And our strength training that we do now gives us a healthy body as we age. It helps us function. It helps our organs. It helps our brain. But it helps us as an organism live a healthier, better quality, longer life as we age.

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 Saigon, 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. So we had a question that came in about rehabilitation, and it has to do with lifespan, strength and

lifespan. And really what we’re talking about, the question is, does rehabilitation become a lifelong effort at some point? So what are your thoughts on

this James?

I think it’s a great question. And I had knee reconstruction from a basketball injury a couple of years back. And it makes me think about strength training through the lifespan. First of all, rehabilitation is our kind of our recovery of our function of the skeletal system and the muscular system. And strength training is a big part of that to improve our muscle function and our stability and our joint mobility and so forth. But I also think that we shouldn’t think of rehabilitation as something that I do for

six months and then I’m back to where I once was. And in fact, if we take a step back from just rehabilitation and we think about strength training through a lifespan or strength through a lifespan, then, historically, we’ve been guilty of thinking that as we age, there’s this kind of just steady tapering off of strength. With each year or successive five or ten years in life, our strength just kind of deteriorates and deteriorates as we age. That’s likely that that’s not how it occurs. There’s more

of a hypothesis recently that it’s actually far more stepwise than that. So what we mean is that there are probably life events that occur that cause us to lose strength in one big chunk. For example, my knee injury and my knee rehab, I could have looked at that and said, well, I’m not going to get my strength back in that leg, in my quadriceps, my hamstring muscles,

and my strength in that knee. And therefore, I’ve had that kind of life event that’s meant that I take a step down in my strength. And then there might be another life event in the next five or 10 years. Maybe I break a leg, or maybe I have back pain,

and I have to spend time off work or immobilized in some kind, and then maybe in my 70s I don’t know, have a hip replacement or whatever it might be. We all have these life events that are effectively unavoidable. But if we don’t do something to bounce back from those, then we do have this stepwise decline. In fact, there’s a researcher that’s talked about the fact that we can invest in our strength when we’re much younger to kind of build up our strength so that if we have these events later in life, we have this reserve of strength. We kind

of have this insurance policy. It’s akin to kind of paying into your pension or paying into your 401k. You do 20 minutes of strength training twice a week while you can, and then when you’re older, the quality of your life is maintained because of the investment that you’ve made in your muscles.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what comes to mind, I mean, we can think of strength training, that proactive activity of strength training twice a week as prehabilitation. We’re in some capacity preventing injury before it begins or setting ourself up for easier recovery after an event. And so, one example I’ll share is I strength trained all the way up in my third pregnancy all the way up to delivery, strength trained. And I had a C-section, so it’s a surgery, relatively

major abdominal surgery. And it was right away, I mean, it was within the first 24 hours I was standing up and walking around. And I didn’t feel the need even for pain medicine to be able to move around and start that activity. And the nurses were like, are you sure you don’t – are you okay? They were flabbergasted that I was walking around. But because your muscles are strong, that activity costs you less effort and is less strenuous to do even after that

event. And so I like the way you described it there as instead of thinking about our strength over our lifespan, if you picture like a graph of the years of your life on the horizontal and the level of strength you have on the vertical, it’s not maybe an exact angular line, 45 degrees going down, perfect. Rather, it’s sort of like a step ladder based on injuries that you get or life events, like you said.

And so the best thing we can do to avoid long plateaus or declines is proactively strength Is that what you’re saying?

Absolutely, absolutely. And you’re absolutely right about pregnancy. I mean, there was so much data that says the benefits of strength training through pregnancy leading to both a healthy baby and healthy mom. So, you know, and the biggest, I mean,

the biggest marker for a positive outcome for any surgery, any musculoskeletal surgery, is strength preceding the surgery. If somebody’s going to have a knee replacement, the best marker for a positive outcome from that surgery is how strong somebody was going into that surgery. That’s just so undervalued or under discussed. You know, everybody who’s ever going to have a knee replacement, the surgeon should always be saying

you need to go away and get your quadriceps as strong as possible. So that when you come into the surgery, you’re an advanced stage of recovery, or you’re a higher stage ready for recovery. The strength training is often talked about, you know, in English, brushing your teeth. We make this investment every day in brushing our teeth so that we can keep our teeth and have healthy dental hygiene when we’re older. And our strength training that we do now

gives us a healthy body as we age. It helps us function. It helps our organs. It helps our brain. You know, we’re going to talk about some of the other health benefits of strength training in other episodes, but it helps us as an organism live a healthier, better quality, longer life as we age. The move that I always see is it’s better to be the oldest guy in the gym than the youngest guy in the retirement

home.

Oh my gosh. I love that one. And the other quote I think of is, you can have every problem in the world, but if you lose your health, you have one problem. It’s the foundation of everything in our life, right? And so it sounds like what we’re saying is it’s just as important to strength train

to prevent injury or prior to a surgery as it is to strength train again to restore and rehabilitate after that event. Do you have any recommendations on strength training following a surgery or following a big life event like that? Yeah, you know, rehabilitation as far as

strength training is fascinating. There was a study done a couple of years back and they talked to some NCAA Division I coaches, strength and conditioning coaches, and they said to them, imagine that your athlete gets hurt in a game on a Saturday or a Sunday. What strength training would you do with them in the following week? And they all said, oh, no, we’d rest them. And in my mind, this is completely the wrong approach. Having an injury doesn’t mean that you stop strength training. It means that you strength train around that injury.

I’ve worked with wheelchair athletes, I’ve worked with visually impaired athletes, and there is always a way to do something. Whatever I say to somebody in a wheelchair, are you in a wheelchair? You just can’t do those things anymore. They just find a way to do those things. Or if somebody’s hurt their wrist or they’ve hurt their elbow or they’ve hurt their knee, then we strength train around that, whether that’s we can train the other limb, if you’ve hurt your left elbow you can still train your right limb, if you’ve hurt your lower body you can still train your upper body or vice versa. So first of all I think any kind of injury or surgery or anything like that, is there a way to

work around it? That’s the first question and it’s not a case of stop strength training completely, it’s strengthening around that. And then of course when it comes to surgery we want to be as strong and as healthy as we can going into the surgery and as soon as physically possible after the surgery we want to get back to strength training. In a supervised, I mean the exercise coach it’s supervised, there’s a coach by your side, there’s science behind you, there’s a coach next to you, what you’re doing is safe strength training. And I think that’s really important. And then of course, when we think about it from

a rehabilitation point of view, I mean, this is a great question, does rehabilitation just become a lifelong event? Yeah, to some extent, it does. but strength training becomes a lifetime event. Strength training becomes the same as nutrition and the same as dental hygiene, like I said. I think that it’s, but we shouldn’t think of it as this is rehab, we should think of it as this is helping me to function. If you think about rehabilitation, well, when you’re in your 50s, you’re rehabilitating your body to try and function like you were in your 20s. So, you know, everything in that sense

is rehabilitation, right? Absolutely. One analogy that comes to mind, if you think about a vulnerable joint somebody has, right, we often hear complaints about knees, about hips, about low back, for example. When we strength train safely and appropriately, given our current fitness level, it’s like fortifying that joint. Picture an empty roll of paper towels in the inside cardboard piece is a tube, right? An empty paper towel roll has a cardboard tube. If I press down on the top of that empty tube, that cardboard will crumble, right?

However, if I wrap layers and layers and layers of paper around that layer by layer by layer by layer and pretty soon there’s 30 layers of paper and then I try to press down on that cardboard tube what will happen it will not collapse right because each of those layers protects and fortifies that area, meaning that it’s going to take more in the future to bother that joint. It’s going to take a more of a force to irritate or cause pain. We don’t want to have such a weak low back because

we’ve avoided strength training that even turning to get out of the car can cause us injury because we’re so weak. We want to be able to fortify those vulnerable areas by adding muscle in a safe way to protect.

Fantastic analogy. I love it.

Well, and I hope that is a helpful way to think about yourself and your body and really what you’re doing when you think about strength training and you think about preventing injury or coming back from an injury. That strength training really is your friend throughout the entire process. It’s just thinking about it in the smartest way possible. So James, thank you for giving us that insight today.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening to today’s episode. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. Make sure you follow the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss another episode. You can find out more information about this episode or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything.com. Join us next week for another episode. You can find out more information about this episode or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything.com. Join us next week for another episode. Here’s to You can find out more information about this episode or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything.com. Join us next week for another episode. You can find out more information about this episode or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything.com. Join us next week for another episode. Here’s to you and your best health.