Why Muscle Predicts Your Cancer and Heart Disease Risk | Ep 482
Most people start lifting to look better, and they treat the health payoff as a nice bonus. There's nothing wrong with that, but the mortality research suggests that the frame is probably backward.
Your muscle and strength are the keys to longevity, with your physique and how you look a nice side effect.
The evidence here is large, in some studies hundreds of thousands of people. One simple measure of strength predicted death better than blood pressure.
I look at what that means for the two outcomes most of us worry about after 40, cancer and heart disease, including a detail about how cancer treatment gets dosed that very few people know. I also get into why muscle behaves like an organ that helps protect your heart, not just things that pop in your shirt :)
You have probably heard that being weak is worse than smoking. Does that hold up? Then I get to the part that should take some of the pressure off, which is how little training it takes to collect most of the benefit and why it is never too late to start.
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Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, muscle and longevity, fat loss over 40, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.
Timestamps
0:00 - Why lifting for looks gets the benefit backward
5:36 - Muscle is medicine... looking good is the bonus
10:06 - The strength measure that beats blood pressure
11:30 - Is being weak really worse than smoking?
14:46 - Muscle, cancer survival, and how treatment is dosed
17:23 - Your largest metabolic organ and your heart
20:14 - A useful longevity tool
22:44 - The surprisingly small dose that protects your life
26:01 - Why it is never too late to build muscle
30:06 - A 30-second strength test you can do today
Episode Resources
Try Fitness Lab (20% off through July 3)
Muscle-Building Nutrition Blueprint (free guide)
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Why lifting for looks gets the benefit backward
Philip Pape 0:00
If you lift weights mostly to look better, to fit your clothes, to see a little more shape in the mirror, I want to show you something today that will help reframe how powerful muscle is, because there is a pile of research, hundreds of thousands of people, that shows us that muscle and strength do much more for us than just our physique and just our function. They change how long you live and how well you live. It is a longevity lever, probably the biggest one we have. Today I'm going to walk you through the actual mortality data on muscle and strength, including how it lines up against cancer and heart disease, why grip strength predicts your risk better than blood pressure, and a part that should make you feel really good, which is how little training it actually takes to get most of the benefit. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today's episode comes from a very, very common question I get from everyone I talk to, clients, listeners, people who email me, they start lifting for how they want to look. And let's be honest, 90% of us maybe, I don't know if it's 90%, but most of us get into fitness or exercise or health or whatever, driven by how we look initially, because we're not happy with it. And yeah, we might kind of trick ourselves into saying it's about longevity or playing with our kids or whatever the deep value why is that we talk about all the time. But it often starts with we're just not happy in our skin. And there's nothing wrong with that. I wanted to start with that up front. Wanting to look good, wanting to feel strong in your own skin, that is a completely valid reason to train and improve your nutrition and walk more and all of that. It's usually the reason that gets people into this in the first place. But then what happens for a lot of us is we treat everything else, like the health stuff, the wellness, the living longer, the longevity, as kind of a nice bonus, as a side effect, right? It's like this thing that's an extra thing in the background that happens, and ultimately we're still chasing the aesthetic goal. I see it in the questions, I see it in the decisions like modifying how I train, the hypertrophy, you know, trying to do fat loss, maybe when you shouldn't, et cetera. There's a lot of things going on there. And I know it's often driven by vanity, even when you don't say it is. So let's be honest, just me and you in your AirPods or your headset or whatever or car, maybe you're working out now. Good for you. But I want I do want to flip this around, and I know I've covered this topic in the past, but I think, I think we're getting it backward, and I think it's more serious and important than we often talk about. More folks in the industry are talking about the importance of muscle and strength, but the data, the data on how long you live, on the longevity piece, on health, on cancer, on cardiac disease, is one of the strongest, most replicated bodies of evidence we have in all of health science. I can't repeat that enough. We're talking studies with hundreds of thousands of people, some cases over a million, that point to something I think most people who lived, us, I hope, or if you just came across this podcast, you're going to be motivated to do that, have never really thought too much about. And that is look, muscle is not just the side effect. Muscle itself might be the main event. The, I hate to say it, the UFC fight on the White House lawn. And I say that as a joke. Hopefully it's a joke to all sides of the political spectrum. And then the way you look, that's the side effect, believe it or not. And a lot of you, I think you kind of know this, and you're like, okay, here's another episode about the benefits of muscle. But I really want you to internalize this because if I see someone who doesn't lift weights, who doesn't use resistance training, I feel terrible for them. I wish I could just grab them and say, you've got to understand that that is the thing that's between a healthy, long, aging life and sickness and mortality, death, frailty, injury. I am serious. That is the dividing line right there. Now, if you're listening to this and you're you're getting older, you're over 40, you're over 50, right? I'm 45. I still consider myself pretty young, to be honest. And I feel young because I act young and I live young in terms of the resistance training, but also how I eat and walk and all that. I know you want to do that as well. And I know plenty of 75-year-olds and 85-year-olds who also feel like they're 40 because they're living this way and who wouldn't want that. Okay. And then we have, you know, the women in this audience going through peri and postmenopause, where hormones are changing. And this stretch of life into our 40s, that is where muscle and strength start to slip at a very rapid pace if you don't defend what you already have, let alone build more of it. And that's where the health payoff exists. That is where it is. Okay, so that's what this episode is about. I'm super passionate about this topic. I've seen too many people just die when they didn't have to, or get injured when they didn't have to, or go on medications when they didn't have to. And it makes me sad. Okay, now that's what this episode is about. If you stick around, I always give you a nice little treat at the end. We're gonna talk about, you know, the science in the episode. And then at the end, I'm gonna give you a very classic test you could do at home to tell you where your strength is. And you can test it anytime. If you're over a certain threshold, like you're good. Uh, if you're below it, you know you have some potential. But no matter your age, this is gonna be a super helpful test to just check it out relative to what the longevity research says. Okay,
Muscle is medicine... looking good is the bonus
Philip Pape 5:36
today we are going to talk about why lifting just for looks and getting health as a bonus, it's kind of the backward frame, and it it may be causing poor decision making as well, which is why I wanted to address it. Then we're gonna talk about the numbers, the mortality data, the cancer and heart disease part of it, which is kind of how I framed, I think, in the title of this episode, because it's so important. It's so correlated with mortality and shorter lives and health spans or yeah, health spans. Um, we're gonna talk about grip strength and then the fix that I to all of this, okay, which is gonna seem so simple. It's gonna feel like a letdown, but in a good way. So let's get into it. All right, let's start with what people believe. What do people believe? Well, that if you lift to build muscle, muscle is gonna make you look better and move better, right? It's gonna improve function, which is not just looks, it's function. I get it. And that somewhere down the line, in some vague way, it's probably good for your health too. A lot of people truly believe, like they don't quite understand why muscle is important. It's one thing I go on other podcasts to talk about all the time. And when someone asks me on the podcast and they're not sure exactly what we're gonna talk about, that is what I pitch to them because it's so important. Where we think of health or even wellness, I hate that term, wellness, because it's kind of a dirty term these days, is tied into like influencer culture as well. But health and wellness, longevity, let's say, is thought of as the side effect or the background of all of this, but really it should be in the front. The reason this matters is practical because the way that you frame what's important in your priorities, is health more important than, say, strength and function or something like that, affects your decisions. So if you're always training for looks or for PRs or strength, then you might skip other aspects of the program, let's say, especially when it's not convenient, right? We need something that drives us, that motivates us. You might deprioritize recovery again, especially as we get older, our connective tissue gets a little less pliable. We get a little more prone to injury and we take longer to recover and things like that. You might bounce around from program to program because you're chasing something when something doesn't change fast enough, like let's say how you look or certain measurements. You'll question whether things are working. And of course, let's be honest, health and longevity is the long game. It's very, very hard to measure that in a motivational way, knowing that it's so far out, it's so many years out. So the mirror obviously can't show you a lot of different things. The body measurements and weight trend can't show you what's happening with your risk of mortality, of dying. It can't show you what's happening to your odds of getting cancer, can't show you how your heart is going to do 20 years from now. But all of that is being shaped right now by the muscle that you're building. But it's kind of invisible. So it doesn't get the attention or the vote when you're making your decisions. So that's the cost of all of this misprioritization. You end up training or eating or moving for the outcome in the short term. And then you ignore the outcomes that determine, you know, how long and how well you get to live. Now, before you think I'm gonna go down some weird path of longevity foods and inflammation and cortisol, I'm not because none of that really matters. Okay, especially for today's episode. So the thing that you can measure in the short term, ironically, is downstream of the thing that matters in the long term. So we kind of have it flipped around. And I know that sounds confusing, but it's because to put it another way, you can have suboptimal, say, physique outcomes in the short term, but it's because you're doing things that are beneficial to you in the long term. And there, and there's different elements of that we'll get into. So the frame today is not, okay, I'm gonna lift for looks, health is a bonus. It's hey, muscle is medicine and looking good is the bonus. Muscle is medicine and looking good is a bonus. And I don't know how powerful that statement is for you. I don't think it's a mic drop moment. It's just the way we're gonna frame it. Okay, so let's get into numbers. Let's get into objective facts. I love vibes as much as the next guy, but we can't live off of vibes, right? So there is a study called Pure, P-U-R-E, and it's probably the first one I'd look at. It followed 140,000 people across 17 countries, and they found that grip strength, that's just how hard you can squeeze, predicted your risk of dying. And by the way, when I've had physical therapy, they sometimes will at some point measure my grip strength. I think they stopped doing it. They're like, Yeah, yeah, you're you're strong. We don't have to worry about that. But it predicts your risk of dying. So for every roughly five kilogram drop in grip
The strength measure that beats blood pressure
Philip Pape 10:06
strength, all cause mortality goes up by 16%. Cardiovascular death goes up 17%. That's powerful, guys. Okay, in the data, grip strength was a stronger predictor of death than systolic blood pressure. Stronger than blood pressure. Now, your doctor measures blood pressure every time you go in, and maybe you measure it at home. But do you ever get your grip strength measured? I've heard people talk about like having grip strength as a normal thing that you measure. Now, maybe older folks get it measured. I don't know. Maybe in different countries they do, but I haven't heard about it around here in the US. Then we have the UK biobank. Now, thank goodness UK has all this data for whatever you think about the national health system. They have a ton of data on half a million people and they found the same thing. And the effect between the grip strength and mortality was a little bit stronger, pun intended, in women. A large meta analysis that had two million people found 16% mortality increase per five kilogram drop in grip strength, just like we said before. And then they, when they compared the weakest group to the strongest group, the difference in mortality risk was 40%. So that's like taking the the two extremes. Now, always want to have nuance. I always want to be honest on this show and not overclaim because a lot of people in the longevity space get loose with the claims. And I hope I don't do that. And if you please call me out on it if I do, you'll hear things like low muscle is worse than smoking. Now, maybe I've said that, I don't
Is being weak really worse than smoking?
Philip Pape 11:30
know, just to get attention. I I again I don't recall. Put me on the stand and I'll say I don't recall. But I did dig into it for this episode because I wanted to know if that holds up. And honestly, per unit, it doesn't. Smoking is just so terrible. Okay. Somebody who's a current smoker versus a never smoker has two to three times the risk of dying. Like smoking's just terrible. It's awful. And so that's a huge fact, a huge like single effect factor from like one variable compared to this five kilogram change of grip strength. So if someone tells you weakness is worse than smoking, that is definitely overstated. But, okay, now this this is the thing that is actually wild and true. When you compare the extremes, when you compare the weakest people to the strongest people, the gap actually gets up toward the smoking range. Okay, that is actually supported by the evidence when it comes to fitness. Cardior respiratory fitness, when that is measured in the lowest fitness group versus the highest, it's been measured at five times the risk of death. And the researchers themselves have said that is comparable to or greater than smoking. So the whole family of things, the muscle, strength, fitness, it lives in that neighborhood of risk factors, of huge, huge, huge risk factors like smoking that we know about. That's kind of where I wanted to take that. Oh, yeah. So at the end of the day, could you make that claim? It's probably not far from the truth, to be honest, which says something that, you know, strength specifically is a smaller per unit effect than smoking, but it's a bigger predictor than blood pressure. And when you take account for fitness overall and the gap between the weakest and strongest, it's a huge risk factor. And that's still something. That's something profound, I would say. Okay. That is very, very profound. I feel like this is something nobody's talked about, what was talking about, let's say five, even five or 10 years ago. And a lot of people are still not talking about it. I read newspaper articles, I see things online, people send me, and article, you know, and I see new studies that come out on things like osteoporosis, let's say. And they'll say, Well, we tried this new medication and it didn't seem to work. So we're still trying to find what is going to help with bone loss. And then they don't even mention strength training. Okay. Actually, I did see one article recently that says, so we're going to keep advising people to do the things that we know already work, like resistance training. I was like, okay, kudos for you for actually saying that. But how many times have I seen it not even be mentioned? And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is either a massive missed opportunity or a massive lack of education, at least among you know the media and reporters who have to go and find this information from experts. Okay, so let's get specific here because cancer and heart disease is kind of the frame in the title of the episode. And I think it's really important. I want to start with cancer. There's a landmark meta-analysis. Almost 8,000 people who had solid tumors, cancer tumors, and they found that people with low muscle mass had significantly worse survival. So they had worse overall survival, worse cancer-specific survival as well. And the mechanism is that when you have a serious illness, your body is going to draw down its protein reserves. And now you're like, okay, now I see the connection potentially to muscle, where muscle is literally the reservoir of amino acids
Muscle, cancer survival, and how treatment is dosed
Philip Pape 14:46
that your body pulls from to fight, to heal, to recover from surgery, and to tolerate treatment. So we're talking about cancer survival. Chemotherapy, okay. Chemotherapy is often dosed by body surface area. They give you a dose basically based on your size. But we know that two people the same size can have different amounts of muscle, different body composition. So the person with low muscle effectively gets overdosed relative to their lean mass and toxicity goes up. In there was a study where serious, like what they call serious chemo toxicity showed up in 50% of the low muscle patients, but only 20% of the other patients. So it was, you know, the same, the same drug or the same treatment, but because of the different amounts of muscle, one fared much better, the group that had more muscle. Now, I don't want to scare people, I'm trying to approach this with the right nuance. There's a difference between having less muscle and there, and something called, it's a syndrome called cachexia, C-A-C-H-E-X-I-A. And that's the muscle wasting that's driven by the disease itself. And you can't fix that by lifting weights. So I just want to mention that. We're talking about the reserve of muscle that you've built before you know you get cancer, you have treatment for cancer. It's kind of like when we talk about surgery. I I always recommend people get as strong as they can before they go into surgery because you're gonna have to stop lifting and recover afterward. And it's gonna give you a much better chance to handle the treatment and the recovery. So when it comes to cancer, more muscle in the bank, more muscle on your frame before you get diagnosed or before you start treatment means more to draw down from if you ever need it. And I mean, I guess this this goes for anything in the future. Having more muscle is just gonna help. It's just gonna give you extra buffer, a massively extra buffer in some cases. And that's very, very empowering because we know we can build muscle at any age, we can increase muscle at any age. That's gonna be part of the outcome of this discussion. So that's cancer. It has to do with survival rates, chemo treatments, survival, you know, coming out of it healthier because you were stronger and had more muscle to begin with. Now, heart disease is this is kind of where I guess the engineer in me lights up because the mechanism here is really, really crisp. Your skeletal muscle is the single biggest place your body disposes of glucose. After you eat something like 80% of the glucose that gets pulled out of your blood, right, from the carbs that you eat, goes into muscle. So muscles, this glucose sink. More muscle, bigger sink, better blood sugar control, less of the metabolic chaos that drives heart disease. So we're talking about things like insulin sensitivity. We've talked about this on the show before, but this could be one of the biggest,
Your largest metabolic organ and your heart
Philip Pape 17:23
most important reasons to have more muscle. You can handle more glucose, have better blood sugar control, less blood sugar issues down the line. Now, that's independent of your body weight, which in it which is its own risk factor, right? We don't want to carry too much body fat, but we're talking about muscle. I think it goes further than that as well, because muscle isn't just passive. It's not just a passive tank or storage tank for glucose. When you train, when it contracts, I mean, not even trained, even when you walk and just use it on a daily basis, it acts like an organ. That's why we call it an endocrine organ. It releases signaling molecules called myokines. And during exercise, one of them, interleukin 6, IL-6. Look it up, IL-6. It can spike up to a hundredfold, like a hundred times when you're exercising. Kind of like blood pressure goes up when you exercise, these acute responses. So that's an inflammatory marker, myocine, a good one. And this is it's anti-inflammatory. It's anti-inflammatory. That's why I say a good one. It helps damp down the chronic low-grade inflammation that is underneath things like heart disease and diabetes and a lot of the things that ages us. So every time you train, your muscles sending out chemical signals that are protective. So the and let's talk about this because this is the part that connects everything. The same tissue you build when you're trying to get those big shoulder caps, when you're trying to get those big glutes. It is also a metabolic organ that is actively defending your heart health. And it's doing these jobs all at once, but you really only can see, you know, you only see your muscles getting bigger, but you don't see all this wonderful stuff going on underneath. So you see what I mean? Muscle is not just something to build for function or strength or or muscles in and of themselves. It's the health piece, it's the health intervention. It is the prescription for aging. It's probably why John Sullivan created his book called Barbell Prescription. He actually goes into a lot of the fascinating benefits of health and avoiding what's called a sick aging phenotype, which is anybody who doesn't lift weights is going to get sicker and sicker as they age, period, bar none. Now, I know you guys want to get practical, right? And I know you're sitting thinking, okay, I'm convinced muscle is medicine. How do I know if I'm building it? How do I know if my training and recovery are pointed in the right direction? And I want to quickly tell you about my app, Fitness Lab, because it's designed for exactly that. Fitness Lab, which we talked about in the last episode, which is all about AI. Go check that out if you haven't. This is the provides a coaching intelligence layer. It's always hard for me to explain it, but it's effectively like a coach. It's not a tracking app, even though it can track lots of things, it can pull in all your data, but it can really work well alongside other data you have and other tools that you already use, including just having conversations with it. And the whole point is it looks at that data, tells you what it means, right? Which normally AI can't
A useful longevity tool
Philip Pape 20:14
do that as well unless you really feed it the data and kind of prompt it over and over and spend hours chatting with, you know, ChatGPT or whatever. My app can just spit out, okay, I know what this means because I'm trained in evidence-based body composition, training, nutrition, the whole gamut. And it can say, look, are you recovering enough? Is your training producing the signal that you need to build muscle? Are you actually progressing? Is your feedback trending the way that you want across the metrics that matter for your goal? So it is a lot like having a coach in your pocket. People joke that it's like having Philip in your pocket when they talk to the chat tab. And it's like paying attention to what's happening to you. And the more you use it, the better it gets because it's learning from you. So if you if you use Fitness Lab, if you've already got it, I would give it a good three or four weeks to start really learning who you are, and it's gonna pay off big time. As you're listening to this episode come out, we have a promo going on as well. So just to put more skin in the game, 20% off. I'm throwing it your way. It ends tomorrow, Friday, as this comes out, witsandweights.com slash app. You can take a free quiz and get a plan that shows you what it will help you with over the next, say, three to six months before you even decide to buy the app. So totally zero risk. Go to wits and weights.com slash app. The link is also in the show notes. Now, if you're listening to this after July 3rd and it's gone back to full price, I want you to reach out to me. Uh, one way to do that is go to Instagram at wits and weights. Another way is to go to wits and weights.com slash email. Okay. So with Instagram at wits and weights or wits and weights.com slash email. I know I've thrown a lot of links at you, but essentially go grab the deal right now for fitness lab, wits and weights.com slash app. Link is in the show notes, 20% off wits and weights.com slash app. Okay, so we've covered why that's Health piece is so important. We've covered some of the data. We've covered mortality numbers, cancer, heart disease. There's so much data under there. I barely scratched the surface, but I think I gave you the essence of it. Now, what is the fix? I have to warn you. This is this is my trigger warning for you. It's gonna feel too simple. So if you don't like simple things, just stop listening right now. But that is the point of the show to try to get to what is the simple fix? Okay, here it is. I want you to train for muscle the same way you would if you only cared about how you look. Oh boy, oh boy, that's it. I'm gonna ruffle some feathers, right? Because earlier I kind of implied that doing that could lead to some wrong decisions, didn't I? All right, stick with me. Stick with me. I'll get to that. There is not a separate longevity program you need to go buy. There's no GLP1 program.
The surprisingly small dose that protects your life
Philip Pape 22:44
There's no menopause hormone program. There's no cycle-based training program that you need to buy. You get what I you get what I'm saying? I hope you feel what I'm putting down. There's no special anti-aging protocol that is different from just lifting hard and progressively over time, because the mortality benefit is the byproduct of doing the things that you are already going to do. Now, why I said it's going to cause poor decisions is because a lot of people are training for looks. And because of that, they pay attention to the wrong things anyway, even when they're training for looks, because they're thinking short term, they're measuring the wrong things, they're looking at body weight instead of, let's say, body composition, or they're looking at their pump or the sweat or the soreness or the size of just their biceps instead of how their numbers are progressing, and so on and so forth. Now, I want to give you the actual dose here because specifics matter. Okay. I want you to train for muscle. And the research on resistance training and mortality is very encouraging here. Any resistance training at all compared to none is associated with a 15% lower risk of death. The sweet spot, okay, this is the this is the point of maximum benefit, lands at around 30 to 60 minutes a week, a week. After that, the curve starts to flatten out. So when we talk about dose response, what we mean is the more you do, the more benefit you get. But the but the caveat being the benefit becomes more incremental or marginal, right? To where it's not worth, it may not be worth it to you given the amount of time in the gym and the amount of stuff you have to do, right? That makes that makes sense, I think, to a lot of you. So you don't get dramatically more longevity benefit from training six days a week versus a couple focused sessions. Now, you might train more than that for other reasons, like to build more muscle because you enjoy it, to get stronger. All of that is phenomenal, and that's a lot of what we talk about. But the floor for the health payoff is that shockingly low amount of 30 to 60 minutes a week. So practically, here's what that looks like. I want you to train all your major muscle groups at least twice a week. Use progressive overload, meaning you're trying to do a little more over time, more weight or more reps. Get enough protein to support it. I'd aim for the minimum of 0.7 grams per pound of body weight, and you can only go up for that from there depending on your goals. And by the way, even that minimum, if you're nowhere close to it, you can get to it over time, you know, over a short period of time. You don't have to do it instantly. And then recover enough so you can keep showing up in the gym. That's that's the whole thing, right? Squat, hinge, push, pull, carry, whatever, twice a week, getting a little stronger over time, fed well, and recovered. There's a reason I call my program Eat More or Lift Heavy, because essentially the essence of it is that. Now, the other piece, which could be the most encouraging thing today, it's never too late to start. There's a famous set of studies done with nursing home residents. Their average age was late 80s. Some of them were in their 90s. They were frail. Come on, you've been to nursing homes. It is very depressing. It's very sad. I've known people who basically lived the rest of their life in a nursing home for one reason or another, died there. It was very, very sad. And all I thought is if I could just spend an hour a week with them, like as a personal trainer, and maybe I should volunteer to do that if they would have let me and get on a resistance training program, you would have gotten the benefit that these people did in this study. So they put them on a program, actual progressive
Why it is never too late to build muscle
Philip Pape 26:01
lifting, where they increased the numbers over time. And guess what? Their strength went up an average of 174%. Now that is people in their 90s. Also, the speed that they could walk increased. Their muscle grew. New muscle, bigger muscle in your 90s. Come on, this is incredible. So if you're 45 like me right now, or 55 or 65, you're listening to this and you're like, I've missed my window. Heck no, that is not an excuse. I'm sorry, I'm taking that off the table for you. The windows right now, it doesn't matter if you're male, female, what age you are. By the way, I'll say it again. Women build muscle at the same rate as men. They have less to start with. That is what it is. That's puberty, testosterone, whatever. It doesn't matter. But once you start growing your muscle, it's the same rate as men. And it doesn't matter the age. So your body will respond to that signal. It's not like anything changes. You're still a human being till the day you die. So it will respond. Now, listen, I'm not saying lifting makes you immortal. That would be awesome. Like if everybody lifted weights and we lived to be 200 years old. I'm not saying muscle cancels out terrible behavior like smoking or bad diet or never sleeping. Of course not, right? You've got to do those things. I'm not saying you should panic about grip strength or go get a death risk score and like start to spiral about it or rant and rave at me. Please don't do that. I'm not saying the research proves adding muscle directly causes you to live longer. All this research, most of it is observational. There's a chance that some can go the other way, that like being sick makes you weak rather than weakness making you sick and stuff like that. But good studies try to account for all of that. And the overall signal has held up so well. You know, I'd be lying if I told you anything was a closed case in science. Like that is science. You can never fully prove anything, can you? So nuances everything. What I am saying though is across an enormous body of evidence, muscle and strength track with living longer and surviving all the things that kill most of us. The mechanisms behind them make biological sense at the human body level, not just in a rat, right? Or in a petri dish. And the intervention is simple and something that you have complete control over. And hopefully we're going to do anyway, since you listen to wits and weights. So you might as well train like it matters, because it absolutely does. And you don't have to change a thing about your program to collect the benefit. You just have to keep lifting. In fact, adding more and doing more and trying to optimize really benefits the other things like the muscle and the physique and the strength. So just know that the health stuff is a pretty low threshold. So there's no excuse not to get in the gym. All right, before we wrap up, remember I'm going to give you a 30-second strength test you can do at home to just kind of give yourself a wake-up call in case you need to get in that gym. If this episode has hit you, if you're walking away thinking, okay, I really need to train and I need to approach my life differently because this is more, this is more important than anything right now, especially if you don't train. It's not just for vanity. It's the single most controllable lever you have on how long and how well you live. If you want to make sure that lever is moving in the right direction, that your training and recovery are producing the muscle you think they are, just to know that you're doing the right thing, even if you do it for a few months. That's why I built my app Fitness Lab. I want you to just check it out, see if it's right for you. I think it's helping a lot of people. It is a daily coaching layer. It looks at your data and tells you what to do. It's very empowering and helpful and holds you accountable. Go to wits and weights.com slash app. We have a discount through Friday, July 3rd, 20% off. Witsandweights.com slash app. Okay, here's the test. It is a classic test to test your strength. You don't need any equipment. It is called the sit to stand test. You sit down in a normal chair, you cross your arms over your chest. So, you know, you can't use them, you just pin them to your chest like a mummy. And then you stand all the way up and sit all the way back down as many times as you can in 30 seconds. Now, you might want to do this alone. If you think people are gonna look at you askance, like my kids do when I tried it, or you might make it a fun family experience. Up to you. You're gonna count your reps. You're gonna stand up, sit down as many times as you can in 30 seconds, count them.
A 30-second strength test you can do today
Philip Pape 30:06
For most adults who are in this midlife range, you know, 40s, 50s, 60s, somewhere in the low teens is average strength. The higher you go, the better your lower body strength, and the better that tracks with longevity. And people who are who just lift weights on a regular basis can like slam out dozens of these. Like there, there are no issues, like no question whatsoever. But if you're in the teens, low teens, so like let's say 15, 10 to 15, that's average strength, meaning you have a lot of potential to get stronger. And if you're lower than that, then you're pretty darn weak. And that's okay to acknowledge that. That's what the data is telling you. And that's even better reason to get in the gym. And that's okay. Like just admit it to yourself, okay, I need to do something. Right? It's it's a place to start. Wherever you're at, it's a place to start. And what's cool is if you do it and it's really low and you start going to the gym and do it just like a week later or a month later, see how fast that number goes up. That itself could be really, really empowering. So do it today, write the number down, retest it, I'll say in four weeks and eight weeks. And if the number is going up, then you're basically getting stronger. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the muscle you build for the mirror is the same muscle keeping you alive for a long, healthy life. So train it, train it, train it like your life depends on it because the data says it just might. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
