Michael Joseph Gross
speaker
38 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Michael Joseph Gross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Strength training improves bone density, blood pressure. It helps treat type 2 diabetes. It reduces risk of cancer. It helps with obesity.
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.
Muscle is so much more 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,
you're much less likely to break your hip if you've been lifting weights for the past few decades. Heavy weight training is one of the best preventive measures for osteoporosis.
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.
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.
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... you know, 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, 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.
Can I tell you a little story about that?
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 that slope that we've all seen too many times
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