Here’s a depressing fact: the average American gains about two and a half pounds each and every year.  Which means, over the decades, you can probably expect to slowly balloon up to increasingly ill health.

Of course, there are a slew of ways you can counter that upward trend, from healthier eating to walking more each day.  But there’s one hugely effective approach that people often overlook: building some muscle.

Unlike fat – which just sits there – muscle is metabolically active.  Which means that, just by existing, muscle burns calories.  A pound of muscle, in fact, burns about 10 calories a day.  And while that may not sound like much, it adds up surprisingly quickly.  Over the course of a year, each pound of added muscle burns off a pound of fat.

Thus, if you put on just five pounds of new muscle in one year, you would burn off five pounds of fat annually after that.  That’s enough to not only offset the average 2.5-pound gain, but also to help you lose 2.5 pounds each and every year instead.  In other words, as the decades added up and everyone else slid downhill, you’d be getting ever healthier, and looking increasingly good naked, instead.

Normally when I mention this to anyone over even just 30 years old, they tell me they’re too old to get started on lifting weights.  But as a great recent study showed, men in their mid to late 90’s, beginning strength training for the first time, still managed to build substantial strength and put on new muscle mass in just twelve weeks.  So, really, you don’t have any excuse.

In fact, research seems to be showing that strength training positively impacts pretty much every aspect of health and is possibly the single best way to ‘die young as late as possible’.  Yet, for whatever reason, the majority of exercisers still tend to pick up cardio training first (along with maybe some stretching), while overlooking strength training entirely.

But if you do what the majority does, you’ll get what the majority gets; and, here in America, in terms of bodyweight and general health, that’s probably not what you want.  So, buck the trend, and add in a couple of short strength training sessions each week.

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A quick addendum:

In discussion with friends here today, I was reminded that there’s often confusion about what actually constitutes strength training, and about how people gain muscle.  To make a long story short, it boils down to something called ‘progressive overload’ – essentially, lifting incrementally more weight over time.  If you can press ten-pound dumbbells overhead today, and are still pressing those same dumbbells in six months, you haven’t gotten any stronger, and you won’t gain any of that fat-burning, health-promoting new muscle you want.  Instead, you need to build to twelve then fifteen then twenty-pound dumbbells over future months to see results.

That’s hardly a new revelation.  It dates back at least to the 6th Century BC, when Milo of Crete became the most famous athlete in all of Greece after winning the gold medal in wrestling (the big deal sport at the time) six Olympics in a row.  He was a farm boy and had trained by picking

For the last year or two, I’ve been starting each quarter with five days of Fast-Mimicking Diet, a low calorie (1000C on the first day, 700C each on days two-five), low protein quasi-fast that research is increasingly backing as a great tool for cancer prevention, longevity, and general health.  This quarter, I started the FMD a few days early, at the end of June, so I’d be done in time to BBQ binge on the 4th.  And, as per usual, I also used the FMD as a chance to take a week off from the gym, both because I think an intermittent complete break from training is wise in general, and because it’s almost a necessity for me given the week’s calorie restriction versus my normal, fast-metabolism-driven ‘human garbage disposal’ eating style.

Most quarters, however, I still do a bunch of walking during my FMD-ing.  But as my previously-mentioned knee tweak is still on the mend, without really meaning to, I’d also temporarily dropped from my usual daily 10-15k steps to just whatever bare minimum of limpy walking was required to get to work or meals or move around indoors.  Thus, for the final days of last week I was barely moving, and over the weekend, I pretty much wasn’t moving at all.

Early this year, when I started having back pain, I traced it to a similar walking fall-off, and ‘miraculously’ cured myself just by starting doing sufficient daily walking again.  But, apparently, I’m a slow learner.  Or, conversely, maybe I didn’t realize how quickly the absence of walking could be felt—especially if I’m also not pushing myself in the gym.

Indeed, by Saturday night, I got in bed, and spent several hours staring at the ceiling before I was finally able to fall asleep.  And then, on Sunday, despite being super tired all day, I again got in bed and couldn’t fall asleep, this time for pretty much the entire night, watching the time slowly tick by in fifteen minute increments until I gave up and groggily got out of bed at 5am.

By Monday, I felt terrible.  But I was also at least just smart enough to have identified potential cause and effect.  So, I got in at least 7500 steps, tweaky knee be damned.  And I made it to the gym for a short workout, easing back into light squats, presses, and deadlifts.

Monday evening, I was out cold almost before my head hit the pillow.  And then slept like a log for eight and a half hours straight.

So, if your own sleep is less stellar than you might hope, consider adding some movement into your day.  Even thirty minutes of fast walking makes a big difference for me, and that’s a small amount of time to invest for seven or eight far-more-pleasant hours of snoozing in exchange.

A couple of months ago, I started having pain in my right hip and far-right lower back when I would do heavy back squats.  Then, a few weeks later, it started to happen during deadlifts, too.  Soon, even running was causing hip pain, light cleans or box jumps would send stabs of pain through my back.

I tried stretches, foam rolling, dynamic mobility warm-ups.  I did pre-hab and re-hab progressions.  I focused even harder on my exercise form.  All of which helped a bit.  But not much, and not in a lasting way.

Throughout, I was mystified.  I couldn’t find anything that had changed in my workout, couldn’t point to a traumatic injury, couldn’t spot a movement dysfunction that could have chipped away at me over time.  I started to think perhaps I’d just never figure it out.

But, after another month of puzzling, I realized something had changed.  Due to a shift in schedule, I was suddenly walking much, much less than I had been before.  And I was wearing shoes – less flexible, heeled, toe-smushing work shoes – vastly more often.

So, with nothing else to lose, I started increasing my steps.  Thanks to my schedule, they were almost all indoor steps, often multi-tasking while walking a figure-eight around a room.  (Lesson learned the hard way: if I just walk around a room in a circle, I end up dizzy and nauseous enough after ten or twenty loops that I need to sit down; a figure-eight turns in opposite directions at either end, so I can loop indefinitely without falling over / throwing up.)  But indoor stepping did allow me to take off my shoes, so I walked the majority of those steps barefoot (or, rather, in sock feet).

I determined that I’d fallen to only walking 3,000-4,000 daily steps, so I inched that up by 500 a day, first to 10,000, then (as I was enjoying it) all the way to a daily 15,000.  And, lo and behold, even before I hit that 15k step count, my back and hip pain had completely and permanently disappeared.

Previously, I could have told you about the importance of daily movement, and of walking in particular.  Looking at our ancestors and current hunter-gatherer tribes, I would have said, it’s pretty clear that we evolved to walk 3-5 miles (or, funny enough, 10-15k steps) every single day.  And I would have theorized that not getting that amount of daily walking was one of the underlying drivers of pain and dysfunction in modern life.

But this was the first time in my adult life that I’d fallen to such a low level of daily movement myself, and had directly paid the price.  Which highlighted the big difference between knowing something intellectually, and really understanding it at a visceral level.  I now know, first-hand, what happens if you don’t stay active.  And I can definitively say: the truth hurts.

About 15 years ago, ‘functional fitness’ became a hot trend in the fitness industry.  Suddenly, people everywhere were doing squats on top of BOSUs, bench pressing on stability balls, and doing crazy one-arm, one-leg movements using cable pulley machines.  At the time, I dismissed the trend as garbage.  And, in the years that followed, studies backed that opinion: EMG muscle readings showed that people simply used their muscles less intensely when they used them in weird, unstable, cockamamie ways.

But as fitness expert Alwyn Cosgrove has observed, we tend to overreact to new ideas in the short term, and under-react to them in the long term.  So while the functional fitness trend has largely now passed, I recently read Mike Boyle’s newly updated *New Functional Training for Sports, 2nd Edition*, and I think Cosgrove may be right.  While there was certainly much to disdain about the functional fitness trend, I’m also pretty sure I threw out a valuable baby with that bathwater.

For example, as we’re working with a bunch of Baby Boomers and older adults through Composite, training to prevent falls is an increasing element of our programming.  Previously, I had always thought of that as a ‘software’ question – improving the proprioception needed for balance.  However, it’s increasingly clear to me in practice that the functional guys had it right: it’s not that your brain doesn’t know when your shin isn’t vertical, or when your hips aren’t parallel to the ground; it’s that you don’t have the strength to stabilize them correctly while you’re moving and on one leg.  And, similarly, it’s not that your brain doesn’t try to move a foot to catch yourself if you start to fall; it’s that you don’t have the speed to move that foot fast enough.  While strength falls off at 1% a year as we age, power, the fitness attribute that underlies foot speed, declines twice as quickly.  So making sure we strengthen on one leg – and build unilateral power in particular – seems like a wise training priority.

Or consider “core work,” which often focuses on lumbar flexion (sit-ups) or lumbar rotation (Russian twists). However, as the functional training crowd points out, that’s not really how the body moves in sport or real-world pursuits.  Instead, if you watch carefully, you’ll notice that almost all athletic movement comes from flexion, extension, and rotation at the hips and thoracic (upper) spine.  The lumbar (lower) spine mostly just braces in place, to transmit power.  Therefore, exercises focused on anti-flexion (like roll-outs) and anti-rotation (like Paloff presses and plank reaches) probably better translate out of the gym.

Even the stability ball – a device I’ve long derided – might be worth its salt.  For the past few weeks, I and handful of our athletes have been using them for hamstring curls (back on the floor, feet on the ball, rolling it in and out), and we’ve found they activate the hamstrings in a remarkably intense way (especially for anyone not yet ready to graduate to a full glute-ham developer raise).  Which is to say, I’ll definitely be including the movement in programs going forward.

So, in summary, when it comes to functional training, I now stand corrected.  Possibly even on one foot.

“An interesting illustration of the uselessness of a brain in a body without movement is the sea squirt, which spends the first part of its life as an animal moving around, and the second part attaching itself to a rock and then camping out as a plant.  As soon as it settles down, does it use this time as an opportunity to meditate or think about the meaning of life?  No, it eats its brain for the energy.  This should make us very curious about what happens to a human brain in a body that spends too much time on the couch.”

– Todd Hargrove, A Guide to Better Movement

This morning, I arrived at the gym feeling like crap.  Tired, sluggish, weak; mostly, I just wanted to go home and get back into bed.  Even carrying the empty bar felt hard.  As a friend used to joke, it seemed like a ‘heavy gravity day.’

Despite my own whiny objections, I buckled down, and starting lifting according to plan.  Lo and behold, I still felt like crap.  But I also managed to hit every one of my lifts.

In the bodybuilding world, a lot of gurus push the idea of “instinctive training” – crafting each day’s workout on the fly, based on what your body tells you it needs.  And, indeed, for some small set of experienced professional bodybuilders, that approach (plus a bucket-full of steroids) seems to work wonders.  For pretty much everyone else, it quickly devolves into blindly wandering the gym, randomly doing whatever exercise someone else happened to have just done nearby.

To be sure, there’s real value in listening to your body.  Don’t be stupid, and if something hurts, stop.  (Or, to quote the orthopedic advice of my old friend and famed physical therapist Kelly Starrett: “If it feels sketchy, it is sketchy.”)  But, for the most part, when people skip workouts, reduce the weight on a lift, or cut the speed or distance on a swim, bike, or run, it’s mostly because they just don’t feel like doing it.

That’s one of the best reasons to hire a good coach: with the distance of an outside perspective, it’s easier to craft workouts based on what’s beneficial, rather than on just what you’d like to do.  Even without a coach, you can simulate some of that yourself (as I do the roughly 50% of the time I write my own programming), by separating the planning and doing by at least several days in time; a week in advance, I’ll wisely assign myself something valuable but unpleasant that I’d otherwise never have chosen the day of.

But, however you get there, ideally, when a workout comes around, you should be able to turn off your brain, and power through.  Even if, like me this morning, you’re not sure you can pull it off.  In fact, you might be right.  But, more often, you’ll be surprised by how well things go once you get started.  As the great weightlifting coach John Broz once told me: “just pick up the weight, bro; how you feel is a lie.”

A few days ago, I ran into a friend at the gym. He’s an executive in his mid-50’s, a guy in good shape who takes fitness seriously. When I saw him, he had 315 pounds racked for a back squat. But, he told me, his knees had recently been acting up on heavy squat days. Could I watch the next set, he asked.

I did. And sure enough, my friend’s form was atrocious. Valgus knees and ankles, forward weight shift over his toes, depth about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way to parallel.

“That was a disaster,” I told him.

“Oh, I know,” he replied. “But if I squat with good form, I can’t lift nearly as much weight.”

He was willing to humor me for the sake of his knees, however, so we went back to the basics. Beginning with a 45 pound dumbbell goblet squat, drilling until it looked perfect. Then we went back to an empty barbell, until that looked perfect, too. And then we added weight, ten pounds at a time.

At 135 pounds, his squat looked great.
At 145, it was back to disaster.

“If you want to fix your knee issue,” I told him, “then squat with 135 pounds next time, and only add weight in subsequent sessions, no more than ten pounds from one session to the next, if your squat form still looks this pretty.”

At which point he balked.
“I can’t do that!” he exclaimed. “The guys here will think I can only squat 135 pounds.”
“And they’d be correct,” I told him. “That’s how much you can squat right.”

Still, I understood my friend’s concern. Six months ago, I tweaked my shoulder while bench pressing. For two weeks after, it hurt every time I lifted my arm above my head. And just when I thought it was getting better, concluded I could just power through, I benched again and tweaked it a second time.

So, taking my own medicine, I went back to ground zero. I worked face-pulls, bottom-up kettlebell presses, scapular drills, perfect bench press reps with just the empty bar. And then I slowly built back up, in ten-pound jumps, one workout to the next.

At the end of those six months, I’m now back to using more weight than I was before, and my shoulder feels great. But for the first few months, I dreaded seeing anyone I knew at the gym when I was building back up. Members and trainers I was friendly with would walk past, and I had a nearly irrepressible urge to explain, disclaim.

“Rehab,” I would tell them, gesturing sheepishly at my nearly empty bar.

It’s a hard impulse to fight, and one I see people struggle with all the time. Most people training in any gym are, first and foremost, trying to look cool while they’re training. But there’s a difference between developing a skill, and demonstrating it. Almost by definition, when you’re learning something new, or building strength or endurance, you make progress only when you’re right at your limit, out of your depth, looking terrible and incompetent, but challenging yourself enough to grow.

Which leads to a fundamental choice: you can either impress your buddies in< the gym with your performance, or you can impress the rest of the world later with your results. Put differently, you can look good while you’re working out, or you can look good from your working out.

So choose. Because, in my experience, you can’t really have both.