What if the real goal isn’t living longer, but staying strong and independent until the very last day?

Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher sit down with Doug McGuff M.D. to unpack the truth about healthspan and what it really takes to protect it. Doug covers why muscle is the foundation of resilience, how physiologic headroom determines the quality of your final years, and why resistance training may be the single most important investment you can make for your future self. Tune in to discover what strong aging actually looks like and how to start building it now.

• Doug shares how his interest in strength training eventually collided with medical school and changed how he saw health altogether. What started as lifting weights turned into a deeper understanding of how the body actually adapts and heals. That is when he realized high intensity resistance training was doing far more than building muscle.
• Doug covers why most commercial gyms miss the mark for the people who need them most. They are built for experienced lifters, not beginners or older adults who need clarity, efficiency, and measurable progress. That is why structured training and working with a knowledgeable personal trainer completely changes the experience.
• Doug explains that when you apply a meaningful exercise stimulus, the adaptation goes far beyond muscle size. Sleep improves, mood stabilizes, emotional resilience increases, and even diet begins to shift organically.
• Doug shares what he has observed in older clients who preserve their muscle mass. On imaging, their organs look younger, better hydrated, and more robust. Their lab work often reflects that same internal vitality.
• Doug reveals that skeletal muscle is the largest endocrine organ in the body. It is constantly signaling and communicating with other tissues, influencing metabolism and systemic health.
• According to Doug, if you wanted everything bad to happen to a human being, you would immobilize them and overfeed them. That combination creates the perfect conditions for metabolic dysfunction. It is also a surprisingly accurate description of modern life.
• Doug introduces the concept of physiologic headroom as the gap between your maximum capacity and what daily life demands from you. The larger that gap, the more resilient you are under stress. Training systematically increases that margin.
• Doug reassures that skeletal muscle retains its adaptive capacity across the lifespan. Even if someone has been sedentary for years, the machinery for growth and adaptation is still intact. The response may be gradual, but it is reliably there.
• Doug and Dr. Fisher explain that it is not the workout itself that produces health benefits, but the adaptive response that follows meaningful fatigue. During a hard set, you actually become weaker, and that perceived threat to movement drives the health upgrade.
• Why strength training is one of the most powerful interventions for osteoporosis. 
• Dr. Fisher reminds us that none of us can escape death. The real objective is protecting healthspan right up until the last moment. Living at peak physiologic capacity for as long as possible changes the entire experience of aging.
• Learn why the dramatic gains in the first year of training are often the most noticeable of a lifetime. After that, progress flattens, and the goal shifts to maintaining a high level of strength. 
• Doug emphasizes the importance of training with intent and controlled aggressiveness. The process is about doing slightly better than last time, even in small increments. 
• Doug is clear that training does not guarantee you will live to one hundred years. What it changes is the quality of the years leading up to the end. 
• Doug encourages anyone hesitant to remember that muscle remains plastic and adaptable throughout life. The adaptive response is simple and predictable when the stimulus is meaningful, so it’s never too late to start strength training.
• Doug shares candidly at 64 that aging itself is not glamorous. Many aspects of it are difficult, but resistance training dramatically alters how it feels.
• Doug closes by sharing that most people do not fail in the gym because they lack effort, they fail because they lack direction. Walking into a gym without a plan often leads to wasted time and inconsistent results. Working with a personal trainer removes guesswork and keeps progress measurable.

Mentioned in This Episode:

The Exercise Coach – Get 2 Free Sessions!

Submit your questions at StrengthChangesEverything.com

Body by Science: A Research Based Program for Strength Training, Body building, and Complete Fitness in 12 Minutes a Week by Doug McGuff M.D.

The Primal Prescription: Surviving The “Sick Care” Sinkhole by Doug McGuff M.D.

Nautilus Training Principles Bulletin No. 1 (Nautilus Bulletins) by Arthur Jones

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All of this works together to the importance of proactive strength training.

If you want everything bad to happen to a human, you only have to do two things, immobilize and overfeed.

Without movement, without muscular contraction, we go from being the hunter to being the prey.

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 so excited to have a very special guest with us. Dr. Doug McGuff is with us here on the podcast, the one and only. If you are a coach at a strength training studio, you may be familiar with Doug’s work. His book, Body by Science, is a widely spread, very helpful resource for both practitioners of strength training workouts and even clients. He breaks down the science behind why strength training is so effective and some of the research that and evidence that supports that and everything we do within Exercise Coach Studios and just strength training in general, why high intensity strength training is so important for best results.

And so Doug’s work is very prolific. And today we are super excited to chat with him about a very special topic. It’s the area under the curve. We’re going to talk with him today about health span concepts. We’re going to talk to him about what are the biomarkers that we can track and measure within our health that really indicate quality of life, our longevity, our disease risk.

What are those factors? And some other really cool concepts that I never knew about before chatting with Doug today. And so I think you’re going to be pretty inspired by this conversation. And I’m super excited to delve right in. So welcome, Doug McGuff, to the podcast, first of all.

Amy, James, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

You are welcome. We’re super excited to have you. So Doug, you know, when when I first interacted with your work, I was pretty compelled by the reasons that you got into this in the first place. You know, there’s a reason that you started to become a leading voice in the strength training area and a practitioner and a distributor of the information and research behind strength training. And part of that includes some work you’ve done in the ER, as well as some of your own experiences. I would love to start with you kind of sharing the backstory that you have and why that was a catalyst for you to do the work that you do.

So I guess it’s fair to say that my interest in resistance training really preceded any interest in medicine or my career in medicine. It goes all the way back until I was about 14 years old. I was participating in a new sport called bicycle motocross. And while I fell in love with the sport, Um, I pretty much sucked at it. I was, uh, not winning or doing well at all. And at the time, my brother who was 10 years older, um, had at our house, an old Ted Williams weight set in the garage that he had used when he took a college course, um, years back.

And he said, you know, you need to get that weight set out and try weight training and see if it’ll help you with, you know, your racing performance. So, um, I did, and I got out the little booklet. I did the program as directed in the booklet and went back to the VEX race a month later and it was the closest thing to a miracle that I ever experienced. So I was hooked. It really improved my performance in the sport. I actually rose pretty high in it.

I was out doing sprints one day at my high school’s running track, sprints on a bike, part of the training. And I saw this really jacked dude in his fifties jogging around the track. So I struck up a conversation with him. It turned out that he had just opened one of the new Daudalus studios with equipment made by Arthur Jones. He invited me over to take a look at it, put me through a workout. I was mind blown.

Could not afford to go to this gym, but being the entrepreneurial little dude that I was, I negotiated trading janitorial services for a membership to this place. And one day I was cleaning up his office and laying on his desk was the novel’s training principles book by Arthur Jones. And I was flipping through it and he walked into the office and I was like apologetic that I was, you know, snooping around and said, Oh no, you can take that book home. They gave me several copies when I bought the equipment. So I took it home and it was the first book I ever read cover to cover. To say that it changed the course of my life is an understatement.

And that’s what brought my interest in high -intensity training that persisted all through my college. It contributed to me being very successful in my sport. And I always maintained an interest there. And I ended up going to medical school because it engendered an interest in biology and medicine. I actually found that I was most inclined or performed best in emergency medicine.

So that’s what I specialized in. Fast forward, I had to pay back a debt to the military. And when I got out into private practice, I thought, you know, if I’m ever going to make enough money where I could buy my own equipment, I’m going to do that. I’m going to put it in this bonus room in my house. And that was the plan. So, um, We figured out that part of the plan was the leg press in this bunless room over my kitchen was going to fall through the floor and crush everyone underneath.

So that led to me finding a little 1200 square foot place in town to put my equipment. And I thought if I could just train a few people and pay the rent, that would be fine. But instead it actually blew up and became a legitimate business. And this was in 1997. So, um, all along I’d been practicing in emergency medicine. And what I thought or what I fantasized about with having my own studio was having a bunch of athletes and turning out a bunch of Casey Bieters and genetic freaks out into the community.

And instead, what you have when you open a personal training studio is you attract people that would not go to a public gym under any circumstance for various reasons. And we became the land of the discarded walker. We had a lot of older clients. We had a lot of really deconditioned clients that made amazing turnarounds, people with health condition that made turnarounds. And all the while, emergency medicine was going through this weird transition in my career. Early on, it was very dynamic.

It was knife and gun clone, motor vehicular trauma and acute medical emergencies. with some other stuff sprinkled in. But over time as the population got older and older, sicker, it became more of a revolving door. Sick people came in, got seen, got admitted, spent a few days in the hospital, got discharged, and bounced back. And emergency medicine became much more of a patch job and duct tape until the next go -round, where what I was seeing transpiring in my studio The whole time that I’m practicing emergency medicine is that if you invoke resistance training exercise for people, you prevent, you’re working upstream from medicine and you’re preventing from preventing them from ever having getting pulled into the belly of this beast.

Because once you get into the medical system and you get in that revolving door, it’s very hard to get out of it. And what I started to realize is that my activity in the high -intensity resistance training realm was having more health benefits than my activity as an emergency physician. Emergency medicine had a reputation for a high level of burnout, and I found that my activity on the training side of the equation was allowing me enough of an outlet to avoid that burnout. So it actually helped me preserve my career in emergency medicine, but it also put into bold relief for me how much better it is to be upstream of the problem and fix it first, rather than having to do this recurring patch job down the line. And the last time me and James saw each other was at the resistance exercise conference. in 2019, and at that time I spoke about the health of the general population.

And I said that we are one existential crisis away from a real catastrophe. And then in 2020, COVID -19 hit. And my experience with COVID -19, I saw the very first COVID -19 patient in our emergency department. I got voluntold to do it because I was the oldest. And it was a person that had very severe disease. They went to a funeral.

that a reverend from Chicago flew down to, and he was a super spreader of the really virulent variant at the very beginning. But the whole pandemic pointed out to me that the real pandemic was not the virus. The pandemic was the condition of the general populace that got the virus. People with a metabolic syndrome and obesity were just a powder keg of inflammatory cytokines waiting to be ignited. And that’s what the virus did. On healthier populations, populations that exercised, my clients at my studio did not have bad outcomes.

But people with poor health status had horrendous outcomes. And it was amazing to me. And I still maintain that the real pandemic was not the virus. It was the people that were affected by the virus.

Doug, there’s a couple of things you’ve touched on there that I just want to jump in and really hammer home or just comment on if I can. The first of which is you said about your studio and the appeal to maybe the older population or people that wouldn’t typically go to a normal commercial gym. And this is something that we see throughout the exercise coach as well. And it’s really a shame because commercial studios, and we’ve talked about this on the podcast, have done a terrible job of inviting in people who are short on time and who don’t have a good understanding of what to do. Commercial gyms are great for people who will probably already fit and already know what to do, and they’re not really suited for the rest of the population, and hence where there’s this uh, your opportunity in the, in the market to really treat people that need the need treating.

Um, and that leads me to my second point is you obviously talked about being upstream. from the people that you see in the emergency room and the idea of prevention better than cure. And I think that’s a really important message that strength training and that the right type of exercise early in life to prevent comorbidities, many of which we’ve talked about previously, and I’m sure we’ll talk about today, is creating that prevention. And then as you said about COVID, I got COVID and I had a sniffle and that was it. And of course, many of the people I know throughout the exercise community had the same sort of response, but that wasn’t a very typical response for the larger population. We all know the extent that COVID really hammered the population.

And as you said, that’s a product of their pre -existing well -being or lack thereof, rather than COVID itself.

A couple comments on what you said. Number one is, I think big box commercial gyms have really dropped the box of the benefits that can be had from exercise. Their marketing strategy, who goes to those gyms regularly are people that are more naturally inclined to have good results from resistance exercise. And by good results, I mean the unusual visual results of people that have an exaggerated muscle growth response. So they get positive feedback. Those are the people that are the regulars at the gym.

You will see them every time that you go there. But the gyms, the big box gyms are not monetized by those people. They’re monetized by the greater, much greater number of people that sign on for a membership or an automatic monthly withdrawal that never go. Planet Fitness’ business model is built completely upon that, to the extent that they actually discourage the class of people that actually use the gym from coming there. So it’s a real wasted effort, the marketing strategy of the big box gyms, relative to the benefits that could be had.

And for any of us that have always been interested in high -intensity resistance exercise, the thing that’s always stood out to me, that even going way back into the 70s and 80s, that I was never able to articulate or prove, is that when you Receive the exercise stimulus so you make an adaptation. Yes, your muscles get bigger. Yes, you get better condition. But what was intrinsically understood by everyone but could not be proved by anyone was that everything got better. Your sleep got better. Your mood got better.

Your emotional resiliency got better. Your diet got better spontaneously and organically. The harder you train, the better you eat. All these things tracked along, and we were unable to prove them. When I was going through medicine, you know, you look at CT scans, and the images are like honey -baked ham slices of the human body. And I started to notice that organ mass tracked along with muscle mass.

And I have subspecialty training in emergency ultrasound, so we do a lot of ultrasound exams. And when you ultrasound a pediatric patient, a 12 -year -old, it’s like, oh my God, the organs just stand out so well. They’re beautiful. They’re plump. They’re juicy. They’re easy to visualize because sound waves love fluid.

They love water. So it gives it all that detail. But, you know, we start out as grapes and we end up as raisins. And older people have organ atrophy and they’re not as well hydrated. So Everything just does not stand out in bold relief. But over time, I started to notice is like if I have an older person that’s working out and has retained their muscle mass, both on CT scan and ultrasound, what I started to notice is like their organs look young.

They retain their organ mass. They retain their organ hydration. It looks like a kid.

And functions better.

Yes. And you could see that in their lab work. You know, you see your average 60 year old and their glomerular filtration rate on their chem profile is going to be, you know, 45, 50. Someone that’s working out their GFR, which is the how well your kidneys filter impurities, is greater than 90. You know, it’s off the scale. So everything tracked along.

But there was no explanation for that. Why should doing a load and building some muscle and getting stronger affect everything? And we didn’t know anything about this until about the time that we were at Dresden at the Kieser conference. In the mid -2000s, Bente K. Pedersen, which is a researcher, I believe, in the Netherlands, came up with the whole concept of myokines. And we finally realized, like, whoa, skeletal muscle is the biggest endocrine organ in the body. It’s signaling every other tissue.

And you’re like, why should that be? And my contention is, and this first dawned on me when I was helping my daughter study for biology, and she was having to learn the classification of living things. And the whole mnemonic of King Philip came over for gold and silver, kingdom, bion, class order, genus, species thing. Well, kingdom is basically two big branches. There’s planti and animalia. Planti are autotrophs.

They sit in one place, they take sunlight, and they convert it into the energy they need. But animalia are animals or heterotrophs. We only get our nutrition or our energy if we go get it. So movement is our most preserved biologic function, because if we can’t move, we can’t get food, and we can’t keep from becoming food. So that, I believe, is if you go all the way down to first principles, why skeletal muscle is so powerful and why it’s the most dynamic endocrine organ in our body, which sends chemical messages to every tissue in the body. Because skeletal muscle is the basis for our existence as animals.

And that’s why taking good care of it means that you take good care of every other organ and tissue system in your body.

I love this. I love this. And we’ve talked extensively about myokines in the past. But the idea that movement is key, and without movement, without muscular contraction, we’re nothing. We’re just not functioning. And like you said, we go from being the hunter to being the prey.

If you want everything bad to happen to a human, you only have to do two things. immobilize and overfeed. And that is the context in which most humans in Western society exist today, is relatively immobilized and significantly overfed. And when you do those two things, you trigger a cascade of badness that is really hard to reverse.

Doug, this is so intriguing. And really, as you describe all of this, it really makes sense to me how you could see kind of on one end of the spectrum of those people coming to the ER who are maybe overfed, who are under -muscled, who are sick, right, who are inflamed, who are experiencing recurring diseases and flare -ups and problems. And then your work on the other side of the spectrum, kind of the earlier side of the spectrum with strength training and muscle and how protected it can be towards, you know, those future outcomes that you were seeing in the ER, I can see how all of this works together to really fuel your passion for the importance of proactive strength training. And it all makes total sense to me. And man, those examples that you gave are pretty powerful and sobering. But the good news is that we have some agency preemptively if we do participate in strength training.

One thing that you teach on that I thought was super intriguing is this idea of physiologic headroom. So can you explain what that means and paint a picture of that for us?

Sure. And I want to make certain to address your previous statement too, but physiologic headroom is not something that I came up with. That was actually a term that was coined by Arthur Devaney. He is an economist out at, I believe, in UCLA. He’s retired now, but he was sort of the father of the Paleolithic movement. And his idea

was on natural whole food diet and exercise patterns that mimicked ancestral movement patterns. So, a large background of low -intensity exertion with spikes of high -intensity exercise done infrequently, so it kind of fit our model. But The physiologic headroom was just a definition of the difference between the most you can do and the least you can do. So what we’re doing when we are training our clients and they are developing more capacity is we’re increasing their physiologic headroom. And that is at a given moment in time, you want to be capable of producing excess capacity or work capacity. But if you extrapolate that over a lifetime, You get this big, long, plateaued area that you can measure, which I call area under the curve, which is physiologic headroom across a lifespan.

And that has also been coined the healthspan. As opposed to how most people in Western society reach a peak in their youth, and then have this gradual decline over the course of their life, such that the last two decades is really miserable, and the last decade is your time is spent going back and forth to doctor appointments and cycling in and out of the ER. It does not have to be that way. Which brings up the point that you made about this sort of training being upstream and the ER being at the other extreme. The good news is that because muscle is so much the foundation of what makes us able to flourish, muscle’s adaptive response to an appropriate stimulus is very well preserved across the lifespan.

So, when you look at studies that are done or study done that looked at just doing leg extension and leg curl in a 92 -year -old, severely ashby, bed -bound male, and after 26 weeks, you know, market improvements seen on imaging and demonstrated through functional capacity, what this demonstrates is that If you haven’t been doing this your whole life and you’ve got yourself pulled into the belly of the medical beast, it’s not too late. It’s never too late. You can start training and that adaptive response is preserved in skeletal muscle and is intact throughout the lifespan and you can turn the game around. So you really can make a difference for yourself.

And that’s great news. I mean, so you just also kind of painted a picture. So thank you for that encouragement, because it isn’t like, once you surpass a certain point, there’s no hope. And I think that’s important. You describe this, you know, area under the curve and health span. So we’ve talked about health span on this podcast before just describing it as, you know, if you picture your life and years on a horizontal axis.

And you have a certain amount of years you’ll be alive. And as you’re young, your strength kind of grows. And then maybe you plateau -ish, and then you sort of slowly decline. And as you fully decline, that difference between what you can do and what you the most you can do and the least you can do matches up, which is called death, right, is what you have said. How can we extend that area under the curve or push that other line back up the longer we live?

What are the most important things we can do? Well, number one, doing that is actually much simpler than most people realize, if you know what you’re doing. And the thing that really needs to be done is strength training. So most people think of exercise as something that directly causes a change in the body. But you absolutely have to understand that exercise doesn’t cause any direct chain in the body. Exercise is a stimulus.

And what we’re doing when we perform resistance training exercise is we’re exposing the muscle to a continuous load and demand. And in so doing, that exhaust and fatigues components of that muscle in an orderly and sequential fashion so that you start out at a certain level of strength, and by the time you end your bout of training or your set of training, you have become significantly weaker. That weakening is perceived by the biological system as a threat to movement, which we’ve already established as our most preserved biologic function, and therefore the body will make an adaptive response. And that adaptive response is going to take a little bit of time, so you need to have a recovery period after this bout of exercise. And done properly, it does not take a whole lot of this kind of exercise to invoke an adaptive response. In fact, it, out of necessity, needs to be rather minimal, because what’s important is that the intensity of the exercise invokes a depth of fatigue meaningful enough to trigger the stimulus, and then

there has, and as a consequence, you can’t do that kind of work for very long. So the workout will be quite brief compared to most people’s standards. And then you got to allow enough time for the body to synthesize the adaptive response to that stimulus. And that can be, you know, 72, 96 hours. In certain people with differing recovery abilities, it can be as infrequently as once a week. But if you know how to deliver the stimulus and to know to wait long enough before you come back and do it again, it’s a very simple process and the body adapts to it very quickly and very aggressively.

Yeah, Dr. Fisher broke that down on a recent podcast we did about recovery and supercompensation. And so that was a really cool concept as well for us to keep in mind. So one other follow -up question I have for you, as we get older, there are certain biomarkers or metrics that we can track as we get older. And maybe our doctor looks at them and tells us, this one needs some attention. What are the, can you kind of just overall give us a feel for what are the biomarkers that we should be looking at as we age?

And then sort of a simplified teaching on how strength training can positively impact those? Let me ask you to ask me the question this way. Are there specific biomarkers you would like me to address? Because my approach to biomarkers is a little different than most people’s.

Let’s hear it.

There are very few things that you need to be checking on and worrying about because the reason for checking a biomarker is to take an appropriate action. To me, the appropriate action is that you perform meaningful resistance exercise, and anyone that does that will spontaneously and organically become significantly active throughout their day and throughout their lifestyle at a lower intensity of effort. So if the biomarker says to do this thing, and my people are already doing this thing, I don’t need the biomarker. I found a lot of times a particular biomarker just invokes anxiety. I think the key thing is from a medical standpoint, you, you have access and measure multiple biomarkers as a, as an identification of pathology. Whereas in the, in the real world, a person doesn’t necessarily need to measure biomarkers unless there’s something going wrong.

So for example, I have no idea what my fasting glucose is because I don’t have diabetes. But if I had symptoms of diabetes or if I was diabetic, then I would be more attuned to my my fasting glucose and so forth with cholesterol and so forth with, you know, blood pressure. The list could go on and on. And actually, this links really nicely with something we’ve talked about previously, Amy, which is process, not outcome. So I’m not necessarily chasing outcome metrics because I’m engaging in the process of regular strength training, of regular high effort strength training, you know, two by 20 minutes per week. And that’s doing the job as well as, of course, you know, some nutritional control with regards to, you know, minimally processed foods and fruits and vegetables and protein intake.

What a lot of primary care physicians as a metric and as a requirement of their practice have to track may be abnormal, and that may be an impetus to start taking on such an exercise program. So if your hemoglobin A1c is elevated, that’s a marker that you are doing poorly at glucose disposal. So hemoglobin is just a protein within the red blood cell that glucose can stick to. Um, just like pouring pancake syrup on your keyboard, it kind of bogs things down. And it’s something that you can measure for your glucose control over a long span of time, because your average red blood cell is going to be around for six weeks or so.

Um, so it’s a measure of your glucose control over six weeks. Well, if you bring someone into train and now, because you’re working out your skeletal muscles hard, you’re dumping, you’re utilizing huge amounts of glucose out of the reserves. and therefore improving your insulin sensitivity and your glucose disposal. And if you go back six or 12 weeks later after training, your hemoglobin A1c that was 9 or 12 is now, you know, 5 .1 and in the acceptable range. So those are biomarkers people look at. I tend to tell women to avoid getting a DEXA scan because I believe that that technology is largely a marketing tool to sell dysphosphonates.

But that’s my personal opinion. If you’re prone to osteoporosis, then the best thing you can do is shrink grain. Because number one, myokines released from working skeletal muscle act on bone and increase bone mineral density. Number two is most people think of the skeleton as a framework on which the body musculature hangs. But that’s not true at all because If you think back to high school and the skeletons sitting up by the blackboard, it was all held together by screes and wires. Because the skeleton’s not a framework on which things hang, it’s a biotenseguri structure that’s suspended within the scalable muscle.

So your bones can even be quite thin, but if the surrounding supporting musculature is strong enough, they’re going to be fine. And strengthening them to that point is going to send a chemical message that’s going to improve your bone mineral density. But if you’ve already had a DEXA scan that says you’re in trouble, guess what? Comes strength training. And if you want to check it again in the future and see if it’s better, you can do that. So that’s kind of how I orient towards that sort of thing.

Fantastic, fantastic. I want to jump back to something you said, because you talked about obviously the area under the curve and physiologic headroom and extending that area. And then obviously, that the point of that being the difference between what you, the least you can do and the most you can do. And obviously, we spoke in 2016, at the Kieser conference, and Werner Kieser died in 2021. But the, the story that I’ve been told by multiple people that were close to him, but on his Last day, he got up, he checked his emails, he went and did the workout that he’d been doing for the previous 10 or so years. He went home, read, checked the emails again, and went to bed, and died peacefully in his sleep.

And he was in his 80s. And we might look at that and think, that’s a tragedy. But actually, we could all be so lucky as to die functioning so well. And his you know, his physiologic headroom then on his last day was exactly the same as it had been the previous day and the day before and the day before. And none of us can escape death. It’s coming to us all.

But what we want is that quality of life, that health span up to the last second. We just had a couple more questions, I think. Um, and the one I wanted to ask was, um, related to, um, how important it is to track strength increases or muscle size increases over time. And especially as we age. So we know that a plateau is effectively inevitable. Um, but people.

still like to see that kind of wind column, uh, and so forth. Now we’ve previously talked about the idea that engaging in the process is key and that everything else will fall into place. But I wondered if you wanted to speak to that at all.

Yeah, I think Lee, I think it’s very important for people to understand, um, that, and especially for high intensity training nerds like us to understand is that I think we’re starting to understand that the newbie gains that you get in the first year of training are really pretty much the extent of gains that you should expect over a lifetime. The experience is so dramatic that it keeps us hooked forever. And we constantly seek that experience of rapid transformation. over the rest of our life, even though you have this steep curve and then it becomes asymptotic and creeps along up here for the entire rest of our life, but that’s as it should be. The thing with clients, particularly clients that have some sort of feedback about their performance, is they get very addicted to NGU, or number go up, where The problem is even the most sophisticated equipment that can measure your performance may not necessarily be able to demonstrate it to you in a rewarding way on paper. That getting up onto that flat part of the curve is the goal and you shouldn’t be constantly looking for a measurable on -paper improvement because really a lot of the improvements are still ongoing.

They’re just not demonstrable or measurable in a way that you can grasp. So stated differently, I think my experience in training clients in my studio is that you do reach this plateau, but I never want to treat that plateau as a maintenance phase. I think like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, you have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. So I think the intent with training and the process is always to train with aggressiveness and an intent to improve and do better than you did the last time. And by doing that, you will maintain stability for as long as possible.

Now, we’ve actually in the past deliberately tried just to hold clients. It means like, well, you’ve peaked out on your weight, so we’re just going to do this weight and we’re going to go for a predetermined time until fatigue. And we’ll just do that. And that’s your maintenance phase from now on. And every time we did that with the intent of just maintaining, we experienced retrogression. But with long term advanced trainees, if we approach the process of one of still trying to produce continuous and never -ending improvement, then we would easily maintain that level of peak conditioning.

So I opened my studio in November of 1997. I’ve kept records of every workout since that time, and I’m proud to say now I was 35 when I opened it. I’m 64 now, and my resistance and time under load on every single movement that I do in my workout is still a better performance than it was when I started in 1997, which represents a long -term plateau in terms of what you can see on paper with tiny little increments up and down, but still is better than it was when I was younger. So it’s a matter of just sticking to the process. And by trying to continuously improve, you can hover all around that maintenance point, which is at the peak of your functioning, at the height of your physiologic headroom.

And that’s what reference to to Werner Kieser. And that’s what he did. There’s no guarantee that training this way is going to make you live to 100. But it will guarantee that instead of spending the last 10 years of your life driving to doctor appointments and in and out of the hospital, that you’re going to go along and then unexpectedly, without warning, you’re just going to drop and you’re going to drop at a level of peak physiologic capacity. And that’s the way to live.

I love this. It is so it’s so important to remember this because So first of all, kudos to you for being able to perform and maintain this level of strength at performance at your age. And it’s so encouraging because it shows how much our body can really do. And I always remember, you know, remember, man, just think about the difference between if I was not doing that and where I am today. Think about that delta. You know, this is where I could be performing and living.

And I don’t like that. And this is where I’m at. And so even if where I’m at doesn’t feel that different from this. previous two years, to me, just keep in mind what could be, right? And this is where we take into our own hands kind of our health span, right? And so it’s a great reminder to keep doing what you’re doing because we will decline otherwise.

Right. And I can say, I mean, I am all my performances on paper are as good now as they were then. What has changed is then the recovery I needed between workouts was 72 to 96 hours. And now the recovery I need between workouts is on the sweet spot is around day five or day six. So things do change and you’ve got to account for that. But Performance remains good, but the recovery interval has to be adjusted for.

You just don’t recover as quickly. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t just keep yelling.

That’s a good reminder, too, for all of us. Our journey is not static the entire time, but it is a journey. So that’s such a really good reminder for all of us as we think about exercise and strength training. This is your life. This is your one and only life. Let’s live it how we want to live it.

And strength training is the way to do it. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Do you have any other closing thoughts?

For anyone that’s just starting or contemplating starting, I would say that we’ll go back to our sort of root cause analysis of all this, that muscle is a tissue that allows movement our most preserved biologic function. And its ability, its plasticity and its ability to adapt is always there. and it’s present throughout the lifespan. It’s never too late. And it’s adaptive response is simple and predictable. You don’t have to do it perfectly.

You don’t have to be the most athletic or aggressive person in the world. If you get in the ballpark, you’re going to have enormous return on investment. And as a 64 year old guy, I can tell you there is almost nothing good about aging. It all sucks. But I should tell you. Resistance exercise makes such a difference.

There are so many things that could have sucked that don’t suck because I’ve continued to do this. Internally, I feel like I’m 19 years old. I feel that good. Um, I still feel like I look pretty good. The very important key for me is when I look in the mirror to stand back about 15 feet, you know, like we’re all right, man. Um, yeah, I mean, aging is tough.

Life is tough. Modern life was tough. We’re under a lot of stress. The way to handle that and the way to get through life the best way possible is to increase your physiologic headroom. And the good news is it’s a pretty simple and straightforward process, especially if you have professional guidance in a studio like the exercise coach.

Love it.

Awesome. Well, on that note, I hope that today’s podcast encouraged you. I certainly am encouraged by this conversation. Thank you again to Dr. Doug McGuff for being with us 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 Here’s to you and your best health.