Mark Bell's Power Project - Optimize Your Strength Training: Preventing Health Issues Before They Start

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

Did you know there's a 2,000-year-old war against muscle that might be destroying your health? It’s time to learn how strength training is the real key to preventing dementia, diabetes, and reversing the effects of aging.On this episode of Mark Bell’s Power Project Podcast, hosts Mark Bell and Nsima Inyang talk with author Michael Gross about the forgotten history of strength. They reveal why much of modern medicine has been wrong about muscle and how the right kind of lifting can fix today's biggest health problems.Discover why the advice you’ve heard about aging is wrong, how to protect yourself from muscle loss if you are on weight loss drugs, and how to build a stronger body for a long and healthy life. This conversation will change how you think about fitness forever.Special perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!Best 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ https://www.PowerProject.live➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerprojectFOLLOW Mark Bell➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybellFollow Nsima Inyang➢ Ropes and equipment : https://thestrongerhuman.store➢ Community & Courses: https://www.skool.com/thestrongerhuman➢ YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=enFollow Andrew Zaragoza➢ Podcast Courses and Free Guides: https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz/➢ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamandrewzChapters:0:00 - The Ancient War on Muscle 3:55 - Lifting Reverses Aging & Depression 6:54 - Why We Still Demonize Muscle 9:54 - Today's Biggest Health Problems 13:31 - The Truth About Ozempic & Muscle Loss 17:32 - How To Get Kids to Start Lifting 24:23 - What is The "Watermelon Effect"? 30:35 - How Modern Life Destroys Your Body 33:32 - The 2-Move Desk Job Workout 37:37 - The Problem with Chasing Aesthetics 47:18 - You're Not Over-Fat, You're Under-Muscled 49:31 - Adopting The Athlete Identity 53:23 - Ancient Greek Secrets of Strength 58:20 - Why So Many Athletes Let Themselves Go 1:03:00 - How a Teenager Changed Modern Medicine 1:14:53 - The Medical Discovery Lost for 100 Years 1:21:12 - The Exercise That Fights Alzheimer's 1:26:00 - Why People Fail to Stick with Exercise 1:29:02 - How to Make Fitness Feel Like Play 1:35:42 - The Correct Way to Train for Longevity

There have been these really constructive results of the tension of the tug of war, how doctors have used weight training to not just help with orthopedic rehab and functional movement, but also to reverse frailty for the oldest people. It's time to look at a different set of problems, dementia, type 2 diabetes, other metabolic health conditions, and musculoskeletal conditions. What happened to me was a shift from thinking so much about how I looked because I was just so focused on being at the gym five or six times a week, no excuses, no skipping. If I couldn't eat right, no big deal. If I couldn't be there for an hour, no big deal.

But I was going to show up. I think it's important to note that there's many ways to have like an appreciable amount of strength. It doesn't necessarily always have to look like a dead look. You could jump, you can run, you can sprint. There's a lot of things you can do when it comes to making yourself strong. What's going on, Michael? You got to talk to us to a bunch about strength today and some strength definitions. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Yeah, I appreciate you coming on the show. Some of the stuff I've heard you talk about and some of the stuff that I know is in your book, talking about like these many different definitions of strength. And we showed you something today that you probably maybe wouldn't have thought of that would be shown to you. I mean, maybe you've seen and seem to do some of it. but, you know, we're a little bit more known for lifting and packing on some muscle, but we were showing you some rope flow today. Yeah, that was so much fun.

I just felt like a new man after you got done. Yeah, it's just interesting to try to get people to just move in some different ways and just get outside and do something slightly different than just, you know, lifting some barbells and stuff. But what are some of these definitions of strength and why do you think, like, looking into our history is important maybe to help move us forward? You know, every single one of us is in the middle of a 2,000-year-old game of tug-of-war that doctors and trainers have been playing with us in the middle. You know, we are the contested territory.

They're trying to decide who gets to corner the market in what we now call health care, you know, in what kind of regimens are going to make for human thriving. And muscle has always played a really important role in this tug of war. Doctors would use it, would point to big muscular athletes as the worst possible outcome of what athletic training could look like. And so there's a prejudice against muscle. It got baked into our culture a long time ago, so much so that we just take it for granted as common sense now. But in modern times, there are a few athletes who have become doctors who have used athletic training regimens, including high intensity, weight training, to do medicine's work of healing. You know, they are taking that tension of the tug of war, which in some ways has been destructive.

It's really the root of the whole myth of brain versus brawn. The whole idea that if you are bigger and stronger, you're probably also going to be dumber. That started as like a rhetorical dirty trick in ancient Rome so that doctors could build up their own authority at the expense of trainers. Aside from that kind of destructive outcome, there have been these really constructive results of the tension of the tug of war. And some of those we can talk about later, how doctors have used weight training to not just help with orthopedic rehab and functional movement, but also to reverse frailty for the oldest people. You know, for a long time, people thought that being old and frail was a reason not to work hard, not to lift heavy weights. It's actually the best reason to lift relatively heavy weights. And it's the only thing.

Relatively. Right? And it's the only thing that can reverse the age-related loss of muscle mass that is called sarcopenia. I mean, even more amazing, starting in the 90s, there have been a series of trials that have shown that weight training for the majority of people can treat depression. as well as the best antidepressant drugs. So it's this kind of big story about muscle, its place in medicine, and it's place in the broader culture

that stronger sets out to tell. I think, you know, physical culture is actually as significant, as legitimate, an object of study, as any of the other forms of culture that we think of as being worth our time, you know, to read a 400-page book about music, art, literature, how we have learned to be in our bodies and take care of our bodies is a fascinating story that we're all a part of that we haven't paid enough attention to. I set out like eight years ago, to write this book. And in the beginning, I didn't have a story in mind. You know, I was just looking

for the most interesting people I could find. And we'll talk about them all today. A couple of them. I know you know. But one of them, Charles Stocking, is probably the only person in any university anywhere who teaches both kinesiology, the study of human bodily movement, and also ancient Greek classics. Jan Todd was the strongest woman in the world for about 10 years in the 70s and 80s. And now she's the preeminent historian of modern strength and runs the Stark Center at the University of Texas, which is really the best collection of the history of strength related materials there's jan 394.5 yeah in 1975 deadlift yeah you know michael i want to ask you this because you were talking about mark you've had the war on carbs in the past and you were talking a little

bit about this war on muscle through the honestly centuries it seems yeah but i want to know why do you think that that is something that continues because i think there there are a lot of great educators in medicine now that are talking about how beneficial muscle is. Like, you were just on Dr. Grab Your Lion's show. Peter Attia is talking more about strength training. But there are still groups, even in the industry of fitness, there are still groups who will demonize almost having muscle or demonize having too much muscle. And I think there is a, your book, by the way, I think everyone should read it because it does

a really great job of showing the balance between a lot of aspects of lifting, training all these things. It shows that there is a balance, right? And they're also, I think people are missing that there is a balance to having muscle and also maybe having a level of movement, right? But there just seems to just be this negative idea on muscle. Why does that continue? Really, it's a prejudice. That's what it comes down to. It's just a nasty old habit that we got into a long time ago. And it is connected to this idea of brain, versus brawn. I mean, think about it. It starts when we're kids. We get separated into groups, right? Some kids are more naturally athletic. They're bigger. They're the ones who get kind of,

you know, moved into the track of lifting weights, paying attention to their muscles, getting strong. Protein, protein, protein. Yeah, yeah. And then there are other kids who don't have those natural gifts. And they're just never encouraged to think of themselves as muscular beings. Now, one of the things that scientists are beginning to realize is that sarcopenia, which is the name for age-related muscle loss when we get older, it's what contributes to frailty, contributes to falls and hip fracture, even contributes to dementia, that that actually begins in early life. So when we deny some of our kids the chance to get strong when they're little, we're actually setting them up for a world of pain when they get older.

But to get back to that question, this is just a habit. It's part of how we've structured our, it's part of how we've structured our society. And we really just need to kind of slap the baby on the back to get him to start. breathing again, you know, to blow the doors off this place, to blow the doors off this gym and, you know, like the culture of a podcast like this and invite everybody in. Yeah. I think also you mentioned the father of aerobics did the same thing when it came to talking about lifting weights. That's right. And that's a really important part of the answer to the question. I mean, throughout the middle part of the 20th century, the biggest killer, not only in the United States, but throughout the developed world, was cardiovascular disease

and specifically heart attacks. So it was a public health crisis. It was an economic crisis. And so all of medical exercise science was focused on aerobics because they were focused on trying to stop people from dying because their hearts gave out. Now, we got past that, you know? Every hospital has the equipment they need now to deal with heart attacks. The incidence of heart attacks is dropping dramatically. And it's time to look at a different set of problems. I mean, the problems that are in the ascendant are things like dementia, type 2 diabetes, metabolic health, other metabolic health conditions, and musculoskeletal conditions. Like, I mean, falls according to the new data in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, just this month, are becoming

more frequent and more lethal. And strength is really the basis of any effective strength and balance training, but strength is part of the basis of any effective falls prevention program. It's even beginning to, there's evidence accumulating that it's going to be the basis of dementia prevention programs too. I think it's important to note that there's many, ways to have like an appreciable amount of strength. It doesn't necessarily always have to look like a deadlift. It doesn't have to always necessarily look like you're going to the gym and working on these machines and stuff, although those things are helpful because it's just like a it's an easy known thing that you can go and do and you spend an hour and you do that a couple

times a week and you're like, okay, got some of that taken care of like I did some of my strength training, right? But there's a lot of other things you can do. You could jump, you can run, you can sprint you can you can get into rock climbing like there's a lot of things you can do when it comes to making yourself strong and I would say like you're one of the one of the key components I think is a strength to weight ratio um you know some people are well a lot of people are over 50% of our population now are 70% is overweight and 50% is like obese or something wild like that so those people automatically aren't going to have a good strength to weight ratio. They can't move their body around well through space because they're heavy and most

likely they're untrained. And so you end up with like a really large list of issues, diabetes being one of them, dementia sometimes simulates diabetes in some ways or mimics it in some ways or shows up similar when somebody has that high blood sugar circulating through their system all the time like that. And so you just end up in kind of this interesting situation. of like you know what should people do and people are really addicted they're addicted to their food they're addicted to their TV they're addicted to their phone there's just so much addiction going on this is sort of a side thing but it is important to note what are some of your thoughts on some of the gLP one drugs and some of those because I know that in some cases people kind of harp on

that and they're like whoa wait a second let's not use those because those might be also causing issues with muscle mass. And there's people that are probably untrained that aren't, they're not lifting. So they're not getting a muscle protein synthesis through that. And they're also probably not eating enough protein. But what are some of your thoughts on that? Because I, as hopeful as I am with fitness, as much as I love fitness and strength, it's not going to be the thing to pull us out of it. I think we need technology. And unfortunately, we might need help of big pharma, which kind of sucks in some ways, but I think that we're just in such a bad spot in this country that I don't know if it's drugs or an app or some other form of technology, but I really think

we need a lot of help. Yeah, those are really good points. There is a brand new international consensus statement on exercise recommendations. It's focused mainly on older people, but it also includes a lot of information about exercise prescription for younger people. It's really an unprecedented review of the literature, more than 30 authors from something like 15 countries citing about 700 papers. I'll give you a copy so we can put it in the show notes because it's something that everybody, every patient should read. It breaks down for the first time what, you know, we've been satisfied for a long time with exercise recommendations from physical activity guidelines that are very generic, very bland.

You know, 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise, two times a week of resistance training. But this goes deeper. And it says, for instance, that people with depression, when they are lifting weights to help treat their depression, they actually need to lift weights more often for the medicine effect of the training to work on their disease. Same things goes for people who have type two diabetes. Training twice a week is not enough. They need to be going to the gym four or five times a week. Now, it also speaks to this new problem of the OZempec and Wegevi type drugs that you

bring up. And the problem with weight loss diets has always been that a lot of, of what you lose, 25 to 50% is muscle and bone. Now, when you accelerate the muscle loss, it seems that the acceleration of, pardon me, if you accelerate the weight loss with those drugs, it seems that the acceleration of those secondary losses may also accelerate. I think I just said accelerate about eight times

that sentence. But we don't have a lot of really good research on that yet. Anybody who is taking those drugs would be smart now, though, to be doing the most robust muscle-building exercise they can to counteract those dysfunctional losses. Yeah, I know that, you know, Gabrielle Lyon talks a lot about that and she talks a lot about eating protein and she talks about how these medicines could be, you know, could be helpful. But you are going to have to take like extra precaution. And so I think that that could be helpful. But where you started, I think is probably the most important place to start. And that's with people that are younger. Yeah. So getting people that are older, lifting. Awesome. That's great. It could extend their life. It could really do a lot of things. But if we can prevent people from getting obese or from getting even close to getting diabetes, even. having insulin resistance or anything these things if we can swerve people away from that i think that would be uh probably the way to go now maria fiataroni sing the doctor whose story is told in the last third of stronger um she's the person who had the breakthrough publication in 1990 called high intensity strength training for nonagenarians she's the person who first discovered that even if you're

90 years old. If you lift at 80% of one rep max, you're going to gain as much strength and as much muscle as a younger person following the same program. She has also been working at the other age of the other end of the age spectrum. And some of her most interesting work in that area is with overweight and obese teenagers. She found in something like 12 weeks that, essentially the same program that she would do with a 90-year-old three times a week, 80% of 1RM, three sets of 10, full body workout, would improve metabolic health markers, would stop the growth of waist circumference. And then other research has been showing that even if they don't lose weight, the intramuscular fat, the fat inside the muscles is reduced, which improves metabolic

health, improves muscle function, and just sets them up for much better lifelong health. Let me ask you this, though. Along with that, how do you think that we should adjust some of the ways that even younger kids look at muscle because I think you you kind of alluded to it earlier when you're young especially nowadays the kids who let's say they started sports early or their parents are into fitness and sport and the people who shovel them into that they feel like okay I'm naturally inclined to do these things and then some kids don't feel that way like you even mentioned the book back in ancient Greece like some people felt that there were just some who were gifted with some like they had gifts from Zeus to be strong and large, et cetera.

And people still hold that today where there's there's some of this idea that you can't get it to a certain size or beat a certain strength level without the use of drugs. And some people just have it and some people don't. So I'm curious, how would you help, I think, someone younger fight against that belief? Because I think that if you can attack that when they're younger, they won't have this belief as they get older. You know what I mean? But there's just, at a certain point, it just becomes so deep rooted, a lack of self-belief in what you're able to do when it comes to building muscle or improving your movement that it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yeah. It's always going to depend on the kid. But the first two things that come to mind are first, having examples, you know, talking to your kids, being observant of your kids, who did they look up? to who do they look up to that's strong and and who do they look up to that's strong maybe in an unconventional way kind of like them um really cultivating that connection i mean there's a force that runs through every story in this book that i call the force of example um it's something that you and your brother talked about all the way back in bigger faster stronger you know the the place that Arnold played in your lives. And actually Arnold plays a big role in this book all the way through too. But looking at that, working with that is one important thing.

The other thing that came immediately to mind is thinking about what's actually feasible for the kid and staying for a minute with overweight and obese kid. you know, lifting weights is something that they can be really good at. They might not be able to go out for a long walk. We might not be able to run or jump the way a lot of their peers can. But sitting at a machine and lifting heavy weights is something they can be really good at and can make them feel really good about themselves. All right, Mark, you're getting leaner and leaner, but you always enjoy the food you're eating. So how are you doing it? I got a secret, man. it's called Good Life Protein.

Okay, tell me about that. I've been doing some Good Life Protein. You know, we've been talking on the show for a really long time of certified Piedmontese beef, and you can get that under the umbrella of Good Life Proteins, which also has chicken breast, chicken thighs, sausage, shrimp, scallops, all kinds of different fish, salmon, tilapia. The website has nearly any kind of meat that you can think of lamb.

There's another one that comes of mind. And so I've been utilizing and kind of using some different strategy kind of depending on the way that I'm eating. So if I'm doing a keto diet, I'll eat more fat and that's where I might get the sausage and I might get their 80-20 grass-fed grass-finish ground beef. I might get bacon. And there's other days where I kind of do a little bit more bodybuilder style where the fat is, you know, might be like 40 grams or something like that. And then I'll have some of the leaner cuts of the certified Piedmontese beef. This is one of the reasons why like neither of us find it hard to stay in shape because we're always

enjoying the food we're eating and protein you talk about protein leverage it all the time it's satiating and helps you feel full i look forward to every meal and i can surf and turf you know i could cook up some uh you know chicken thighs or something like that and have some shrimp with it or i could have some steak i would say you know the steak it keeps going back and forth for me on my favorites so i it's hard for me to lock one down but i really love the bavette steaks yeah and then i also love the rib eyes as well you can't go wrong with the ribbyes so Guys, if you guys want to get your hands on some really good meat, you can have to goodlifeproteins.com and use code power for 20% off any purchases made on the website.

Or you can use code Power Project to get an extra 5% off if you subscribe and save to any meats that are a recurring purchase. This is the best meat in the world. Yeah, there's a lot of different types of strength, right? And what you were saying, like looking up to somebody as an example, maybe you look up to grandpa, because he's, like, he's strong, but maybe he's not strong necessarily, like, you didn't seem like deadlift 500 for reps. Yeah. Maybe he's a mechanic or something, and you just, you feel like he's got good grip, right?

And he's, he's got, he's a good example of strength. He's raised a bunch of kids and is successful in other ways. And I think that that view of strength, I think is, is important to have maybe some different ideas in your head about strength. The idea about gifts is a really interesting one because I'll just flat out say it this way, I've always felt like I was gifted. Yeah. But that's because I had an awesome mama.

I had a really, I had really awesome parents, you know, that, and they didn't blow smoke up my ass. They didn't, but they did point out, like, I would be really upset by some, by homework. Like, I remember working on homework and, like, crying, like, just being so frustrated. My dad would show me over and over again. My dad was a numbers guy. My dad's an accountant. So my dad would show me.

And then he would say, all right, I'd like you to try to do this again. And I would try to do it again. And I would kind of get it. because he was like leading me through it. He's like, all right, a little bit more on your own. Okay. I would kind of get it, right? And then he'd be like, all right, this one, next one you're going to do on your own. And I would get it wrong. And it's just hurt. Like, he cried. You know, we both were, yeah, we both were like hurt by it. Like why can't I, why am I struggling with this? Why do I have to put extra time into this? And my mom was the one who pointed out. She was like, well, she's like,

when you run against your friends, you race your friends on the playground, who wins? Like me. She's like, when you arm wrestle your friends, who wins? And when you wrestle your, She's like, you can't even wrestle your friends, Mark, because they cry. You hurt them all the time. You know, my brother's taught me some stuff and like, you know what I mean? So my mom was like, hey, you have a lot of these strengths, but guess what? You know, you unfortunately have a couple things that, you know, you need to just work extra on. And so I think this idea of gifts is kind of sometimes unfortunate because some people may not have those examples in their life to describe what having some of these gifts could look like for you.

My parents were very supportive. They went to every powerlifting meat. They would, you know, they would, if they had to pay for a contest entry or any of that stuff, they were like, how do we do it? Where do we go? You know, you want to go to, you know, drive two hours away to go to a power thing meat. We're going to drive you there, you know, that kind of thing. Right. Now, I mean, among other things, you just made me feel so much better for how I was crying after we were wrestling before this.

Well, that was in Seamus' fault. I wasn't out expecting it seemed to do that. Okay. But the, one of the great things about social media right now is that you can look and find these examples for basically any kind of person. You know, there are people out there who are, I mean, I just saw this morning a like a powerlifting Indian grandmother with knee arthritis. And there are editors of magazines who are kind of geeky, who are now putting up pictures of their workouts online. So, you know, a little kid who's a reader and a writer who doesn't think of himself as a jock

can see this really successful person in newspapers or magazines. Oh, there she is. Oh, my gosh. Um, uh, yeah. Um, and, you know, Jan Todd, who is the main character in another third of this book is really one of the greatest forces of example of our time. She went to a gym in 1973, where she was one of only two women there. And she looked around and this one other woman who was like 115 pounds was deadlifting. She watched this woman build up to a deadlift of about 225. She had never seen anything like this in her life. She said it was like a religious revelation. And she was just fascinated

by a woman exerting great force by means of muscle because she grew up at a time when, as she put it, Girls didn't try hard and girls didn't do sport. So she decided she was going to give a try to setting a world record. Within 18 months, she was able to do that. And that set her off on a career that made her widely considered the strongest woman in the world for 10 years. When I think about Jan, though, the main thing I think, is this line that she told a newspaper reporter when she was performing as a strong woman at a state fair. She said, I don't feel like there are any limits to what I can do anymore.

The main thing it's done for me is that, you know, I'm not afraid anymore. And that all started for her one day in the grocery store. She'd been lifting for a couple months. And she'd been lifting for a couple months and she went to the grocery store and she said, I picked up a watermelon and the watermelon wasn't heavy. So that's what this whole thing is about. You know, strength is about the watermelon effect. It's about it's about going to the grocery store and being able to get your stuff home on your own steam without it tiring you out. Everybody, can find these examples now. And that's just, you know, for all the negativity online, that's a wonderful thing that

social media has given us. You think about strength and like almost longevity. If you think about, you know, people making a journey, you know, across the United States years and years ago or any of these explorations that people had to do over the years, whether it was like in cold temperatures, hot temperatures, there was not any paths paved. Like somebody had to pave these paths and getting across bodies of water and all these different miraculous things that were done over time. And you think about, well, these people weren't, they weren't just walking by themselves.

You know, they're walking with large groups of people, but they're also walking with weight, whether they had a baby in their arms or they had, you know, their stuff, you know, on their shoulder along with, you know, horses and all these other things that they had to carry. I mean, that is, that's like, that's resilience. And that is an important, it's important piece of history for us to recognize that that's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to have a lot of movement. Right.

To try to get ourselves to better spots or better places. That's probably what people were trying to do as they were exploring different land, different temperatures and different, I guess, different things in nature that they could, maybe one area has more berries than another area or whatever it might be or more sunlight or gold or whatever that somebody was searching for. But these are important parts of history. Like that's embedded into our body. Like our body knows how to do these things. We know how to make a weapon to kill something and then not only kill it, but to be able to do something with it. We got to carve it up. Once you carve it up, you've got to carry it. I mean, these things, you know, an animal could

weigh hundreds of pounds. So we see Cam Haynes, you know, walking with a deer on his back and and all these different things. We're designed for some pretty cool, gnarly stuff that's really difficult to do. Right. Right. We've got to find ways of doing it. And I think today we call it fitness. That's like our artificial exercise.

You know, it's a different way of making up all this stuff that we would have had to do previously. I mean, modern life has been designed to make muscles marginal. Modern life has been designed to make it very difficult for us to get strong. stay strong, right? The standard heights of chairs and countertops make it so that we don't really have to bend over to get things. We don't have to reach to get things. I mean, people will be uncomfortable if you're standing. Like, have a seat. That's right. I don't want to sit down. I want to stand up. That's right. I mean, and that's why nobody has like no real people out in the actual world have glutes. You know, the 1% have glutes. That's so funny you say that. You know,

people ain't got no ass. But like to write a book can destroy your glutes. And so I, when I was writing this book, came up with Charles Stocking, the power. I picture you writing your book in a glute bridge. You're like typing. Well, it's almost that. So, Charles stalking, the powerlifting classicist, he told me that when he is working on a book and he can't necessarily do the workouts he needs to do, he will, you know, the workouts he likes to do in his normal life. He has a special writing workout. It's like the desk proofing workout. And it's just two moves. It's a, um, a, uh, uh, like a hip extension, like a, a hip thrust on the edge of your bed or on the edge of a sofa. Um, and of course,

you use a hip circle. Um, uh, I've given probably 10 hip circles to 10 writer friends who've been working on books to save their butts. Um, you try to get up from the desk about every 90 minutes or so. If you've got weight, use it. If not, just do it with body weight. Do three sets of 15 or 20 and then do some kind of row, you know, either either do a bent over row with a weight or go do like a reverse pull-up. And again, three sets of 15 or 20. And for long periods of time when I was working on this and I couldn't do a real gym workout, that's what I would do. Four, five, six times during the day. But you can save your butt. You can save your glutes. You just make it your break kind of instead of Instagram. Can you mention the example you gave in the book of how certain

positions like sitting are actually reforming the body? Because you gave some specific examples of that. Yeah. Well, I mean, sitting at a desk, you are engaging all the flexor muscles on the front of your body and disengaging the extensor muscles on the back. So you're at the desk. You think your your biceps are shrinking in, your pecks are shrinking in, your hip flexers are getting tight, yep, your neck. And that's why this desk proofing workout is designed to counteract all of that. You do the rows to move the tension back to your rhomboids. Oh, you could actually pull up on men's health. There's a whole article about this, an excerpt from the book. Maybe spend a little bit of time just lifting your head up, you know, since you're kind of,

you know, looking down so much, right? Yeah, definitely. Little things like that. Definitely. And, you know, I think this isn't to say that sitting. That's on that Instagram, too. Okay. Yeah. And what about different chairs? You know, just some different chairs, because There are chairs where you can, you know, kind of sit in a slightly different position, right? It'd be that older. There it is, the ancient Greek guide to future-proofing your posture. And there's a link to it in the, yeah. Yeah, some different chairs, like something I'll do at my house sometimes.

I just, I sit on my couch backwards. Yeah. You know, so I rest my forearms, like if I'm texting, and I end up texting a bunch. I'll get up out of my seat and I'll just, I'll turn around. And then my forearms are resting on the back end of the couch. And then my hips are like more forward. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. And it actually gives me like a little bit of a stretch in the quads and stuff like that. Charles Stocking goes to periods where I think he just won't sit in chairs. And so his daughter, who's very young, will say things at school like, my daddy doesn't believe in chairs. that puts him in a weird a weird category yeah you know i don't want us to i hope we're going to get to the mental benefits because you've talked about like dimension all these other things um but you know i i am curious on your idea about uh some of the focuses on appearance especially within today's age of social media and fitness because one cannot deny that um even the

ancient Greeks, you showed so many different, there's so many images of the body and the form that it's easy to marvel at that. But then it's also easy to focus on that as being like the thing that's needed, right? Whereas being able to expand your mind, like Mark was mentioning other forms of fitness, but maybe different types of strong bodies is going to be helpful for people. So I'm just curious what your thoughts are there, because aesthetics cannot be denied, but I think they're also seen as everything for some people. Yeah, yeah. What I think about when you ask that question is the extreme focus that a lot of people have been placing on muscle dysmorphia, the form of body dysmorphia that is preoccupation with a perceived flaw.

in one's own appearance. And so muscle dysmorphia is a preoccupation with the idea that you don't have enough muscle. This is an idea that was proposed by a Harvard psychiatrist in the late 80s, early 90s. It has been a tremendously successful media phenomenon. There are stories about the ruination of our young men, especially by muscle dysmorphia in all kinds of magazines and newspapers. It was, you know, a part of part of the movie that we were talking about a little bit ago, too. It's a really serious problem for some people and it destroys some people's lives. We've seen that. The absolute number of people that it affects, however, in relation to to our over a population is minuscule.

I mean, the most generous estimate of the number of American men who use anabolic steroids or other performing enhancing drugs in connection with working out at the gym, the highest estimate in the most recent statement on this from the American College of Sports Medicine was four million people. The number of older people who are at risk of severe functional disability because of age-related muscle loss is, in the United States alone, about 35 million. So, you know, I understand the problems of excessive focus on appearance, but our society has just much bigger problem. when it comes to muscle and and I really I just I just prefer to focus on those you know I prefer to think about what we can do with the the power that we have in this world of

physical culture that the power that you have in this world of podcasting physical culture to help the people who need this stuff most. And I mean, if I had one goal for this book in one sentence, it would be just to encourage people to think how the world might look if every time they heard the word muscle, the first person they thought of was not some big guy, but they're grandmothers. You start thinking of people that are maybe just strength training in a different way or

something along those lines. Is that what you mean? Actually, actually our grandmothers need heavy weight training. You know, and I think we patronize people with our low expectations of them. it's really the most robust form of weight training that gives the frailest people the biggest response um so would you kind of say like it kind of sounds like you think that everyone

should kind of have this goal to aesthetics like look at this you know person doing this uh glute bridge you see some definition in the legs and the calves and through the chest and everything um it sounds like you're kind of more of a proponent of like not necessarily maybe having like a like a negative connotation surrounding that but and and not necessarily making their making themselves feel bad about their own body but you're you're maybe uh alluding to people should have probably a goal to really not have a lot of body fat and to be fairly lean Well, Jan Todd, when she started training for her world records, started to gain weight. And she wasn't totally comfortable with that.

It didn't exactly comport with her ideas of what feminine beauty should be. but as she put it at a certain point my concerns about my appearance fell away in the face of my own goals and i really think i mean what happened to me over the course of working on this book um was a shift from thinking so much about how i looked because i was just so focused on being at the gym five or six times a week, no excuses, no skipping. You know, if I couldn't eat right, no big deal. If I couldn't be there for an hour, no big deal. But I was going to show up. I was going to do some work instead of no work because I knew and the more I learned, the more I knew that I was just building a house for myself when I'm 90 years old. Now, it did change.

the way that I look. I'm not a huge guy now, but I weigh more than I did then. I look better than I did then. But, you know, when I started the book, but that's not why I do it, you know? And I do think that anybody who really gives themselves to these regimens with any kind of functional or health goal being primary undergoes a transformation of their experience of the aesthetic aspect of this. I mean, I don't know much about your life experience with that in Seema. I know a little bit about yours, Mark, and it seems like that has been a big, it seems like what I've just described is probably a pretty accurate account of something.

You've gone through too, right? Yeah, I would say so. I mean, you know, I always have goals to, I guess, just be better. But it's like, it's a long evolution. You know, I've been like losing weight, I guess, for like almost like 15 years from the time I was, you know, 330 pounds or 12 years or so all the way until now where I'm like 215, 220 and still working my way down a little bit because I have some goals with running. So I think I think those things will match up. but yeah i mean i i i kind of to me it's like a hobby that's kind of the way i look at it but i like what you're saying i think that like if you just take your average person who's

you know say like mid 40s or something like that and they just start going to the gym and they have like their goal isn't necessarily to get ripped their goal isn't necessarily to like lose 50 pounds their goal is just to get to the gym you know get yourself to the gym start to put into work start to eat the protein make some of the small changes where your diet doesn't need to be perfect doesn't need to be spectacular doesn't need to be anything complicated or confusing just see if you can start to reduce rather than eliminate reduce fast food and fried food and some of those things that we know that aren't good for us and then kind of see where the chips fall and most likely if you're able to stick with something for let's just say two three years I know that sounds like a long time but if you're

able to stick with something for two or three years, you might have a pretty good shift in your body composition. You might have lost 10, 15, maybe 20 pounds of body fat and you might have gained a couple pounds of muscle mass. It's like people are going to be completely shocked with how you look and on top of that the way that you move and the way that you can move weights around, just, you know, picking up stuff at your house and carrying groceries and so on. Our friend Gabrielle Lyon has a great way of talking about this. She talks about obesity as being not a problem of being over fat, but being under-muscled. And this really goes back to, she arrived at that formulation on her own and independently, but the same concept has been in circulation since the

late 80s when in Boston at a laboratory at Tufts, some researchers decided that really the key to all of the diseases of aging was body composition and that people needed to stop thinking about body weight and simply think about body comp. You have a great point because when you think about the strongman athletes, I mean, I know these are extreme people and I understand their performance. enhancing drug side of things, but it's an interesting example. Or even when you take some of the people that aren't on performance enhancing drugs, I always point out like Jesus Olaveris, we had him on the podcast squatting over 1,000 pounds with just a pair of knee sleeves on. He's in a drug tested federation. That guy's amount of muscle is insane. And the things he can do, he's an unbelievable

mover on top of having that type of strength. But he's, I think, like 400 pounds. And he does have a large amount of muscle mass on him. I'm sure after his career is done with powerlifting, I'm sure he'll, you know, maybe want to lose some LBs just for general health purposes, because it's probably not great to be that large for a super long time. But if you look at Brian Shaw and some of the other guests that we've had on the show, Eddie Hall comes to mind. I'm not saying these guys are pictures of health, but what I'm saying is that even with their size, because they have so much muscle mass, they're not in that category of being more like a obese person with diseases and stuff like that.

You know, with what you're mentioning, what both of you guys are talking about, I think it makes me think that like when people think of their identity, you know, you're a writer, you look at yourself as an athlete, runner, lifter, but because of those things, you find it easier to just do these things, right? And someone that doesn't identify themselves as being an athlete puts a barrier between themselves and doing certain things that an athlete would do. Like you talk about the build and the breakdown of muscle that happens, right? Whereas somebody who doesn't identify as an athlete goes into the gym, they break down,

like, ooh, this hurts, this is soreness, this is bad, I'm moving away from this. And I think that every single human being is an athlete. And the sport is just becoming a stronger human being. It doesn't have to be that your sport is bodybuilding or running or whatever. You can do those things. You can do pickleball. That can be a sport. But underlying all of that is your athletic goal of being a stronger human who can be a strong human forever.

And what does a strong human need to do? They need to walk. They need to be able to get up and down. They need to be strong enough to pick up the watermelon without struggling. Right. They need all these things. And they also need to know how to recover. Right.

Which is an athlete. An athlete does that. And a strong human has to do that too. Right. You know? Right. I will never go to a doctor ever again about my general health. All they want to do is put you on pills.

Really well said there by Dana White. Couldn't agree with them more. A lot of us are trying to get jacked and tan. A lot of us just want to look good, feel good. And a lot of the symptoms that we might acquire as we get older, some of the things that we might have high cholesterol or these various things, it's amazing to have somebody looking at your blood work as you're going. through the process as you're trying to become a better athlete, somebody that knows what they're

doing. They can look at your cholesterol. They can look at the various markers that you have and they can kind of see where you're at and they can help guide you through that. And there's a few aspects too where it's like, yes, I mean, no, no shade to doctors, but a lot of times they do want to just stick you on medication. A lot of times there is supplementation that can help with this. Merrick Health, these patient care coronators are going to also look at the way you're living your lifestyle because there's a lot of things you might be doing that if you just adjust that boom you could be at the right levels including working with your testosterone and there's so many people that i know that are looking for they're like hey should i do that they're very curious um and they think that testosterone is going to

all of a sudden kind of turn them into the hole but that's not really what happens it can be something that can be really great for your health because uh you can just basically live your life a little stronger just like you were maybe in your 20s and 30s and this is the last thing to keep in mind guys When you get your blood work done at a hospital, they're just looking at like these minimum levels. At Merrick Health, they try to bring you up to ideal levels for everything you're working with. Whereas if you go into a hospital and you have 300 nanograms per deciliter of test, you're good, bro, even though you're probably feeling like shit.

At Merrick Health, they're going to try to figure out what's like things you can do in terms of your lifestyle. And if you're a candidate, potentially TRT. So these are things to pay attention to to get you to your best self. And what I love about it is a little bit of the back and forth that you get with the patient care coordinator. They're dissecting your blood work. It's not like if you just get this email back and it's just like, hey, try these five things. Somebody's actually on the phone with you going over every step and what you should do.

Sometimes it's supplementation. Sometimes it's TRT. And sometimes it's simply just some lifestyle habit changes. All right, guys, if you want to get your blood work checked and also get professional help from people who are going to be able to get you towards your best levels, that's americhealth.com and use code power project for 10% off any panel of your choice. One of the biggest differences between the way that we experience strength today and the way that ancient Greeks did is that an ancient Greek poet would often describe a warrior or an athlete as receiving strength. More likely to say they received strength than

they had strength, and that's because there were eight ancient Greek words for strength, which Charles Stocking has written a whole book about, the eight ancient Greek words for strength in Homer's Iliad. Now, only two of those kinds of strength, Stocking points out, are holy human qualities. The other six are collaborations between people and the gods. gods or gifts of the gods. And so when Stocking thinks about ancient training, one of my favorite parts of researching this book was getting to know the only long text about athletic training that has survived from the entire ancient world.

It's called the Gymnasticus. And it's not exactly a training manual. It's more of a, the Stocking calls it, a defense of athletic training as a legitimate form of social and cultural knowledge. And the first sentence in the gymnastics is, let us consider athletic training a form of wisdom inferior to no other. Stocking has translated this whole book. He's written a series of great essays about it. I walk through a lot of that in Stronger. And what it all kind of adds up to in the end is a vision of training as what Charles

Stocking calls a practice of possibility. And he explains that by saying, what are the gods to the ancient Greeks. The gods are the embodiment of human possibility. They are what would happen. They run as fast as we could run if we had no limits. And so training is, and athletics were ways that people could get a little closer to that experience of the gods, the possibilities of our physical existence. And victory was another really key idea in ancient Greek athletics. It really was the defining idea because victory was everything.

There was no second place in the ancient Olympics. There were no style points. And there were no team sports either. You know, individual victory was what everybody was going for. And so victory, Charles Stocking points out, is it's the ultimate actualization of that possibility. Now, for a runner in the ancient Olympics, victory was winning a race to take a torch, to complete a sacrifice to Zeus, to you and a powerlifting meet. Victory was getting the highest number. And to the Indian woman with knee arthritis,

Victory is probably carrying her bags of groceries all by herself to her car. So there she is. Yeah. You know, that's what you're saying there is what I just hope every, like, it's what I hope everybody can learn how to do. take take these ideas of athletics take these ideas of sport just implement them in your life doesn't mean you have to go play a sport but just you are an athlete and have that identity

I mean like just own that identity you can be a writer and an athlete you can work at a bank and be an athlete every single person no matter what you do who you are what your weight is you're an athlete and treat yourself like one and I think that's it's I mean it's interesting because, for example, you see many people who are athletes when they are younger, they stop playing their sports, they don't keep the habit, and then they end up being just as unhealthy as many people who never really took care of their bodies, right? So that's why it's so important to keep this as a lifelong practice, rather it being a practice that you're just using for your sporting endeavor. A study of thousands of alumni of Harvard actually found that the ones who played sports as undergraduates who then gave it up ended up being in worse shape in older age than people who had either never done it or picked it up in you know

as they got older so why do you think that is oh that's a question about mechanism that would take a physiologist to answer I got you but like let's let's even just like If we were, if we just guessed, right? Like, I don't know. I think it's because, you know, I know a lot of athletes who are in that same boat that you're talking about, right? Because I spent a lot of time with athletes. And these athletes who are in these situations practically weren't able to shift any of

those habits into just being now a working human being in the marketplace. Because all of their athletic identity, the reason they recovered was for track. The reason they trained was for track. The reason they did all these things, ate healthy, was for track. Right. Track is gone. Right. Why am I going to do this shit anymore?

I was going to eat. I have a kid. Right. But practically, again, the mechanisms might be more complicated. But seeing so many of the people I've known, that's what they did. They just lost it. Right. But so great point.

And the answer to your question is, life is the sport. Life is the sport. And the sooner we figure out that life is the sport and learn to play that, learn to take whatever actions we need to take to counteract the damage that our daily habits are doing to us, the sooner we figure out that, the sooner we get to victory. Sarkopina is an opponent. how the hell are you going to beat sarcopenio man you know you're going to get in there and and you're

going to get on a hypertrophy program yeah you know you're going to build muscle not because you want to look good naked although you're going to look better naked um but because it's really what you need to be a happy healthy 90 year old i think competition structure you know someone playing like college football or something like that or somebody going to the military, they kind of feel like they have, you know, in the military. I mean, what's your, what's your option? You don't have it. It's militant, right?

And some people need a milt. For some people, what I've found is that they need a militant mindset. Right. I have some friends that, you know, you would be better off, you know, saying, hey, let's just meet every day at 4 a.m. in gym. They, they, I don't know why, but that like turns them on. They dig that. That's like they're up their alley for some reason.

And if you were to say, hey, you know what, let's just chill and let's like meet at like 10, they might not show up, you know, because they won't they, they thing has to be really difficult. I found that to be true with a lot of different things that I've suggested over the years. You know, if you tell someone like, hey, you know, jumping rope is good. You should probably jump rope once a week. They might be like, well, after that, I'm just not going to, they're not even going to bother because it's not much of a challenge. Yeah. They say, hey, you know what? I want to present this 30 day challenge to you.

I'd like you to, because I believe in jumping rope and I think it's fantastic, you should just try to jump rope every, you know, maybe twice a day for 30 days and just see what you get out of it and just do five minutes at a time or something. Probably be more people hyped up for that because they have to kind of rise to the occasion because it's like a challenge rather than, you know, just saying like, oh, you just kind of do it here and there. It's like two almost like low level sometimes. Yep. Another thing I want to kind of talk about, pushing off that is that if we continue to just think about what we're doing at the gym, our progress and our programs at the gym as being about ourselves, we're thinking way

too small. The wealth that we have because of these regimens is something that really could change the world and and has um tell you a little story from the 1930s there was a kid in Alabama who got diagnosed with rheumatic fever and his doctors told him to just rest he had to stay in bed for four months and like any teenage boy he was going crazy but lucky for him there was a brand new magazine out it was called strength health and it was full of articles about old strong men and strength and health which I think may have turned into strength and fitness which may have turned into muscle and fitness right is that am I right on that or am I way off this is so cool I don't know the genealogy of those titles but

this dude's jacked what years is yeah yeah this is I think that's 1935 on the cover why doctors are seldom healthy. Yeah, yeah. So he's reading these magazines and he gets so fired up that as soon as they let him get out of bed, he goes wandering through local junkyards and he finds railroad parts and he builds himself a barbell. I mean, I walked into your gym and saw so much, you know, homemade stuff. I thought of this kid, Thomas DeLorm and what he had done. He made himself so strong that they started calling. him Bama's Hercules when he went to UAB. He'd pick up the back of a truck during the halftime show of a football game. He went to New York City. He worked as a model for a while.

And then he decided to become a doctor. So about 10 years on, it's 1944, and he gets sent to Gardner General Hospital in Chicago. So toward the end of the war, of soldiers coming in, wounded, going in for surgery, filling up the beds, and they just can't clear out the beds fast enough. They've got to get people stronger and better, faster, but they don't know how to do it. And physical therapy isn't helping because the dogma in physical therapy at that time was that weak muscles, quote, should never be worked to the limits of their strength. That was what you read in your textbook if you were a physical therapist in the 1940s. But this doctor, because of his experience, reading these muscle

magazines, basically watching Mark Bell's power project, you know, and hearing what the guests were saying, you know, reading what he found there, he decided, I'm going to try heavy weightlifting for these soldiers, and he got them so much better, so much faster, even though all of his colleagues were saying, don't do it, you're going to hurt people, that the whole U.S. Army ended up adopting his system. He went on to do experiments with adolescents, with women. He worked with children with polio and you can actually have amazing pictures in here I marked a couple of them including one of a kid with polio who's doing a knee extension and getting his little legs strong so DeLorm sets all this up he really starts to change the whole subfield

of physical medicine and orthopedic rehab but there's there's still a problem even as it's becoming a success his colleagues remain skeptical because

he's using the wrong words he's calling it heavy resistance exercise and people are just freaked out by the word heavy so he sits with his wife and he says here's my problem How do I get people to not look down on this?

And she comes up with the idea of calling it progressive resistance exercise. Now, you see the difference there? Heavy resistance exercise versus progressive resistance. It's the difference between challenge and invitation. And just that shift of language is probably the most important thing that ever happened. to bring weight training to a wider population. There's a little postscript to that story, though, which is that when I was working on Stronger,

I decided at one point I was going to spend like a week just reading the magazines from the years that he was a teenager. And I read and I read and I started to come across. across this, it's not on the cover of this one. But I started to come across this phrase, progressive training and then progressive resistance. And then I came across in the advice columns, the exact protocol for one repetition maximum strength testing

that he used in his scientific research. And the 80% of 1 rep max, the 3 sets of 10, it all comes from a muscle magazine that this doctor read when he was a teenager. I love it. And that has been the basis for basically every national and international exercise guideline about resistance exercise ever since. So there is somebody listening to. maybe not this episode of the podcast, but some episodes of your podcast who is getting ideas about training and is going to become a doctor or is going to become a scientist and is going to take these out in the world and really change the world. But, you know, I don't

know if Thomas DeLorm forgot where he first ran across those ideas. or if he kind of intentionally suppressed them because he didn't want to sound stupid in front of his colleagues. In that book, he writes, most persons, especially of the medical profession, are bewildered or repulsed by the so-called bodybuilder. Going back to this. I think, you know, prejudice. You start thinking about those times, a lot of homophobic stuff, you know, like these magazines,

this guy's like his butt hanging out or whatever he's got these like skimpy shorts on. And there was a lot of these things were like suppressed, I think, because of that. And I think like if a young man was looking at this, you know, X amount of years ago, they would be considered to be very weird. You know what I mean? That's what that's what people would call him. It's a guy's really weird. I think Arnold mentioned that.

Arnold mentioned he was looking at all these magazines and his dad was like, what are you doing you know and he's going to Arnold wanted to go to California and be with these other guys that look like this and his dad was always like what's going on here right right and so those things were like not not quote unquote tolerated you know right right I first started hearing about transcriptions from Thomas to Lauer yep and you know Thomas is somebody it's an animal with working out you got a chance to work out with him I worked out with him and he's kind of always on the front lines of like you know finding out about these new companies that have have cool things. But I didn't really realize that transcriptions was the first company to put out methylene blue. Now look at methylene blue. It's so popular. It's everywhere.

It's one of those things. If you guys listen to this podcast, you know, I'm very iffy with the supplements that I take because there's a lot of shady stuff out there. You've got to be careful. The great thing about transcriptions is that when people want to get methylene blue, usually they'll go on Amazon, they're going on there these other sites. It's not third-party testing. It's not dosed.

A lot of people end up with toxicity from the blue that they, get because there's no testing of it. Transcriptions, they have third-party testing for their products. It's a dose so you know easily what exact dose of methylene blue you're getting in each troki. So you're not making some type of mistake. There's not going to be anything in it. It's safe. You can have it dissolve and you can turn your whole world blue if you want or you can just swallow it.

They have two different types of methylene blue. They have one that is, I believe, dose at 16 milligrams and they have another one that's dosed at 50 milligrams. So make sure you check the milligrams. I don't recommend anybody start at 50 milligrams, but the 16, I feel, is very safe. You can also score the trokies and you can break them up into smaller bits. Yes, what I do. And in addition to that, on top of the methylene blue, they have a lot of other great products of stuff as well.

They got stuff for sleep. They got stuff for calming down, all kinds of things. I got to say, I use it about two or three times a week. I use it before Jiu-Jitsu. And the cool thing that I've noticed, and I've paid attention to this over the past few months, is that after sessions, I don't feel as tired. So it's almost like I've become more efficient with just the way I use my body in these hard sessions of grappling. And it's like, cool.

That means that, I mean, I could go for longer if I wanted to and my recovery is better affected. It's pretty great. I know Dr. Scott, sure, we had him on the podcast and he talked quite a bit about how he recommends Methylene Blue to a lot of the athletes that he works with. and they're seeing some profound impacts. And one of the things I've heard about it is that it can enhance red light. So those are you doing red light therapy or those of you that have some opportunities to get out into some good sunlight. It might be a good idea to try some methylene blue before you go out on your walk or run outside or whatever activity is that you're going to do outside.

And this stuff is great, but please, like first off, they have stuff for staying calm. They have stuff for sleep. But remember, this stuff isn't a substitution for sleep. is this in a substitution for taking care of nutrition. This is supposed to be an add-on to all the things that we already should be doing, and it's going to make things so much better if you're doing everything else, too. And I think this is just a little different, too, than just adding some magnesium to your diet. I think this is a little different than, you know, treat these things appropriately.

Make sure you do some of your own research, but. Oh, if you're taking medications. Yeah. You better talk to your doctor first. Don't, don't be popping these things. And if you're taking any medications at all, it would be good to double triple, quadruple. check and make sure that you're safe. Transcriptions has a lot of great things that you need.

So go and check out their website when you have the opportunity. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness never strength. Catch you guys later. But yeah, the basic point is just that even when we're all just having fun learning about this stuff, there's also something happening where the regimens that we're creating that Thomas DeLorm created, that Jan Todd created, just to pursue their athletic interests actually end up changing strength and health for a broader population in a really

durable way. And yet, this is a history that's still so new that it's really, vulnerable. And one of the things that blew the top of my head off while I was researching this book was coming across in the 19th century in the Journal of the American Medical Association discoveries that then would disappear and show up as discoveries a hundred years later. In the 1890s, the Journal of the American Medical Association, published an article about a man in England, major Knox Holmes, an octogenarian who, by riding his bicycle,

as many octogenarians are riding around in Davis today, grew the size of his vasty muscles, of his quads, thus refuting physiological doctrine that new muscle, may not be grown beyond three score and 10, 70 years old. Yeah. Okay. So that's the 1890s, but then nobody listens, right?

It's 1990 before high-intensity strength training and non-agenarians gets published, that like world-changing study that that I had the real honor of describing an lot of detail in this book. And for a hundred years, there were old people who were lying in their beds, like, in helpless pain because they had these withered legs and everybody thought there was nothing that could be done for them. I mean, it's 1988 before mainstream physiology recognizes that it's even possible to build actual muscle for men or women in their 60s. Like we believed until 1988 that any increase in strength was owing solely to a neural paradigm and had nothing to do with mass building, which was considered to be impossible.

And, you know, what's even interesting about that, too? It's not just muscle. It's also bone. And I think it's recently, things have started changing in terms of some of the, I wouldn't say the mainstream medical messaging when it comes to building bone after 30, but you start having professionals like Gabriel Lyne, we've been talking about this for a very long time, start hearing P.R. T. I talk about building bone density after your age of 30, right? Because there's this idea within certain medical circles that like you really won't be building much bone density after that age. You'll build most of your bone before 30. But I know people who are in their 40s, 50s and 60s, I've helped people who are in their 40s, 50s and 60s build bone density at those senior age by progressive resistance training and different aspects of training. So it's like it's a very weird thing that in, it's good that more of the medical industry is catching up to the power of that form of training or just physical training in general. But I think it puts more, it puts less of a limiter on the beliefs of people who are trying to change themselves because now they know they can do it if they work at it. Right.

Anybody, by the way, not just someone who looks like Mark or anybody can. Right. Right. There's so many different things to train with nowadays too. So we could look at our world and say, oh, it's easy to be fat. But you could also look at our world and say, well, it's actually easy to be fit because there's more fit. food everywhere like there's more there's more companies like legendary and quest and uh you know there's more protein powder and all these different things and some people might you know view

those things as maybe not the healthiest thing because they're still processed in some ways but you it's not like you can't order healthy stuff off of door dash you can make and it's not like you can't make a healthy decision at 2 a m ordering off a door dash when you're playing a video game uh but the likelihood that you're not you know getting insomnia a cookie or something like that at two in the morning is probably pretty low. And so in modern society, there's a lot of gyms. There's a lot of things that are easy. There's companies that, you know, make sleds.

And we always talk about the torque tank just because that product is just so awesome. It's magnetically charged. You don't even need to put weights on it. You just push it and it gives you resistance. We did a workout with it like two days ago. And we just used the tank back and forth for like 30 minutes. you get just such a great workout so simple you're you know building muscle mass and all kinds of stuff when you're doing that activity something i find interesting and is is the link between

or uh yeah the link between the physical and and your mind you know like body mind spirit type stuff that really fascinates me a lot but i almost don't understand how you tap into the depths of the mind without going through the physical. Like there's physical stuff that you do. And I'm sure you can challenge yourself mentally. You know, I've been to seminars and stuff like that where you just got to walk out of there

and you've got to like take a little break and you see a couple other people there too because you're at like a two or three day seminar and you're learning stuff really fast and you just need to like sit down for a second and not hear another speaker talk. And so I understand that, you know, you could be learning really dense material.

Maybe somebody in college that's studying for a PhD or something like that, I could, I can understand and see that that they're really pushing the mental limit. But that that crossover between the two, I think only truly happens through the physical. You've got to be like working your ass off on something. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it makes perfect sense that what is anabolic for the body is going to be anabolic for the brain. One of my favorite through lines of the work of Maria Fiataroni Singh, who did the work on depression that we talked about a little bit earlier, is her growing interest in and her increasing investigations of weight training

and brain health. She found she's the part of the first team that ever observed that weight training exercise, but not aerobic exercise, increases the size of the brain's posterior cingulate cortex, which is the part of the brain that's the seat of emotional memory, of empathy. And it's the first part of the brain that atrophies in Alzheimer's disease before people begin showing any other symptoms of the disease. Wow. So, um, I think that's a really, there's something really profound in there, too, you know, about weight training connecting us to one another. Another amazing study she did of people with mild cognitive impairment, which is the early stage

of dementia, showed that weight training on its own was superior in many respects. to cognitive training on its own or to combined weight training and cognitive training in slowing the progress of MCI of mild cognitive impairment to full-blown dementia. So, like, to simplify that, lifting weights protects against the progression to dementia for some of the people who are most susceptible to that disease, most likely to develop that syndrome. It's kind of amazing that, like, you know, thousands of years ago, you know, the ancient Greeks and Romans and stuff like that

seem to have been on the right path with a lot of these things. And you've mentioned that these things have kind of come and gone a bunch of different times. Why do you think sometimes they disappear a little bit? It seems like competition and, you know, sprinting against somebody else or running against somebody else and doing these different track activities that they may have done, it seems like that was a popular thing. Why do you think some of that stuff has, you know, maybe just it falls out of favor here and there? It's a combination of this persistent prejudice against muscle, which is fortified by,

by the indomitable myth of brain and brawn. I mean, it's like any prejudice. We simply have to cultivate an everyday consciousness of it and actively take actions to counteract it both in our own and other people's lives. and really to reach out and help or to be constantly open to possibilities of sharing what we know about training with people who are interested and and and might want to know it. There are some people that are really adverse to doing anything healthy or like, you know,

like trying a healthy drink or or it's just amazing it's like man what's the why is there so much resistance to it but I guess you know I think people just think that physical activity has to be so difficult and I think that that's like a scarcity thing I think people are like worried or concerned or they're you know oftentimes when in Seema and I show people the rope which is something we both felt too when we first tried the rope is you're going to look a little you're going to look a little stupid. You're going to look a little silly. And there's some fear in that. And I would imagine that, you know, if somebody's, you know, not, somebody does, somebody feels fat, they feel way too

skinny. They feel way too short, way to this, way to that. And they're going into a gym environment. You know, there's maybe some, probably a lot of intimidation and probably, you know, some resistance in getting started maybe. Yes. And I think related to that, it makes people feel alone. There's a lot of research on the factors relating to adherence or, you know, starting and adhering to exercise programs. The research isn't of the highest quality, but some of it is, some of it is insightful and poignant. And one of the most unforgettable papers I read about that was a study. of people who lived in low-income housing project

in Boston and most of them were inactive, most of them were extremely overweight but most of them said they wanted to exercise and they were ready. They

just didn't know what to do and they didn't think there would be anybody to help them. And look deeper into the social science research on what gets people starting to lift weights and continuing to lift weights.

One of the things I noticed, especially about people who are in demographic groups least likely to lift weights, like older women, people with type 2 diabetes, is that social support was one of the very top factors. Basically, if people have people in their lives who are there to encourage them and support them in lifting, they'll do it. And if they don't have those people in their lives, they're not going to do it. Oh, go ahead. No, we did some rope flow before this. And like we were talking about at the beginning, it was a blast.

and I loved it. And you were so generous as to say that you would give me access to your program online. But one thought I had, you know, in like just in my deepest heart as I was leaving was, it's such a bummer that I'm probably going to be the only person I know who's doing this in my world, you know, when I go home. And I thought, like, I'm just going to have to. decide that I'm going to be the guy in the garden doing this weird thing. And, you know, I'm going to have to, we'll have to FaceTime or something. Yeah, yeah. We'll be

together. You know, okay, so on the note of like, women tend to naturally be more communal. You know what I mean? So it does make total sense. I mean, that's why you'll see certain places like Orange Theory, certain things that have classes because these communal classes, you'll just see these people, women congregate more. Right. Because their friends are there. Cycling classes and so forth. Right.

But the other thing, I think, you know, you mentioned it earlier in terms of finding certain, like, finding a level of interest in fitness. Something that Mark has mentioned for years now is to pursue one's interests. He always tells people to pursue their interests. And I, one of the things I love about physical culture in the book, you talked about, like the ancient Greeks, et cetera. but I think one of the cool things is that worldwide, you'll see different forms of physical culture. Like this, this mace right here in the east, Persia and India, I'm going to mention India first.

Because whenever I mentioned Persia, that Indian people are like, we made it first. So in India and Persia, they have clubs, maces, they have their own form of physical culture. In Asia, they have different forms of swing, also types of kettle-like implements and throwing it in the air. There's all these different types of lifting. And I think that can, and even like there's, there's rock lifting that people do in sandbags. There's so many different forms of lifting and creating a stronger structure that I'm excited that more and more people are being exposed to these things because sometimes people find typical barbell lifting disinteresting, unfortunately, because it can be very beneficial.

But for some people, there's maybe some intimidation factor or they don't think that's for them or they do it for a little bit and they don't find it fun. But things like the rope, even though it's a movement practice, there's a level of resistance to that rope. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's light, but it can be heavier if you want it. It's still forming a level of resistance on the body.

And then all these other things, they can be implements that people can have a level of fun with and people can have a level of play with. I think that's one of the things that I try to encourage people to figure out a way to explore when it comes to their physical practice. How can we turn this into something that doesn't feel like a workout anymore? It just feels like you're playing around. You know what I mean? And I think that's going to be one of the things that allows people to stick with this for a

lifetime where their physical aspect of what they do doesn't feel. Like I know some people enjoy it to continue to feel like a challenge. But when it can just feel like you're picking up a sandbag and you're playing around with it, you're also building your structure while having a level of play. play, which as adults, we need play. Right. You know what I mean? Right.

I think it's a lot of exposure, you know, to being exposed to a lot of different things. Because when I think of like a hypertrophy, like a standard hypertrophy workout, like a regular, you know, couple sets of like, you know, eight to 12 reps or something like that. Yeah. Usually, you know, you have to do three to four sets and you have to do, you know, maybe two to three exercises, right? It's like starts to be like a lot of work. Yeah.

And it's like a lot of the same work. Now, some people may really enjoy that. I sometimes enjoy that, like just doing, you know, 10 sets just for triceps or something like that or 10 sets of chest or 10 sets of legs or any of those kind of combinations of things. But I like what you're just saying there in Seema where if somebody is dragging a sled or pushing, you know, pushing something, pushing a car or throwing some med balls around or even just walking with some weight, like, you know, putting a 20 pound sandbag on your shoulder

or walking with just one 20 pound dumbbell and switching hands while you walk maybe a mile or something like that. I think that just brings like a different level of what it is you're doing. And it just changes that dynamics so much. So it might be, you know, you just got to, I guess, find a foot in the door. Like what thing are you going to like enough to do to where, Or maybe you're like, you know what, I should probably start to do some of those other things, too. Like once you're in the gym messing with the med ball and utilizing a sled, maybe you're like, you know what? Some of those machines would probably be decent for me to do too.

So I can do like direct hypertrophy work. But yeah, when I think about like a bodybuilding workout or powerlifting workout, if they are, they are kind of boring, they have always been boring for me. Like, I like them to some degree. But there's, you're just like, man, this is. really time intensive. It takes a long time to do. And as I got stronger and stronger, forget about it.

I mean, it would just, a workout would just take forever because of the warm-ups and the preparation and all the stuff. And so I can understand why the public would be very resistant to some of that stuff. But there are more intermediate stuff or there are other things you can do, strongman training, cross-fit workouts, met cons, body weight exercises, calisthenics. In this book, are in these magazines, these. strength and health magazines that you brought us it's unbelievable some of the exercises that people are doing in here this is exciting to me because i'm like the i haven't seen a lot of these

exercises before or they're uh reminding me of exercise i've seen from years ago but some of the stuff they're doing in here is like they're lifting each other you know like one person's lift i'm like holy crap like the the amount so my point is is that your training can can be so vast It doesn't have to be here. It doesn't have to be this tunnel vision thing of I'm going in the gym and I'm doing three sets of ten of three different exercises. It's like, oh, man, you know, and five sets of five and all these different things that you've got to do. It's like, man, that stuff I understand. It can be boring.

But man, what about calisthenics? What about some of these other activities that we can do? Yeah, the principle of specificity is something to always keep in mind. And again, the answer to what people are going to do is going to depend on the individual. But the research is really clear in saying that the clinical benefits for exercise, resistance exercise, as medicine, especially for older people who are suffering from some of the chronic diseases we've been talking about. you can get those in 45 minutes twice a week, you know, it just doesn't have to be big and complicated. It's not like a bodybuilding workout or a powerlifting workout. You know, it's a, it's a much smaller investment of time, particularly for untrained people with a huge payoff. And

if we're thinking in very specifically about the oldest and frailest people, there's an emerging consensus that the priority of the modality of exercise needs to follow the stages of getting up from a chair. So what do you need to stand up from a chair? Strength. Yeah. You need strength. You need strength. what do you need once you're stood up before you take your first step you need balance and then what do you need as you walk across the room that's where your aerobic capacity comes in but if you try to do it in a different order for old people for frail people you're actually subjecting them to dangers i mean there have been a couple of of uh trials of walking as therapy for teaching people to walk that result in falls, that injure people

and put them way back toward the goal of walking. But if you start with strength, move on to balance and then work on aerobics for the oldest people, that is going to work best. I'm really happy, though, that you also mentioned the balance aspect there. I think that's something that is missed out on, but it's also something that can be very easily added into once daily life. It's something that we're over at, there's a community that I do some stuff in, and where people are doing stuff like that every single day. So like, you know, you're doing a little bit of rope flow. One of the things you can do is you can go up on one leg and do that practice. Oh, wow. You know, in the morning, you can, while you're brushing your teeth, you could go

up on one leg and just see if you could, like, these are little things. If, you know, One of the most powerful things one can do for movement is figure out ways of baking certain aspects of movement into the habits of their day. So it now becomes something they don't have to think about. You know what I mean? And I think that's, again, that's the beauty of like when one plays a sport and they're an athlete in a specific sport, they think about that sport all the time. When you were powerlifting, tell the story about like the couch.

Tell the story about the couch, bro. Yeah, I mean, when I was powerlifting, I thought about power lifting all the time. I mean, I would wake up from, you know, I'd have a dream about, like, benching and I'd, you know, move all around like crazy when I was sleeping. But, yeah, even sitting on the couch, like, before I'd sit on the couch, I would, like, hit a squat and I'd, boom, you know, a couple, a couple quick reps before I would sit on the couch, getting up off the toilet. Like, it didn't matter what I was doing.

It was like, try to think of being, like, explosive with just about anything I was doing. So, yeah, it was baked into my day. And I wanted Mark to mention that just to say, like. you don't have to be a powerlifter to have those types of ideas to your health and fitness. I still have like weird thoughts of just certain things. Like as soon as I park my car, I'm like, okay, get out of the car. Like just have like an initial like, I'm not trying to like break some record or anything. I'm not trying to look like a crazy person or anything like that.

But I'm like, let me just like kind of pop into getting out of the car rather than getting out and being like, oh, how's it going and see you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. being all grizzled and old, you know? I'm trying to. Oh, yeah, here. This is a, this is a great one. This is me getting off, off this, uh, this couch, uh, when I was like 320 pounds or something like that. This is hilarious. I had to go, I had to go sideways on this one because it's super low. This body squatted over a thousand though, so. The cushions are really sunk in when you're that heavy. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's the cushions for sure. Exposure. Oh, I did it. I did it. Victory. I thought. I thought I would even have to go out of that side of it. Look at my face. Wow. That's health right there. That's what I'm saying. Like, you know, any outside of being a athlete in sport, like you were talking about, Michael, you're mentioning, you know, now that sport is life. So, like,

how can, like, maybe can you go down to the ground, you know, before you get old, before you get to that place where going down to the ground and coming up feels like it's something you need to think about, it's a chore. Can you make that a habit in your youth in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, Because, you know, I do jiu-jitsu. So naturally, we're getting up and down all the time, right? But can you, as someone who doesn't do jiu-jitsu, spend a little bit of time on the ground? Right? And then get up and do the other stuff you need to do.

Like, you could read on the ground. You could take notes on the ground. Because I guarantee you 10 years from now, that's not going to be a problem. Right, right, right. Preemptive care. That's all it is. Yeah, yeah. I love that.

Where can people find your book and where can they find out more about you? Instagram Michael Joseph Gross website Michael josephgross.com the book is everywhere any bookstore any online bookseller and I want to say this is been I guess my my favorite book on strength in the past five years and the funny thing is you're not like you saw like you're a coach or you're someone who is a you've heard them personally training people but just the stories and the way that you put these ideas in the book and the paradoxical ideas too it was beautifully written you know and i've read a lot of strength-based books to teach people about stuff but this one right here it's uh it's it's very it's super motivating for me so i just want to say thanks for writing

this and everybody y'all should read this seriously it's really good thank you so much yeah and we had a wild hunt conditioning on before and a bunch of times he's a friend of ours that's his name on Instagram but he uh you know has he studies a lot of a lot of the history of strength and and talks about um you know the ancient greeks and romans and tribal people and so forth utilizing different strategies for strength training and it's uh it's just so cool to hear like so many these things they've been around for a really long time we think that you know something's kind of new and there's really it's very rare there's uh that there's something new under the sun but it's nice to have this to me it like it backs up what we're doing you know when i see some of this movement uh in some of

these books you know it makes me think of you know some of what ben patrick does with the knees over toes and some of the movement that we've had uh with some of that and some movement that we have more recently with people practicing how to move better and some of the uh things that we've seen in strength training and stuff so it's it's nice it kind of backs up what we've been talking about on this show for such a long time and it just reconfirms what we've already known is that strength is never weakness and weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.