Building strength and muscle mass: how to optimize training, nutrition, and more for longevity (AMA #71 rebroadcast)

“Creatine, again, we've talked about it a bunch, but it's just worth remembering what it is. Creatine is a phosphate donor, so it's kind of the fastest way to generate ATP. Multiple clinical trials, meta-analyses nonstop demonstrate that creatine is favorable in terms of strength, power, and muscle mass.”

“to people who are exercising, or anybody for that matter, and creatine's probably the closest we have to that list for me. Beyond nutrition, any other quote-unquote lifestyle factors that people should be aware of that can affect their ability to gain muscle, focus on muscle mass, resistance training?”

“Again, that might be true for the situation in which that's on, but we've also seen that casein versus whey, which is also a dairy protein, produces a much longer and slower delivery of the amino acids. And so I tend to think a lot less about this than I used to.”

“than I used to. I used to really worry about exactly when I was consuming protein. Now that I don't consume whey, protein shakes that much, if at all, and I tend to eat more of my protein, I'm just trying to get 40 to 50 grams of protein four times a day through a meal or snack, and I'm not thinking that much more about it.”

“potentially lose too much muscle? Some of these things are going to be less relevant if you're using high amounts of anabolic steroids where you can fight the inertia of this more. But if we limit this to people who are either not taking anabolic steroids or who, if they are, they're doing it under physiologic replacement levels,”

“what are they doing in PE? What are they learning in science? That kind of stuff. But the kid sitting right across from me noticed I was drinking a diet soda. And truthfully, I don't really drink that many. I'm mostly a Topochico Waterloo guy, but this was the first thing I grabbed.”

“was I was drinking, a Fresca, actually. You know that that has a sweetener in it that is 500 times sweeter than sugar? And I said, oh, yeah. I think that's how they get away with making it have no calories.”

“One of my favorite exercises is on the Keiser Leg Press Machine, which is a pneumatic machine doing explosive single leg leg presses.”

“and they'd followed them for seven years. And so these people were divided into quartiles based on muscle mass and strength. So separate analysis. So DEXA was used to quantify muscle mass, and I believe they use leg extension for quad strength. They might have used grip strength as well for upper body strength.”

“I've talked a lot about how I like using a device called Morpheus. No affiliation with Morpheus, but I like it because you use either a chest strap or an armband where the optical sensor is in the antecubital fossa”

“than I used to. I used to really worry about exactly when I was consuming protein. Now that I don't consume whey, protein shakes that much, if at all, and I tend to eat more of my protein, I'm just trying to get 40 to 50 grams of protein four times a day through a meal or snack, and I'm not thinking that much more about it.”

“And you have to do this with a trap bar, not a straight bar, because then you, from a standing position, drop the bar. So the whole hex bar just drops. And then you drop yourself down with no tension and you pick it up and you do it again. So why would I do that? Well, I wanted maximum strength and power with zero size because size is weight.”

“So unfortunately, you have to sort of develop enough experience to be able to use that. One question we get commonly asked, which I think is just due to the rise of wearables that people have, is where does HRV fit into understanding where someone's at and if they should be training intensity, day off, et cetera?”