Podcast 22

The Science of Strength: Brian Cygan Interviews James Fisher, PhD – Part 1

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SHOW NOTES

Brian Cygan and Dr. James Fisher break down the science of strength and discuss what the proper level of resistance during training is, the threshold for the effort that you need to achieve to see results, and why some exercises are best avoided if you want to see optimal fitness benefits.

• Fisher is an exercise scientist in the UK and was a personal trainer for a number of years before becoming a researcher. His area of research was mainly lower back pain and lower back strength and has recently been looking into the perceptual responses to resistance training.
• He advocates a framework of evidence-based resistance training. One of the first papers published was focused on guiding trainers and trainees on what the research supports and how to exercise the most effectively.
• In total, Dr. Fisher, in collaboration with researchers from around the world, has published over 100 papers. The part he enjoys the most is the fact that once one paper is published, the research always raises new questions to explore.
• There is a mountain of evidence that supports the health benefits of resistance training. Ultimately, all the benefits combine and stronger people have a reduced risk of all-cause mortality. In layman’s terms, the stronger you are, the harder you are to kill.
• The goal of most people with resistance exercise is to have a biological age that is lower than your chronological age. We want to live longer and be able to function as if we were much younger.
• Resistance training resets the biological clock, sometimes by decades. Studies on older males using resistance training showed they had similar cellular characteristics as men in their 20’s.
• The first thing you need to understand is that the key is the tension of the muscle doing the work, not just moving an external load. The evidence supports the finding that effort is key, which is where most people go wrong as they fear the hard work. Whole effort is one of the guiding principles of the Exercise Coach.
• The intensity of effort really matters to trigger the results we are looking for from exercise. There is also a threshold of a near maximal effort to trigger a response from the body.
• If people are working at a lower intensity, the volume becomes a key factor. If we train to a higher level of effort, the volume becomes unnecessary.
• For the average person, optimal results can be achieved with two 30 minute-or-less workouts per week. For bodybuilders, there are some questions around doing more training in order to maximize muscle growth, but for most people, they want the functionality of strength and not an increase in size.
• To get a whole body benefit, the minimum dose of training performed is only three exercises: an upper body pressing exercise (bench press), an upper body pulling exercise (seated row), and a lower body pressing exercise (leg press). Those can be complemented with additional multi-joint movements for other areas of the body that need work.
• Even under lockdown, people can see positive benefits from doing simple exercises like pushups and lunges.
• Squats are a unique exercise because it has a high degree of coordination and skill. You can become “stronger” at the squat without really seeing results in other areas because you are just becoming better at moving the weight up and down. This is why the leg press is a more beneficial lower body pressing exercise.

I’ve constantly got that competition and that motivation to be young in body and be strong and be fit. And ultimately, isn’t that what we all want? You know, there’s no harm in living to 120 years old. But if you have the body of 120 year old, that’s probably not much fun.

I’m Amy Hudson, and this is the Strength Changes Everything podcast. Today we’ve got a real treat for you. We are going to be airing an interview conducted by Brian Sagan, my co -host of this podcast, the Strength Changes Everything podcast. and James Fisher, and they’re going to be discussing the science of strength. That is what their discussion is called. That is what the topic was that they were discussing.

This interview originally aired back in May of 2020, when most of the United States was shut down for the initial COVID response. And what we tried to do at the exercise coach was develop some live video interactions to keep our clients engaged, inspired, and motivated in the midst of not being able to come into our studios in the traditional way, but to continue to fuel the fire behind their participation and effective exercise, such as we offer at The Exercise Coach. In this interview, James will talk to Brian about intensity and technique of exercise that really produces results. He’s going to share some of the findings of research on really the threshold of effort that it takes scientifically to move the needle and to force your body to adapt to the exercise you are doing, to produce meaningful change, and continued improvements in your fitness levels. It’s very interesting and somewhat surprising possibly, so I encourage you to tune in and check it out. listen to part one of this interview between Brian and James called the science of strength.

Enjoy.

Hi, this is Brian Saigon. And I’m the co founder and CEO of the exercise coach. The exercise coach is a cutting edge personal training business that helps people get the results that matter most to them. with no more than two 20 -minute workouts per week. We offer safe, effective, and science -backed workouts in small, clean, private exercise studios in locations across the nation. And today, I’m here with my guest, Dr. James Fisher.

Dr. Fisher is an exercise scientist at Solent University in Southampton in the UK, and we’re going to be talking about his research -based perspective on strength training today. Dr. Fisher, thanks so much for being here with me today.

Welcome.

I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Thank you very much for having me, Brian. It’s great to be speaking to you.

You bet.

Well, Dr. Fisher, I thought we could just start, rather than me trying to share your background, could you just share with us, with our listeners, a little bit about your background, expertise, and your particular focus or passion in research, if you have one?

Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, it’s probably worth clarifying that for a number of years, I was a personal trainer myself. So I’ve kind of got a practical investment in this. And I think that’s true of a lot of researchers these days, certainly the young ones that are trying to see this connection between the science and between the application of the data. My area of research has predominantly been low back pain and low back strength. But we’ve also looked at kind of volume of training.

We’ve looked at the minimal dose approach to resistance training and looked at comparing heavy and light loads. And then more recently, we’ve looked at perceptual responses to resistance training. So under the construct of taking resistance exercise to moments muscular failure, we then looked at degree of effort, and then how that might differ from a degree of discomfort, particularly based on maybe loading patterns or time under load and so forth. And that’s been a really big area over the last few years and continues to be.

Wow, super interesting to me and I’m excited to get a chance to talk about your findings today and your perspective based on research. And you would say, I think I’ve heard you call it before, your view on resistance training and ultimately what it is that you’re trying to help us practitioners apply, I think you’ve called it evidence -based resistance training, is that right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of my first papers from sort of 2011, 2010 -2011, was titled Evidence -Based Resistance Training Recommendations. And the idea of that paper and everything since then really has been, how can we deliver kind of guidelines or recommendations to the masses, whether that’s to trainers or trainees about what research supports, what practices, I guess. So yeah, so I would certainly call it evidence -based resistance training.

Yeah. Great. That’s really, yeah. The exercise coach, our focus is really, as I said in the intro, we want to deliver exercise that’s safe. that’s maximally effective, it’s as time efficient as possible, and that we really can say this is backed by evidence, this is backed by science, and that’s why I’m so interested in your perspective. You know, just a little bit about the work that you’ve done on evidence -based resistance training, on resistance training, low back strengthening, etc.

How much work have you done?

How many publications have you been a part of? Any idea? Yeah, well, if we tie them up, and this is, of course, giving credit to a number of other authors around the world. I’ve got colleagues over in Germany who do some great research, who I’m fortunate to collaborate with in the US. Matt Breschke over at Princeton, Wayne Westcott, people like that, Luke Carlson at Discover Strength, and a lot of other places. I think the number is just around the tip of the 100 publications mark.

so where it’s due to those colleagues so Wow fortunate so that’s a pretty robust long -term effort that’s creating this perspective that you’re drawing from so I think that’s pretty cool for people to hear Yeah, and it’s great because, you know, as soon as you collect one set of data and analyze it and write up a paper, you get more questions from that piece of research that lead on to more and more research studies.

And that’s really the really exciting bit that we’re still really enthused and really motivated to continue that process. That’s great.

Well, Dr. Fisher, why don’t we just kind of take it from the top? When we look at evidence -based resistance training, what kind of health and fitness results can people pursue through effective resistance training. Yeah, so I mean, that’s the key question really. And there’s just an absolute mountain of evidence supporting health benefits from resistance training. If we go through individual studies, there’s everything from reducing risk of colon cancer, reduction in low back pain, improved bone mineral density, blood pressure, improving insulin sensitivity in diabetics, and so forth. And then psychologically, there’s sleep patterns, reduced anxiety and stress response, and so forth.

And ultimately, all of these actually combine for or the sort of the statements of increased strength or stronger people have a reduced risk of all -cause mortality. And in layman’s terms, that means that the stronger you are, the harder it is to be killed by any cause. But more than that is, we published in a paper a few years back, and I don’t claim credit for this statement, I’m sure I read it somewhere beforehand, but we’ve said that the goal of most people doing resistance exercise is to have a biological age equal to or lower than their chronological age. So for example, Brian, I’m 41 years old, but every year I have a fresh influx of 18 or 19 year old students. So I’ve constantly got that competition and that motivation to be young in body and be strong and be fit.

And ultimately, isn’t that what we all want? You know, there’s no harm in living to 120 years old, but if you have the body of 120 year old, that’s probably not much fun.

But if you have the body of a 60 or 70 year old, then that’s great. So my goal is to live longer but to be able to function as if I was a lot younger.

That makes so much sense and we see people really as a result of effective resistance training in their 60s and 70s that they’re performing workloads that I think that the average 25 year old would find really, really challenging if they weren’t trained in the same way. It seems that we’re setting the clock back by decades for people in a lot of ways.

Literally decades, there’s been some really nice studies that have shown that after even six months of resistance training, older males, I think it was in their late 60s, have shown sort of cellular characteristics, mitochondrial characteristics similar to people in their 20s, to males in their 20s. It literally can reverse aging from that point of view. Well, that’s inspiring for sure. Well, that’s a great summary. So then the next question I’d like to ask then is I’d like to start to dial things in a little bit to how exactly my guess is that the research doesn’t show that we can just sort of do whatever we want and say we’ve done strength training in any way and get these kinds of amazing results. transformative results.

So I want to talk about really more specifically the how. What do people need to achieve in the workout to achieve this kind of response from the body?

So what do we know? Is there a way for you to maybe even create a framework of the key principles or variables that we need to control and in what way we need to control them to get results like this? Yeah, well the first thing that I think that we need to manage is that the muscle is in the tension We don’t get anywhere by simply looking at the process of moving an external load and that focuses largely on a degree of technique maybe or on a degree of control of the external resistance one of the big problems I see when people go into when I go into a commercial gym is that people are focused on simply moving a load by any means they can whereas if they think about contracting a muscle they’re going to get a lot greater results because they’re actually doing the metabolic work of contracting the muscle, but they’re also stimulating adaptations in that muscle. Alongside that or perhaps secondary to that I think is intensity of effort. So a lot of people will go into the gym and they’ll do a few reps and when things get a little bit difficult they’ll put the weight back down again and then they’ll update Twitter and update Instagram and send a few messages and before you know it five or six minutes have passed and then they’ll do another few reps that don’t really mean much. And actually I would say the evidence now supports that really is the effort level that we take exercise to.

And I know there’s a big debate going on about whether we do need to reach complete muscular failure, the point where we simply can’t do anymore, or if we get close to that. But I think getting close is the key. And then maybe the closer we get to that point, maybe is dealing in the minutia of benefits.

But I think effort is key. And of course, that’s one of the main reasons why people don’t perform resistance training, because they fear the hard work or they see a lot of complexity in it.

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. That makes sense. I appreciate what you’re saying about whether or not we need to go to absolute failure. It seems difficult to land on what exactly that would be, whether we’re looking at mechanically, whether or not a weight stops moving, we can no longer lift it. Have we reached metabolic failure at that point, even though we see mechanical failure?

I don’t really think so. So we use this term whole effort. We talk about whole effort exercise. at the exercise coach.

And what we mean by that I think is in line with what you’re saying where we’re basically trying to coach and guide people to a point of near maximal effort.

And it seems if we can get in that ballpark of failure, mechanical metabolic failure, that we see that we ignite some really neat results.

Yeah, I completely agree and I think that if we put effort on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being completely maximal and you’re pressing against the weight that isn’t moving anymore, you know, we’ve used that definition in some of our literature and we like to say without change to the speed of movement or the technique because a lot of people will change the technique when the effort gets hard. Sure. to try and make it ultimately to try and make it easier. And changing the technique can be worse than doing the exercise to begin with because that might lead to injury.

But actually, I think if you’re an 8 or a 9 out of 10, you’re probably getting, you know, a large proportion of the results. It’s when your exercise is a 4 or a 5 that you’re probably or people are probably not getting much in the way of results. That makes sense. So the takeaway is intensity of effort really matters to trigger these results that we’re looking for from exercise. And there’s a, it seems there’s a threshold level. It’s not just necessarily proportionate to effort.

It seems there’s a certain threshold.

You’re calling it like an eight or nine, a near maximal effort to really trigger the maximum response, or maybe even any response at all from the body. Yeah, absolutely. And I definitely think the threshold is the right term. I think that we have to tip a point where we get to that maximal level of recruitment, where we get to that point where we’re telling our body this stress is too much, you have to adapt. If we stay below that, then we’re not flicking that switch for want of a better term.

And with all this in mind, and the reason intensity is so important is because if people are working at a lower intensity, then they tend to do more and more and more. And so volume then becomes a key factor, whether that’s number of sets per exercise, or number of exercises per workout, or even number of workouts per week. Actually, if we train to a high enough level of effort, then I think the volume becomes certainly a less significant factor. More than one set per exercise doesn’t seem necessary, more than a handful of exercises per workout, and probably more than a couple of times a week. And all of this really can mean that we can get certainly the health benefits of this kind of workout in probably less than 30 minutes, twice a week. We might, there might be debate over are we optimizing muscle hypertrophy?

Okay, you know, if you did more, could you get more? And if we’re looking at pro bodybuilders, does an extra set get you an extra few percent? Maybe so.

Okay.

But certainly their motivations are different.

And, you know, totally.

Yeah. So you said a couple things just for some of our listeners that aren’t as technically familiar volume, you’re calling that when you say volume, that doesn’t have to do with the music in the studio or anything that has to do with the total amount of the exercise you’re doing, right? Exactly, exactly. Okay. And then hypertrophy would be the idea of the muscles growing larger. And so yeah, certainly our clients we find are people that want to, to look better, and they want to feel better.

They want to feel great. have more energy, be stronger, be healthier, but they’re really interested in gaining that as a result of making their muscles better, not necessarily a whole lot bigger.

I mean, I think our clients want a firmer, more toned, more defined look. They certainly want to see that they’ve built muscle, but we’ve often said our goal is not to turn a bunch of baby boomers or busy professionals into bodybuilders. It’s to help them make their life better through enhancing their muscles. Right, right. And in fact, if you go back far enough in the resistance training literature, hypertrophy or an increase in muscle size was actually referred to as a noxious effect of resistance training, because it’s not always desirable that people grow their muscle size.

What they want is the functionality that having strength affords them, but not necessarily the muscle size. So I think that really we should look more at your day -to -day people rather than your pro bodybuilders. And certainly that’s where my area of research has been focused. Cool. So we’ve talked about intensity of effort and we’ve talked about volume. So we’ve talked basically so far about how hard the strength training should be.

how much of it we should do. And I’ve heard you say in terms of number of sets, it doesn’t take multiple sets. One properly performed set can trigger a result for the muscles involved. Putting that together as a handful of exercises allows us to do a whole body workout. In terms of frequency or how often, you’ve said I think really a couple times a week should be effective for these broad health benefits. And then, you know, we deliver a 20 minute workout.

I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think you would say you believe that could be fully effective for these health benefits.

So it’s high effort, brief workouts, one set of guess how many exercises maybe would be one thing. We’ve heard about level of effort, we’ve heard about how often, we’ve heard about how long the workout might need to be and how many sets one might need to perform, which is one properly performed set. What about how many exercises in a workout does someone need to do to get a whole body benefit? Yeah, that’s a great question. So we published a paper back in 2017 called A Minimal Dose Approach to Resistance Training, subtitled The Prophylactic to Aging.

And the idea of this was we reviewed a lot of the literature about all these health benefits and what was the minimum dose of training performed. And in the end, we actually recommended that an upper body pressing exercise, so e . g. a chest press or an overhead press, an upper body pulling exercise such as a lat pulldown or a seated row, and a lower body pressing exercise is probably sufficient to see some health adaptations and some strength and muscular adaptations. So really only three exercises. And in fact, in that paper, I even suggest that a chest press and a row are potentially more favorable than overhead movements because of a sort of potential for shoulder impingement going above the head.

So anything that’s in this line in shoulder flexion extension is probably better than add an abduction. So sorry for the technical terms there. So those three exercises are probably the minimum dose and then we can build on that with other compound multi -joint movements or single joint movements beyond that if there are specific areas that need work.

So we might look at people with low back pain or a weak low back and say let’s put in a single joint low back extension or a neck extension or flexion or a knee extension exercise for the quadriceps or so forth and we can start to then develop that personal element of, let’s design this workout for this individual. But I think those three or three key multi -joint movements is the minimum dose. And I think right now with everything that’s going on with social distancing and kind of lockdown and closure of a lot of fitness facilities around the world, people can maintain or even still see positive adaptations by just doing those three movements.

If they can do any kind of pulling or rowing exercise, push -ups or any kind of bench press or chest press exercise, and then a squat or a lunge or some other kind of lower body multi -joint movement, they can still see really positive benefits from doing so.

Sure, and the key it seems then would be, are they able to apply the right effort level to make those productive?

But that’s really interesting. So you said upper body, so like a chest press, a row, and then you said a lower body pressing movement. For our clients, you know, we talk about a leg press, that would be a leg press movement that you’re talking about, right?

Exactly, exactly, yeah. Cool. And I would even go so far as to say that I would favor a leg press over and above anything else because I think the instability of a squat means that we train the skill element of a squat exercise. So I think that a leg press is probably more favorable because we don’t need to train balance in that way or that coordination. We simply need to train the muscles to contract with a higher degree of effort. That’s a great point.

Yeah, I love that. So it’s safer and it allows us to keep the focus on what really matters, which is the stimulus, which is about the time under load, the quality of that loading to reach that level of effort that’s necessary to trigger a result versus the average

person worrying about balancing hundreds of pounds on their back. And am I going to fall?

Am I going to tweak my back?

Am I going to get into the range of motion that’s actually going to load my muscles versus just be a range of motion? That’s me just sort of bouncing weight on my skeleton. Right, right.

I think that’s completely true of a squat exercise. Yeah, yeah. Sure. An elite athlete could use a barbell and squat very effectively, very intensely. Um, I think it’s, I think we could debate whether or not that would even necessarily be ideal for them compared to something else, but for the, but certainly for the average person pursuing, you know, looking, feeling and functioning better that that squat exercise is probably less than ideal for them from a safety standpoint. You know, completely anecdotally, I worked with a strength coach a few years back and he was telling me that he introduced the squat exercise to a training routine.

And he was telling me how much stronger his athletes were getting when they were squatting, but how their actual performance, they were rowers, how their performance in the boat hadn’t changed. And I asked him if he’d continued to use the leg press exercise as well. And he said, yeah. And I said, are they getting stronger on the leg press? And he said, well, that’s the funny thing.

They’re not getting any stronger on the leg press.

And I had to say to him, well, they’re just getting better at squatting. They’re not getting stronger, they’re just getting better at performing that exercise. And that’s something we’ve got to be really careful of when we add an exercise that has a degree or a high degree of skill, of balance, of motor coordination. We almost want to eliminate as much of that as we can so that we can truly stimulate the muscle. Wow.

I’m just taking some notes here.

You’re covering so much. You’re covering a lot today. I don’t know if people listening can appreciate that. I feel like you’re taking about 30 or 40 years of scientific research and anecdotal experience of thousands of people around the world and sort of cramming this into these really, really rich pregnant statements, but this is good. We’re touching on a lot.

And we are going to pause the interview right here. We will continue this interview next week on the Strength Changes Everything podcast with part two of this interview.

I hope you were inspired to age gracefully, to change the way you age through meaningful exercise, provided in a motivating, clean, environment such as the exercise coach. This is why we do what we do and it is our heartbeat to deliver the life -changing benefits of exercise in a fraction of the time so that you can live longer, look cleaner, feel better. Tune in next week to the Strength Changes Everything podcast. I’m Amy Hudson. Have a great day, everybody.