Mobility Secrets for Stronger Aging

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What do you think the biggest myth people believe about aging bodies after 50 is?

Oh, I think by far the biggest myth is that age is just an inevitable decline. And there's nothing you can do about it. And I think that myth has been believed for years and years and years. And yeah, people think that, oh, when you get older, you just get stiff, you get weak, you lose muscle mass, you get arthritis, and that's just how it has to be. And you're either lucky or you're not, and we don't have any influence over it, which of course we know now is a total lie. And there's a lot you can do to remain strong and healthy and mobile. And just because our cells are aging over time doesn't mean that our function has to go downhill. And the other thing that I think people get wrong is they think, well, even if we can do something about it, surely that's gonna take me, you know, 5 hours every week in the gym. I'm gonna have to like take up a new full-time job to maintain myself.

I'm gonna have to lift heavy stuff.

Absolutely. And again, none of that is true. You can do it with some really simple steps at home.

I'm glad you're saying this and everybody's gonna get these steps because I, I like to say challenge your muscles instead of lift heavy things.

Yes.

Because I feel like we are scaring people away from the very thing they need by showing grandma deadlifting her weight.

Yeah, I could not agree more. I think that's so, so important. And there was, I mean, if we go right back to the '80s, the craze was like cardio, cardio, cardio.

Oh honey, I know that was my, like, that's when I was in college and I was an aerobics instructor before I became a personal trainer.

Exactly. And we know now that even though cardio's not bad, that's not the thing we should be doing to stay strong and mobile. But then I think the pendulum tipped really far the other way. It's like everyone needs to lift heavy, and we know that lifting heavy is good for us, but if you're just getting started, it's super intimidating. But there's research now showing that you don't actually have to pick up heavy weights as long as you are challenging your muscles.

Mm-hmm.

You can improve your strength, your muscle mass, and your bone density.

So you say many people aren't aging, they're actually deconditioning.

Yeah.

Okay, explain what you mean by that.

So I think it's important to define what deconditioning means. And deconditioning is basically just taking away the stimulus that your body needs to stay strong and mobile because our bodies are ruthlessly adaptive in both directions. Okay? If you strength train, you'll get stronger, your body responds. But the opposite also applies. If you don't do very much, you'll get weaker and stiffer. Very quickly. Now these symptoms of weakness and stiffness, people just blame them on age. Mm-hmm. But really what's happening is they've just taken away that stimulus that was keeping them strong and keeping them well muscled. And that's the reason they're suffering with these, in inverted commas, age-related symptoms, not just because of their birthday.

Now, what do you think about the medical system and how they handle these things like, you know, joint pain, osteoarthritis, et cetera? I mean, do you feel like they could be normalizing some of this problem?

100%. And I mean, I've been through probably 150 consultations where a patient's come in and said, my doctor told me this was just due to my age. Everyone's got arthritis. There's nothing I can do. I just have to learn to live with it now. But then of those 150, probably about 130 of those, we've been right through the process, strengthened the person up, and hey presto, their symptoms have improved or in fact disappeared. So it wasn't age, and it's actually a damaging and harmful myth to tell someone that this is just what you've got to expect now and that it's hopeless, basically, because it takes away their hope.

Yeah.

So I'm not blaming the, the practitioners themselves because they're under a heck of a lot of pressure. They often don't have the time in the consultation to actually fully address the mechanics of that person, and maybe they're not even the right person to do it.

I mean, think about, you know how they always talk about, uh, Physicians having 1 hour of nutrition.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, how many hours of exercise physiology did they have?

Probably even less.

No, they had none. There is none. So you look at it and go, and then you're supposed to be able to prescribe exercise? And then you prescribe exercise and you say, do gentle movement, which no one knows what that means anyway, right? So I see that as a big issue is it's just knowing who to refer to.

Yeah, definitely.

Right, that's important.

Yeah, and you touched on a really important thing there, which is that People don't know what gentle movement means. This is why I think specifics are really important. So it's why whenever I try and give a recommendation, I'll always put specifics on it as well if I can. So to tell people, this is an example, this is exactly what you should do step by step. This is how long it's gonna take and this is what it should feel like. And I feel like that is one of the reasons that the content I make resonated. Yeah. Because it's actionable.

I love that because here's what I'm seeing out in the world that I think is problematic. I understand why it is and I understand that science is nuanced, you know, I spent years in graduate school in exercise science. However, I also know that people can't do anything with nuance. And that if you don't give them specific things to do, if you say, "Hey, you can do this, this, or this," they will do none. And so if you just say, "This is where you start. Just do this," they can actually do that. Then you can build on it. So I love that you're giving them super actionable. So if the joint pain and the osteoarthritis, all these things aren't due to aging, what are they due to?

Yeah, it's a great question. One of the reasons we can say that osteoarthritis or the pain from it is not just because the joint is wearing away is because we have these wonderful studies now where they take big populations of pain-free people. So people with no pain at all, they put them through MRI scanners and you see exactly the same changes inside their joints as you see inside the joints of the people who do have pain. So if you put the scans side by side, You can't tell which person has pain and which person doesn't quite often, because we see all the same, you know, loss of cartilage, bony spurs, that kind of thing is in both scans. Well, we know from that that it must be something other than just the deterioration in the joint that's causing the pain. So in my practice, we refer to most problems as mechanical. Okay. And what mechanical means is that there are funny forces acting on the joint that's putting too much stress through it, and that's contributing to pain. So those funny forces could be due to weakness in the surrounding muscle. It could be due to stiffness somewhere that hasn't been corrected and has been allowed to be there for a long time. It could be a joint above or below the problem area that's forcing stress on the problem area. So most of the time, I would say 80%, there's a mechanical issue at play in someone who's got these arthritic pains. And once you solve it, you can often really improve those symptoms.

Well, and just having stronger muscles and tendons around the joint to support it.

Yeah.

You know, and then movement, getting all the fluids moving. So, all right. You call strength the most important insurance policy after 50.

Yes.

Why?

So strength is just a wonderful proxy for independence. If you're strong, you can pick up heavy shopping bags, you can open and close heavy doors, You can get up and down from the floor. You can do all the things you want to do. And the other thing that's tied to strength is your muscle mass. And you know this, JJ, like muscle mass is so closely linked to just about every health outcome. The more muscle mass you have on your body, the less likely you are to suffer with things like diabetes or arthritis or even brain issues like dementia. So strength and muscle go hand in hand. And they basically back up every other system in the body. And your muscle mass is a completely independent organ. It's got the abilities to communicate with all the other parts of the body. And the more muscle you have, the better all the systems work.

Yeah, I like to say muscle changes everything.

Yeah.

I'm the chief metabolic health officer for a string of clinics. And we have looked at not just fat-free mass, because again, unless it's very hard to look at actual skeletal muscle mass, but we've been not just looking at fat-free mass, but also looking at quality muscle by doing a grip strength test. Tests.

Yes.

What are you doing to assess in your clinic for both predicting skeletal muscle?

Yeah.

And testing quality muscle?

Yeah, we have a few functional tests. And one of the things I love about coming to the US is that you guys are like 10 years ahead of us when it comes to the technology. But in my clinic, we don't have any of the scans or any of the fancy machines, but we do functional tests.

So you guys don't have bioimpedance yet?

No. Well, we do have it. We just don't have it in the practice because we run off— everything is based on functional tests. We care more about what a person can do rather than the results of a scan, to be honest. So in terms of what we test in the clinic, so grip strength is massive. So grip strength is well established as possibly the strongest biomarker of health we have.

Isn't that crazy? And it's so cheap and so easy to do. Yeah. Why isn't it done everywhere?

I know. And I honestly think that doctors should be testing grip strength as often as they test blood pressure.

I agree. Like you look at it and go, I understand why everyone's not doing a VO2 max test. Sure.

'Cause that's so tough. I get it.

They suck.

Yeah. They're horrible. I haven't done it since I had to do it —in grad school, literally.

I'm like, you guys should do it. I haven't done it. But grip strength, come on. It's fun. Yeah.

It takes like 5 seconds to do, and it's super predictive of health. And to be clear, grip strength, we're not just testing grip. We're testing overall body strength because grip is a wonderful proxy for how strong you are everywhere. And if the weaker your legs are, the weaker your grip is usually. And once people understand this, they say, oh, I see the relevance now. Yeah. So grip strength is a better predictor of longevity than blood pressure. It is, which just blows my mind every time. But it's super easy to test. So we do that. We also do something called the 30-second chair stand test. Oh, I love that. Which I really like, which is how many times you can get up and down from a chair. Yeah. In 30 seconds. And then another really big thing we do is a, um, a 10-meter walking test.. All right. And we do that to test someone's walking speed. And there's some really scary data around walking speed being a predictor of how long a person will live. And one of the best studies I've seen on this took a, a group of older men. They were, uh, in their seventies and they tracked them over 10 years. At the start of the 10-year period, they took a walking speed test, and then at the end of the 10 years, they had a look to see who was still alive. All right. They found that the slowest walkers, only 18% of them were still alive 10 years later. Wow. The fastest walkers, 86% of them were still alive 10 years later. So again, walking speed doesn't necessarily keep you alive on its own, but it's just a great proxy for your overall strength, your overall mobility, and how well we can move.