Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - Prescribing Strength Training for Depression

Episode Date: May 29, 2018

Can strength training help alleviate depression? In this episode, Dr. David Puder is joined by Trent Jones, a Starting Strength athlete, to discuss how systematic strength training can significantly impact mental health. From boosting confidence and assertiveness to reducing symptoms of depression, we explore the science and personal stories behind this powerful intervention. Key topics include: The transformative mental health benefits of resistance training. Insights from research studies showing the link between strength training and reduced depressive symptoms. How strength training fosters assertiveness, confidence, and resilience. Practical tips to start your own strength training journey, even if you're a beginner. Whether you're a clinician looking for holistic treatments for depression or someone seeking new tools for personal growth, this episode offers actionable insights and inspiration. By listening to this episode, you can earn 0.75 Psychiatry CME Credits. Link to blog. Link to YouTube video.

Welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast, the podcast to help you in your journey towards becoming a wise, empathic, genuine, and connected mental health professional. I'm your host, Dr. David Puter, a psychiatrist who splits his time practicing psychopharmacology, individual and group psychotherapy, medical director of a day treatment program, medical education research, and teaching, residents, and medical students. All right, welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today with Trent Jones. He is a starting strength athlete, a barbell athlete.

And he, the purpose of this talk is threefold. One, we are going to discuss a recent study that came out, a meta-analysis that summarizes strength training's effect on depression. Number two, we're going to talk about his personal story of depression and kind of how his mood has changed since starting strength training later in life. And number three, we're going to talk about, like, if you were a complete novice or someone who didn't know anything about strength training, maybe it was like completely foreign to you, what would you do first? Where would you start? How would you go about maybe adding this component into your

life? So, Trent, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thanks for having me. Glad to be here. I don't think I fully introduced you well enough. I think I would introduce you as the person who helps make this podcast happen. I don't think I can do it without you. He is my editor, and he's visiting from Texas. And so we had an amazing dinner. Oh, so good. Yeah, I'm going to do my best not to fall asleep because I have a belly full of burgers and ice cream.

It was really good. It was good. It was really good. So the article that we're going to discuss is from JAMA psychiatry. It's titled Association of the Efficacy of Resistance Exercise Training with Depressive Symptoms. It's a meta-analysis, which means it looks at pretty much every study that's ever been done in this category of depression and resistance training. And the corresponding author is Brett Gordon out of Limerick, a university, so Ireland.

And this was done as recently as it was published May 9th, 2018. So this is really hot off the press, a new article that came into my viewing, thanks to one of my other psychiatrist friends who's into this. And this was a cool study because they basically looked at all of the studies that have been done in this field, which turned out to be about 33 randomized clinical trials involving 1877 participants. And they found that the mean effect size between the control group, which was no exercise and the resistance exercise training, the mean effect size was 0.66, which means,

means it moved, you know, 0.66 standard deviations from the control group, which is significant. So this is a very strong effect size. This is psychotherapy, a lot of psychotherapy trials for cognitive behavioral therapy are actually around this number, 0.6 to 0.8. And for other types of therapies, long-term therapy, psychodynamic can be up around one to two in various studies. And medication trials will actually be lower than this for just a simple antidepressant, but that's complicated because they actually have a really good placebo for medications. So in a medication trial, they have a, people don't know that they're taking the antidepressant. So the belief that they're taking the antidepressant actually makes the placebo effect a lot stronger.

and so although it's lower than this effect size, it's different. It also works for more depressed people. But in this study, they found that the mean effect size was 0.66, which is pretty, pretty good. And they found that the number needed to treat was 4, which is also very, very good. And that's the number needed to treat to get a remission. and they found in this particular study that total volume of the resistance training participant health status strength improvements were not significantly associated with the antidepressant effect of resistance exercise training so as long as the people were doing it no matter how sick they started out it had a benefit to them and they found

that there were smaller reductions in depressive symptoms in those that had really good blinded groups. So maybe they did something that was akin to resistance training, but not a lot of weight, but they were in a group doing things together. And so there is a benefit, of course, of being in a group and having a community of people you're doing stuff with. But I'm still really impressed with this. And I'm going to leave a link to the article in the show notes

and on the website, if you're curious to kind of jump into it a little bit more. I think, you know, JAMA psychiatry, one of the best journals for psychiatry, and they did a really excellent job on this study. So any thoughts on this trend? I know this is kind of new for you. Yeah, I mean, you know, coming at this from a total layman's perspective, the comment about total volume was really interesting. So, in other words, is saying that there's not there's not a correlation between doing the well as we'd say in the starting strength world the program you know capital p program um you don't necessarily have to comply um fully in order to reap benefits right so in other words if you can get somebody um engaging in strength

training just you know one day a week or two days a week or just just at a small level they can still reap some benefits. Yeah, and that's really interesting. In another study in an earlier episode when I talked about strength training, there was that one study that looked at cognitive or depressive benefits, and they found that the people who gained the most strength

had a correlated decrease in depressive symptomatology more than the ones that didn't gain as much strength. And I think part of it is like when you have a ton of studies, you lose some of the nuance, but you get the big picture. And the big picture is pretty clear that strength training is going to be helpful. And it's going to be a part of the toolbox for someone who's a therapist, who's a psychiatrist, someone who's treating people with depression. It may not be the first thing that I do with a new patient is like, hey, join strength training.

Let's get you doing a program because a lot of times they're so depressed by the time they get to me that they're not getting out of bed. They barely got to the appointment. They haven't taken a shower in a couple weeks. so it's going to be something you do maybe a couple months into, you know, getting them out of that slump. Right, right. Well, Trent, I want to jump into your story a little bit. So tell me, tell me a little bit about where you were before you started strength training. Yeah, so in a sense, like I was kind of a typical, um,

American male that played sports, right? So I played sports in high school. I was a football player. I was a linebacker, but I was a small guy. I was always kind of undersized. I'm about 5'8. At the time when I played football in high school, I was 165 pounds. But when I got into college and then, you know, after college in my professional life, I got pretty thin, you know, small guy at 165. point before I started really, before I really discovered strength training, like we talk about it, in starting strength. Before I started really strength training, I was 150 pounds at my lightest. Yeah, that's a lot lighter than you are now. How much do you weigh now? I'm 200 now. Okay. And I've kind of, I'm on a, you know, it's almost beach season, so I've cut down from 210, but. And

you look, you look slender. Oh, thank you. So it doesn't look like you, gained a lot of fat in that process. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, as I've found, you know, if you want to change your body composition, getting strong and putting on some mass helps an awful lot doing that, you know. So the goal down the road is to get that chisel hard body and you've got to have something to chisel from. And so you've got to build the block of marble, so to speak.

What about your mood? You told me earlier that you had some sort of episodes of depression. like what were those like or how bad were they or how often were they yeah i can remember in as early as junior high actually you know i want to say like my eighth ninth grade years so when i was 14 or 15 um i was treated for depression um i took antidepressants for a period of time i don't know three months six months something like that um but as i got into college and then again in my professional life and in my career, yeah, I had two or three major depressive kind of these prolonged periods where I became very depressed. I lost confidence in my abilities

and my value. I detached from a lot of the people that, you know, that I was close to. And I just wasn't getting any enjoyment out of life. Yeah. Everything kind of became a drag. Even some of the things I previously enjoyed and that were kind of my escape from the stressful parts of life kind of became bland. It must have been fairly frustrating to kind of enter into that.

It was, yeah. You know, in college and afterwards, my first couple jobs out of school, I fought not knowing it at the time, but I fought through who I was in terms of my skills and my abilities and my interests versus what I thought I was supposed to be. And I think, you know, looking back on it now, one of the disconnects I had was not being able to or not standing up for myself and saying,

you know what, this is who I am over here. These are the things that I'm interested in, that I'm good at, that I like to do. And that's valuable. That's worthy. I don't need to adhere to this image or this idea of what I should be that other people have grafted on to me. Yeah. And so that's sort of like who you were created to be or who kind of like what your natural passion was. Right.

You almost needed like a sense of like confidence and assertiveness to get to that point to do that. Yeah. Assertiveness is the word, definitely. I was very passive. of, I'm a people pleaser, you know, at heart. And I don't like conflict. I avoid it, you know, interpersonal conflict. But, yeah, I definitely had a pattern of allowing other people to walk on me that I see now that, you know, it's like, nowadays, I'll stand up for myself in situations where I find that, looking back, I didn't used to do that at all.

I didn't used to stand up for myself in situations. I didn't used to let my opinions be known, you know, when I was in a group. Was there like anger in the midst of that at all? Or like it's almost like assertiveness, you needed like a healthy amount of anger to be assertive to fight for those kind of things. Because I'm, you know, we just did three episodes on micro expressions, right? Yeah, yeah. And as you said this, this several times you flashed just a tinge of down and together with your eyes, which is the micro expression of anger.

Yeah. And I normally wouldn't comment on that with an interview, but since my buddies, I'll comment on. No, that's really interesting. And when we paired it with assertiveness, that's when you were like, that's it. Yeah. Right there. Yeah. And the people pleasing is, of course, like, how do you be, if you're people pleasing,

You're not going with your own, you're not listening to that voice. That anger is being suppressed to please other people. That makes me wonder, you know, like at the time, how did you make sense of that? Or maybe you didn't. I don't think I did. I don't think I did. And that's okay. Yeah, I think that.

And I didn't, it took me a long time to seek out counseling of any sort. on my own. You know, I, I, I, I, I was counseled when I was in high school when I first went through this because I had my parents there. And they were concerned enough to take me. And, um, but I didn't do that for myself when I was in college and, uh, when I was on my own. And it took me a long time to do so.

So I don't really think I was really cognizant of what was going on. I didn't see these negative patterns of behavior. And it's not really until now. Now, fairly recently, I can look back on those periods of my life. It's like, oh, I see the patterns that I was engaged in, and I see where I might have gone wrong. So would you say potentially, because you weren't assertive in the way that you needed to be, the anger was directed at things that were very unrelated to what the anger.

anger should have given you the correct maybe energy to do. Right, right. So, for instance, you know, if I was at my job and I had a boss making unreasonable demands, there might have been a time period where I should have pushed back, say, hey, you know what, what you're requesting is not reasonable and here's why. And here's how we should do this instead. I wouldn't do that. I would just take it passively and then end up throwing a plate across the room the next

day after I'd been up all night trying to fulfill demand at work. What you're doing is unreasonable flash of anger. Yeah. And I think that, you know, and this goes into like anger is not a bad thing. It's supposed to give us a voice, right? And I hope if you ever feel like I'm giving you, like, demands that you can't meet that are unreasonable, you can't. and have a voice with me and tell me,

I need more time to get that episode together or something rather than staying up super late and, you know. Sure, sure. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's still, even today, it's still something I have to cultivate that sense of you have to really think about,

Trent, are you taking care of yourself? My wife talks about self-care. My wife's a yoga instructor and is a very aware person, for lack of a better word. But yeah, she talks about self-care a lot. And I have to really make that a conscious part of my day. It's like, am I taking care of myself? Am I doing what I need to do to make sure that I'm okay?

Right. And then everything else flows from there. Yeah. Yeah. And I think my sense is that you're a very giving person and also very naturally empathic. and I think people who tend to have that feel other people's experience quite exquisitely. And it's really hard to disappoint someone when you feel their disappointment in yourself to some degree about as much as they're feeling it, you know?

Right, right. Does that register at all? Definitely. Definitely. Okay. Well, I don't want to psychoanalyze you too much. Yeah. I think it's fascinating.

I really, you know, it's, again, This is something standing where I am today versus a year ago or two years ago or three years ago. I find kind of laying, I'm more comfortable with laying myself open and learning more about myself. Okay. So then you started strength training. What changed? Or what was that, first of all, what was that process like? How did you get into it?

How long did it take for you to go from being interested? to doing it, to, you know. Well, I had a leg up versus a lot of people in that because I had played football in high school, I was exposed to the weight room when I was 15 years old. So I was used to the idea of picking up a barbell and putting plates on it and doing exercises with the barbell to get stronger. It doesn't mean we really did it in a very effective or efficient way, but we did do it, right? We tried to squat. We tried to press. We tried to deadlift. So I had that,

I carried that from high school forward into college. And I always had an interest in strength. I love the world's strongest man competitions that air on TV. I've always kind of been fascinated with these guys who are not necessarily like bodybuilders where they have this aesthetic appeal, but they're just, these guys are the ultimate and, you know, moving giant weights. And there's really know in our modern world, there's really no purpose to being able to pick up a car, but it's cool. You got to admit, it's pretty cool to watch a big hairy dude just manhandle a car. It's like a human can do that. That's cool. Yeah. So I had it, I had an interest in strength and a fascination with it. But the turning point for me is, so I lifted on and off in a gym,

what we'd call exercising, but not training for years. But what really hit me is... Wait, but I'm going to slow you down. You said you did exercising. Yeah. What do you mean? What is that? What is exercising to find that for me?

Random selection of exercises for a random weight, a random number of sets and reps. Basically just no organization or goal in what I was doing. So I'd go in the gym, for instance, and I'd say, you know what, today I'm going to bench press. And I would, I just sort of knew because I'd done it before, well, I can do about 185 pounds. Okay. So I would just bench 185 pounds. And then maybe one day, if I was feeling really good, I'd put a little bit more weight on

there. Like, 195. 199, maybe 205. But I had no really logical way of determining, hey, why would I bench press today versus is do something else. Why would I do 185 versus 195? Okay.

So, yeah, there's just no systematic approach to it. It was just kind of a random selection of things. And I was really just moving my body around and getting sweaty. Okay. And then so at some point you kind of started to do what you're calling like a linear progression, which is you are systematically increasing your weight slowly.

Right. In the major big lifts. Yeah, exactly. It's just a few. exercises to squat, bench press, deadlift, with increasing weight. So you find a weight you can do on day one and then you continue to increase that each workout. But the exercises and the number of sets and reps doesn't change, only the weight changes. So you're doing squats, three sets of five, three days a week, dead lifts, one set of five, three days a week, alternating bench and

shoulder press. Correct. Yep. Three sets of five, you know, every other day. Right. And each time

you added five pounds to your squat, each time you added 10 pounds to your deadlift, five pounds each time to your bench and press, and did you get stronger? I did.

I think there were two components, though, that made it different. One of the things was gaining weight, right? So realizing at 100 50 pounds in 5-8-5-9, I was very underweight. It was a very important thing. I think we were talking about this earlier, but just to kind of entertain people who

might be listening, like, how different is this, right, than most of the world, like, talks about dieting and losing weight. Oh, it's totally different. And when I started listening to podcast episodes from like starting strength and barbell logic, and it's like, you guys need to gain weight. And it's like, what? Like, yeah. And we're not talking about like a 270 pound guy gaining weight, you know, which is kind of

where I, which is where I was. Right. You were kind of starting from the opposite side of the equation. But I was anyways. Yeah. Just because I think you get caught up in the culture of it. Right. Anyway, so you gained weight and you gain muscle therefore.

Yeah. And you went up to. Yeah. So previously in my attempts to get strong, I could not top a hundred and eighty five pound squat, which which for a young male is not much at all. And I think I finished the starting strength progression, the novice progression, the first kind of phase of lifting as we call it at 300 305 for three sets of five yeah on my squat. My dead lift was probably 315.

Okay. I don't recall what my presses were at the time, but, but pretty good. I've always been kind of a naturally, a pretty good presser, so it's, my results are a little bit at the ordinary, but yeah, in other, in short, way, I went way further on that program than I thought I could ever go. Yeah. Possible. Okay, so we're talking about physiologically rewiring, I believe, not.

not only your muscles, but your brain. Yeah. Because you're subjecting yourself to stress. Like, just to give the audience an idea, like when you started squatting in the 260s to the 300s, how much did you think about squatting every day? Oh, you wake up in a cold sweat because you realize that afternoon.

Yeah. I've got to squat 275 today. Yeah. What am I going to do? Yeah, right? It's terrifying. Yeah. And I still get this when I approach a really heavy set of squats.

I get butterflies in my stomach. That first set of squats, right before I do it, I'm warming up and I know it's going to be heavy. I've got that pit in my stomach. And it doesn't go away until I squat that first heavy set. Okay. And then once I get done with that, I'm like, all right, I'm in it now. I know I can do it.

It's still hard, but the butterflies go away. Yeah, I think I train some people out of my garage And they show up and they don't think they can do it Like this one guy this week, he takes the weight off the rack His, it was 275 And he does his first rep And then he just racks it. I'm like, what are you doing?

He's like, well, that first rep was like killer And I think it's going to be too heavy today. And I'm like, well, you're, you're, bar speed was actually pretty good. Like you did it in about two, three seconds. Like it was pretty fast. I think you can do this. And he's just like, he's like stressed out about it.

And he goes out and he does it. And it's like he gets done with it. And he's just like so happy that he actually did it. Yeah. That he was able to accomplish it. And that like psychologically he pushed himself through it. So the way that I see it is like you're subjecting. to stresses that are just both physical and psychological.

Right. What helped you keep pushing through that psychological piece to keep going? Oh, good question. Well, I think having a coach was a really important part of my progress. Like I said, I hired a starting strength coach. It was actually an online coach via Facebook, but she was a starting strength coach. It was Leah Lutz. and having that accountability of knowing that there's somebody that's going to watch the videos

that I shoot my cell phone camera as I'm squatting and I'm going to have to post those on the internet later, I knew that I would disappoint somebody if I didn't do my workout. So if I chickened out and I said, oh, you know what, I'm really tired. I didn't get enough sleep last night. I don't really want to work out today. Well, I knew I'd have to explain on the internet why I didn't have a video. video to post today. So the accountability was huge. I think the other thing was starting strength in general, reading that book, which is a tome, you know, it's a textbook about lifting, exposed me for the

first time to logic as applied to physical fitness. It's like on a whole other level. It's on a whole other level. People, I mean, until I went to the starting strength seminar, I didn't really understand it. I'm in a room with about 40 dudes, about four girls, and literally they spent three hours talking about the squat, and then we go out and we do the squat for two hours. Yeah. And then we do the next exercise, and they talk about it for three hours. And you know, you may be listening to this thing. Can you really talk about the squat for three hours? And yes, yes, you can. You can talk about it. for even longer.

Even longer. Which is totally unnecessary for the trainee, right? You know, that is a seminar meant for coaches, right? Right. But I think the thing that starting strength, the organization showed me was that you can apply logic to lifting, and that logic can help you get through the emotionally distrustful time. So, for instance, you talked about your trainee that was squirene.

spotting 275 said, oh gosh, that was really hard. That first rep was so hard, I didn't think I was going to be able to get four more. But you, from an objective standpoint, saw his bar go up pretty fast. Yeah. Well, having to film all of my work sets and post them on the internet for a coach to review made me see, you know, when I had the subjective experience of doing the set and saying, gosh, that was really hard. That was ridiculously hard.

but then I put the video up on the internet and I look at it as I'm posting it I said well that didn't look very hard on the video it's a bug it's a beguiling thing but regularly experiencing that that disconnect between my emotional experience of the lifts versus the logical kind of objective eye that's looking at it

and saying well you know you were strong enough to do that that helped me push through times later in my lifting career or, you know, lifting experience, knowing that, okay, I've done things before that I didn't think I could do, but I did them anyway. That was huge. As you talk about that, once again, you know, I'm wondering if that is that moment of assertiveness, because you even flashed a little bit of anger there. It's kind of weird to throw that out there, and I don't do that with people normally.

Yeah. But for the sake of the people who can't see, you know, your face. And I'm wondering if it's like that bit of assertiveness that you practiced over time, how did that play out in your interpersonal life, in your, in your relationships with people? Has it? It has. I'll never forget, I used to ride the train into work. and, you know, it's a train.

You're jostling with people. It's packed. And as I gained in strength, I grew also physically. I got bigger. I started putting on weight, started putting on muscle mass. And I'll never forget, I was walking on the train, just kind of absin-mindedly looking for a spot. And I had to walk through a group of people.

And I remember several of them looking at me and then, like, stepping aside to clear, room so I could walk by. Yeah. And it struck me in that moment, maybe it happened before and I just didn't realize it, but it struck me there. It was like, oh, I like, I guess I looked imposing enough for people to just like voluntarily step aside.

I never had that experience prior to that moment. I was kind of always the guy who had to like turn sideways to kind of squeeze through, you know, the crowd full of people. And a lot of moments like that. followed. I found myself almost without thinking about it, unwittingly speaking my mind in everyday situations. Yeah, so you started having a voice. You started being able to be assertive in a healthy way. Yeah. Did you stop throwing things? Yes. It's okay if you do one through. Yes. I mean, it depends on whether or not I made my lifts, you know. Yeah. But no, no, actually,

I found myself getting mad at the bar sometimes. I definitely have experiences where if the bar humbles me, because I wasn't really, you know, I didn't really mentally prepare myself for a heavy set and it pinned me, you know, and I tried to squat something and I couldn't do it and I had to put it on the safety pins. Going for that second set,

I'd kind of wake me up and I'd get angry at the bar, but I found myself, it was a very directed and focused anger. as opposed to these outbursts that would just come up out of nowhere. How has your work situation changed since you started down this path of being more assertive, more listening to what you're actually passionate about? What have you stopped doing and what have you started doing? Well, yeah, work changed hugely.

So in short, I left my corporate job. I was able to take side gigs that I had slowly built up over time and build them to a point where I could leave my corporate job and do those side gigs full time and hustle up some business and various things, create my own path. So basically you're an entrepreneur who... Yeah, it feels weird saying that.

Who's a creative entrepreneur, right? You've found a way to use things that have come to you naturally. you've always loved music and instruments, guitar, and mixing stuff. And now you, how many podcasts do you edit? I've got five podcasts that I produce and engineer and sixth one coming on pretty soon. That's amazing. Yeah, it's crazy to think that. I think I was the second one, right?

You were the second one. That's right. Yeah, so Barbell Logic was the first one. That's the biggest podcast I produce and then your own. And yeah, it was interesting. I found an outlet for my creativity, which previously was just music, and was able to pair that with my interest in the technical side of recording audio and making it sound really good.

And my writing skills that I developed in my English degree. in school. And kind of mush all those together into a job that's very satisfying. That's really cool. So, and have you experienced depression like you did before since doing the starting strength? I have. Okay. But what's interesting now is I almost see it coming.

in a sense. Okay. I find myself now able to step back from my subjective experience of everyday life and evaluate, whereas in previous years, I've never been able to pull myself out of my emotional experience of the moment. I haven't been able to kind of stand outside myself for a period of time and just kind of evaluate what's going on in life. Like, am I happy with where things are going?

Do I have problems? And then identifying them and coming up with a basic plan or strategy for what I'm going to do differently to help myself, that self-care moment. Yeah. And so I've had moments where I've been depressed, but the depression wasn't as deep. And like I said, I was able to kind of sit back and say, yeah, you know what? You're getting depressed. Like you need to talk to somebody. You need to reach out to your support circle, your friends.

You need to make those connections and do something about this. Be active in your self-care rather than, I think in previous bout to depression, I almost saw myself as, oh, this is this inevitable thing that's just going to drag me down. I was a passive actor in that moment. that's that's really powerful because it's like you've moved we would call it from like external locus of control like the world is affecting me and there's nothing I can do about it to sort of internal locus of control like these things are happening it's unpleasant but I have the strength to overcome it the psychological strength the you know like I can reach out to friends I can do these self-care things to sort of reorient my life and to some degree it sounds like the depression is kind of a Geiger meter for when you're off, you know? Yeah.

It's like, I wouldn't say this for all people. I think some people are wired genetically and maybe you are, you know, maybe there's, you know, I don't know your family history or whatnot, but maybe it's kind of like that message of like, hey, like pay attention, something's off here. I don't know. Does that ring about your nodding your head? I think so. Yeah.

I think so. You know, yeah, I definitely have other family members that have struggled with depression. And, yeah, it's certainly,

you know, there's definitely, I'm finding nowadays that, um, that experience, when I, when I kind of have that moment where I realize, like,

hmm, I'm starting to get depressed here. It usually precedes negative patterns of behavior. When I start doing things that I know are bad for me. Yeah. But I do, anyway. And yes, it's almost the canary in the coal mine. Yeah, and I see that with you, a lot of it comes around like meaning of work, which I think for a lot of people is very, very important,

meaning of work and also maybe meaning of connections with friends. Like if your work is off, if your sort of path and work is off, or maybe or not. Is that kind of one of the big triggers? or? Yeah. I think it's easy to get marginalized as a creative person when you become an adult. Yes. Because the reality of the situation is that art is not, it's usually not very economically viable.

Yeah. Art and commerce rarely intersect. And trying to create a commercial venture out of your art. is a slippery slope. And, you know, that was kind of my experience. As a musician, I've started meeting some other professional musicians, some people who actually had made a go at a career at this. And I realized at some point that it was almost a different,

it was a totally different experience, right? It was more of a craft in the art of music and the creativity, the expression of, you know, and just the act of being creative, didn't necessarily have anything to do with being a professional artist, which seems weird. It seems weird to say that, but they can be totally different things. And we have in American society, and I'd say in Western society in general, we do have some artists in the last 50 years that have reached huge levels of fame in notoriety. and I think we set these expectations for ourselves that our art must achieve something,

it must reach some level of recognition in order to be valuable. And, you know, when you become an adult and you're still making music and making records or painting paintings or whatever your thing is, it's, seen as either a hobby, which can be... It's pejorative. Pejorative. It is. It's meaning deflating.

Yes, right. I mean, because I think, like, art is incredibly meaningful. And it's easy to... It's easy to equate monetary value with meaning in our society. Yeah. If you make a lot of money doing something, Therefore, it's meaningful. Whereas, you know, who knows the full impact of the art and what you're creating, it's hard to tangibly touch base with.

And, you know, like these podcasts, like once in a while, you get a good review from people. And I appreciate that that keeps me going, that, like, that's meaningful. Yeah. I want to share those with you. A lot of people comment, actually, that the audio quality is very high. And I appreciate that. appreciate. That's good.

I should probably tell you every time I hear that. Well, let's transition a little bit into like, okay, like let's say someone was getting started. And I'm thinking we're going to create a nice sort of blog to go with this. So it'll be a link in the show notes with some videos of the different lifts, the book recommendations, the starting strength online coaching. I'll put a link to that. I want to put a before and after picture of you

because like your face looks so different. I need to, yeah. So if you can give me a before and after picture, that would be also. Sure, sure. It doesn't need to be shirtless or anything, but just to kind of give people a pictorial representation of what you look like before and after you started lifting.

And but where would you start? Like if, let's say a person came to you who had no experience with lifting and they said, hey, where do I start? What would you say? So I would have them follow the starting strength model, which is very simple. You're going to do four exercises, just four. We've mentioned them already.

You're going to squat, going to press. When we say press, we just mean an overhead press. It's the overhead shoulder press. The third one would be the bench press. And then the fourth one is the deadlift, where you're, you know, you pick a weight off, you pick a weight off the ground, right? And you use a barbell for all of these, all of these exercises. And the starting strength method is very simple.

For each of these exercises, except the deadlift, you do three sets of five reps. So you go in the gym, day one, and you watch the videos that Dr. Peter is going to link, understand how to do the movement. and once you learn how to do the movement with the empty bar, you start adding a little bit of weight and you find the weight that's a little bit challenging today for each of these lifts. And then you do the three sets of five.

For the deadlift, you do one set of five. And here's the key thing. When you come in 48 hours later on day two, you add a little bit of weight to the bar. You add five pounds to the bar for each of those lifts. So if you did day one today, if you squat and you can squat 65 pounds, day two, you got to squat 70 pounds. That is the key to all of this is you got to add a little bit of weight to the bar every single

time you work out. And pretty soon, two, three months, you're lifting a whole lot more weight than you ever thought you could. But it happens very slowly. Yeah. I think that's a really good starting point. That's kind of how I started watching YouTube videos, lifting actually out of my garage. And I had a buddy who was into it.

So that was helpful. One thing I would say is videotape your lifts. Don't be afraid of videotaping your lifts. And for free, you can post them on the Facebook group, actually, the starting strength Facebook group. And you'll get sometimes 20 to 50 comments on the 10. technique. You'll get just some really quick feedback. And I did that a number of times, and that really helped me get unstuck. Absolutely. Yeah, I can't understate the importance of if you have the means, hire a coach. If you're lucky and you have a starting strength coach in

your area, and you can search on the starting strength website, you can search for coaches, see if there's one in your city. Hire them, even if it's just for a one session, they can cut a lot of the learning curve of learning how to do this stuff. They can cut a lot of that learning curve off and get you on the right path and correct mistakes early. If you can't do that, there's online coaching now where you can submit videos like I did.

You can take videos of all of your lists and have them regularly looked at by coach, and the coach makes adjustments to your full. form over time. And then, you know, barring that, if you don't have the means to do that, definitely take advantage of the coaches that are that are on the web and do these for free. But that's, yeah, I can't overstate having a coach is a really important thing for both the accountability and just to make sure that you're doing it right. Yeah. The other thing that really helped me was listening to podcasts. And, you know, these are very manly men doing these

two podcasts, starting strength, barbell logic. So brace yourself for that kind of culture. But they're really good people. They're smart people, actually. Both the barbell logic and Mark Rippletoe, all the guys, you know, Reynolds and Scott Hamburg, they're really smart guys. So these are not just like people who lift heavy weights. Actually, when I went to the conference, there was 12 doctors.

out of a group of 40. Yeah. Smart people find this. And it's almost like kind of a small community, I think, because of that. There's like 10,000 people in the Facebook group. But it tends to be, you have to be a little bit kind of motivated to find this sort of method, I think, early on. Yeah, it definitely attracts. Well, I think the logic is undeniable.

Seekers find this. People who are seeking for the best ideas. And that's why I like it. I like the best ideas. When I find the best ideas for something, I adopt it, find something that works, and then execute it. And I think that this is one of the best ideas. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. And, you know, I should say that, yeah, there's definitely the culture of starting strength started with manly men. But, you know, we've got a number of really strong, really smart women. that are starting strength coaches. And that's a growing community. It's embarrassing to me, actually, to watch some of them lift on Instagram. I follow some of them.

Super strong. It's embarrassing to me, as in, like, I'm watching them lift as much as I do. And I'm like, oh, my God. Like, that, like, girls deadlifting, like, 315 pounds. And it's like, like, what? Okay. You know, and I have, like, testosterone.

And I'm, like, like, twice the body weight. Right. You know, so it's not just like... Yeah, yeah, and that's the thing. You know, these women are really feminine. You know, they're not like super hulky-looking. You know, it's like, no, they're very feminine, like beautiful women, and they're just also really strong, too.

It's pretty cool to watch. That's another sort of myth that got busted. Like, the bulky women that look super strong, like usually use steroids. Yeah. But usually women who lift weights, they don't grow the... sort of, you know, when you think about bodybuilding women types of bodies. Right. Because they're not using steroids.

And, you know, I think that that's where the logic also speaks to. There's quite a few. It's been interesting to me that the demographic for starting strength tends to be middle-aged people. And I think men and women have realized that when your time is limited, And you really just want to be results. You want to get results and you want to just be healthy and functional as you get older. That it's a really effective method for doing that. And you see people who are in, you know, really high levels in their careers.

They're busy people. They've got families. They've got lots of obligations. And you kind of, they almost vet the effectiveness of this program because you realize these are people that wouldn't waste time with other things in their life. So they're not wasting time here or they don't feel like they're wasting time with this program.

Yeah, I mean, if you do it right, your squat should increase by 60 pounds every month. Yeah. And your deadlift 120 pounds every month for the first couple months. Right. And then the programming gets a little bit more complicated. But nevertheless, like, that's very results-based.

And as a scientist, you know, I'm really hoping that those results, and the depression studies and the mental health studies can be done on this particular way of lifting weights because I think it's very nuanced and it's very good and also the body mechanics. It just makes sense to me in a way that like this is the way that you will not get injured. You know, people get injured lifting lawnmowers, lifting kegs of beer, twisting motions. They don't get they don't get injured, you know, Very rarely do people get injured doing very systematic barbell training. Yeah, yeah, exceedingly. Especially compared to sports. We look at other sports, like recreational sports. You know, the- Like soccer.

Like the rates of injury are like, I think 10 times lower than soccer? Yeah, at least. Yeah, and I think there's some data out there on the, you know, per hundred or per thousand participation hours on various recreational sports as compared to competitive weightlifting. Okay. And that's where they're really pushing the envelope. Right. And that's where people are intentionally pushing themselves and

and cutting weight while they push the envelope a lot of the time. So you think about, yeah, in training, you know, we're not doing that. We're not operating at the limits of our ability. We're operating within our, comfortably within our limits. So, yeah, the risks are even lower. Yeah, when I looked into weightlifting and the injuries of weightlifting, a lot of it comes down to when they're cutting weight and they're continuing to push really, really hard in the gym.

Right. That's when people get injured. Yeah. Okay. Wow. I think we covered some amazing stuff. You know, we looked at this scientific study. I'll put a link of that in the show notes and in the blog and put up some videos and put up

some before and after pictures of you. And yeah, if you found this helpful, throw up a comment on either of our social media sites. I'm sure we'll have like a post for each for each of us on this. And, you know, shoot me an email or, you know, I appreciate good reviews on iTunes. And I hope this was helpful for you. And it was a lot of fun. Yeah, thanks for having me on. It's so good to have you come visit me from Texas. I'm glad I can make it out here. All right. We'll leave it there.