Dr. Andy Galpin

musicians, leaders, scientists, educators, or anything else in between.

Human performance really is what you want your body to be capable of.

So in order to accomplish that, I'm extremely excited to share with you the physiology behind human performance in a way that is engaging, applicable, and most importantly, useful.

Today we're going to be talking about muscle, more specifically, skeletal muscle, my favorite.

Now, I know when you first hear that, your mind may jump to things like sport performance and big giant muscles and bodybuilding and aesthetics.

And while that may or may not be of interest to you, I will tell you candidly, it's a large interest of mine.

You may be surprised to learn that muscle quality and quantity are incredibly important for your overall health and well-being.

Yeah, you heard that right.

Quality muscle is essential for the vitality of nearly every cell, organ, or organ system in your entire body.

Let me give you two specific examples of what I'm talking about.

First is the connection between muscle and the brain.

Now, there are many lines of evidence we could utilize here, but one that I think highlights the point beautifully is a recent study on about a half a million participants, mostly middle-aged men and women,

And in that, they found that about 30% of dementia cases were directly attributable to low grip strength.

Now, that may sound alarming and or interesting to you, and I promise we'll get into the details of that study and many others later in the show.

Now, that was an example of muscle quality or functionality.

Let me give you another one regarding muscle quantity or size and how that will directly relate to longevity or lifespan.

Once again, there's lots of research to pull from, and we'll get into this later in the show.

But it's very clear that being under-muscled is a significant problem.

In fact, we know this is such a big problem, the National Institute of Health has an entire wing dedicated specifically to sarcopenia, which is the advanced loss of muscle with age.

If you'd like some hard numbers to wrap your head around a little bit here, consider this.