to me all the time, going through the perimenopause, postmenopause transition, also have a lot of questions about these things.
• 20:34
  Philip Pape: And I like to be very positive and empowering about this because it's not a negative.
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: You are not hopeless at all.
• 20:40
  Philip Pape: It's quite the opposite.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: So the compressive load through the spine, that axial loading, the thing that people always talk about as potentially dangerous for your bones.
• 20:50
  Philip Pape: That is the single best evidenced non-drug stimulus we have for building bone density.
• 20:57
  Philip Pape: Or at least preserving bone density, if not building it.
• 21:00
  Philip Pape: There's other things that can also build bone density, like jumping type movements.
• 21:04
  Philip Pape: And this matters enormously right now, at this point in time, because the menopause transition accelerates your bone loss.
• 21:12
  Philip Pape: A meaningful chunk of a woman's lifetime bone loss can happen in those few years around menopause.
• 21:17
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 21:17
  Philip Pape: And I'm not fear-mongering, that's just stating a fact.
• 21:20
  Philip Pape: And we can do something about it.
• 21:22
  Philip Pape: I've talked about the lift more study before, L-A-F-T-M-O-R.
• 21:25
  Philip Pape: And most studies are done on young men in college.
• 21:29
  Philip Pape: This was actually done on post-menopausal women, average age around 65, who already had low bone mass.
• 21:35
  Philip Pape: And they're the same type of population that gets told as they get older, they go to their doctor and they're told, what are you doing lifting weights?
• 21:42
  Philip Pape: What are you doing lifting heavy?
• 21:43
  Philip Pape: You got to protect yourself.
• 21:44
  Philip Pape: Oh, you got to watch out for your bones.
• 21:45
  Philip Pape: So, what they did in the study is they had them do heavy deadlifts, heavy back squats, overhead presses, all around 80 to 85% of their one rep max, twice a week for eight months, and they were supervised.
• 21:56
  Philip Pape: So heavy stuff, okay?
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: The stuff that the internet Like it's gonna break you.
• 22:01
  Philip Pape: No, it's not.
• 22:01
  Philip Pape: And what happened?
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: Well, their bone density in their spine improved by almost three percent.
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: While the comparison group that just did light home exercise, they lost bone.
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: Hip bone improved, strength improved, balance improved, posture got better.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: What about safety?
• 22:19
  Philip Pape: Out of the whole group, one minor adverse event, it was like a back spasm.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: So this is heavy barbell training in 65-year-old women with weak bones.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: It was effective, safe, and hugely beneficial.
• 22:31
  Philip Pape: And remember that I mentioned they were supervised.
• 22:34
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 22:34
  Philip Pape: So the women didn't just walk in off the street and they were like, here, load 85% of your max, go for it.
• 22:40
  Philip Pape: They actually spent a month first learning the movements and building up with lighter loads.
• 22:45
  Philip Pape: Exactly what we talk about.
• 22:46
  Philip Pape: That's the whole point.
• 22:46
  Philip Pape: That's progressive overload.
• 22:48
  Philip Pape: It's not just grab the heaviest thing and jump into it.
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: It's you build the skill up over time with completely manageable weights and increase that load, which is the medicine, which is the prescription.
• 23:01
  Philip Pape: As I mentioned correctly, you have to dose it correctly.
• 23:03
  Philip Pape: So when you hear all this stuff about unsafe exercises and you're like, oh, you should do the leg press or the chest supported row and forget the other ones.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: You may be missing out on that load on your spine and hips that you actually benefit from, especially for your bones, especially for your skeleton.
• 23:18
  Philip Pape: So I wanted to mention that.
• 23:19
  Philip Pape: Now I'm not saying machines are bad, of course not.
• 23:21
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 23:22
  Philip Pape: We can't, these are not mutually exclusive things.
• 23:24
  Philip Pape: For building muscle size, machines, free weights come out about even.
• 23:28
  Philip Pape: We had uh Lauren Calenzo Semple on here to talk about that.
• 23:31
  Philip Pape: Nothing wrong with machines at all.
• 23:32
  Philip Pape: I use machines all the time.
• 23:34
  Philip Pape: If you like the leg press, use it.
• 23:35
  Philip Pape: It's a great tool.
• 23:36
  Philip Pape: And I'm not saying the alternatives they suggest in the podcast or anybody suggest are quote unquote wrong.
• 23:41
  Philip Pape: There's so many options you have.
• 23:43
  Philip Pape: A trap bar, for example, sure, it does reduce the load on your lower back compared to a straight bar.
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: So if it's a better fit for you, great.
• 23:50
  Philip Pape: Again, you're missing out on other things big time, potentially, maybe not, right?
• 23:54
  Philip Pape: It depends on what your goals are.
• 23:56
  Philip Pape: RDLs, goblet squats, split squats, chest supported rows, they're all legitimate exercises.
• 24:00
  Philip Pape: They're great supplements, they're great substitutes to the mane occasionally, or maybe you work them in on different days other than the mains, for example.
• 24:08
  Philip Pape: And sometimes you have just those in and you don't have the mains for a while.
• 24:11
  Philip Pape: And I'm not saying everybody should barbell squat and deadlift no matter what.
• 24:15
  Philip Pape: If you've got a diagnosed issue, a back problem that really flares up with a movement, a movement doesn't work for you, you don't have the mobility, whatever, you have to individualize.
• 24:23
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 24:24
  Philip Pape: If you regress on something, you have to build it back.
• 24:27
  Philip Pape: It helps to work with someone.
• 24:28
  Philip Pape: That's just a smart thing to do.
• 24:30
  Philip Pape: And then I'm not saying form and fatigue don't matter.
• 24:32
  Philip Pape: Obviously, they matter enormously.
• 24:34
  Philip Pape: That's the whole point.
• 24:34
  Philip Pape: So the big barbell lifts, in conclusion, are not the hazard.
• 24:39
  Philip Pape: Load is a stimulus, it's not a dangerous thing.
• 24:42
  Philip Pape: Activation is not equivalent to growth.
• 24:44
  Philip Pape: When a lift hurts, look at the programming.
• 24:47
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 24:47
  Philip Pape: That will help you find the root cause.
• 24:50
  Philip Pape: Load progression, fatigue, recovery, technique, that is it.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: Now, before we wrap up, remember that study result that I promised you about heavy lifting and women over 40 and a question to ask before you swap a barbell lift for a machine.
• 25:04
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna share that in a second.
• 25:06
  Philip Pape: But if this episode changed how you think about the big lifts, do me a favor and just text it to someone, share it with them, email it to them.
• 25:14
  Philip Pape: You know somebody who is scared of lifting or squatting or deadlifting or who, you know, tells you, oh, isn't that dangerous and just doesn't know.
• 25:22
  Philip Pape: And it's holding them back.
• 25:23
  Philip Pape: Or maybe they think they're too old or too fragile.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: Text this to them.
• 25:27
  Philip Pape: That is the person who needs to hear it.
• 25:29
  Philip Pape: And it might be the thing that saves their lives.
• 25:31
  Philip Pape: I can't understate that.
• 25:32
  Philip Pape: That is not an under an overstatement.
• 25:35
  Philip Pape: It's gonna keep them strong for decades to come.
• 25:38
  Philip Pape: All right, so here's the number that I want to share with you.
• 25:40
  Philip Pape: Up to 20% of the bone a woman loses in her entire life comes off in the handful of years around menopause.
• 25:47
  Philip Pape: I alluded to this before.
• 25:49
  Philip Pape: It isn't just spread across decades.
• 25:51
  Philip Pape: It's actually concentrated right there in a window that for most women is happening at the same time that everything else is changing.
• 26:00
  Philip Pape: People are telling you to be careful, take it easy, skip the heavy stuff.
• 26:04
  Philip Pape: You might be getting gaslit by all sorts of doctors.
• 26:07
  Philip Pape: You know, you've got the symptoms of menopause, the hot flashes, whatever it is personalized to you, the hormonal fluctuations, the stress in your life.
• 26:15
  Philip Pape: So the timing is pretty tough because this is yet one more thing you might be afraid of or not sure it's gonna help, or thinking it's gonna exacerbate the other issues.
• 26:24
  Philip Pape: And yet the signal for your skeleton, for your bones from heavy lifting is phenomenal.
• 26:30
  Philip Pape: So the next time you're about to swap a barbell lift for a machine to be safe, ask yourself a question.
• 26:36
  Philip Pape: Be honest with yourself.
• 26:37
  Philip Pape: Am I swapping this because the movement genuinely doesn't fit my body?
• 26:43
  Philip Pape: Or because someone told me it was dangerous, or I haven't mastered it yet, right?
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: I haven't, I haven't mastered the things Philip talked about in this episode.
• 26:50
  Philip Pape: There's something else that I need to work on before just giving up the lift.
• 26:54
  Philip Pape: And if it's the second one, then you're not really solving the problem, are you?
• 26:59
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 26:59
  Philip Pape: You're just give kind of giving into fear and not getting the benefit from it.
• 27:03
  Philip Pape: And I just want you to be honest with you.
• 27:04
  Philip Pape: So I want to motivate you to see if you can keep the lift, if it is right for your body, or if the reason isn't that it doesn't fit your body, but for these other reasons, and fix the other stuff.
• 27:15
  Philip Pape: You know, we can help you do that.
• 27:16
  Philip Pape: I've talked about that before.
• 27:17
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna pitch my stuff again, but get the help if needed.
• 27:20
  Philip Pape: Up and one final little thing about this is seek out the right gym and equipment as well.
• 27:26
  Philip Pape: Don't settle for what you have.
• 27:27
  Philip Pape: I see a lot of women, for example, come to me and all they have access to is a Smith machine.
• 27:31
  Philip Pape: And then they're trying to squat with a Smith machine.
• 27:33
  Philip Pape: And it's it's really dangerous form they're using because they can't get into the right form given the constraints of the Smith machine.
• 27:40
  Philip Pape: Forget the Smith machine.
• 27:42
  Philip Pape: Go with the free the free weights or other machines.
• 27:45
  Philip Pape: Anyway, um, that's a separate topic.
• 27:47
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna leave it at that.
• 27:48
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 27:51
  Philip Pape: And remember the barbell isn't the risk, it's a tool and used well.
• 27:54
  Philip Pape: It's one of the best things you can do for your body over 40.
• 27:57
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.