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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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 because she wants to try to help older people avoid her grandmother's fate. Maria Fiatoroni Singh went on to become the first doctor to use strength training in the way that we've just defined it.
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 going to 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. Now, that was the light bulb moment for 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.
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 heavier.
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.
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 want to just maximize your chances of, of doing this as safely as possible for as long as possible.
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 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.
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.
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. Full stop.
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