Part 2: Eric Rawson on the Power of Resistance Training for Longevity.

What if your everyday tasks could turn into opportunities to build your muscles? What if the secret to muscle hypertrophy isn't just tons of weight and low repetitions, but lighter resistances and higher repetition schemes instead? 

Together with Eric Rawson, an expert in muscle hypertrophy, we unravel surprising truths and debunk traditional beliefs surrounding muscle growth and fitness. We offer practical ways to make "exercise snacks" a part of your daily routine, thereby transforming mundane tasks into fitness opportunities. Regardless of your age or lifestyle, it's never too late to start integrating these habits into your routine to see impressive improvements in your strength and fitness. 

We often get lost in the maze of fitness do's and don'ts that it becomes easy to fall for misconceptions. One such misconception is the belief that muscle fitness demands countless hours in the gym. Eric and I challenge this notion, emphasizing that just a few days of half an hour workouts per week can yield significant results. We delve deep into the importance of recovery, the role of genetics, training, and even pharmaceutical assistance in muscle growth. The negative influence of photoshopped images on our fitness goals and the positive mental health effects of resistance training also form part of our discussion.

Lastly, we focus our attention on the often misunderstood world of creatine supplementation. We explore how vegetarians, aging and sleep-deprived individuals, and those recovering from illnesses or injuries could harness the potential cognitive benefits of creatine. Eric provides invaluable insights into creatine dosage, its relationship with body size, and common misconceptions. If you're curious about the potential benefits of creatine supplementation or eager to maximize your muscle fitness, this episode promises to be an enlightening and informative guide. Join us for this thought-provoking discussion!

Transcript

Jerry Teixeira: 0:01

This is part two of my interview with Eric Rossin. This is a portion of the interview that I thought I lost due to losing power thanks to the California Storm and, as it turns out, I was able to recover it. Rookie podcast or mistake. If I had more experience I would have known that initially, but I was able to get it. You guys are going to get to check it out, which I'm glad, because it was some really good content. At the end of this there is the final wrapping up of the interview that I did lose due to the power. That's not recoverable, but it was right as I was about to conclude, so you didn't miss anything. So please enjoy the rest of the interview with Eric Rossin.

Jerry Teixeira: 0:37

If you're training in very, very low rep ranges, the hypertrophy may not be as good as going a little higher. You're talking 1, 2, 3 reps per set is going up to, say, 5 or 6. Or as you get to the extreme high rep ranges, you start moving away from hypertrophy, although, interestingly, in the last few years, research has come out that shows that you can accomplish hypertrophy just as well with low weight, high repetition training or low load high repetition training, provided those loads are above, I think it's about 30 or 40% of one rep maximum. So as long as the loads aren't too small, if they are effective for hypertrophy, what do you think about that?

Eric Rawson: 1:19

Yeah, and I think that's great research. The extremely heavyweight, low repetition type of programs are wonderful for developing strength and they develop strength better than they would develop increases in muscle mass or muscle hypertrophy, because strength is a bit of a skill. You can practice the deadlift and get stronger by learning how to deadlift better. So strength at that level is a skill. Adding muscle mass can come from much lighter resistances and much higher repetition schemes than anyone ever thought before and research that's consistently shown. That is very high quality research from some great labs and I like it because it has allowed people to consider that pushups at home could really improve the muscle mass of your upper body.

Eric Rawson: 2:26

Don't write off pushups in favor of. You have to do bench presses, and I think people sometimes conflate what they see in the gym with different types of goals. So when someone says you can't accomplish that with higher repetitions or bodyweight exercises, what's your goal? Is your goal to increase your bench press strength? Is your goal to compete in powerlifting? Okay, you need to bench press. Is your goal to compete in powerlifting and break a record in the squat? Okay, then you need to do barbell squats, because that's the event.

Eric Rawson: 3:07

But if your goal is to increase the size and strength and endurance and overall muscular fitness of your body, then you can attack that in a number of different ways, and that includes going to the gym and it also includes doing pushups and pullups and bodyweight exercises. And there's all sorts of spaces in between too. I have a weighted vest in this office that, for one piece of equipment, it can completely change what I can do around the house. So I can squat wearing the vest, I can do pushups wearing the vest, I can do pullups wearing the vest, and that increases the load dramatically. I can also go for walks with the vest on and really increase my energy expenditure, or I can wear the vest around the house while I do housework and burn more calories that way, place an extra load on my bones that way. So there's a lot of interesting things we can do in between going to the gym and just a pure bodyweight routine with very modest equipment, some of which can be homemade.

Jerry Teixeira: 4:24

I think even people who start out walking, if you take a weight and you suitcase carry that weight so you hold the weight to one side of the body, start with something that's not very heavy for you so you can build the stabilizer muscles and build the base level of strength doing Then you overload over time. But to me, just alternating hands with a suitcase carry around the neighborhood even would be great for somebody. Maybe you're going to. Don't worry about what you look like. Most people don't exercise anytime you're outside doing something. You look like you're an outlier these days, but you know to your point it doesn't necessarily have to be the dedicated strength training session and then whatever else you're doing, you can combine it with your working around the house.

Jerry Teixeira: 5:06

And one thing that I'll be honest about my training my training sessions are no longer. I'm 43, I got kids, so it's not like I go okay time for me to train everybody leave me alone. I need my hour or whatever the case is. So my a lot of days I'm literally in front of my trigger, like putting stakes on or whatever, and I'm literally doing like lunges at the trigger, or I'm inside, you know, helping my one of my sons, my son's home school. So I'm inside the house and I'm like helping them with the schoolwork and like, in between him, answering problems. I'm literally doing exercise sets on the floor. So my, my personal training is not this glorious. Going to battle with the gym, or you know this. This, this session, that people sometimes think is what is required to build a great physique or get results.

Eric Rawson: 5:55

Yeah, and you know what you're doing exercise snacks. The cardiometabolic benefits of those are documented. You're improving your health and you're also maintaining your muscular fitness at a very, very high level. You know, I have an expression when we were young we planned our lives around our workouts. And when we get older, we had to plan our workouts around our lives.

Eric Rawson: 6:24

That doesn't mean stop moving. It might mean that when I get to the office in the morning I do push-ups before I do email, and that you know when I work in the yard I you know when I'm pushing the wheelbarrow uphill, I sprint. You know, or I take the long way around the house, or I do lunges when I grill or whatever. Whatever it is, whatever works for you, you can really make remarkable improvements in muscular fitness. And, like I said, if you're challenging your body several times throughout the day, the you kind of get a burst like an improvement in in health every time you exercise. And you know there are the the beneficial effects of chronic exercise training. You know working out for an hour hard every single day works. But there's also the benefits of you know doing a five minute exercise snack, a five minute blast of exercise, a couple times per day and stringing all those metabolic improvements together throughout your life. And I personally find fitting in cardio to be the hardest because I dislike it and and it just takes time right.

Jerry Teixeira: 7:40

Yeah, you can't do that, plus other stuff for the most people. You can't go on a treadmill desk, but it's limited. You can't go on a three mile run while you're helping your kid with his homework.

Eric Rawson: 7:50

Whatever the case is, you have to get yourself to that thing so that's a difficult one to fit in, but I find that fitting in snacks of exercise throughout the day. You know, consciously, you know taking the stairs and moving up the stairs quickly is is the way at least at this point in my life that's become the way is not to be idle is to keep moving and to not convince yourself that what you're doing is not as productive as what you could be doing in the gym by staying in the elliptical for an hour yeah, well, there was recent research in out of London I think I can't remember the university, but they they took office workers and they had to do all out sprints on a cycle for three minutes of active I mean that you have.

Jerry Teixeira: 8:37

It was. It was like 30 second burst and then a few minutes slow pedal 30 second if I remember correctly. But they were doing three minutes a week of active bursts and it made significant measurable improvements in in their their. You know, when they did lipids, I'm sorry, when they did um, biomarkers from like blood pressure, they did blood work and they looked at all these various things and they saw improvements across the board. So I thought it was and I did a video about the time that I was like man, three minutes a week, like literally you can move three minutes a week with intention.

Jerry Teixeira: 9:08

I mean it was intense movement, but that's if three minutes a week can improve your health, then you know, and you're talking about doing these things throughout the day, so you're doing them several times a day and then that many days, even if you never had a structured exercise session like that's going to have a huge impact on your health yes, and, and it's you know, we're at the point where all of the physiology that we've studied and all of the physiological knowledge we've acquired, it's it comes down to human behavior.

Eric Rawson: 9:37

So how can I modify my behavior, how can I help you modify your behavior? And if some of these things appeal to you, then, uh, what you know, we're on the right path. So, something like you get to the office and before you check your email, you do push-ups. They could be modified push-ups, they could be five push-ups, they could be a hundred push-ups. What you know, we're working at your level.

Eric Rawson: 10:02

But the habit becomes before you get stuck in your computer, before you get in your chair, you do your push-ups. Or or maybe at the end of the day, before you get in your car for your commute home, you do, you do push-ups then, or you do 10 squats, you know, before you go to lunch. For me, personally, I find that most of the time when I think I'm hungry, I'm just bored. And if I can discipline myself into doing some sort of movement before I eat, I never, I never want to eat after that. You know. So, for me, if I, if I say okay, I'm going to go upstairs and look for peanut butter. Um, if I drop on the floor and do 20 push-ups and I stand back up the craving if there, if there was a craving, it's gone now.

Eric Rawson: 10:49

So those little exercise snacks throughout the day, those little exercise breaks are are enormously beneficial and I think they fit better into most working people's lives and and most parents lives yeah.

Jerry Teixeira: 11:01

Well, I think what goes along with what you're saying is and this is something that when I was younger I didn't. I wasn't in this camp, and as I've gotten older I kind of switched sides as more research, you know, came to light. But the amount of resistance exercise volume that is needed to elicit a good response is not high. And one of the things I see happen online is there's a lot of arguing and bantering about optimal, like this is the optimal retching or this is not. A volume is optimal and the thing is and I think this is a really important part and maybe you can kind of chime in being being the expert the amount of total volume. So let's talk sets per week, let's talk hard sets per week, the amount of hard sets per week per muscle that someone needs to perform to get a, a great result or an optimal result. You can still get that great result, if not optimal, on way fewer sets than the optimal.

Jerry Teixeira: 11:58

So online I see a lot of arguing over what's optimal and then people want to structure their resistance training for optimal, but for most people it you know you can do half the number of sets per week or less and get the majority of the possible gains in the bodybuilding world. People are willing to train an hour and a half or two hours every other day or every day to squeeze out that extra five percent, and I think it's important for the normal person, the average listener, to realize that I'm going to get most of the benefits of resistance training. I'm going to build most of the muscle mass from doing a few hard sets per muscle two times a week. I don't need to. So can you kind of just talk about the difference between optimal and good and and what the disparity in the amount of volume that's required to get to reach those things?

Eric Rawson: 12:45

sure, and and I think this is one of the things that hasn't changed about the resistance training game over the years, is that we're all chronically over trained and we're constantly comparing ourselves to the wrong person which is bad enough in individual or the wrong groups of individuals. So if you're comparing yourself to a competitive bodybuilder, a competitive physique athlete, first of all they're already bigger and stronger and leaner than 99 percent of the population there. There could be something very different about that person. Second of all, that could be their full-time job. Right, training is their full-time job. Training and eating and sleeping is their full-time job, and you have a other things to do. And and third, you know they're gifted. That's their full-time job.

Eric Rawson: 13:45

And part of that full-time job is of recuperation and, and my guess is, for most of us, we're not getting the amount of sleep we need, you know, whereas some of these athletes who are training 90 minutes a day, seven days a week, are getting eight hours of sleep a night, plus a two hour nap. So it's recovery as well, not just the training, but part of the equation. So it's genetics, it's training and recovery, and then it's pharmaceutical assistance, right, right, and I suppose I should add the fourth one would be photoshop, although that hasn't been historically there, but you know if you're comparing yourself to someone who's you know got space alien genetics. And they have no stress in their lives.

Eric Rawson: 14:30

Their only job is to train and eat and sleep uh in their, their, you know, not admitting it until they get caught that they're using drugs that will assist them to recover, that will increase muscle hypertrophy. That's a terrible thing to do to yourself. That's a terrible comparison. Uh, you know all of the resistance training research, like some of those early studies on older adults, those were, you know, two days per week, about 30 minutes of resistance training and that there's been a real movement to study minimal amounts of resistance training. And with, you know, two days a week, 30 minutes a session, we see improvements in hemoglobin a1c we we see improvements in strength. We see improvements in walking speed. We see improvements in habitual physical activity, obviously improvements in strength and bone density and the usual things we talk about, but it's a lot less than people think. So if you're comparing yourself to a professional athlete, you just have to stop that, unless your goal is to be that professional athlete. If you're talking about, you know, getting from where you are up to, you know better than 90% of the people in your age group. It's two or three days per week for about a half an hour. It's a much lower volume, so far fewer working sets and then, if you prefer, your reps up in the 15 to 20 range. That's fine. You could be down around 8 to 12 or you could be up around 15 to 20 and you're still receiving the same benefits in strength, muscular endurance and muscle hypertrophy. So we haven't done a good job and the science is young and the body of literature is not as large as with aerobic exercise training. But we just haven't done a good enough job getting the word out that a little bit of resistance exercise goes a long way. And if you look at the big, big studies and you know the ultimate question would be mortality If you do this, are you less likely to die? You know no proxy marker like lipids or blood sugar or body fat. If you do this, you're less likely to die. If you look at those studies, you will find that under an hour of resistance training a week it dramatically reduces your likelihood of dying.

Eric Rawson: 17:06

So we have to think carefully about our goals and we have to kind of shake out what sort of bad influences are in our head, what sort of severely photoshopped individuals you know. I certainly appreciate how difficult it is to come up with reasonable goals when social media has changed the game so much. You know what we can do with pictures on Photoshop is incredible. But what we can now do with basically photoshopping videos, which no one really ever thought we could do, you know, not with an app on your phone where you could, you know, make waistlines, you know, ridiculously small, impossibly small shoulders, impossibly wide, you know, change the lighting, change the filter, and we're not really looking at any good examples of human potential anymore. We're looking at something that's like the comic books that inspired me a long time ago. You know, so it's. We're frightening people away from resistance training by overcomplicating it and by not getting them the message that two or three times a week, for 30 minutes and you can make fantastic gains. And that's muscle, that's bone, that's every system in your body.

Eric Rawson: 18:34

You know, I think some of the most impressive research on the benefits of resistance exercise is the stuff we don't talk about at all and that's the improvements in mental health. Right there there are two incredible meta analyses. So, remember, a meta analysis is a collection of every research study that's ever been published and then it's mathematically analyzed. So when we collapse all these data together, we can say here's the size of the signal, here's how well this works. And if you look at the meta analyses on resistance exercise.

Eric Rawson: 19:10

Not walking, not cardio, just resistance exercise on anxiety or resistance exercise on symptoms of depression. It's phenomenal, the signal is so large it almost makes me think that not prescribing resistance exercise to improve mental health is almost it's almost negligent. It should be standard. It should be standard of care and, and you know, I think resistance of exercise should be standard of care. When you know someone's leaving the hospital, I think there should be an exercise prescription. I think it should be part of a lot of treatment plans, but it's a lot lower volume than people actually think and I think social media has made that message harder to get out there.

Jerry Teixeira: 19:58

Yeah, that's one of the things that I try to stress and I mean I posted something this morning on Twitter and I already got people like kind of fired up a little bit. But I basically said I said that you're because I've looked over the various data that are out there and you know, not a scientist, but what I'm looking for in this particular instance is when they take a study and they look at people performing one set of an exercise and I want to make sure these are high intensity sets, that they're for high effort sets rather. So these are, like you know, hey, one set to failure versus three sets, versus five sets, or at least close proximity to failure. You can. You can see where set one, so the group that performed one set, they'll yield like somewhere in the mid 60s to 70% At the end of the study term. They'll say, oh, they gain this much muscle mass, right. Then they'll compare it to set two, group two, which is, say, three sets, and they'll find that group one gained almost 70% of the total possible or the muscle mass that the highest gaining group did, which maybe is the five sets per exercise group. So it's like, okay, you can do five times the volume of this other group and you can gain 30% more muscle mass. But for a normal person to net 70% of the total possible gains in one set, it's like, dude, you could live for 15 minutes. You could literally do let me do my push ups, let me do my, my pull ups, if I can. If I can't do pull ups, let's do something with a resistance band, doesn't matter. But it's like I could just go through into a circuit of these eight exercises and I could literally be in and out in 15 minutes and I could net 70% of the gains. And like that's the message I try to get across.

Jerry Teixeira: 21:26

Like my own mother, she passed away two years ago and she was 76. So not old to die, you know. And she retired in her early 60s and after retirement she was a hairdresser, stood on her feet all day long, she became very sedentary and it was a rapid decline in musculoskeletal health, shed osteoporosis, and she ended up having to go through like multiple marathon back surgeries was all bad and I told her for years after she retired because I could see it happening Her posture was falling apart. I was like mom, you have to be physically active, you cannot just lay around all day like this and I saw her literally go from this strong woman to just frail, frail you know, and then ultimately, like I said, she passed away of pneumonia. She wasn't strong enough to beat it but she had this script to go to physical therapy and it was like not close to the house and all this stuff and I was trying to tell her I was like no wall push-ups right there at home, like it can be so, so simple to institute and I just see all these barriers. So that's one of the reasons why I try to help people realize like no one set is great If that's what you got time to do Two sets.

Jerry Teixeira: 22:38

When I look at these studies, if you do too high effort sets, so try hard, get close to failure.

Jerry Teixeira: 22:41

I mean, you got to put effort into these sets but you do two sets per exercise and you get like 80% of the total possible gains. So let's take a year. Somebody trains for a year doing five sets or whatever of you know the optimal quote, unquote optimal exercise prescription and they gain 10 pounds of muscle in a year. Another person does the first two sets, yield 79, 80% of the gains and they gained eight pounds of muscle. And then we can see a difference.

Jerry Teixeira: 23:05

Like, yeah, technically the person with the optimal program got better results, but it wasn't that much better. Like you could have done two sets and you could have got great results. So that's you know. I think the overarching theme I think for this conversation for people is like don't erect these walls in your mind about why this isn't going to work or that's not going to work or my program is not the best, like that it doesn't even matter. Just put a high effort into a couple of sets two times a week and you're going to get the lion's share of the progress. If not optimal, it's going to be damn good.

Eric Rawson: 23:38

Absolutely, and you know. And consistency. You do it and you keep doing it and that's why another reason it has to be it enjoyable or bearable. But you know we have to design exercise programs that are sustainable and a very small amount of work offers major results. And it really reminds me of of the you know, the protein discussion, which is, you know, should I have way protein concentrate or way protein isolate? And if there's a difference there, it's tiny. The difference is between eating enough protein and not eating enough protein. So if you eat enough protein, that will help augment the resistance training response.

Eric Rawson: 24:27

And if everyone's arguing about protein quality and protein timing and protein supplements, just eat enough, I promise you'll get 95% of the way there, if not more. You know, and it's the same type of thing with the exercise program. You know, if you work hard, if you're consistent, two to three days per week, hit every major muscle group, you'll make the progress you want. You know. But but assess your goals. You know, if the goal is to break the you know the record in the squat, then you have to go squat. If your goal is to have muscular strength and muscle mass in your lower body so that you can ski or mow your lawn or golf or carry your kids, then you can accomplish that with much, much less work than you think.

Jerry Teixeira: 25:16

So along those lines, we're talking about resistance exercise as it relates to healthy aging. I understand you have a new paper or a couple of new papers that you've worked on, so do you want to fill us in on what those are about?

Eric Rawson: 25:34

Well, I think we've touched on a bit of it already, and that is that we're trying to bring people around to the concept that we shouldn't be recommending people do aerobic exercise training and also resistance training. Right now, I understand when, when you're talking about two different things, you have to list one first and you have to list the other one second. That's how language works, right? But there has not been Really in emphasis on the benefits of resistance exercise from the major public health organizations, from the major sports science and sports medicine organizations. It's always Do your cardio, do your aerobic exercise training and also Lift weights, and I think people feel that messaging and I think you know there's some biases in there. But the fact is there's a massive amount of literature on the beneficial effects of Aerobic exercise training and improved cardio respiratory fitness and there is a much smaller, although rapidly growing, body of literature on resistance exercise and the benefits across organ systems. You know, across all systems. You know and and you know for the past 25 years we've just been talking about resistance exercise and muscle and maybe bone once in a while, but but while we've been quiet, all of this information has accrued. Resistance exercise improved symptoms of depression, improves anxiety, improves quality and quantity of sleep, you know. Improves cardio metabolic health, reduces, you know, your risk of premature death as well as makes you stronger and gives you strong bones Right. So now we're we're we're in the conversation with aerobic exercise training. So some of the projects I'm involved with now are, I hope, helping to get the message out there that we shouldn't be saying either, or we should never be saying, just do resistance exercise or just do aerobic exercise training. But we really shouldn't be brushing off Resistance exercise as it only is good for muscle or muscle and bone, because I think there's a lot more overlap between the beneficial effects of aerobic and resistance exercise training than people think. And for aerobic exercise training, increases in muscle mass and increases in strength and power are extremely unlikely. You need the weights to do that. So it goes back to one of the first things we said. If you have an individual who, for some reason, is not going to walk they're not going to get in the treadmill, they're not going to get on the elliptical or the stair master and they want to improve their health, start them with some resistance exercise and it can lead like a gateway drug to greater things and an increase in different types of physical activity. We really should be thinking about resistance exercise on par with aerobic exercise training as the data emerge, like I mentioned earlier, with quality of life for cancer patients. We're thinking differently now and we're speaking more openly about it. You know I had said earlier that it's been. It's an interesting to be this age because of how I've watched resistance training change from just linemen to now everyone in the world should do it Right.

Eric Rawson: 29:13

There was a time when cardiac rehabilitation If you had a heart attack, they told you to stay in bed and rest and then you're conditioning plummeted right. And then it became okay, get out of bed and we're gonna get you walking, which is wonderful. And then it became get out of beds, walk to the gym, lift some weights and then walk back. So resistance training was incorporated into cardiac rehabilitation. Now we're incorporating resistance training into cancer rehabilitation. The field of exercise oncology is growing rapidly and we're really thinking about things differently. So go ahead.

Jerry Teixeira: 29:53

Especially with catechia right Cancer. You have this wasting. That happens. That is brutal because, as that happens, it limits standard of care. How much chemo can you get or what drugs can you take? You have to maintain a certain level of health in order to withstand some of these treatments.

Eric Rawson: 30:07

Right side effects of the cancer and side effects of the treatment.

Jerry Teixeira: 30:11

Right and I think you're right. I've noticed that there are papers coming out now where exercise and it can be resistance or this extends into both types of exercise, but just physical activity in general improves health outcomes in almost every case, in almost every disease. So it's definitely something where I know dealing with a disease or being in a disease state can make being physically active more difficult for you. But when you look at the outcomes, it's something where you've gotta figure out how to get it in and I feel for people going. I have an uncle right now dealing with cancer, I feel, for I can't imagine what it's like to be in issues. But yeah, it's one of those things where, again, because from an evolutionary perspective we never could have been sick or not, you gotta be active and because you would have had to just survive.

Eric Rawson: 31:02

Yeah, and cancers can be very different different types of cancers and the negative effects of the medications can be very, very different between individuals. So we can't just say everyone who has cancer will lift weights. But we're no longer really afraid to study it and we actually have exercise oncology degrees, graduate programs popping up. We have certifications for people to work with as exercise cancer rehabilitation specialists. So it's fantastic to watch us grow right.

Eric Rawson: 31:42

One of the things that I ask people, because it's a pet peeve of mine, is, if we're taking prevention seriously, if we're taking exercise seriously as a medicine, why isn't exercise included in your discharge notes from the hospital? How many people are leaving the hospital? Who that's there? One time they're gonna have contact with a provider, with a health expert. Why are they leaving without any advice on how to become more physically active? And to even add to that, there's some wonderful research where they sent fitness professionals, physical therapists, into the patient's rooms and, depending on their medical condition, they had them exercise in the hospital. Why aren't we talking about inpatients doing resistance exercise in bed? If they're in the hospital for a period of time, that loss of muscle mass is ultimately going to be the reason that they can't hang on. So we're getting closer, but I think I'd like a much more serious discussion about are we really thinking about exercise as a medicine, such that we'll prescribe it to inpatients and we'll make it part of the discharge notes when people leave their doctors?

Jerry Teixeira: 33:06

I have big dreams, I agree, because survival of the fittest is not just a meme or a saying. You don't need to be a bodybuilder, but the more part of your musculoskeletal system is in that health extent. Very few people are gonna have a robustly strong musculoskeletal system and then weak organs. There's an improvement in overall systemic health that happens with exercise. I know, I know. I know I know there's an improvement in overall systemic health. That happens with exercise.

Eric Rawson: 33:38

Sick. Your ability to survive the illness or survive the side effects of the medication could be improved from a physical activity program. So even if you got sick anyway, the exercise would help you maintain your quality of life as you fight for your health. I just have. I'm an unbelievably biased exercise physiologist. I have nothing but good things to say about exercise.

Jerry Teixeira: 34:08

I mean it's side effect free.

Eric Rawson: 34:09

So can't help it. My students, I'm sure, are sick of hearing it day after day that every lecture winds up coming back to exercise is good. Keep doing it.

Jerry Teixeira: 34:21

Yeah. So one of the things I wanted to touch on before we wrap up is so I think people are now keenly aware that creatine benefits your resistance training pursuits. Right, if anything you do that is explosive. The nature creatine is going to have, or strength based in nature creatine is going to have a benefit. But I've also seen some research to show that endurance athletes who supplement with creatine, their performance at endurance sport doesn't improve, but their recovery from endurance sport actually improves, so they're able to get back to train more quickly. So which I found that to be interesting.

Jerry Teixeira: 34:53

But also there's emerging data showing that there are cognitive benefits to creating supplementation and these things may not. If you eat meat, if you have a certain base level of creatine your diet, perhaps those things won't actually apply to you. But for people that are vegetarian or an aging population and maybe that's tied to them not Not eating as much, so they're not consuming as much animal based protein. But can you maybe touch on the benefits to creatine outside of strength training, because I think people understand that, hey, I'm strength training consistently creating will benefit me, but in what other ways might create team benefit somebody based on on your research?

Eric Rawson: 35:30

Sure, and we can come back and do a whole couple of hours on creatine. There's always more to talk about with creatine. So your you know your muscles are already filled with creatine. You consume creatine in your diet. Your body manufacturers it to. If you take creatine supplements, you can increase your muscle creatine levels. And then any sort of exercise challenge that resembles high intensity sprinting so it could be a set of push ups or it could be an actual sprint or it could be, you know, a team sport activity, intermittent activity any of those things can benefit from having more muscle creatine, which you can achieve with supplementation pretty easily.

Eric Rawson: 36:16

The brain is a little bit different, because the, whereas the muscles don't manufacture creatine and it's really easy to get creatine into your muscles the brain manufactures its own creatine, but it's the same type of principle that your brain is going to rely on creatine to produce energy during during stressful times, and potentially you could supplement with creatine and increase your brain creatine levels and then any type of stressful task that you were engaged with could benefit from having this, this increased brain creatine levels from the supplementation. So there are a few studies now showing that in different populations. So some of these studies were vegetarian. Some of them were older adults, some of them were younger adults, some of them were stressed with sleep deprivation, some of them were stressed with exercise. So a whole mix of different types of studies.

Eric Rawson: 37:16

When you put them all together, there's a really consistent improvement in cognitive function or cognitive processing in people who've gone through just a standard creatine supplementation protocol. This is, you know, good news for young people and certainly good news for older adults as well. I think it might be particularly valuable for people who are going through some sort of stress, which could be disease. It could be, you know, disease that results in remarkably low physical activity, like if you're bedridden. It could be stress, it could be sleep deprivation, it could be all of the above that I think the benefits are likely to be even more pronounced. But it's a very consistent response in the literature that regular creatine supplementation doses appear to improve brain function in all different types of populations.

Jerry Teixeira: 38:14

Now with creatine supplementation, by way of how it works, there is a small increase in total body water. So when you take creatine it's common to see the scale go up a pound or two. I encourage people not to get discouraged. I have clients sometimes in their training they want to lose weight. So we say, hey, let's try creatine. But if you notice a little bit of a small fluctuation of weight, don't stress. Right, it's not body fat and at some point in the future, if you stop taking it, that invariable will go away. But are there any other side effects? I mean, I've heard your hair falls out and I've been taking creatine since I was 20 and 43 and my hair hasn't fallen out. So at least for me I'm not too worried about that. But there's people that your hair falling out and increases DHT like is it bad for your kidneys? Maybe you can just run through those. I know a lot of those are just urban legends. But maybe you can kind of talk on the next one.

Eric Rawson: 39:10

A group of us actually got together and wrote a scientific paper addressing the like the top 10 urban legends, which I'll send you a copy of. You can share it with your listeners and your followers because We'll make it into an infographic.

Eric Rawson: 39:25

That's fine. Hey, when there's some misinformation that gets out there in the world of nutrition, it lasts at least 30 years. I mean, I'm getting questions that I thought we resolved with research, you know, 20, 25 years ago, but the misinformation is still getting to the athletes, still getting to the parents, even the physicians, coaches as well. So I don't mind answering these questions, but it's incredible how long lasting misinformation is in this business. A lot of it starts off with a misinterpretation or a mistake, or a single paper is a good example. So science is not about a single paper. It's not about the most recent paper. It's about a collection of research studies and some research studies will just find a result by sheer luck. So if you do 100 studies, 99 of them might get the same result, but one of them, just random luck, might get the complete opposite result. So when we look at all 100 of those papers, we realize that overwhelmingly the evidence supports this particular effect and this one study. We don't know what happened there. That's just kind of how research works. And you know, as an example, one person or one group did a study on creatinine supplementation and they measured DHT, dihydrotestosterone levels, and dihydrotestosterone levels are loosely connected to hair loss. It's not a completely unanimous finding or unanimous thing that your dihydrotestosterone levels will equal your hair. You know your hair health or your hair growth. So we have this one study and they show an increase small increase in dihydrotestosterone levels with creatinine supplementation.

Eric Rawson: 41:23

If you go back and look closely at that paper you'll find a couple of things. One is that the increase in the creatinine group was small. This is the danger of only using percent changes and not looking at the absolute values. The increase was small, it remained in the normal range and the placebo group had a reduction in dihydrotestosterone. And statistically, when one group goes up and one group goes down, that's kind of where the statistical finding comes from. Like if the placebo group had stayed the same, like it was supposed to, there probably wouldn't have been a statistical effect, or they may not have been. So you know, changes in the placebo group confound the paper. You know, not exceeding the normal range confounds the paper. The fact that no one has been able to reproduce these results in years compounds, you know, confounds the paper. And you know, theoretically I'm not sure why we would be looking at creatinine and dihydrotestosterone anyway, because there's about a dozen papers that have measured creatinine supplementation and testosterone and they found nothing.

Jerry Teixeira: 42:39

Right.

Eric Rawson: 42:40

Right. It's not going to alter your endocrine system. It's a nutrient that's involved in energy metabolism in your muscles and in your brains. If you ate an extra hamburger a day, I don't expect that your testosterone levels would change dramatically, and I think your testosterone levels are the feeder for your dihydrotestosterone levels, right? So how did dihydrotestosterone levels go up but not? How did DHT go up but not testosterone?

Eric Rawson: 43:08

I don't know why didn't testosterone go up in any of these other studies. Probably because it doesn't make any sense that it should. So the data were always interesting for that brief period of time. But here we are, years later and we have enough data to say I don't really believe there's something happening here. I know there's an ongoing study that's supposed to be addressing this actually from a hair perspective. However, one measures hair growth or hair loss. That's outside of my domain, but really the whole creatinine hair loss thing is, as far as we know now, based on many studies. It's much ado about nothing. One study, that that you know gave us some interesting findings but has never been replicated and on its own doesn't make too much sense.

Jerry Teixeira: 44:02

And then the creatine and kidney damage or whatever.

Eric Rawson: 44:06

Yeah and another, you know, another bit of misinformation. So sometimes misinformation comes from social media, Sometimes it comes from the news and sometimes it comes from medical journals. So two investigators published a case study. Now, case studies can be very important, but a retrospective case study, where someone shows up in the emergency room or they show up in your office and you kind of backtrack and try to figure out what got them there, what happened that's generally considered the weakest form of science. Right, you know, a case study shows that someone had elevated creatinine levels. The person already had creatinine disease. Excuse me, the person already had renal disease. They were taking a medication that's incredibly nephrotoxic and they want creatinine supplements and their urine creatinine levels increased, which would happen if you ate a big steak.

Jerry Teixeira: 45:06

Right.

Eric Rawson: 45:08

So that turned into this guy with kidney disease. Taking this awful medication was on creatinine supplements, and creatinine supplements caused his kidney diseases to get worse. When you look back at that case study you'll think, wow, this is really not the highest quality science we can do here.

Jerry Teixeira: 45:28

And, of course, how did they make that jump?

Eric Rawson: 45:30

So since that time there has been multiple clinical trials on all different types of populations patient populations, athletic populations, general population to show that creatinine supplementation does not cause renal dysfunction. Creatinine supplementation does not Does not even increase markers of kidney dysfunction like creatinine excretion under most cases. 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 took us 10 or 15 years of 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: 46:57

Yeah, which would be five grams a day. That's all I think anybody really needs to think. 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: 47:09

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: 47:40

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. 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.

Jerry Teixeira: 48:19

And this is the part where the power went out and I did not get a close, so I'm going to have Eric back on for around two. The guy's just phenomenal. We could talk for hours Prior to having him back on. I'll make sure to reach out on all my social media channels and get questions. I can do a good Q&A with Eric, so stay tuned for that and if you have questions, I will make sure to get to those when we do a part two.