Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
My name is Richie Kirwan. I'm a registered nutritionist and I have a PhD in clinical nutrition and I'm a senior lecturer at John Moors University where I lecture in nutrition and exercise physiology. So that's my bag. That's what I'm into. That's what kind of gets me out of bed in the morning.
Speaker 1:Some other degrees from here. And today, what I want to talk about, and hopefully we'll get some really good questions on it, is today is specifically going to be the importance of muscle health. So this is the whole area of my PhD, why muscle is important for people and why we might want to consider holding onto it as long as we can. And I want to talk about what will happen to it with weight loss, particularly with anybody who's using a GLP-one, for example. And then not in this chat, but next week, we're going to talk about some of the best nutrition and exercise approaches to help hold onto muscle or even help increase it as well, which is the holy grail that most people are looking for.
Speaker 1:Just some declarations. So we're going to talk about why muscle matters for health. We're going to talk specifically about things like heart disease and diabetes, which are things I'm really, really interested in. And we're gonna talk about how we can lose it as it ages and then how muscle can, be increased as well. So, Scott, just out of curiosity, do you want me to just talk all the way through, which I'm I'm very capable of just talking until somebody, throws something at me.
Speaker 1:Or do you want it to be a little bit more interactive? Do you want it to be more of a chat? What what are you thinking?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think let's go through slides and then we can ask questions. And then, you know, with the people on the video, you will have the privilege of maybe being able to ask questions again, get into discussion because there always and there's some good at least some good, like, conversation about these topics in terms of I know we've all heard muscle is important now and, like, in all our, but, yeah, let's just do that. And I'll any questions, leave in the comment box as well or anything, guys, and then I can keep tabs on Richie.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, really important one. If if a question comes up, if I say something that kinda just kinda sticks out, guys, just pop a question into the chat box and we can go from there because I know if you leave until the end, it's very easy to kind of forget about it. So, yeah, let's get into this.
Speaker 1:So why are we even talking about muscle and health? And it's not just about looking good in a swimsuit as much as we'd all like to look like this tanned god walking along the beach right now, it's not just about looking good. There are a lot of health benefits that come with having muscle on our body. So the first one and my particular area of research, what I'm really, really into is heart disease. And the first thing I want to mention is that people with the most muscle compared to people with the least muscle, so if you divide people into a few different groups, you'll see that those with the most muscle have an eighty one percent lower risk of developing heart disease.
Speaker 1:That's a phenomenal difference and the reason I'm saying that's a phenomenal difference is heart disease is the number one killer on earth, simple as that. And if we can reduce the risk by eighty one percent by maintaining muscle, then that's something I think everybody should be really, really aiming for with their lifestyle habits. I want to show you guys here is So this is just an interesting look. So we've got a few different lines going on here. I'm just going to explain what this means.
Speaker 1:So this is research in people who actually have heart disease, so people who've had some sort of what we call a cardiac event. And what we see is that people with the most muscle and the least body fat have a sixty eight percent lower risk of dying from heart disease. So these are people who've had some sort of an event. They might have had a heart attack. So amongst those people, the people who've got the most muscle and the least body fat are the least likely to die.
Speaker 1:So if we look at this graph here, we'll just look at it a little bit more closely here. You see we've got two separate groups. We've got the top line, which is green and black, the bottom lines, which are blue and red. So the green and black lines are people who have a lot of muscle. And we can see that the green and black lines, we've got also what's called high fat and low fat.
Speaker 1:So the black line is people who have lots of muscle, and they've also got a lot of body fat. But then the green line is people who have a lot of muscle, but they've got lower body fat. And you can see that there's just a very, very small difference in between those two people in terms of survival. So what we see in this is hopefully you can see Can you see my cursor on the screen there? So if you can see this, we can see there's very little difference between these guys here who have both got high amounts of muscle.
Speaker 1:These two lines are people who have low amounts of muscle mass. And you can see that one of them has high body fat. So these guys have high body fat, and these guys have low body fat. And we can actually see that what this is telling us is that body fat is not predicting somebody's risk of dying. Actually, it's the muscle that's doing most of the heavy lifting here.
Speaker 1:And what we can see from this is that muscle is protective of our heart health. So in people who've had some sort of a cardiac event, having more muscle seems to be protective. One question I get here a lot is we can see this as people will say, well, why do these people with the low muscle mass and the low body fat have the worst survival of them all, the worst chance? And it's a really, really easy one. Generally, what you're talking about is people there who are very, very frail.
Speaker 1:So they've lost lots and lots of weight. They've lost a load of muscle. They've lost, obviously, a load of body fat as well. They're frail. They're weak.
Speaker 1:They're not able to survive another heart attack or something like that. Whereas these individuals up here, they're bigger. They're stronger. They're more robust is the word that we use, and they're better able to survive. So that was just talking about muscle.
Speaker 1:But something I think is a little bit more important than muscle size itself is strength. And one way we measure strength is by using grip strength. A really easy device. We use this in the lab fairly frequently, this device here, a dynamometer. And we know that people with the strongest grip relative to their body weight have a forty one percent lower risk of heart disease.
Speaker 1:So again, the strongest individuals seem to have the lowest risk of heart disease. So previously, more muscle, less heart disease. This one, more strength, less heart disease. And that kind of begs the question, what's going on there? Why does this happen?
Speaker 1:And there's a lot of different things going on. But the basic one is, one, having more muscle and more strength is usually a sign of greater physical fitness. It basically means somebody is a little bit more physically active. So that's one way that we can tell somebody's being physically active, if they're stronger and they've got more muscle. And if we get a little bit more exact or a little bit more into the science, we know that the muscle is actually able to produce different chemicals that have a lot of different effects in the body, but specifically, they reduce inflammation in the body.
Speaker 1:So muscle, healthy muscle specifically, and active muscle, so muscle that's working a lot, produces these anti inflammatory bodies, these anti inflammatory chemicals that help reduce our risk of heart disease, because we know that there's a massive link between inflammation and heart disease. So if we can reduce that inflammation, we reduce our risk as well. And it's not just of heart disease, but other diseases as well. Okay, we also know and this is another particular interest of mine is having more muscle can affect our cholesterol. Not necessarily our cholesterol levels, but just the way cholesterol behaves in our body.
Speaker 1:And we know cholesterol has a massive role to play in heart disease too. All right. Okay, diabetes. Another major chronic disease that we see and something that seems to be growing in terms of the amount of people that have it these days. Again, we see that people who have the least muscle have twice the risk of developing diabetes compared to people with more muscle.
Speaker 1:And this is an incredibly common finding. So we see this in a lot and lot of different groups of people in lots and lots of different studies. More muscle means a lower risk of diabetes. Less muscle, a greater risk. Again, that's just muscle.
Speaker 1:That's just size. What about strength? Again, we get back to it. And we see, again, people with the lowest grip strength also have twice the risk of developing diabetes. So something's going on here where having more muscle and I want to say is, I want to say healthy muscle.
Speaker 1:And we'll kind of get into what healthy muscle means. But generally, healthy muscle is active muscle, so muscle that is being used. It's being used for what it's supposed to be used for. It's able to help reduce our risk of getting diabetes. And again, we have to ask how does that happen?
Speaker 1:And so this is one of the very, very cool things about it. So muscle cells really, really what we call metabolically active. Okay, so that means that they do use a lot of different fuels in our body for a lot of different chemical reactions. And they use that a lot because they're working a lot. And one thing that's interesting about muscle is it's what we call a glucose sink.
Speaker 1:So glucose, for anybody who's not familiar, is a type of carbohydrate. And when we eat things like bread, or when we eat pasta, or when we eat fruit, we break down the carbohydrates in those into glucose. That's the basic type of carbohydrates, the basic sugar that we have in our body. And that glucose gets absorbed into our bloodstream and it has to go somewhere because if blood glucose goes too high, then that can cause problems. Okay?
Speaker 1:And if that happens, it's usually when somebody is diabetic, but most people are able to bring their blood glucose back down when they eat food, and we have a lot of different ways of doing that. One of the ways that we do that, like one of the ways we get that glucose level to come down when we eat food is by sending it to different parts of our body. And it goes to two main places. Now it can go to our fat and it can go to our fat cells and it gets turned into fat tissue there. And that's how we store more fat.
Speaker 1:Or it can go to our muscles. And our muscles, if they're healthy, active muscles, do a very, very good job of absorbing that extra glucose. And they absorb that extra glucose, and sometimes they burn it, or they store it as more carbohydrate in our muscles. And we can use that for exercise later on. And basically, that's what you want to be able to do with a healthy lifestyle.
Speaker 1:You want your muscles to be able to help you manage your glucose levels in your body. So more muscle, and again, more healthy muscle, so muscle that's active, is better able to use insulin to bring our blood sugar down. So if we look at this diagram here, what we have here on this side is relative muscle. So that's the amount of muscle somebody has in relation to their body height. And then we've got something here called insulin sensitivity.
Speaker 1:And if you're insulin sensitive, it means you're better able to use that glucose when you eat it. So you'll take that glucose into your body and your body will send out insulin and then it'll send that glucose through your muscles or to your fat to be stored. And if you do that really efficiently, if you do that really, really well, you're called insulin sensitive. And we want to be insulin sensitive for health. So what we see here is that the more muscle you have, the more insulin sensitive you get, the better you're able to use glucose and the lower your risk of diabetes.
Speaker 1:So again, reason why having more muscle is beneficial for your health, for helping to reduce our risk of diabetes. And it's not just diabetes and it's not just heart disease, but I'm going say it's not just those two. Those are quite possibly two of the most important health conditions that we are dealing with in this day and age. They're rampant and a lot of people are dealing with them. But there are other things that our muscle can do as well.
Speaker 1:One of the big ones is osteoporosis. So again, for anybody who's not familiar, osteoporosis is a condition where we lose density in our bones. So this bone here is a nice healthy bone. What we can see here is within our bone, we've got this honeycomb structure to keep them nice and light. We've got all of these little, we call them air pockets.
Speaker 1:They're not filled with air, but they keep our bones strong, but they keep it light. Now, if we have osteoporosis, we lose some of the strength in our bone. And we can lose that as protein in our bone, and we lose the calcium in our bones as well. And what happens is those air pockets get a lot bigger. And when those air pockets get a lot bigger, the bone becomes weaker.
Speaker 1:So basically osteoporosis is a weakening of our bones. And it happens to a lot of people, especially as we age. And we know that people with lower levels of muscle have a greater risk of osteoporosis. And there's a very good reason for this. So I think the easiest way to think of it is when we, when we do anything, when I do any movements like this, if I'm moving my arm like this, what's happening is my muscles are pulling on the bones to make my arms move, but my muscles are also attached to the bones that they're on.
Speaker 1:So my bicep, for example, is attached to my upper arm bone. And what happens is every time our muscle contracts, every time it does a movement, that actually pulls on the muscle. And that signal of our muscle pulling on the bone actually causes it sends a signal to the bone to get stronger. And one of the interesting things about this is if we look at bone density, we would say that this bone here, that's good bone density. It's nice and healthy.
Speaker 1:This is bad bone density, low bone density. You don't want that. We know that in people who do power lifting for all their life, so people who lift really, really heavy weights, they have some of the strongest and the highest bone density of any people on the planet because they're lifting these heavy weights that are causing their muscles to strain really, really hard. And that muscle is tugging on the bone and sending a signal to the bone to get stronger. So that's why exercise is so important for helping to maintain our bone density and why muscle is so important for us as well.
Speaker 1:Now, the next one I'm going to talk about a lot of people never think about. And particularly, a lot of younger people don't think about. When I say younger, people in their 60s don't even think about this. But it's frailty. And what I mean by frailty the funny thing about it is it doesn't actually have a definition of what a true definition or accepted definition of frailty.
Speaker 1:But what most people say is it's a loss of ability to do what we call daily activities. Okay. So it's harder to do the normal things that we do in our daily life. Okay. And we know that having low muscle mass and specifically having low muscle strength makes it harder for us to do everything that we do every day.
Speaker 1:And what I mean by that is like, it makes it harder to get out of bed in the morning. It makes it harder to walk up and down the stairs, to carry your groceries, to pick your groceries up and put them up into a high shelf, to pick up your grandkids, those things become harder. We don't think of it now because, you know, hopefully we're all feeling really, really good at this point in our lives. And we're, we're able to do a lot of stuff with our body, but as we get older, a lot of the things that we used to be able to do become almost impossible for us. And that really affects people's quality of life.
Speaker 1:And as you can see here, we've got, let's say a young fit individual. And as we're getting older, we're getting more frail. We need somebody with a cane, somebody with a walker, somebody who needs assistance, somebody who's in a wheelchair, and then eventually they become bed bound because they're able to do so little and having more muscle strength really, really helps to reduce that risk of frailty as we get older. Another big one that I want to talk about, and this one's a quite close to home for me. So risk of falls and fractures.
Speaker 1:So when you've got lower levels of muscle and strength, it increases your risk of fractures, and it increases your risk of falling in the first place. And I'm going to explain why that happens. So some people might be familiar. You might have heard that we've got a couple of different types of muscle. We've got what's called type one muscle, and we've got type two muscle.
Speaker 1:Type one is basically a slow muscle. It's what we use if we go for a long jog. And then type two muscle is what we call fast twitch muscle. And it reacts really, really quickly, and it reacts really, really powerfully. So it's the kind of muscle you'd use if you were sprinting or if you were jumping or doing anything really, really fast.
Speaker 1:And what happens when we get older is we actually lose type two muscle faster than we lose the other type. So we lose that type two muscle really, really easily. And what that means is I want everybody just to think for a second. If you've ever slipped in the past, you can probably remember that when you slipped, you did all sorts of shapes and you moved your hands all over the place. And before you hit the ground, hopefully you were able to stop yourself by moving yourself really, really quickly and regaining your balance.
Speaker 1:All the muscles that fired in that moment that you slipped are mostly type two fibers, type two muscles that are able to react really, really quickly. But if you're older and you lose those type two fibers really quickly, you lose that ability to react fast. So that means that if you slip, you're not able to move as quickly to regain your balance. And that means that you're more likely to fall. You're more likely to hit the ground.
Speaker 1:Because people who are older and they've got less muscle have lower bone density, like we mentioned earlier, they've got osteoporosis, you're much more likely to break a hip. And we know that in the twelve months after somebody breaks a hip, their likelihood of death is actually about fifty percent greater than otherwise. So it's a very, very serious thing. And the reason I bring it up is my grandmother, when I was a teenager, slipped in a supermarket. And she broke her hip.
Speaker 1:And yes, within a year, unfortunately, she died. So it's something very, very close to home. It happens to so many people. Actually, it was only I remember the day specifically because it was Valentine's Day this year. I was walking into town with my partner.
Speaker 1:We were going for dinner. And we actually walked past we didn't walk past. We stopped and we waited with her. An older lady had fallen, and she'd slipped. And we tried to see if she could move it.
Speaker 1:And it was very clear she was after breaking her hip. So we had to wait for an ambulance to come and pick her up. It happens a lot more than we think. And we need to be laying the groundwork to prevent that now while we're younger. So I'll try and pump up the atmosphere on this.
Speaker 1:I've gone down a bad route. But anyway, there's other diseases as well that we know muscle mass is associated with. We know that people who have low levels of muscle have a greater risk of non alcoholic fatty liver disease. We know that they've got a greater risk of chronic kidney disease, which is a metabolic disease as well. We know they've got a greater risk of cancer.
Speaker 1:And we know that they've got a greater risk of cognitive decline, so a poor ability to use their brain, and depression. And people often ask me, how are they getting more depression? And I want to take it back to what I was talking about with frailty. If you lose your ability to do the things that you normally do, you become less active. You're less able to do things.
Speaker 1:You're less able to play with your grandkids. You're less able to go for a walk down to the pub to meet up with your friends and say hello or to go around to your friend's house and be with them. So that takes a major toll on people's mental health. So that's why it can lead to these greater risks of depression in some people. And another one is risk of death.
Speaker 1:And I just want to show you this here. So we've got basically three different groups of people. They had a big population of people here. They were all men in this population, but they were over 60 years of age. And they measured their strength, they put them into three different groups.
Speaker 1:And they found that the group that was the strongest, this green group over here, was much less likely to die than this group over here, which was the weakest group. So the weakest group had a much greater risk of death than the strongest group. Okay? Now, I really think it's important to talk about death. It's your risk of death over a certain amount of years.
Speaker 1:Just in case it's a surprise to anybody, there's none of us getting out of this alive, but most of us would like to last a little bit longer. So that's one thing we want to talk about. So the strongest group seems to have that lower risk of death. They seem to live longer than the individuals who are weak. But it's not just about living longer.
Speaker 1:Okay? I'm going to give another example. I was at a conference in Japan last year, and I was actually speaking with the researchers who work with the centenarians in Japan, so the people who are over 100 years of age actually, specifically, the people who I was at this conference with, they work with super centenarians. So those are people who are over 110 years of age. And one of the questions I was asking them was, how are these people?
Speaker 1:How are their daily lives? Because they're obviously living to 110. And he said to me, the people who are over 100 years of age oftentimes are really, really good. They're still quite active. When you get to 110, everything goes downhill quite quickly.
Speaker 1:And a lot of these people are bedbound, they need permanent care all the time. That's not what we want. That's not what we talk about living longer. We want to live better. We want to be adding life to our years so we can have a better quality of life.
Speaker 1:Because living longer is no good if we're stuck in a bed for the last thirty years of our life, we want more muscle because one of the great things about muscle is that it improves our quality of life. It means that we're able to move more. We're able to do more. We're healthier. So we're living longer, but we're living better as well.
Speaker 1:And that's the goal. So it's more years free from chronic disease, you know, more years without diabetes, without heart disease. So quick one here. What happens to muscle as we age? Just to give everybody a little bit of an anatomy lesson here.
Speaker 1:So we've got a, this is a muscle. This is a thigh muscle actually. So this is a cross section. So if you are looking directly down onto somebody's thigh and you cut them right down the middle if you're feeling particularly sadistic for some reason, and you look at this. And what we have here is this gray, dark gray area.
Speaker 1:That's the muscle. And then the white area around here, that's the fat that's just underneath the skin, Okay? So just around here, and then we've got the bone in the middle. And this is a nice, healthy looking muscle. So this is from a 24 year old guy.
Speaker 1:He's seventy six kilos. He's only got 10 kilograms of body fat, fifty seven kilograms of this, what we call fat free mass. So for all intents and purposes, we're going to call this muscle mass over here. So lots of muscle, low body fat, really, really healthy looking guy over here. Now, let's look at another example.
Speaker 1:This is also the same type of muscle from a different person. Now, big difference. So as you can see here, the amount of muscle, there's less of it. The amount of fat, there's a lot more around the muscle. And you can also see that the fat is going inside in the muscle as well.
Speaker 1:And that's what we call fat infiltration. And generally when we see this fat infiltration, we know that this makes the muscle weak and it makes the muscle what we call metabolically inefficient. So it's not able to do a lot of the metabolic functions that it normally does. Okay? So this is a very, very unhealthy looking muscle.
Speaker 1:Now I need to show you another one. So I'm sorry. This is from a guy who's 66 years of age. He's eighty one kilos. He's got thirty six kilos of body fat, so a decent amount of body fat and a lot less muscle mass, this fat free mass over here.
Speaker 1:We've got somebody. Scott, I've just seen that somebody's left a message. I think it was Julie, something about not being able to see the presentation. I'll leave that with you.
Speaker 2:Can everyone else hear? Yeah? Yeah. I can see you on the phone. Okay.
Speaker 2:So, Julie, maybe swipe across or if anyone else knows how to show it on the phone.
Speaker 1:I'm just I'm going to have to say, Scott, you've a great group of people here because they're bloody interactive. Yeah. Because, like, if I asked a question like that when I'm giving a lecture online to some of my students, it's like Yeah. It's silence. So it's it's nice to get a reaction.
Speaker 1:Okay. So this guy here, again, this is the example of unhealthy muscle. Now, another example here. Now this is something in between. So this is a lot healthier.
Speaker 1:All right. What we've got here, okay, is there's obviously more fat than in our example over here, but it's a lot less fat than over here. We don't have the fat on the inside of the muscle as much as we do over here. So this is a really, really nice, healthy looking muscle. Now what's the difference with this?
Speaker 1:This guy is also 66 years of age, same age as this guy here. So these two are the same age. He's very similar in body weight. So he's like a couple of kilos lighter, but that's all. He's got much less body fat and he's got a lot more of this muscle mass going on over here.
Speaker 1:Okay. So really, really impressive looking situation over here. We're going to come back to these later, but I just want you to remember this if you can. So what happens to muscle as we get older? So we know that we've got this thing called sarcopenia and this is one of my areas of research.
Speaker 1:Sarcopenia is basically the progressive loss of muscle as we age. As we get older, we lose more muscle. Okay. And there's a few different reasons to it. So basically we see this drop in muscle size as a person gets older with age.
Speaker 1:And we know that in some extreme situations, can lose as much as 40% of your muscle between your 20s, which is when people usually have their peak, and your 80s, which is usually kind of end of life. So when somebody's got peak muscle in their 20s or early 30s, we see this drop in muscle mass. We also see something called dynopenia. And dynopenia is a loss of muscle strength. So sarcopenia is muscle size.
Speaker 1:Dyneopenia is muscle strength. And I would argue, and a lot of people would agree with me, that dyneopenia, this loss of muscle strength, is probably more important than the muscle size. Okay? So it's the loss of strength as we get older, more important for muscle size for your health. And we've got another thing called sarcopenic obesity.
Speaker 1:Okay? So we've all heard of obesity. Sarcopenic obesity is when we've got muscle and strength loss and we've got excess body fat. Okay? So I think a lot of people will have heard of this.
Speaker 1:It's called a skinny fat body type. It's where you've got somebody who's got very little muscle on their body, but they've actually got a decent amount of body fat. And what I say about these individuals, because I've worked with quite a few in my research, is if they were wearing clothes, t shirts and jeans and stuff like that, they'd look like a normal weight individual. But once they take off their shirt, you can see that they've got very little muscle definition, very, very little muscle, and they've actually got quite a significant amount of fat. And oftentimes, they've got that fat around their midsection like that.
Speaker 1:And it can be very difficult to identify. You can't use BMI, your body mass index. It's useless for identifying that. So we need to be able to look more closely at muscle levels and body fat levels with these people. And we know that we've got this thing called the sarcopenic cycle.
Speaker 1:And I just want to talk about this very quickly. So as we get older, we lose our muscle and strength. It happens to everybody. And when we lose our strength, it makes movement a little bit more difficult. And if movement is more difficult because we're less strong, we become less active.
Speaker 1:If moving is difficult, we don't want to move as much. So we become less active. And what that means is if we're less active and we're eating the same amount, we're going to get more body fat. So we get heavier. And if we're heavier, it makes difficulty more sorry, it makes movement more difficult, which means we move less and we get this terrible, terrible cycle, excuse me, this terrible cycle of muscle loss, strength loss, body fat gain, and it can go on and on and on into this vicious cycle.
Speaker 1:Now, I want to talk very, very briefly about the effect of GLP-1s because it's very, very current at the moment, okay? A lot of people have probably heard of the news headlines or online. They've read something where it says GLP-1s leads to muscle loss. There's been a huge amount spoken about this online. And the truth is we have a lot of trials.
Speaker 1:So semaglutide, which is the active agent in Ozempic, for example, we know that in some of the original studies with semaglutide, we were seeing weight loss of about 15% of their body weight. So body weight was down by 15%. But that's just weight loss. Now, if you break that down then into fat and muscle, what we were seeing is 61% of that was fat mass, which meant that 39% of the weight that people were losing was lean mass. And lean mass, again, let's just call it muscle for the moment.
Speaker 1:So people are still losing a lot of muscle right there. And people saw this research, they were thinking, oh my god, this is awful. These GLP-1s, they're ruining people's muscle. And I'm going to say this. It was a terrible headline, or at least it was handled very, very badly in the media, because what happens is GLP-1s leads to weight loss.
Speaker 1:And we know that the amount of muscle that somebody loses on a GLP-one is the exact same as the amount of muscle that somebody would lose if they just went on a diet. So what happens is when we lose weight, if we're not exercising, we lose weight from everywhere. We lose muscle tissue, and we lose body fat. Now, we'll lose more body fat, which is fantastic, but the loss of that muscle mass is a little concerning. That's not something that we want to happen.
Speaker 1:And one of the big things that I'm going to talk about with you guys the next time we have a chat is what we can actually do to prevent that muscle loss and some of the strategies. And we'll talk about more of the reasons why we lose muscle with weight loss. So I want to leave it at that, Always leave them wanting a little bit more, so to speak. But I do want to talk to people and answer any questions you might have for the moment, bearing in mind that next week or sorry, the next time we chat is going to be very, very much a focus on what you can do. So I'll leave it there.
Speaker 1:I'll say thank you. And I'll kind of open it up to any questions that people might have.
Speaker 2:Awesome, Richie. That was very insightful. And is anyone else motivated to go and do some weights now? Because I feel like I gotta go and lift some weights. I gotta go and do something.
Speaker 2:Weight. I've got my question, and then we can go to the questions as well. So this is a common one of the community, actually. It's that, you know, my choice of exercise is jujitsu. It's not directly a strength exercise.
Speaker 2:A lot of people use yoga. A lot of it is mainly some cardio. Are we saying weights need to be done? And that's what the research is saying, that it's the weights and it's the resistance of that. Or have you seen any research where, like and was I can't remember who it was doing, like, a strength Pilates, adding some resistance to the Pilates and stuff.
Speaker 2:Is Are you seeing that any research on like a middle ground? Because people enjoy that thing, you know? Weightlifting is a bit boring.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So when it comes to research, the amount of research that we have is always limited because doing research costs money. So it would be great if we could have a trial that says, right, this study is looking at doing yoga while people are losing weight and how does it affect muscle? And this one is looking at Pilates and this one is looking at Jiu Jitsu, for example. We just don't have the research.
Speaker 1:But what we can do is we can use the research that we have available to make fairly good guesses about what happens. So for example, I'd like people to think of exercise as a spectrum. And if we think about one end, we've got our weights. So weight machines or free weights or whatever they are. And those are the heavy hitters.
Speaker 1:Those do the job. Simple as that. Okay? That is guaranteed to help with maintaining muscle. Down at the other end, I want to go to something.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about the really low end of the exercise. Let's talk about walking a little bit more. Okay. So that amazingly just walking more, if walking more or sorry, if walking is your form of exercise compared to being sedentary. So if somebody is not active at all, If somebody starts walking, that does actually improve muscle health.
Speaker 1:And we have studies where we've looked at older individuals and basically what they did, we'll talk about this next week, is they stopped them walking. They said, look, you've got to limit your step count for a couple of weeks. And they saw massive changes in their health outcome, the amount of muscle that they had in their ability to use glucose, that insulin sensitivity I spoke about. So you've got this spectrum that I'm talking about. This little bit of walking can help a little bit, okay?
Speaker 1:Lifting weights is the best. Everything in between then is kind of working the way up. What we need to think about is intensity. How hard are your muscles working? So, and within that, we've got things like you can do body weight pushups.
Speaker 1:That is working your muscles. If you do lots of that, it's going to get more intense. We will talk about this more, and I don't want to give too much away. The intensity of the exercise is important. Actually pushing your muscles.
Speaker 1:Your muscles, they only want to hang around if there's a reason for them to hang around. So if your muscles think, oh, this person needs me to they need me to be strong, and they're getting that signal from somewhere. And if that signal is coming from you doing lots and lots of push ups or lots of bodyweight squats, or if that signal is coming from you, lifting weights in the gym, the signal is all the same. It's just easier to give that signal if you're in the gym. But again, we'll talk about different options that people might have, but yeah, I'll say this, if you're going from no exercise at all to anything, that's a win.
Speaker 1:And that's what some people should be looking at.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Yeah. I'm sure next week we're all in sight in our achievement. We need the answers now. You're gonna be doing this to us, man.
Speaker 2:Okay, so here we go. Azazar, do you want to come on? So I've seen you've got a few questions there. Yeah, come on the mic and
Speaker 3:Sure. Hi, hi, Scott. Hi, Richie. I have a few questions. The first one which I put in the chat was and I get that this might be a question for next week but can you improve fast twitch muscle or is there a point of no return?
Speaker 1:So I try to be an optimist with everything I say so I don't like to say that there's a point of no return. No, And there's not. We know that with training, people get stronger. Simple as that. Now, what we see is that with older people, building more muscle, like muscle size, is harder.
Speaker 1:With building muscle strength and remember what I said earlier, strength is probably far more important from a health perspective. Building more strength is possible. We have trials of people in their mid-80s where we get them lifting weights and we see improvements in strength and function and their ability to do daily activities. So I would say absolutely not. What I like to say to people is the best time to start being active and lifting weights and stuff like that is when you're a child, okay, and to maintain that shorter life.
Speaker 1:The next best time is right bloody now. Simple as that.
Speaker 3:If you don't mind, I have a follow on question and that is, what's a reasonable rate of increasing muscles? So, I have lost about 11% of my body weight in the last nine months.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. And I
Speaker 3:have one of these scales that gives you lots of data. I love data. I they're not like 100% accurate but has told me that my muscle weight has increased by over four kilos. Is that reasonable in nine months or
Speaker 1:what? So I will say this: the scales at home, the body composition scales, there are questions about their accuracy. So it could very, very well be possible. Have you been quite active? Have you been doing a lot of strengthening exercises in that time?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've been back in the gym for about a year. And in the last eight, nine months, I've done a real push up training with a personal trainer three times a week.
Speaker 1:Okay. So it most definitely is possible to gain that much muscle, you know, like, especially if you're, you're coming, if you're what we call naive to training. So if you haven't been training for a while and you come back and you go really, really hard with your training, it is possible. I work individually with people. So I work on one to one basis with lots of people.
Speaker 1:And what I'll say is with all of the people I've worked with and then like with all the research that I've done as well, the rate of muscle gain between people varies hugely, and so much so that I don't even like giving a number to people. So one of the first things people do when we're working together is like, well, how long is it going to take me to either, A, lose this much weight or, B, gain this much muscle? Two questions I'll get almost without doubt. And it's such a I can't give an answer. And I'll just be honest with people.
Speaker 1:It's like, I have no idea. I don't know how your body is going to react. Some people gain muscle very, very easily. Some people lose body fat very easily. And the opposite is also true as well.
Speaker 1:But if you've been very, very active over the past year, gaining muscle as you're losing fat is very, very likely and well done on that. That's fantastic news. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Thanks, Taza. Question here from how am I seeing here? She's not available to talk on the mic, but she says, both my granny and grand uncle broke the hips in her nineties. Both healed, but both did die within the years, and she never connected the DOS before.
Speaker 2:So that's interesting. But she does ask, where does cardio fitness or cardio fit into building muscle and longevity? Is it where does it fit in?
Speaker 1:Where do So put it first off, I'm really sorry to hear about your grandparents, but like into their nineties, that's fantastic. So there's some good genes there. So that's a good thing to take away from it. So this is an eternal question. People are always asking which one is better cardio or strengthening exercises.
Speaker 1:And I always give the answer that nobody wants to hear, which is both are brilliant. Okay. So when it comes to muscle size and strength, cardio doesn't do much, Simple as that. I've actually just finished writing up a paper. We're trying to get it published at the moment, looking at a few different studies where they included exercise with people who are using GLP-one drugs to lose weight, but the exercise that they included was just cardio.
Speaker 1:So it was some light walking or some bike work or some light jogging, no effect on muscle. Well, no significant effect on muscle at all. Cardio doesn't do that. Okay. Strength work is what you need to build muscle.
Speaker 1:Now where cardio comes in is in our cardiovascular health and also in insulin sensitivity. So we need this combination of strength work to help build our muscle, keep it strong, keep us strong and help us stay nice and independent as we get older. And then the cardio work works our cardiovascular system, our heart, our lungs. And we know that individuals who are more cardiovascularly fit are incredibly, or sorry, have a much lower rate or likelihood of death compared to people who are less fit. So what we like to see is people who are both cardiovascularly fit and strong seem to have the lowest risk of death of anybody in the population.
Speaker 1:And it makes perfect sense. If your heart and your lungs are strong, your muscles are strong, your likelihood of dying and your likelihood of a number of different diseases is much lower than other people as well. So nobody wants to hear that. Everybody wants to hear like, do one or the other, but no, it's both for the win, unfortunately.
Speaker 2:Where does high intensity interval training fit into that, whether it's on the bike or anything? Do you think that'll make a difference whether it's all out or probably Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:So then this is another one we actually we just published on this two months ago. So big review of huge amount of research on high intensity interval training, comparing it to this moderate intensity cardio. So if you think of going for a jog and you're going for a jog and obviously you get out of breath, but like if somebody spoke to you, you'd be able to say, fuck to me, I'm going for a jog. You'd be able to do that. But if you were doing high intensity interval training, you're going so hard that wouldn't be able to maintain a conversation with somebody.
Speaker 1:It really, really gets you up and you do that high intensity interval training for a short amount of time. And then you take a little bit of a break where you might reduce the intensity for a bit, and then you go really, really hard again. And what we see is with the high intensity interval training, even if you do it for less time compared to the moderate intensity stuff, you seem to get the same benefit. And the reason for that is the intensity. So doing more intense cardio means you need to do it for less time.
Speaker 1:And the reason I think that's important, somebody is sedentary, know, and they don't have a lot of exercise, I would definitely say do not jump straight into high intensity cardio at all. Like, You need to build up your base first. But to build up your fitness, it can take a lot of time. Nobody wants to be on a treadmill or on a stationary bike for forty five minutes or an hour. I know that would drive me absolutely mad.
Speaker 1:So what we see is that you can actually reduce the amount of time that you're exercising and get the same benefit if you're doing high intensity interval training. And it's something I recommend to individuals who are able to do it. A great form of exercise, but it does require a little bit of a knowledge of what you need to do. So having a coach coaching you through that could be really, really useful.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. It makes sense. And this leads nicely into the next question by Vicky, who was asking I think you covered it a bit, and maybe it's next week, I don't know. But body weight, is that enough for strength? Or do you need weights?
Speaker 2:Where would you just guide someone there?
Speaker 1:So body weight exercises can be absolutely phenomenal, like really, really good. You can get a lot of intensity. Again, it comes to that intensity. So when I talk about intensity, for everybody, when it comes to strengthening exercises, what I mean is how close you get to what we call failure on a movement. So if you imagine if you've got a dumbbell and you're doing this and like, it gets really hard at the end and like you get close to the end and you can barely get it up.
Speaker 1:That's getting close to failure. Okay. It's harder to get to failure with body weight exercises when you get fit. At the start, it's not. At the start, body weight exercises are hard, but you will get to a point where you're doing maybe, let's say pushups, you're doing thirty, forty, 50 pushups, and you're still not tired because you've become so strong and so fit.
Speaker 1:And from there, it's hard to progress. And that's kind of the beauty of lifting weights or using weight machines is all you need to do is pull out a pin and put it into the next one, and suddenly you've got a greater intensity and it gets harder and you get to that failure a little bit quicker. So that's the difference. So there are different ways to increase intensity with body weight exercises, things like slowing down the reps because the slower they are, the harder they become. But I'm going to be and this is just a me thing, but I find them very unpleasant.
Speaker 1:I remember during COVID, I was doing a lot of body weight exercises at home and got start crazy after a while. Was really eager to get back to it.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, using thirty, forty, 50 press ups, like, it's nothing Richie. But, yeah, I'll be be dead after that one. That's that's max for me. Maximum. There's a there's a good question here.
Speaker 2:But maybe, Jeanette, are you there actually? Because that's quite an interesting story you got there. Give you if you can come on the mic.
Speaker 4:Hopefully. Can you hear me?
Speaker 2:I can hear you, yes.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Welcome. Hi. Yeah, I was going to have osteoporosis three years ago on a DEXA scan. It's obviously started me on medication, But I took up, I was already running, I took up strength training with PT and on the next DEXA it had reversed to osteopenia.
Speaker 4:So I stopped the medication and obviously I've continued with the weight.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. And I just think that that's a beautiful example. It's like what Zaza was asking, is there a point to no return? I don't think there is. It's like if you are willing to put in some effort, that point to no return doesn't exist.
Speaker 1:If you can go out there and start doing something, you can make serious changes in your muscle, in your bone. That's phenomenal. Well done, Jeanette.
Speaker 4:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Jeanette, do you know when you first started the strength training? You started from zero, like you've never
Speaker 1:done Oh,
Speaker 4:I couldn't lift two and a half kilo dumbbells. Yep. I can do nine now on a floor press and 52 on a track bar deadlift I did this week. Phenomenal. So nobody's more surprised than me.
Speaker 1:Keeps surprising myself.
Speaker 2:And what were you doing? How many times a week were you doing? Just out of curiosity so that people can have some
Speaker 4:Three.
Speaker 2:Three?
Speaker 4:With an hour with a PT.
Speaker 2:And how quick did you go from twos to, say, fours and fives? Was it I'd say
Speaker 4:I've been quite slow. I'm not the youngest of chickens. So I've been doing it probably two years. So it's just slow progress. But I might plateau for a while and then a few gains and plateau for a while.
Speaker 4:It's just that perseverance that you will eventually be able to move up a weight.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No, amazing. Well, look, you're in the case study for next week, Richie, so you can get in our case study for next week.
Speaker 4:And I must say, gym recommended Parrot Pal to keep an eye on the protein. So, obviously, that's been a thing as well. Thank
Speaker 1:you. No
Speaker 2:worries. No worries. Thanks for sharing. And then on to this now is a question from Debbie Richie. Osteoarthritis and osteoporosis.
Speaker 2:Same effect or difference or what's the
Speaker 1:So obviously with osteoarthritis, you're experiencing a lot more pain when you do the movement generally. And what I say to somebody who's suffering with that is find a PT who has experience working with individuals who have certain specific conditions. And it can be a bit of a faff to do that. It can be worth looking online. But working with somebody who's got training and knows how to accommodate your needs is really, really important.
Speaker 1:You still need the movement, but it's just harder to do. And that means that there's going to have to be some compromises made in how you do certain movements or what machines you use or what movements you do in general. But having a PT who can guide you with that is really, really important. But it's the same thing. You still need that stimulation of your muscles and you still need that stimulation of your bone to help keep it strong.
Speaker 1:You just need to find a way that works for you to keep you active.
Speaker 2:Awesome. It's a good point on the PT side. There's such a variance in a good PT and a PT that's gonna kill you in session one because they think that's what they need to do for you to come back with the opposite of what you should be doing. It should never be given you know, some PT's do high intensity interval training weight switching in the start. Absolute killers, but hopefully do some research in your local area and get a good one if needed.
Speaker 2:Same as Zaza going to PT. I think it's such a good idea when going to the gym because it can be quite intimidating for sure, especially some gyms. It's a good one actually as well, Richie. Is that high protein every day, you're gonna be averaged over the week? And we know strength training is number one in this case, but where does protein fit in there?
Speaker 2:Daily,
Speaker 1:We'll have a big chat about protein next week. Again, that's another kind of favorite area of mine. We will talk about it a lot, but will say that it would be better to have a relatively consistent daily protein intake than kind of saying, right, I'm going get all of my protein over the weekend and just spend the rest of the week living off cocoa pops or something like that. Not that anybody would. But I I do think that, yeah, distributing it relatively evenly over the week is a good idea.
Speaker 2:Okay. Over the week. Are the scales in the gym any more accurate than the ones at home? Maybe what are they called in the gym? The InBody.
Speaker 1:You can get InBodies. Yeah. So InBody can be quite good. Like, here here's one thing that I'll say. We, so InBody and the ones that we have at home, they all use a system which is called bio electrical impedance, and it just measures the electricity that goes to your body and how long it takes to get down.
Speaker 1:Generally, if you've got something that you can hold onto with your hands and something that you're standing on with your feet, that's generally better. We have one of those in the university, for example, for research. We've got a DEXA at the university. DEXA is obviously like the gold standard. The bioelectrical impedance is decent, but it is very easy to get variation depending on how hydrated somebody is.
Speaker 1:So if you come in one morning and you're exceptionally dehydrated, it's going to tell us that, you know, you've got very, very low levels of muscle mass. If you come in very hydrated the next day, it'll give you a completely different number. And you might say, my God, I've gained a kilo and a half in the last day. I'm killing it in the gym. So there's a huge amount of variation there, but that's kind of a problem with all of these machines.
Speaker 1:What I would say is if you're using it just to track trends over time, it can be useful. So if you do it when you start your diet and then three months later or six months later then, and you can see that body fat is down, muscle is up or muscle is the same. That's a good way of using it. But just don't, the big one I say is don't pay too much attention to how much body fat percentage it tells you. Because that's what everybody wants to look at.
Speaker 1:It's the first thing they want to know. What's my body fat percentage? It's not particularly accurate, but it's good for watching a trend. It'll tell you if you lost a little bit of body fat.
Speaker 2:And the last one then, because I know we're coming up to the time, and I think next time we're going to talk more in-depth about this, but a lot of people feel maybe they don't want to start the program because if they can't do three times a week, four times a week, what's the point? What if someone had one day a week for the next few weeks until we chat again? House sufficient is on your eyes, a 10 to the intensity matters. What's your view on it? Full body like
Speaker 1:I say this. The greatest changes or the greatest benefits from exercise come at the point where somebody goes from doing no exercise to doing something. So if you're, if somebody is doing nothing at the moment, if all you can do is thirty minutes once a week, is leaps and bounds better than doing nothing. So anything is better than nothing. I'll talk about it next week.
Speaker 1:I like to encourage people to find something that they actually enjoy and find something that they love. Even if you're like I don't want to go to a gym, I don't want to do any of the classes, even if you went to a dance class for example, that's better than being completely inactive And that's doing something for you. You can still improve from there, but maybe start with that. Somebody wants to do a full body routine, and I'll give the game away, I think full body routines are fantastic. I would never actually recommend Spitz to anybody from a health perspective.
Speaker 1:Think if they want to do one full body routine once a week, great. Here's my caveat. Okay? Somebody does train just once a week, that's a long time between training sessions. So what can happen is the first time somebody goes straight, everybody else would be familiar with this, getting that feeling of muscle pain after a really hard workout.
Speaker 1:Those, those DOMS, the delayed onset muscle soreness, go away if you train regularly. So if somebody is training three times a week, they'll never experience DOMs. It just doesn't happen. But if somebody is training once a week, that week is enough time for you to kind of go back into that session and feel completely fresh and to get those DOMs all over again. And I have worked with people in the past who, there was one person who told me, I don't want to exercise.
Speaker 1:I hate that feeling of muscle pain. And I'm like, you know that pain goes away if you train regularly. And she's like, what are you talking about? It's always there. And I managed to convince her to go to the gym regularly, just three days a week.
Speaker 1:And a week and a half after we started, I asked her, how was the muscle pain? And she was almost angry at me because I was right, because she didn't feel any muscle pain anymore, and she started enjoying her sessions. And I did bite my tongue, I didn't say I told you so, but just one thing to be mindful of.
Speaker 2:100%. Well, I'm sure everyone is motivated now to go and do something even if it's small, especially some strength. Richie, I appreciate all of the science explained very simply or and easy to understand. So I'm looking forward to the next one. So everyone, please thank Richie in the chat.
Speaker 2:I'll send a link to his Instagram and stuff as well, so you can go and see more of his content. But for next time, you know, the topic is you are doing a strength program now. So if you have any kind of progression you can share with us like Jeanette had, that would be amazing just to see where people are at. And we'll see you in a few weeks, Richie.
Speaker 1:Lovely. Can't wait. And thank you, everyone, for being a great group. And loved all the questions. Absolutely love them.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Thanks, everyone. Have a good night. See you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Take care.
Speaker 2:Ta da.