Why strength & stability are essential for longevity | Peter Attia, M.D. & Beth Lewis

so beth let's talk a little bit about strength and stability this is your wheelhouse uh you spent your entire life focusing on these things and how to apply them why is this stuff so important oh that's kind of a that's a big question i mean basically your your body is what's moving you through space it's how you're able to be a human be independent um be able to do things as you as you move through life um you're going to lose that a bit as you age the goal is to try to slow that rate down as much as possible so you can maintain independence i can't think of anything worse than having this healthy body but not being able to be independent as i age yeah so let's even define some of these terms for people i think the idea of strength is kind of intuitive to people they sort of get that it involves you know generating a force in a muscle and moving something although it doesn't have to move obviously we're going to talk about isometric strength where there is no movement whatsoever i always think the idea of stability is a bit harder for people to understand and yet we talk about it so much and it's so embedded in how you do strength things correctly you know my favorite analogy on this is the race car so i'm gonna just have to give this out right so if you think about a race car uh most people tend to fixate on its horsepower right the engine of the car and that's what determines how fast it's going to go um but that's actually barely true you know it is true that the engine matters a ton but there's two other things that really really matter one is the stability of the chassis and the other is the grip of the tires and i think this is a perfect analogy for us as humans if you have muscles that have great strength great contractile force but that force can't get transmitted to the outside world i.e through your feet and your hands that's how we transmit force to the outside world because you lack the stability which means force is escaping through the knees through the hips through the ankles through the back through the waist all of these areas then you're not gonna transmit force well and furthermore if you don't have the ability to load the feet or the hands correctly you're gonna further more experience what we would think of in a race car is slippage so you have the most powerful motor in a car but it has a loose chassis that powers all over the place if it has lousy tires there's no grip yeah in in training we call those energy leaks exactly yeah so it's like you're you're moving something from point a to point b but if you're not able to respond to it with what you're moving it with there could be a leak yeah use the example of a bicep curl something like that if you're doing a bicep curl and you're holding the weight and the weight overcomes you because your grip and your fingers aren't strong enough that energy is going to leak through the wrist as opposed to sharing force through the tissue and i think it's important to remember too with stability we often think of bracing like hanging on for dear life and over bracing is just as detrimental as not bracing enough um so we have to train stability in a way so you can be malleable and and reflexive um as opposed to just hanging on for dear life yeah in fact that's the i like the word stability with one exception and it's that which is for most people stability conjures up the image of static stability that's the wrong way to think about it you want to think about kinetic or dynamic stability and that's why a world-class pitcher can throw a hundred mile an hour fastball and i can't right it's not necessarily that he's that much stronger than me it's that when he throws that ball there is zero escape from his toe to his finger whereas if i do it and again it's a kinetic motion i'm losing power everywhere i cannot transmit like a whip across my body that sequential force transfer is is important and it's important to remember that that's vital for being a human you know even even walking you have to be able to transfer that force through your feet yeah absolutely so so how important is this stuff well look as as as a member of this species you've pretty much peaked in terms of your muscle mass and strength by about the age of 25. so most of you watching this are over 25. uh so we're all on the downhill side of this thing um and for some of you if you've been you know voracious exercisers your whole life you'll you'll already understand what that feels like i know that i'm not as strong i don't have as much muscle mass i'm i'm half the man i was when i was 25. but the good news is uh we can do a lot to mitigate that so so how bad is it well if you look at the published literature on this subject matter from the age of 25 until about the age of 50 we would expect to lose about three to eight percent of our muscle mass by decade that's a pretty wide range and it speaks to how much you can offset that by training right yeah i mean if you train obviously you'll do much better if you don't train the rate of decline is staggering it is in fact uh it's not uncommon for a person by the time they're 70 to 75 to have lost 50 percent of their muscle mass from their peak in life so why does that matter well it turns out that there are a couple of physical metrics that are insanely correlated with longevity and again it's impossible to know exactly how causal these are because you can't do this experiment so we're left sort of looking at correlations but the strength of these correlations suggests that there's causality in them and the two associations that are so strong with longevity are muscle mass and strength which couple very tightly together and vo2 max so beth you and dan have done a ton of work on this kind of walk us through what you found as the sort of pillars of strength that are essential so i mean a lot of people um kind of correlate exercise with more sports but we're thinking more activities of daily life so you know picking up an object taking it downstairs putting something on a shelf and you know a lot of that requires things that you don't even think about so being able to reach grip strength not just squeeze strength but also finger dexterity so grip strength and finger strength and even grip modulation um grip reactivity those that is that was kind of the first chunk that we found very very very important so basically how do your hands interact with the outside world whether it's turning a doorknob right picking something up yeah or reaching for something yeah and when we think of the hand you don't think of all the things that your hands do like you don't just grab the doorknob and turn it you have to be able to modulate that pressure through your fingers also being able to switch your grip and be able to change according to where your elbow and your shoulder are and if you don't have that ability in your younger life it's going to create pain and discomfort up the chain but as you get older you're just not going to be able to grab things um so that one was that one was a huge one and by the way in primates grip strength is the single highest correlate with longevity oh wow now again you might say well that's obvious you know primates are up and around swinging around and doing all these things um but i think in humans this association is also very strong because one of the greatest sources of mortality um as we age in fact it's probably the fifth leading cause of death in people over 75 is falling which sounds crazy when you think about what else is going on in this 75 year old right alzheimer's disease cancer heart disease stroke all of these other things and then to think that falling becomes a enormous source of mortality and now imagine how many times a person falls and they're unable to brace themselves they're unable to grab a rail as they're falling down a flight of stairs this stuff matters yeah um the next would be just lower body strength and strength and strength training can be you know divided into three different ways to train concentric training uh eccentric training and isometric training so if you think of concentric training it's more the act of being able to push when the muscle is going into a shortened state eccentric would be when it's going into a lengthened state that's more like your braking system how you control movement and then isometric strength just being able to maintain tension through a movement so easiest way to think about this again using something as simple as a bicep curl the concentric phase and you're going to hear these words a lot so it's just important to get familiar with it concentric means shortening so when you are lifting the weight up that's the concentric phase the eccentric phase you still require strength when you're putting it down if you think about it if you're holding 40 pounds up here you can't just drop it your arm would fall off so you actually need to exert strength as the muscle is lengthening and then isometric strength would be the strength you would exert to hold that weight in one position now you might think well i don't care i'm not going to do bicep curls maybe not but you are going to walk up and down stairs you are going to walk up and down hills and there you'll see that walking up requires that concentric strength and i think most people sort of get concentric strength but eccentric strength is the strength as beth said that's your braking system when you're walking down and guess where more people get hurt is it walking upstairs or downstairs it's absolutely walking downstairs it's walking down the hill on the hike where people are going to get hurt why because they don't have a good braking system they don't have the ability to fire the muscle fibers as the muscles getting longer because they don't train that system deliberately absolutely um the last one would be lower body power and that's something you know you only think of like athletes as jumping and as as needing this but for activities of daily life that quick recruitment getting up out of a chair being able to push yourself or push yourself up the stairs very important and to really dive deep into that reactive strength stepping off of a curb being able to absorb force change directions and then even further lower leg adaptability being able to problem solve with your feet just as you do your hands um that's going to be the biggest thing that's going to help prevent falling is being able to push yourself through through space and we lose that just as you lose power 50 of it by the time you're 70 say or excuse me strength it's the same with power it declines quickly and more quickly if you don't train it now you might think well okay so those are three buckets that you've come up with right beth we've got everything that has to do with how the hand interacts with the world we've got lower body strength power and then how the feet interact with the world how come this doesn't involve you know how strong your pecs and lats are it does but if your hands and feet can't do the work that's not going to get stronger you know what i mean you're not you're not doing we'll just use a bicep curl you're not curling with your elbow or your shoulder just like you're not pushing with your shoulders you're doing it with your hands that's your connection point and the more dexterous you are and the more ability you can control and tolerate the load the better the proximal stuff will be [Music]

Channel: Peter Attia MD

Views: 416,775

Keywords: strength, mobility, stability, longevity, exercise for longevity, strength training, stability training, strength exercises, why training is important, why exercise is important

Id: aYzWHsWz_Oo

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Thu May 26 2022