The #1 Exercise to Stay Physically Independent as You Age | World's Top Strength Training Researcher

If you do not do resistance training, you will begin to lose fundamental muscle mass at the rate of about 1.5% per year, sometime in your 30s, the average person. 20% of people in the United States are regularly doing what would be considered the recommended amount of muscle strengthening exercise every week. 50% of all older adults who experience a hip fracture never regain their physical independence. One of the coolest studies was in 90 year olds in nursing homes. And they had them do just leg extensions three days a week. They experienced strength gains of 150% in their knee extensors. 50% improvement in functional capacity. Three out of the 10 subjects were able to walk without assistance of their canes after an eight-week training program. Resistance training, the muscle itself secretes various substances called myokines. Several of them affect the brain, and it's been shown over and over that depression is ameliorated with resistance training, and aerobic training as well, just exercise in general.

One thing that's become incredibly popular now is this hot-cold therapy contrast. Also some controversy about doing cold plunge.

If you do cold plunge or cold water application within 20 minutes or so after the end of a resistance training workout, you compromise muscle growth.

What would you say is the most overrated trend in longevity right now?

My humble opinion, it's that...

We all know that exercise is incredibly important and beneficial, certainly as we age. But what if some of what we're doing in the gym right now is working against us or isn't getting us the result we both want and need? My guest today is widely regarded as the world's leading strength training researcher. Brad Schoenfeld has spent decades separating what the science really shows from what the fitness industry often tells. And so we're going to talk today about the minimum effective dose of training, exercise selection, what GLP-1 drugs can do to your muscle mass, which supplements we should actually take. And most importantly, what are the things that you should be doing today to protect against the signatures of aging? Please enjoy my conversation with Professor Brad Schoenfeld.

Brad,

welcome.

It's a pleasure Chris.

It's such a pleasure to have you here and I want to tell you firstly why this is a real full circle moment for me because 22 years ago I was studying your textbook at university to graduate as an exercise physiologist. So two decades later here we are having the privilege of interviewing you in person.

It's awesome. It's my pleasure, Chris.

So, hey, a good place to start, I think, would be to give the listeners a bit of context as to why you are widely regarded as the sort of godfather of the exercise physiology world.

Yeah, so I started out as a personal trainer. My career path was very windy. And I was a bodybuilder as well, and I trained a lot of physique athletes. And basically the research at that point, you're going back now to the late 90s, early 2000s, um was mostly for strength and conditioning for sports and there was very little research on hypertrophy and whatever research there was was kind of an adjunct it wasn't even it's really much more focused of