What You’re Getting Wrong About Exercise with Sal Di Stefano | 1134 | Dave Asprey

And what is the single biggest fitness mistake people make?

Oh, boy.

They don't start where they're at. They go from not exercising to, I'm gonna go five days a week. They start working out in a motivated state of mind, which is not permanent. You're going to overestimate your ability. You're gonna overestimate your ability to maintain consistency. And you just do too much. I managed gyms for years and I saw it happen all the time. People come in and just overdo it right out the gates and. And we'd lose them three months later.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is a fun episode because I'm recording it live here in South Bay area in California. My old stomping grounds at the Mind Pump Media, social media set, studio, recording room, whatever you want to call this place. That's because I'm interviewing style. That's because I'm interviewing Sal D. Stefano. Thank you, Sal D. Stefano. You Italians. What the hell?

Everybody says distefano. But you said Sal, right?

Sal Di Stefano.

You got it.

There we go. All right.

I was gonna say, hey, I don't know why I feel like I saw like godfathers or something. I'm like, Stefano. Anyway, my bad.

Sal.

It's actually really fun to talk to you because in the world of biohacking, when I was like, what groups am I trying to pull together? What are the people who are best at controlling the human body, controlling their own biology? You have the longevity guys like me. You've got the neuro brain guys in special forces, and then you've got bodybuilders and powerlifters. It's like the very best of the best. Oh, yeah. I want to remove this much fat, do this with this hormone. And maybe the most edgy is that is in that area even more edgy than some of the longevity stuff when you look at the history of what people have been willing to do for body building. So you're a cool guy because starting out as 14 year old who's skinny, saying, I'm going to get a little bit fit. And at 19, you're a major top trainer. And then at age 28, you start mind Pump Media. And so you've been like growing a meaningful business all around this aspect of biohacking and fitness and health. So I want to dig in on things you've learned and especially what you've learned about resistance training because you wrote a big book on It, Yeah.

So my passion is really about helping people through fitness. So fitness was my favorite hobby. Now I started personally working out because I was insecure about my body. So I had some body image issues. I felt like I was too skinny. Started lifting weights, fell in love with it because it was something I could do to change myself, really engulf myself and everything I could learn about strength training and supplements and diet. I even read old Soviet studies on herbs and supplements are awesome, aren't they? Well, you know, you, you mentioned, you know, bodybuilders and strength athletes, the strength sports, I mean, they had, you know, massive government funding during the Cold War because you had the Soviets versus the US and the Soviets, their studies were incredible on way better how to develop. I mean, and when the Iron Curtain came down, their strength coaches came over. And then, now the whole world has benefited from some of the stuff that they, that they studied, but they studied everything from peptides to hormones and different types of training, programming and diet. And the bodybuilders. Bodybuilders are just the, they're the experimenters of the strength training world. What athletes now use for performance enhancement. Steroid. You know, bodybuilders did way before we talk about anabolic steroids is just one of them. There's many hormones and compounds that they experimented with. And I always found that very fascinating. Now I personally, for my clients, really worked with the everyday, average person who just wanted to become fit and healthy. And so that's where I focused a lot of my intention, my attention when it came to my career. Personally, I love learning about that, that fringe stuff. I always thought it was very fascinating. Like I remember learning about there's a compound from Dynamite that bodybuilders found burned a lot of body fat, but also could potentially kill you. Just to give an example of some of the, you know, dnp.

Oh, dnp.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. So anyway, it's just, it's a fascinating space, but where I really put most of my efforts was trying to figure out how to get the average person to become fit and healthy and to stay consistent. In the beginning of my career, it was how to get people results. But halfway through, I realized that I needed to spend more time on figuring out how to get people to keep those results. People lose weight all the time, but everybody gains it back. People start a workout program, but then they stop. People change their diets and then they go back. And so the back half of my career was really figuring out how can I take the average person and help them become consistent with something that improves their health and fitness, at least on the journey, or at least considering it, and doing something that is both effective but sustainable. And so that became my passion for a long time. And I wrote a book on strength training because of all forms of exercise on a time per time comparison, apples to apples, the returns you get on the time you spent with strength training, all things being equal, just far surpass any other form of exercise. In fact, it's the most perfectly aligned form of exercise for modern life. If you look at the ills of modern life, from inactivity to hormone disruption to access to food all the time, strength training is really perfectly positioned. And so the book I wrote was the Resistance Training Revolution, because I believe that we're on the cusp of this exercise revolution where strength training becomes adopted as the main form of exercise, surpassing cardio, which is how everybody believes you need to work out to become fit and healthy.

I kind of look at cardio as like the vegan diet. Like everyone says you should do it, they all try to do it, they all get weak and start whining. And if you look at strength training, you get meaningful results for it. Like you get if you eat a steak, but you don't get if you eat a fake steak. And I'm a little angry that when I was a teenager and I was really desperate to lose weight, that I bought a Cannondale and became a roadie and I'd ride 20, 30 miles a day in Albuquerque. I never lost any weight doing that. And. But I should have. But maybe it's because I just ate one potato chip too many. And that sort of thinking, it almost feels like self abuse, like I'm going to malnourish and like overstress myself. And if you want to get VO2 max, it'd be cardiorespiratory fitness. I'm all over doing that. I just think endurance cardio is bad for you over time.

Well, it's. If any form of activity done appropriately, we have to say appropriately.

Right.

Applied appropriately, meaning for the individual, the right intensity, duration, whatever. And there's a lot of factors that influence that sure are better than nothing.

Okay, that's a fair point.

But you have to. The human body is an adaptation machine. And the way we adapt, a lot of it's been influenced over how we evolve. If you're constantly sending a signal to your body that says, I'm moving a lot, I don't need strength, and I'm also consuming a little, your body adapts to become more efficient. It's no different than an AI car that changes its engine and its fuel efficiency based on your driving habits. So If I'm driving 300 miles a day at five miles an hour, you know, my car's going to become extremely efficient with gasoline. It's not going to be very fast and powerful, but it's going to become very efficient. There was a study done that I quote all the time because it was one of the first of its kind where they studied modern hunter gatherers, the Hadza tribe, right. And they went down there and through really good, sophisticated testing, were able to test their metabolic rates. And what they found was that these modern hunter gatherers, okay, who they move all the time in comparison to the average person. I mean, hunting and gathering is far more active than modern life. Okay? No electronics. Hunting is like wounded animal. Run after it until it gets tired, drag it back, gathering. Even the resting positions are like in a squat, right? So even the resting positions are active in comparison to ours. They were burning similar amounts of calories to the average Western couch potato. And that makes perfect sense if you understand evolution. Like, yeah, if I don't need much strength and I'm moving a lot and there's not a lot of food, which was how we evolved, my body learns how to burn less calories. And so I essentially teach my to run off less and less and less and less calories, effectively slowing my metabolism down. Now, strength training sends a very different signal, especially when you combine it with adequate nutrition, right. Protein and nutrients. And strength training, which strength training doesn't burn a lot of calories an hour. Strength training in comparison to an hour of cardio burns far less calories.

Okay?

But the signal it sends is we need strength, we need strength, we're in danger. We need more muscle and more strength. Oh, and by the way, we're getting adequate nutrients. So don't worry about becoming less efficient with calories. And so what your body does is it says, oh, that's the priority. Let's build more muscle, let's get a faster metabolism, let's speed up our metabolism. Now, there's data, there's people that will say, oh, the science shows a pound of muscle only burns this many calories or whatever. The human metabolism is far more complex than that. Way more complex. It's actually the second most complex thing that we've identified is mammalian metabolism.

Right.

The human brain being the most complex. And your body can become more or less efficient with the same amount of lean body mass. If you send it a certain amount of. If you send it the Right signals, the right stimulus and you move it towards building muscle. Your body learns how to burn more calories, you get a faster metabolism, you get more muscle, you become more insulin sensitive. And then the part that a lot of people don't, that aren't necessarily aware of, is the environment that your body needs to produce to build muscle through hormones is a hormone profile that most people are looking for. So if you want to send a signal that tells your body to have a more youthful hormone profile, which is also known as an anabolic hormone profile, strength training, adequate nutrition, good sleep does that. And a lot of people don't know that. So you get a lot of people trapped like you were, where they, oh, I need to lose weight, I gotta go burn calories, I gotta do this manually. Oh, and I gotta eat less. And initially you'll lose some weight, but your body will adapt, you'll plateau. And then you're left with this, eat less, move more. Maybe you say, okay, I'm gonna do this even more. So now I'm working out five days a week and I'm eating 1500 calories. And you lose a little bit more weight and then you plateau again and you're like, what am I gonna do now? Keep eating less, keep moving more, and what happens if I miss a week?

You can't do it. Plus you feel like crap all the time too.

Yes. Because that type of activity, when you're constantly telling your body to become efficient with calories, it is an anti active tissue form of stimulus.

Right.

Strength training is proactive tissue, pro muscle. The side effect of which being, or the, you know, offset effect being fat loss. When I'm going anti tissue, people listening might be like, what? That sounds crazy. No, that it's super. The data on this is super clear. If you diet and do nothing, or if you diet and do cardio, half the weight, almost of the weight that you lose is muscle. Now your body's not burning the muscle, but it's paring it down, it's adapting so you end up smaller, same flabbiness, but now with a slower metabolism and probably a worse hormone profile. And if you follow that long enough like you probably did, you start to really feel terrible.

Oh, just monstrously, terribly awful all the time.

Whereas strength training, you know, you hear a lot of biohackers. I love the fact that you're talking to me because you're the guy that started it all. A lot of biohackers like to talk about mitochondrial health.

Right?

Improving the health of your mitochondria Build some muscle. Build some muscle. One of the most effective ways you can improve mitochondrial health and insulin sensitivity. You've now just increased your capacity to store glycogen. Muscle is very insulin sensitive. Strength training increases androgen receptor density. You don't even have to get more testosterone. If you build muscle, you're more sensitive to the testosterone that you currently have. But you probably will raise it.

You probably need to do both.

Well, my point is it's one step closer.

It'll make what you have go further.

That's right. That's right.

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There was an interesting study they did on testosterone levels and muscle building. Of course, this was all within range of what would be considered okay or healthy. Not the range what you would go to the doctor and get. But I think the range cutoff was like, like 4:50 to like 700 or something like that total. And the free was pretty good. And they found that the testosterone levels were not a great predictor of muscle growth. It was the androgen receptor density that was a much better predictor.

That makes a Lot of sense.

Yeah. So it's just, it's a form of exercise that hasn't been sold well, unfortunately. Definitely not to women. People don't view it as a longevity tool. They're starting to, but they haven't for a long time.

It's one of the most important longevity tools, at least to live as long as you're supposed to. So it doesn't look like exercise has any ability to extend your life, but it does have the ability to keep you from being sick when you're old.

Right.

And so I, I kind of take exception when you see guys like Peter Attia saying like the number one longevity thing you can do is exercise. It's actually no, Peter's not a longevity doctor. He's a diet your normal age doctor. But be happy before you die. And I support that. But it's not what we're doing, which is we're extending human lifespan by 20, 30, 40 years. That's where the new science is at. And do you need muscle mass to do that also? Yes, you do. But I would argue that exercise isn't the most important thing for longevity.

But it's important it is, because here's the comparison that I'll use.

Right.

If you were to look at a bunch of vitamin D deficient people and then you gave them vitamin D, you would say vitamin D is a miracle drug. The reality is you're comparing what's normal to unhealthy. The reason why strength training is connected to longevity is not because of its magical effects, but rather because it's offsetting all the negative crap that you've been doing. So because we're inactive, we're not lifting heavy things, we don't eat properly, we're weak and brittle. If you get old, weak and brittle, you're gonna die sooner than you're supposed to. Strength training allows you to live as long as you're supposed to. So it's not going to backing up what you're saying. I don't think it's gonna, it's gonna take you past your limit, but it'll prevent you from going short of it.

Right.

And you don't want to be unable to move when you're older. So I'm all about having adequate muscle mass for metabolism.

Yes.

And functional movement.

Yes. Right.

Those are both necessary for you to live to a ripe old age of 87. And if you want to live to 187, it's going to take actual longevity science in conjunction with exercise and good food and all that.

Totally.

And I I think it's a bit scary right now that, that Peter and a couple others are saying, well, exercise is all we can do because there's no hope of extending human life. Actually, no, we're doing it. There's so much magical science, which means you're going to be able to continue maintaining muscle mass when you're 120. And right now you see a few people in their 80s, even 100, who have meaningful muscle mass. And look at guys like rfk. The guy's like, he's totally got muscle and he's doing pull ups and push ups in a way that's unprecedented for someone who's 70.

You know, you mentioned movement. You know, that reminds me of a point I like to make with strength training, is that it's been. There's this myth around building muscle mass and strength that it can cause loss of mobility. And you get tight mobility is range of motion with strength and stability. So you can be very flexible but weak. That's instability. That's like a baby.

Yep.

So as you get older, one of the best mobility tools you could have is just to not lose strength or, or build some strength. It allows you to keep moving through these deep ranges of motion. Reach up and grab something at the top of the cupboard or, you know, squat down and stand back up or get up off the floor without having somebody help you. That's where mobility comes from, not from flexibility. People think flexibility. Flexibility is a component of mobility, but without strength, it's, it's actually quite. It's instable.

Oh, it's totally true. If you're so flexible you just bend over backwards and you can't get back up, you did it wrong.

That's right.

And functional movement is something that I've been very interested in since I wrote the first book on biohacking back in the Bulletproof Diet. And I talked about some of the very basic things you could do, like, you know, measure your arm length when you're bending over past your toes. But it's been kind of a dark art. And there's people who are experts in functional movement. Guys like Kelly Sarrit. I've talked about it. And right now we're getting to the point where we can use AI to help do functional movement assessments. Because if someone's 50 and they look like they're reasonably healthy, but their functional movement.