How Strength Unlocks Better Running And A Longer Life | Extra Mile

0:00Hello again, and welcome to Untap the Extra Mile. This is becoming my favourite part of the show. I just love it. I'm Spencer Matthews. I'm Oli Patrick. And together we're just a couple of guys that love physiology. We do. Human physiology, mostly. We love the human body, don't we? And the mind and all that comes with it. Everything in between. Endless fascination. And joy. Endless fascination. It is. It is. potentially you heard it here first the human body's amazing it's it's an incredible piece of kit isn't it just when you think it couldn't be any cleverer you find out something that is extraordinary just how many here on this show well a we're discovering things real time but it is an endless marvel i truly love it today's episode strength and conditioning particularly around running?

0:56Is strength overlooked in running? I certainly think it is. Is strength and lifting weights a superpower? Why is building muscle increasingly viewed as one of the best predictors of healthy aging and longevity? These are many questions that we'll answer today. Why don't you begin? I suppose the running bit is always our North Star or the athletic performance strength probably didn't have its flowers because when you looked at the the build of your traditional runner they were very light very lean and people always associated strength training with building mass and building force and that wasn't always as associated with running and i think probably the last 20 years or so people have understood strength and conditioning are a key key part of elite running and actually everybody's running spencer you know you and i will need strength for the large reason of it's going to protect us against injury.

1:58So even if you forget sort of the potential role that strength would have in us being better runners or better at paddle or better at any sort of endurance-based sport, its big role is how it will reduce the chance of us getting injured in that repeated strain and load that is fundamentally what endurance training is. Every time you land, there's many times your body weight going through your ankles, through your Achilles, through your calves, through your quads, through your hamstrings. That whole ecosystem requires strength and resilience to withstand that and deliver over time. So strength has become a sort of a, you know, it's a part of every conversation with endurance.

2:36If it's not, then that will be a shortcut to injury risk and potential failure. And of course, it's that lovely saying, you know, you don't get old and then become immobile, you become immobile and then become old. You know, I think it's the, you know, movement, movement mobility muscle mass all very important uh parts of the machine in when when wanting to to live a long healthy life yeah i think it's become a major longevity vehicle you know you and i debate longevity and its facets and its detriments um but when we're looking at what is the main part of living well for longer so i think a health span not not lifespan so how can we be the fittest version of ourselves until the end of our life.

3:18Retaining strength and muscle mass, skeletal muscle mass in particular, is a major part of aging well. So when you get to somewhere around mid-30s, you know, that era that you've drifted into nicely and I've danced past, your body goes, why the hell have I got like 45, 40, 35 kilograms of muscle when all I do is sit on my ass playing FIFA or commute to an office? You've got way more skeletal muscle mass, than you need to lead a sedentary life. And then your body basically commences a process called sarcopenia, which is a great little bit of words where you effectively slowly waste the unused muscle mass at a rate of between 3 % and 5 % per decade.

4:00Not that bad. Not that bad, but that 5 % could be the bit of muscle that stabilized my knee. It could be the bit of muscle that held my spine in place while I pick up a weight in the garden. You know, that 5 % of muscle that I've lost will also be, let's imagine it was a kilogram. That kilogram of muscle might have burnt me anywhere between 30 and 70 calories each day, just doing nothing. So I'm now someone who's going to get injured when he picks up a heavy rock in the garden. What are you doing picking up rocks in your garden? A little bit of manual labor. The muscle didn't just help you lift the, it wasn't just moving the levers, it was also stabilizing all the other key facets of your body.

4:37So the key point is, muscle isn't just big levers. Muscle is also my stability infrastructure. it's if we think of the knee great joint the knee and always want to study back in school because what's famous about the knee joint is it's just two bones sat on top of each other whereas if i think of my shoulder joint which is a ball and socket it is a ball of a of one bone going into a socket of another so its structure is designed by the shape of two bones my knee is two flat bones on top of each other so why doesn't my knee bend in every different direction because of Ligaments. Ligaments. Because of my, again, the old ACL, you know, the various ligaments we hear about, but also my tendons and potentially as much my muscle mass.

5:18So I've got my quadriceps, four muscles, quadriceps that cover across my knee. I can't help thinking of when we had Ben Stokes in here talking about bowling, saying that eight times your body weight. And like some of these lads weigh at least 90 kilos. Like, yeah, like, you know, 90, 95 kilos, I'd imagine some of these larger lads like Kevin Peterson, you know, Freddie Flintoff, Ben Stokes himself, all large men. Eight times the body weight. It's nearly a ton going through the one knee. Amazing that they don't just buckle. Well, they often do. And of course, the big challenge to any bowler is longevity, which is why James Anderson, what a phenomenal career.

5:57They do an awful lot of strength and conditioning. And that is because the muscle isn't about how muscular they look. It's not necessarily about driving force. it would be driving stability at the very least. If you felt stuck trying to lose weight, you're not alone. Enter Weight Loss by HERS. It's designed to support you in reaching your goals. And HERS now offers access to an affordable range of FDA-approved GLP-1 medications, including the Wegovi pill and the Wegovi pen. Even better, with a range of affordable GLP-1 options, HERS makes it simple to find an approach that fits your needs and your budget, if eligible.

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9:01when we come to longevity there's two different parts if you and i lose functionality we are going to struggle right and there's a big if you if you lose you know five percent of your muscle over over three decades you are now potentially not able to stand up from a chair if you started with a low starting point so you can't get out the house you can't carry two shopping bags back from the shop you can't um get to a certain point where you can roll over five percent not you but if someone started from a really let's imagine someone in there you've put yourself a nice high bar you can chip away for ages I suddenly just got quite scared we shouldn't get scared but you should be also aware that every if you are losing 5 % of your muscle mass on a you know decade by decade your functional capability how many decades do you think we've got like you know I think we've only I've only got I've only got kind of 5 decades left at the absolute most 25 % you lose a quarter of your muscle now thank the lord you have built yourself a big old feast of muscle.

10:01You've done the old, you know, harvest, you know, feast, then famine. Some hay while the sun shines. You've made some hay while the sun shines. Now that doesn't mean you won't then stop losing muscle. In fact, if you've got loads more muscle than you need, your body might waste it at an even faster rate. The reality is how well you and I function later in age, a major part of that is not just muscle mass, but the strength we can generate as well, which is why grip strength is a really important test. If somebody were just in theory to live like a perfect life, eat nutrient-dense, lovely food, sleep loads, consume absolutely no alcohol, just for argument's sake, Brian Johnson, but less odd, just like a normal person, when will you start to see a decrease in strength?

10:53If you literally lift weights three times a week, you keep your cardiovascular health in good toe, you're not pushing yourself to extraordinary limits. You're just ticking along nicely, but doing all of that lovely maintenance work, just regularly. Are you going to be as strong at 70 as you are at 50? Or is that not possible? Or when do things start to just slowly deteriorate? It's a good question. So you would say strength itself, we don't know, because no one's lived a life like Brian Johnson, the tech billionaire who's obsessively trying to slow aging or reverse aging. What's going to happen if at 80 he just pegs it, like every normal person?

11:41The average age of death is what, 80, 81, something like that. Brian Johnson may just keel over before that, right? And then is this all wasted? If he didn't enjoy the life he's leading, I think it'd be wasted. I think Brian Johnson is personally happier now doing all these extreme things than he was when he was leading the life of a sort of unhappy Silicon Valley millionaire without a purpose. So I think what we've got to be careful with Brian is we don't defer his state of happiness. What we may want to say is he's not a good model for me to follow or for you to follow. And he is unequivocally in better place physically, mentally now with all these obsessive behaviours than he was, I think, before he did all those.

12:18I just think the project only works when he's the age that he's at. Because, like, if he were 110, everyone would be going, oh, yeah, this guy's onto something. But, like, obviously, like, I could just live a perfect life and go, well, look, I'm going to live till, like, it's all bollocks. But it's like anything, nothing in longevity is proven. It's like the greatest thing I could sell you because you can't come and complain because you're dead. I think Brian Johnson is just as likely to die at 80 than I am. I would disagree. And for several reasons. But one is his, a key part of longevity is his disease detection.

13:01Bear in mind, we understand what we call the pathophysiology of major diseases. So he is being tracked for all the things that could cause you, assuming, and he does manage car risk and he manages, you know, he manages this sort of viral risk, manages all these different things. But the things that would suddenly catch you off guard, he is screening for them in-house. So he's... But I've literally never had a disease. Yeah, but most diseases you don't have, you aggregate over time. So if you think of a traditional heart attack, that might start in your teens, as your arteries start to get irritated and inflamed on the inside, and then progressively scar, narrow, and stiffen.

13:34And so the disease that gets you at 75 actually was building through your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, which is why longevity becomes relevant not just to old people who don't want to die, but to people in midlife who want to change the trajectory of their physiological deterioration. I think it's a bit selfish like I think your time's up and you know you should clock out I think it depends I think the opposite to the medium let's imagine what what aging looks like what you are trying to avoid with aging is falling below a dependency threshold right which is where Vogue has to change your pants or get you into bed or out of bed or your kids Vogue's older than me like that's never gonna happen or women have a longer life expectancy all that factored in you don't want anyone to be dependent on anyone and that's a major part of that is your capability to remain functional of which strength will be a key piece now why is Brian Johnson doing better I want to finish on Brian Johnson because he is cellularly different to the version of him that was 10 years ago so we are constantly changing our cells so basically the cells you are now all of the tissues of you now won't be the same Spencer in 10 years time You would have cloned yourself effectively.

14:48And that version of you is a poorer copy. It's like in the old days where we had VHS videos and someone videoed one and passed it around the school, whatever it might have been. That video got increasingly corrupted, as did the souls that watched it. But the principle being, when you got to the later version, it's a less good copy. And you are a diminishing copy of yourself. And that's the cellular aging process. and that bit means Brian Johnson will be weaker when he's older, but not as weak as the person who didn't keep their testosterone levels optimized. But Brian Johnson's not like strong now.

15:25He is. He's strong for him. Yeah, but what does that mean though? It means he's retained his independence and his functionality. Brian could do any key biomechanical movement that was required of him to keep himself alive, to feed. So can like most 50-year-olds. No. No, they don't. That's like me saying, you know, I could go and climb whatever. Yeah, that's your choice. But I don't because I might hurt myself. Well, let's imagine you can't have that choice. That's a freedom of ageing. And by the way, just to come back to your previous point, if I ever need someone to come around and change my nappy, right, I give you and all listeners permission to wheel me off a cliff, right?

16:04Just I'd like to be taken somewhere really nice in a wheelchair, wheel me off the edge. I don't need that. No, but you will have other things in your life, above and beyond. I'll just tell them all, listen, I've been around too long, right? I've been around a while. I don't actually enjoy shitting myself in bed. So listen, I'm out. Have a great life. Here's some cash and other bits and bobs that you'd probably prefer, right, to have rather than coming to see me in this state. I'll see you in a bit. The cold reality is at that stage, most people want to preserve life as everyone does because that's the opinion of someone young and fit and able.

16:43If we take the science of ageing, whether irrespective of yours or my opinions on it, retaining strength and muscle mass are two of the maiden facets of ageing well, alongside sleeping well and VOT Max. They'll probably be a big four, and we've touched on both of those previously. You go to a gym, what age is the average person in the gym? I don't know. If you go to City Athletics, Sean Stafford's gaff, there's quite a few old people in there. That's because Sean's set in lovely culture. Again, training people for all stages of life. You go to your traditional gym, average age will be Gen Z. But this does come back to what I was just, like why stop is what I'm saying.

17:16Do these people get injured? They never started. They never started. You've got a massive difference. The UK is at 18 % penetration on how many people go to gyms now. That's the highest it's ever been. 18? 18%. Including young people? That is everybody. Yeah, so that's the highest it's been. That's horrendous. Well, the challenge with that is, you can go, I don't need to join a gym to be fit. I'm just going to caveat. at. If you go to a gym, right, the reason you go to a gym to do weight training, because you can do your cardio, you do most of your cardio outside, of course, treadmill sessions are great, and cardio is great.

17:44But in a gym, there are weights that are lighter than my body weight, and heavier than my body weight. So everyone goes, well, you can train body weight, not easily, you know, there's not an easy 10 progressions for a shoulder press. There's not 10 easy versions of a pull up 10 easy versions of a push up. There are versions, they're not harder versions.

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20:10What we've got is a real lack of people in this country meeting the two weight training sessions recommended by government guidelines, which are really solid as a rock, per week. And that becomes increasingly important as you age, not decreasingly important. And there again, strength is not about whether I look ripped and buff. Strength is my physical functional capability, which should diminish and deteriorate year on year after 35 unless I train. I'm quite surprised, to be honest. You thought the gym penetration would be higher? I thought it would be higher than 18%. Yeah, I don't think that's a lot at all.

20:39It's less than one in five people go to the gym. I don't think it's shocking in the sense that I understand that lots of people may not be able to afford a gym membership or going to the gym may be inconvenience with full-time work and kids. I get that, but I'm assuming you mean train in some way. And we can't distinguish those two. I don't mean like going to the gym. I mean like, are you saying that only one in five people weight train in some way, whether that be at home or other? It's a good question. I don't know the stat on that, but it would be similar. You were looking at government guidelines for exercise.

21:20150 minutes of moderate cardio or 75 minutes vigorous. So I think zones three to five or zones one to two. A week? 150 minutes a week plus two weight training sessions. So that'd be a full body, you know, resistance training session covering legs, you know, upper body, shoulders, back. And that's twice a week plus two mobility sessions. Think flexibility, core, stability. Think Pilates, yoga. That's a lot of training. How many people in England do you think listen to the government? Well, no one. And what's interesting, most of the fit well not when it comes to health advice the guidelines are great and they're formulated and well constructed but the credibility doesn't pull across no one is going there they're all going to it's something like 56 % of all Gen Z take all the health advice from TikTok and therefore we're following people who look a bit like us sound a bit like us and create vignettes or sound bites of you know very binary information you do this and you live longer do this and you die quicker and that nuance is dead which is why we've got this lovely long format conversation we're trying to have now.

22:21I think the cold reality is most people don't strength train and that's relevant from an aging point of view. But also then you go to your running community and your athletic community and they're equally undervaluing it. And if you go and see a physio, you know, the physio will help you rehabilitate a physiotherapist or you might see an osteopath or a chiropractor or a sports medicine physician. They will rehabilitate you from the injury and then they will almost certainly give you a series of exercises to strengthen the area that got injured or an area associated with the area that got injured.

22:52So they'll say, look, you're getting a recurrent calf injury because your glutes are too weak. And everyone will go, yeah, great, I'll do those exercises. And then six months later, they're back in the physio's office with a new, again, shin splints or a new Achilles tendonitis. The cold reality is strong tissues, strong and strength is a combination of do I have sufficient muscle mass, but as we call it, neurological fitness, right? My coordinated ability to fire that muscle in the way it's meant to be fired, they are the facets of elite performance, and they're the facets of a long life. Therefore, everybody should wear weight training.

23:27Like, it's unequivocal. I don't like weight training, but I will do close to two sessions a week. Why don't you like weight training? Because I'd rather do other things. There's no play to it. I want to play paddle. It's so nice, though. I'll go paddle boarding on the river, or I'll dick about with my kids in the garden. Well, all of those things sound nice. But everything comes at an opportunity cost. So if I do one thing, it means I'm not doing another thing. So the idea of me going to a gym and doing a weight training session will come at the cost of either work, play, social. So I have to understand the value of that cost.

23:54And to me, that's a cost that everyone needs to weigh up. No one needs to do it as a hobby. You need to do it as, like Simon said, I don't want to do it. Yes, but you need to do it. And that's the distinguishing point. And if you want to be a good athlete, you have to do it. When you're talking about weight training, I'm assuming that you mean kind of free weights that exceed body weight, because could people also see this as just doing 100 push-ups a day throughout the course of the day? you know i'm quite certain although i've not ever really tested this fully uh or scientifically but if you did kind of you know five sets of 10 push-ups at some point you know a couple in the morning couple in the evening every day you would also be better off for that right i just you know and that takes like less than a minute in the morning less than a minute in the evening you as an easy takeaway, is that a good starting point?

24:56Beautiful starting point. Stretch in the morning, just get up. Even on the bathroom floor where your shower is, just bang out, 20 press-ups, just touch your toes a few times, stretch your hamstrings, jump in the shower, jobs are good and don't need to go anywhere or do anything or pay anyone. Literally just get some blood pumping into your muscles every morning is probably a good idea, is it not? Without a doubt. And again, whatever you can do, where you're at is where you should start. And body weight, so again, if I do push-ups on my knees, if I'm not strong enough to do a push-up, I can do push-ups on my knees on the floor and how far my knees are from my chest so the further my knees are out, the harder the push-up is till I get to a standing point.

25:36There is great progression there. There'll come a point where you've got sufficient muscle and strength that push-ups won't overwhelm you enough, right? Bear in mind, strength is about, have I got the tissue and the coordination to meet the demand of my environment? Your body doesn't know whether you want to be jacked, whether you want to run. It goes, oh, my new life requires me to push up 20 times every morning. I don't know why. And now I've got enough muscle to do that. I don't need more muscle. I don't need more strength. So there comes a point where body weight may be too hard to start with or may not be hard enough to finish with.

26:05And that's where you look at external weight capabilities or intelligent programming as you might get from an online PT or similar. But I think the basic premise being you have loads of muscle. So I do, again, a body composition relatively frequently, once a quarter, and I've got 41 to 42 kilograms of skeletal muscle mass. So we take my weight, work out what percentage body fat I've got, how much of me is not body fat, how much of that is muscle, 41 kilograms. What's my weight training objective that it's always 41 kilograms, right? If it goes to 40, I need to do more weights, eat more protein.

26:38If it goes to 42, I can have a lazy few weeks off, right? So that's a sort of data led approach to saying, now that's separate to strength, but I can measure strength with one rep maxes on various machines. So I could do a one rep max with dumbbell press or with a squat or a deadlift. Those are things you could qualify. But what you've got is most people haven't noticed they're losing muscle, losing strength until they've lost so much muscle, so much strength, they get injured or lost so much muscle, so much strength, they've become a dependent. And I think when we look at the running community, it's a great example of a group who've lent into what they're great at and love and do lots of.

27:10We can't get this right all the time. There will be periods of humanity where there was a famine or a war or we have children people need to get into the clothing people go places because it's a trigger to the behavior so it's very difficult in a home environment for lots of people who aren't naturally akin to this to suddenly find the psychological you know capability to take their muscles to exertion when they don't have to say you're somebody that does absolutely no exercise yep and you set yourself the target of doing 50 press-ups yeah at your own pace over the course of a day. Over the course of a day, every day.

27:46Just, you know, it might sound like a lot, it might sound like absolutely nothing, you know, whatever. Everyone's going to have a very different view on this. That, I would say, is a great little challenge. It's going to take you no time at all. Like, you know, when you go to make a cup of tea, just drop down to the ground and do 10 push-ups and then make a cup of tea. It's going to take you 15 seconds, right? It's a mind shift. Yeah, I know, but just do it. Yeah, I agree, but To do it, you need all the sort of behavioral psychology. Just do it. Yeah. But then you look at things like, there's a good book, Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, which is if I'm going to do something, I need to bind it to an existing habit.

28:22So if I'm always going to brush my teeth twice a day, I can do a set of push-ups pre and post. I can do that four blocks a day, starting where I'm at and progressing. The beautiful thing about strength is most of it is skill. So two people, you look at the power lifters, they're not as muscly as bodybuilders because what they've built is the neurology of fitness. So if you and I both went to the gym and neither of us had trained at all, over the first six weeks, we're going to get way stronger. So of course, a big part of strength is not how much muscle you've got. If we both started training from deconditioned status, we will increase our strength, you know, 15, 20, 30 % in six weeks, but build no muscle whatsoever.

29:00It's because we're learning to access the muscle we've already got. So a large component of strength is neurological. so how do I fire what we call the motor units in the sequence that's required if Simon had never done a kettlebell swing before and he does the first set of kettlebell swings the first set will feel harder than the second set because his body has learnt to drive that action in a more efficient play so everyone's got sufficient muscle to do a push up they just don't know how to fire that muscle in the right sequence then you get to the point where you've got the right neural fitness if you like you've recruited those motor units in the right pattern and then your muscle mass is the reason you can't do something heavier, then your body will start to lay down more muscle tissue.

29:42So strength comes before mass, and actually strength is maybe more important than mass because that's what we cling on to in later life. There's also the kind of repeating of things and your body getting used to stuff. Like, for example, lots of my friends are physically stronger than me, but I would annihilate them on a bench press because they don't bench and I do. How are they stronger than you? They're bigger than you. They're bigger. They're more physical. They're kind of like, were we to have a scrap to the death, you know, I would probably put my money on them because they're just big and heavy, but they don't bench press ever.

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31:48The mechanics of the bench press are foreign to them. So for me, I've rinsed and repeated it for eight years, right? Three times a week, eight years of bench pressing. So I bench press, you know, a lot for my weight because I'm very used to, I know exactly how it feels. I know exactly where to push, whereas somebody that's a bit foreign on it, like I have a friend who's 115 kilos. He's a big guy, six foot seven. Yeah, massive. I bench a lot more than him. But, you know, I'm sure that were we to go into a raw, who is stronger scenario, I'm sure he may come out on top. I disagree. I think you'd come up on top.

32:31And again, depending on the biomechanics of the action. So what you've described there is you have trained the skill of strength, which isn't about laying down gym muscles. So there's different strength ranges, right? So if I do, theoretically, sets to exhaustion between eight and 12 reps, I'm trying to create as much muscle hypertrophy as I can. I want the muscle itself to become larger. I want a bigger muscle. If I'm training in that lower reps range, four to six, for example, I'm not that interested in the muscle the self becoming larger, I'm interested in becoming stronger. If I again, training in higher ranges, I'm keen to create muscular endurance, different things.

33:07So if you got someone who historically is building loads of muscle hypertrophy, they may not be working as much at the strength range. And again, therefore, you get to an elite level runner, they don't want massive calves and gastrocnemius, they don't want huge quads and huge glutes, they want strong. So they might be drawn more to training modalities that train strength or explosive strength, like these things called plyometrics, where I rapidly take the muscle through and it's sort of explosive rebound type exercise. Or I might do low rep ranges on heavy weights because I don't want a bigger muscle.

33:38I want more strength. And you might need a bit of both of those, but you'll find in your world, if you do something regularly and you get stronger at it, you're probably stronger than someone who looks bigger and buffer because that muscle is not a functional muscle in the same way yours are. do you think that the future of elite sports belongs more to the hybrid athlete i mean definitely i think the idea and it was probably ryan gigs in the premier league who sort of infamously started yoga and it was like ryan gigs is prolonging his career in his mid mid 30s by doing yoga and you won't find many elite level athletes now who don't do cardio weights mobility and in mobility we would include core stability or functional movement patterns because you can't go deep into your career without all of those facets.

34:27You've got to remember that they're different biological systems. My cardiorespiratory system and its ability to deliver oxygen is completely different to my muscle strength and ability to fire motor units in my muscle, which is different to the pliability and flexibility of my tendons, my ligaments, my movement patterns. And just because all three of them burn me calories doesn't make them the same thing. Just because I do all three, dress head to toe in Lululemon in a fancy looking, well lit facility, doesn't mean they're the same thing. And I think the person who sub specializes in performance sport and longevity will ultimately be found out by their limiting factor.

35:02And the limiting factor will be the thing that you were least good at naturally and neglected potentially most willfully. And there we have it. I mean, honestly, Ollie Patrick, everyone. Just it's like having a kind of, you know, human chat GPT. Who needs Claude and chat GPT when you have Ollie Patrick? It's still a great place for both of those things. um thanks very much for listening we uh very much value your listenership as ever we'll catch you for an episode of untapped dropping on youtube on sunday evening uh and available on audio and other platforms monday morning and a fresh episode of extra mile every thursday we'll see you soon lots of love

35:56Thank you.