The Berman Method
The Berman Method
Episode #236: The #1 Predictor of How Long You'll Live (It's NOT Cardio)
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In this episode of The Berman Method Podcast, Dr. Jake and Jenni Berman discuss why muscle is one of the strongest predictors of long-term health and longevity. They explain how maintaining muscle supports strength, balance, metabolism, brain health, and independence, while also addressing common misconceptions about weight loss and healthy aging.
The conversation explores the importance of proper nutrition, strength training, gut health, and the responsible use of GLP-1 medications. Rather than focusing only on losing weight, the hosts emphasize preserving muscle mass through adequate protein, progressive exercise, and consistent healthy habits.
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Mic Check And Why We Rant
Speaker 1Did we check our mics? No. Mike Check one two, Mike Check one two. And we're rolling, baby, with the Berman Method Podcast. Dr. Jake Berman here with my beautiful co-host.
Speaker 3Jenni Berman, physician assistant.
Speaker 1We are David going against Goliath. Goliath being the corporate medical system, big pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies. We got another rant on health
Insurance Denial And The Lost Review
Speaker 1insurance companies that you can't make this up. So let me go ahead and give a big shout out to. I want to thank all of our health insurance companies over the years. Blue Cross, Freedom, United, United, Cygna. I just want to thank all of them for the endless content that you've given us. Like just endless content. You can't make this stuff up. We just got another letter this morning.
Speaker 3We thought it was over. We have we have been off insurance for a year now. Walker only the past four months or so. But we thought it was over because we got rid of it.
Speaker 1And just when you thought it was over.
Speaker 2It's not over.
Speaker 1It's not over.
Speaker 26 30 this morning. I'm opening mail in the mall. Wait, what? What is this?
Speaker 3Yeah, so I'm like reading it, and I read it all over again a second time. And I was like, you'll never believe this. I'm not making this up right now.
Speaker 1Like, this is real stuff, and this is what you have to understand is we've gone through this so many times because of all of the health issues that we've been through over the years, including all of the kids, that this is just a common practice for us. We understand how the game is played. And the problem is if you don't go through this on a regular basis, you don't understand that this is a game that they're playing. This is a regular routine practice that they're doing. So a year ago, we were you were planning on having an abdominal surgery for a hernia repair. For a hernia repair that was a legitimate health concern.
Speaker 4Correct.
Speaker 1Like this wasn't a tummy tuck or a mommy makeover thing.
Speaker 4Right.
Speaker 1Like this was a legitimate health concern that the abdominal hernia, because of the pregnancy, was splitting. So kind of like a what was it? Uh diastasis or diastasis recti, where the abdominals are actually splitting and the guts are protruding through the stomach or the abdominal abdominal wall. So this is a legitimate health concern.
Speaker 4Right.
Speaker 1But the health insurance company that we had at the time said, no, it's not. This is a mommy makeover, and this is not medically necessary.
Speaker 3They said it wasn't medically necessary. The hernia repair was not medically necessary.
Speaker 1So the letter you open up this morning a year later.
Speaker 3Well, so the like backstory is when they said it wasn't medically necessary, this whatever, $20,000 surgery for a hernia repair, they were gonna cover $1,200 of it. And so we tried arguing with them about it being medically necessary, and I submitted for a review so that they would re-look at the medical notes from the physician, the surgeon, saying, like, yes, it's in the umbilical area, it is necessary because of whatever all the reasons. Anyway, so I submitted for the review, so I get a letter this morning, one year later, saying you had submitted information for a medical review, and we are sorry to say that your uh your what do they call it? Your application was misfiled.
Speaker 1It was lost.
Speaker 3Misfiled was the word that they used. And so we're just now reviewing it for you. One, yeah, and whatever, then like the outcome of the letter. But I'm reading this and I'm all what are they talking about? And then I was like, it dawned on me a year ago, is when we I had the surgery planned for August initially, and we found out in July that they were only gonna cover $1,200, and so yeah, here we are. A year later saying that my application had been misfiled.
Speaker 1So you think that this is not real? This is happening. Like they're literally they got to be coached. I I want to get a job at a health insurance company just to infiltrate the system because I know that day one is this is the way that you answer the phone. No. I'm sorry, that's not covered. It has to be training because it's all the same. Right, it's all the same. This medically necessary procedure was misfiled, and they just magically found it a year ago.
Speaker 2One year later.
Speaker 1I'm telling you, what that what had actually happened was they said, okay, here's what we're gonna do in this case. I don't want to pay for this, so we're gonna put this over here, and I'm gonna say, hey Siri, remind me in one year to come back and bring this up so that's no stop, I'm not talking to you. Oh she's actually listening.
Speaker 3Uh but yeah, it was just crazy. And again, I was like, you can't make this up. You can like this is in the insurance world, is that a year now later they want to bring up somebody's surgery and be like, okay, now we'll reconsider. Except they didn't reconsider, they still denied it.
Speaker 1They still denied it. They still denied it. So I'm glad that we didn't wait a year for answers.
Speaker 2Could you imagine?
Speaker 3I might have had an incarcerated colon by then.
Speaker 1Yeah, strangulated colon.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah. So that's what we wanted to start off with today. That's why we're David going against Goliath because it's not right. You've got to speak your mind, you've got to ask questions, and even when you get answers, most likely it's not the right answer. So you gotta become an asshole. Ask, ask, ask, ask, ask, ask, ask.
Speaker 3Stella did that to me yesterday.
Speaker 1Holy cow.
Speaker 3She kept asking me the same thing. I was like, no, no, no, no. Okay, fine, whatever, just fine. Just do it. Yeah, sure. And I immediately thought, like, she got me.
Speaker 1Yeah, she won. Yeah.
Speaker 3But that's what you have to do to your medical providers.
Speaker 1You have to become an asshole. You've got to ask, ask, ask, ask, ask. And if you don't get the right answer, then ask somebody else. There's six, seven billion people on this planet. You'll find the answer eventually. You just gotta keep asking.
Speaker 4Right.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3Well,
Muscle As Medicine For Longevity
Speaker 3what else? Do you want to talk about what we really were gonna talk about? Yeah, what did we really want to talk about?
Speaker 1Yeah, this was a serious rant. What was this? This was a seven-minute rant.
Speaker 3That wasn't actually bad for you. Yeah, I think you've done worse.
Speaker 1Yeah, at least it wasn't 10 or 15.
Speaker 3Yeah. But it's just part of it. Like again, we have to we have to go. Okay, so what's that?
Speaker 1I think it ties in very nice to what we actually did want to talk about today.
Speaker 3About muscle.
Speaker 1Yes.
Speaker 3And muscle and longevity?
Speaker 1Yes.
Speaker 3And muscle being the new I don't know what I was gonna say. The new 90?
Speaker 1I don't know where you're going with that.
Speaker 3Well, like muscle's the new medicine. Muscle is the new medicine. Yes, that's what I wanted to say. But you know, like there's this now I feel like we're getting back into the fad of skinny. We gotta be skinny. We gotta be skinny and show our abs. But like that's not your longevity.
Speaker 1I I have no idea what you're talking about. That's a new fad now.
Speaker 3Oh, it's social media.
Speaker 1Because of GLPs, it's like okay, I can eat whatever I want and just take a shot. Just take a shot.
Speaker 4Right.
Speaker 1I'll lose the weight. It doesn't matter if I'm losing fat and muscle, at least I'm getting skinny again. Correct. When was skinny in?
Speaker 3Oh 80s and 90s, right? It was about being skinny.
Speaker 1Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 3Well, anyways, it's like, and again, with like you said, with the GLPs, a lot of people are losing a ton of weight, but they're m I shouldn't say all, many are not using the medication appropriately. Number one. They're not using it correctly and actually fueling their system with taking the GLP. But number two, when they're getting the GLPs online, how do you know what's actually in the GLP?
Speaker 1How would you know?
Speaker 3You're not doing it safely by just going online and buying these medications. And even if you're going to a clinic and getting the injection every week and somebody's actually d dispensing it to you, they're doing the injection, you may still not know where they're getting it or what's in it, or if you're even getting the right nutrients and vitamins with taking this thing.
Speaker 1Okay.
GLP-1 Benefits And Common Mistakes
Speaker 3So let's well, we weren't really gonna talk about GLPs, but since you brought it up.
Speaker 1Yeah, I I don't know if we need to go down that rabbit hole. We can if you want, though.
Speaker 3GLPs are can actually be very beneficial. And in in fact, a lot of them have autoimmune uh they actually can help with autoimmunity. So when you have an autoimmune condition or an autoimmune disease, they actually help with the anti-inflammatory effects. And so some providers are actually using GLPs for autoimmune conditions as opposed to just blood sugar and weight loss. And with the what blood sugar and weight loss, they are beneficial. There are some good things and pros to using GLPs if you're using them the right way. And we're talking about the GLP ones and GIPs like uh Ozimpic and Manjuro and Zeppound, and then of course the compounded versions of semaglitide, terzepatide. The thing about it is you have to know how to fuel your body with taking these things. Because if you're not using them correctly, yes, you will lose muscle mass, you will lose your hair, you will have constipation issues and GI issues, you won't sleep as well at night because we're not actually fueling our body the right way. They also deplete B12 vitamins, and if you're not replacing your B12 or getting one that's compounded with B12, that's a problem all in itself. Then you're eating away at your brain because you don't have enough B12 to protect your brain.
Speaker 1Holy guacamole, I just wanted to lose 30 pounds. Like that's all I wanted to do. Now you're telling me that there's all these repercussions and side effects.
Speaker 3Well, I mean, it's just think about like if you were to go on a a weight loss diet and you were eating a 600-calorie diet and you were fasting for long periods of time and you were burning way more calories than you're consuming, that's not a healthy way to do it either, and you're gonna lose muscle that way, too. So it's really not much different than like the old types of medication. Anyways, the point of all this is that we wanted to come back to is I'm telling you about GLPs because you brought them up. They're not all bad. We just have to make sure we're fueling our body the right way. We have to make sure we're eating enough protein, we still have to make sure we're exercising and we're weight training. But that really wasn't where we're going today. We were gonna talk about how muscles, medicine, and as we're aging, the importance of strength training.
Speaker 1Muscles medicine. Back to what we originally wanted to talk about.
Speaker 3Yeah, you just now you got me on, right now.
Speaker 1Jeez Louise, that was like a boomerang burn right there.
Why Strength Prevents The Downward Spiral
Speaker 1I think one one really good way to segue into what we really wanted to get onto was there's not a single situation on the planet where being stronger than weaker is a benefit.
Speaker 3Where being stronger than weaker is a benefit?
Speaker 1Isn't a benefit. Meaning that there's no downside ever in the history of life when we're talking about living and thriving and surviving. There's no situation where being stronger than weaker is a downside.
Speaker 3Except maybe with their trap muscles. I'm just kidding. My gosh, stay focused, stay focused.
Speaker 1There's not a single situation.
Speaker 3You're right, you're right.
Speaker 1Right when we're talking about survival, yes, where having more muscle, more strength and weaker, yes, is a downside.
Speaker 3Correct.
Speaker 1Right? The problem is as we're getting older, we're not using the muscle. If you don't use it, you lose it, and it speeds up. The older you get, the quicker it happens.
Speaker 3For several reasons, yes.
Speaker 1For several reasons, yes. And if we want to get as simple as possible, one of the number one predictors of longevity is one of the five physical things out of our ten. We haven't talked about these in a couple of episodes now, which is being able to get down on the ground and get back up again without using your hands. Yes, so many people think that that's easy, that's not a problem at all, until you actually try it and you're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe how much my knee just buckled in and I had to use momentum to get up. Some people can just do it, okay, that's great. Make sure that you can keep doing it. But then so many people over the age of 70 take it for granted that they're never, they just think that they're never gonna end up on the ground. Right. Why would I need to get up from the ground? I'm never gonna end up there.
Speaker 4Right.
Speaker 1And we've said this multiple times that I can say this with 100% certainty that every single person listening to this episode will fall in the future. You're gonna fall. At some point, you will fall.
Speaker 3Yeah. I mean, a lot of times it's in the middle of the night, too, is when most people fall over the age of 70. However, if you have a dog, your dog's gonna trip you at some point.
Speaker 1The dog's gonna trip you, the rug's gonna trip you, you're gonna slip on something, you're gonna go down.
unknownYeah.
Speaker 1And then it's like, oh wow, I've never been down here. I haven't been down here in 20 years. How am I gonna get back up? Then that turns into a whole ordeal. Life alert shows up, next thing you know, your quality of life has immediately gotten smaller because now you're more scared, you're more you're more conscious of walking, and you start doing the furniture shuffle. Like, this is how the snowball happens. It doesn't, you don't just wake up one morning, you're not thriving in your 70s, and then you just wake up at 80 and you're like, oh my gosh, I have no balance. Right. Like this is a thing that happens, and it's 100% due to muscles.
Speaker 3Correct. Not being utilized, not knowing how to use them, not keeping them strong enough. And as we go through the aging process, muscle mass starts to decline because of hormonal change. So if we're not doing the right
Protein, Muscle Loss, And Smart Support
Speaker 3things to protect the muscle, meaning eating enough, where so many people are actually deficient in how much they're eating, their protein, their total calories, especially as they age and they feel like they're they're expending less energy, or maybe they just don't have as big of an appetite as it used to be. But then we get in this chronic issue of being deficient and the amount of calories and protein that we're getting. So that's gonna decline muscle mass. Not using it as efficiently is gonna cause it to decline. And again, taking certain medications can affect the muscle mass as well.
Speaker 1Yeah, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy when you get over or you get past your 30s, you get into your 40s, you start getting a little fluffier, 50s and 60s, you start to get that speak for yourself. 50s and 60s, you start to get the spare tire, and it's like, man, I'm really struggling to lose this excess weight around my stomach. So then you're like, okay, I need to eat less, and part of that less is the protein.
Speaker 4Right.
Speaker 1So you're eating less protein, you're eating salads, and you think that you're doing yourself good, but that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because now you're not getting enough protein. So, yes, you may be losing weight, but you're losing muscle mass, not fat mass, because now you're starving yourself, so your body's gonna hold on to the fat and get rid of the muscle because if it's the most efficient thing on the planet, so I'm not gonna expend calories to maintain this muscle mass if we're not gonna use it.
Speaker 3Right.
Speaker 1So it's like, wait a minute.
Speaker 3Yeah, right. We think we're doing the right thing by following the online that says just eat less and move more, and we're just actually not providing the right types of energy to our body to be able to hold on to the muscle mass. And you know, again, the like a lot of our individuals should be using branch chain amino acids to help with slowing down the a the aging process or the decline in muscle mass. So if you're not using branch chain amino acids, you should definitely uh ask us about them, send us a message, ask if you should be using them, what kinds we have we carry them in the office. So some are better than others, so that could be beneficial in addition to getting enough protein and doing your strength training regimen.
Speaker 1Yeah, the
Peptides Plus Gut Health Basics
Speaker 1we're in such a pivotal switch or shift in medicine right now. We're we're experiencing it now where we're biohacking, we're learning so much about what can be done to slow and in some certain cases actually reverse the aging process. And most of the time, the things that we're reading about, these are normal or natural occurring things that just are not naturally occurring because humans weren't supposed to live to be a hundred. So now we've got some medicine and some health that's come into our world that's keeping us a lot around longer, but the human body has not evolved. I mean, it's just a hundred years ago that we weren't living to a hundred, that just didn't exist. So it takes time for the body to evolve and evolution to occur. So we're getting to the point now to where we can fast track it and we can say, okay, these naturally occurring peptides that were your young peptides that your body produced naturally in your twenties and thirties, and they stop in your 40s and 50s or actually slow. Well, if we can start taking them again, like they're not, it's not a pharmaceutical, it's not a chemical. These are natural occurring things in your body.
Speaker 2Synthetic, yeah.
Speaker 1It's given us the keys to the kingdom. It is the fountain of youth, it does exist.
Speaker 3Right, right. But again, it's not always, you know, again, peptides are not the easy button either. And again, you need to know where you're getting your peptides because some of them aren't even regulated of any kind right now. So going online and just buying peptides is not recommended either. Um, but even with peptides, like we have to make sure that we're still eating enough and that we're getting the right balance of our proteins, our carbs, our fats, how we're avoiding food sensitivities and allergies. When I went to a peptide peptide conference recently, the whole basis is still your gut health. And if your gut's not healthy, you're not even gonna absorb the peptides well, you're not gonna utilize them well. So we can't discount the basics of nutrition and exercise by any means. However, there are things that we can utilize now to augment the process and make sure that the gut is as healthy as it can be and that we're actually absorbing our nutrients and that we're maintaining our muscle mass.
Speaker 1Holy cow, we're all over the place, and we've we just randomly ended back at gut health. Everything is gut health. Everything comes back down to gut health. It doesn't matter how strong you are, how many supplements you take, how good you eat, if your gut ain't healthy, it's irrelevant.
Speaker 3The kids just asked me about it this morning. Was I not talking to them about gut health this morning while they were eating breakfast? Stella asked me a question and I'm like, we have to keep your gut healthy. That was the answer to my question. Oh and she was like, My gut? Like my butt? And I was like, no. Like your intestines and your tummy and where you get your nutrients.
Speaker 1How do you explain that to a six-year-old?
Speaker 3It's where your immune system starts, and it's how your brain is healthy and you're smart, is from your gut. So I'm telling my six-year-old that she has to have a healthy gut today.
Speaker 1And here's the here's the irrelevant part is if just because you think that you're doing something that's healthy, gluten-free, dairy-free, whatever free, lots of protein, no fluff, no preservatives, if your gut is not healthy to begin with and you actually have a sensitivity, then it's irrelevant.
Speaker 4Okay, right.
Speaker 1So it all comes back to what's your food sensitivity saying, what's your your um your blood your blood panel showing, then you make the adjustment based off of what that tells you.
Speaker 3Right. Getting the right vitamins, the right nutrients, the right balance again, coming back to your proteins, carbs, and fats, which is going to help with the pro preserving the muscle mass we have and building muscle mass as we age so that we can combat the sarcopenia or the natural loss of muscle mass, and then making sure you're doing your physical training in your EMTT.
Speaker 1Oh man, we are all over the place in this episode. I would love to see the cliff note.
Speaker 3Well, we're we're talking everything comes back to being able to build and preserve muscle, right?
Train Efficiently Not Just Heavy
Speaker 3And it's not just one thing, it's not going and doing 50 curls, 50 push-ups, and 50 squats a day that's gonna preserve your muscle mass.
Speaker 1No, absolutely not.
Speaker 3Like, yes, the physical training is important, the exercise, the pickleball, the golf, but those aren't building strength.
Speaker 1No.
Speaker 3Lifting weights. It is. It is building strength. However, if we're not doing the basis of It the muscle's not gonna recover and build. Yeah, it's gonna take a long time to heal.
Speaker 1Yeah, I was just working with one of our clients that's been with you for 10 years now, through Cedar Quiz and uh followed you over here too. So you've been working with this guy for 10 years, and this guy's in really good shape. And his back started to tighten up on him. So he was being proactive before the back got really bad. He's like, Well, let me see what I can do about it. Comes in and we do some tests, and we're looking around, and this is a guy that goes on the leg press machine and will press 600 pounds on the leg press machine. That's a lot of m that's a lot of weight. You would think that he's really, really strong, and he is really, really strong, but that doesn't mean that he's really really efficient. So after doing a couple of tests, we were like, okay, we're not using this right glute at all. So you're moving 600 pounds of weight on that leg press machine, but you weren't doing it the right way. So I think what you're trying to get to there is being able to do things more efficiently will give you the bigger return on investment. It's like, what's the point of pressing on the leg press machine 600 pounds if you're doing it inefficiently? So being proactive and saying, oh wow, I didn't know this right glute wasn't working. Now I feel it working, and you go from 600 pounds down to 200 pounds because you can't do more than 200 pounds the right way, and then you build back up the right way, that's how you maintain the muscle mass as you're getting older.
Speaker 3Right. And yeah, being able to actually use the muscle the right way, which is what's gonna get you off the ground.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 3As opposed to like, great, you can push 600 pounds, but then if you can't even get your own body weight up, it's no problem.
Speaker 1Life Alert. We should be sponsored by Life Alert. How many times have we brought up Life Alert on this podcast over the past couple of years?
Speaker 2But yeah, we're trying to get them to go out of business by making our people strong enough to not have to use them.
Speaker 1Oh, maybe they wouldn't sponsor us.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1So health insurance companies aren't gonna sponsor us, pharmaceutical companies aren't gonna who's gonna sponsor us? Jeez Louise. Oh, I know who's gonna sponsor us.
Knowledge Wins Reading Labels Matters
Speaker 1This episode is brought to you by bermanboomers.com. If you haven't gone to bermanboomers.com, I highly recommend you go there because you want to figure out what is your score. Zero to 100 is what the score is out of. Anything 80 and above, you're thriving, you're on track to arrive at 80 feeling 40. Anything under 80, we've got work to do. The vast majority of you listening are going to be surprised that your score is under 60, which is not good.
unknownNot good.
Speaker 1Not good. Good news is it doesn't take a whole lot of correct decisions to get it above 60, and then it just takes another couple of correct decisions to get it into the 80s or 90s.
Speaker 3And really consistency.
Speaker 1Consistency and accountability.
Speaker 3Yeah, I don't know if it's the correct decision, as much as like you have to have the knowledge on what the correct decision is, but then it's just gonna be the consistency.
Speaker 1Knowledge is the big one. Like, I think about that so much. If you really knew how bad a bagel was, would you really eat it?
Speaker 4Right.
Speaker 1Like if you really knew how bad that glass of orange juice was for like your inside, would you really drink it? Most people don't know.
Speaker 3Yeah, well, not if you read what's on the internet. Orange juice is good for you.
Speaker 1So are breads and carbs.
Speaker 3It's like that tea drink that you had the other day. It's a perfect example. You're drinking the green tea out of a can, and you're like, it's green tea. And I look at it and I'm all, do you know that this is not good for you? You had no idea.
Speaker 1Yeah, I don't ever drink, I usually drink water, right? I drink water, and for whatever reason, we're at a friend's house. I opened up the fridge and I saw these green tea, cans of green tea. I'm going, oh man, that sounds great. I would love to have one of those. I drink it and I'm going, oh my gosh, this is delicious. I chugged it. Chugged it. You didn't know that I did that. And then I grab another one, and as I'm walking out, you grab it from me and you look at it, and you go, What are you doing? I said, I'm gonna drink another one of these things. It's it was amazing. She goes, Do you know what was in that? And I go, green tea.
Speaker 3I was like, Do you know you just drank a cup of ice cream? Like, that's how much sugar was in it. And then I started reading the ingredient list, and it's not like it was like cane sugar, right? Which is tolerable or monk fruit. No, it was high fructose corn syrup.
Speaker 1Yeah, and when she told me that, I almost went in self-induced vomiting. I'm going, What?
SpeakerThis is why I don't drink anything except water and beer. That's it. I know it's in my beer and I know what's in my water. That's it.
Speaker 3It was so I was like, oh, like you just should have just drank a Coke.
SpeakerI should have drank a Coke.
Speaker 3Yeah, might have been, might have been better. I don't know. But see, that's the thing, is like they oh, on it it said something about being sweetened with honey and ginseng. Yeah isn't that what it said? On the can. So it's like the green tea, Arizona green, well, maybe I should have said the brand, but anyways, green tea. And it said sweetened with honey and ginseng. So then you're like, oh, it has to be healthy, it's honey and ginseng. Yeah. And then the first ingredient, or maybe second ingredient on the back was high fructose corn syrup. They didn't market that. And that's the thing about knowledge is like all these things, they market it to make it look like it's so good for you. Like the protein pop-tarts, right? People are like, oh, it has protein in it, it must be healthy.
Speaker 1Crustables.
Speaker 3It's not healthy.
Speaker 1Crustables, protein, pop-tarts.
Speaker 3Like they market it to make they look so good, but if you don't know how to re-label Wow.
Speaker 1We were supposed to be winding down and now you're wound up again. Should we just keep going? Should we make this a double episode or see?
Speaker 3This is why you can't talk about muscle. Like, we all have to we just have to keep coming back
Progressive Overload And Tracking Workouts
Speaker 3to muscle. Muscle has so many things that are involved in it. It's not just about going to the gym every day. And by the way, if you're doing the same darn routine at the gym every single day, you're not doing yourself any good either.
Speaker 1You mean three sets of ten reps of the same five exercises. Yeah, yeah. So it's I did three sets of ten for the past 20 years of the same reps.
Speaker 3The same five exercises every day.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's not exercise. That's work, but it's not exercise.
Speaker 3Yeah, you're not getting stronger.
Speaker 1Yeah, there is a very big difference. This was one of the big things that I've I still struggle with to this day with documenting exactly what it is that you're doing. So the best that I ever did at this was two years ago when I hired a virtual personal trainer, and he got me into his app, and every single set I had to document the weight that I did. And this was just this was documented for weeks, and every single day that I would go to do that exercise again, I could see the weight that I did last time. And just by seeing the amount of weight that you did last time and the amount of reps that you did last time, it made me want to do more of one or both. So it's like, okay, I got nine reps at this weight last time, I'm gonna get ten this time. It just makes you push a little bit harder. The amount of growth that I had strength-wise in a two-month period, it was just astronomical compared to anything that I had experienced over 10 years until training for the high rocks. Oh my gosh, it makes me want to vomit just thinking about that torture.
Speaker 2You should be doing it now.
Speaker 1I am doing it now. I ran this one.
Speaker 3You haven't been writing your workout for you.
Speaker 1Yeah, well, maybe we should start again.
Speaker 3Because I think that's also why the high rocks allowed so much growth and opportunity for us, is because we were actually following a plan. We're following something that was written out, like this is what we have to reach. The next week was something different, next week was something different, but it was a progressive plan building up.
Speaker 1Yeah, progressive way out of your comfort zone, way out of my comfort zone every single time. Every single day, every single week, it was just a little bit more than what I was comfortable with. And the craziest thing happened. I got stronger. What crazy, right?
Speaker 3Nuts. Yeah. So if you're doing the same routine every day for weeks on in, you're not helping yourself. If you're not building reps, weight sets, you're not helping yourself. But even if you are building the reps, weights, and the sets, you can't do the same exercises all the time.
Speaker 1Yeah, this is Tony Horton 101, P90X, muscle confusion.
Speaker 3Yeah, metabolic confusion, muscle confusion. I still talk about it every day.
Scores, Resources, And Closing
Speaker 3So if you want to build muscle mass, should I summarize it? Your insurance stinks, they're gonna write you a year later rebuttling your argument from a year ago. Okay.
SpeakerOh my god.
Speaker 3If you want to build muscle mass, which is your longevity, your brain feeds when you have more muscle mass, your metabolism feeds when you have more muscle mass, your longevity, your strength, it is the predictor for how long you're gonna live, the amount of muscle mass you have. And you should actually be checking your muscle mass to see what it is, like objectively. That's like on the scale in our office, yeah, right?
Speaker 1I've got a section in my notes on my phone where every single time I jump on that scale, it gives me all the data points, and it tells me exactly this is how much muscle mass you have in pounds, this is your percent body fat, everything. So I'm documenting it, and since training for high rocks, it's the first time that the number has actually gone up on your muscle mass.
Speaker 3Just because you're doing something different, you would get in that habit where you would do the same works out workouts.
Speaker 1I just got done saying that.
Speaker 3Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1Like I already admitted that. So I'm down on the ground right now. Kick me while I'm down there, please. Go ahead. You're driving the bus, you already ran over me this way. Back up, run over me again.
Speaker 3Do you need a pat on the back?
Speaker 1Pat on my head. There you go. Okay.
Speaker 3So building muscle mass. We gotta make sure the gut's healthy. We have to make sure we're eating enough, specifically protein. But really, is your protein outweighing your carbohydrates? It's a pretty good starting point. Knowledge is important. Reading labels, understanding what you're actually putting in your system, and then strength training, different exercises, building progression.
Speaker 1Write down what you're doing.
Speaker 3Writing it down.
unknownYeah.
Speaker 1Do more than what you did or sleep.
Speaker 3Sleep hydration fits in there somewhere, but we're not getting into that today.
Speaker 1Where does it start?
Speaker 3It doesn't.
Speaker 1Never mind.
Speaker 3Like building muscle is not just about exercise.
Speaker 1It's not, it's about having a team.
unknownYeah.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3Berman Health Club.
Speaker 1Berman Health Club. This episode is also brought to you by Berman Health Club.com. If you don't know what you don't know, you should go to Berman Health Club.com and figure out what you don't know.
Speaker 3Correct. Right?
Speaker 1The four levels, the four stages of competency. Right? Unconsciously incompetent, consciously incompetent, consciously competent, unconsciously competent. If you don't even know what you don't know, right now you're unconsciously incompetent. You don't even know what you don't know about maintaining muscle, getting healthier, arriving at 80, feeling 40. So bermanhealthclub.com.
Speaker 3Share this episode. We should end before we start on down another journey. Yep.
Speaker 1All right. Good.
Speaker 3Okay, bye. Ciao.