Is Skeletal Muscle the Secret to Lifelong Health? | Dr. Mike Israetel

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:00)
Welcome to The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show. In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Mike Israetel. He is probably most famous for being the founder of RP Strength, which is hands down one of the best strength and hypertrophy training programs out there. And that's exactly why I wanted him on the show. In this episode, we talk about how skeletal muscle is life or death. Number two, what you need to do exactly. How do you maintain hypertrophy, strength, and ultimately power? Muscle is the organ of longevity.
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Dr. Mike Israetel, thank you so much for coming on the show.
In fact, you're a legend, so much of a legend, that Dr. Pat Davidson said that you should be in person here, but we'll settle for remote because you are so epic.

**Dr. Mike Israetel** (1:20)
Oh, my God. Well, I'm honored and Dr. Pat Davidson is a legend in his own right.
He's prone to exaggerating on other people's behalf, so I promise to disappoint. That's one thing I can guarantee.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:32)
One of the reasons that I really wanted to have you on is, number one, you do such a great job at explaining all things, hypertrophy, skeletal muscle health, strength, but you do it in a way that is evidence-based and replicatable.
So you have many programs, you discuss many protocols, and I appreciate that. And I know that the listener and the viewer and everybody who is aging, quite frankly, needs that.

**Dr. Mike Israetel** (1:59)
Thank you so much. Yeah. Aging is really fun and everyone should look forward to it.
Just kidding.
I guess, yeah, there's a lot to say about maximizing muscle growth, especially when you're aging, because of course, when you're 22 years old, I mean, your concerns kind of involve like, where is my next alcohol binge coming from? But when you get a bit older, you start to think, well, okay, maybe I'm more concerned about my appearance and you get even older than that. You get to be concerned about especially two things with relation to muscle. That is your ability to ambulate and move through the world. If you have low enough muscle mass, it starts to impact your strength in a way that's not like, oh, it's spare strength, you don't need it. It's like difficulty getting off the couch physically.
That's a problem. The other part of muscular size that really helps with aging is that muscle is a huge reservoir of essentially a glucose disposal sink among other things. What it does is it keeps you very metabolically healthy. To some extent, the more of it you have, the better. Thus, for those two reasons, especially older folks probably could be concerned with their levels of muscularity, and they generally aren't en masse currently, and that's definitely some room for improvement there.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (3:16)
Do you think that that is really missed among the general population and in somewhat of health and wellness for the aging trajectory?
Here's where I'll frame it. It seems that in the 60s, there was this change over to recognize the importance of exercise, but it really was focused on cardiovascular and aerobic type exercise, and that became where a lot of the ACSM guidelines seem to have put their energies or these other guidelines to talk about aerobic exercise for cardiovascular health.

**Dr. Mike Israetel** (3:47)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think later on, there was an evolution where strength training, phrased exactly like that, strength training, became something that was talked about more and something that was promulgated by more formal organizations such as the ACSM.
But a lot of the benefits of strength training are actually the benefits of increase in muscularity. I would say most of the metabolic benefits, perhaps all of them, are dependent on muscle gain, to put this intellectually. If you manage to gain strength as an older individual, somehow without gaining much or any muscle, metabolic benefits and the benefits to health and longevity will be minor, potentially none at all. And so my suspicion is the reason strength training was the term they used and what they pushed. The strength training seems significantly more palatable and significantly less, how do I say it best, egoistic and predisposed with appearances. It seems like it's pretty vain to train for muscular hypertrophy. And also, I think it's a way to convince women, low-key, to start doing the resistance training that is so beneficial, especially to women, especially to Caucasian women who are older, for the anti-osteopenic and osteoporotic benefits, essentially getting stronger bones. You don't end up snapping your femur just by standing up off of a couch.