Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2697: 7 Lies Older People are Told About Fitness

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

7 Lies Older People are Told About Fitness What can happen if you exercise properly? Based on science! (1:15) 7 Lies Older People are Told About Fitness #1 - Cardio is the best form of exercise for the aging population. (5:12) #2 - Your body won’t get stronger or build muscle. (9:02) #3 - Exercise is too dangerous. (12:22) #4 - Exercise will make my pain worse or bad for my joints. (14:29) #5 - Exercise doesn’t help with mental health. (20:04) #6 - I’m already active. Why do I need more exercise? (21:03) #7 – I’m too old to exercise. (23:44) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Vuori Clothing for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** No code to receive 20% off your first order. ** October Special: MAPS GLP-1 50% off! ** Code GLP50 at checkout. ** Selection of Resistance Exercises for Older Individuals: The Forgotten Variable Resistance training-induced gains in knee extensor strength are related to increased neural cell adhesion molecule expression in older adults with knee osteoarthritis Mind Pump #2670: Pilates, Yoga, Running, CrossFit, & Strength Training Face Off! Muscle Mommy Movement Quiz Mind Pump #2657: The Over-50 Fitness & Health Plan Mind Pump #1835: Why Resistance Training Is the Best Form of Exercise for Fat Loss and Overall Health Mind Pump #2385: Five Reasons Why You Should Hire a Trainer Is exercise more effective than medication for depression and anxiety? New Study: One or Two Days of Exercise May Offer Similar Health Benefits As Daily Workouts Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump, Mind Pump with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, seven lies older people are told about fitness. We will set you straight. Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Viori, the best at leisure.

where you'll find anywhere. By the way, you get the best best discount anywhere through our link. Go to Viori Clothing.com. That's V-U-O-R-I Clothing.com forward slash mind pump. That link will get you 20% off. We also have a sale on a program this month. Maps G-L-P-1. This is a workout program with nutritional guidance and lifestyle guidance that helps people specifically who are taking a G-L-P-1 for weight loss. So if you're using tersepetite, some agglutide, Ozympic, Wagovi. This program is designed for you to maximize fat loss, minimize muscle loss, maybe even get you stronger. Go check it out.

Go to Maps at gLP1.com. Use the code GLP 50 for 50% off. Here comes a show. All right. Today we're going to talk about seven lies that older people are constantly told about fitness. We're going to crush these lies and encourage you to start exercising. It's one of the best things you could do. We're going to break it down.

Let's go. Break it down. Yes. Before we get into the lies, I'm going to bring up a study. There's a lot of studies on exercise and older population. And I'm talking about people over 60. Their studies done on people in their 70s. And I even found a study of people in their 80s.

Okay. And I just want to talk about the studies a little bit. I brought one up here. Just so that people can kind of see what can happen. if you exercise properly. Now, this particular study occurred over three months. So this was a 12-week study. Here's what they found with this population.

Ready? Knee extension strength increased. Now, this group exercised twice a week for about 30 to 40 minutes of strength training. How old was this group? This particular group was 65 and older. And the intensity was moderate. So this wasn't like a crazy workout.

Okay. And we'll talk about our own personal experience, but I'll just quote this study. You can find tons of studies. There's so many of them done on this population. But check out the strength gains that they saw in that period of time. Knee extension strength went up on average 174%. Okay. 174%. These are more than doubling their strength. More than double. Yeah. More than double. On the low end, 61% on the high end, there was an individual that increased their knee strength, knee extension strength by 374%. leg press strength went up 130% on average. Overall gains of strength in the upper body were between 20 to 50%. Now let's talk about muscle mass gains. There was a 10 to 13% increase in muscle fiber hypertrophy across the board. Mid thigh girth increased by 2.7 centimeters, which correlates with the first part, which was done with a CT scan. And then functional improvements, walking speed improved by 50% indicating better mobility and reduced fall risk.

The control group, zero gains in anything, of course. They had a group that did nothing and they saw zero. I wonder how much was controlled too nutritionally because I would bet that put on a high protein diet in conjunction with this. There was no nutritional intervention. So that to me. This was all exercise. So I just want to point out how much more compelling this is. Because in my experience, that's always a challenge.

It's always been a don't care of how old or young you are. Clients tend to struggle with hitting the optimal amount of protein. And so if there was no control for that and they basically just introduced strength training and they saw that good of benefits, I would argue if I got a hold of that same group and was like strict about, hey, we're going to also bump your protein while we do this. I bet you would see almost double that, which is crazy to think about that. Yes, 100%. In other studies, we'll compare strength gains in older populations to younger populations.

And the rate of strength gains are similar. Okay, so there's this belief that as you get older, your body's ability to adapt to exercise, you just don't adapt as well. It's not true. Now, your ultimate capacity changes, obviously, max strength at 70 is not going to be what your max strength potential was, let's say, at 30. But the strength gains happen very quickly, especially when you first start exercising. So we're going to do is we're going to go through the lies.

A lot of the myths that people are sold in this age group around exercise. And I'll start with the first one, which is that cardiovascular exercise is the best form of exercise for the aging population. Now, this myth is perpetuated by what we know about the benefits of heart health and relation to cardiovascular. And so this is why I think it becomes, and your doctor, right? Your doctor tends to, you know, promote this over squatting or doing an extra, like doing a new, you know, weight training routine.

And so by default, this has been used as the main form of exercise for the elderly, and it just isn't the most ideal one at all. It doesn't even come close. Let's just talk about heart health here for a second. The data will show clearly that when it comes, to overall heart health, reductions in cardiovascular events, right? Reductions in cardiovascular disease in heart function and health, strength training is not just as good as cardiovascular training, but probably better in a few.

Way more protected. In a few other ways. And part of the reason for this, now cardio is great for endurance. Okay. So if you want lots of endurance, cardio is a great way to exercise. But that doesn't mean you don't gain endurance from strength training because you do gain endurance. In fact, the type of endurance you gain from strength training is more applicable to your life than the endurance you'll get from cardio because strength training makes you stronger. And what you really need is you get older is strength and stability.

Now here's why strength training in many cases, again, I'm talking about the data actually outperforms cardio for heart health. And that has to do with insulin sensitivity. so building muscle or strengthening muscle improves insulin sensitivity and there's a lot there's a very strong correlation between your insulin resistance in cardiovascular disease we know this we know this in extreme cases with diabetes for example building muscle makes you far more insulin sensitive because number one muscle is a storage vessel for sugars and carbohydrates but also muscle itself is insulin sensitive cardiovascular exercise will improve in insulin sensitivity while you do it, but it doesn't contribute to this permanent change

in insulin sensitivity, not nearly as much as strength training. So even just heart health, strength training has been shown to be superior. But then when we look at all cause mortality, because you're just looking at the heart, which again, I made the case, and again, look at the data. We'll look at like osteopenia and osteoporosis, and what's the best form of training in that regard? That's definitely weight training. Strengthening bone, reducing risk of fracture and fall and resilience if you do become ill.

Cardio doesn't touch it. Doesn't touch it. So strength training, if you had to pick one form of exercise as you got older, that would give you the most bang for your buck in terms of longevity and health. The data is very, very, very clear. It's actually strength training. And then just to add a cherry on top, the amount of strength training required to re-rength training required to re-referral. the majority of the benefits you'll get from strain training is very little. It's actually quite little.

In fact, the data was shown the aging population. One day a week will give you probably about 70% of all the results you get from strain training. You'll get from one day a week. Two days a week gets you close to 80%. You just don't need to do a lot of it to reap tremendous benefits. And it's very protective when you have muscles protective when you're not doing any type of activity.

Again, in my experience, by the way, in this population, the benefits they get from proper exercise are actually more profound than I see in the younger population because they tend to come to me very deconditioned. So you see this huge turnaround. The next big lie, which we kind of talked about, is your body won't get stronger or build muscle. Oh, yeah. And I've actually had clients that thought this and believed this. And because of their age range and, you know, the thought that your health just naturally

declines over time that they weren't actually going to be able to build a substantial amount of muscle or like that wasn't they were just able to maintain at this point which is not true they can still build muscle this is why i've never liked those studies that show um you know for every year after a certain age every decade after 30 yeah you lose this percentage of muscle because it makes people think that oh no it it's uh assume yeah it's inevitable that oh as i age i'm just going to lose muscle when in fact I've had many clients that never weight trained didn't get started until they were 50, 60 years old and had more muscle at 50 or 60 than they did in their 30s. And a lot of people do not realize. In fact, we still get, that's a con, this is a common

question. We have a group that we do, the muscle mommy group with women, right, that we've done the muscle mommy movement that we were doing a lot of women in that group. We had it just the other night. Someone asked that like that it's, that was older. It said, you know, can I still build muscle and I'm past 50? It's like, yeah, yeah, absolutely, you can still build muscle. And I've had a lot of clients that were in their best shape of their life at their 50, 60, and even 70 years old. So it's very possible. It's actually reasonable.

If you're not strength training now and you're 65 or older, it's reasonable that if you all things being okay, right, that you're going to double your strength within a year. double. That's reasonable. By the way, I read a study in 90 days. So I'm giving you a very conservative. Like if you start out and let's say, you know, right now you're like, man, I could barely do 10 body weight squats. It's very reasonable that at the end of the year you'll be able to do 20. In fact, it's reasonable that that'll probably happen within three months, not just a year. So think about that right now. If you're listening to this, you can be twice as strong as you are now within a year. And that's again, that's not like a pie in the sky goal. That's something it's extremely conservative. I mean, I could promise that to someone, barring any major

illness or injury, that that's going to happen. That's going to happen. Another lie is that exercise or in particular strength training is dangerous. This is not true whatsoever. If you do it properly with good technique, good control, and you apply exercise appropriately, right, according to your current fitness level, what your body's capable of, you progressively, well, you progressively, in an appropriate way, it's not only safe, but it improves your safety overall. So I've trained many, many people. At one point, majority of my clients were over 60, and not a single, I actually had never had an injury while training someone.

They were under my care. I watched their technique, watched their form, we applied exercise properly, and nobody got hurt. Yeah, and a lot of times this gets perpetuated. like some doctors out there that are trying to prevent certain movements like the deadlift, for instance, you know, to avoid that at all costs. And, you know, obviously technique

and progressively overloading has to be a major factor of doing it correctly. But it's going to do the opposite. It's going to strengthen you and be more resilient towards forces you're going to face. Not only that, but every exercise that you can think of that you make, that maybe you consider dangerous or scary

or you're very insecure about trying because it looks hard. There's a regression. There's a regression to that movement. There is a movement that, I mean, many of my clients that were advanced age, I did not start with a barbell back squat. No. There was some of those clients,

the exercise looked like getting up and down from a chair. That's right. You know, and some of it started with me assisting them, and then eventually became them by itself, and then eventually it became one leg doing it. It's like there is a way for you to take every exercise that maybe somebody else has deemed dangerous. And you regress that movement and nothing is wrong with starting with the regression. In fact, I encourage, you know, starting with something like our map starter type of program that's regressed way back.

And then eventually progressing to that, if needed. And if you're really afraid or worried about the risk of injury during exercise, hire a trainer. Yeah. Hire a trainer. This demographic is such a great demographic for personal trainers because, number one, they tend to have the time and some of the expendable income to invest in a personal trainer once a week. Trainers who are trained in working with people in this age group are very good at what they do, and you're not going to get hurt.

They're going to train you appropriately, and it's very safe. It's actually safer than other forms of exercise because it's very controlled. control. Remember this. Like when it comes like if you have a major injury or you're recovering from an accident, uh, the form of exercise that a rehab specialist, the doctor will apply a strength training. This is what you do if you go to a physical therapist. They use forms of strength training because it's so safe. So it's a complete myth, uh, that it's dangerous. Next up, this is a big one. This is a big one. Well, I already have bad knees. Yeah. I've already got a bad back. This is just going to make those things worse. Right? No.

The opposite, properly performed strength training is the best thing you could do for chronic pain. Period. End of story. Not just my opinion. Again, look at the data. It's very, very clear. Chronic pain is different than an acute injury. Like, if you tore your knee and you need it to heal, that's different. Don't go work it out. Wait until it heals. But if you've got knee pain that's been with you for years or decades or back pain that's been with you for years or decades, that's a result of dysfunction, which starts. with weakness, there is a dysfunction in that joint. And what controls and stabilizes the joint are muscles. If you look at all your joints and you took all the muscles off, the joint does nothing. It just sits there. What makes the joint move and function are all the muscles that surround it and control it. And if some of those muscles are weak or tight or both,

the joint itself starts to function in a way that is dysfunctional, that's what causes pain. that's what causes the joints to wear down. If you look at your knee and you look at the way the kneecap slides over the femur, then the way the knee flexes and extends, if it's moving the way it's supposed to and supported the way it's supposed to be supported by the muscles, there's no pain. If it's moving in a way that's suboptimal, that joint starts to wear down. Now, the question people often ask me is, well, my joints already worn down.

What can I do now? Your joints heal. People don't realize this, but joints heal, once they start moving properly, once the surrounding joints starts to move properly, and this happens... Plus, don't you want to build

some stability around it? Yeah, regardless. So you can actually walk and have function and do, like, daily activities. It's, you know, it's such a defeatist way to look at it. I used to, like, deal with this with, you know, my grandpa, my grandma

and, like, trying to, you know, really reinforce the fact that we need to get stronger. So, you know, a lot of these pain signals, will dampen because now we have more security and more stability there around the joints. Yeah, and I mean, just we'll talk about the back because that's a very common. It's the most common area of pain is back pain.

If you took your spine out of your body, it's made up of multiple joints, what puts the spine in proper alignment and prevents it from moving and flexing in ways? It's all the muscles that surround it and stabilizing it. Well, isn't all chronic pain, the root of it is weakness and instability. That's it.

Right? So if you are suffering from chronic pain in your knee, in your shoulders, in your neck, in your back. The root cause of that is weakness and instability of the muscles. Therefore, training those muscles to be more stable and strong is the way you alleviate that pain. Now, here's the key, because someone might be listening and saying, look, my knees hurt, and I do get up to go to walk and exercise, and when I do, they hurt. And so I need to sit down and rest them.

That's the only thing that takes the pain away. So here's the difference between good function and dysfunction. So if you get up and walk and your knees hurt, there's dysfunction there. Walking more is just more dysfunctional movement. Strength training is targeted. So what a good coach or a good trainer will do is they'll look at your movement and say, okay, that's why your knee hurts. Here are the specific exercises for you that will correct that dysfunction.

It's not the walking that's hurting you. It's the fact that when you're walking, there's dysfunction in the joint. And so we need to work on creating better function. You can track those muscles and build up support system. That's right. So as a trainer, I'd see somebody with knee pain and they says it hurts when it walks. And I do an assessment. That's what a good coach does.

And then you see, okay, I could see why your knee's bothering you. And so let's strengthen these muscles. Let's loosen these muscles. And over time, walking no longer hurts you because now your joint is moving the way it's supposed to. You know, the extreme version of that, I remember when I went through my ACL and MCL tear and I couldn't think, I couldn't understand why I could still walk. And I remember the, oh, after they were torn. Yeah. remember the doctor going like, it's because of how much muscle you've developed in your legs.

Your muscle is supporting it and keeping in place. There's no stress on the ligaments, even though you don't have them and you blew them. That's how much your muscle supports that. Now, that's obviously an extreme example of that, but the reverse is true, right? So if you have no muscle in your legs or in your arms, then all the stress goes to the ligaments and the joints. You getting strong and developing those muscles takes the stress off those joints. and especially proper movement, like you're saying, is that what's happening when someone walks

and they feel that crumny is you're not walking properly. You're putting all the stress on the joints and the ligaments because you have no muscle to support the walking. Once you build the muscle to support walking and moving properly, you no longer have that pain. Again, and this is why other forms of exercise are sometimes not so good for pain is because you're not targeting what needs to get stronger.

So your body develops these movement patterns, and your joints develop these patterns based off of, well, how strong and stable you are or you aren't. And if you don't correct it, moving more isn't going to fix the problem. You have to move differently. And the way that you move differently is you train the body with targeted strength training because strength training is great because they could target specific muscles, specific movements in very specific ways, fix the problem, boom, no longer have pain. And joints begin to heal. They actually start to heal. Next up, Exercise doesn't help with mental health.

There is a significant percentage of people in older populations who start to suffer from things like depression. Exercise has been shown, recent study, actually a huge study, just showed that exercise, proper exercise, is one and a half times as effective as talk therapy or medication. Yeah. For the most common forms of depression. Why? Well, there's a couple of reasons why. One is a healthy brain tends to be happier, and a healthy brain comes from a healthy body. And muscle is like an organ, it's one of the largest organs of the body.

If you consider it one, and when you strengthen muscle, you start to feel a lot better. And you can get into all the neurotransmitters and how the brain works, but the data is very clear on this. One of the first things you'll notice when you start properly strength training, even once a week, is a change in your mental health. You just feel a lot better. next up i'm already active why do i need more exercise i garden every day i go on walks uh every night i think i'm good i think i'm fine if you don't send a signal to your body that says you need strength your body will only ever be as strong as it thinks it needs to be in fact it starts to challenge that if you never challenge it this is this is where the those studies or come out right where you lose muscle

every decade so much because if you don't send a signal to the body that you need it, it pairs it down. And anyone has seen this example if you're old enough to have realized like you lost the ability to do something, you know, I remember when I lost the ability to squat all the way down. I mean, it was like a rude awakening. Like, I mean, I obviously did it as a kid where I could sit all the way as to grass comfortably. At one point in my life, I stopped doing that and I was not even 30 years old in my body. he said, hey, we don't need to do that.

You don't do this anymore. Your body will pare down whatever you don't stimulate. And so if you don't stimulate it to carry weight to be stronger, then I'll say, hey, this is worthless for us to have it. And that's where those studies come in where they talk about how as you get older, you just keep losing muscle, you keep losing muscle, because we're not doing things to counter that. Right. You know, strength, well, all physical pursuits, but strength in particular, and by the way, strength is the cornerstone physical pursuit. So strength contributes to all the other ones. When you lose strength, then you start to suffer.

The other ones start to suffer as well. But your body's only as strong as it thinks it needs to be. So let's say every day for the last 20 years after dinner, you go for a walk for a mile. This is your activity. It's good, by the way. It's good. It's great. It's definitely better than, definitely better than not doing anything.

And it's definitely made you healthier to do it than to not do it. But what your body does is it says, we only need to be strong enough to, to be able to do this. And in fact, let's challenge that. The reason for that is your body's an efficiency machine. It's not going to make you require more energy than it needs to. Okay, it's an efficiency machine. So if it doesn't think it needs it, it starts to challenge it.

So here's what your walk starts to look like. At first you were kind of fast. Before you know it, it starts to slow down. Before you know it, your posture starts to change. Then somebody tells you, hey, you should probably use a cane. Now you're using cane. Now your body adapts to the cane. Now you need a walker.

Now you're in the walker. before you know it, you've lost that function. Strength training tells your body, we need strength. We need to be strong. And if you tell your body it needs to be strong, it will be strong. It'll keep that strength. So you're already active, which is great. Add a day of strength training.

Watch what happens. And then finally, the last one, I'm too old to exercise. Your body always adapts. Yeah. It always has the ability to adapt until the day you die. The beauty of strength training is it's so individualizable. It's so adaptable. I could train somebody who's had a stroke.

I could train somebody who can't walk. I could train somebody who's 90. I could train somebody who's nine with strength training. The difference is how I apply it, the way we do the exercises and what the techniques look like. That's it. So a good trainer, a good coach knows how to do this. And regardless of where you're at,

they can use strength training to improve your strength and your function. I think something, I don't know if you add this as another lie or it fits into one of these, but I think you have to address this. You talk about it a lot on the podcast on other episodes. but I think there's also this misunderstanding of how much you need to do. You don't need much to read these benefits. I think that that's got to be the other thing.

You got to think, oh, I'm 60, 70 years old and I'm just losing muscle. It's a young man's game to get back in the lift and build muscle. And I don't got the – I mean, I have friends that are in their 40s that they claim they don't go to the gym because they don't want to spend seven hours a week in the gym to look like a certain way. And it's like, oh, my God, you have such a misunderstanding of what it takes to build a strong physique. does not take anything near that. The amount of strength training, this is backed by data,

that is required to prevent muscle loss. That's it. You're just going to keep yourself from losing muscle as about once every two weeks. Once a week will actually have you building muscle. That's how little you need. Twice a week, you're going to get about 85,

roughly 80 to 85% of all the potential benefits. Potential benefits. So I'm not saying you're going to get just, you're going to slow down your progress. That means that your ultimate potential of strength, you'll get about 85% of the, way there with about two days a week. But one day a week gets you a lot of the way there. In fact, when I think back to all the clients I trained in this age group, they all train

with me once a week. I had nobody over the age of 65. Actually, I take that back one person. I had one person over the age of 65 that worked out with me more than once a week. Everybody else was once a week. We'd come in. We'd do about four or five exercises. They would leave profound benefits. So you don't need much. Look, if you like the show, come find us on Instagram. We'll see you at Mind Pump Media. you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at Mind Pumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes MAPS

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