Optimal Aging

Resistance Snacks with Dr. Alan Rozanski: The Cardiologist’s Secret to Aging Well

Jay Croft

In this episode of the Optimal Aging Podcast, Jay Croft talks with Dr. Alan Rozanski, a New York City cardiologist with five decades of experience in cardiac rehab and prevention. Dr. Rozanski introduces the concept of "resistance snacks"—short, simple bursts of resistance training that anyone can incorporate into their day.

Whether you're a fitness professional or a healthcare provider, this conversation breaks down how micro-movements can build strength, prevent decline, and serve as an accessible gateway for deconditioned adults over 50.

Dr. Rozanski explains why resistance training is often overlooked in traditional medical advice—and what needs to change. He also shares how even soup cans and wall pushups can be powerful tools for building resilience later in life.

🧑‍⚕️ Guest: Dr. Alan Rozanski

Bio:
Dr. Alan Rozanski is a renowned cardiologist based in New York City, with over 50 years in preventive cardiology and cardiac rehabilitation. He is a national leader in lifestyle medicine and passionate advocate for incorporating strength training into everyday health routines for older adults.

Links:

📌 Episode Highlights

The Resistance Snack Revolution

  • What resistance snacks are and why they matter
  • Examples of snackable exercises anyone can do

Muscle Loss, Longevity & Prevention

  • Sarcopenia’s silent effect on older adults
  • How doctors can better guide patients toward strength

Breaking the “Too Old” Mindset

  • How to reframe aging and vitality
  • Why even minimal movement yields maximum results

🎧 Resources & Links

🎤 Host: Jay Croft
Jay helps fitness and health professionals reach more people over 50 with better marketing, storytelling, and engagement.

🌐 Podcast Website: https://primefitcontent.com

👍 Rate us on Apple Podcasts
 📱 Follow @primefitcontent on Instagram
 📬 Join our email list: https://primefitcontent.com

📢 Loved this episode? Share it with a friend or tag us using #OptimalAging

Speaker 1:

The more you had these one-minute, two-minute episodes of physical activity, there was definitely lower risk of heart disease, cancer and all-cause mortality, meaning that every time you go to the shopping mall and you park further away from the entrance instead of wasting that time to find the closest spot, you're actually promoting your health.

Speaker 2:

Today we're talking about snacks. Snacks we can all support. Movement snacks, specifically resistance training snacks Just little bursts of strength training throughout the day to help deconditioned folks over 50 get started. It's an idea supported by a New York City cardiologist, dr Alan Rosansky, who's my guest this week on Optimal Aging, the show for fitness, health and well-being professionals who want to grow their businesses with more people over 50.

Speaker 2:

Now we've all heard the common excuses about I don't have time to go to the gym or to exercise or take care of my body because that takes hours and hours. You've got to spend your whole life at the gym and I'm not going to do that. Of course, probably an excuse more than a reason, but we hear it a lot and we also know that no one's asking them to spend 24-7 at the gym right, we just want them to move their bodies a little bit to start, and that any kind of resistance training at any age will lead to pretty quick health benefits for anybody. That's a key message that we all need to keep getting out there that there's no age limit on this and that you don't have to spend all day doing it Seriously. Every time you think you've said that enough, say it again and again because there are people out there who haven't heard it yet, or people out there hasn't sunk in yet Now.

Speaker 2:

Dr Rozanski has 50 years of experience in cardiology prevention and cardiac rehab. He's seen firsthand with his patients what happens when people enter their 60s, 70s, 80s without enough strength to just climb the stairs or carry their groceries or live independently. Dr Rosansky is dedicated to changing that story and he's helping people understand the benefits of these resistance snacks the simple, approachable movements that you can do throughout the day to build strength and vitality, no matter what condition you're in or what age you are, and without needing to go right away to a gym and starting a long workout. You can build up to that. This can be a gateway, so to speak. This is part of a bigger shift in how medicine is beginning to recognize strength training not just as exercise, but as a foundation for long-term health and something that older people need to be doing.

Speaker 2:

How many of us have heard from clients or prospects that their doctor told them not to exercise or not to lift heavy weights? Well, here's a doctor telling us to do just that. That's what he tells his patients. It's part of what we talk about why resistance training matters so much for heart health, bone density, everyday function and more. How even these small little bits of activity can transform lives. Enjoy my conversation with Dr Rozanski. Dr Rozanski, hello, nice to see you today, hi it's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

Well, it's an honor to have you. I'm delighted to speak with someone about these topics strength training and, as it relates to health of folks when they're a little bit older, particularly heart health and bone health, and this idea you have of resistance snacks. I really like that idea. So these are messages that we can't get out there enough, because I find maybe you do as well that a lot of people who are 50, 60 and older don't really understand the importance of resistance training. Do you find that as well?

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. You know society has changed. I mean, we've become progressively sedentary over the course of decades. We sit more. We, you know, factor that a lot of incidental physical activity that we normally would do and that turns out to be important too. So we have to compensate today and we're living longer. So we want to live well, and all of that means moving more and moving better.

Speaker 2:

Right, we used to move more in in our lives, just incidentally, daily living. We had to walk to work or we worked, we had physical labor, and now it seems like we just all sit at our desks. I sit at my desk all the time. That's all I do for work.

Speaker 1:

Sure, you know online shopping, you know you don't have to go to the post office. It's many, many ways in which we just don't get this incidental physical activity, and the data shows that that activity counts. It adds up toward better health.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Tell us about that before we get into the resistance training the idea that these little things add up, because I find that a lot of older folks in particular are intimidated about exercising because they have this idea that it's a huge commitment. They must live at the gym and they must never eat anything pleasurable again, and they could never have another drink.

Speaker 1:

Sure, well, there has been a sea change in all of our understanding that even I think many physicians still don't understand.

Speaker 1:

Until about six, seven years ago, we had this notion that, you know, activity had to be in minimums of like 10 minutes or more to count in terms of your health.

Speaker 1:

And what happened was that, with newer data, with accelerometer data and so forth, we began to look at micro moments and the data began to show that, gee, you know, even if you got two or three minutes of physical activity here and there, it promoted better health, greater longevity, in fact and so the 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans changed the guidelines and said that any amount of physical activity accumulated in any way actually promotes your health.

Speaker 1:

So that was a sea change. Interestingly, after that study was published, data was published from the UK Biobank, which involves over 70,000 people that they've studied in all sorts of ways, but they had people wearing accelerometers for a week and then they were able to follow them over time. What they found, remarkably, is that, when they added up, even among the sedentary people so people were not exercising the amount of short bouts of physical activity that they were getting the more you had these one-minute, two-minute episodes of physical activity, there was a definitely lower risk of heart disease, cancer and all-cause mortality, meaning that every time you go to the shopping mall and you park further away from the entrance instead of wasting that time to find a closer spot, you're actually promoting your health.

Speaker 2:

Right Now. This is an idea that I've been familiar with in my business and on this show, where we've talked about movement snacks, this idea of parking farthest from the door of the store and taking the stairs when you can and walking to the mailbox even if you're not expecting anything or other, dancing around while you're doing the dishes perhaps these little things to increase movement. But I think this is the first time I've heard someone talk about resistance snacks. Tell me about that and why you are focusing on resistance training.

Speaker 1:

Sure, Well, first of all, I mean that's really a two-sided question, because if we first talk about the importance of resistance training that's an important topic in itself Then maybe talk about the resistance now.

Speaker 1:

So the muscle, we don't want to outgrow our muscles. As we get older, we are, you know, progressively we're sedentary, losing muscle mass, muscle strength, we're losing bone density, our metabolic rate is going down and we're aging and you get to the point in your 70s. Patients who are referred to us for cardiac stress testing, and the doctor's referring them because the patient is reporting, you know, shortness of breath and our tests are generally negative in many of these patients and what's really happening is they have just progressively found it harder to climb stairs and are having harder, you know, picking up, you know, groceries and things like that. And all of that is can be highly modified by doing physical activity and, importantly, resistance training. So there in cardiology, we have a tradition of, you know, promulgating to people to be physically active and exercise, not as much with resistance training, but resistance training will, you know, protect your mass, improve your balance, and it has a lot of metabolic effects we can get into as well. It decreases inflammation. So that's why resistance training is a master tool for aging successfully.

Speaker 1:

So, having said that, what about resistance snacks? So that's just simply taking this idea of getting small bites of physical activity. So that's just simply taking this idea of getting small bites of physical activity and I've divided it into, you know, activity snacks, exercise snacks and resistance snacks. Great, the reason I do that is that for one person, what might be an exercise snack, for another person who's well conditioned, might just be an activity snack like climbing up a couple flights of stairs.

Speaker 1:

So you know we have to deal with different patients and where they're at. So those are two concepts. But resistance snacks is a little bit different because resistance training itself requires a certain know-how that the general public overall doesn't have. So well Doctors don't have that in their back pocket, all doesn't have so well Doctors don't have that in their back pocket. And, as you know, how you do a squat or a lunge or the bird dog exercise, for example, the way you do it can be, whether you get a beneficial effect depends on posture and how you're holding your body and so forth. So it's an area where we have to get knowledgeable. So that's number one. But number two this is a. Resistance snacks is a way of getting people in the back door to start to do physical activity. We apply this with physical activity itself.

Speaker 1:

Many patients, many, many patients that I've dealt with over the years are completely sedentary. So my goal there isn't aerobic success first, it's psychological success. Can I get them walking five minutes a day? You know how many times that I've done that and it hasn't happened because the commitment isn't there. But many other patients, they started with five, they got to 10, they got to 20. So the same thing with resistance snacks you can pick one or two things per day that you're doing and you're getting. You know. If you can start to do that regularly, it gets you into a mode of perhaps then doing a third and a fourth and you build up, you get more motivated and eventually, hopefully, it leads to general resistance training in longer bouts, which I think is important.

Speaker 2:

Hey, are you a fitness professional trying to grow your business with people over 50? If you are, then you need to know how to communicate with them, how to market to them and how to get them to trust you with their fitness, well-being and money. We're talking about millions of people who are a little older than the typical market that the fitness industry usually pursues. They have more money, more time and better motivation to make the best long-term fitness consumers you'll find anywhere. If you're not focusing on them, you should be. Prime Fit Content is the only content marketing company designed specifically to help you engage people in this group and to help you distinguish yourself from competitors in your community. It's effective, affordable and super easy to use. Check it out at primefitcontentcom. That's prime like prime of your life, fitcontentcom. Back to the show. Can you give us some examples of resistance snacks that a deconditioned older person might be able to perform and also gain some benefit from?

Speaker 1:

Sure. Well, if you take any one of these things let's say, do a pushup. Now for you, getting on the floor and doing a push-up is a piece of cake for someone else if you're sitting at a desk at an angle, you could do it there and someone who's more deconditioned, just being up against a wall and doing gentle, you know, push-ups against the wall would be a way to start. Same thing with, let's say, squat. You know you may do a deep squat. Somebody who's older may do a very mild squat, partial way, going in that way. Balance is extremely important. So just standing on a foot for 15 seconds maybe when you're brushing your teeth and building that up or practicing a tandem walk, that would be important. Calf raises Really want to hit really all parts of the body. But you know, if you start off with two or three and something with upper body, lower body, one thing with balance, you're already, you know, on your way, you're on your way.

Speaker 2:

How do you define resistance training to these folks who are not familiar with working out?

Speaker 1:

It's anything that's putting a stress on any of your muscles, whatever that may be. It may be bicep curls, it could be any one of the muscles we're talking about, even heel raises. You're putting a stress on the muscles of the body. It's as simple as that.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so I remember in the pandemic we were advising older folks a lot on how to how they could get in some resistance training at home, since we couldn't go to the gym or anywhere else there for a little while. And people were advising that they use soup cans as dumbbells. That kind of thing. Is that effective, is that useful or is that silly?

Speaker 1:

of thing. Is that effective, is that useful or is that silly? It's not silly. It depends on where someone's at. For someone who's done nothing, maybe walking with soup cans is definitely a great place. To start With the data that shows that it's very interesting. If you take people that are totally sedentary, actually those people go, let's say, to 10 minutes of a walk per day, at a moderately brisk pace we might say, you know, equivalent of three miles per hour they actually show the greatest delta benefit, delta change in terms of decreasing mortality risk. In other words, you get the greatest bang for your buck from going from completely sedentary to something. So something as low as 10 minutes of walking per day can give you the effect of what we would see with a statin in terms of a mortality risk reduction for that particular issue.

Speaker 2:

So none of this is silly.

Speaker 1:

You know it's the, and in no age and in no condition is it true that you know you're over the hill and you can't get some benefit from from doing some physical activity and some resistance training deficient, who are not athletes either.

Speaker 2:

You know, just maybe folks have been working a desk job for all these years and raising children and and now they uh, they want to start exploring resistance training and maybe get in better shape and enjoy life a little bit more. Planning ahead for the coming stage of life what can, what can you recommend for them?

Speaker 1:

well, that's a great question.

Speaker 1:

So as you are more conditioned, you can do more.

Speaker 1:

You want to do more for the benefits that resistance training provides slowing in terms of, you know, loss of muscle mass or sarcopenia, maintaining more power, you know, with the goal of. You know, I have a 77 year old friend that I'm dealing with who is so sophisticated and goes to see doctors for many things, and it has been a lot of work to get him just to be physically active and I've got him at the point where he's walking a half hour each day. Now I'm working on resistance training and I'm saying to him look, I'm concerned how you're going to be at 94. I want you to be very vital when you're 94. It's not in his mindset yet, but you have to paint that picture and get people to relate to that kind of emotionally, because if you will do more now, you know and you're going to, it's the muscles which are going to prevent you from getting frail, from shrinking from. You know it's a tremendous return on your investment as you get older. But you have to project into the future.

Speaker 2:

A lot of people would say your friend at 77 is old and he should be thinking about today, not about someday in the future when he's old. It's interesting how nobody thinks they're old, isn't it?

Speaker 1:

Well, I'd say two things about that. It's all relative. We have a tendency sometimes to project that I'm going to be able to do things in the future that I'm able to do now. So we're thinking about the vacation you'll take when you retire and so forth. We don't project in terms of how we might be, and there's one of two roads to remain very vital into old age or to, you know, develop the sedentary syndromes of aging, and it's a choice. But we just, we just don't take it seriously enough. That's that's, that's the truth of it.

Speaker 2:

And that's something I struggle to understand, and I know a lot of people listening to this who are fitness professionals or in health and wellbeing. In some sense, yeah, you're struggling to get your friend to move. What does he do all day? Why can't he go for a walk? Why can't he walk his dog or play with the grandchild or go to the community center? I struggle to understand it and I know a lot of folks do. How do you understand it?

Speaker 1:

Well, there are a number of key reasons. I'll tell you two. One of them is that we have fundamentally misunderstood what health is. If I would say to you that well, as long as you don't have disease, your health is the absence of disease, intellectually you would understand that. I've asked that question to hundreds of people. I've written medical articles on what is health and most people intuitively know that health is not the absence of disease. But when you're asking what health is, you get a smile, you get a gentle answer Well, it's, you know physical and emotional and mental well-being, but it's imprecise.

Speaker 1:

We don't have a definition. Well, it's, you know physical and emotional and mental well-being, but it's imprecise. We don't have a definition. Well, you know, I've thought about this and derived a definition over time where health is not merely the absence of disease, not merely physical and psychological well-being, but it's living with the sense of vitality. By vitality I mean this inner sense, this pleasurable sense of feeling energetic and alive, and when you have that sense of vitality you want to do things. So, at any age, you can be 90, and you may not have the same physical energy when you were 19, but you can be every bit as energetic. But you can be a 25-year-old and you may not have a sense of vitality, so in that sense I wouldn't say you're healthy. There's something that is off there that you need to address, you see that.

Speaker 1:

So what happens as an outcome of the way we normally think about health in terms of, you know, disease prevention, for example, instead of promoting the sense of vitality, is when we talk to people about exercise or resistance training. It's always well, if you do this, you will be healthier when you're older, You'll have a lesser risk of falling, You'll have a lesser risk of needing assisted care or some other scare tactics. And what we're missing is talking about these are the immediate benefits you have once you start exercising. Within a short period of time, you're going to have more energy, you're going to feel more vital, you're going to have more confidence, you're going to be more optimistic, you'll have greater self-esteem. We don't sell the immediate benefits, which are very palpable when people get involved in training. What we deal for it in the medical side is oh, if people just knew how good it would be to exercise. And you're right, it's very hard to get them on that other side. So that's one whole area. The other big area is the fact that many people who want to exercise or do assistance training don't, because they will start it tomorrow, Of course. I want to get more fit. I hear what you're saying.

Speaker 1:

I'm listening to this podcast, I'm motivated, perhaps hopefully, and I'll start tomorrow and then tomorrow. It's that same dynamic. This has been well-studied in the bi-behavioral literature. They teach this in business schools. Now, this is the concept of temporal discounting. We tend to overvalue what's in the present and we discount what's in the future. And even if today, in the future, I still got my present things today I got the emails, the cell phones, the meetings, et cetera I'll get to this tomorrow, and that's why time management becomes actually a very important part of all of this. So those are big reasons that people don't exercise.

Speaker 2:

You are a medical doctor and you encourage older patients to exercise, to practice strength training. Many do not. Why is that? Why there seems to me a gap between, I don't know. I hear a lot of older people say my doctor told me not to lift anything above my head, or I'm afraid I'll hurt myself if I lift something heavy, or I can't go to a gym. That's crazy At my age I'll hurt myself. Now that's not necessarily the case. We know that it's more dangerous to sit on your couch all day long than it is to move your body or to practice some resistance training. Why do you think that this, that this persists? Because you know, my mother would I died a couple years ago, at 87. She was in decent health. She would. She put a lot of weight behind what her doctor said.

Speaker 1:

Right, she would not have listened to a trainer who told her to take a yoga class twice a week well, that's a profound and a very important question and of course, I've thought about that a great deal and that is part of my mission to make that a bigger part of medicine. I've written about this and studied this whole issue for about 20 years already and I can explain to you why. But there are a number of reasons why this is so and I wouldn't say it's the fault of any given group of people or doctors. I think there's just this is a true health gap which needs to be addressed in a careful way. First of all, as we've said, counseling patients on resistance training is a whole different ballgame than just telling people intuitively be more active, walk more, which people can understand what to do. It's generally safe. People can understand it. Once you get to resistance training, I put that as a different domain of health because it requires a lot of information about what we're talking about in terms of guidelines. If you look at the guidelines let's say, take the activity guidelines of all the medical societies They'll recommend people get 30 minutes of physical activity or 150 minutes per week or 30 minutes five times per week, and they'll define what mild, moderate or brisk exercise is. And resistance training. They say well, do resistance training twice a week. It doesn't say how long. It doesn't say which muscles per se. There's no guidelines that are given to the doctors. They're not trained in that area.

Speaker 1:

Okay, now the question is, should they be? Well, I think we need a system. If you took the different groups of doctors that could be involved, for example, physiatrists and orthopedists. Physiatrists definitely tell patients what to do, but they're helping them with the specific problems patients are coming to. They're not functioning as an overall preventive person in terms of, well, get into resistance. They're more likely to do it than anybody else, by the way, so they're more likely to do it than anybody else. By the way, cardiologists feel very comfortable promoting aerobic exercise but aren't really trained in counseling and resistance training. Geriatricians might be more tuned, but they're a very small subspecialty. They're not going to meet the needs of all the older groups of people.

Speaker 1:

So what do we need? So what do we need? We need more of a network of patients being referred from doctors to, you know, physiatrists, orthopedists, with instructions to physical therapists and trainers. You know, and you know there's a great need here to have very skilled trainers who can work with patients. The other part of this to be said here is, of course, we don't want for patients to have to be told by the doctor. We need an educational system out there where we're educating the people about the importance of resistance training, just like we do with smoking or with, you know, avoiding excess alcohol and things like that.

Speaker 1:

So that's kind of missing from the general domain as well. So I'm actually not painting a pessimistic picture here. I'm painting one optimistic because what I see is there's a growth of of voices from the medical world, from all of these, just what you're doing yourself. You're having these podcasts on fitness and all the things now available on the internet that people can have as an adjunct. I would say to you know, be trained, and things like that. So, and there's the growth of fields like lifestyle medicine now, which is dedicated totally to improving health from lifestyle, and they have a big emphasis on doing resistance training.

Speaker 2:

So these things are building and percolating and I'm very optimistic that we're going to get further along this pathway is there anything you would say to gym owners about what they can do on that end to bridge these gaps?

Speaker 1:

yeah, it's. Uh, I think we need more gyms. I think maybe more variety of gyms. I mean, I haven't thought about that question. Uh, I go to a gym because, uh, they don't want to use the equipment, but I also like the atmosphere, but, boy, I don't like how they blast all that music. I'd like to see just more varieties and more environments and perhaps, you know, I think a lot of gyms now have a good repertoire of highly skilled trainers. The gym I go to, I have physical therapists working right in the gym area and I think there's been a great synergy there. So I think that there has to be perhaps an involving collaboration between gym owners and health facilities. I think that would be terrific.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's happening more and more. It really is, but between gym owners and health providers, but also in the broader areas of well-being. You know, I don't know if you would count chiropractic as healthcare, but you see a lot of chiropractics in gyms or massage therapists in gyms or people who are doing more with peptides and other sort of supplements. That it's all kind of coming together more and more as people want to look at their whole whole health situation. Right, yeah, yesterday I saw a friend who's an orthopedist at his office here in Atlanta and he's got a, he's got everything in there. It's amazing. He's got physical therapy, he's got plunge, you know hot and cold. He's got estheticians to do you know Botox and and things like this explains this little. You know this little thing on my face. Here I had some. I had his staff take care of a little spot on my face Pretty amazing.

Speaker 2:

And I see that more and more among fitness providers who are trying to be more than just a big room with weights in it. Right, right, tell me about your, your exercise routine because I want to ask about. You mentioned the music. It's a really important thing and we talk about it a lot. It is part of the user experience that people who are our age don't want to go in and listen to obnoxious, loud music and be surrounded by a bunch of boys throwing weight around and posing in front of the mirror and all of these things that we associate with gyms. So more and more, gyms are providing a really thoughtful experience for people who are a little older. Tell me about what you do and how you enjoy it.

Speaker 1:

Sure, well, I've always been into being physically active. That's a gift from my parents my dad until he was almost 86, my parents, my dad until he was almost 86, which, when he developed a cancer which took his life, quickly walked every day of his life. I mean literally every day. We were living on Long Island and he would drive to Jones Beach on the South Shore there and had a boardwalk two miles, so he'd go four miles, because two miles in each direction, uh, 10 months of the year, you know two months of the year, when it was like january, february, he'd go to a, a mall to walk, and so you know all everyone in my family adopted being physically active.

Speaker 1:

I used to run, you know, all the time. If I was on call as a physician, my training years, I'd run the morning of being on call and the night after, even if I didn't get any sleep. What I didn't know was I grew up in that age where I thought running was just all you needed to do. So I ran for decades but I didn't do all that resistance training and so forth. I did develop arthritis and other issues with my knees and so forth in my early 50s and that got me into, you know, brought me into the world of resistance training. Plus, you know, I was, through my work, observing much more the issues of sarcopenia and things like that, and we were, you know, seeing people live longer, so that drove me in from the medical side.

Speaker 1:

So I'd say, you know, for years now I go to a gym, usually either before work, after work and at least a few times a week, and I work out with a trainer. And I do that because I'm not, I'm one of those people who needs an accountability partner to do it. So that's, I'm able to do it, so that's what I do. So my routine isn't super elaborate. Accountability partner to do it, so that's, I'm able to do it, so that's what I do. But, uh, so my routine isn't super elaborate, but I I don't feel. You know what happens. So interesting about the body is that when you're not doing these things, it's hard to start. But if you can keep it up and get past that level, your body comes to love it and then you don't feel right if you're not doing exercise, resistance training. I'm sure you see that in practically all the people you work with, right yes, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

So. May I ask your age? I'm 75 and when did you start working out at the gym?

Speaker 1:

um 20 plus years ago.

Speaker 2:

Okay, yeah, good, good, very good. Then I want to ask you one last thing, and then I'll let you go. This is kind of selfish, so forgive me. All these things, no health issues. What are some resistance snacks that I can do and that other people like me can do to increase our strength and our resistance abilities during an ordinary day? Are there things we can do, too, that don't involve soup cans and push-ups against the wall?

Speaker 1:

See, it's really interesting. I want to emphasize here that I think that resistance snacks is a great way to first of all get in a door, and it has. I think it's going to be big in a strategic way, because we sit so much and we need to break that up more. We need to stand, we need to sit, we need to stand, we need to sit, we need to change positions and and also press for time and like when you're brushing your teeth. You can, you can balance things like that, and certainly you know you could be.

Speaker 1:

You know, carrying a load, depending on what you have in terms of weights around the house. You can do sit-ups, push-ups around the house. You can do sit-ups, push-ups. You know rows, presses, squats, lunges, calf raises, all of that. I suspect that, though you know, to get to that progressive loading and volume, you do need to work out, you know. In other words, it's a way in and it's a great compliment and it's important to have in your pocket, but it's a compliment. I think that for someone like you, who is clearly someone who's fit and highly committed to exercising it's. It's just part of a repertoire, but it's it's. It's not not going to be a replacement for going to the gym or working. You don't have to go to the gym, obviously you can work out with bands and all those sort of things, but having, you know, a, a real workout, I think is important a couple times a week so I've got more work to do today at my at my desk.

Speaker 2:

After this phone call is over, I could do some push-ups. I could break out my resistance bands, do these things for 10 minutes. That would count as a useful thing for me to do. Correct, correct, yes, and then I could still go to the gym today or tomorrow and get in a full workout. Yes.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to add one caveat because, I know your audience is.

Speaker 1:

You know a lot of health professionals who are coaching the population. I want to emphasize what I call the power of the first step, just like I talked before about, you know, just getting patients onto five minutes walking per day and then all of a sudden, one day they walk 10 minutes and then they run into a friend and they walk 20 minutes and it's whatever I'd say. Apply that to resistance training to get people who don't do any of this to do one thing per day. That the one thing one time a day. Hopefully cue to something else, like when.

Speaker 1:

I you know, before I brush my teeth, I'll do this. Or you know, before I made my morning coffee, I will do this and use that. Use that as a start with everybody and then build from there.

Speaker 2:

Beautiful Doctor. Where can people go online to learn more about you?

Speaker 1:

Sure, they can go to my website. It's my name alanwazanskycom, and they can find me on LinkedIn as well.

Speaker 2:

And I will put that in the show notes so people can find you. Thank you so much for your time and insight today. It's been a pleasure getting to know you.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

People on this episode