Essentials: Optimal Protocols to Build Strength & Grow Muscles | Dr. Andy Galpin

And so right out the gate, I just want to ask you, why should people think about and train for strength and hypertrophy? Not just for people that want to get bigger biceps, et cetera, but that have other goals, longevity goals and health goals unrelated to what most people associate with hypertrophy.

So what are the benefits of training for strength and hypertrophy for the everyday person, for the athlete, for the recreational exerciser, and so on?

One of the major disservices we've done in this field is convince people that things like strength training are for athletes or for growing bigger muscles, and cardiovascular training are for things like fat loss and heart health.

And that is a tremendous disservice because it puts a lot of unnecessary barriers and leads to a lot of false assumptions and then therefore poor actions.

We could do a hundred episodes on the benefits of exercise, and we could run all the way from mood and focus, um, cognitive tasks to a better immune function.

You'll get less colds.

You'll be-- you'll fight them off more effectively.

To mortality, right? So s- some of the strongest predictors of how long and how well you will live are exercise.

However, there are independent benefits that come from just endurance training, and there are independent benefits that come from strength training.

And so to just give you one categorically, um, the way that you want to think about this is resistance exercise and strength training is the number one tool to combat neuromuscular aging.

You cannot get that through any other form of exercise besides heavy overload strength training.

If you want to be alive and you want to live by yourself, you have to be able to engage in human movement.

If you have any dysfunction in the neuromuscular system there, then you're not going to be able to do that.

And again, as I mentioned, the only way to preserve that or fight that loss of aging i- is through strength training.

So people will tend to hear numbers like you lose about one percent of muscle size per year after age about forty, and that's true.

However, what they don't realize is you lose about two to four percent of your strength per year.

So the loss of strength is almost double that the loss of muscle mass with aging.

Muscle power is more like eight to ten percent per year.

And so we can very clearly see the problem you're going to have with aging is not going to be preservation of muscle, although that is incredibly important.

It's going to be very specifically preservation of muscle power and strength.

And why that really matters is your ability to, again, stand up and move, your ability to catch yourself from a fall, your ability to feel confident doing a movement.

That is a function of muscle power more than it is muscle size.

And so functionality is really what we want to be, right? You want to be able to do whatever you want to be-- do physically and feel confident in doing that as you age.

That's going to only be obtained through strength training.

So is it appropriate to say that training for strength and hypertrophy is also a way to keep your nervous system healthy and young?