It doesn’t matter if you’re young or if you’re old, if you train once a week or if you train five times a week. The data here says total cholesterol levels improved irrespective of those factors.

We can reduce these figures just through strength training alone. 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 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. Welcome back to the Strength Changes Everything podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about cholesterol. We’re going to be talking about how strength training can help reduce cholesterol, control cholesterol levels if you’ve been told you have high cholesterol. We’re going to just talk about what the science shows between participating in strength training and the reduction of cholesterol, and we’ll also touch on dietary cholesterol compared to cholesterol levels in the body to help break this topic down for us. Dr. Fisher is here. He is one of the leading researchers on this topic and his talk today is going to share with us the science based on presentations that he’s given as keynote speaker on this topic on some of the many benefits of strength training. So, cholesterol just being one of those topics. How are you doing, Dr. Fisher?

I’m doing great. Thank you those topics. How are you doing Dr. Fisher? I’m doing great. Thank you Amy. How are you?

I’m doing well. I’m doing well. I do have some cholesterol concerns with you know family members and things like that and so I am excited to learn about how strength training can benefit us when it comes to those of us who are concerned with this looming fearful topic of high cholesterol. So, um, let’s dive into the topic and, and talk about this.

Yeah.

Okay. So cholesterol is a really interesting topic and it’s become a bit of a, a virinous word, um, that we, we maybe don’t use appropriately. We kind of generally loosely use it as kind of, oh, people have high cholesterol. It’s not quite that simple.

For absolute clarity, cholesterol is actually, it’s a waxy substance found in the blood and it’s actually a hormone. So we sort of produce it and we regulate it sort of ourselves anyway. But there’s also, when we talk about cholesterol, what we’re actually really talking about is what’s called lipoproteins and there’s two types. There’s low density lipoproteins, which are the bad lipoproteins. Um, and they’re the ones that build within our artery walls. They’re the ones that run our risk of, uh, of having, of causing us to have higher blood pressure by hardening or narrowing our arterial walls. And obviously previously we’ve talked about high blood pressure. So a lot of these kind of medical conditions that we’ll talk about are in some way interlinked. I know we’re going to talk about diabetes in the future, and we’ll see how that connects at that stage as well. We also have high density lipoproteins and they’re considered our good cholesterol or our good lipoproteins and they pick up what’s loosely thought of as the excess cholesterol to be removed from our body or to be taken back to our liver and kind of disposed of or broken down. But it’s worth clarifying that when we talk about cholesterol in research studies, we often also talk about triglycerides. And triglycerides is simply the amount of fat that’s in our blood. So a lot of the time in research studies, we’ll measure HDL and LDL cholesterol as our good and our bad cholesterol, respectively. But we’ll also measure triglycerides as the amount of fat that’s in our blood. And we’ll often measure things like adiponectin, which is an adipokine that regulates the amount of glucose that we have and the amount of fat that’s metabolized.

So we often talk about triglycerides and triglycerides are generally bad. We want lower triglycerides. So if we see a study where triglycerides go down, that’s good. Adiponectin is good. So if we see a study where adiponectin goes up, that’s good. Those are the things that we want to see. So I’ve got together a couple of research papers here actually. And the first one, if you’re watching on YouTube, you’ll be able to see these. What we’ve got here is a meta-analysis which includes 69 different studies with a total of 2,158 participants. And as we’ve talked about previously, our meta-analysis is a combination of different studies with all the participants of those respective studies kind of combined together. So it’s not, did strength training have an outcome on this group of 20 people? It’s, did strength training have a regular outcome across these 69 studies, across these 2,000 people? And the authors of this meta-analysis, they concluded that strength training promotes decreases in total cholesterol and triglycerides and LDL cholesterol as well as increases in HDL and adiponectin concentrations. So those are all the things that we’ve literally just talked about previously. We want to see LDL come down, that’s considered a bad cholesterol. HDL is a good cholesterol so if that can go up that’s great. And adiponectin was our adipokine that helps regulate kind of blood glucose and fat as well. We also saw a drop in triglycerides there as well. I think we have some of the figures here or some of the data here. So we’re seeing that strength training led to a reduction in total cholesterol levels of approximately 8.5 milligrams per deciliter. So that’s a quite a considerable reduction. And then subgroup analysis actually said that the effectiveness of strength training for reducing total cholesterol wasn’t influenced by food control tools. Now, Amy, any thoughts, any questions?

So it was not influenced by food control. It’s just the strength training that’s reducing the cholesterol numbers.

Yeah.

And in fact, the reason I pause there is the academics are really interesting terminology here. They’re saying food control tools. They’re not even saying food controls. So what that means is that if I state you to change your diet, or I say to you to go away, eat all this whole grain bread or whole wheat pasta and things like that, that would be changing your diet. But a food control tool is even simply, Hey, go away and track your diet, record it on a piece of paper or take a photo of the meal or record it on an app. And one of the reasons why that’s so important is because the people who are engaging in positive healthy habits and start to look at how much they’re eating and using a food control tool, they actually automatically begin to change their nutritional habits. So you can imagine if somebody said to me, okay, I want you to take a photo of everything you eat. And you’re going to share it with all the lip was this podcast. Then suddenly, when I decide that I want to have a bag of candy or a box of popcorn or some some takeaway food, something that’s unhealthy, I might think, oh wow, do I really wanna take a picture of that and share that?

So even just the idea that I’m now recording what I’m gonna eat can impact what I actually consume. And this is really important, because one of the things that they’re saying is that in these studies, they found that strength training reduced these factors, cholesterol, triglycerides and LDLs, irrespective of whether there was a food control tool in use or not. So I think that was really important. Effectively, this is in spite of nutritional habits. And then the other thing that they’re saying was that mean age, body mass index and weekly frequency, volume per exercise and even volume per session were not associated with the improvements in total cholesterol levels.

And then there’s a big win. This is saying it doesn’t matter if you’re young or if you’re old, it doesn’t matter if you’re a healthy body mass index or a really high overweight or obese body mass index, it doesn’t matter if you train once a week or if you train five times a week, it doesn’t matter if you train once a week or if you train five times a week. It doesn’t matter if you do one set of an exercise or three sets of an exercise.

And it doesn’t even matter if you do just a few exercises, three or four exercises, or if you spend hours and hours in the gym. The data here says that none of those things were impactful. Total cholesterol levels improved irrespective of those factors. And I think that’s a really big win because we’re often, you know, really promoting brief, infrequent, uncomplicated exercise. And that’s exactly what this study is showing, that none of the other variables seem to make that much of a difference on this health parameter.

Wow, that is super exciting and it is great news. I totally agree.

And to kind of follow that one up, we have another study here and this is actually an empirical study. This is by a guy called Simon Walker and his colleagues at Uvascula in Scandinavia and it’s a 2019 study of 65 to 75 year old community dwelling older adults and they were randomized into a training frequency of once per week, twice per week or three times per week. Now we can see there there were 24 people in the once per week, 24 people in the twice per week, 26 people in the three times per week and there were 20 people in a control group as well and this is what we tend to see in these individual empirical studies that have then gone to make up the meta-analysis. So this was six months of supervised whole body strength training where they did seven to nine exercises per workout. Okay, so what did they find? Well, they found significant reductions in total fat mass of around 1.3 kilograms. They found significant reductions in LDL, so that’s our low-density lipoprotein, that’s what we want to see come down, and they reported increases in HDL or high-density lipoprotein as well. And that was in all the exercise groups but not in the control group. And they actually even went on to say in the study that when they compared between the exercise groups the once twice and three times per week they didn’t find any difference so they actually just analyzed all that data together because they they basically said it didn’t matter what you were exercising once twice or three times per week the results seem to be very similar and they went on and their conclusion was that the study provides support for the effectiveness of progressive resistance training on metabolic health in older men and women. Now I want to pause for a second and just take a step back. One of the first results that they report there is a reduction of 1.3 kilos of fat. Now anybody who’s done a quick conversion in their head or who is familiar with the metric system will know that 1.3 kilos is really not a big fat reduction. It might be the equivalent to three pounds of fat. So to think that you’re going to engage in strength training and only lose three pounds of fat over six months, well that’s not a big change. Most people would probably hope to see more than that if that was their goal. But of course remember that this is without change to nutritional habits. And the more important factor and the reason that I draw people’s attention to it is that the reductions in LDL cholesterol and increases in HDL cholesterol were irrespective of a reduction in fat mass so it’s not about going into the gym and reducing your body fat so that you can then improve your LDL or your HDL cholesterol. Is actually the action of strength training itself irrespective of your body composition or irrespective of fat loss that led leads to reduction in LDLs or an increase in HDL cholesterol.

Hmm.

That’s really, really interesting. I mean, I think most people when, when they think about metabolic health, I think that it’s easy to put cholesterol into a bucket that is not really controllable through exercise. It’s more controllable through diet or through a pill. But what this is showing, you know, I think people expect okay I can control my muscle mass and my body fat through exercise but other things like cholesterol I think it’s easy to place in a totally separate bucket, you know. But what this is showing is that no, in fact we can Reduce these figures, you know and put ourselves in a favorable favorable range just through strength training alone And we can separate it from our diet in that way in our mind and know that we’re making progress in that area

Yeah

I 100% agree and I’m gonna add to this a little bit with just my own thoughts. And there really isn’t the kind of research to back this up, but there have been some, some really interesting books about cholesterol and the influence of, of, uh, of our lifestyles on our cholesterol levels. And there’s a lot of, uh, a lot of, um, discussion around high stress levels, increasing cholesterol. And I think there’s probably a lot to that. You know, modern Western society, we live in a high stress environment, whether it’s the traffic or families and children, whether it’s inflation rates or politics or the environment, you know, there’s a lot of things that are kind of going on that could cause us to be a little more anxious or a little bit stressed out.

And I often wonder if the engagement in strength training where we kind of give ourselves over to sort of 20 minutes of high effort exercise, we really kind of expend that energy and really kind of unload that stress into that format, kind of leaves us a bit kind of, um, weight free. When we walk out the door, we kind of feel better about kind of, uh, unloading that baggage onto, onto the equipment, onto the weights, rather than carrying around that extra stress.

And that actually links to one of the podcasts we’re going to talk about in the future, which is linked to quality of life, uh, when it was strength training can play a big role in that, but I’m not going to spoil that one yet.

No, I really appreciate that thought. Cause I think there’s something to that.

Okay.

One more thing before we end this episode, just to touch on, and I would like to hear your thoughts on this. What is the role of dietary cholesterol? cholesterol, people will blame eating eggs or things like that for their high cholesterol levels or they feel a need to do some drastic dietary changes in order to reduce cholesterol. What would you say about that in terms of how we should think about the role of dietary cholesterol in terms of our actual cholesterol levels when we test those? Yeah, absolutely. So at the start of the podcast when I talked about what cholesterol actually is as far as a hormone and the waxy substance, and then it’s not the cholesterol that’s bad per se, it’s the low density lipoproteins, the negative part that we’re interested in. I know that we’ve then talked about kind of total cholesterol levels. So it kind of can be a bit mixed up in all of this.

The reality is that we can influence our cholesterol intake, or we can influence, sorry, our cholesterol levels by some of the things that we consume, but it’s really about consuming whole grains or whole wheats. It’s not about cutting out things like eggs, which contain cholesterol, or even certain products that are relatively high in fat will have a higher cholesterol content. The reality is if we are eating a broad spectrum of minimally processed foods and of course whole grain bread or whole wheat pasta is less processed than white bread or white pasta and so forth, then that can be the bit that we need to do. Interestingly, a lot of the studies that have looked at things like red meat intake or whole egg versus egg white intake or even red wine intake, they’re observational studies rather than empirical randomized control trials. What we mean by an observational studies rather than empirical, um, randomized control trials. What we mean by an observational study is we’ve effectively taken a group of people and say, Hey, do you guys eat whole eggs? And they’ve said, yeah. And then we’ve taken another group of people who eat just egg whites, and then we’ve looked at maybe their cholesterol, or we’ve looked at their, um, their body composition, or we’ve looked at their quality of life, or any other parameter. And then what they’ve done is they’ve said, oh, well, these people that eat whole eggs, they’re not as healthy as these people that eat just egg whites. Well, the reality is that anybody who probably eats just egg whites is very health conscious and may engage in more exercise, may engage in better hydration and less alcohol consumption. They might be less likely to smoke. Um, they might have a higher, they might be in a higher socioeconomic group because they can afford to kind of make that choice on those dietary habits.

So there are all these other lifestyle factors that play a part in whether somebody is more or less healthy. And the evidence now shows that it’s not the yolk of an egg or a whole egg that has a high cholesterol content that’s going to negatively impact your LDL cholesterol within your body. So the reality is we can make positive dietary changes that can certainly impact our health, but really a good rule of thumb is to go for that minimally processed approach. Any abroad spectrum of, you know, in this country I say to my son, eat the rainbow or eat the alphabet. We should eat foods that begin with different letters, we should eat foods that are different colors. I think in modern society, there’s a lot of beige put on the plate, and whether that’s fried foods or breaded foods or things like that, or fries or chips or potato chips. So yeah, I think if we’re eating greens and reds and blues and these other things, you know, bananas and things like that, then we’re hopefully getting a good variety of nutrients, micronutrients and macronutrients as well.

Yeah, perfect. That’s helpful. Thank you for breaking that down for us. I totally agree. So thank you for all of that information and I hope if you’re somebody who is concerned with this topic that this episode has inspired you to go get it, go get after it with your strength training sessions, knowing the good that you’re doing for yourself at a hormonal and protein level inside the body. We will see you next week as we continue this series and stay healthy, stay strong, stay fit. 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 and be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss 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.