Stronger Muscles Longer Life: The Untold Value of this Accessible to All Anatomy

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It is no secret in 2025 and beyond that muscle is the organ of longevity. For you, if you're listening and you are a woman in perimenopause, postmenopause, or anything in between, which we call menopause transition, this is no surprise to you either.

My hope is that you are already lifting. No coincidence or accidents that our programs behind the scenes at Flipping 50 are called Stronger and Lifted.

And my guest today is an author of the book called Stronger, with subtitle of The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives. I don't think it's so untold anymore.

I think we are much more aware of it, but I want to unpack it all for any of you who've got any doubts.

So this is a longtime Vanity Fair contributing editor, Michael Joseph Gross.

He's published investigative reporting, essays, books about culture, technology, politics, religion, and business. And he was raised in rural Illinois, so from one Midwesterner, Iowa, to another, and now lives in New York City. This is going to be a fantastic episode. My hope You agree and you will share it because if we can help our peers, our family members, our friends, our colleagues do anything for their health that doesn't require a poke, a patch, a pill that is accessible to all of us, this would be it. How you get stronger and how stronger may just save your life.

Coming up.

I'm Debra Atkinson, and you're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness and menopause and beyond before you know to ask them. The goal to help accelerate your results with the science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman.

It's not just you, but it's the 3 generations that you influence.

My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause-and-beyond fitness membership in the world, Every week I interview experts behind the science of optimal hormone-balancing fitness and longevity and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy you want, need, and deserve.

Shall we talk about muscle? That's the topic of the day with my guest, who is a Vanity Fair contributing editor, and Michael Joseph Gross is here to talk a little bit about the contents, not so much about his book, but about the contents of the book and how muscle is the most important thing to you as you age. Thank you so much for joining me today, Michael. This is gonna be a great episode. Muscle is one of our favorite topics. So welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Debra. Really happy to be here.

And where in the world are you coming to me from? Are you in New York City right now?

Live from New York City. That's right. About 10 blocks south of the United Nations.

I do not know if you know this, but as I was reading your bio, I told listeners it was from one Midwesterner to another. So I knew that I was going to like you. So I'm an Iowa girl.

Ah, Illinois boy.

Yeah, exactly. Rural, I noted. So there's that.

That's right. How many, how many people in the town where you grew up?

1800.

Oh, 1700.

Oh, so I get you. I really get you. You dated your cousins and you kissed in a cornfield, right?

Yes, but kiss no cousins.

This is good. All right, you're way ahead. Okay, so as we're talking about the topic of muscle, and you have a new book and we'll kind of expand on it, but I'd love to expand on the the content of it, why this topic? I mean, you've written for Vanity Fair, you're a longtime contributing expert. What called you and when did that knock for you to do a book on strength and muscle?

I got into a stream of stories at Vanity Fair investigative stories about technology and national security. And so it led to some pretty dark and twisty places with online espionage and cyber warfare. And I decided that I needed to get out of my head and into my body. I decided I wanted to learn a sport that scared me. So I chose whitewater kayaking. Just, just learning it at a really basic level. But I knew I had to be stronger than I was before I got on the river. So I started working with a trainer more seriously than I ever had before. And it just really changed me inside and out. And I was just past 40 at this time. And I was, I was so blown away at what a difference it made to everything in my life. That I thought, why didn't I know about this? You know, like, how can I get to this age and never have seen anybody in my life go through this kind of transformation? And I also just wondered technically, like, what was it that was happening in my body? And there came a point where I realized, you know, I had built up these skills as an investigative reporter translating really technical topics for a broad audience. And I just realized I, I need to use these skills now to go deep on what makes me happiest and what I think I can share with other people that might give them a chance of being a little happier too. So I decided to write a big book about exercise. And in the beginning, it was an insane project. It was like all everything about all forms of exercise. But once I got into it, I realized that very specifically weight training, strength training was the thing that most people know the least about, that the fewest people do, and that would make the biggest difference in the most people's lives for the most limited amount of effort. So that's what I decided to concentrate on. And, um, I spent almost 10 years traveling around the world looking for the best experts, the most interesting doctors, athletes, historians, and figuring out how to weave their stories together into one big story that's also our story. You know, that would just kind of blow the doors open and show that the gym is a place for everyone. That, you know, the world would look really different if we— if the first person we thought of when we heard the word muscle was not some big young guy who had taken steroids, but your grandmother, because your grandmother is made just as much of muscle as any college athlete. She just hasn't activated it yet. And there's just a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of help standing between the older women of the world and the life-changing power of weight training.

Wow.

You know, if you were watching the video right now, and you may or may not be able to see all of it, I was fidgeting right now. I was reaching around because I needed my pen and I need my paper because I feel like we just had all the mic drops we can handle in one show. If you were listening carefully, you got them all. If you didn't, I'd like you right now to replay that and walk a few more steps while you're listening because that was gold. That was like the epitome of what we hope we're doing here. But as a writer and a reporter, Notoriously, I think there's always been this connection between, like, writers who run or runners who write. And I don't know which comes first, the chicken or the egg. Were you ever a runner or a distance athlete like that?

I guess it was freshman year in PE class when they made us run a mile. I, having never trained before, broke the school record for the mile. What? And so, so my PE teacher said, you're going to dress for track this season. But I ran so hard that I made myself throw up. Right. I didn't— I didn't know how to titrate the effort. So, you know, that was actually the off-ramp for me from athletics in a pretty final way until I was 40. I did have a gift for running and I do still enjoy it, but I find that the way the practical realities of my life in New York City make it a lot easier for me to have a satisfying exercise life built around the gym than built around running.

Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. And I use a saying here, you know, the children's book, if you give a mouse a cookie, or you give a moose a muffin or something like that. We like to start with, if you give a woman a weight, you know, it's not just about the strength outside and exteriorly and all the physiological things we're going to talk about that it does, but it's how it changes her internally. She walks differently into a room.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. There's a psychological concept called self-efficacy, which you've probably talked about on this show. It refers to a person's confidence in their abilities to do what they want to do in the world, basically. And the first study of self-efficacy in adolescent girls lifting weights was in the— I think it was the late '70s. It may have been the late '80s, but the findings were just off the charts. And when you look at social science research, even now, about the relationship between weight training and body image for men and for women, you find a big difference that's related to that concept of self-efficacy. For men, lifting weights improves body image because of subjective impressions of how they think they look. But for women, although those subjective impressions are important, It's the objective improvements in strength and endurance that are as or more important. And so what that comes down to is when men lift weights and they like to do it, it's mostly about how they look. When women lift weights and like to do it, it's not just about how they look, it's about what they can do.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

I so love that. And I think, you know, especially at this time, well, two times, two pivotal times. Adolescence, you know, major change. Your body is changing. You kind of feel out of control. But then menopause, your body's changing again, and it's like you're kind of watching it happen. It's like, wait a minute, I didn't actually choose this. But the reaction, the response, we can choose, and then we can control it a little bit more. And I, I'm so glad you led with that because I want to tie muscle and strength to, you know, all of the prevention and the treatment of disease that it can do. But I think the bottom line is, no matter how old you are— I tell a story where my mother was 87. She'd had a hip replacement, and she was on high cholesterol medication, high blood pressure. I mean, you look at her and she's relatively healthy for, you know, a woman of her age, and you wouldn't necessarily know. But many women, you know, are on thyroid and that and this and the other thing. But what she asked me— and I had long since stopped nagging anybody in my family because it was not panning out well for either of us, you know— but she said, you know, while you're here this weekend, could you do something to help me work on this? And she pats her belly, and I'm like, oh my God, it's never gonna end, it's never gonna be over, we're always gonna want that. And then I, you know, it dawned on me, I don't care what motivates somebody to start because I know they're gonna get the 2-for-1 that comes with it. They're going to get the rest. So for anybody who's listening who thinks it's vain to start because of X, Y, and Z, it's just your catalyst. It doesn't matter.

So, and once those functional changes begin to happen, it also recalibrates your whole sense of what strength is in relation to your identity. About a third of this book is structured around the life and work of Jan Todd. Now, Jan Todd, as you probably know, was a pioneer of women's powerlifting. She went on to become an academic historian. She helped found with her husband Terry, and she now runs the world's biggest academic archive of the history of strength and Strength Sports, and that's located at the University of Texas at Austin. But Jan, when she tells the story of what it was like to begin to set just world record after world record in deadlifting, squatting, bench pressing, all kinds of strength feats in the '70s and '80s, she talks about the struggle she had with gaining weight when she was gaining muscle initially. And then she says, and this is, this is what I'm getting at with that whole story. She says, my concerns about my appearance fell away in the face of my own goals.

Wow.

So you begin things begin to change, when your abilities in life change, the way you see yourself changes. And you kind of come to realize that who you are at the most basic level, like what your identity is, is your ability to act upon the world. And that is an ancient, ancient sense of identity that actually comes from Homer. That's what what the warriors in the Iliad were. They were their ability to act upon the world. And we are too.

So rich. And I think the interesting thing about menopause for a lot of women is they come back to that. They come back to a sense of what so many of us lost when we were about 5, 6, and 7. You know, until that point, we would run around with capes on thinking we could jump off couches and roofs, and, and we were so fast. And then all of a sudden, you know, we started looking around at how people might be looking at us, and, and it changed. You know, we lost that feeling powerful and feeling like we could do anything and started, you know, trying to shrink and be smaller and thinner, thinking that that was somehow better. And now I think we're kind of tired of it. We're just done. And I think we're all ready to be a little bit more powerful. Yeah, I love all that. So speak to me from a male standpoint, right? So on the other side, is it— of course there's andropause, right? There's, you know, it's not the same probably as when you were 20, but is there a change in the way males feel about themselves as they age. And, you know, they all have navigated toward stereotypically the strength training side of the gym. You know, the strength room is there, the cardio women, that's where they all hang out. You know, we fortunately, that's changing dramatically. Young women are filling the weight room and I love it.

But strength training equality.

Yeah.

So, so talk a little bit about for the male counterparts, because so many of the women listening are, you know, wishing or wondering, you know, who's the male counterpart of Flipping 50 is a very common question. And they want to know, how do I encourage my partner to get involved?

You know, that's, that's a great question. And it's actually a different book. I didn't, I didn't go much into that. I was, I was more interested. I was honestly more interested in how women age than I was in how men age. Um, and my own experience has been that, um, uh, I mean, I'm in better shape, I'm stronger. Uh, I, I would, I would be very surprised if my, um, uh, anabolic hormone levels aren't higher now than they were in my 20s and 30s when I was mostly just sitting at a desk or sitting on airplane seats.

Wow.

So, you know, there's a huge amount of— we don't have— men don't have the drop-off in hormone levels that women have, the precipitous drop that happens with menopause. I think that men have more control over maintaining or building the anabolic hormones, um, just based on, you know, mostly activity, to some extent diet, uh, than, than women have, uh, over, over the, the menopause.

Agree. So in regards to the connection between strength training, if we look at that as, you know, muscle is medicine, exercise is medicine, specifically, we could look at the kind of medicine you need to be taking is strength training to build that muscle in prevention and treatment of illnesses. Connect it to some. Look at, I mean, what would you say is which ones really stand out as, you know, these could be prevented, or definitely strength training is a part of treatment for these illnesses and diseases.

Hey, this is Debra Atkinson, and there's one thing that you can't do in the gym at your age, and that's get all the protein that you need. You've got to do that in the kitchen. To make it easy for myself to not only get the protein but the fiber, fruits and veggies that I want daily, I started drinking a smoothie a day over 30 years ago. When I realized all the junk, the sugar and the extras that you don't want hiding in most protein powders or pre-made shakes, I finally caved in after years of saying I'd never ever ever sell supplements. Look, stop skipping, skimping, and sabotaging yourself in the morning and after workouts by always being prepared. Protein plus fiber kill cravings and boost satiety and build muscles and a strong future. Use code PODCAST for 10% off your first order at flipping50.com.

I want to answer that with a story. I want to take you to Australia right now. I want to go to the northern suburbs of Sydney. I know you just want to go to Bondi Beach, but you're going to have to get on a train and come with me because we're going to go to a little development in a suburb. There's a piano school in there. There's a couple of other little business offices. And then if you take the elevator upstairs, you walk into a doctor's office that is basically a 2,000-square-foot gym and a couple of little examination rooms. And the doctor who's there seeing patients is Maria Fiadoroni-Singh. She's a geriatrician. She's a professor at the University of Sydney Medical School. She is a world-renowned, uh, uh, researcher in sport medical exercise science, um, and sports medicine. And she's the person who discovered that if you work at high intensity, if you lift weights that feel heavy to lift, even if you're 90, even if you're 100, you can get basically the same strength response and build relatively the same amount of mass as younger people. And so she followed a course of research. She's followed a course of research for 35 years since she had that breakthrough paper. She's been studying how weight training can treat or prevent basically any chronic disease that you can name. So the patients who come in there, they have an average of 4 chronic diseases. They're on an average of 5 medications when they first come to see her. And let's take, for example, a woman named Alice who was a 74-year-old grandmother, and she'd just been diagnosed with osteoporosis. And she couldn't believe what hit her because she thought, I mean, she took her walks every day. She was active. She worked in the garden. Um, she thought, and she paid careful attention to what she was eating. She just thought she was doing everything right. But, um, the doctor who diagnosed her osteoporosis said, I want to put you on Prolia or some other drug like that right away. And she decided that she was going to go see this other doctor. I forgot to tell you the name of this medical practice, which is— that just tells you everything you need to know. It's called the Center for Strong Medicine.

Okay.

And, and the Center for Strong Medicine, uh, prescribes drugs. You know, it's a traditional medical office. Maria Fiataroni Singh is an MD, but she also prescribes exercise and specifically weightlifting exercise as part of treatment for every single patient, no matter what disease they come in with, because there's now really good clinical trial evidence that weight training can treat I mean, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, blood pressure, depression, insomnia, anxiety. It reduces falls risk. It treats osteoarthritis. It can be helpful in obesity and overweight. I'm leaving out about 20.

Cancer. Hard to say.

Thank you.

Blood pressure, cholesterol.

Yeah.

Lipids. Yes. But getting back to Alice, there are a few conditions. Osteoporosis is a big one. Depression is a big one. Once you get a little further down the road, frailty. And dementia, Alzheimer's disease, that weight training treats in a way that nothing else can treat. So for Alice's osteoporosis, Maria prescribed weight training and her T-score changed so much within the year that she no longer fit the diagnostic criteria. There's another doctor, Belinda Beck, in Brisbane Debra Atkinson, who you may even have had on here, who has in head-to-head comparisons of a weight training and jumping program versus Prolia, she has found that the exercise improves bone density more than the drugs for the majority of people.

With only positive and no negative side effects.

That is right.

Huge distinction.

Yeah, that is right.

Yeah. You know, and I think I want to point out to everybody listening here, because as much as I think you've heard me say this before, you've heard it before, so many I find have not. And I find that still today, some doctors are even telling patients, well, you can't increase bone density after a certain point. And I'm like, well, we're not going to probably put you back to industry standards where you were at 30 or go above that. But we can get you to that again. If you've had losses, we can put you back in normal bone density, healthy bone density stats. We've seen that happen. And the big difference for many of our listeners who may be over 50, over 60 and 70, that in the '90s, late '90s, when we first began talking about this, it was about '95, it became mainstream. We started talking, we had to, we had to define osteoporosis. It wasn't a household word. But we all thought, once you're diagnosed, we're going to bubble wrap you. We don't want you doing anything, almost anything, like don't rotate, don't turn, you know. And so, so much today that women are almost afraid. And Belinda Beck has really just broken down the barriers to— and we're not saying to anyone who may be at high risk, you have a really high risk factor, that primarily is you've already had one, right? You need to be under supervision and make sure that somebody is watching your form and looking at where are you at risk. But we now know the difference potentially between you today and you yesterday is simply that you you know you have osteoporosis. So, so can you do many of these things?

Yes.

And can you do it if you have osteopenia? My answer to somebody is almost always, you need to do it more than somebody who doesn't know. Yes.

Right.

Yeah.

And at the same time, thinking about middle-aged women as the ultimate fitness influencers, as you so often say, yeah. We need to be, all of us, thinking about how to pay this forward, because if we're really serious about reducing osteoporosis on a population level, the most important thing we could do is help our girls to be lifting weights and doing a lot of irregular, um, impact exercise, bring bone density up to a higher level. In childhood and adolescence, because if we could just increase that by 10%, we would reduce the risk of fractures in later life by more than 50%.

It's quite a statistic.

Yeah.

Now, now, if I were a financial planner and I told you that if you just increased your savings for your kid by 10% per year and you would reduce the risk of your kid ending up in poverty when they were in old age, you'd do it in a heartbeat. You'd scrimp and you'd save and just make, you know, like what, what does it take to shave 10% off? Just like, like don't go to restaurants a couple of times during the month. Right?

Right.

Cut the vacation by 2 days. But for some reason, we still can't bring girls into the story of a life of strength because we haven't accepted it fully for ourselves, you know? And a huge part of that is just not having the companionship of really accessible examples. Um, women are still so much less likely to lift weights than men are. Best data on participation says that if you looked at everybody in every gym in the United States today, 70% of them would be men.

Truth. And something like 80% of women are still not doing the minimum 2 times a week of resistance training.

Yeah.

In, in 2025, while we're all talking about it, or we feel we are. And I think to all of my health and fitness pros listening, because I know you're out there too, you know, we think everybody's lifting because our antennas are up. And we look around us and that's who we're surrounding ourselves with. But the truth is we're still passing around the same 20%, you know, or there's some are coming in and we're— there's attrition. And I, I want to ask you this, Michael. So I'm not here to play devil's advocate, but I'm going to kind of play devil's advocate because you really are an advocate for lifting heavy. And, and some of the, like, superhero women you've, you've talked about. And tell me if I'm wrong, but I think the message lifting heavy, you know, are we going down the wrong path and making it intimidating for that 80% if we talk about that too much? What are your thoughts on that?

Um, one of the things that my book, uh, does is it follows the trail of, of evidence and experiment around lifting heavy. And there are some results that you get from lifting heavier weights. And again, that means heavy for you. It doesn't mean making a grunting effort. It means, it means doing something that is tough, but achievable. And so, you know, that is always relative. And it's also cyclical. You can't do that all the time. You have to build up to it. And then once you're doing it, you have to take breaks from it. You gotta, you know, gotta, gotta take your foot off the gas so that you can then recover and continue to get stronger.

To all of my women out there who are Type A's and pushers. Notoriously, this is one of the things I think that stops women in their tracks. We are known for, you know, we'll get it done. Like, we'll just get it done. We will hold our urge to go to the bathroom so the kids and everybody else is taken care of. We'll, we'll push through. We'll lose a little sleep. We'll get up early. And a lot of times I see this happening with our, our membership. They push themselves to exhaustion and then will say something like, and they say it once because I hear it and I'm like, no, no, we're going to stop that right now. But like, I had to rest like 3 or 4 days before I could even think about doing it. I'm like, no, no, stop. Something else needs to happen before we come back to this. But, you know, I think we need to hear that in what you just described is periodization. We have cycles of we work hard and we don't, or we're in season and we're out of season, or we have a few weeks where we're building, but then we have a recovery week. Week, you know, and I think that is responsible exercise that's not going to get you hurt. It's going to keep you higher in energy and get you the strength gains and the energy that you want. But I think we can never forget the reason we do this is so we live better, not so we have selfies in the gym. Right, right.

And what you've just put your finger on is a really fundamental shift that I think we need to all be making when we think about muscle and strength training. We so often think about these things in binary terms. So if we're talking about lifting heavy, we're talking about lifting heavy, but part of lifting heavy is lifting light. You know, like this is, Lifting heavy is a paradox. It's not just, it's not like a power move. Lifting heavy is an art and it takes a great deal of delicacy to be able to pull it off.

Brilliant.

So, so the things you'll get from lifting heavy that you won't get from only lifting light all the time bone density, less depression, less risk of dementia, and, and better metabolic health. Intensity is, is really sort of a key factor in blood sugar control. So it has to be part of what we're doing, but it can't be all that we're doing.

That was so beautifully said. And I think the distinction is for everybody when you're starting, you're, you're— we all have to start with light, right? We have to onboard at a lighter, and then gradually we progress to slightly heavier. And with weight training, it has an inverse relationship. This is always confusing to a beginner that we start with more repetitions and then we do fewer, because the point is, when you think about it, something you can only pick up and put down 5 times is much heavier than something you can do 20 times. So when you, when you get to that, but we'll all find that there's potentially, we reach our line on that continuum at a different spot, maybe because of a history of an injury or a trauma that occurred with a certain joint. But finding that is an important distinction to make. Where is it? And if you find it in one joint, it doesn't mean all joints are covered that way. Your lower body may be able to lift more because there's nothing wrong there. That shoulder bothers you here, so upper body may not be able to lift as much. But finding that space is kind of each of our own jobs to do that.

I want to tell you another little story that for the first couple of minutes is going to make you just like like wonder what the heck I am doing. But, but, but it's— it is a translation of what you just said that to me is indelible. And it's really one of the most important things I learned in the whole process of writing this book. It's a story about an ancient athlete, a wrestler whose name was Gerenos. Now, this story comes from the one and only long piece of writing about athletics that we have from the whole ancient world. We know that there were dozens, if not hundreds, of athletic training manuals about all kinds of things. There was a whole athletic training manual about different kinds of sweat. But But they're all lost except for this one book called the Gymnasticus of Philostratus. It's from, I think, the 3rd century in the Roman Empire. And Philostratus tells a story about this wrestler, Garenos, who was a great wrestler. He was an Olympic champion. And after he won victory at Olympia, he decided to celebrate by going on a bender to end-all benders. He just got drunk and he stayed drunk for days. Um, but then it was time to show up at the gym, and he shows up to work with his coach, and his coach is not happy. His coach decides he's gonna teach this kid a lesson, and he's gonna put him through a really hard workout. And Garanos is just like a type a mother of 3 who's going to get it all done no matter what. He's going to— he's going to hold it, not go to the bathroom, finish, finish the workout, make the coach happy as if the coach were his kid. And he pays the ultimate price for that. In the middle of this workout, Garanos dies. And Philostratus tells this story to teach the difference between good training and bad training. He says a good trainer improvises exercise, or a good trainer chooses exercises improvised all for the right time. And the word he uses for time there, the Greek word is kairos, spelled K-A-I-R-O-S. And kairos is a really difficult word to translate, but it basically means doing the right thing at the right time. And that stands in contradiction to bad training, which is following the formula, always following the recipe, having the idea that heavy training always has to be heavy training. So there's a whole, I mean, there's like 150 pages of this book are about athletics and medicine in ancient Greece and what those traditions, how those traditions shaped our experience and our experience of our bodies on an everyday basis, even today. But if you forget everything else from that whole 150 pages, if you just remember the word Kairos, and think about doing the right thing at the right time, doing what the realities of your body today say you need to do, then you've learned what you need to learn about training. Now, you know, you can easily take that as an excuse to just go easy on yourself, but I think we can all treat ourselves and each other as grown-ups who, you know, will really want to do the right thing for ourselves and aren't afraid of doing hard and take Kairos as an invitation to step into the fuller version of ourselves, step into the kind of strength that really is our identity and is just kind of there waiting for us to claim it.

So good. So good. So Michael, would you give the full title of the book, please?

Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives.

So good. And where can listeners get their hands on that?

Anywhere at all. Go to your local bookstore, go to Barnes Noble or Amazon, any of the online booksellers. It's everywhere. And if it's not in your local bookstore, then you better tell them to get it, get it on the shelves right away.

And where can they find and stalk you? Because our listeners are known for doing that.

Oh, please. Come, come follow me on Instagram. It's Michael Joseph Gross there. And my website is michaeljosephgross.com. Got a lot of links and cool stuff there too.

So, so excited to get my hands on this book. And I'm looking forward to the next one. I am guessing you have one roaming around in your head. Do you know what it is?

I've got a couple. One of them is about a four-footed species and another of the— I feel like we've just exhausted the possibilities of humanity with stronger. And then the other one is about a feature of the landscape that we all love. And, uh, and I think we all want to know a little more about. Hmm.

Very cool. Very intriguing. Thank you so much for your time today.

What a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you, Debra.

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