Part 1: Eric Rawson on the Power of Resistance Training for Longevity

You can find Eric on Twitter/X at @EricRawsonPhD

Prepare to transform your perspective on exercise as we delve deep into the world of 'exercise snacks' with expert exercise physiologist, Eric Rawson. Discover how brief, frequent bouts of movement throughout your daily routine can substantially boost your health. We'll debunk misconceptions around the need for high volume resistance training and shed light on the potent benefits of manageable doses. Even with an unexpected power outage cutting our conversation short, we managed to pack in a wealth of insights on incorporating resistance exercise into your lifestyle, plus the truth about creatine supplementation.

We then navigate through the importance of physical activity across all life stages - from the playground to the golden years. Learn why resistance training is a crucial shield for our health, how establishing an exercise habit can create a ripple effect of positive health outcomes, and how our modern environment impacts physical fitness. 

Brace yourself for a deep dive into the symbiotic relationship between resistance training and cardiorespiratory fitness. We'll reveal how a modest resistance exercise regime can significantly enhance your VO2 max and overall fitness levels. Eric will also explain how resistance training can serve as a motivational tool to inspire more active lifestyles. Don't miss out on our myth-busting session about body weight strength training and creatine supplementation, where we unravel their true benefits and recommended dosages. This episode is overflowing with actionable gems that can guide you towards a healthier, more active lifestyle.

Transcript

Jerry Teixeira: 0:00

In this episode, I talk with Eric Rawson. Eric's an exercise physiologist who studies healthy human aging. In this episode, we dig into the concept of exercise snacks and how short, frequent balance of movement dispersed throughout the day can lead to big changes and improvements in health. We also talk about the misconception when it comes to resistance exercise, where people think that you need a large dose to elicit an effective response, which is not the case. We also dig into creatine. We talk about its applications. We also talk about potential side effects and, toward the very end, as I was about to thank him for coming on the podcast, we lost power. So there's an abrupt end and the parade of storms the West Coast weather phenomenon that's apparently once in multiple decades was going on at the time. We lost power for a minute. It knocked out the internet and we lost Eric, but we did get everything that we wanted to get into the episode, so you're not missing anything other than me thanking him. I was extremely grateful that he gave some of his time to the podcast and so, without further ado, please enjoy my interview with Eric Rossin.

Jerry Teixeira: 1:09

All right, today I'm talking to Eric. Eric, I'm happy to have you here. This is Eric Rossin. He is a PhD researcher. He's a doctor, but the good kind, because he researches hypertrophy and strength and how it relates to healthy aging and other topics that I'm super interested in. Now, this is a field that I believe is understudied. There's a couple guys and girls out there that are researching this, trying to elucidate the benefits, but, again like I said, I think it's super understudied, so I'm really happy to have you here. So yeah, welcome to the podcast, man.

Eric Rawson: 1:43

It's a pleasure to be here. I'm thrilled with the invitation and I'm quite happy to finally meet you outside of the wonderful world of Twitter.

Jerry Teixeira: 1:53

Yeah, likewise. Likewise. It seems like for a long time there was this the gym bros that are into strength training and hypertrophy type goals and people commonly associated that with, like it's vanity, it's I just want to look good or whatever. But I think we're starting to find out more and more that that's not necessarily the case, that there are our health implications to having muscle mass building strength. So I just wanted to highlight that I think the work that you're doing is important and that's why I think it's understudied is because we don't appreciate at least it may be my bias, but we don't appreciate the role that this can play, and I think some of it's because the negative connotation from the bodybuilding click and the Instagram weightlifting crowd and that type of thing. So hopefully we can dispel some rumors and educate people.

Jerry Teixeira: 2:45

Now, how did? Because it's such an understudied area, I'm really interested in what brought you to where you are. Like, how did you get from high school? You had to choose a clear path and that arc happened. So what brought you around to where you are today?

Eric Rawson: 3:03

That's a great question and we'd have to go back to even before high school to figure this out. And I think we'd have to go all the way back to when I was a young child and the men in my family were prolific readers. They read everything lots of science fiction, classic books and I really couldn't stop moving. I was perpetual motion. I was constantly physically active. I would ride my bike eight or 10 hours per day, skateboard eight hours on the next day, throw a baseball up and down in the yard for 10 hours, and the only reading I really did was comic books and things about sports.

Eric Rawson: 3:50

And in hindsight, what I figured out was that I have this incredible interest in human performance. I just find making people bigger, faster and stronger to be an incredibly exciting thing, and even as a young child, I very, very much remember always trying to exceed my previous record in something, and it could have been how long I could hold my breath, it could have been how long I could ride a wheelie on my bike, but it was always a performance improvement. And, in addition to the physical aspect of that, I was always interested in what I could possibly put in my body, meaning food and nutrients that would help me to achieve my best possible performance. And over the years I've had the great opportunity to meet different athletes from a whole variety of sports and a lot of them had that same childhood experience they were interested in making themselves bigger, faster, stronger and achieving their best in just across the board.

Eric Rawson: 5:09

The comic books were interesting to me because these superheroes, they embodied these fictional characters. I was a huge fan of the Incredible Hulk, a bit of a fan of the Flash, mostly the Hulk and a few other superheroes, and at one point in time they started running in the backs of the comic books advertisements for training programs, in particular Charles Atlas's Dynamic Tension Programs, and it led me to the world of bodybuilding and powerlifting and Olympic lifting and I discovered that to my eye, you could actually become this type of superhero. So my interests since the very beginning have been anatomy, physiology, nutrition and human performance. It was just always there.

Jerry Teixeira: 6:04

That's interesting.

Eric Rawson: 6:08

So back in the 80s, when I was finishing up high school, it seemed like all of my friends were headed off to college. They were studying engineering, they were studying computer science and I was the only person interested in studying the human body and I had no idea how to turn that into a career or what the profession would be. I just knew I wanted more anatomy and physiology. I didn't know there was a nutrition profession. I didn't know there was a course called Exercise Physiology and I started out in physical therapy and I learned that there's a rehabilitation side of the fence and there's a prevention side of the fence. There's a huge amount of overlap, particularly with Americans today in terms of their health.

Eric Rawson: 6:54

But I really didn't belong in rehabilitation and I was in physical therapy. That was the wrong place for me and discovered exercise science accidentally and I thought I would be the world's greatest personal trainer. I thought I would own at least one gym and eventually I encountered a woman named Priscilla Clarkson who taught me about how to be excellent as an educator, as a mentor, and she taught me about research and how someone like me could contribute to research, to generating new knowledge. So it's always been the same thing how do I make people bigger, faster and stronger? Except, I started out with applying this to myself. Now I'm applying it to other people and, in particular, I've grown an interest in applying that type of thinking to older adults. So, any type of exercise, any type of nutritional intervention that promotes human health and in particular, I've always been fascinated with skeletal muscle much more than the cardiovascular system, it's cooler.

Jerry Teixeira: 8:12

I mean, come on.

Eric Rawson: 8:13

Well, I've always said anything that lasts longer than 30 seconds. I'm just not gonna do it.

Jerry Teixeira: 8:20

Well, the reason I think this is great is because I'm sure that listeners are aware we have a rapidly aging population. The baby boomers are getting older. I read a statistic that 10,000 baby boomers retire every day and almost exactly 10,000 baby boomers also die every day, and so it's sad in a sense, because we are increasingly the unhealthiest generations that our species has ever produced, and it's long and storied history, you know.

Eric Rawson: 8:53

Yes, I've come around at a very early age and I've come around at a very interesting time where, when I started all of this and this is a long part of the discussion, but when I started all of this we weren't talking about obesity and we weren't talking about diabetes, not as researchers, not as Jim Brose, not as parents. There just wasn't the emphasis. And throughout the 90s, from children all the way up to adults and older adults, the increase of lifestyle diseases has been shocking. The increase in obesity has been shocking. The increase in physical inactivity has been shocking and, coming from someone who loves movement, it's been incredible to watch how fast these changes happened. And, of course, this changed research funding. It changed research interests. For me, at this point, I think successful aging is probably the most important thing we could be studying.

Jerry Teixeira: 10:03

Yeah, and one of the things that I find particularly interesting when it comes to aging is that when we look at the poor metabolic health, you look at insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes. It in many respects, at a cellular level, mirrors accelerated aging. So when you're doing research into the one, you are kind of by default also doing research into the other, and so I definitely think that what you're doing has a direct application to even someone who is aging healthily, has a benefit to them. But this also has a benefit and application to those that are younger, who are experiencing accelerated aging, even though they may not see it as that because of the insulin resistance to diabetes I mean insulin resistance it begins inside the muscle. So that's an area where we often talk about how diet is fundamental to fat loss and that people need to fix their diets first and absolutely.

Jerry Teixeira: 11:07

When you look at the proliferation of ultra-processed food and how our diets gotten so far off track, I think that's fair. But because insulin resistance and these things begin inside the muscle before you can even see them on regular blood work, what or how strong of a protective role do you think physical activity plays in preventing these types of diseases the insulin resistance, the type 2 diabetes, outside of diet. So I know that exercise improves insulin resistance or insulin sensitivity, rather independent of diet. But how strong do you think that signal is? Like? What do you think? I guess what I'm getting at is, provided the same terrible food environment, provided the same environment that we're in take the physically active kid versus the inactive kid, or the person who's exercising versus not, and strip away weight loss. Like how important is that exercise? What do you think that's doing on a cellular level to help prevent the poor metabolic health that we're seeing?

Eric Rawson: 12:09

That's a great question. The short answer to me is it's a robust signal and it's incredibly important to maintain a level of respiratory fitness, of muscular fitness and of habitual physical activity levels, even if you're struggling to maintain a healthy body weight. I think the signal, the benefit of being physically active, is absolutely protective against disease. I think where the conversation has to go is well a few places. One is how are we defining health? Because your question was about cardiometabolic disease or metabolic disease. There are other types of diseases. We're interested in cardiometabolic disease, we're interested in mental health, we're interested in cancer.

Eric Rawson: 13:11

One part of the question is where does physical activity fit in in terms of creating a signal to reduce our risk of disease? Then the other half of the question is should it be aerobic endurance training or should it be resistance training or should it be both? That's something I've been very vocal about and you've been vocal about in the past few years. That is, we're underselling the benefits of resistance training in terms of protecting our health. I think you mentioned something else, and that relates to age. This is not just a discussion that starts when you're over the age of 75 or 65 or 45. Young people today have much lower levels of muscle strength. They have many more distractions to prevent them from being physically active. It's very much a toxic environment in terms of being physically fit and physically active. This is a lifespan discussion and we're talking about maybe successful aging, but we should start the discussion with children really.

Jerry Teixeira: 14:20

Yeah, I think for most people they don't actually think about aging and its impact on them until they start to get to maybe that midpoint 40 years old or they start feeling some physiological changes.

Eric Rawson: 14:34

Until they get sick.

Jerry Teixeira: 14:35

Yeah, or even sick. Coincidentally, I went into the Marine Corps right out of high school and I wasn't a very fit. I mean, I wasn't lazy, I lived on a dairy farm but I wasn't an athlete I should say. I went into the Marine Corps and that was my first hard structured physical training. I think what helped me was we had to be physically active at your morning PT five days a week. It wasn't like you had a choice.

Jerry Teixeira: 15:00

I've learned later, as a little older, as an adult, that we are the product of our habits. Because people grow up where we're in an environment that's not forcing physical activity anymore, we simply don't do it, so we never build a habit to do it. Then we transition. As we get older and older, those things start to take their toll on us and, to your point, there's already damage being done. That entire time of inactivity. Where I got lucky was, I think, going into the military. I was forced to build this habit that I just carried on after I left the military. So even when I got fat, at one point I was obese, I was 50 something pounds overweight. I'm not the tallest guy in the world. I'm five nine. It's a tall five nine, but it's five, nine nonetheless, and so you know, gaining 50 pounds of not muscle was significant, but I kept exercising through all that and so I've always felt that the physical activity that I've engaged in because my blood work was still good during that time, even though my doctor was concerned with the weight gain.

Jerry Teixeira: 15:58

So I do think that being physically active, in my own experience and based on a literature as well, it's definitely, I think, protective. But to me it just comes back to the modern environment, from from technology impacting food preservation and the availability of these terrible ultra processed foods, ubiquitous of food in general, everywhere screens, remote controls for TVs, everything's automated. Now there's Uber they bring you your food like we. We don't have to do much to exist, and throughout the rest of human history, just to exist and and you know, not die you had to be physically active, which is why modern hunter, gatherer societies are very interesting to me, not because I think we should do everything they do, but because they have to exert high levels of physical activity just to exist.

Jerry Teixeira: 16:51

And then when we look at their metabolic health, it's quite high. There's there's no obesity, they're not overweight, and you know, everybody focuses on diet and I do think diet's very important, but it almost seems like I I get engaged in these debates where people are talking Hunter Gathers and it's almost all like 90% of its diet, you know. Or you look at the blue zones and it's everything. Everybody focuses on diet and I'm and I'm looking at the blue zones and I'm like these people don't drive cars, they walk everywhere, they live in the hills, like they go to bed on time, they don't have screens, like they have strong family ties and there's all these other factors and I think, because our diet's so terrible here in America, in America and some of the West, that we, we, we harp on that, but I almost feel like we're we're just forgetting everything else and we just shoot straight straight to diet like that's everything. And I even see it on, especially on twitter.

Jerry Teixeira: 17:41

You got tons of people and they they really struggle to exercise and and they Like endlessly manipulate and tinker with their diet and adjust all these little things and all the while still are not physically active enough. So I I don't want to I guess I'm on soapbox for a second here just because I I feel like we really do hammer Diet, justifiably, like I said, because how things are in the West. But I think we need to also step back and realize that the other side of that coin Is getting people physically active, getting them to like we talked about resistance train If they, if they love doing cardio. Ball means go do cardio. I'm not I mean, I do it myself.

Jerry Teixeira: 18:19

I'm not an anti cardio guy, um, but, and actually on that same token, resistance training is cardio. So one of the things I hate is this but we refer to exercise and it's like okay, you got strength training and then you've got your cardio. And I'm like last time I checked, my heart rate was up pretty well during my strength training. So maybe you can elucidate the listener to how strength training is cardio. And especially, I think, if you're sedentary and you're coming off the couch, it's great cardio, like just getting physically active and and so. So if you can just kind of dig in that a little bit, that'd be awesome.

Eric Rawson: 18:53

Absolutely, and if you have some some room up on your soapbox, I'll come right up there with you. We it's wonderful that we talk so much about nutrition, but we talk about nutrition at the expense of physical activity. I have happened to live in central Pennsylvania and I am surrounded by Uh the Amish population, and I have to tell you that their diet could not be described as vegan or low fat or any any popular diet. They're not ketogenic, they're not carnivore. If anything, they probably consume more butter and more salt and more gravy than is typically recommended. But their rates of obesity are incredibly low and I would connect that to their muscle strength, which is incredibly high, and their Daily physical activity. They get three or four times the steps that a typical American does. You know they're physically active and See, I believe physical activity modifies our dietary behaviors and I think one of the reasons that they can eat Three meals per day and not snack is, one, because that's the habit they built, but two it's easier to do that because their body is regulated in terms of energy intake by their high energy output.

Eric Rawson: 20:19

I think physical activity very much regulates Our energy intake, our calorie intake, and and there are data from Gosh, six decades ago, showing that um, in very active populations it's it's quite easy to achieve energy balance, and this was before apps and no one did diet records back then, right? So people who burned the most calories ate the most calories, but they only ate enough to maintain their body weight. People who burned the fewest calories Mismatched their energy intake, and over eight. So we really can't talk about nutrition, whether it's carbs, fats or protein or calories. We really can't talk about nutrition without that direct connection to physical activity, because I'm I'm quite sure our physical activity levels help modulate Our dietary behaviors. So I'm up on the soapbox with you. I love that we talk about nutrition so much, but not at the expense of physical activity and physical fitness.

Jerry Teixeira: 21:25

Yeah, and and it makes sense because from an evolutionary standpoint like there there's never been, except for maybe a few in the aristocracy in most recent four, four thousand years or so. But there is no physically inactive human. It couldn't have existed before. Right, I would have resulted in you expiring and you would have been selected. You're gone, you know so exactly. To me you feel like it's.

Jerry Teixeira: 21:46

One of the arguments that I have sometimes on social media Is like I don't ever want to shame anyone who's sedentary. I don't want anybody to feel like I'm putting them down if not being physically active, especially because historically we would have simply had to be physically active to survive. We weren't choosing it, it was just what you had to do. Now, because we no longer in that environment, we have to choose it, so, so I want to be careful to make sure people know I'm encouraging people to be physically active, but I'm not trying to shame anyone. I don't think that's that's the right approach. But but yeah, to your point. I People often look at my blood works great or my labs are great and I lost weight, which is awesome, all that stuff's awesome.

Jerry Teixeira: 22:24

But to me, if you're not physically active, I don't care how good A health you think you're in like. You're not in that good health. You can look at the data, even when they control For obesity and and and waste circumference and everything else. If you're sedentary it's literally like smoking. The correlation to To mortality increases like smoking, even after controls. So you know, to me it's like it's a false sense of security to think that you're physically inactive yet You're. You're actually healthy.

Eric Rawson: 22:53

You may be, you may be free of disease, or at least observable disease, but that's a different thing than being robustly healthy to me, Right, I, I agree and and our own personal experience is valuable, but it's a, it's a snapshot, it's a single time point type of you know sample size of one study. I can tell you, you know, what I'm doing right now in terms of nutrition and exercise and my blood work, but that doesn't mean that this will be the successful plan 10 years from now or 15 years from now, and I think that's part of what what people are missing is we're talking about, you know, years of health, what we're talking about successful aging and not just being able maybe to get away with being less active Because you're only in your 20s or your 30s or you're you're in your early 40s. You know things will start to accelerate after about the age of 40 or 45 in terms of declines in fitness and declines in muscular strength, and that will make it harder to develop the physical activity habit. Again. I want to touch on on something you said about resistance training being aerobic or cardio respiratory training. This is actually a question that I include in one of my exercise physiology labs every year.

Eric Rawson: 24:21

When we do laboratories for, you know, musculoskeletal strength, we tend to separate those from the laboratories on cardio respiratory fitness. But but I like the students to realize there's so much important overlap there. We tend to teach the components of fitness separately and we tend to teach the metabolic systems separately. That's how we have to teach it, but there is a lot of overlap there. So one of the questions I always pose to the students is it's quite simple, it's you know, does resistance training increase your vo2 max or your maximal cardio, or your maximal cardio respiratory fitness? And so many of them are shocked to stumble upon that research to show that, in particular, if your fitness is low, you will have an increase in VO2 max and maximal cardiovascular fitness from a very modest resistance exercise program.

Eric Rawson: 25:18

Now, that's improvement. That's important for a few obvious reasons. One is that it works right. Resistance training can increase your cardiorespiratory fitness. Two, cardiorespiratory fitness is an incredibly good predictor of mortality, right? So if we're increasing VO2 max, then we're having beneficial effects on mortality. But I think you know the real benefit here is that it reaches people who maybe will not do aerobic type exercise training, or they cannot do it or they don't enjoy it or they find it painful. You know a lot of. For a lot of frail elders, getting in a treadmill is a very scary experience. For a lot of large people who have arthritis and pain, doing cardiovascular exercise is nightmarish. It's you're offering them punishment to improve their health and I think a lot of these people could really benefit more if the starting point was resistance exercise.

Jerry Teixeira: 26:30

Yeah, I agree with you 100%, and even with my own clients, which I mean I do have a knowledge of cardiorespiratory geared exercise, I mean I can coach that. It's not what I. I don't take people on for that purpose, because there's there are people way more qualified than me.

Jerry Teixeira: 26:45

If you want to go run a marathon or something, that's not you know, that's not not my jam, but I find that when people start out and you focus on resistance exercise and I tend to take people that are novice and we reduce their rest period, so we keep the the sessions brief, we keep the intensity up, we keep the pace up, what happens is they do improve, like, like you're talking about, their conditioning improves, all their overall fitness levels increase. And a perfect example is I have one client that we've been working together for maybe like nine months now and at first it was just resistance exercise and then she started walking. I encourage people to walk. I mean, walking is incredible for us. It did for tons of different reasons, we can dive into those, but but anyway she started out walking and then from walking it was well, I feel like jogging now.

Jerry Teixeira: 27:37

Like she lost weight, she built up quite a bit of muscle mass, she had a stronger musculoskeletal system and then and then I actually feel comfortable saying have at it. If you feel like a go run man, that's great, right, like when people are weak, you know when they're musculoskeletal system overall is weak, and then you take it and you place this demand of repetitive. You know whether it's running or whatever the case is, you're going to make adaptations and you're going to get stronger even in response to that, but I feel like strengthening the musculos, skeletal system through resistance training first and then adding in the additional cardiovascular training. I find that that works well for a lot of people, especially when they're coming off the couch.

Eric Rawson: 28:17

Yes, we would never discourage people from doing aerobic exercise training. I strongly encourage everyone to increase the amount of walking they do. But you know, if you look at the data on, you know how physically inactive we are. You realize that we're not getting people to exercise. And never saying, you know, don't walk, don't do the treadmill. Never saying don't do the stair master.

Eric Rawson: 28:50

But really you know, looking at people as individuals and saying what can I do to help this person develop an exercise habit? And, like I said, for a person who's frail and they're concerned about a fall, maybe the treadmill is more anxiety than benefit. Sure, right. And for a large person, you know, even the seat on an exercise bike could be painful and if they have arthritis, then walking isn't what to start with. And I've always believed that if you, if all you can do is sit in a chair and I can hand you some dumbbells and you can do presses and you can do curls and you can do a variety of different exercises, In my own experience in working with people, they feel better and they make progress quickly, progress that they can see by number of repetitions, by the weight they're lifting, and it's really hard to see that progress on cardiovascular type exercises when your fitness is very low or when you're very, very large. So I've always thought that, you know, getting people engaged in resistance exercise is a great starting point that will spontaneously lead to more physical activity, more walking, more walking briskly and potentially even jogging. You know things like team activities, things like pickle ball. I think the foundation is muscular strength, yeah, and I often ask people I say, when you go to the airport, what do you see at the escalators?

Eric Rawson: 30:27

And they say huge line of people waiting at the escalators. And I say, what do you see at the stairs? And they say what do you see at the stairs? The stairs are empty. I say, okay, is no one in a hurry? Everyone is, you know, on time and has plenty of time. Why are they waiting for the escalator when the stairs are open and they could just cut the line? And you know, if you're in an airport, you're surrounded by thousands of people. Don't you want some space? Why is everyone all crowded around the escalator and waiting?

Eric Rawson: 31:01

And I take the stairs. You know, I take the stairs on purpose, because I've been sitting on an airplane, right, and I want to use my muscles, I want to use my body, but I think one of the reasons that my brain will tell me to take the stairs is that the stairs are no more difficult for me than the escalator, and that's not because of my cardio. I think that's from years of squatting Right, right. I think my muscular strength, even with my luggage, gets me up the stairs and it's just as effortless as standing on the escalator, whereas in my opinion and it's only my opinion, I think most people, their muscular fitness is so poor, combined with maybe heavier body weights, that the escalator is really a lot easier for them than the stairs. The stairs will be a difficult challenge for them, so they don't take it. And I look at that and I think that's an opportunity for a resistance exercise intervention to help these people. I think that's. I think the activities that I choose to do are based on my muscular strength, not my cardio.

Jerry Teixeira: 32:13

Yeah, I think in day to day life my experience is similar. So like we moved from a one story to a two story recently specifically because we had to move anyways and my youngest had always wanted to live in a two story house. He's eight now. Well, he'd be eight shortly. And then my daughter, she's 16. And when she was younger she always wanted to live in a two story house. So we thought, hey, let's, let's do it, you know.

Jerry Teixeira: 32:34

So we move in and my wife hates the stairs. She was like, oh my God, why did we do this? But the funny thing is what I do, so our stairs are like halfway up, then you turn, you flip it, you turn the rest of the way up, so it's like a two piece staircase, Right so at the bottom. Almost every time I'd say 95% of the times I've gone up that staircase, I literally take two to three stairs at a time and I run up it as fast as I can, Like I make the turn as quick as I can and I like fly up it. You know it almost like I'm doing step ups and it's not hard at all for me. But it's like on the one hand it's kind of fun, you know.

Jerry Teixeira: 33:06

But also I've come to realize earlier on in you know, just my fitness journey or whatever you want to refer to it, as I had the training bout. So you're going to go to the gym or you're going to train at home, whatever it is, but you've got your structured exercise session and I used to think, okay, well, I'm working on the computer, I'm sitting a lot, but I'm working out, so I'm good, right, Like it counteracts the physical inactivity. And recently a lot of data are coming out that suggests that, hey, be inactive for 30, 45 minutes a day is great, but it's not undoing that nine to 10 hours of sitting around. Yes, you need to break up that sitting around and and have physical activity for circulation of lymphatic fluid and blood and everything else you know, getting your muscles moving. So when I do have to go upstairs for something and I'm home, I take that little sprinting up the stairs as, like a way to help break up my periods of inactivity.

Jerry Teixeira: 33:58

And similarly, when we go to malls or anywhere else where there stairs, I'm like you, I'll take the stairs. But I think part of that's because mentally I understand the benefit and I think, oh, that's good for me, I'm going to go ahead and do that and I think a lot of people they don't. Like we hinted on earlier, I think resistance exercise being such a boon for health is underappreciated and so some people don't realize that. I think if more people understood it, more people would actually go through the trouble to do it. They just don't know.

Eric Rawson: 34:26

Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both. I think resistance training, that the research is lagged behind aerobic exercise training, but I do think a lot of people know that moving is is better than sitting. I think they know that the stairs are better for them than the escalator or the elevator. Perhaps they perhaps they don't know that you know, one sprint up the stairs can have real health benefits. I would imagine most people don't know that and we call that in research exercise snacks. So there's some wonderful research where they have people, you know, go for a five minute walk every hour on the hour or, you know, climb a flight of stairs, you know, a few times per day, and there were real cardiometabolic benefits, measurable cardiometabolic benefits which, given how variable the response is to exercise, to how we all improve differently, that's phenomenal, that just a tiny bit of exercise throughout the day can have real measurable benefits.

Eric Rawson: 35:31

But we're fighting against. You know how automated our lifestyles have become and you know I'm at a standing desk right now. I have a standing desk at the office and that will burn probably an extra nine calories per hour, which is better than zero. But I could, you know, easily overwhelm that with, you know, just one bad dietary choice or one slip. So we're trying to overcome a very toxic environment and I think you know developing exercise habits we have to be very smart. It's much more nuanced than everybody go jogging right that we know that's not going to be effective. One thing I'll share with you, and I guess I'm not sure how old your, your followers, are, but if they're around my age, they've lived through an interesting time when it comes to exercise, in particular resistance training. So when I started all of this, it wasn't okay for old people to lift weights. Right, it was unsafe.

Eric Rawson: 36:46

And it wasn't okay for children to lift weights because it was unsafe. Because it was unsafe and dangerous. Now both of those things have no evidence. They had no evidence then. They have no evidence now. This is all silly. And when I started all of this, athletes did not lift weights, with the exception of maybe some linemen in American football and shot putters, throwers and track and field. If you were a gymnast and you got caught lifting weights, you'd probably get thrown out of the weight room and threatened with the loss of your scholarship. Golfers didn't lift weights. Women, of course, didn't lift weights, right, so I've lived through all of this. You know ridiculousness. None of it was evidence based, but I've watched the research kind of catch up. And that goes for women, it goes for older adults, it goes for children, it goes for obese adults, people with stable medical diseases, it goes for athletes. Think of the whole field of strength and conditioning not existing. That wasn't that long ago.

Jerry Teixeira: 37:55

Yeah, you're right, it's pretty crazy if you think of, I mean, tiger Woods. I remember when Tiger Woods was young and he was a rookie and people were literally like, why is he lifting weights? Like that's, he's a golfer. Like what's he in?

Jerry Teixeira: 38:05

the weight room for the Williams sisters play in tennis and people were like shocked that they're like weight training hard, like that. And then you're like, oh, granted, it's skill. I'm not saying she's the most dominant female tennis player ever because she's jacked, but my point is the power that she has and the strong musculoskeletal system that she developed certainly improved her sport. She was able to use her strength to her advantage. So now you see it in every sport, even the.

Jerry Teixeira: 38:29

I think it was last to break into the high socioeconomic status sports for whatever reason, or at least it seems that way. And it also seems that when it comes to endurance training endurance training almost universally, I've noticed, like attorneys and doctors and your a lot of researchers they gravitate, I would say people with a higher education level, higher socioeconomic status, they kind of gravitate to resistance, I'm sorry, endurance training. And only recently and I know most runners now I see they're starting to strength train two days a week. They're doing these things, so they've learned and they're accepting that, but it seems like, for whatever reason, there was a long-term disconnect where it was. Your blue collar blue collar guys are in the gym slinging weight and then your white collar guys are riding bikes and running marathons, and it's like we're finally seeing an amalgamation of these things coming together.

Eric Rawson: 39:24

Yes, it's evolved right. So at the beginning of my career, the only people who were supposed to be lifting weights were linemen and football shot putters and weight lifters, and everyone else was supposed to avoid it. Again, no evidence behind the ridiculous concept of getting muscle bound and we got through that and people would talk about loss of flexibility. No evidence behind that. We talk about increased risk of injury which no evidence behind that, right. So today, if you think of LeBron James without lifting weights, if you think of Tiger Woods, if you think of Serena Williams, if you think of any athlete in any sport not lifting weights, that almost seems like negligence on the part of the athletic trainers and the coaches, because, in addition to the strength, in addition to the power, we have a reduction in injuries, we have protection from injuries, and we've gotten to a place now where, when we teach you about the benefits of resistance training, we've gotten through the myths, right. We've gotten through the muscle bound stuff and the injuries and all the things that were never really true, but we tend to teach the benefits of resistance training in a very, very limited capacity. We talk about increased strength, we talk about increased power. Once in a while, we get to the part about. You know protection from injury. We've all signed on to resistance training as part of rehabilitation from injury.

Eric Rawson: 40:57

Right, but we're still not talking about the protective effects of resistance training against cardiometabolic disease. We're not talking about resistance exercise improving quality of life in cancer patients. We're not talking about resistance training and there's research to support this. You know resistance training reducing your risk of mortality. No aerobic training at all, just resistance training twice a week. You know improved mortality, and we're getting better at talking about it. For me, the one thing that no one's talking about and I've tried to be loud about it is I think we can use resistance training to modify behavior.

Jerry Teixeira: 41:39

Okay.

Eric Rawson: 41:40

I think we live at a time where it's very difficult to develop healthy habits, where it's very difficult to become physically active, and I think there's some evidence that resistance training will improve many other systems in your body and also potentially spontaneously increase your physical activity. So probably the first and most important resistance training article on resistance training in older adults was from Maria Fiat-Aroni in colleagues, and it was published in our most prestigious medical journal and it showed remarkable increases in muscle strength in old people lifting weights. Everyone was shocked that they didn't just die, right, you know, the mean age in the article was over 90 years old, you know. So they weren't old like 55, they were old like 95. Right, they lifted weights, that massive improvements in strength and walking speed. But the part of the article that no one read was the part that shows a really large increase in habitual physical activity. They made frail elders lift weights and they got more active in their free living time.

Eric Rawson: 42:59

And then, a few years later, also from the same group at Tufts University, miriam Nelson published a 12 month resistance training paper and it was supposed to be about bone, which we always talk about, right, but in the paper the part that no one read was that the group who didn't lift weights had a spontaneous reduction in physical activity and the group who lifted weights for a year, again only about two days per week minimal they increased the amount of physical activity they did outside of the gym spontaneously. It wasn't part of the study and there's been several investigations. They've used all different types of ways to measure physical activity. It's a small body of literature but it includes overweight people, older adults, middle-aged adults, young adults and we keep seeing this spontaneous improvement in physical activity outside the gym once we get people stronger.

Jerry Teixeira: 43:56

Yeah, it makes sense and it kind of aligns with so. One thing I often say on social media is movement begets more movement and I found that it's the gateway drug Right and I found it to be true, like, time and time again.

Jerry Teixeira: 44:09

There's one guy I follow who started out just walking right, that was his. He was super overweight, started walking every day. Next thing, you know, he's running triathlons. I mean, obviously there was a journey there, but it began with walking and then, once he was like actually starting to be physically active, he kept becoming more physically active over time to the point where he wanted to challenge his body and gravitated toward triathlons.

Jerry Teixeira: 44:31

Some people, you know, they gravitate more and plug into resistance exercise or whether it's taking your kids camping, whatever, like I've seen that experience play out in my own life. I mean, the other day my kid and I were playing is it pickleball, it's a junior tennis in the backyard and he hit it over our block wall and so we'd go around the neighborhood. I was like, no, I'll just jump over the block wall, I got it. So it's not like I'm that old, but I'm 43 and I'm scaling the block wall and grabbing a thing and jumping back over and totally fine. Well, I mean, I guess, theoretically, if I'm super worried about getting injured, yeah, me jumping off a six foot wall into my grass is gonna increase my injury risk, but I'm confident that my training and my musculoskeletal system are perfectly adequate to handle it.

Jerry Teixeira: 45:12

So I still do stuff that most people my age probably wouldn't do. They would just walk around and go get it. But I'm not. You know what I mean. Like that stuff just comes second nature. Like I still do everything I did when I was 20, but I'm 43. I just do it like run up the stairs. I do like all that same stuff.

Jerry Teixeira: 45:28

But my first apartment was a second story apartment when I was 21. And I used to come home from work and I would run up the stairs every time. And I still do that. So that's like I'm saying. My experience mirrors exactly what you're saying, with clients who start off with a simple two day week strength training program and then it grows from there to running and whatever else they wanna do. But yeah, even myself I see the same things and as I'm getting older my daughter's friends as she's 17,. Like my daughter's friends, parents and other people I start seeing the chasm between the stuff I normally do and the stuff they normally do just keeps widening. And I think it goes right back to what you're saying. It's just the fact that I keep moving, keeps me moving. I don't consciously force it, it's just. It's not hard for me, like it's not hard for me to do.

Eric Rawson: 46:16

I think your brain knows that that's not a big deal. Carry your groceries, walk up two flights of stairs, walk up two stairs at a time, jump over the fence or the wall in the yard. I think your brain does a great job telling you what your limitations are. It's really a cycle that we get trapped in and no one knows exactly where it starts. But we gain weight, exercise becomes uncomfortable, so we do less of it, and when I say exercise, I mean purposeful exercise and also physical activity of our daily lives. We do less of it, we move less, we get in that chair quicker and we think about walking to a store or parking far away. We think about it less and less as we become heavier and we become more tired. We become more fatigued, so we move less and that feeds into becoming heavier, which makes it less likely to move.

Eric Rawson: 47:19

And the cycle goes around and around, with low energy leading to less physical activity and leading to a higher body weight. And we're fighting against a very remarkable food supply Plentiful food supply and food that has been engineered to taste much, much better than the food did 50 years ago. So it's created to overeat, it's not created to satisfy, and it's tough to break through that. With physical activity, I think very few people will be able to just start jogging and start running triathlons and get control of all of this. I think it has to be nuanced and we have to ask ourselves some questions. If the only thing you had at your, if the only option was running, would you run or do nothing?

Eric Rawson: 48:21

Right and a lot of people would say I won't run, I'll do nothing, Okay, well, what do we do with them? Let's find some resistance exercises for them. Let's start them on the pathway, but with a different starting point, and for some people, I think that's really the way. I think they can feel their strength increase. I think they can see it around the house, whether it's dragging out the trash barrel or reaching for something on a shelf or opening a jar. I think people can see the improvements in strength with their own two eyes. Their fitness is improving and I do believe that muscular strength is the foundation and resistance exercise is the gateway drug to get people moving more in the 23 hours a day we aren't in the gym.

Jerry Teixeira: 49:10

Yeah, when I first started to grow on social media which is quite by accident, I never planned for it, I wasn't trying to, but I was on Twitter to follow mostly researchers so I could learn to apply things to my own training. And then I had there was a doctor who had an issue with the wrist and I posted a quick video showing some wrist strengthening exercises she could do at home using a wall, and she was like, oh, this is great. And she retweeted it and started to grow. Some people ask questions. I started making videos and the rest is history.

Jerry Teixeira: 49:38

But one of the things that I noticed is that we need to remove the barriers to physical activity for people to the best of our ability, and so, especially early on, I stopped going to a commercial gym and lifting weights almost entirely of when my son was born, which is eight years ago now, and I decided I was gonna switch to calisthenics as a discipline and I was getting burned out with weight training. So that's why, for me, it was like going through the motions and I was finding I was having to force myself to do it and, my daughter being a gymnast at the time, I'd seen male gymnasts, I saw these awesome physiques and I was like you know what, I can do this. Let me take the principles of hypertrophy and strength training and just look at calisthenics and let's structure it so that I'm still doing the things I know need to be done to make this an effective methodology. And then what I found is that resonated with people because they were like, oh, I can do this in my living room. I'm self-conscious, I don't want to go to the gym, or I'm a single mom, or even not necessarily being single, hey, I've got three kids. It's really difficult to pack them in the car, take them to the daycare, go to the gym.

Jerry Teixeira: 50:43

So I think, to your point, removing barriers and making people understand that the mental model that we have about, okay, what is resistance training? Well, you picture barbells and dead lifts and like, yeah, that's one way to do it, for sure, but your body provides adequate resistance. You don't have to necessarily use weights. So if someone's listening to this and you think, okay, I know I need to resistance exercise, I know I need to include resistance exercise, you guys are saying two days a week, well, what I encourage people is all you need is a floor in your body and you can get a chair. I mean you can utilize a chair. There's different ways you can do it, but you can get phenomenal results with no equipment at all.

Jerry Teixeira: 51:25

So I think a lot of people also have that mental disconnect where what they think is required to engage in successful resistance exercise Just like you said with running people are like well, if I have to run, I'm not going to do cardio. For a lot of people it's like well, if I have to drive to the gym, I'm just not going to strength train them. And so I think it's important for people to realize like it's so and I get I still not so much now because I think I've gotten people to come around to this, but I still get pushed back sometime on social media where they're like you can't get just as good a results with body weight training as you can with using weights. And my my retort to that is yes, you can incrementally, progressively overload easier when you've got two and a half pound plates, one pound dumbbells and all this stuff.

Jerry Teixeira: 52:07

Yes, that there are advantages, but your muscles don't have eyes where they go. Oh, he's got a barbell, let's grow. Oh, it's a push up, let's not grow. I mean so maybe you can, maybe you can back me up or tell me I'm wrong, but you know, when it comes to strength and hypertrophy development, it doesn't matter what implement you use. It really doesn't.

Eric Rawson: 52:26

Right. And you know, one of the things probably the original thing that attracted me to your Twitter account. You know I tried to keep Twitter, you know, is close to 99% professional development as possible, you know. So I'm following other scientists, I'm sharing new research, and then I like to keep connected to the fitness community and I discovered your account. I said, look at this stuff this guy's doing with body weight exercises and it's, it's, it's real exercise, it's. He's not selling anything except real exercise here and progress. And that's why I started following you, I don't know how many years ago. And the thing about resistance exercises we've over complicated it.

Jerry Teixeira: 53:20

Yeah, 100%.

Eric Rawson: 53:22

Right and we've scared people away. Okay, on the one hand we're telling people, just go outside and walk, and people can do that Many people can't, not everybody. But then when we advertise resistance exercise, we show pictures of lat pulldowns and squat machines and leg presses and you know that that's not the same approach we've taken to trying to get people to move more. So you know, like you said, you just need a floor and you need gravity and it might be easier to throw a, you know, a two and a half pound plate on the end of your barbell. But just slight changes in position can really overload the muscles.

Eric Rawson: 54:02

And you made a comment about gymnasts earlier. If you go up to anyone in a gym and show them a picture of a gymnast Olympic level, college level, probably, even you know high school level and say is this a physique that you admire, is this a good physique, everyone will say that's, that's fantastic. Look at the development, look at the muscular development. And it's not from heavy squats and it's not from heavy bench presses, it's from primarily body weight, resistance exercise and lots and lots of repetitions. So you know, hypertrophy can come from what you do in the gym. If you have, if you can afford the gym. If you will go to the gym, then go to the gym. But if you can't afford the gym if you, if it doesn't fit into your lifestyle right now, then there's so much you can do at home to improve your muscular strength and your muscle mass, men and women, and get all the health benefits of resistance exercise with what we used to call calisthenics.

Jerry Teixeira: 55:08

Yeah, that's actually why I called it body weight strength training, so people would grasp, because so my experience was. I went into the Marine Corps and it was high rep. I mean hundreds of push-ups, hundreds of everything, you know they're trying to just wear you out and I didn't gain a bunch of muscle mass because I was being ran ragged. You know I'm going to gain some, but it was when I came back around and I looked at gymnast have like mentioned having screws on me. Oh, did I Nope you're back.

Eric Rawson: 55:32

Oh okay.

Jerry Teixeira: 55:34

So my experience with with calisthenics as a strength discipline, it seems like there's a natural gravitation toward strength endurance. People look at push-ups and you know, non-weighted dips and all that kind of stuff. They look at it as like and more toward the endurance side of resistance. You know, when you are, when you're setting up your strength training, you've got pure strength, you've got strength hypertrophy right, and then you've got your strength endurance and as you optimize more for one you can pull a little bit away from the others. For example, if you're, if you're training in very, very low rep ranges, the hypertrophy may not be as good as going a little higher. You know you're talking one, two, three reps per set, going up to say five or six. Or as you get to the extreme high rep ranges, you start moving away from hypertrophy, although interestingly, you know, in the last few years research has come out that shows that you can accomplish hypertrophy just function like creatinine excretion under most cases.

Eric Rawson: 56:43

So much to do about nothing. And I always ask people at my talks you know we're talking about adding enough creatinine to your diet. That equates to like an extra hamburger a day. Are you really that frightened by an extra hamburger a day that you think your kidneys would just collapse? It doesn't make much sense. So it took us 10 or 15 years of good, good quality studies to say that this case study that started at all probably shouldn't have been published and certainly spoke beyond the data that were available at that time. So there's no recommendation for anyone with normal renal function to have any sort of testing or talk to their doctor or any such thing before taking, you know, recommended doses of creatinine supplements.

Jerry Teixeira: 57:39

Yeah, which would be five grams a day. That's all I think anybody really needs to take. Yeah, what do you think about five? So if somebody eats meat regularly, two and a half a day, do you think would be sufficient?

Eric Rawson: 57:50

Yeah, so if we're talking about muscle creatinine, you know elevated muscle creatinine levels remain that way for weeks and weeks after you stop taking the supplement. So if you take, you know, one scoop per day the manufacturer scoops are typically five grams If you take one scoop per day, grade. If you take a half a scoop every other day, fine. If you forget to take it and one day you have a big steak which is loaded with creatinine, fine. You know your muscles are super saturated with creatinine.

Eric Rawson: 58:22

There's a limit, there's a ceiling. You're up around that ceiling and if you stop taking creatinine, you're not getting back down to normal for about six weeks. So if you want to drop it down to three grams per day, you know, go ahead. It's a bit related to how large you are. Sure, If you're a 300 pound offensive tackled, and maybe five grams per day If you're my size, then you could probably, you know, get away with three grams per day. But I've not seen any data to suggest that anything bad would happen by taking five grams per day. You would just, you know, absorb it and excrete the excess.