The Fundamentals of Training for Muscle, Strength & Longevity

We're gonna start with longevity.

Now this is obviously of interest to all of us.

We all want to live a long life, a healthy life, and a high-performing life, whether we play sports or not.

And I think the best way I can describe my philosophy or point of view with longevity in terms of exercise is the following: You wanna actually think about outcomes.

What are we trying to optimize for? And that will then help us walk backwards into how we set up our training programs.

To me, when I think of longevity, we want to, of course, live a long life.

That's great.

But then past that, we also wanna be resilient.

And that word is important to me because as I think about my own aging, I wanna be able to do the activities I want and not feel hyper restrictive, or restricted rather, and at the same time also not feeling in danger.

So I wanna be able to do something new.

I want to be able to play a game of tennis if I'm not used to it and then not be incredibly sore at a really high risk of injury.

That is really all it comes down to.

I don't wanna be at risk of dying early because of some physiological limiter, and then I wanna be able to do what I want within reason.

So if that is our actual goal, we can start going backwards and saying, "Okay, well then what are the different physiological skills or attributes I need to have to be able to execute on that?" And so you immediately start thinking of things like you need what we'll call tissue tolerance.

So your Achilles and your back and your neck and your adductors and kinda all different parts of your body need to be functional.

They need to be able to handle stressors.

The antithesis of this would be something like, say you choose one mode of exercise, cycling only or bench press only or even lifting weights only.

That's great, but then what happens if you ask that muscle to do something fast when it's never done that, or load it really heavy, or in a different range of motion? Well, now we're not necessarily resilient against those things because we haven't practiced them in years or decades.

And so ultimately what I'm saying here is you want a wide variety of movement skills, of s- training styles, of range of motion, of speed, and all the other things I laid out.

That's truly at the core of longevity.

And so I think you should be setting yourself up and thinking about your training on the kinda months and years rather than individual workout programs.

And you should be thinking about, "Can I get all of my joints moving through all of its range of motions? Can I be doing," as I've alluded to earlier, "some things fast?" When appropriate, of course.

"And some things slow? Can I work on building a good amount of muscle? Can I work on building a good amount of strength? Can I work on a good range of motion? Can I work on balance? Can I work on proprioception?" And you just really start to paint the picture here of saying, "Well, I just really want you to be well-rounded." That's the top of our pyramid.

That's really what we're going after.

Or r- rather I should say, that's the base of our pyramid.