Healthy Aging Master Class | Build Muscle, Stay Mobile & Live Longer

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
I think that is an extraordinarily powerful idea, that as you imagine yourself getting older, you do not have to imagine yourself becoming breakable and frail. That there is this, what you call the medicine of mobility, that you're going to talk about today, that is important for all of us to understand and embrace, I don't care how old or young you are, and that there is a different way to age that creates a completely different life, and that you do have control here.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:31)
Well, when I say things like mobility is medicine, movement is medicine, it's because there is this phenomenon, and I wish I had made this up, called Sedentary Death Syndrome. It is the 33 chronic diseases that kill us in this country. It's everything you've thought of, heart disease, brain disease, stroke, it is diabetes. All of those 33 chronic diseases that people die of are directly treated by moving.
Because if you have high blood pressure, you'll take a pill for that. If you have cardiac disease, you'll take a pill for that. If you have dementia, you could take a pill for that.
One pill, moving your body, is the medicine that positively affects them all. So if we want to cure Sedentary Death Syndrome, it involves the medicine of mobility. Now, let's just take two steps back so that we acknowledge that we don't control everything in the future. There are legitimately these time bombs of aging that just happen at a cellular level. But the thing is, our lifestyle can control our mitochondria, the energy of our cells. They can control how many bad cells circulate around. They're called senescent cells or zombie cells. We can control that by the lifestyle we live. We can control inflammation in our body to a certain extent with the lifestyle we live. And so all these time bombs that age us faster, we are not the victims of the passage of time.
If you want to feel better now, then that is an action step. It is not reading more about what could happen to you and putting the book back on the shelf. It is learning how to take action to change the trajectory of the future, or else you are a victim of the passage of time.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:22)
Well, one thing that I will say is that if you are somebody that listens to this podcast and you normally listen to it while you are sitting at work or you are sitting in your car, one change you could make is listen to this while you are walking.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (2:39)
Absolutely.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:40)
That way, you are combining the advice with your interest in listening to something that's helping you improve your life.
You've said that our understanding of aging is completely skewed because all of the studies that have been done on folks that are older, are studies done on people who don't move much. Can you unpack this for us?

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (3:01)
Absolutely.
When we look at aging studies, you will often find things like, oh, we slow down when we age, we lose our muscle, and some of that is true, right? It is true, I'll concede that. But in big population studies, like there's a study that was going on when I was at the University of Pittsburgh called the Health ABC. They took a cohort, a group of 70-year-olds and just followed them to see what happens. They all slowed down, they developed a lot of body fat, all the things you think about of an aging. Well, when you look at the US population, and it's not that different around the world, 70 percent of us don't do any form of mobility or exercise a day. It's like this thing I described to you, 20 hours sitting down, right? So what do we know from those population studies? We know how we age if we don't move.
So my group and I, I formed this group early in my career called Prima, the Performance and Research Initiative for Masters athletes. Masters just means people over 35 or 40

**SPEAKER_3** (4:09)
That doesn't sound that old. It's a category, right?

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (4:12)
Yeah, it's a category. So all of my academic research has been investigating what happens if we take sedentary living out of the equation in terms of our aging. And so I was the principal investigator on a number of studies that looked at bone health, muscle health, brain health, our stem cells with aging, all looking at when do we slow down if we continue to be active our entire lives?
And we started studying people, active people, they were not professional athletes, asking the question, what are we capable of if we take the variable of sedentary living out of the equation? Can we maintain our muscle mass? Can we maintain our bone density? Can we maintain our brain function? When do we really slow down?