What’s so exciting is that we really do have a choice in how we age.

You’re quite literally reversing aging with this process.

It makes so much sense to add strength training to whatever else you do, whether it’s aerobic exercise or sensible dieting. But the strength training is really key.

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 wellbeing.

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. We’re joined today by one of my greatest mentors in the area of strength training and in academia as well. And he’s published outline studies on resistance training on efficacy and safety and the health benefits of strength training and numerous books as well.

So it’s my true pleasure to introduce Dr. Wayne Westcott to the Strength Changes Everything podcast. Wayne, great to have you here. Thank you so much, Dr. Fisher. I’m honored to be with you this morning. We’ve famously co-authored a number of papers together and spoken at conferences together so you know as I say you’re one of my great mentors in this field but something I’ve

never asked you and I wanted to share with the listeners hopefully is I want to kind of go back to the beginning and ask you where your interest in resistance training and in studying resistance training actually came from.

I appreciate that question, and thank you again for having me. You are the expert in all of these, and I’m honored to be with you. But I started strength training when I was in high school to help me with my running, which was a very bad move

because back then strength training was not accepted at all. And the coaches found out that I was strength training and they became very upset with me and said, you have to stop this because it’s bad for you and it’s gonna slow you down.

So came from an era when strength training was not accepted really even in the athletic field, so possibly for maybe shot putters and discus throwers and football players, but for the average person it was not recommended whatsoever, which is very sad because it’s the most important exercise we can do for health and fitness. And I’m a cardio person too, so I say that with a lot of research support. But when I started teaching, I started out as

a physical education teacher, teaching at the elementary school level, and I felt strongly about the children who were, even back in the 70s, early 70s, they were very weak and kind of fat, to be blunt about it. And I was able to get approved through our local area, and then I think through the whole state of New York at that time. The strength training curriculum I put together for young students in fifth and sixth grade, so that would be 10, 11, 12 years of age, and I brought in all my equipment to the gym and made a lot of benches and things,

and we had some very successful strength training programs. And based on that, I went back to college for a master’s degree. And I did work in the area of strength training, did my master’s thesis on strength training, and then continued to do that throughout the rest

of my long career. I’m an old timer, as you know.

And that’s fascinating. And of course, to start to instill great habits in children with strength training, because so many people do shy away from a strength training in children. Now we know that the benefits extend

even beyond kind of the physical health benefits into the cognitive and the academic benefits with children as well. So the health benefits through the lifespan, yeah, are clearly becoming more and more identified and identifiable by even the lay population.

So talking about the health benefits, you published so much about retaining and rebuilding muscle as we age and functional capacity and cognitive function and bone mineral density and resistance to medical conditions like type two diabetes. I’m gonna put you on the spot and say,

is there a most important health benefit for resistance training?

I believe there is, especially since I’m in my mid to late 70s now, so I’m an old-timer, and I’m doing my best to maintain some muscle mass, but the facts are just very challenging with the aging process, and this starts with muscle loss and bone loss in the 20s for most individuals, that the sarcopenia, the loss of muscle by disuse is just incredibly important because muscle is one of our most important tissues, believe it or not.

It’s certainly our most active tissue outside of the heart and the brain. And when we lose muscle, a lot of negative things occur. And you mentioned some of them. It affects our, number one, it affects our body composition and the fat gain. I just heard on the news the other day that it is now predicted that by 2050 that 60%

of Americans, as you know I’m over here in the United States, 60% will become, will be classified as obese, not just overweight, that right now it’s about 65, 70% are overweight or obese, but 60% obese. And I’ve known, we’ve known for years, the prediction that by 2050,

about one out of every three Americans will have full-fledged diabetes, which is just an impossible situation because it leads to a lot of other serious issues, especially heart disease and blindness and amputations and those types of things. And strength training is the best means, in my opinion, for preventing all of those because as we lose muscle we tend to slow our metabolism and even if we’re eating the same, if we’re not eating more, which is unlikely for most people as we age, but if we’re not eating

more we still add fat because there’s less muscle, there’s slower metabolic rate and so calories that used to be used to keep that muscle alive and functioning now go into fat storage. And it creeps up. In the middle life years, most men and women are adding about 10 to 15 pounds of fat per decade because they are losing about five pounds of muscle per decade. And that’s a serious imbalance of the way it should be. As we get into my age range, actually even after age 50, for most people, the menopause years

and the change of hormone years, that muscle loss comes out to about a pound per year or 10 pounds per decade. That’s a lot of engine. Your muscles are the engines of your body and you’re going from an eight cylinder engine

to a six cylinder engine to a four cylinder engine to a riding lawnmower engine and it’s not good. And we gain the fat and when we gain the fat, then we have all these other issues such as higher risk of type two diabetes, blood pressure increases, cholesterol and blood

lipid changes that are not good, and then of course cardiovascular disease, diabetes, osteopenia, and then osteoporosis. The loss of muscle is always accompanied by a similar loss of bone. In fact, it’s usually the bone loss is much greater than the muscle loss on a percentage basis. So for a strong musculoskeletal system

enables you to do the things you want to do in life as well as to just be healthy, but also to do your cardiovascular exercise for your heart, you better do some strength training.

Fantastic, what a wonderful answer. I’m going to come back to something you said there about the increasing kind of rate of obesity because of course a typical response to becoming overweight is that people will go on a diet to try to or they will change their diet and try to lose fat although it’s often phrased as they will try to lose weight and of course

one of the big problems with this is some of the weight they lose is muscle mass if they’re not engaging in strength training. Did you have any comments around that? Some of your research has touched

on this as well I know so. Certainly have and you’re correct because I’ve been in the field for so long within a lot of research studies, none as well as you do your research, I say that sincerely, but we’ve done a lot of studies. The ones we did in the last several years along with Harvard University, one of our top universities in the United States,

and other key people was on just that factor, reversing the fat loss, losing weight, but mostly losing fat. And you are 100% correct. In most cases, at least 20% of the fat lost on a good diet, a sensible diet, is lean weight or muscle mass. So it exacerbates the problem because you’re losing fat,

but you’re also losing muscle. And when that happens, there are a handful, just a handful, probably less than 10. I know of five, and there may be five more I don’t know about, studies that have shown that in the year following, or usually they’re six months, so the six months following a very successful weight loss program, about 95% of all the participants regain all the weight

that they’ve lost. And when they regain it, they’re regaining more fat and less muscle than they lost, and it becomes a vicious cycle. So the key thing for weight loss is to understand it’s not about weight at all, as you just said. It’s about body composition, and we don’t want to lose the muscle.

And numerous studies have shown that if you strength train while you’re on a diet program, a sensible diet program, that you will maintain your muscle mass. But we have a couple of studies that fall into that good category that I just mentioned. One was our six-month study where we looked at people who were losing fat the regular way or losing weight the regular way, those who are doing strength training and also strength training with a little extra protein in their diet so that they have the building blocks to take that strength training stimulus and build more muscle.

You need the stimulus of strength training, you also need a little more protein, especially people in my age group who don’t process protein nearly as well as they did when they were 35 or 40. So in our studies, and there are many other studies of outstanding researchers, you know them of course, Stuart Phillips and his group, et cetera, who found the same thing. But we found in six months, and it’s a sensible program of Harvard Medical School personnel gave us

the diet program for this. They said women 12 to 1500 calories per day, men 1500 to 1800, it wasn’t a crazy diet. And in six months they lost almost 15 pounds of fat and they gained about three pounds of muscle, which is unheard of. So in fact they didn’t lose the muscle, they actually gained muscle when they did strength training and the extra protein,

protein being about 0.7 grams per pound of body weight, which again, the recommendation from the nutrition experts and the medical doctors that we dealt with. And what was good about that is we did a six-month follow-up study where we stopped all dietary restrictions.

They could eat anything. We just said, please keep up with your strength training, which they loved doing, by the way, when they learned how to do it safely, effectively, and efficiently. It was just one set of 10 different exercises, two or three days a week, and twice worked just as well as three, incidentally. But when they kept up their strength training and they kept up their higher protein intake, 0.7 grams per pound of ideal body weight, in that next

six-month period we became one of those five to possibly ten studies that showed no significant weight gain. They maintained their weight for six months backed with normal eating, which never happens or rarely happens. And believe it or not, they added another three pounds of muscle or lean weight, which is mostly muscle. So it just, it makes so much sense to add strength training to whatever else you do, whether it’s aerobic exercise

or sensible dieting. But the strength training is really key. And again, in our age brackets, we do recommend a little extra protein for most people.

That is so awesome. I just want to highlight that study because would you go so far as to say that successful weight loss involves maintaining muscle? How would you describe successful weight loss in general?

Absolutely. You can lose weight much more quickly simply by cutting your calories and losing a lot of both muscle and both fat and muscle, I should say it in that way. And on some studies, we’ve had some very, very type A behavior people who are just go-getters and want to do everything fast and furious, including one of my deans, awesome dean, brilliant dean. But he had a 50% muscle loss and a 50% fat loss, and he did not look well or feel well

when he finished the study and I said, why didn’t you do what we said? He said, I will from now on. He gained the muscle back and he was able to, you know, then make everything work properly. That muscle is so important. It’s the engine of the body and we need it so desperately and the strength training is

the only thing that I’m aware of that can help you build muscle, functional muscle. So I would recommend that everyone do some type of resistance exercise who’s trying to lose weight and especially to maintain weight. I guess I missed my point there. I’m so sorry, Amy.

My point was that you can lose weight fastest with dieting alone, but you’re going to gain back fastest also. But if you strength train, at least as our study has shown, you can maintain for at least six months. Actually, we went for nine months and we continued to add muscle and lose fat even in the next three months. So, nine months after stopping all dietary restrictions, which again was unheard of, the body weight was essentially the same, statistically no different. It was a little heavier because they lost a teeny bit of fat,

but they still kept gaining muscle. So their body weight was heavier, but their body composition was better and their lifestyle was, and their functionality was incredibly increased. So the strength training is critical for maintaining that weight loss and a healthy lifestyle.

Fantastic. And of course you talked about protein there. And just before we started the show, Amy was talking about one of your studies which should include protein intake for bone mineral density as well.

Yes, yes.

We did a nine month osteoporosis study and because we wanted to be very sure that they got a little extra protein, these were postmenopausal women, and we made sure that they drank a little protein shake before they left the fitness center. They couldn’t leave without drinking the protein shake.

It was just, it was just 24 grams of protein. You know, it wasn’t a lot. It didn’t cause any issues whatsoever. And what we determined, and I was a little disappointed in this because other studies done at Tufts University and other studies here in the United States had shown that strength training alone

had increased bone mineral density. And we must have had an uncharacteristic group. I don’t know. But our group, those who did no strength training, they lost 1% of their bone density in that nine-month period.

Those who did the strength training did not gain significantly, but they didn’t lose anything. And although I was really upset that the doctors, the physicians who were doing the DEXA scans, the bone density, and all those things, they said, don’t be upset. We can’t believe this. We’ve never seen a study where they haven’t lost before. So I said, no, they didn’t lose.

And he said, no, they didn’t lose. But those that did the extra protein, because protein makes up a lot of bone, just like muscle. The muscle’s made of myoproteins. The bone’s made of osteoproteins. Those who take the extra protein were able to apparently assimilate that better with the strength training, and they actually made a 1% gain in their bone marrow density. So they reversed what the control group had, 1% loss versus 1% gain.

And those who did strength training only who didn’t take extra protein, they still at least maintained. So we recommend the strength training, certainly, but the extra protein for, certainly, definitely for post-menopausal women would make a lot of sense. They don’t get enough protein from our perspective and from the perspectives of Dr. Carolina Porvian,

who’s the Harvard expert that helped us with those guidelines, because I’m not a nutrition expert by any means.

I think you hit a really fantastic point there, Dr. Westcott, because you said that even though the one of the groups didn’t gain, it didn’t improve their bone marrow density, they retained what they already had. And I think this, if we take this back

to what you talked about with the weight loss, losing, you know, to me, it highlights the tragedy of losing muscle mass, you know, the aim is to add more muscle but if you hang on to the muscle that you’ve already got that’s also good but if you’re losing muscle by going on an extreme diet or by the exercise habits that you undertake.

I’ve worked with a number of athletes and when they go through a kind of a cutting phase where they’re trying to drop body weight they’ll increase their cardiovascular exercise, they’ll change their nutritional habits and they’ll lose weight very rapidly and as you said a lot of that will be muscle, they’ll change their nutritional habits and they’ll lose weight very rapidly. And as you said, a lot of that will be muscle and that they’ll reach a point where they’re simply not able to rebuild that. So I think that’s a really important point.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani No, it’s important. It’s brilliant. I apologize for forgetting this. I’m a cardiovascular person, old track coach at a number of universities like good old Penn State, and I was a distance runner. And so I love cardio as much as I love strength training. But what happens is people say, well, okay, I’m gonna exercise as well as go on my diet. I’m gonna cut calories, I’m gonna do my cardio. And in every study ever done, when they do that, they do lose more fat, which is great, but they also lose more muscle. They’re burning the kale at both ends.

So it’s actually, it’s good in terms of increasing the fat loss, it’s good for your cardiovascular fitness, but it increases the muscle loss, so it exacerbates the issue, the basic problem is the loss of muscle, slowing the metabolism, using fewer calories because you have less muscle,

that burns calories all day long. In fact, you are a great strength trainer, great athlete, but you have strength-trained muscle, Amy, you have strength-trained muscle. So, every pound of your muscle is burning about 9 calories per day just to stay alive. People who don’t strength-train every pound of their muscle burns 6 calories per day to stay alive. That means if you strength train at rest,

which most of us are at rest most of the time, you know, you’re burning 50% more calories in your muscles, not your home resting metabolic rate, although that increases as well, but not nearly that much of course. But that’s pretty impressive about the muscle metabolism. So the cardio is great and in our studies, I should mention this, our people did cardio. They did 20 minutes of cardio and they did 20 minutes of strength training. Talk about efficiency.

Two or three days a week, depending on various factors, but two or three and they both worked in our studies with even studies with 3,000 subjects, we found that two and three days a week are essentially equal in terms of building muscle. There are other benefits of going more frequently, but building muscle, building bone does just fine on twice a week.

And all of our studies have used about 20 minutes per session. Again, 10 exercises, one set each. Not that there’s anything wrong with doing multiple sets, but in terms of efficiency for the average person, in terms of interest for the average person

until they start seeing the results, that seems to be a great way to start.

Fantastic.

You’re much too kind, but thank you.

Obviously, the exercise coach, the workout’s a 20 minutes. There’s a handful of exercises. Time under load is typically somewhere between 60 and 90 seconds. And it really aligns so closely with your

previous recommendations. Obviously we’ve talked about safety and efficiency. If you were to rewrite your recommendations now for the general population, is there anything that you would change or do you think this still carries true today? First, is that true, Amy?

You guys do 20-minute workouts like I did?

Yes, two 20-minute workouts a week is what our program is all about. And it’s personally optimized exercise, a mixture of strength and interval training designed specifically for every single person at their exact strength level, real-time

feedback and strength targets to work at under load every second of every exercise. So it’s all tracked. So every individual’s exercise routine is designed to help them work at the right level of intensity each exercise they do and challenge them to improve over time. So that is how our program is designed.

I am amazed.

I did not know that. You know, I’m over here in America and I’m retired now, so I’m clueless. But what you have done, what James’ research has shown and my research is so consistent. We’ve always recommended safe, effective, and efficient for decades. We’ve always recommended 30 to 90 seconds,

but 30 to 60 would be just for the young people who can’t stop charging forward. But 60 to 90 is what we normally recommend. 60 to 90, the anaerobic energy system. Again, muscles don’t count reps. They know time under load or time under

tension. We feel that’s the best time frame and we take a relatively moderate repetition speed. So, we’re talking, you know, 10 to 12, maybe for older adults, 10 to 15 repetitions. There’s research that says you can get great results doing even more and certainly doing less. You do a lot more, it’s very hard to do that because it’s very painful and you do a lot less as a higher risk of injury we feel. So I couldn’t agree more with those guidelines and I stand by our guidelines for the average

person. As I said, you can do fewer, you can do more as long as you fatigue the muscles at some point you’re going to get results, but fatiguing them within the anaerobic energy of 60-90 seconds seems to make the most sense to me. That’s the end of the continuum where we build strength and muscle, just like the other in the continuum, you go lower intensity but longer durations where you build cardiovascular

endurance and muscle endurance, that type of thing. So I could not agree more with your protocol. And we did one set, but we’ve also done studies for our armed forces over in the United States where they had to do things a little differently. And we found that, you know, if you do fewer exercises for more sets in that short period of time, you still get very good results. So the time and the frequency to me are important.

People start strength training and they try and do too much, too frequent, too many sets, too many reps, too many exercises, and they burn out. And we see this all the time. But if they take it sensibly

and progressively increasing their resistance, you know, gradually as they become stronger. It is just a fabulous activity with almost a zero injury rate when people do it properly. It’s not like any other sport or activity.

And it has so many benefits. I don’t understand why more people don’t do this. So we’re beating a lonely drum here, but with the help of you and the research that you’ve been doing, it’s getting much better.

Thanks, Wayne. Thank you for that answer. I wanted to touch on something within that, because obviously when we talk about resistance training recommendations, there’s a lot of talk about repetitions

or time under load, as you said, or the number of sets or the frequency of training. But I know we’ve discussed this before, the importance of muscular tension and maintaining control through the concentric and the eccentric parts of the muscle. Now, this is a big part of the exercise coach as well, but can you maybe

just tell our listeners why this is so important and particularly the eccentric muscle action. Right. The eccentric muscle action due to a variety of factors, Arthur Jones who kind of led the charge in this area a long, long time ago, he’s since passed away, but he felt that the eccentric and the concentric were identical except for the effects of internal muscle friction. In other words, if you look at what you could hold isometrically with your elbows at a right angle and at what we call a curl, but an isometric curl, stationary curl, just holding it there. Let’s say you could do 100 pounds holding it.

You could most likely, now this would vary depending on the speed and factors, but most likely you could lift about 80 pounds. You couldn’t lift as much as you can hold because internal muscle friction subtracts some of the force that you’re producing to overcome that friction, and he would say that you could lower, and you could. You could try this any time.

You could lower, someone handed it to you up here, you could lower about 120 pounds because the muscle friction works for you. It’s working against the filaments tearing apart. That was his theory. I can’t prove that that’s right or wrong, but certainly the eccentric enables you to use heavier loads or to exert more effort and you don’t want to just let gravity take it down.

That’s dangerous, number one. And number two, you’re missing what could be the most important part of the exercise because of the ability to use more resistance and to use it more effectively. So we’ve always, we’ve gone by Arthur Jones’s recommendations generally. He said two seconds up and four seconds down. Many other researchers in the United States have gone with, that like the idea, but like our people, which is two up, which is up, and which is down,

which is two and which is four, so we said, just do three and three, three seconds up, three seconds down, and leave it at that. And with our younger people who can’t go that slow because their mind doesn’t function that way,

we do two up and two down. And we found that two up, two down, three up, three down, four up, four down, they all work really well as long as you’re controlled and keeping the muscle tension. It’s all about, as you said, that muscle tension.

Geoff That’s sick.

Dr. Kahn And in fact, the exercise coach, a lot of the exerbotics devices are negative accentuated, so there’s a greater resistance on the eccentric phase. And actually the phasing is a lot slower. Obviously you’ve written books about super slow training where the rep duration was as slow as 10 seconds per concentric and eccentric phase. And a lot of the protocols within the exercise coach kind of follow that suit. They vary from four seconds concentric to eccentric to maybe eight or ten seconds each direction as well.

It is so great because as far as client motivation and ability to exert, we know that having more ability to produce force in that eccentric, we are a little bit stronger is how we explain it to clients and during that eccentric and so we’re able to hold a higher load for a longer period of time which really does help. If you were to contrast, let’s say, a seated chest press you know, at a regular gym using a standard weight stack

chest press. If I can, you know, press out and away from me with 100 pounds of force on a standard weight stack chest press, I would have to select 100 pounds on the weight stack just to be able to press out. But on the way back, I may be able to resist at 150 pounds, you know, and so on the X-Robotics, I’m able to give on average 150 pounds of resistance because I’m giving all I can every second of every rep.

I’m not stuck at a certain weight. Isokinetic exercise allows me to give exactly what I can give at every second of every exercise, which is optimized, right, for what I can do.

Awesome. That makes it even more efficient. Yes, fantastic. Certainly would agree with everything you just said.

Wonderful.

So Wayne, I wanted to ask you, I’m gonna kind of put you on the spot a little bit here and say, with all the wonderful research that’s been done, you mentioned Stu Phillips and there’s so many other wonderful academics out there publishing great strength training research, but where do you really see this going in the future?

Is there going to be a new area that we move into or do you think there are kind of niche parts that we just haven’t considered in sufficient detail yet?

Sounds like you’ve moved into some of those areas already so you’re leading the way in that with the eccentric exercise being accentuated I guess I’ll say that way. That makes so much sense and it involves not just the contractile components but some of the mechanical components in our musculoskeletal system as well. So I think you get really good results. I think you would certainly get even better results doing it that way. We typically, when our research was done on

knowledge machines, which are weight stack machines or free weights, things of that nature, but you’re at a cutting edge of, you know, much more efficient and probably effective exercise in terms of what you’re doing. What I really think to answer that is, if you don’t know anything about strength training,

the last place you wanna go is the internet because you’ll get 10,000 different opinions that are not researched based on what to do, all of which work because strength training works. If you do it, you can do it with rocks, I suppose, and get results, but it’s not always very efficient.

It’s not always very effective, and it’s oftentimes not very safe. You talked about chest presses, the way that you do them. We used to go into colleges, the football teams, and we’d say, can you show us your best bench press, you know, for 10 reps? And, oh yeah, yeah, they’re loading that weight

up there. And they do 10 reps, boom, boom, boom, and they finished their 10 reps in 15 seconds. So, they’re using a lot of momentum and not using the slower speed. We did get significantly greater results with slower speed exercises than with normal speed exercises. Unfortunately, many people don’t like going quite that slow, my wife being one of them. So she helped me come up with a protocol that we call the 5-5-5, 5 seconds lifting, 5 seconds slowing and 5 reps.

I got her to slow down enough to do that. So sometimes you have to compromise a little bit with average people. But the point I would like to make is that I think if we get back to basics, to just a few good exercises that work all the major muscle groups in a manner that, as you’ve both said many times, keeps the tension on the muscles in a safe and effective manner throughout the entire exercise, the concentric, the eccentric,

you’re concentrating on what you’re doing and you make every repetition count, boy, you can do far fewer repetitions with far fewer risk of overuse injuries and other things and get awesome results. So I like relatively infrequent workouts

so that it doesn’t take too much time in the average person’s life, at least to start with. If they say, I’m into this and I want to do more, okay, but at least start with something that they can handle. Keep it time efficient, keep it doable, and keep it interesting, which if people work out with the trivia, that would not be a problem. But I will say this, in our studies, including our weight loss studies, we had an 85% completion

rate in our numerous weight loss studies, which is almost impossible. Usually it’s a 50% dropout. And in all of our strength training studies, including our high intensity studies, we had about the same 85 to 90% completion rate, which is not usually the case. And I think that it’s not because of me. I did have good instructors.

So it’s probably because of them, probably, like the two of you. But it’s because it was doable. It was manageable. It was brief. It was basic.

It was sensible. And people could actually do it. And once they started doing it, they see the results quickly. It doesn’t take long. We typically get in a six-month study, and you probably get better than this, but we typically get in our average people a one-pound muscle gain on average per month for the first six months of training. That is noticeable. I mean, it takes a

few years to lose that much muscle, and they’re putting it back at, you know, six pounds in half a year. No wonder they’re staying with theram. It is visible and it’s functional and they like it. And that’s probably where we need to go to get more people to straight train.

Great. Just a fantastic answer. And I want to just reiterate two points in what you just said. First of all, you talked about getting back to basics. And I think that this is the big, there’s a big emphasis on what I call uncomplicated resistance training. It has to be palatable for the population. It shouldn’t be confusing, it shouldn’t be overbearing. And of course, at the exercise coach,

it’s supervised exercise anyway, so there’s always a coach by the side. But the other thing that I really wanted to hit on is you said about, if you can rebuild six pounds of muscle within six months, then that’s the equivalent to, you know,

what you might have lost over the last few years. So you’re quite literally reversing aging with this process. You know, you’re building muscle that you would otherwise have lost previously. So.

Yes, absolutely.

And you’re right, the uncochlated X, and one of your best studies. I should have thought of that. Thank you. You’re way ahead of me on all of this and putting it into practice, but I’m honored to be sharing our little studies

with you as well. Thank you so much.

Fantastic. Amy, did you have any more questions for Dr. Westcott?

I just really appreciate your research and some of the studies you shared today. You know, at our Exercise Coach Studios, a lot of times we meet people who come in and when we first meet with them, we ask them what results would matter the most to them and what would mean the most in their life. Weight loss is common. Weight loss is really common. And so, what I gleaned from today’s conversation is just how important it is to focus on losing body fat and maintain or gain muscle being that engine of our metabolism. As you said, even at rest, you know, that muscle is metabolically expensive tissue.

And so for people who want to maintain those results beyond the initial period of time where they might be dieting or going on some kind of a program a year from today, two years from today, how do you want to feel, you know, and how and strength training is the way to go. So I really, really appreciate all of the the way that you described that. And one other comment I have is, it’s so clear that if we want to fight the aging process, so many of the things that you mentioned,

that strength training and adding that muscle back can help combat, which is the bone density loss, the functional abilities, the cognitive decline, reversing conditions such as type 2 diabetes. These are things that most people start to look at as they age and associate with regular aging.

This is just something I have to worry about now that I’m in my 50s or whatever it may be. But what’s so exciting is that we really do have a choice in how we age and what we’re facing. And the cost is very low. It’s very minimal. As little as 20 minutes can really restore,

two times a week, can really restore that lost muscle, which really will ward off a lot of these effects of aging. And so I hope people understand that there’s so much that can be accomplished in a minimal amount of time if done correctly. And it’s hard for people to have the motivation to think about exercising six hours a week

in a complicated fashion. So at The Exercise Coach, we try to make it easy. We try to make it motivating, you know, and having an appointment and a trainer that’s there to help you guide it through. This is what we want to do. We want to help adults reverse the effects of aging and so thank you so much for the research that you have because it helps, it helps fuel our fire for what we’re doing and to back up why this is so important for people.

And thank you for sharing it with the general population because as we get older, there’s a lot of people out there, especially in the United States, those baby boomers, there’s so many of them. It’s important work.

Thank you so much. If I could end with one last comment because what you just said, I know this won’t apply to your people, but one of the best studies we ever did was with 90 year olds, 89 years old, at John Knox Village in Orange City, Florida.

It’s a senior living center. And they gave us 20 adults who had difficulty ambulating. They all had either canes or walkers or they were in wheelchairs, and they gave us 14 weeks to get them ambulating again. And we did twice a week training, five knowledge machine exercises, twice a week, one set each,

so that was less than 10 minutes of exercise time, even transferring them from their wheelchairs into the machines. They had special machines made the transferring easy for them. But in 14 weeks, these 89-year-old, almost 90-year-old men and women added four pounds of lean weight, that would be muscle. They lost three pounds of fat, which they really didn’t need to lose at that age. You try to keep on as much weight as you can, but they made a seven pound change in their body composition. All of the other factors improved, but the most important one was their functional capacity.

We had the nurses do functional capacity tests on them. You know, can they brush their teeth, can they wash, can they ambulate at all? Well, they all were out of their wheelchairs and ambly, except for one woman who was a double amputee, and she did even much better in a wheelchair. They increased their functional independence measure, that’s a measure we use in the United States, so much, their functional capacity so much in those 14 weeks that that study got around to the nursing home administrators, and within one year, 1,000, over 1,000 nursing homes in the United States put that five station program

into practice. It was basic, it was brief. I know you’re not gonna be working probably with too many 89-year-olds, maybe you are, but that’s when people see success with a simple program, it seems to catch on.

And I just leave that with you that at any age, what you are doing is very beneficial because those people now went out and they weren’t even only able to walk, but they had fewer falls, even though they’re walking. And some started getting on their bicycles, which haven’t been on for 20 years and go out and do things they hadn’t done. So strength training at any age is a really important thing to do.

Well, thank you so much for all of that.

Wayne, that was just phenomenal. Such a privilege.

Thank you so much for that insight into the older adults and the older population. When I think of my parents, I often think that they wish that they’d engaged in things earlier. And I’m so conscious that some people might wish that, but they can’t have their time back, but they can change their tomorrow by their engagement in something today. And I think that’s so important. So thank you so much for the research you’ve done, for the books that you’ve published, for your time as a fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine and all the roles that you’ve played in academia and conferences in motivating and mentoring the next generation

of academics and practitioners. Thank you so much.

You’re so welcome. You’re far exceedingly, but I’m honored. Amy, nice meeting you.

It was so great to meet you. We will certainly link to some of your important and groundbreaking work in our show notes as well. Thank you both so much for the time today. We will see you guys next week on the podcast. And remember, strength changes everything. Thanks for listening to today’s episode.

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