Why Muscle Alone Won't Save You: The Skeletal Longevity Framework for Women Over 50 | Dr Vonda Wright

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:00)
If we want to harness the power of mobility in healthspan and aging, we must be concerned with the entire skeletal system. I call it skeletal longevity.
How many of you have been told you need to lift weights to build more muscle? How many of you have been told that you need to eat more protein? How many of you have been told that you need to jump? You've been told. Everybody is telling you. In fact, I am telling you. And I'm even doing the research to prove that when you do that, it matters in the long term. Everyone, including me, is telling you. In fact, we tell you that because there is irrefutable data. I mean, you can't argue with it, that exercise and mobility is the key to healthspan and longevity. We know how to measure it. We know what dose you need.
We just know that you need to move and exercise. But here's the catch, because I take care of about 3 million of you online and you write to me, this is a relationship we have. You are constantly communicating with me. When I say to you, we need to build muscle, we need to eat protein, we need to jump up and down, you say to me, got it? We have the message and we want to. We want to feel like ourselves again and we want to exercise, but we can't, because our knees hurt, our back hurts. I have too much arthritis, my total body aches. And it made me stop and think about what I believe about longevity. I do not believe that longevity is just this timeline that, oh, we're trying to reach 120, 150 years, you know, that's what you will believe if you just listen to one side of the longevity conversation. I believe longevity is not a timeline.
I believe that health span and longevity is built by design. And why do I believe that? Well, I'm an elite sports doctor. I have taken care of athletes and active people my entire career.
And when we're injured or have a goal, we don't just say, oh, let's just see what time brings. Let's just ride a timeline to the end. No, we build a plan by design. So as I think of longevity, not as a timeline, but a design problem, and I'm telling you, you need to design your health span and longevity plan by making muscle, eating protein, jumping, and you respond, I would love to, but I can't. I am listening to you.
And it has reframed the way I talk about musculoskeletal longevity, including the fact that I've now created a new category. Because you know that's what I do. I like to create frameworks and thought processes, because here's the deal.
Longevity, despite what you have been told, does not begin or end with muscle alone. Muscle is critical. I was a muscle scientist. I've told you this. Muscle is critical. But without the whole skeletal system, muscle, tendon, ligament, bone, cartilage, annulus, stem cells, fat, the system, muscle, it's just like a heaping pile of metabolic tissue, like a chicken breast on the counter.
So when we reframe, do you need to build muscle? Do you need to eat protein? Do you need to jump up and down? I am framing it in skeletal longevity because muscle is not the beginning or the end of longevity. We need bone that provides structure and is the master communicator. We need functional tendon and ligament that degrades with the loss of estrogen. We need to rebuild that. We need to be able to control our visceral fat. We need to pay attention to our cartilage because we've known for a hundred years that there is a rapid decline in cartilage matrix when estrogen walks out the door. Do you see what I'm doing here? We cannot treat ourselves like one organ. We're just not the sum of our muscle. If we want to harness the power of mobility in health span and aging, we must be concerned with the entire skeletal system. I call it skeletal longevity. It is the coordinated work, the integrated communication of muscle, tendon, ligament, bone, fat, collagen, cartilage, annulus of your back, and muscle-derived stem cells.
So as you're thinking about it, and as you're wanting to do the right thing, it's not one part of your skeletal system, it is your entire skeletal system, skeletal longevity. So just as we're telling you, you need to build muscle, eat protein, jump up and down, exercise more for your health span and your longevity. If we do not have skeletal longevity, the very key to healthy aging becomes the gate. Skeletal longevity is the gate that can keep us from aging healthy, vital, active, joyful with the highest capacity. So do you see why this is important? It's not just one organ. It is your entire skeletal system that unless we are capable of maintaining it, muscle, tendon, ligament, bone, cartilage, annulus, fat, even muscle stem cells, it becomes the gate that keeps us from the future of high capacity that we envision. It's called skeletal longevity. It's a new framework for thinking about the way we move.