If you had to put a number on your happiness, energy, and overall well-being—what score would you give your life right now?

In this episode, Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher dig into the science of quality of life—how researchers actually measure it, and why it’s about so much more than health stats or fitness levels. They reveal why building physical strength often leads to emotional freedom and how strength training improves mental health, social connection, and vitality.

Tune in to learn how training your body can completely reshape the way you feel about your life.

• Amy shares her definition of quality of life. She looks beyond just physical health and considers energy, mood, and daily worries. The big question is: Am I happy—and could I be happier?
• Dr. Fisher explains how quality of life is measured. He breaks it down with short-form surveys like the SF-12 and SF-36 that ask people to rate their health on a simple scale from excellent to poor. The point is not the specific symptom—but your overall sense of well-being.
• Understand the broader meaning of quality of life. Dr. Fisher reveals it’s not only about physical health or ability to work—it’s also about mood, social connection, and everyday 
• experiences. 
• Dr. Fisher shares: “How often during the past month have you felt so down in the dumps that nothing could cheer you up?” It’s a reminder that emotional health is central to quality of life.
• Amy and Dr. Fisher discuss how resistance training impacts your quality of life. 
• A 2019 systematic review of 16 studies showed that strength training consistently improved health-related quality of life in older adults. The benefits weren’t just physical metrics like cholesterol—they were about how people felt.
• Learn how resistance training changes perception. Participants filled out quality-of-life surveys before and after strength training interventions, and the results showed mental health, energy, and outlook improving.
• Dr. Fisher reveals how training affects mental and social well-being. Resistance training boosted emotional control, mental health, social function, and vitality scores. 
• According to Amy, people who engage in strength training don’t just get stronger—they become more energized, more social, and more alive.
• Understand the concept of emotional role function. 
• Amy and Dr. Fisher unpack how it reflects control over emotions and the ability to bounce back when life feels tough. Strength training plays a role in building this resilience.
• Dr. Fisher shares his personal perspective. When he strength trains, it’s a way to release stress, burn off anger, and reset emotionally. It’s not just exercise—it’s therapy for the mind.
• Amy explains how we experience the world depends on both our emotional and physical states. Strength training is a tool that improves both—leading to a richer, more positive quality of life.
• Amy and Dr. Fisher agree that resistance training can help us regulate emotions and reclaim a sense of freedom. 
• While we can’t control everything that happens to us, we can control how we respond.

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Quality of life is an everyday experience, which means that I have a choice every day about behaviors I can take to improve how I feel today.

Engagement in strength training helps us feel better about who we are and helps us engage in a more fulfilled life. quality of life.

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, everybody. So I have a question for you if you’re listening today. And my question is, if I asked you to rate the quality of life that you have on a scale from 1 to 10, what would you answer? So rate your quality of life on a scale from 1 to 10. When I ask about quality of life, at least for me, various categories pop into my mind. I think about How I feel overall.

How is my health? What’s my energy like? Do I have any pressing physical ailments right now or pain right now? That impacts my answer to that quality of life question. I think about mood and fears, worries that I experience on an everyday basis or every week basis. Overall, you know, how’s my disposition?

That impacts quality of life. I think about relationships. How are those doing? How is the quality of those? The time that I’m spending, am I happy with the way I’m spending my time? Do I wish I was able to spend my time differently than I am?

And then a really interesting question to sort of wrap this up as you think about your answer is like, what would make me happier? So what am I missing, right? That would make me happier or improve the quality of life. Sometimes that helps us to answer the question. So if you’re listening to this, I hope you have an answer in your mind. And as you consider some of these variables, Dr. Fisher and I are here and we’re going to talk about how quality of life is measured in terms of research.

You know, when we think about understanding at a population level or when we do studies, how people rate their quality of life, how are we getting to that answer? So how’s it going, Dr. Fisher? I’m super excited to talk about this with you today.

I’m doing great. My quality of life overall, I would say is a nine out of 10 today because there’s not much I could give much better, but maybe there is and I’m not considering that. So, um, so I would love for you to get started too and share with us a little bit about, about research into quality of life and how we would measure that and start there.

Yeah, well, of course, we’re kind of drawing to an end of these health benefits of strength training podcasts. And one of the things that we haven’t talked about that we’re going to talk about today, as you’ve mentioned, is quality of life. Now, this is such a broad topic. And most people, when they think of it, can think about all the different kind of facets and different parameters of their life. Well, I can do this, but is that good or is it bad? Or can I do that?

Or I wish I could do this. my life would be better if I could do this more frequently and so forth. So the way quality of life is typically measured is by what’s called a short form survey. And it’s an SF standing for short form. And there’s two main surveys, there’s an SF 12, which has 12 questions.

And there’s an SF 36, which believe it or not, has 36 questions. And what I’ve done for those of you who are watching on YouTube, you’ll see on the screen is that I’m going to put some of the questions up on the screen. Obviously, if you’re not watching on YouTube, we’ll read them out and go through it. We’re just going to give you some of the example questions so that you’ve got a good idea of what the questions are like when scientists measure the subject of quality of life.

So the first question that we have is in general, would you say your health is, and then there’s five choices, one, excellent, two, very good, three, good, four, fair or five. poor.

So it doesn’t ask you specifically what parameter of your health, it just asks you for a general comment about how you feel about your health. Now, if somebody were to be ill, have chronic medical conditions, maybe diabetes, or if they have back pain, or if they have osteoarthritis, then they might think, oh, My, my health is good or fair or poor, or if somebody has just been to the gym and they’re grateful that they could go to the gym and they, they went for a run over the weekend and they, uh, you know, saw some friends and went for a hike. They, they might look at their health and say, you know what, I’m, I’m X years old and I do all the activities that I want to do. And I, and I, and I feel great. So my health is excellent. So obviously there’s different things that can impact the way we think about answering these questions.

Yeah, so if you’re listening, think about what your answer would be, right? Excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor.

So I’m going to skip ahead. So question four within the survey, I’m not going to read out every question. Obviously, these are from the SF -12, but I’m not going to read them out. 12 questions because we’re not trying to get you to complete that survey. You can actually find them online if you want to go into Google and Google things like SF12 quality of life or SF36 quality of life. You can do the survey yourself.

The key thing that I would say is any. moment of doing it is only a snapshot in time. What you’re really interested in is how your results differ based on changing a variable. So it might be changing a job or changing your exercise habits or changing your nutrition habits. So how does it vary before and after? So question four on the screen now is, does your health keep you from working at a job, doing work around the house or going to school?

Answer one is yes for more than three months. Answer two is yes for three months or less. And answer three is no. So I would of course say no, my health doesn’t prohibit me from working a job, doing work around the house or going to school in any way. But of course, if somebody’s health or their physical ability does impact that, whether it’s fatigue levels or whether it’s injuries or chronic pain, then that might be impactful. as far as doing those activities, working or going to school and so forth.

Okay, so question six. How much of the time during the past month has your health limited your social activities? So we’re now seeing the broader impact of what quality of life actually is. It’s not just your physical health and how you feel, it’s not just your physical health and your ability to maybe work or do things around the house or go to school, maybe dependent upon your age, but it’s how Has your health limited your social activities? And the example that the question gives is like visiting friends or close relatives. And then it gives six answers or six possible answers.

One, all of the time. Two, most of the time. Three, a good bit of the time. Four, some of the time. Five, a little of the time. And six, none of the time.

So I would look at this question, how much of the time during the past month has health limited my social activities? Well, I would say six, none of the time. I haven’t felt unwell at any point that I haven’t been able to see friends or close relatives. You know, I have a pretty normal active social life. So, you know, that’s that’s obviously a big part of my quality of life.

And this doesn’t really ask about mental health, right? Like if somebody is suffering with a bout of depression, they may not take part in as many social activities. Is it is it up to the person answering the survey whether or not they factor that into their answer?

Yeah, so one of the things about surveys like this, and this is a very well -established and very well -validated survey, is the questions have been refined very specifically and are left to the interpretation of the reader. So if somebody read that and they interpreted health as being their mental health, maybe anxiety, or, or fears or phobias or things like that, then they would of course say, yeah, you know, um, if they’re agoraphobic, if they don’t like going outdoors, then they might say, yeah, most of the time my health limits my social activities. It, it, it doesn’t say physical health or mental health specifically in this case, it just says health. Uh, there are some questions later that we’ll touch upon that, that get more specific towards of mental health.

So question eight, during the past month, how much of the time have you felt calm, peaceful? Now, I love these kinds of questions. They use very lay terminology. They’re not overly scientific in the way that they kind of phrase the question. I think that’s really important because sometimes scientists can be guilty of using terminology that’s that’s sometimes beyond the normal vocabulary of people, or certainly would hinder people in their English if English was their second language.

So, for example, in this question, during the past month, how much of the time have you felt calm and peaceful? I look at this question and think, I drink a lot of caffeine, so calm probably isn’t the right word, but have I felt calm and peaceful? Well, the opposite to that would be anxious or stressed out, and I haven’t felt really anxious or stressed out. So I would say, yeah, most of the time I feel pretty calm, pretty, pretty peaceful. So, um, but again, it leaves some interpretation to the, um, to the reader himself. And of course the answers there for those of you who are listening rather than watching, uh, all of the time, most of the time, a good bit of the time, some of the time, a little of the time.

or none at the time. And then jumping ahead, question 11. How often during the past month have you felt so down in the dumps that nothing could cheer you up? I read this question and I hate the thought that anybody would be so down in the dumps that nothing could cheer them up. There’s an array of things that I find that can cheer me up. And I wish for other people to have that kind of quality of life.

Um, but the answers of course, the same as previous all of the time, most of the time, a good bit of the time, some of the time, a little of the time or none of the time. So I would have to say how often during the past month have I felt so down in the dumps that nothing could cheer me up. I’m going to say certainly it’s either. none of the time or maybe a little of the time. We all get sad sometimes. We all get a little bit unhappy sometimes.

And I think they serve a natural purpose in our life. but we obviously don’t want that to be too extreme. So those are just some really nice examples from the SF -12 that ask about a person’s quality of life. We can see the variety of physical health elements, and then the sort of mental health elements, social interaction, and kind of emotional wellbeing as well.

So we can see how broad a quality of life survey can be. And you can imagine that when we get into the 36 question, survey, but it gets into a lot more detail over certain facets and certain parameters of a person’s life.

Great. Okay, well thank you for breaking that down on how this information is basically fleshed out in terms of studying this. That helps us. Yeah, of course, of course. And then the main thing that we wanted to talk about today is how quality of life is impacted by resistance training. So, of course, that’s the key emphasis of this podcast.

Strength changes everything. We’re going to talk about the benefits of strength training. Now, we’ve talked about, over the previous episodes, diabetes and hypertension and cholesterol and osteoarthritis. And, of course, If you’re engaging in strength training, then you are improving your bone mineral density and you’re improving your, uh, your blood pressure metrics or your cholesterol metrics. Then not a lot of people walk around and think, wow, I’ve done a workout today. My, my bone mineral density is good.

That makes me feel happy. That makes me feel great. Um, or they walk around and think, wow, you know, I’ve done my bit for my cholesterol by engaging in strength training or so forth. You know, we don’t. necessarily feel the difference in it. of ourselves in the short term.

So this is a really nice meta -analysis, and we’ve talked previously about meta -analyses, that they’re a collection of studies where all the data has been combined into this one single study so that they can extrapolate all the values and say, does strength training impact this or does this metric of strength training impactful on this other variable? So for those of you again watching on YouTube or those of you listening on the podcast we are sharing the article on YouTube for you to go and take a look at. The article is a 2019 systematic review and meta -analysis that includes 16 different studies and its title is the effect of resistance training on health -related quality of life in older adults. So the adults, the participants in each of these 16 studies had to be over 50 years of age. And in fact, the mean age was 73 .9 years. So they were older adults.

And they either completed the SF36 or the SF12, the short form 36 or the short form 12. And from that, you can establish the same sort of criterion from each of those. There’s two components. There’s a mental component, which has within it mental health, emotional role, function.

And there’s a physical component which has within it physical role function, general health, bodily pain, and physical functioning. So there’s multiple kind of components within each of those two bigger components or bigger parameters. So just to clarify, the people in these studies were surveyed as a baseline before studying the impact of strike training? Yeah, so in each of these studies, great point, great point. So in each of these studies, each of the individual studies, all of the participants would have completed either the SF -12 or the -36 before engaging in a resistance training intervention.

And then they would have engaged in some form of resistance training intervention for a duration, probably somewhere between eight and 12 weeks. Although we should, you know, clarify, I haven’t got into the details of each of the, each of the studies included, but that’s typical of a strength training study. And then they have repeated the survey having engaged in, in resistance training for a given time period. So presumably their strength did increase over that time and some of their other health metrics increased over that time. Maybe they reduced their body fat or reduced their cholesterol or their HbA1c, which is their resting blood sugar. But we’re not interested in any of that.

We’re only interested in how their health -related quality of life metric changed before and after resistance training. So on the screen, the main thing that I’ve shown here is the mental component score. You can see straight away that that went up in the people engaging in resistance training. So they felt better within themselves, their mental values, their mental health values increased. And in fact, resistance training actually significantly increased all health -related quality of life metrics. And we’re going to jump ahead a little bit now.

So, on the screen now, for those of you that are listening, I’m going to show four different figures for some of the different values within the parameters of the study itself. So up on the screen right now, we can see emotional role function, and you can see the diamond has shifted to the right from where it was before. We can see that strength training improved people’s emotional role function. We can look at mental health specifically, and we can say certainly people’s mental health improved after engaging in resistance training. The next one we’ll bring up is social function. So people engaged in more social activities or they certainly rated their social interaction or how much their health impacted their social interaction as being better having engaged in resistance training.

And then the final one we’ll bring up there is vitality. So maybe how much energy or how much kind of enthusiasm they have towards life. And again, we can see that that had improved. following engagement in resistance training. So, and I find this really important because as we said, you know, we engage in strength training and we know all the health benefits, we might know all the health benefits, we might be learning the health benefits that strength training can have for our quality of life, for our warding off chronic medical conditions like diabetes, like obesity, like cardiovascular disease, and so forth. But we don’t necessarily walk around and feel better Knowing that we’ve done that we might well do we might not do that actually irrespective of all of those metrics people that engage in strength training. feel better about their life. They feel like their quality of life as a measure is better when they engage in strength training.

Now that might be because of mental health, it might be because of emotional role function or social function or vitality and so forth. It could be any one of these metrics that’s improved or it could be all of these metrics that’s improved. But the key thing for me is that engagement in strength training helps us feel better about who we are, and helps us engage in a more fulfilled quality of life. Yeah, you know, I think at the end of the day, I think most of us could admit that we make choices a lot of the times based on how we feel. There’s what we know and then there’s what we feel. And there’s this cerebral understanding of some benefits that I’m accomplishing today through my workout in terms of lowering my cholesterol or improving my bone density.

And they’re sort of like far off in the future or not quite related. It’s a mental, cerebral understanding I have of the benefits of that outcome. But then there’s how I feel and my emotional state.

And that is more immediately motivating. And so when these studies are reporting people’s mental health, vitality, social function, that is instant payoff in my mind that everybody wants. Can you clarify what emotional role function means? Yeah, that’s a great question. So I would need to go back and look at the criteria specifically for how they define it. But presumably that’s how much they feel in control of their emotions, whether they feel like if they’re unhappy, whether things can cheer them up, they can do things to cheer them up, or whether they, for example, if they’re unhappy or as the question asked before, if they’re down in the dumps, but they feel like nothing can cheer them up.

So it’s how much they feel kind of in control of their emotions. You know, we know that, uh, for example, people get stressed out. People might get angry where people might get frustrated. Uh, we all experienced things like, um, road rage, maybe if somebody cuts us up in traffic or something like that, and it’s our ability to kind of control those emotions. Um, and, and I kind of let them wash over us and ignore them, um, or let them kind of bring us down and really stress us out for the rest of the day.

I think that’s a really important one.

Our ability to interact with different things is key. We are all going to interact with different people at different times of the day. day. We’re all gonna maybe sit in traffic or go on a commute at some point on our ability to kind of tolerate other people, uh, engage with the people or cheer ourself up and, and things like that is key. Now, one of the things from my perspective that I often think about when I look at these parameters and health, quality of life is that when I engage in strength training, I immediately feel less stressed out. I feel like that’s my opportunity to get rid of any kind of, uh, built up anger or built up kind of aggression and really kind of, kind of push that out of my system.

I also know that improves my quality of sleep. It helps me get to sleep and improves the depth of my sleep at night. and my quality of sleep overall.

And therefore, I wake up feeling more refreshed and with a greater vitality and more able to control emotions. So there’s a lot of different parameters will go into this. And I’m sure if people think about their day -to -day interactions with other people or with their work, then, um, or with their money or their family or all the other things that are happening, then, um, then they might start to think, ah, yeah, that’s, that gets to me a little bit or that doesn’t get to me or actually engaging in strength training helps me deal with, with those variables. It’s important to connect those dots. So thank you for spelling that out because I think sometimes we miss that, but it’s so, so key. So much of our life experience. is dictated by our interpretation of it and how we feel. And how we feel is a function of our emotional state and our physical state and a whole bunch of other things. And I think the reminder of the immediate benefits of strength training in terms of how we feel and experience life, I mean, I think about two people could experience the same exact situation. And one person could respond with letting it roll off their back, not getting too anxious about it, you know, having a mindset that it doesn’t really ruin their day. And then another person, it could just put them over the edge. And it’s the same stimulus.

And so that internal state is something we have to care for.

And there are things we can do. fascinatingly physically that will help us internally with the mental piece, which is how we experience the world. And so I think that’s really exciting to make that connection today for people. Yeah. And interestingly, I’m going to kind of jump on the back of what you just said, actually, because It’s often attributed to somebody called Viktor Frankl, who was in a Nazi concentration camp during the second world war. And he referred to it as our final freedom.

We often can’t control the things that happen to us, but we can control how we react to the things that happen to us and how we feel about the things that happen to us.

And of course, our inability to control the things that happen to us can be very frustrating.

And our inability to control how we react to that, whether we immediately get stressed out or whether we do get depressed or sad, or we get anxious or fearful or so forth, can be really inhibiting if we can’t control those emotions. you know, what this paper is saying and what the evidence is showing is that, you know, resistance training does help us with our ability to control our emotions and help with this idea of this final freedom. We can’t control all the things that are going to happen to us in the day, but we can control how we react to it. Mm -hmm. Yep. And it just goes back to the reality that it’s very possible. that somebody answers these questions one way on one day and then a week later you ask and they give you completely different answers.

And so that just reminds me that quality of life is an everyday experience, which means that I have a choice every day about behaviors I can take to improve how I feel today. and how my life is today. There are today’s benefits and of course there are long term benefits and the long game that I’m playing too to set myself up for success in the future. But going back to that initial question that I asked you, if you were to rate your quality of life overall on a scale from 1 to 10, thinking about what your answer is, think about one thing you can do today that will boost that answer for you, unless you’re already at a 10 out of 10. But even still, what can you do to maintain that?

One thing that I’m going to do is strength train. And so that’s the takeaway I have from this episode. Dr. Fisher, thank you for breaking this down.

Are there any other closing thoughts or admonitions you’d like to leave with our listener today when it comes to thinking about their quality of life? No, I think we’ve covered everything. I hope everything makes sense. And I wish everybody a wonderful day. Yep, we do too, and we will see you next time on the podcast. We hope you remember, strength changes everything.

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