We can’t control aging. We can’t control the years passing. What can we control? As we age, we’re more likely to suffer from these medical conditions. And if we never strength train, we don’t get this advantage. It’s like if we’re going to live longer, we might as well feel healthier.

Exactly. Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well -being. I’m Amy Hudson. I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co -hosts are Brian Sagan, co -founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence -based strength training.

And now for today’s episode. Welcome back to the Strength Changes Everything podcast. Today we are continuing a series of episodes all about how strength training reverses aging. We’ve talked in this series about physical appearance. We’ve talked about sarcopenia, all kinds of other conditions associated with aging that are undesirable that people are trying to avoid or push down the road, um, that are unpleasant, you know, associations with aging. Today’s episode is about how strength training can improve or help us decrease disease risk.

So this episode, we’re going to share some of the top diseases that people are concerned about developing as they get older and that they’re at higher risk for developing as they get older. We’re going to talk about the great news that strength training can help decrease risk of these diseases and then we’ll flesh out why that is or how that works. So you’re going to want to stay tuned to the entirety of this episode because statistically we’re going to be, most of us are going to be at risk for one of these or all three of these as we age. And so it’s going to apply to everybody listening today. Dr. Fisher, how are you today? first of all?

I’m doing great, thank you, Amy, and the other two that you couldn’t think of were cognitive decline and pain and joint function. How are you doing? Yes, I must be experiencing a little cognitive decline because I am getting older, so that explains it, but I’m doing well other than that, so thanks for helping me out on that one. No problem. All right, so let’s talk about disease diseases. So I guess my first question for you today is, you know, what are the top diseases that people are going to be concerned about as they age and why is that?

So as people age, there’s a number of kind of chronic medical conditions or chronic diseases or comorbidities that we often talk about that are both impacting quality of life, but are also impacting lifespan themselves. Um, typically we talk about cardiovascular disease. Most people very familiar with that talk about type two diabetes. And of course we talk about cancer. Um, I’m going to jump straight to some answers, some, some kind of shocking statistics in all of this. Uh, I went through a number of research studies in preparation for this podcast, and there’s a key one I’m going to talk about as we go through, but just to drop some statistics out there.

Engaging in resistance training reduces risk of cardiovascular disease by between 10 and 20 percent. It reduces our risk of type 2 diabetes by between 17 and 46 percent. And you can see I looked at multiple studies and hence why there’s a broad range for some of these. And it reduces our risk of cancer by between 10 and 31 percent. So those are our kind of shock factor statistics. I’m going to put those out there and obviously we’ll get into some details on those.

And there’s a number of risk factors associated with those chronic conditions. So for example, the risk factors associated with cancer are, you know, tobacco use, diet, physical inactivity is consistent across all of those. But there’s also things like, you know, excessive UV radiation exposure. But one of the key risk factors with each of those chronic medical conditions is age. So it might be that You know, you have had a lot of sun exposure or you have got a bad diet or high tobacco use or whatever else it might be, but it’s kind of a cumulative effect of age. So you’re not a risk of those.

You’re not at such high risk of those medical conditions, maybe in your twenties, but as you get older, your risk increases. you know, moving to kind of maturity and older age, let’s say 50, 60 plus, your risk factor, your age becomes a significant risk factor towards those chronic medical conditions. Okay. That makes sense. So basically just to summarize what you’re just saying, you know, as we get older and the years pass, it’s not the mere fact that the years are passing and that we’re getting older. It’s what’s going on.

during all of those years in our lifestyle that is compounding upon itself to eventually really lead us to sometimes developing these diseases. Yes, yes, absolutely. And to some extent, I almost miss sold that age is a factor as well. But but there’s a cumulative element of those other factors. But age is certainly a factor. And we’ve talked previously about our body being in different states, an anabolic state through our youth and through our growth phase of life, and then a catabolic state as we age.

So, for example, type two diabetes, the risk factors associated with type two diabetes are being overweight. There’s genetic risk factors. there’s high blood pressure and there’s high cholesterol and physical inactivity, and there’s age. And one of the reasons why age is maybe a risk factor specifically for diabetes is because our metabolism slows down. So we’re no longer in this building phase. You know, people often talk about their metabolism slowing down at a certain point in their life.

They no longer can burn off the calories that they used to be able to consume and so forth. Um, but, and because of that, they’re at a higher risk of diabetes. Their metabolism has slowed down. They maybe don’t have the same amount of muscle mass, um, and so forth. So. Age is a factor in and of itself, but it’s also a factor that causes those other factors to be cumulative.

That’s a very helpful kind of clarification. But my question is, we can’t control aging. We can’t control the years passing. What can we control? Yeah, so we can, of course, control engaging in resistance training. And in fact, historically, there’s been talk about 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity.

And those have been the typical guidelines that have been cast out to people to reduce risk of comorbidities and chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. And the paper that I was going to bring up today is a paper by Stu Phillips’ group from McMaster University in Canada. The title of the paper is Resistance Exercise Training as a Primary Countermeasure to Age -Related Chronic Disease. And it’s a really nice mini review paper, so it’s not heavy going per se, but it’s certainly an academic research paper. And they do a really nice job. One of the first things that they say is that age is a primary risk factor for a number of chronic diseases.

And they list exactly those that we just talked about. They also add mobility disability. So effectively a decline in our functional capacity. a decline in our movement and our functionality. And of course age is naturally going to be a risk factor associated with that because we lose strength, we lose muscle mass as we’ve talked about sarcopenia and so forth. We lose bone mineral density etc.

And they basically kind of review the body of literature to talk about approaches to dealing with these comorbidities and one of the things that they say is that pharmacological agents are frequently prescribed to treat or delay the progression of major chronic diseases. Of course, there’s not really a pharmacological intervention to prevent, you know, mobility disability, but certainly if somebody’s diabetic, they might take insulin. If somebody has cardiovascular disease, they might take statins for blood pressure or they might take blood thinners or so forth. So there’s obviously uh, you know, a medicalization of society to some extent, where if there is a medical, or if there is a disease it’s looked at through the eyes of medicine and it’s dealt with through medicine. But of course we then arrive at a point where somebody is, is taking a number of pills or tablets or medications each day. And there’s potential side effects associated with those.

So, jumping to the end, one of the things that these researchers talk about in this paper is they effectively say that resistance training can reduce our risk associated with those those comorbidities, those chronic diseases. And they go on to say that actually, in their opinion, that resistance training should assume a more prominent position in exercise guidelines, you know, especially more prominent, perhaps, than aerobic training in it for older adults. Interesting. As you’re describing, like, sort of the process of you know, people going on medication, as they analyze different risk factors, you know, they’ll get, they’ll go to their doctor as they get older and take blood tests sometimes and understand, you know, where their A1C is at and their cholesterol. And there are things that, you know, There are signs sometimes that you can see leading up to or heading into a disease.

I think about prediabetes as a diagnosis and things, and then getting on that medication. But what you’re talking about, too, is strength training isn’t often a part of that conversation in the medical world. But it can positively impact the factors that you’re trying to combat and more. um, sometimes, you know, then a medication alone can. And so I understand why it would be considered to be a primary intervention and something proactive you can do, um, you know, to reduce the risk. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. And of course it’s no, it’s no fault of medical practitioners. They’re not. qualified in exercise prescription. So they’re qualified in medication and pharmacology and, you know, and the human body and these medical conditions and so forth. So it stands to reason that if you go to see a doctor, they’re going to work within their scope of practice.

And of course, that’s what everybody should do. But this is where, this is where specifically resistance training almost falls through the cracks. We’ve talked previously about other research papers, which have uh looked at exercise physical activity guidelines and resistance training guidelines and sort of said the big problem is that people go and see a doctor and a doctor says go and exercise and and a doctor a medical doctor is not necessarily allowed to give any more detail than that or is not equipped to give any more detail than that but that’s that’s analogous to somebody coming to me and saying I don’t feel well. And me saying, go take some pills. and not knowing what pills to take.

They’re not prescribing exercise, I’m not prescribing pills, and so forth. And of course, we’ve talked historically about the benefits of resistance training, the multifaceted benefits of resistance training, but specifically these three comorbidities, for which age is a high risk factor. And therefore, as we age, we’re more likely to suffer from these medical conditions, these comorbidities. The whole theme of this series that resistance training reverses, or in this case resistance training reduces our risk of these comorbidities. So it takes away that age as a risk factor because it brings in high effort physical activity, which is often one of the big risk factors leading to the cause of these conditions, but it also serves to produce obesity, reduce blood pressure, reduce our risk of diabetes, reduce cholesterol, and so forth. It’s working across multiple ways.

It creates an anabolic state within our body. It boosts our metabolism. So in and of itself, it’s working, but it’s also working to reduce some of those other risk factors. Okay, so Dr. Fisher, this is really exciting information. So, I mean, what I’m craving right now is just sort of like a high level, a quick explanation for each of these diseases we talked about. Let’s start with diabetes.

Let’s talk about what are the factors that can lead to diabetes that then strength training reduces and how does that work? Okay, so when we start to talk about mechanisms of these medical conditions, for example, diabetes is associated with high blood sugars, high blood glucose. So we’re effectively taking in nutrition that’s high in sugar, and our body’s got nowhere to store it. It’s effectively got nowhere to put it. Our body might still be responding by producing insulin, but it’s not doing anything with that insulin because it’s got nowhere simply to put the blood sugar.

So it’s then being converted and stored as fat. So we kind of create this insulin resistance as well, and then eventually, our body, our pancreas will stop producing insulin because when it has produced insulin, it wasn’t doing anything for us anyway. So we now have this almost chronic high blood sugar, this poor insulin production, and we’ve created somebody that’s overweight because they’ve taken in extra nutrients in excess of what they were needing and what they were burning. So probably the best way to think about this and the answer that I should have given instantly was a resistance training depletes our body of glycogen. So it empties our muscles of the existing stores of glycogen. So as soon as we then eat again, our body has somewhere to put that sugar.

And that’s probably the key mechanism by which resistance training can start to impact diabetes. It’s shown to reduce fasting blood glucose levels, it’s shown to increase metabolism, excuse me, and all the things associated with starting to reduce diabetes and even reverse diabetes. Excellent. Okay. Thank you for breaking that down. I mean that really paints a helpful picture We talked about emptying the sink.

So those muscles that we have in our body Storing all of this glycogen this the sugar energy within the muscles when we when we strength train we deplete those and empty those muscles out and so now you know the The blood sugar has somewhere to go and this is a very healthy process And if we never strength train, we don’t get this advantage going forward with this and the regulation that we’re looking for and needing. And so thank you for explaining that. Okay, how about cancer? Yeah, okay. So cancer is a bit more tricky one.

Cancer is probably more closely linked to systemic inflammation, which we’ve talked about in the past. And from that, we talk about visceral fat, which prompts systemic inflammation. But we also talk about myokines. We could talk about apoptosis and what’s called pre -programmed cell death. So cells effectively mutate and replicate. But cells are meant to, when they’re not complete, when they’re not working in the way they should, they’re meant to die and be recycled.

And actually, it’s the variants in cells as they mutate and then replicate that can start to cause cancer that effectively is what causes underlying cancer cells to exist. Well, primarily resistance training increases our body’s capacity to kill off cells that are no longer functioning properly. A good way to think about this is As soon as you engage in resistance training, you’re saying to your body, Hey, we need to perform at this high level. And your body looks at the cells that aren’t performing at the highest level and says, okay, you’re not doing your job properly. I’m going to get rid of you and use the good bits to make another cell that will perform at a high level. So we kind of create these mechanisms, which are completely normal mechanisms within the body, uh, to, to, to exist and to occur.

Um. with a greater degree of frequency maybe than they would do if we weren’t engaging in physical activity. We then also, when we engage in high effort muscular contraction or releasing myokines, and we’ve talked a lot historically about myokines that produce systemic inflammation and so forth. And then of course, cancer is also, other risk factors associated with cancer are things like obesity. So we’ve talked about some of the mechanisms associated with diabetes that we just did so we can reduce our risk of obesity and so forth. I think that is so cool because I do remember when you were talking about in that myokines episode that our bodies know basically how to send detectives out to find those those cells that are not working correctly and like clean them out.

I think that’s so amazing. But it’s kind of sobering to think about, like, if if you’re not strength training, you know, is that not going to happen then? I mean, or is it happening less often? Well, this is where it’s probably happening wonderfully when we’re young, but doesn’t happen quite so well as we age because of these other factors. As we’ve talked about this, I keep coming back to this simplistic idea of an anabolic and a catabolic state. But really, it’s not much more than that.

Our body has a building phase and has a breaking down phase. And to some extent, from an evolutionary perspective, we’re maybe not designed to live as long as we might wish or so forth. So our body kind of has these natural phases of trying to break down. But we can, of course, combat that with the things that we’re also designed to do, which is movement and high effort exercise and good nutrition. It’s like if we’re going to live longer, we might as well feel healthier. Exactly.

Because life expectancy has increased over the years. great amount due to modern medicine and other factors. So yeah, we might as well feel good. Okay. So we’ve got cancer. We’ve got diabetes.

Heart disease is the last one. Yeah. So cardiovascular disease is an interesting one. And again, primarily there’s things like high blood pressure and high cholesterol, obesity and diabetes. are our primary risk factors for cardiovascular disease. So once we’ve kind of engaged in resistance training and we’re starting to reduce our risk of diabetes, reduce our blood pressure, reduce our cholesterol and triglycerides, we’re kind of working there anyway.

But actually resistance training can impact vascular function in a number of ways as well. So it improves endothelial function and it can improve nitric oxide release, which helps veins, arteries and capillaries kind of open and close and helps them retain their elasticity or helps them stay. elastic enough to allow blood to pump through in high volumes and allows them to contract when not required. So where we think about kind of atherosclerosis and plaque buildup within arteries, we see a reduction of that when we engage in resistance training and we see our arteries still able to be elastic as we want them to be when we’re younger. We also see some other adaptations in the heart, actually. We see increases in left ventricular wall thickness, so it’s our left ventricle.

I should say there is research to support that there are increases in left ventricular wall thickness. There are some people who are not so convinced, and we’ve talked about it in the past in research papers where we’ve said it may or may not occur. But the left ventricle is the last part of our heart, which ejects blood out into the aorta and out into the rest of our body. So by engaging in resistance training, we’re increasing effectively the strength of the muscle of our heart and its capacity to pump blood. In a similar way to aerobic exercise, we also see an increase in capillarization, which is where oxygen from the blood is actually transferred into active muscles. So there’s a number of different mechanisms taking place here.

And when we think about cardiovascular disease, we might think about certain elements, but actually we can think about a whole cardiovascular system, you know, heart, veins, arteries, capillaries, and so forth. And it’s impacting it, you know, multiple, multiple places along the way. Awesome. Thank you for humoring me and spelling that all out. I think that’s really helpful. I think a lot of us are sort of disconnected with our body and maybe never take the time to sort of consider what’s going on on an internal basis and why the functioning is so important.

And so in my mind’s eye, when you describe some of these things happening, it’s neat to picture like Oh, the blood is flowing better. The arteries are more open. The muscles are depleted of those. You know, the insulin has somewhere to go. I think picturing in my mind, like how the body is supposed to function, be healthy on the inside, and then making the connection between how strength training is supporting that is kind of motivating. Maybe I’m the only one who who feels like that.

But it is it is interesting to consider. And and connect those dots, because especially if you have a risk factor for one of these things, or if you are already experiencing some of these things, I think understanding the value of how much strength training can help you manage or ward off these things, as we’ve talked about, is huge, is huge. Nobody wants to live with chronic disease if they can avoid it. And even if we do have it, we still want to feel good and we want to function well. And so strength training again becomes one of the best things we can do no matter the stage to um, to, to achieve that outcome.

I love what you just said about wanting to know those things. And I think more people do, um, and more people should do, you know, we’re, we all have different professions, whether it’s in economics or politics or engineering or whatever it might be. And so we know a lot about something, but actually what could be more important to know a lot about than our human body. And so when we’re engaging in exercises. It’s probably nice to think about what we’re actually physically doing to our muscles, to our bones, to our cardiorespiratory system. Absolutely.

Yep. And at the end of the day, it’s going to help you do what you want to do and, and live the life that you’re trying to live. Right. And so that’s kind of what we’re all after, isn’t it? So I love it. Well, thank you so much for sharing all this with us today.

I’m super inspired by the content of this episode. If you know somebody, um, who’s concerned about any of these. things, please share this episode with them. It’s super motivating. It’s just huge. This is information that everybody should know and understand.

And so thank you for helping spread the word about this show to your friends and family and providing this content for them to take in as well, because it makes a huge difference. So we thank you for tuning in today, and we will see you next week on the podcast. Until then, we hope you remember strength changes everything. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. You can submit a question or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything .

com. Join us next week for another episode and be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss another episode. Here’s to you and your best health.