#1666 Strength Training: Why, How, When, How Much, How Hard? - Harps (PT1)

to strength train. More broadly, not all strength training has to involve weights or dumb bells or gettle bells or bar bells, of course, But and I'm going to say I have started and stopped this episode more times than I want to tell you. I don't know why. I

don't know why. I think I think part of it is because I just I don't know how the fuctor fits forty five years of training and training others and education and working in gyms and owning gyms, and you know, being a fitness industry person and trying to trying to get clear about what it is that I want to tell you. You know, it's like it's almost like you've been on a five year trip and you've got to give somebody a five minute debrief on your five year trip,

and you think, fuck, where do I start. I've been away five years and I've only got fight, and it's kind of for me. It's like forty five years in forty five minutes, give or take. So maybe I'll do another one. This is, by no means absolutely comprehensive. This is not the start and finish, and I guess, I guess it's really aimed more for people who don't know a lot about strength training, maybe people who know nothing

or next to nothing. Maybe people who have got a bit of experience, or maybe some people who've been training for a while and you just want to hear my thoughts and ideas. This will not be advanced, but I will talk about some advanced I guess, or more complicated ideas and science, but I'll explain it in a way

which is completely understandable. So the last few times I tried to do this, I just started banging on about you know, sets and reps and volume and frequency and workload and intensity, and then you know, when you talk, and you think I'm talking a lot, but I don't think I'm saying much. I felt like I was doing that and I felt like I was probably maybe talking over people's heads. So what I did was which I

don't normally do. But I've just written a bunch of what I think of relevant questions in front of me, and so I'm going to Obviously I haven't written the answers, but I just I've written the things that I think I need to address, which might be the most valuable to you. And so question one on my list is why this topic. Well, despite what a lot of people think, strength training is probably more important for the people who

typically don't go to the gym. I mean typically, and by that I mean people who are not particularly athletic or sporting, or young, or people who might not be in Inverted Comma's gym people. And so for me, the idea of getting people involved in lifting weights is really about health and wellness and function and the way that they age their health span, which we've spoken about many times. That is how well you can live and for how long. And of course some people will lift weights more because

they want to change the way they look. It's an aesthetic thing, and there's nothing wrong with wanting fucking wide shoulders and a little waist or big arms or less body fat more, there's nothing. Of course, if I'm being honest, of course I don't want to look terrible. I don't think I look amazing, But I think for my age, I'm in okay shape. Do I want to be in okay shape or good shape because I've got an ego? If I'm being honest, yes I do. But is that

my primary driver? No? My primary driver these days is that I'm okay operationally, I'm okay functionally. Can I get out of bed? Can I lift things? Can I? Can I go for a run around the block? Do I have that strength and my lower body and my lower back and my glutes and my quads, and you know, can I I pick things up in and out of the boot of the car, And can I do all

that stuff? And more importantly, even can I train in the gym and left relatively heavyweights, which then extrapolates into all the benefits and advantages into my day to day life. So there's a thing that I've spoken about many times on this show many, I say many, maybe ten over nearly seventeen hundred episodes. And that's a thing called cycopenia. And cycopenia s A R COO pe Nia is just a fancy terminology for the physiological and inevitability of people

losing muscle generally as they age. When we're talking about sycopenia, we're generally talking about older people. And yes, of course there is an inevitability and an unavoidability. I guess that you and I will lose muscle, But how much muscle

we maintain as we are age is manipulatable. Even if you are listening to this and you are in your forties, fifties, sixties and beyond, and you don't lift weights, or you don't do something or some things to stay strong, then unless there's some medical reason, then more than likely you can build muscle strength and function. I've worked with many people into their eighties who have increased their functional strength, their lean muscle mass, and their ability to do life significantly,

even starting in their really kind of ladder years. So bodies are very adaptable, and of course how adaptable they are and what our physiological potential is declines with age. But it doesn't mean that you at forty or fifty, or sixty or seventy need to be typical or generally representative of what most people are look, feel, function, health performance at that age, And so why do we need to lift weights? Primarily because it keeps us healthy and strong,

you know, bone density, muscle mass function. And over the last decade or so, we've really come to understanding research and science that there are sociological, psychological, and cognitive benefits. So we know that lifting weights, lifting weights consistently improves cognitive function for a period of time. After that, we know that for most people, lifting weights produces a dopamine response. It makes us happy, It puts us potentially in a

better place emotionally. Now I will. Of course, the asterisk next to this is that not everybody responds the exact same way, of course, just like everybody doesn't expot respond the exact same way to the same food or the same five k run, or the same job or the same environment. So there's a lot of variability around this, but generally speaking, lifting weights is a good thing, of course.

So next question is what is bioage. Bioage is basically how old your body is from a functional point of view. Bioage is a little bit of a bro science term, but really what it means is, irrespective of your chronological age, how functional is your body and how does your level of function compare across the lifespan to somebody typically in

a different age group. So, for example me, I just turned sixty one, and so if we did some testing on me, which is possible where we do a bunch of stuff strength and flexibility, range of movement, muscular endurance, aerobic endurance, and depends on the test, but we test a whole lot of physical stuff. We get some data, and then we put all of my data, all of my results, we compare them to a whole lot of

other data. Tens hundreds, maybe thousands of results depend on which protocol we use, but we compare my results to lots and lots and lots of other results, which we call, like I said, normative data. And we find out that Kraig at sixty one has got the functional strength or the bioage of somebody who is fifteen years younger than him, or twenty years younger than him, or it might be. Sometimes we do a bioage test and fifty year old's got the biological age of a sixty five year old.

You've probably seen these TV shows, but we could scrap the term biological age and just put how old old or young compared to your actual age? Is your body in terms of physical performance? And then the next question is which I mentioned the term, what is functional strength? So for me, that is what it is all about. Like how much you can bench press or deadlift or squat, they are indicators of strength, of course, of absolute strength.

But what I'm most interested in, and I suggest most of you would be most interested in, is how functional or practical or useful is the strength that you have or the strength that you are building in day to day life. Hopefully the answer is really functional. So for example, let's say, for example, I can leg press eight hundred pounds for twenty reps, which I can't, but let's say it could. We might say, wow, Craig's got really really strong legs. That's amazing, and at leg pressing eight hundred

pounds for twenty reps, Craig is really good. And then we go, now, how does that functional or how does that strength in the leg press translate to something like running fast or jumping high? And the answer, depending on the individual and the way that those reps are done, and a few other variables, the answer might be not very well at all. It doesn't translate. So strength in the gym is good, and there is generally a correlation

between strength in the gym and functional strength. But when I am designing a program for somebody, I will design it, which is very rare these days. Please don't send me an email, but you know I've designed thousands of programs for thousands of people. But generally I am looking at what is the kind of strength that this person needs to be able to function close to optimally based on their potential in the real world. Or it might be

it doesn't have to be functional strength for life. It could also for those of you who are a bit more advanced, it could also be functional strength for a specific role or task. Let's say somebody's going on climbing a mountain, we might say, and they don't have strong legs.

And let's say they're going to go to you know, they're going to do base camp, Everest or something, and they've got to do a whole lot of climbing or maybe go one above base camp, right, so they've got to well, they don't need massive quads, and they don't need to be able to squat a million pounds or leg press a million pounds, but they do need strong

ass legs, so glutes, hamstrings, quads, calves. So what we might do in the gym with them is we might do squats and deadlifts and hack squads and leg press and all of these kind of knee extension type movements, but we do lots of reps. So we do a light ish to moderate ish weight and we do lots of reps. So we're building some strength, but more importantly and more appropriately for that task of base camp, we're

building functional strength. We're building muscular endurance. Right, So the right kind of program for the right kind of need or goal or individual or individual I guess requirement. That's what functional strength is. And you know, if you're getting a program designed by somebody, we need to make sure that that strength that you are gaining, all strength gained generally is good generally, but we want to make sure

that that works for us in life. And also, I guess I'm going to chuck in here, making sure that we are building total body strength, total body strength. Right. So, for example, what we see is a lot of people in gyms, and not just gyms, but a lot of training environments where they are training their upper back. You've seen dudes and girls with really big strong backs. Upper backs lats we call them lats rhomboids, and you know that kind of V shape, and some of them never

train their lower back. Some of them rarely train their lower back. And so what we do is we have an upper back that this is bro science what I'm about to share. But their upper back is are nine out of ten in terms of strength, but they're lower back that rarely gets trained. That is the kind of the gap or the conduit between you know, the glutes, the lower body and the upper back traps rhomboids region

doesn't get trained. So now we might have the lower back that's three out of ten strength, the upper back that's nine out of ten ten strength. It's a little bit of bro science here, but you'll understand it. And so not only are we not training the lower back, but now we're creating a real potential problem, and that is we've got this upper back that's disproportionately stronger than the lower back. So guess what we're going to fuck, Guess what we're going to get injured? Well, the lower back.

So we need all of our body to be trained in a sensible way so that we're building total strength, so that where we don't have muscular imbalances. And there are so many people who train in a way which is actually over time, almost guaranteed to injure them because they neglect certain muscle groups and lower body one percent absolutely and lower back are the most neglected areas in the gym because some people are primarily, if not only,

concerned with esthetics, so all round workout. My next question is do I need a gym? No, you don't need a gym. I like gyms because not because I'm an ex gym owner, but I like gyms because, especially these days. Now before you tell yourself I'm not a gym person, just hit the pores. But on that, you don't have to be a gym person. You don't need to be a gym junkie. You don't need to love going to the gym. But so, for example, the little gym that I go to, I'll give them a shout out Snap Fitness.

I'm not affiliated professionally with them. I pay for my gym membership like everybody else. But what I like about having And interestingly, the gym I train at used to be one of my gyms. It used to be a Harper's. How interesting is that it's now a SNAP and I pay to go there, which I happily do. But what I like about that is one, if I'm a member, a full member, I can go to any Snap gym in Australia or around the world. They're in different countries.

They're also in the States and the UK, I think Canada, not sure all but which countries, but they're in a bunch of other countries, and there's hundreds and hundreds, maybe more than a thousand around the world. The bottom line is I can use my same card at any Snap gym.

Walk in the door. Now, when I go to the gym, what the main thing for me is that I have got I would think in most gyms, the one I go to anyway, and it's not over the top, it's a regular gym, but there's probably about a million bucks worth of equipment. So I walk in the door and for whatever it is, ten, twelve, fifteen bucks a week, whatever you're going to pay for your twenty four hour gym membership, you've now got access to a million dollars

of equipment. You don't need to buy more equipment, you don't need to maintain the equipment, you don't need to clean it. You don't need to unpack it and pack. You just need to walk in the door, do your shit and fuck off. Right. What I love also is now this depends a little bit, but you know, for me, it's a more motivating environment. I literally have a gym at my house outside. I have an undercover but it's in my front yard like a little area. I used to call it the Zenden when it was a Zenden.

It's now the zen gym, and I use it maybe once a week, maybe no times a week. It's got everything in it that I need, and I will often train there, but at least ninety five percent of the time I do my training at the gym. And the reason that I do that is one I meet my training partner there at some for me more motivating environment and so on. Now, some of you will be listening to this a few and I understand this, and you'll be thinking, I'm not a gym person. Fuck gym's. I

don't want to go to a gym. So I want to say a few things about that. One, you don't have to go to a gym. You don't need to. You can buy dumbells kettlebells, bar bells, balls, bands, whatever you want, put dinn your garage, put ding your spare room. You can train at home. You can do that. The next thing I want to say about that is most people don't do that. Most people who intend to train well at home and really transform their body and be

consistent and train progressively and get great results. In my experience, most people don't do it. They don't do it despite the fact that they want to and they have the intention. The reality of the experience is that pretty soon this ain't fun, this is boring, and I've got other shit on and then they look up and it's been six months since they've done one of those workouts at home. I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm saying for many people it's not a great strategy. For some it

probably is, but for many it's not. And I think with these things, we just need to be really, really practical and honest with ourselves about about, you know, looking reflecting upon our history with food and exercise and health behaviors and changing habits and this again, as I always say, it's not self loathing, it's just self awareness, like do you truly, truly in your heart of hearts, think that if you go and spend five hundred bucks or a

thousand bucks on some gym equipment, that that's going to be you for the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, that you are going to train consistently and progressively, that you are going to do something something remotely like optimize your genetic potential training in the spare room of the

garage or the back brand or whatever it is. And I think for most of us, not all, And again I'm just generalizing here because for me, I understand the nuance and the variability and the multitude of different issues psychological, emotional, physiological, practical surrounding this stuff. We think it's just a physical process lifting weights or building strength. It's not. It's almost

like the physical part is just the easy bit. The hardest part of all physical transformation is getting our mind in the right place for us to make the right decisions and consistently do the right things and build new habits and behaviors and operating systems that align with our physical goals, and to keep doing that over period of time, a long period of time, so this now becomes your

new normal operating system. Everyone starts nearly everybody that I know, not everyone, but nearly everyone that I know has started something and then given up, including me at various times in my life. And so we need to be really self aware, vulnerable, humble, honest and say, if I do, if I go and buy myself a bunch of shit and I put it in the spare room or wherever it is, am I really genuinely likely to change my body, build muscle, build strength and maintain that over the long term.

Now you might be the unicorn that does that. If that's you, giddy up, well done. But if that's not you, then I really suggest that you find it doesn't need to be a commercial gym. It could be that you train with a friend and you do something together three times a week. It could be at the yacht club. It could be at the footy, but could be some other training, could be at the dojo, it could be some other training environment where you're doing your strength stuff.

But I think that you know, all of this advice about how to lift weights, how often, how much, and program design, all of that, all of the technical and scientific and physiological advice is redundant if we just fucking give up. And so that's why you know, start something that you will keep doing. And for me, I think gyms are perfect for that. Not because I per se love gyms, but I just I know that people mucht typically get much better results. My next question is what

should my focus be in the first four to eight weeks. Now, well, that depends on your starting point. That depends where you're at. But let's I'm just going to assume that you are somewhere. No, I'm not. I'm going to give a couple of pieces

of advice. First one is for someone who is close to beginner, novice, unfit, unstrong, it's not a word, but it is now so in the first four to eight weeks, if you are close to the complete beginner end of the scale, your focus should be, in my opinion, your honor. Your focus should be consistency, creating a practical operating system that you will keep doing. So training thirteen times in

the first week ain't a great plan. Let's start on something that is realistic and maintainable and maybe over time we'll keep doing it, or we might even build on it. So we want to be practical and realistic. We want to start to understand the way that our body interacts with and responds to the different movements and exercises. We want to build what I call body awareness. What am I doing? What am I meant to be feeling? What does this work? How do I do it? Do I

have my knees bent or straight? Do I stand? Do I sit? Do I have my elbows in by my side? Do I have my palms up supernated or my palms down? Do I do this overhand or underhand? What are all of the specific specifics of this movement? So we're trying to learn how to train. We're trying to learn how to be safe. We're trying to program and condition our body to this new stimulus that we're putting it in the middle of. We're not trying to see how strong we are. We are building a base. We are building

a relationship with strength training. We are improving our understanding, we are improving our body awareness. We are trying new things. We are figuring out what is good and what is not good for our body. There are things that I can't do safely. I can't squat heavy safely, so I don't. I can leg press relatively heavy and safely, so I

do so. Depending on where you're starting at you are spending the first four to eight weeks really just introducing your body to a new stimulus and building from there. If you are someone who is already underway, you already have a bit of strength, a bit of awareness, a bit of momentum. Then I would say, and after this you kind of want to kick yourself in the pants a little bit. You want to reignite the fire a

little bit. I would think about maybe just changing what you do, or doing what you normally do, but in a different way. I mean, there are so many people that essentially do the same workout the same way in the same gym, on the same equipment time and time and time again, and then wonder why their body is

not changing or adapting or progressing or improving. And remember the role, you know, apart from building strength and having fun and maybe meeting your friends at the gym and all of that, having a bit of socialization, which I think is great when you can make that happen. The other thing that we're trying to do in the gym is we're just trying to do something to our body which will cause our body to adapt to that something

that we do. So lifting weights or doing strength training, doing a chin up, doing a push up, doing a dumbbell curl, doing a leg extension, doing a hack squad, whatever, all of those are forms of stress on the muscle. And when you build strength or when you grow muscle, we call that hypertrophy, or when you build muscular endurance, or you build speed or power, all of those things are adaptations to the thing that you did to your muscle.

And so for those of you who have been training for a while, we can incorporate another question I've got here, which is what is maintenance and what is progressive training? This is that so maintenance training is essentially you do in a form of the same thing the same way

and then kind of expecting things to change. How come I'm not getting stronger or faster, or leaner or fitter, or more muscular or aerobic endurance, or more speed or more flexibility or a quicker reaction time, or any of these what we would call fitness indicators or fitness variables. And the reason is for many people, the reason that they're not progressing is because they're not training in a way which will make their body or force their body

to adapt and progress and improve performance. So if you are, for example, you are someone who's been training for a while and your goal is to get better. Whatever that means for you, what does what does that mean? Getting better? Well, that might be getting that might be running ten k's in a quicker time. It might be bench pressing more. It might be it might be improving your dead hang, so hanging from a chinup bar, just hanging, just body

weight hanging. It might be to improve your hangtime from ten seconds to thirty seconds. That's progression. It might be being able to do a one arm row with a ten kilo dumbbell or a twenty kilo dumbbell when you started on a five or a seven and a half. It might be that you now have a bit more muscle and a bit less fat. It might be that you now have a lower resting heart rate or lower

blood pressure. It might be that you now have better posture because you've you've stretched and made the muscles on your front that's your peck muscles more flexible, and the muscles at the back, your homboids and traps and lats, you've made them stronger. So now you've got better naturally just walking around, better posture. That's progression, that's adaptation, that's growth,

that's improvement. So if you are saying to me, I'm going to the gym, harps, and I'm going to improve, well, then you need to do things that are associated with improvement, that will facilitate, that will preempt, that will cause adaptation. And I'm telling you right now, the vast majority of people in gyms anyway, and many other training environments by the way, but let's talk about gyms for the moment. Most people are not training in a way which is

even close to optimizing their genetic potential. And it's not they're not training in a way which is forcing progression and improvement. They're essentially in a holding pattern like they're training, or they're exercising, or they're lifting, which is good, which is good, But what they're essentially doing is keeping what

they've got. So let's say their flexibility is a five, their strength is a five, their aerobic fitness is a five, their muscular endurances are five, all the fitness markers are a five. And then any year they come back and everything's still a five. Well, that's not terrible, but it means they haven't improved, they haven't gone backwards. But they

haven't improved. And if you said to those five out of ten people right now, and we took them five out of ten based on their potential, not compared to any standard or any other person, but just on that person's potential. If I could go into the gym now and interview twenty random strangers and they didn't know me, and I didn't know them, any gym in Melbourne or any gym in any city anywhere, and I said, hey, can I ask you a quick question, is your goal in the next year to kind of stay where you

are physically or to improve? Probably twenty would say I want to improve. Very few people say I don't want to improve. Very few people say where I'm at right now is where I want to be. But nonetheless, most people train in a way which is going to keep them trapped in that groundhog Danus of physiology, So maintenance versus progression. You want to be training progressively unless you're

already where you want to be. So that's the answer to the question, what is maintenance and what is maintenance training? And what is progressive training? My next question that I get asked, I'm realizing this ain't going to be forty five minutes, so I might break it into two bits. The next question I get asked is what do I do now? None of what I'm about to share with you is advice for you. It's just that people seem

to be interested in what I do personally. So I'm going to give you a snapshot into my and I'll speak a bit more broadly than just strength, but all of it to give you an insight. Again, not a recommendation, not a prescription, but a lot of people my age are not in particularly good shape. A lot of people want to be in good shape, and a lot of people are curious about, well, what is possible, and what is possible is often a lot more than you think.

All right, So my strength protocol is just that I go to the gym every day and I don't follow a set. Okay, Monday I do chest and back, Tuesday, I do you know, lower back and legs. Wednesday I do shoulders and arms. Thursday I have off and then I get then I repeat from day one through. I don't do that. I train somewhat instinctively, but also an exercise scientist, and so I understand training, and I've been training forever. I've pretty much always got some kind of

limitation or injury. Right now, I've got a torn rotator cuff, which is some muscles around the shoulder where the humor is the head of the humorous the big armbone goes into the shoulder humoral joint. You don't need to know all that. Bottom line is, technically speaking, left shoulders a bit fucked. So what I do is if I get to science, he let me know. So what I do is I go into the gym and I go what

can I do? What can I do? I'm doing specific rehab work at the moment to fix my shoulder, or to fix it as much as I can, but I train around it. So there's some things that in the gym that I would do that would make my shoulder worse. I don't do them. There's some things that I can do that hurt a little but don't make the actual injury worse. And there's some things that I can do that are next pain free other than just the pain that comes with doing the movement hard. And so I

do waits every day. I do about an hour every day. Maybe I'm in the gym for an hour and a quarter, sometimes an hour and a half. If I'm being fully transparent, quite a bit of that time is talking, helping other people, talking to my training partner, talking to his kids, training a few people that I kind of help out a bit here and there. Johnny who got blown up and was told he'd never walk. I work with him two

three times a week. Love, he's guts, beautiful human being, and so in that, you know, i might be in the gym for an hour and a quarter, but I'm only actually lifting stuff for truly twenty to thirty minutes, Like when I'm actually lifting a weight might be twenty to thirty minutes. I would generally, now, if I go to the gym on my own, which is rare, I'm in and out in forty five minutes because I'm just doing my thing. Let's just go It's a normal day and it's just me, right, So yeah, I would go

in and I generally do more compound movements. What is a compound movement? Let's ask that as a question. Compound movement is a movement that is using two or more joints, or two or more joints are involved, and then multiple muscle groups. So, for example, let's just do something that we all know a bise curl where you've got your palm up and you just bring a weight up towards your chin and then you lower the weight back down

towards your hip. That's what we would call an isolation movement because it's just one joint involved, which is the elbow joint. And what we're doing is we're bending the elbow. That's called elbow flexion. And when we put a weight in the hand, whether that's a dumbbell, barber, whatever it is, you know, a band, a cable, row, anything, and we're doing elbow flexion that is bringing the palm up to the chin region. We call that elbow flexion underload. All

of those are various kinds of curls. So barbell curl, z bar curl, cable curl, dumbbell curl, hammer curl, preacher curl, all curls, and you've all I'm using this because everyone knows nearly everyone knows what a curl is, but all curls are essentially the exact same or very similar movement, which is elbow flexion underload. So that's a single joint movement. Now, let's do some thing like a bench press. Now, maybe you have never bench pressed, but I think most people

know what it looks like. So a bench press is a multi joint exercise, So you're using shoulder joint and elbow joint, and you're also using other joints as stabilizers.

But in terms of what's actually moving significantly through the movement, that is shoulders and elbow and also like for example, back just quickly to the curl, we're using primarily biceps, and we're also moving we're also using a muscle called brachialis, which is under the bicep, and then brachio radialis, which is kind of forum and crosses over the elbow joint. But you know, all of these are what we call elbow flexa muscles, right, But it's really very much an

isolation movement. But then when we look at something like the bench press, we are working the whole chest, and we're working our shoulders, and we're working our triceps that's around the back from the biceps. And any time we're doing a pushing movement, we are doing we are using our triceps. Anytime we're doing a pushing movement, we're doing what's called elbow extension. Now, if you put your hand on your chest right now, you are in elbow flexion.

If you put your palm on your chest right now, you're in elbow flexion. Now if you put your palm out straight in front of you with a straight arm, you've just done elbow extension. And what allowed you to do elbow extension is primarily your triceps, which sit on the back of the arm. So most of the work that I do is compound movements, so deadlifts, leg press, shoulder press, upright rows, push ups, chins, seated row and the like, you know, but I also do some isolation stuff.

So my strength protocol is every day. It doesn't need to be every day, by the way, I just enjoy it. Some days are harder, some days are easier. If I go into the gym and I'm a little bit flat or tired, or my energy is not great and it's genuinely not great, it's not me just being a pussy, then I will back off. I will have a somewhat easier day. There are sometimes where I go to the gym and I realize I'm real sore or real tired, and I'll just train a few people and I'll talk

to people and I'll go home. That's not very often. That's maybe three days a year, and there's probably another two or three days a year where I might not get to the gym because I'm flying somewhere. I'm traveling. It's like practically impossible to get to a gym. But I would say there are no more than ten days a year, probably no more than five that I do absolutely nothing in terms of strength stuff, even if that means that I do five sets of push ups in

my hotel room. All right, So that's my kind of strength protocol. And just FYI, I run three days a week or four days a week. It's short, at sharp, and I run generally two to three k's. I run out the front door. I run like Phoebe Buffet from Friends. If you don't know who that is, just do a search on Phoebe Buffet running. You'll see a little bit more technique than that. And I do that because short, hard, sharp is all you need to be getting real cardiovascular benefits.

I don't want to do long I can actually run quite well, but I don't want to do long, steady state runs. I don't want to be doing ten k runs. There's nothing wrong with them, but I don't want to be doing them, because as soon as I start to do twenty thirty forty fifty ks of running a week, I lose lots of muscle. So for me to get muscle and hold onto it is a work. So I

don't want to undo that. So I do strength stuff as I described, and also cardio stuff which is not endurance based, short, hard, sharp, so I get the cardiovascular benefit, but I hold onto the muscle. All right, I've kind of answered the next question, but I'll quickly touch on it. So what are the benefits of strength training in no particular order of importance? Bone density, which is really important

as we age people. If you get say two twin sisters that are sixty, and everything else is identical, you know, lifestyle, food, even, you know job, incidental activity, occupational activity, obviously genetics, DNA. But one of them lifts weights consistently and one doesn't, And then you'll find the sister who lifts weights has got

a much higher bone density. If everything else is, all things being equal, generally you're going to see one with much higher bone density, which higher bone density and higher body strength equates too longer hell span and longer lifespan. And also if one of them perish the thought, but one of them falls over. One of them is way more likely to break a hip or break some kind of bone than the other, so bone deadseity. We're talking about the benefits of strength training lean mass, so we

know when we have more muscle. Now we're not talking about being a body builder, a massive and jack, but when we have more muscle, muscle is metabolically active. What that means is that muscle uses more energy than fat, so body muscle muscle on the body. Lean mass uses more energy. So the bottom line is that the more muscle you have, within reason, it helps you stay lean. Because let's say we've got again, let's go back to these sisters. Let's say these six sisters weigh both of

them weigh sixty kilos. One's got a lot of muscle for her age and weight, and the others got more fat and less muscle. Well, the sixty kilo twin that's got more muscle will actually be able to eat more food because having more muscle require more energy in brackets calories, and so she has the shares the pleasure of being able to eat more food than her sister who's got less mass. Without that game so being strong having muscle

also has a metabolic advantage. So other benefits of strength training of course, balance sporting, performance, cognition, as I said before, quality of life in general, and just I guess on a really practical level, for older people like my mum and dad, being stronger allows them to more effectively do what we call activities of daily living ADLs and yeah, and who doesn't want to be able to be functional

and operational when you're old? So activities of daily living, you know, getting in and out of air, in and out of the car, being able to step up onto a low step and get something out of a cupboard, being able to make beds, being able to carry things to the washing machine or maybe carrying something out to the car or doing housework. So just you know, being in your seventies and eighties and being comparatively or relatively strong for your chronological age sets you up well for

your latter years. I get a team. I'm just going to interrupt myself. Look at me interrupting me. This went way longer than I thought it would, but not really surprising because it's me anyway. So ended up being somewhere around about now and a quarter of me, just bloody banging on in my office by myself the extended monologue version. So I'm going to call this the end of part one for now. I'll be back tomorrow to complete the conversation. See then,