The Muscle–Longevity Connection

0:00Welcome to Spark Faith with me, Dr. Chris Sargent. This show is about renewed health, rooted in truth, and restored by grace. What does finding health look like for you? Do you have a vision for your future self and a way to get there? I'm Dr. Chris, and after 33 years in functional medicine and a lifelong journey through brain health, weight loss, hormones, mindset, and faith, I know that real transformation doesn't come from willpower or white-nuffling your way to wellness. It comes from gratitude, honoring your body as the temple that God created. This show is about body stewardship, not shame. It's about rewiring your mindset, your metabolism, and your spirit to find lasting health without the garine. I'll help you cut through the noise, see opportunities, instead of obstacles. And finally, live a healthy, purposeful life you were created for.

1:05Let's Spark Faith and transformation together. Spark Faith starts now. Hey, hey everyone, how y'all doing today? I am Dr. Chris Sargent, and this is the Spark Faith Show. And today we are going to hopefully dispel a few myths, but we are really going to talk about the muscle longevity connection. And if y'all are over 35, you need to be listening to this. This is so, so, so important. And if you're like me in their 60s, and if you're older than me, please keep listening. Because I have some really cool news for you today about muscles, health, and muscle strength. And we are just going to have a really, really good time today. Muscle mass and muscle strength are among the strongest predictors of long term health.

2:05Strongest predictors of long term health, right? Metabolic stability and independence as we age. This is about healthy aging, healthy lifespan, not just longer lifespan, right? This is about healthy lifespan. So, let's go the longevity marker that nobody talks about is muscle tissue, right? We talk a lot, although it's, I know it's gaining in popularity, but we talk a lot about cholesterol. We talk about blood pressure. We talk endlessly about body weight. But really, one of the strongest predictors of most consistent longevity, across longevity studies of how well you age is something y'all may not think about. And that is muscle strength. So, over the last decade or so, there have been several large studies, some super large studies, have shown that muscle strength predicts longevity better than body weight or BMI.

3:12I know my mouth is kind of like, we'll get rolling here. Researchers often use something super simple when they estimate long term risk, right? They measure strength and it can be just as basic as our grip strength. So, your doctor can do grip strength with a little dynamometer right in his office. And it can give you an idea over time, like even over months, right? How well your muscle system and your nervous system are connected? Because the better grip strength we have, it is connected to healthier longevity, right? And frankly, most women over 40 are slowly losing muscle mass every year. I know we know this, right? Sometimes we don't notice it, but it may not be because you're doing anything wrong.

4:20But our life, let's be honest, really encourage us sitting and scrolling or Netflix binging, which, you know, I do enough of that too, dieting, right? On and off cardio, endless cardio, we grew up with Jane Fonda. Come on. While muscle just quietly disappears and you're like, wait a minute, I'm doing cardio. So it doesn't take muscles. Yes, and we're going to talk about that a little bit more in a couple of minutes, but we need to do some other things. So let's look at a little piece of research. It was a large international study published in the Lancet, which is a British journal that followed 140,000 adults across 17 countries. Researchers found that grip strength predicted, I want to make sure I get this right, grip strength predicted risk of death, like sooner death, right?

5:20We're all going to die, but grip strength predicted risk of death more accurately than blood pressure. Okay. So something as simple as how strong your hands are can tell researchers a lot about your overall health trajectory. So strength is not just cosmetic because strength takes up less space than our fat does. So it can make us look smaller. But it is really like biological insurance for aging. Who doesn't want that, right? So another way you might want to think about this, it's like your retirement account for your metabolism. You know, I say this endlessly, right? Muscle is metabolism. So the more you build now, the more metabolic stability you will have later. You know, you may be thinking it is just too late for me. I've had too many injuries. I can barely walk like how am I ever going to get stronger?

6:24So these are things that I'm going to talk a lot about in my living fresh collective that I'm opening in the next couple of weeks. You know, I've been building this platform for all y'all who are all y'all who are listening. So we're going to dive deep into some of these things, but just know that regardless of what your health status is right now, if you can sit and lift a can, you can get stronger. So muscle is our metabolic organ, right? It is the engine of your metabolism. Muscle is super metabolically active, and you can think of it as the parking garage for glucose, all right? So maybe you just think, oh, well, muscle just helps me move, but physiologically, you know, I love physiology. Muscle is way more important than that. So skeletal muscle, our big muscle groups is really a major metabolic organ.

7:26If you think about it, like our liver, our spleen, or whatever organs you think of, muscle is like a big metabolic organ. It is the largest site in the body where glucose is absorbed and used, all right? You think, well, wait a minute. I thought that was the brain. The brain uses about 20% of body's total glucose at rest, right? This is blood sugar. Glucose is the primary fuel. Uptake is largely insulin independent, right? We don't need insulin to get glucose into our brain. We just need to get it there, right? We need to feed ourselves a proper amount. And the storage capacity in our brain is very limited. So it requires a constant uptake, right? This is where glucagon comes in, and we talked about all those hormones a couple weeks ago. But muscle is the largest site for glucose disposal after meals. So glucose uptake is insulin dependent, right? We have to have insulin.

8:31And muscle can store this glucose as glycogen. It's like the storage form. It takes up less space, and then use it later for activity. So muscle can actually, the more muscle you have, the more glucose the body can clear from the bloodstream quicker, right? So in simple terms, the brain requires glucose to function, but muscle determines how efficiently the body can handle glucose metabolically, right? When you eat carbohydrates, right, a large portion of that is stored in your muscle tissue. And we're going to talk about carbohydrates in just a second, and we talk about it a lot, I know. But this is why it's described as the parking garage, right? The more muscle you have, the more capacity your body has to absorb and utilize glucose efficiently. People with a little bit more muscle have better insulin sensitivity, right? We have more stable blood sugar, and we have lower risk of metabolic disease.

9:36So like type 2 diabetes, like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, there's several new names for that. But fatty liver disease in general, that's a metabolic disease based in a lot of times how well your body is handling glucose. Also, the interesting piece, and this is something you may or may not know, but there are signaling molecules called myochines, myorefers to muscle. And these guys, these little things act like hormones, traveling through your bloodstream and communicating with other organs. They can influence your body by reducing inflammation, they have anti-inflammatory effects, they improve your metabolism by increasing insulin sensitivity and fat burning, or fat oxidation, big words. And they support brain health by stimulating factors involved in neuroplasticity, so rewiring your brain, and cognitive function.

10:37Hello, foggy brain anyone? Move your muscles, right? So basically when muscles contract, they send these biochemical signals all over your body that improve the entire health of your body. So muscles not just about getting from point A to point B, right? This is pretty metabolic. We didn't always know this, right? Just like we didn't know that fat also communicates to your body, it doesn't just lay there. So it is, muscle is really an active endocrine tissue, so communicates with your entire body, right? We've talked about the parking garage, if the garage is large enough, like you have good muscle mass, right? That means that glucose has somewhere to go, but if your garage gets smaller over time, and we don't tend to that smaller garage, right? That muscle declines, and glucose is going to stay circulating in your system, leading to higher glucose levels, which cause inflammation, and contributes to insulin resistance.

11:45Your insulin doesn't work as efficiently, this is type two diabetes, and metabolic disease, like fatty liver disease. So muscle really provides a lot of metabolic capacity, all right? So muscle mass predicting longevity, this is exciting, right? In the past decades, there's been so many big population studies that say like people with lower muscle mass and lower strength have higher rates of disease and earlier death. So lower amounts of muscle is associated with cardiovascular disease, metabolic dysfunction, being frail, right? Just not feeling strong and not looking strong. And then ultimately, what we never want to think about, particularly as genxors, right? Some kind of loss of independence, not a fan, not a fan. And the condition that researchers study is called sarcopenia, big word, sarco just refers to muscle, penia refers to like smaller amounts, right? Reduced amounts, so elute loss.

13:00So that basically means age-related muscle loss, sarcopenia means age-related muscle loss. And some studies have actually shown that individuals with sarcopenia have up to twice the risk of mortality compared to those with healthy muscle mass. I don't want to say that again, but I'm gonna. So some studies show that individuals with sarcopenia have up to double the risk of mortality compared to those with healthy muscle mass. And what is even more surprising is that sarcopenia actually predicts survival longevity better than BMI. And we've known the problems with BMI and there's maybe less problems than you think, but BMI may or may not be the greatest predictor of longevity. Whereas someone with a higher body weight and stronger muscle mass may fare better than someone who's thinner and weaker.

14:10So health is not always about the number on the scale. And we've talked about that before, right? Like obesity ultimately comes with a lot of other health issues. That's not what we're talking about here. And I'm not here to shame anybody at all ever, right? But health is not just about your weight. It's about your muscle capacity. So it's like muscle is like the engine of your body. Two people may weigh the same, but if one has a stronger engine, more muscle, more metabolic capacity, their engine is gonna be able to handle illness, falls, stress, and aging much, much, much better grip strength. I know we touched on this, but it is such a simple way that researchers can estimate overall strength. And you're like, wait a minute, why? Because there is a correlate between muscles and your brain, like we talked about that before, right? In the myocons that get stimulated just in grip strength, and just by the muscles that we're gonna grow, grip strength connects to all of those things.

15:25And studies have shown that lower grip strength is associated with higher mortality risk, right? We just talked about that. Cardiovascular disease, disability with aging and cognitive decline. This is a big one for me. My mom died after five years of dementia, and that is just not a place I want to go. So there's a study following older adults for more than a decade found that individuals with weaker grip strength had significantly higher risk of dementia and cognitive impairment, right? So it's really reflective of whole body strength. It's not just, oh, well, let me build up my forearms. This is about whole body strength and the connection to that. So part of that reason that cognitive with decline and higher risk of dementia is that strength reflects muscle health and nervous system function, right? Remember those myocons we talked about, the brain and muscles communicate constantly, constantly, constantly.

16:32But if that communication becomes weaker, then, right, if that communication becomes weaker, both cognitive and physical resilience decline. Many of us may actually recognize some of these changes, right? We can't open that jar that we used to be able to open. We can't carry as many bags of groceries as we used to carry. And our hands just fatigue sooner. So these small little indicators, like this is just declining strength. There's going to be some encouraging news here, just so you know, don't don't tune me out yet here. But those small signals may indicate just declining strength overall. And let me tell you, improving grip is not anything special, right? Any kind of strength training that you do holding weights in your hands? Guess what? That improves your grip strength, right? So if you can hold three pound weights in your hands and carry them around a little bit, that's going to improve your grip strength.

17:40Also think about knitting, crocheting needlework, right? That's that's longevity at one of its finest. It's also good brain, brainwork. So one of the things that many of you may not think about is when does muscle loss begin? So maybe you think, oh, I'm not 60 or 70 or 80, but here's the thing. This is so hard to say, but even as low as in your 30s and definitely over 40, you are going to have some muscle loss that can be significant. And you know, this is part of a sedentary lifestyle. We sit to work. A lot sitting is the new smoking. I get so bad for us to sit, sit, sit, sit, sit. Most of us have chronic stress for lots of different reasons that I have outlined and talked about in other shows. And this repeated dieting cycle that so many of us women have been on for so, so, so long.

18:50So, and then the other piece is this cardio piece that I mentioned earlier, right? If we neglect strength training, cardio is going to accelerate our muscle loss, right? It's great for cardiovascular health, so don't give it up completely. But when it's the primary form of exercise and we combine that with calorie restriction, the body is going to break down your muscle tissue, right? To use for energy that is the exact thing we do not want, right? So over time, we're just reducing our metabolic capacity by reducing our muscle mass because we keep restricting and doing more cardio. All right, it's a little bit like downsizing, you know, we downsize our houses. This is like downsizing your metabolism without even realizing it. So every time your muscle mass declines, the number of calories in your body that can comfortably burn becomes lower.

19:50Wow, that's crazy, right? This is why you may feel crazy, right? I eat less than I used to, but I keep gaining weight and it's really about muscle mass over fat mass. That can be thin, but if you have more fat mass than muscle mass, then you're going to have a much harder time losing any of that fat, right? This is about loss muscle mass. So in order to rebuild that, we have to have protein, which we have talked about and we have to add resistance training, particularly over 40 years old. And the cool part is that research shows that 60-year-olds, 70-year-olds, and even 80-year-olds, come on, come on. Consistently show that resistance training can significantly increase muscle strength even within just a few months. So this is not a lost cause. Even if you just have to sit and do upper body work, it's better than not doing any.

20:50Or if you've got a shoulder problem, maybe just work legs, right? Like there's a way to do this with whatever you've got going on. The other piece that makes it a little bit more difficult is that your body becomes a little less sensitive to muscle building signals. But that means like two things become super, super important at this point. The resistance training weights, resistant bands, even just body weight exercises, right? You don't need anything fancy to do these things. You can do them right in your house. But your muscle will grow and your bone health will grow, especially with body weight stuff, right? As you continue to train, these are really good stressors. The second key is protein. And I'm going to give you the next key that we talk about a lot in here. But muscle tissue requires amino acids.

21:50Mino acids come from protein. Your muscles have to repair, which also means you have to take time to recover. I know. None of us like to take a day off from working out. You can still walk and move your body. But muscle growth with strength training requires rest. Sleep and rest allow tissues to repair. That is when we repair our body, right? So muscle will adapt as your challenge gradually increase. So slightly heavier weights, maybe next month, maybe the following month, and additional reps, a few more repetitions will help to stimulate your growth, right? This is like your shock absorber for aging. It stabilizes your joints. It prevents injuries. It supports balance, right? And if you fall, then you have more muscle mass protecting those joints.

22:53And it allows us to stay independent, right? Ah, got to have that. Got to have that. You know, I'm going to pull a scripture here, but Proverbs 31, 17. And this is not about the Proverbs 31 perfect woman. This is about the fact that 31, 17 says she sets about her work. It's about her work vigorously, right? Her arms are strong for her tasks. So this isn't about appearance. This is about capacity. This is about the ability to do a little bit of work, to serve, to carry that responsibility. Taking care of our body is not really about vanity. It's really about sturdying the physical life God has entrusted to us. Strength allows us to remain active, not just in our families and not just for ourselves, but in our calling and in our service much longer. How cool is that?

23:56So for decades, the health conversation has really kind of asked one question, how much do you weigh? Right? But a better question might be, how strong am I? How strong am I becoming? And just, you know, muscle influences metabolism. It protects our independence. It supports our longevity. So let's think about adding all of that strength training that we've talked about in the end. We know we should be doing it and we're out there running or on the elliptical for hours, right? Burning up the muscle tissue that you're actually trying to gain. So maybe we cut our cardio down to 30 minutes and add 15 or 20 minutes of strength training. It's the same amount of time. It's not going to take more time, right? Or if you're at home and you're just starting out,

24:59let's start out with some body weight. It push ups on the wall, right? Just start something simple and then you can work your way down to the floor and your niece, right? Or the couch, right? Like there's many ways to do that kind of resistance training again without anything fancy. If you've got a water bottle and you fill it up, it weighs more than just having a regular arm hanging out there, right? You can do some bicep curls with your water bottle. That works, right? Totally works. So let's expand our capacity to live well, right? That's what this is about. It's about longer, healthier life. And that's really what I want to bring into the living, fresh collective that I'm getting ready to start. And we're going to bring in tools and tricks and specific small things that you can start doing in specific protocols and really work on our body's capacity,

26:06our rest capacity, our strength capacity, our capacity to live better, spiritually, mentally, physically, emotionally, all of those pieces in living, fresh collective. So I'm building this platform and I'm so excited about it and there's going to be some introductory material that everybody gets to go through. And then we are just going to start rolling month after month, F-R-E-S-H, F-R-E-S-H, and we're going to keep going, keep going, and more things will be added, there'll be some Q and A, there'll be some live zooms. It's going to, it's going to be so much fun, y'all. We are going to have such a good time. So muscle is not just about fitness, it's really about capacity for life, right? And as always, like, subscribe, look for my living, fresh collective, opening very soon. I am here to help you renew your health that is rooted in truth and restored by grace.

27:12I love you guys so much. See you next week. You've been listening to Spark Faith with me, Dr. Chris Sargent. This show is about renewed health rooted in truth and restored by grace. Tune in every Thursday morning at 9.30 a.m. Pacific on the transformation talk radio for more simple, faith-fueled steps to live the vision God placed in your heart. Are you ready to take the next step? Schedule a discovery call or connect with me at DrChrisSargent.com that's DRKRISSargent.com. While you're there, download my free ebook Endless Energy, the six non-negotiable keys to Endless Energy, and sign up for an upcoming Masterclass. Don't forget to subscribe, like, share the show, and I'd love to connect with you on social media. At Dr. ChrisSargent, let's keep Sparking Faith and transformation together. Can't wait to see y'all next time.