Something You Should Know - When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

Why do airplanes have ashtrays if smoking is prohibited? Could someone open the airplane door in mid-flight? What are the green and red flashing lights on the plane for? These are some of the common questions about air travel that I answer to start this episode. https://www.smartmeetings.com/tips-tools/103099/answers-random-airplane-questions Are you the kind of person who likes to explore and try something new or are you more likely to stick to the tried and true and do what you did before? Of course, it depends on the situation, but it seems some people, for example, like to order the same thing off the menu time and time again while others order something different every time. Some people like to go back to the same place for vacation while others prefer to visit somewhere they’ve never been before. Why is that? Here to discuss this interesting quirk of human nature is Alex Hutchinson. He is a columnist for Outside magazine and has contributed to the New York Times, The New Yorker and other publications. He is author of the book The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map (https://amzn.to/3XRGYQa). All exercise is good but strength training in particular has some wonderful benefits you may not be aware of. Those benefits include weight control, improved mental health, fighting cancer and more. Strength training is simply lifting weights that strengthen your muscles and it can help anyone at any age. Here to explain the benefits and explain how to do it is Michael Joseph Gross. He is a longtime Vanity Fair contributing editor who has published investigative reports, essays, and books about culture, technology, and business and he is author of the book, Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives (https://amzn.to/4ib4sHc). You may think memory loss and mental decline is a problem for old people, but it actually begins at a much earlier age. Listen as I reveal which parts of your mental function start to deteriorate when - and what you can do about it. https://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/memory-decline PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure!  Go to https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! SHOPIFY:  Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk and upgrade your selling today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ooh, nice! Air Canada has a worldwide sale. Wow, look at this deal to the Philippines. Nice, let's book it. But wait, Naples is also a steal. Saving seafood and sun? You want sun? There's a hot deal to Mexico. And even hotter to Yellowknife. Nice, but I thought you wanted tropical hot.

You're all over the map. Well, yeah, we've got over 180 destinations to choose from. Saving on every single destination. Nice. Hurry, book at aircanada.com or contact your travel agent. Conditions apply. Air Canada. Nice travels. Today on Something You Should Know, why do commercial airliners still have ashtrays?

Then, when is it best to take a risk and try something new? Or when should you play it safe? If we want to think in terms of minimizing regret, which believe it or not, mathematicians have a definition of regret, which is the difference between basically what you got and what you could have got if you had a crystal ball and have been able to make perfect decisions. To minimize regret, you do best if you choose optimistically, if you're more willing to take a chance. Also, memory loss starts a lot sooner than most people think.

And I'll tell you what you can do about it. And strength training, building muscle, it has a lot of benefits. Strength training improves bone density, blood pressure. It helps treat type 2 diabetes. It reduces risk of cancer. It helps with obesity. All this today on Something You Should Know.

I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times. And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters. We come together to host Unspool, the podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits. Fan favorites, must-sees, and acacia missteps. We're talking Parasite the Home Alone.

From Grease to the Dark Knight. So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure. Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to hit the follow button. Something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. So for the past eight years that I've been doing this podcast, sitting here interviewing people and editing the show and putting it all together. Sitting here with me has been my dog, Taffy. And sadly, Taffy died the other day. She was 15 years old and getting up there. Taffy was a Lasso Opso, Shih Tzu, Jack Russell Terrier, and we had her DNA done and she was a little bit of everything. And she was not the friendliest dog to strangers. You had to really earn her friendship and it took a while.

Taffy was a rescue dog and I always had this sense from her that she was really, really grateful to have been rescued. She was very loyal, followed me everywhere, my wife everywhere. She was a great dog and she's really, it's very sad to sit in here and do this and she's not there. So this episode we are dedicating to the memory of Taffy. First up today, people have a lot of common questions about flying and I've got some answers.

One of those questions is, do you really need to turn your phone on to airplane mode? Well, it's tricky because you're supposed to, but probably nothing's going to happen if you don't. There has never been an incident where the interference from a cell phone has caused a crash. However, it's been said that cell phones can interfere with radio frequencies, potentially harming communication between the pilot and air traffic control. What if your plane is struck by lightning? Well, it happens, but planes are built with a protective metal that's engineered to prevent electric buildup while protecting the plane from power surges, so nothing much is likely to

happen. Why do airplane wings have red and green flashing lights? Well the lights are there to signal to planes crossing in their path. The red light is always on the left side while the green light is always on the right. This way the crew on another plane can determine the direction of travel of your plane. Why do planes still have ashtrays in the bathroom when smoking is prohibited? Well, even though smoking is not allowed and hasn't been for a long time, the FAA actually made ashtrays a requirement. That's because in the event that some passenger pulls out a cigarette and starts to smoke it, there will be a place to put it out.

Can the doors on a plane be opened in mid-flight? No. Planes are designed so the door remains shut throughout the flight. There is so much more pressure inside the plane than outside the plane that the door is constantly being forced closed. You would have to be Superman to open it. And why do airplanes leave that long white trail in the sky? Well these condensation trails form when humid exhaust from jet engines cools very quickly in cold dry air at high altitudes. It's kind of like the fog that results when you exhale on a cold day. And that is something you should know. When you're faced with the opportunity to try

something new, does that sound exciting or scary? Are you someone who likes to stick to the tried and true, do what you did before, or do you like going out on a limb and trying something different? It can be as small as trying something new from a menu, or just get the same thing you always get, or take a vacation to a new destination, or go back to the same place you always go. It's your willingness and desire, or lack of it, to explore. That's what we're about to look at with my guest, Alex Hutchinson. He's a columnist for Outside Magazine who has contributed to the New York Times and

the New Yorker. He's author of a book called The Explorer's Gene, Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. Hey, Alex, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike, thanks for having me. So when I first saw this, I started thinking, well, what do I like to do? Am I more the explorer?

Do I like to stick with the tried and true? And the answer really is, it really depends. And some days I want the same thing that I got before on the menu and other days, I wanna try something new. A hundred percent. And that's, I think one of the realizations I've come to after, you know,

spending three or four years digging into the research about how we decide when to explore. I kind of thought that exploring is so cool. We should always explore more. How do I explore more? But I've come to a different position which is it's about knowing when to explore and when to exploit as the, you know, if you think of that as the opposite of explore. And you know, if you did nothing but explore, think of it in the context of music, you know, if you're always searching for new music, that's great because you're finding new things.

But if you were to never listen to the same album twice, because you're so dedicated to always finding something new, that would be kind of sad too. You'd never actually be enjoying. So it's absolutely important to explore and to exploit and to try and think, be thoughtful about when you're doing each one. So here's an example from my life that I would like to get you to comment. I have a tendency, like if we're going to go somewhere on a vacation, my tendency is to go back to where we've been before because it's comfortable, I know what to expect. And yet when I go somewhere new, I almost always love it and the next time want to go back there. So I'll stretch and try something and explore and usually like it, but my tendency is the

tried and true. I think that's a tension that exists in all of us, you know, maybe in different contexts and different respects. Thinking of the food example again, one of the interesting things, so you can do huge big data analyses of millions of orders from food delivery companies to try and get a sense rather than just talking in the abstract of do we like trying new dishes or do we like going back to old favorites, we can see what people do and how they rate those meals. And when people try something new, on average, like if they order from a restaurant they've

never ordered from before, on average, they tend to rate that meal lower. By exploring, they've actually taken a hit. They've got on average a meal that's worse. Over time, they have a mix of good and bad meals and they drop the duds and they add the good new one into the rotation. As a result, their ratings creep up over time. So exploring pays off in the long term but we kind of know, we kind of have the realization that it comes with a risk and it means that sometimes we're going to get worse results.

So you may decide to go somewhere new on vacation and you realize that by taking a chance that you may end up with a crummy vacation. So it's natural to feel that worry or that resistance to exploring. And I think one solution is to try and zoom out at rather than thinking about how am I going to enjoy this week, it's like, will I be glad in a year from now that I took a chance and maybe discovered something that will make my future vacations even better? So I imagine everybody has heard this idea that, you know,

people on their deathbed say that looking back, they wished they had taken more risks. They wished they had asked that girl out. They wished they had taken that job in that other place or that they had explored a little more. I don't know if that's true or not. I think we have an intuition about that, right? That most people, you look back and you say, boy, I wish I'd asked her to dance more likely than you are to be worrying about, oh, I can't believe I asked her to dance, and she said no. The things we did that didn't turn out don't generally stick with us as much as the things that

might have been. The scientists who studied decision theory and who tried to understand what is the optimal way of making decisions, they have an approach. it's called the upper confidence bound algorithm, which is a complicated name, but the basic advice that they come up with based on the mathematics is that you should make decisions based on what has the best realistic upside, what has the chance of turning out really well. If you're choosing between a job that's stable but kind of boring and not what you're interested in versus the job that maybe is a little more uncertain, maybe has a lower starting salary but has a pathway towards your dream job, their advice is all else being equal, take

a chance on the job that has the bigger upside. Because again, to your point, when you're sitting on your deathbed or even a year or five years from now you're gonna look back and say boy I'm glad I took a chance on something that had a great possibility of paying off even if it didn't work out compared to never knowing whether it might have worked out. There's always that wondering about the road not taken no matter what you do you didn't do that other thing, and I wonder what if I had. That's the human condition.

We can't split ourselves in two and know how both options would have turned out. So I think the advice is to choose optimistically, to go for the thing that you think will be best, recognizing that A, it might not turn out and B, you'll never know if you had, you know, if you had chosen the other path, maybe it would have turned out to be great, but this is the human condition. So it does seem, and I think I put myself in this category of

I don't want to look back and wonder what if. Yeah, I don't want to regret. I've got plenty of those that I don't want to keep doing that. And so avoiding regret drives a lot of the decisions I make. And I imagine a lot of people are like that. If we want to think in terms of minimizing regret, which believe it or not, mathematicians have a definition of regret, which is the difference between basically what you got and what you could have got if you had a crystal ball and have been able to make perfect decisions. To minimize regret, you do best if you choose optimistically, if you're more willing to take a chance.

Not a reckless chance, not a, oh, if I invest all my money in lottery tickets, there's a chance I might be a billionaire. That's not a good decision. But when there's a realistic chance of a good upside, if you're in a position that you can make that gamble without exposing yourself to terrible problems, it's probably a good idea to give it a shot. Because who doesn't have one of those regrets, whether it was the high school dance or whatever, one of those, if only I had asked her out or if only I had gone to that thing and you'll never know. So you'll always regret it and if you had to do it over, you probably

would do different. Yeah and we will always have those regrets. It would be impossible to live a life with none of those regrets. But boy, if you can try out some of those things after all, I think in general, you're happy you did, even if it puts you through a little bit of awkwardness or some uncertainty at the moment. But in the research of looking how people make these decisions, what about personality? There do seem to be some people who are very cautious and the stress of trying something new might be overwhelming and maybe they're better, you know, getting that same old hamburger at the restaurant. Yeah, I mean, this goes back in part to what we were

talking about earlier with the idea of an explorers gene that some people really are wired to enjoy uncertainty and novelty more than others. And there's also, I think, we have to recognize that even within a given individual, I'm very exploratory in some aspects and I like my routines in other parts of my life. And so, there are times depending on the context where I might be more exploratory. And what the example that springs to mind for me is there's all this research on when should you take a parking spot versus this is part of the exploring research. When should you grab the parking spot you see versus keep driving towards your destination

and hope you get a parking spot that's closer to you? And you can do all these sophisticated calculations about well, how many, what is the rate of empty parking spots? You know, how far are you from the destination? But for me, I hate parallel parking under pressure with cars behind me. And I don't mind walking. So if I see a parking spot that's really wide and I can, you know, go in front ways rather than backing into it, I take it and I don't care what the math says.

So, and that's my, to your point, that's my anxiety about parallel parking that makes it worth taking what I've got rather than gambling that there'll be something better down the road. So we're talking about our desire to explore and try new things versus our tendency to want to just stick with the tried-and-true. My guest is Alex Hutchinson. He's author of a book called The Explorer's Gene. Why we seek big challenges, new flavors, and the blank spots on the map. My parents have had a lot of time on their hands lately. At first, it was nice. Hey mom, can you drive me to soccer practice?

Sure can. We're having slow cooked ribs for dinner. It was awesome. And then it became a lot. Some friends are coming over to watch a movie. Oh, what are we watching? I'll make some popcorn. Thanks to Voila, they can order all our fresh favorites from Sobeez, Farmboy, and Longos online, which is super reliable. And now my parents are reliable. A little too reliable. Voila. Your groceries delivered.

Just like that. I'm Anne Foster, host of the feminist women's history comedy podcast, Vulgar History, and every week I share the saga of a woman from history whose story you probably didn't already know and you will never forget after you hear it. Sometimes we reexamine well-known people like Cleopatra or Pocahontas sharing the truth behind their legends. Sometimes we look at the scandalous women you'll never

find in a history textbook. If you can hear my cat purring, she is often on the podcast as well. Listen to Vulgar History wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Vulgar History wherever you get your podcasts. So Alex, I wonder if we learn from those regrets that you were talking about. Do we take those regrets and then say, you know, next time, given the opportunity, I'm going to go for it? Or do we just lament our regret and don't learn from it? This idea of an explore-exploit dilemma, it comes from a Stanford University

management professor named James March who wrote about it back in the 90s. He was talking about it in a corporate context, should companies invest in R&D or should they invest their money in marketing their current product line? His main contention was that companies tend to systematically under-invest in exploration in R&D because the returns are, it's a long time before you know whether you've made a successful gamble. If you invest in marketing, you can see a sales bump and right away you're like, that was a good thing to do, I'll do more of it. If you invest in R&D, three years later you're still not sure whether the you right away you're like, that was a good thing to do, I'll do more of it. If you invest in R&D, three years later,

you're still not sure whether the product's gonna pan out, you don't know whether it's gonna be success or failure, so the feedback is less direct. And I think that applies in personal lives too, that taking a chance, we don't always know as clearly, we don't see the effects right away. Whereas sticking with what you know, you know what you're gonna get

and you get this positive feedback. So that leads us maybe to not learn as well as we should about those times when we took a chance and it paid off. So I think it requires sort of being aware of that and stopping and thinking, okay, what are the things that were meaningful in my life? What are the decisions I made that I'm really happy I did? If you ask me to list the five best decisions I made, do I look back and say, I'm really glad I just, if you ask me to make, to list the five best decisions I made, do I look back and say, I'm really glad I just stuck with the tried and true and didn't gave it a chance. It didn't, didn't try out this other thing. I think for most people,

that's not, not the case. As I listened to you talk, I wonder psychologically, what is it that makes somebody want to be more of an explorer versus somebody who wants to not explore so much. And even within the same person, some days you want to try something different on the menu and some days you just want to go with what you know you like. You know, there's an area that I found really interesting in psychology called the effort paradox because when we talk about exploring, we often end up telling these tales of explorers who

cross the ocean or whatever and three quarters of them died of starvation and it's very hard. And even in our own conversation right today, we've been talking about exploration, but we've been talking about taking a risk and the possibility of failure. And so there's a tendency, I think, to think about exploration or about the challenges you might face as a price you have to pay for the payoff. That, yeah, it's going to be hard if I try and do this thing, but there's a chance it's going to lead to something good, so it's worth putting up with the difficulty. And what the Ever Paradox says is that's the

wrong way to think about it. That in fact, if something is hard, if running a marathon or climbing a mountain is hard, that's actually part of the attraction. We do it because it's challenging, because the feeling of doing something challenging makes it feel meaningful to us. And so that is a different way of thinking about the challenge that we shouldn't run away from things that are hard, but we should realize that whether it's running a marathon or whether it's having kids or whether it's buying furniture from Ikea, sometimes doing things that are hard actually is kind of the point and is what makes it feel good. What is it that drives the desire to explore? Is it just simply curiosity that I wonder what that's like, so let me go check it out or is there something else?

I think we can, we can answer that on a few different levels. And I think if we, if we go deep enough, what we're, what we're really saying is that being curious about the unknown, wanting, always wanting to know what's behind, what's, what's around the next corner or what's over the horizon has been good for us as a species.

That it's helped us to survive, it's helped us to find new resources and figure out better ways of doing things. So we explore fundamentally because it helps us learn about the world. Now, that's not, you know, when I'm on vacation, I'm not necessarily like, I really need to know what's around that corner so I can learn about the world and propagate the species. Over time, we've evolved so that exploring feels good. It feels fun to find an area that I don't know something about, to find an area of uncertainty and to resolve that uncertainty, to learn about the world. So I think in the modern sense, in the proximate sense, we're driven by curiosity because it's fun, because it feels good, because we enjoy it.

But the underlying reason is because that's a good thing for a species to have is the desire to learn about the world. And is there therefore some evolutionary deep satisfaction that exploring gives you because it's kind of worked its way into us or no? I think so and I think when I talked to one of the psychologists who works on the effort paradox about this, we got into talking about the meaning in life which is a heavy topic, right? And so I was like, I don't know what meaning is. What does it mean to say that something is meaningful? And he said, well, when you ask people

whether an activity like having kids or going on a trip or something, they can't articulate what they mean by meaningful, but they can answer whether something was meaningful or not. And I think meaning is, it's a big word, it's a heavy word, and it's a very imprecise and hard to define word. It's something that we get from undertaking adventures and explorations and opportunities to discover new things that we don't get necessarily from sitting on the sofa and watching a documentary about someone else going and having an adventure. Well, that is really interesting that people know what's meaningful but they can't tell you what it is.

But they know what it is. But it's unspeakable. Yeah, it's the topic or the debate that has launched a thousand arguments in philosophy departments around the world. And I certainly can't answer what meaning is. But yeah, I can think back in my life and say, wow, that was a really, I'm glad I did that for reasons that I can't articulate it felt really meaningful. Yeah, because you often hear things like people who go in the military or people who were

drafted into the military and desperately tried not to be. But they will often talk about their days in the military as not a great time, but as a meaningful time. They seldom is it a joyful time, but there was something very meaningful about it. And even my son, he wanted to go to a military camp, summer camp when he was 12 years old, and we tried to talk him out of it because it was a Marine camp and he was 12 and he went and it clearly was one of the most meaningful things that ever happened to him.

But he doesn't describe it as a wonderful time. Yeah, those are two very different things, aren't they? And obviously meaning is about more than exploring, and so you can add in factors like purpose. And I think people in the military feel a powerful sense of purpose too. But they're doing something hard, and they know that it's not necessarily something fun, but it's something that is meaningful. Do you think or is there evidence to show that this is something people think about? I mean, I think about this, but I don't know, do other people think about, should I take more risks?

Should I try new things or not? If I was to generalize, I would say, no, I don't think people think about this a lot. Even when I started to dig into this literature and the science and ask people about it, there are some scientists in the world who are thinking very carefully about it. But most people, they say they're not analyzing their decisions. Especially as we get into adulthood, and we're all busy and we're all trying to pay the bills and take care of the family and all that, in a sense, we're trying to minimize decision fatigue. So it takes some energy to stop and think about why am I making this decision? Is this the right decision? Am I considering what could be if I did something

different or am I just trying to get through the day and so it's understandable but I think a little more introspection on how and why we make our decisions is probably a good thing. Lastly, anything else about this whole idea of exploring that you think people would be fascinated to know? You know, I think there's a bunch of research on how exploring changes across the lifespan. And we naturally explore less as we get older and that makes sense because we know more about the world, so we don't need to explore as much and we have less time left to enjoy it to be brutally frank about it. There's

less value in discovering something new at my age than there was when I was eight years old and would have had an extra four decades to enjoy whatever that thing is. So there's a tendency to kind of accept this slide of this gradual decrease of exploration that makes sense. One of the researchers I spoke to, I asked a lot of researchers like, should we be trying to explore more? And he said, you know, this decline in exploration is natural. But what you have to remember is that unlike a million years ago when we were evolving, if you're 60 years old, you've probably got a good, you know, and if you happen, if you're lucky enough to be healthy, you've got a good two or three decades more of living and enjoying things. So you need to still be exploring because we live a long time

now and we have the opportunity to keep discovering new things. So that's a message that really struck home for me. Well I find this helpful because sometimes I think I play it too safe and then other times I think why did I do that? That seemed pretty risky at the time. But everybody's different and not everybody is the same in all situations. And it's really good to get this perspective from you. Alex Hutchinson has been my guest. He's a columnist for Outside Magazine and he's author of the book, The Explorer's Gene,

Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Bl the blank spots on the map. If you'd like to read his book there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks Alex. Thank you Mike, I really appreciate you having me on. Hello I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox and we would like to tell you about the new series of the Infinite Monkey Cage. We're gonna have a planet off. Jupiter versus Saturn. It's very well done that because in the script it does say wrestling voice after all of that it's gonna kind of chill out a bit and talk about ice and also in this series we're discussing history music recording with Brian Eno and looking at nature's shapes.

So listen wherever you get your podcasts. From the podcast that brought you to each of the last lesbian bars in the country and back in time, through the sapphic history that shaped them, comes a brand new season of cruising beyond the bars. This is your host, Sara Gabrielli, and I've spent the past year interviewing history-making lesbians and queer folks about all kinds of queer spaces,

from bookstores to farms to line dancing and much more. You can listen to Cruising on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes air every other Tuesday starting February 4th. We all know how important it is to exercise. Yet for many people, when you say the word exercise, they think of aerobic exercise, running, walking, biking, swimming, exercise class, things that get your heart rate up. Yet, there's another important kind of exercise, and that is strength training, building muscles

by lifting weights, essentially. Somehow strength training in many people's minds just isn't as important. And then there are the fears that if you lift heavy weights you'll get all bulky like the Incredible Hulk, which is extremely unlikely. Or you sometimes see people lifting weights but they're very light weights. And doing that's probably fine but it doesn't really build muscle. Yet, as you age, muscles deteriorate. That's why you often see older people having trouble getting out of a chair, or getting out of a car, or having trouble opening a jar, or lifting something. It's lack of muscle strength. And as you're about to hear, keeping your muscles strong not only helps with those things I just mentioned,

but has a lot of other benefits too. Here to discuss this is Michael Joseph Gross. He is a long time contributing editor to Vanity Fair and he's author of a book called Stronger, the untold story of muscle in our lives. Hey Michael, welcome to something you should know. Thank you. So let me ask you first to address the disparity between aerobic exercise and building muscle. Why there's a difference and why they're two different things and not part of the same thing.

Well, the reason we learned to think it wasn't important goes back thousands of years. At the very beginning of scientific medicine, doctors and athletic trainers were competing to see who could corner the market in what we now call healthcare. Now the most famous doctor in ancient Rome whose name was Galen, He argued that trainers who encouraged athletes to build mass, what we now think of as building muscle, were actually making those athletes suffocate their souls. Now, this idea of muscle as being both kind of superficial and the opposite of healthful continues into the modern era. Kenneth Cooper, who wrote the most popular book about exercise in the 20th century, the

book called Aerobics, which really put aerobic exercise at the center of our idea of what exercise is, said that building muscular fitness was just like putting a shiny new paint job on a car when in fact what we needed to be doing was give the body a new engine a better heart and lung system. Which I think still persists to some extent and so explain how important muscle is. Muscle is so much more than what most of us have grown up thinking it is. I than what most of us have grown up thinking it is. I think a lot of us have grown up thinking that muscle is mainly a matter of appearance. When we think about its function, we think about how it moves us. But muscle is performing a huge number of jobs

inside the body. Let's start with metabolism. Muscle is the main sink for disposal of blood sugar, making sure that our metabolism is healthy. Muscle is also the main reservoir of the proteins that do the work of healing us when we're sick or building our bodies when we're children and adolescents growing. Strength and muscle even shape our whole identity. There are connections between muscle and mind, muscle and mental health that have only begun to be discovered in the past few decades. For instance, for many people in the first proper randomized controlled trial of heavy weight training as treatment for depression, for 75% of people in that study, lifting heavy weights treated depression as well as the best antidepressant drugs.

And as we get older, muscle more and more becomes a matter of life and death Our muscles are interacting with our bones all the time. And if we lift heavy weights, we're Allowing the muscles to make more strain on the bones which makes the bones stronger Which means that if you're an older woman and you fall stronger, which means that if you're an older woman and you fall, you're much less likely to break your hip if you've been lifting weights for the past few decades. Heady weight training is one of the best preventive measures for osteoporosis. So I've heard that exercise in general helps fight depression and is good for mental health. I hadn't heard that specifically strength training was, that it was just exercise in general.

No, it's now very well established that both weight training and aerobic training are effective as treatments for depression. That's recognized in the clinical practice guidelines for the treatment of depression in a number of countries, not so much in the United States yet, but the World Health Organization recognizes this. And there was very recently a big global consensus statement about exercise and optimal health throughout the lifespan that really established definitively weight training is as important for mental health as aerobic training.

So Kenneth Cooper wrote that book, Aerobics, and it was a huge book. Has he ever restated his position or modified his position about strength training? By the time he turned 70 years old, Kenneth Cooper, the father of aerobics, had committed to a regimen of lifting weights. The Cooper Institute has longitudinal data on the health of thousands of people that they have been monitoring for decades. And when they went into their data starting a couple of decades ago, they realized that over time, it turned out that strength training, muscular fitness

was on par with aerobic fitness for long-term health. When we talk about strength training, lifting weights, building muscle, there is a lot of confusion as to what does that mean, how big a weight, you don't want to hurt yourself if you lift weights that are too heavy. So what does it mean to strength train and what are the parameters? How do you do it? Strength is defined in most scientific literature as maximal force. The basic concept for measuring strength is called the one repetition maximum. A one repetition maximum or 1RM is the heaviest weight that a person can lift

one time with perfect form. It's not a grunting effort. It's not wrenching your body around to see if you can get the weight up. It's one perfect rep. Now to train for strength, it has traditionally been accepted that since about the 1940s that training at about 80% of one repetition maximum will get the best strength response. We can go way down the rabbit hole on sets and rep schemes. Some people are going to say if you're lifting anything lighter than you can lift for five or six reps you're wasting your time. Other people say you should really be lifting the amount that you can lift for eight or ten times. The truth is for people who

are just starting out really anything they do is going to be building strength but our muscles adapt very quickly. Muscle is one of the most adaptable tissues in the human body and after a very short period of time you know a couple three months if you don't start moving into those higher ranges of weight, you won't continue to be building strength. And the basic principle of progression there, progressive overload, adding strength as you go on so that you can increase your capacity. That's the most basic principle of strength training. And talk about just the immediate benefits

of just having stronger muscles. Can I tell you a little story about that? Yeah. There was a young girl in California in the 1950s who loved to go visit her grandmother. They would turn on the Jack LaLanne show and do exercises together in front of the TV. And this little girl grew up learning to love exercise because of that. Now she gets older and her grandmother gets older and her grandmother has a bad fall eventually. She breaks her hip, she goes into the hospital, she goes into the nursing home, and it's just that slope that we've all seen too many times. Now by this time, the young girl has become a medical student and she decides that she's going to specialize in the treatment of old people people because she wants to try to help older people avoid her grandmother's fate.

Maria Fiataroni Singh went on to become the first doctor to use strength training in the way that we've just defined it. L lifting heavy weights at about 80% of one repetition maximum for frail elderly people. The way she came to that idea was she went to a nursing home called Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for Aged in Boston, and she had a meeting with the residents. And she said, I need to run some kind of a study here and I want it to be a study that's gonna improve your lives. What would you like? What can I do for you as a doctor? Would you like to live longer? And a

man raised his hand in the back of the room and he said, I'm 90 years old. I lived through the Holocaust. I don't want to live longer. I just want to be able to get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom and get back to my bed by myself. her, she thought, what if I came in and tested these people's strength and worked with them to lift weights at a high level of intensity, 80% of their one repetition maximum? Nobody had ever done that before because everybody thought it was dangerous for older people's hearts. But she ran the study. 12 weeks later, the minimum strength gain in these older people's legs was 64%. The maximum strength gain was 374%. And the average was almost double, about 175%. She went on to run a bigger randomized controlled trial of strength training for the oldest malnourished people

and had the same results. But it not only made them stronger in the sense of testing their strength, lifting heavier weights, it made them walk faster. It increased their spontaneous activity. They were just walking around the nursing home more than they did before, moving around the nursing home. Some of them actually were walking who hadn't been able to walk on their own before. They'd been using walkers or canes. A couple of them just threw those canes away. But for everybody, the result was an increased ability to act on the world in the ways that they wanted to. Do we know what diseases, other than being able to move around in the world better,

what specific diseases besides the mental health thing you mentioned, does strength training improve, if any? The list is long. Strength training improves bone density, it improves blood pressure, it even improves aerobic fitness as much as moderate intensity walking, especially for older people.

A lot of people can't believe it when they hear that. It improves body composition. It helps treat type 2 diabetes. And that's especially true for older people. It reduces risk of cancer. It actually reduces the risk of cancer mortality much more than aerobic exercise does. It reduces the risk of falls. It reduces the risk of osteoporotic fracture. It even helps with obesity and overweight. This is something that Maria Fiataroni Singh often emphasizes for younger people who maybe are heavier and aren't very comfortable doing aerobic exercise.

Strength training is a great alternative and it's something that they can be really good at. And also something that at the same time is making them healthier, establishing a foundation for long-term health as well. I think one of the things that puts people off on this whole topic is if you say you need to exercise, well, I can walk. I can walk fast. I can walk on a treadmill.

I could even run a little bit. That's very easy for me to do. I walk into a gym and look at this big thing of weights. Many people would say I wouldn't, many people would say, I wouldn't even know where to start, what to do, how to put my toe in the water with any of this. It's a great question. Where does a person start? The best thing, if you can afford it, is to hire a good trainer. And if you're on the fence about whether you can afford it, it's I think a good thing to remember that

building our muscles and strength is really like saving for retirement. It is that important. There are some resources on YouTube, channels like Squat University, that are really good about providing guidance on safe progressions and safe form. But when you're starting out, you really do need in some form, in some way, to get some help. If you wanna just maximize your chances of doing this as safely as possible for as long as possible.

And what do we know, because people hear, if you're going to do aerobic exercise, you should do it, a minimum of three times a week, more is better. But what about strength training? How much do you have to do and when does it start to, the effects wear off if you don't do it for a while? Just that type of information. Most of the national and international exercise guidelines

put out by government health departments or by the World Health Organization. Recommend strength training, full body program, two or three times a week. For some people, more is better. For people who have depression, greater frequency of training will help. For people with type 2 diabetes, greater frequency of training, I think it's now acknowledged, will help. One of the most important things is actually probably the most important thing is consistency. You can't go heavy all the time.

Sometimes you have to back off. Sometimes you have to back off. Sometimes you have to just rest. But showing up week after week really on a regular basis is absolutely necessary. The study of high-intensity strength training in 90 year olds in the nursing home found about three months later that most of those people who'd made the spectacular gains in strength, the people who'd been able to throw away their canes and walk on their own again had lost most of the capacity that they'd built. This is true of people of all ages. This is true of teenagers too. You can train for months and then in a couple of months,

lose most or all of what you've gained. But it's also true that once you've built it, regaining it comes faster. I mentioned it at the beginning, but we didn't really address it. And that is the fear that people have, the reason that they don't lift weights is the fear of getting big muscles

and looking like a bodybuilder. Those fears are almost completely unfounded. Gyms around the world are full of men who've been trying for years to get bulky without success. Eating tons of food, showing up every day for workouts, trying to get bulky, and they just can't do it. Now men have a hormonal milieu that allows them to build mass much more easily than most women. To the question of safety, all of the reviews of safety data have shown that with good form with proper progression, lifting weights is extremely safe.

And in one study by the CDC, it was even shown to be safer than walking. Most of us have, I think, have older people, grandparents, people we know who are older, and encouraging this seems like, in older people, encouraging this would seem to be a great idea. Maria Fiataroni Singh, the geriatrician, often says that for her as a geriatrician, as somebody who's treating old people, weight training is the most powerful medicine we have,

is the most powerful medicine we have, full stop. Well, you couple that with all the other benefits. You mentioned mental health benefits, weight control, help with diabetes. I mean, there are so many reasons to do this. And I've been doing strength training for a long time. And I don't know if I enjoy it, but it feels good. It feels good to do it. It feels good to feel strong. I've been talking with Michael Joseph Gross. He is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, and he's author of a book called Stronger, the Untold Story of

Muscle in Our Lives. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Michael, appreciate you coming on the show today. Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure. I think there's a tendency to believe that memory loss, mental decline, is something that old people have to deal with. But when does the process of mental decline actually begin? It actually begins at 35. A study of about 50,000 people age

10 to 89 was conducted by MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital and here's what they found. Working memory, that ability to hold onto facts, names, numbers for a short amount of time, that peaks at around age 25 and it holds steady till about age 35 and then slowly starts declining. Long-term memory actually increases until about retirement age before it starts to decline. We also know that adults hold on to their memories longer than in previous generations. Apparently we're doing something right, although no one's exactly sure what that is. It may be education, diet, crossword puzzles, who knows.

But it is clear from the research that the more you exercise your brain, the stronger it gets. And that is something you should know. You know, I can't tell you how dog-eat-dog competitive it is out there in the podcast world competing against bazillions of, literally millions of podcasts. And the best way to get new listeners is to have someone like you tell someone you know because they're more likely to listen to you than to a commercial or something else.

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