Build More Muscle, Live Longer & Look Amazing - Dr Gabrielle Lyon

You say the quality of your life is a direct correlation to your muscle health. Why?

Because muscle is the organ of longevity, and your capacity to show up and execute anything and everything that you want in your life depends on your strength. And in order to build physical strength, it requires mental strength. It requires fortitude. It requires resiliency. And right now, we have this conversation about longevity and health span. What does that actually mean? That actually relates to the tangible plasticity of skeletal muscle. And by the way, you know, we were kind of joking around, podcasters in Austin, but when you think about skeletal muscle, you often think about bro science. You think about the big dudes. Skeletal muscle is so much more than that, and in fact, the health of your life depends on the health and the quality of your tissue.

Interesting. Obviously, the by-product of building muscle, uh, discipline, resilience, being able to overcome hard things, consistency, motivation, so on and so forth, somebody quite easily could say, "Well, I get that with distance running. I get that with rowing. I get that with doing yoga." What is it specifically about muscle building that is important for longevity?

Well, when you think about skeletal muscle, there's, there's a couple of things that you have to think about. Skeletal muscle is the primary site for glucose disposal. Right now, if you look at the CDC, and they'll give you a list of causes of death, it'll put, uh, cardiovascular disease, it'll put cancer, it'll put diabetes. It won't put obesity on there, and it won't put lack of skeletal muscle. It'll also have Alzheimer's. What you'll see is that these diseases, at the root, all have its place in skeletal muscle, first and foremost. So if you care about any of the top eight or nine causes of death, you have to care about skeletal muscle. Now, what's the next level to that? Could endurance running be great? Yes, it's amazing. Is yoga great? Sure, absolutely. You have to also train for strength and train for life. Having skeletal muscle is like your body armor. We've all had friends, family members that have gotten sick. If they were amazing in endurance training, but had very little skeletal muscle, what is going to protect them in those moments of catabolic crisis? And we don't age, Chris, we don't age linearly. It's not as if there's this slow decline. What happens is there's an insult, and then there is a rapid decline, and then depending on your capacity to step back up is based on your ability to have healthy skeletal muscle, in part. It's called catabolic crisis.

What, what do you mean when you say insult or catabolic crisis?

So for example, if you fall and you're injured or you get sick and you have pneumonia for a week, when you're younger, your ability to get back up to baseline to be more physically active is more flexible. As you age, we've all seen it. As you age, an individual, um, grandmother breaks a hip. She'll never be able to rise back up to her baseline level of functioning. Potentially she could, but as she gets older, the ability to return to a more youthful baseline decreases, and that has to be trained for. You have to be able to be strong. You do have to be able to build muscle, and skeletal muscle is interesting. The skeletal muscle is a nutrient-sensing organ. Skeletal muscle is an organ system. It's a nutrient-sensing organ system that senses the quality of the diet, and specifically these amino acids, specifically leucine. I'm sure we'll get into it, but that efficiency goes down as we age. If you train and eat and do the things you did in your youth, you're not evolving. Um, you know, there's, you know, mental evolution. There's all kind of more esoteric evolution, but you also have to keep up with an evolving physiological process and a biological process, and that's where focusing on hypertrophy and strength... Obviously, they're not the same, but focusing on skeletal muscle as a tissue as it relates to medicine is paramount.