Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher break down three important research papers on the connection between strength, muscle mass, and longevity. They cover the benefits of exercising regularly and how being strong—regardless of weight—greatly reduces the risk of all-cause mortality.

Tune in to hear valuable insights on how strength training improves healthspan, not just lifespan, and actionable advice on prioritizing strength for long-term vitality. 

• Dr. Fisher starts by unpacking the “Fat But Fit” Paradigm.
• He shares research that highlights how overweight but fit adults had a lower risk of all-cause mortality compared to normal-weight, unfit adults. The key takeaway? Fitness and strength matter more than weight.
• Amy explains why it’s better to have muscle and be slightly overweight than to be at a “normal” weight without strength. 
• Dr. Fisher emphasizes the benefits of building strength for longevity. Strength is the single most critical factor in living a longer, healthier life.
• Amy highlights the goal of weight loss: It’s not just about losing weight but about losing fat while preserving or gaining muscle. Maintaining strength after weight loss sets you up for better health and resilience in the future.
• Understand that losing weight through calorie-restrictive diets often results in muscle loss, which increases the risk of mortality.
• Learn how the Muscle Mass Index is a life-extending marker. Dr. Fisher reveals that people with more muscle live longer and are more resilient. 
• Exercise isn’t about making your body smaller—it’s about getting stronger to live longer. Strength training benefits you today, tomorrow, and for years to come.
• Amy and Dr. Fisher cover the short-term, mid-term, and long-term benefits of strength training. Amy reveals how building strength pays off immediately and compounds over time, improving health and quality of life.
• Dr. Fisher breaks down research showing that being overweight or obese is far less of a risk factor than being inactive. 
• Your health is more than a number on the scale: Amy emphasizes that strength and activity level are far better health indicators than weight.
• Dr. Fisher reveals the universal benefits of strength training. A groundbreaking study shows there are no “non-responders” to resistance training. Everyone, regardless of age or gender, sees positive results.
• Amy explains the compounding power of healthy habits. Your current health reflects the small choices you make every day. Consistency, not perfection, creates lasting results.
• Dr. Fisher on cheat meals: One bad meal doesn’t derail your progress. Avoid letting it spiral into an unhealthy day.
• Amy and Dr. Fisher discuss how our genes influence the benefits we see from resistance training.
• Dr. Fisher dispels the idea that you need to get bigger to get stronger—or vice versa. Strength has nothing to do with muscle size. You can be strong and have smaller muscles. 
• Dr. Fisher explains how our bodies evolved to handle exercise stress.
• Amy shares the difference between health span and lifespan. Your goal should be to add quality to our years—not just more years to our lives. 
• Amy’s parting encouragement: Even if you’re starting now, it won’t take long to see meaningful results. In just 12 weeks, you can achieve transformative changes in strength and health. 

Mentioned in This Episode:
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Engagement in strength training and improving strength more than combat, being overweight or obese.

We wanna lose fat, but maintain or gain muscle and strength. And why this is so important is for our longevity. 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. Welcome back, everybody. It is Amy Hudson, exercise coach franchisee, along with Dr. James Fisher with you today. We are going to have a really interesting discussion today about exercise, about strength training, and really about how we should really think about exercise. I think a lot of us out there think about exercise as a means to losing weight, exercise as a means to getting our frame physically smaller. We think about exercise as our ticket into maybe looking the way we want.

But there is a way that we should think about exercise that really doesn’t have anything to do with that. In fact, when we think about our overall health, longevity, and lifestyle factors, there is a totally different paradigm through which we should really be thinking about exercise. And so we’re going to talk about that today.

There are several different articles, several different studies that Dr. James Fisher has ready to share with us today about this topic. And we’re going to discuss all three of these and then share with you what these takeaways might mean for you as you consider exercising, as you consider what type of exercise that you wanna engage in depending on where you’re at in life.

So welcome Dr. James Fisher, how are you doing today?

I’m doing great, Amy, how are you doing?

Good, I’m super, super excited to discuss these with you, these three papers. And they’re kind of bombshell revelations, I think, for some of us. And so I’m going to throw the ball over to you and ask you to introduce this topic and where you’d like to start in discussing what these papers reveal about exercise.

Thank you so much, yeah. So the way I always frame this is these are some of the most important research papers of the last decade. And we’re kind of taking a step back in time here. This was actually published in 2015, but in my opinion, it didn’t really get the media presence that it deserved.

And I think it’s never really had that trickle-down effect to the lay population. And so I think it’s a really important discussion to have on this podcast. So the first paper we’re going to talk about talks about something called a fat but fit paradigm. And if anybody’s watching on YouTube, hopefully you can see the slides up here and the paper up here as well. And if you’re not watching on YouTube. Hopefully you can see the slides up here and the paper up here as well. And if you’re not watching on YouTube, then please do so to get some of the details. So this was Jeremy Lenecky and Paul Loprinzi out of Old Miss, so University of Mississippi.

And Sam Buckner was one of the PhD students. And what they did is they looked at some of the NHANES data. And NHANES is basically a national census looking at healthy activity and so forth. And they looked at what’s called… So there was about 2,750 adults over 50 years of age. And they looked at C-reactive protein. So C-reactive protein is a blood marker that can be indicative, it’s generally thought to be indicative of systemic inflammation, which is kind of an indicator of poor health in various forms. It might be disease, but it might also be kind of long-term health disorders such as arthritis or diabetes or high blood pressure and so forth. So if you ever have blood taken and your CRP levels are high or elevated, then that’s indicative of something not quite right within the body and long-term, obviously, that’s bad. And then the other thing they did is they looked at knee extensor strength.

So basically a simple test of lower body strength. And then they classified people based on their body mass index. So body mass index is a factor of height and body mass, and it’s quite easily calculated, normally done by GPs. It’s not a great marker, but it’s a good marker at a population level. And so they classified people as a normal weight and unfit, overweight and unfit, obese and unfit, and then normal weight and fit, overweight and fit and obese and fit. And by fit, what they mean is strong. So we often, when we’re talking in kind of general terms, we’ll often say, oh, this person is fit, but actually what they mean is this person was strong and that’s key in all of this. So effectively what they did is they looked at the number of people that died during this intervention, they looked at their CRP levels, and obviously people that had higher CRP levels were more likely to have died during this period. But what they found was really fascinating. So they effectively uncovered that compared to normal weight, unfit adults, overweight fit adults had a lower hazard rate for all cause mortality. Now, if I just pause for a second, you would think that the gold standard walking around would be somebody that’s of a normal weight, somebody that’s of a normal size. But actually what we’re saying here is that being overweight didn’t matter. In fact, it was more than negated if you’re strong. So if you’re fit, so actually engagement in strength training and improving strength more than combat being overweight or obese, effectively.

That is incredible. So what you’re saying here and what the study shows is that it’s better to be strong and a little bit overweight than not fit, not strong, and at a normal weight? Is that what you’re saying?

Yeah, absolutely. And to me, one of the key things is we often look at kind of all of these factors of a healthy lifestyle. We say, oh, I need to do strength training, I need to do cardio training, I need to change my diet, I need to, I don’t know, drop a dress size or a couple inches off my waist or all these factors.

And actually what this data kind of shows is that the only thing that really matters is being strong. And of course to get strong you engage in strength training. So you know, to me this epitomizes what the title of this podcast, that strength changes everything. Strength is the single biggest important factor in our life as far as healthy aging. That is amazing. One thing that I think about our clients that work out at our exercise coach studios who maybe do have a goal of losing weight, and there’s so many people out there with that goal. And what we try to educate people on is we want to lose fat, but maintain or gain muscle and strength.

And why this is so important is for our longevity, right? It is more important five years from today to maintain our muscle and to be strong than it is to drop weight. Because when we drop weight, oftentimes, especially with calorie restrictive dieting and things like that, we’re losing our muscle mass and our strength, right? And so what the study is saying is that that puts us at a higher rate for all-cause mortality five years from today, or even several, two years from today, if we’re losing our strength and our muscle mass in addition to body fat from a caloric restriction. It’s more important, even if we keep some of our fat, to add that muscle and add that strength, right? Because we are way healthier and we

are way less at risk for any all-cause mortality. Is that an accurate way to put that? That’s exactly an accurate way to put that. And in fact, you’ve touched on another paper that I’m not going to get into too much detail today, but that actually looked at something called body mass index and it related it back to something called muscle mass index. And it found that in older adults, so I think this was looking at 70 plus year olds, the people with the highest body mass index also had the highest muscle mass index. So the people with the highest body mass also had the highest amount of muscle mass. And muscle mass is a key marker to resist all-cause mortality. So people with more muscle effectively live longer or are harder to kill. I mean that’s the easy way to think of it. So yeah absolutely going on a diet and risking losing any amount of muscle is a bad thing. We’re far, far better to be a little bit overweight, but be strong and have that muscle mass.

That’s where I want us to consider what is the purpose of exercise? Especially, what is the purpose of strength training? And there are some immediate benefits of strength training. There are some sort of midterm benefits of strength training, we could say. And then there are long-term benefits, right?

And so why do we choose to strength train? Well, you know, those immediate benefits, a boosting of our mood, our are able to see some initial gains in our strength. Midterm, we’re putting our body at a better metabolic trajectory. We can maintain and add muscle mass, which puts our metabolism in a better state.

And then long term, we are reducing our risk of dying. And so it is so important to not think about exercise as a way to just get my body smaller, right? In fact, that’s actually counterproductive in so many cases. We want to, the most beneficial thing we can do is to preserve our muscle to get stronger because it’s going to help us live longer. Right, right, that’s exactly it. And as we move on, it’s the next study here. This is the same authors with a different PhD student. This is Scott Dankel that led this project this time. He effectively looked at the same concept, but does it carry over time? So what if we’re overweight or obese for a long period of time? So let’s have a look. This time they had 11,000 adults aged between 36 and 85 and they basically divided them the same way. But of course now we’ve got time as a factor as well, so there are eight groups. So this gets a bit tricky as we go through this, so bear with me. So there’s people that were physically active and are a normal weight now, and were a normal weight 10 years ago. There’s people that are physically inactive, but were a normal weight now and were a normal weight 10 years ago. Then we’ve got the same thing, people that were physically active now or physically inactive, but were, but are overweight now, but were a normal weight 10 years ago. And then we’ve got people that were physically active or inactive but were a normal weight 10 years ago and are overweight now and so on and so forth. So we’ve now got eight different groups and it’s interesting to look at it from this perspective. But obviously there’s 11,000 adults. So most of these groups had, you know, one or 2000 people per group. And what they found was that the overweight and obesity, whether it was now, or whether it was 10 years ago, played almost no role as a risk factor for all cause mortality. It was the groups where people were physically inactive that had a higher risk of all-cause mortality. So, again, it doesn’t matter if you were overweight 10 years ago and a healthy weight now or overweight 10 years ago and still overweight and obese now. It’s the fact that you’re physically strong that makes a difference to reduce your risk of all-cause mortality.

Wow.

Wow. Wow.

So, what you’re saying, I mean, would it be fair to just challenge listeners to say the measure of your health shouldn’t be the number on the scale per se. The measure of your health should be your activity, especially strength training activity, and how fit you

are.

Yeah, 100%. 100%. And instead of it being the number of the scale, it should be the number of the screen. So obviously the exercise coach, when they use exerbotics devices, there’s a force of the output that they’re reading and they can see their strength index. So actually that’s what they’re far more interested in.

Are they engaging in strength training? Are they engaging in this type of physical activity that we know is positive for their health through a number of different methods, including sort of myokine release, which we know are proteins that travel around the body and positively impact multiple different organs. But yeah, that’s the figure they should be looking at, not the figure on the, on the scales at all.

And if they see that typical trend or put on a bit of weight over, over a few years and, and so forth, there’s not a panic to get back to their, their weight that they were 10 or 20 years ago. It’s the engagement in strength training that will physically improve their health, not the decrease in their body weight. Okay that is so so encouraging I love that I love the one-liner it’s not the number on the scale it’s the number on the screen if you are an exercise coach client love that that is super super encouraging too.

Yeah and then as we move into the last paper that I want to talk about this is one of my favorite papers of all time to be be honest. This was led by Luke Van Loon’s group from the Netherlands and it’s titled, There are no non-responders to resistance type exercise training in older men and women. And again, this is the 2015 research paper. So a few of these papers are a few years old, but they’re key papers. So what they did is they had data for over 65-year-old male and females engaging in 12 or 24 weeks of resistance training, of supervised resistance training. And they had a number of outcome measures. So they had lean body mass measured by DEXA. They had type 1 and type 2 muscle fiber size measured by biopsy. They had maximal leg strength like we talked about in the previous studies. And they also had a physical function test, which was a chair rise test, so it sits a stand. And we’ve talked about that previously in one of my own research papers. And they had that measured at baseline and at 12 and 24 weeks. And then they report all the data and all the outcomes. But there’s a couple of key things that I want to talk about. So the first thing is they said that there’s a large heterogeneity in the adaptive response to prolonged resistance exercise. What that means is there’s a large variation. So we already know that some people will increase their strength a little bit that some people will increase their strength a little bit and some people will increase their strength a lot. Some people will change their muscle fiber size by a small amount. Some people’s muscle fibers will grow a larger amount. And some people’s lean body mass will change to a different degree as well. So, and some of this really is dictated by genetics more than any other factor. So we might look at some of these as maybe nutrition or maybe sleep or other stresses and so forth. But really, these are determined by our genetics. So if we want to change these, we just have to go back and pick different parents. That’s the only thing we can do. So there’s a different adaptive response and that’s key. It’s worth highlighting that. But the more interesting and the more exciting part

is that every single participant in the study showed a positive response in one, in at least one of those variables. And hence the title, there are no non-responders to the benefits of resistance exercise on lean body mass, on fiber size, on strength or function in the older population. And I’ll just read verbatim from the end of the conclusion that the author said, consequently, resistance exercise should be promoted without restriction to support healthy aging in the older population. Wow, so basically this is saying it’s impossible not to receive some benefit. Yeah, absolutely, and the reality is that this was only a handful of variables. There are far more variables that we all see positive adaptations in, whether it’s mental well-being, whether it’s other physical well-being, whether it’s fat loss, whether it’s reduction in our HbA1c levels, which is a blood marker that shows our blood glucose and shows our risk of diabetes and so forth. You know, none of those things were measured, but the fact that we’re seeing positive increases in at least one of these five outcomes means that everybody is making positive adaptations as a result of strength training. Now, one of the things outcomes means that everybody is making positive adaptations as a result of strength training. Now one of the things for me why this is so exciting is again linking back to what we’ve talked about we often engage in strength training with a view to a specific outcome. Many people think they want to increase their muscle size, many people are trying to reduce their body mass or their fat mass, many people are trying to reduce their body mass or their fat mass. Many people are trying to improve their physical function and so forth. And sometimes we can get disheartened if we don’t see the actual outcome that we want.

You know, if I go to the gym and all I really want are bigger biceps and I don’t get bigger biceps after a certain time, it would be easy to say, oh man, I’m just not going to bother anymore because it’s just not happening. But actually, what we’ve got to remember is all of the other positive health adaptations that are occurring, irrespective of the one that we’re most interested in.

Yes, it reminds me of the compounding effect of any healthy habit. Is that, um, how healthy you are today is really a function of what you’ve been doing every day over the last year, right? And even in the area of nutrition. If I eat really healthy today and I look for a certain outcome after one day and don’t see that, is that cause for me to stop eating healthy? No. Every day I eat healthy compounds upon itself, right? And changes me at a cellular level that some of those major external changes maybe that I’m looking to see are going to happen after repeated… It’s not what I do once, it’s what I do every day, right?

And so that’s what it reminds me of.

Yeah, I think that’s a great analogy. And I think that obviously habit forming, healthy habits are absolutely key. When it comes to nutrition, I always laugh when people talk about that they’re having a cheat day because they had one bad meal or they had one bad snack, and it suddenly turns into a whole cheat day. And I find it funny, you know, hold on, you had one bad snack, that’s okay. Go back to your healthy habits, get back on the wagon kind of thing. You know, where people say, oh, that’s it. That’s it. I’ve had one bad thing. I’m just going to have anything else I want today.

Well, to me, that’s akin to going out to your car and finding that you’ve got one flat tire and going and bursting the other three as well. You know, you don’t go that far. Okay, so one thing’s gone wrong, but you can fix it by following all the other healthy

habits that you’ve already got. Absolutely. And I love that reminder. And one other thing I want to touch on before we end the episode, you know, that you mentioned in this study is of no non-responders, is that our genetics really does dictate in some way which benefits we see first as an individual when we start strength training. So I may wish for, you know, outcome C, but my genetics make me prone to outcome A first. And, you know, what we’ve just said is we’re not gonna discount and throw outcome A out the window as a useless outcome when I’m really looking for outcome C. But can you talk a little bit more about some examples of that or why that is and how we should think about that in terms of sort of the benefits we see? What are some things that some people may be prone to see first compared to other people based on their genetics?

Yeah, absolutely. So physical strength and muscle size are two potentially connected markers. We’ve often thought that actually they’re very closely connected, that to get stronger you must get bigger or to get bigger you must get stronger. But actually they’re two quite different markers. And the ability to, for example, add muscle mass is quite limiting. And in fact, it’s historically been thought that our body doesn’t want to add muscle mass because it’s metabolically very, very expensive. So, you know, if we go back to kind of Neanderthal time, if I can’t eat a certain amount of calories, a certain amount of protein, maybe, then I can’t retain that muscle mass. So strength might be easier to add for some people compared to muscle mass. Whereas other people might find it quite easy to add muscle mass and may be limited

by certain genetic factors around strength. Other people may carry a certain amount of body fat or carry it in certain places. And we’ve obviously talked previously on episodes about body fat and body fat reduction and so forth.

And then of course there’s physical function, so how well we function as an adult may be related to our joint health as well as our muscular health. So there’s other various factors around there and we don’t all respond to life in the same way, to nutrition in the same way, to other habits that we might have in the same way, whether it might be sleep or stresses or so on and so forth.

We know that everybody’s individual. So our response to exercise is again, is really individual. And I think that that’s something that’s key to remember that our engagement and exercise is still having positive responses somewhere along the line, even if it’s something that we’re not specifically tracking.

CMH Exactly, yeah. So is that not true for everybody? So I’m going to ask you a follow-up question about the, evolutionarily speaking, that our bodies want to be as lean as we can, but as strong as we can, just based on the Neanderthal times, for example. During those times, we may not know when our next meal is coming. We may not know when our, and we need to be able to move quickly to chase the, the, the, what we’re hunting. Right.

Right.

And so it’s, it’s to our advantage to be strong and have a lot of stamina and a lot of power to sprint, for example, but not to be too large. And so, um, sometimes, you know, when we strength train, our muscles add density. So they’re stronger for the size that they are, but they’re not larger. I know that can vary man to woman as well, based on our hormones and things like that. But is that not true across the board or is that mostly true? Well, it is true. And I think if you think of a population level, that’s fine. But if we think within our tribe, within our societal tribe, remember there were some people who were hunters and maybe they were fast, and they were strong, and they could throw, and they could jump. And they had maybe a higher type two fiber typing, which is our general thoughts around kind of explosive movements.

But we were also gatherers, and we were also nomadic people that moved around a lot. So we still had to have, or some people within the tribe still have to have a high amount of stamina. So maybe they weren’t as fast or they couldn’t throw or jump or be as strong as the other people, but they could go for hours and hours and hours to gather food, or they could do exhaustion hunts where they might track an animal and just keep on its trail for 24, 48 hours. And they might even have not showed the same level of hunger or the same level of thirst as other people. They might have shown greater immunity to sleep deprivation. So a lot of it comes down to smaller genes and the way those genes are expressed as to how our body adapts and as to how our body can cope with different stresses. So it’s absolutely fascinating. Without everybody doing genetic typing and looking at their DNA and how certain genes are expressed, we really can’t know the intricacies

of how we will respond to exercise. And even then, we can say, well, there are still many psychological and health benefits associated with it. As a final touch on this, I briefly mentioned myokines before.

And myokines is the growing area of research over the last 10, 20 years that really is telling us that muscle is an active tissue. It’s effectively like a hormonal tissue. It’s sending off proteins around the body to positively impact all the other things, our brain, our liver, our kidneys, our lungs, and so on and so forth. So we just, there are some things that we just still don’t know, but we do know that there’s to some extent a large variation from one person to another, even though we all look almost the same. Yeah, well, and it just comes, it just comes back to the original point of strength training and why that’s just so beneficial. When you tap into your muscle, you are tapping into health. And so what these studies are saying is that it is so important to participate in strength training. It’s impossible not to receive a benefit from it.

In fact, it’ll help you avoid death and increase your lifespan, right? And it’s more important than almost any other health pursuit because of all of the ways that it benefits you. And so that is pretty exciting. And this is why we have this podcast, to let people know how exciting it is to consider life being strong and what that means, you know, what that means for you today and in the future. And so I’m pretty excited to hear about all of this. Any closing thoughts or remarks you have, you know, for our audience to sort of take away today after hearing these three things? Any, you know, closing thoughts that you want to leave people with? One really quick point, because we’ve talked a bit about something called all-cause mortality, which is death. So, you know, we all want to live longer, but it’s not just about adding life to our years of living long. It’s about adding health to our life or adding years to our life. So it’s a, it’s about adding quality of life as well.

And that’s a key variable that we know comes from strength training and comes from that physical function improvements.

Absolutely. I mean, when, when you think about living a long time, I don’t think there’s a lot of people out there that would say my goal is to live as long as I can, no matter how I feel, no matter how terrible I feel. What I think a lot of people want is to live as long as they can, feeling as good as they can all the way up until the end. And so that’s what it is.

Awesome. Dr. Fisher, thank you so much for these awesome research articles and breaking them down for us. I think there is a lot of very valuable insight here, and I hope if you’ve listened to this podcast today, it really lights your fire for how crucial it is to strength train and to stay strong above and beyond almost anything else. And also to encourage you that it’s not going to take very long to see some initial, incredibly meaningful benefits, even if you haven’t gotten started yet. It’s never too late. Just as little as 12 weeks, you can see very meaningful changes. And so it’s something that everybody should participate in. And we highly recommend, of course. So thank you so much, Dr. Fisher. And we will see you next time. Remember, strength changes everything. 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.

Join us next week for another episode. Here’s to you and your best health.