Are You Doing The Right Workout?

In this 20th episode of the Get Better, Not Older Show, Dr. Rob Jones and his wife Shannon, a dietitian, discuss the importance of adapting exercise routines as we age. They share their combined 50 years of clinical experience to explain why traditional exercise methods may not be appropriate for older adults, and emphasize the need for strength training, proper hydration, and balanced nutrition. They debunk common myths, such as the fear of getting bulky from weightlifting, and provide practical advice on how to stay active without causing injury. They also highlight the significance of recovery, flexibility, and mobility exercises. Additionally, Shannon stresses the importance of protein intake. The episode wraps up with tips and the benefits of proper supplementation for optimal health as we age.

Full Episode Transcript
https://heydrrob.com/episode-20-are-you-doing-the-right-workout/

Further Reading & Cited Research:

• Daily Energy Expenditure Through the Human Life Course – Pontzer et al., Science
• Resistance Training and Mortality Risk – Momma et al., Am J Prev Med
• Recommended Physical Activity and Health Benefits – Zhao et al., BMJ
• Exercise for Preventing Falls – Sherrington et al., Cochrane Database
• Optimal Dietary Protein Intake in Older People – Bauer et al., J Am Med Dir Assoc
• Creatine Supplementation During Resistance Training – Devries & Phillips, Med Sci Sports Exerc.
• Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Muscle Synthesis – Smith et al., Am J Clin Nutr

Intro Music:
“Got A Feelin’” (Album Version) by Albert Donaldi.

About the Hosts
Dr. Rob Jones 
25 years in chiropractic care specializing in spine, joint, and soft-tissue disorders. Expert in Active Release Therapy and functional rehabilitation to keep you moving pain-free.

Shannon Jones 
31 years as a clinical dietitian focused on obesity prevention, functional nutrition, and integrative medicine. She tailors nutrition strategies to prevent disease and support whole-body health.
Together, they bring over 50 years of combined clinical experience and share a passion for promoting foundational health so you can truly Get Better, Not Older.

Transcript

Episode 20: Are You Doing The Right Workout?

Intro

Dr. Rob: Alright, off we go. Welcome to the GBNO Show, the Get Better, Not Older Show, episode number 20. I am Dr. Rob Jones. This is my awesome wife, Shannon, the dietician. Say hi, Shannon.

Shannon: Hi, Shannon.

Dr. Rob: You fell for the joke. I love it. Alright, so, um, for those of you who are tuning in for the first time between the two of us—because we are so mature, not old, mature—we have over 50 years of clinical experience between the two of us: yours truly from the outside in, and Shannon from the—

Shannon: Inside out.

Dr. Rob: So we are here to help you get better, not older, from the outside in and the inside out with tons of really good information. And today we’re really gonna be talking about something super important, which is exercise as you age. And Shannon came up with the title—which is basically, what’s the title today, Shannon?

Shannon: I didn’t really come up with a title, but I just said our topic is the exercise regimen that you are doing, proper for your age.

Dr. Rob: So really the main thing to remember about this is any type of exercise is good. Okay? If you’re moving, you’re doing better. Okay?

If you want to die young, early, miserably—don’t move. It’s pretty simple. Okay? It sounds dire, but it’s pretty simple: if you move, you’re gonna feel better. But—

Social Media Spreading Bad Info

Dr. Rob: The glut of information out there on social media right now is probably immensely confusing to a lot of people. And so we’re gonna try and clear up some of that confusion today with: How should I exercise? When should I exercise? What should I do for set exercise?

Shannon: And specifically, what’s important here is for your age, because I would say if you are going on TikTok or Instagram or whatever and just following whoever pops up on your screen, if you’re not paying attention, some people may not know that the information they’re being given is not accurate.

There a hundred percent needs to be adjustments in your exercise choices and regimen as you age. Right? So let’s start with breaking down why—what variables are included—and why we have to be, you know, careful as to what we’re doing as we age, because if you’re doing it the wrong way, it can actually have some detriments.

Dr. Rob: A hundred percent.

Shannon: So it’s hard enough for people to get the motivation to do it. We just want to make sure our listeners understand that what you’re seeing all over TikTok, et cetera, may not be exactly what you should be doing for your age.

Dr. Rob: And it’s not just all over social media. I’ve spent my whole career—I’m in my 26th year of clinical practice—helping people get outta pain.

Parts of the Body: Mobility vs Stability

Dr. Rob: And I will tell you one of the most common things—and you know this because I’ve been lamenting this at our dinner talks for two decades, over two decades, actually a quarter century now—there is so much bad information in the exercise world, specifically with regard to the spine and shoulders, that people are actually going, “Okay, it’s a new year, it’s January, I wanna lose weight, or whatever it is that is motivating them to get into exercise.” They go to one or two classes and then they’re broken.

Shannon: Yeah.

Dr. Rob: Whether it’s Pilates or CrossFit or yoga or a personal trainer—and I’m not trying to knock any one mode of fitness, ’cause I want everybody to do everything. If you love Pilates, do Pilates. But you have to remember there’s some kind of detrimental information out there, and if you don’t understand how to do certain basic movements, then you’re setting yourself up for some failure.

Shannon: Alright, so let’s start with why it is that we do need to alter as we age. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the reasons why it’s important.

Dr. Rob: Okay? So can I jump on this because it’s my world?

Shannon: Sure.

Dr. Rob: Okay. So the human body is designed to work in a very specific way. So if you go from the ground up—when you start with the ankle, the ankle is designed to be very mobile.

So we go joint to joint on this analogy: the ankle is designed to be very mobile, okay? The knee is designed to be stable. We don’t want it to waver around. We just want it to hinge. Then the hip is a ball-and-socket joint. It’s designed to be very mobile. So those three things: ankle—mobile; knee—stable; hip—mobile.

If we exercise in a way that keeps those on pattern, you’re not gonna break down. Then we move up to the lower back. The lower back is designed to be stable and not move very much, while the hip is creating movement. So if you look at a squat, you want to be upright, chest up, with good core pressure, and just moving through your hips, ankles, and knees.

When you start to move the spine forward and backward during a squat, guess what? That’s when it breaks down. Then we move up to the middle back. The middle back is not designed to be all bent over and stiff like it is with computers.

Shannon: I just sat up.

Dr. Rob: And everybody does when I do that. Um, or when I say that.

Dr. Rob: Okay. Then your shoulder blades are designed to be stable while they hold the platform for your mobile shoulders to move around. Now, taking that into account, there’s not a lot of understanding of that with a lot of modalities of exercise—specifically core training—and, you know, I’ve been beating this drum for years and years.

Protect Your Back 101

Dr. Rob: I started writing my book, Protect Your Back 101, in 2015. Oh, we have it there. Presented. Mm-hmm. Lovely. It was published in 2018, and the gist of the book is it’s a self-help manual to get you through: if you hurt your back this way, do this stuff; if you hurt your back that way, do that stuff.

But the book was really written as impetus because I saw so many patients breaking down their backs because—

The Myth of Spot Reduction

Dr. Rob: What’s the first thing people want to do when they go to the gym? They want to lose blubber or waist fat, right? So what do they do? They think they’re gonna spot reduce. They go to the gym, lay down on their back, and they do what they did in eighth grade gym class, or when they were running track in seventh grade or ninth grade or whatever. They do sit-ups and crunches because they think that’s gonna roast their belly fat.

It’s a myth, okay? That does not happen. Actually—

Shannon: I just saw another study yesterday that said spot reduction does not exist.

Dr. Rob: And we don’t need to study it anymore. We know it, okay? But people go, “Oh, I’m gonna get on an ab machine and roast my love handles.” Well, it doesn’t work that way. And then, guess what? Remember me saying the spine should be in a nice, stable position? Well, then they’re moving their spine through a range of motion, and then they break their spine down. So that’s my soapbox about that.

Dr. Rob: So when you start your training, you have to look at how the body is designed to move. Okay? Okay, that’s number one. Number two is as we get over 40, we start to lose muscle mass with what’s called age-related sarcopenia. It actually starts in your thirties, but it can be as high as eight to nine percent per decade, which is a lot.

But here’s the cool thing: there are studies that show people in their sixties that are dosing themselves the right way with exercise and eating properly can build muscle just as well as people 20 years younger.

Shannon: I have studies cited today that’ll be in our show notes that relate to that, for sure.

Dr. Rob: Another situation is we’ve had really bad information coming out of the basic medical model, where family physicians are telling people not to squat and deadlift because they’re gonna hurt their back.

Am I encouraging people who’ve never touched a weight before to go to the gym and get under a squat bar and max out the weight? No. But I’ve got patients that come to me with lower back problems, and they’re in their seventies, and one of the first things I do—once I get them out of pain with various core exercises—is teach them how to squat.

Because if you can’t get out of a chair, out of your car, or off a toilet as you age, guess where you’re going? You’re going to a retirement center. Okay? Squatting isn’t just about putting weight on your back and grinding yourself down and up. It’s about getting your body weight off of a seated position to a standing position repeatedly so you can do that functionally without hurting yourself.

Metabolism

Shannon: Okay, so let’s go over a few of the key reasons why we have to adjust after 40. In addition to everything you just said, one is our metabolism slows—right?—one to two percent per decade.

Dr. Rob: Okay?

Shannon: Why is that?

Dr. Rob: Why? Why do we—yeah, I’m testing you here. Okay. Well, let me see if I can pass. Because of age-related sarcopenia, in a lot of cases, when people don’t exercise, you actually get fatty infiltration in the musculature. There are MRIs that show cross-sections of a thigh in a healthy 60-year-old who weight-trains, and it’s just like you’re looking at a steak. They’ve got thick, nice red muscle. Then you look at somebody who doesn’t exercise, and it’s like 20 percent muscle, 80 percent fat. It’s astounding. It’s a rib eye, riddled with fat.

Now, we’ve known in my world—in the chiro low-back world—that if you have a chronic lower back problem, when they MRI your lower back muscles, you get fatty infiltration of the deep stabilizing muscles right beside the joints. So instead of those muscles being nice and red like a steak, they’re riddled with fat. And if you have more fat in the muscle than muscle mass, that muscle is less like an engine that’s revving. So your metabolic rate for that area is gonna go down.

Shannon: You passed, Dr. Jones.

Dr. Rob: Ha.

Shannon: Ding. Yeah. Okay.

Dr. Rob: Okay. So what we have to do as we age is we have to load-bear—weight training.

Dr. Rob: Can I—were you gonna ask me something else? Because I’m on a roll for a few minutes. We’re gonna keep going through these—

Shannon: Points. I don’t wanna—

Dr. Rob: I just wanna keep—

Shannon: Talking. Well, it doesn’t matter what you want—sometimes, because sometimes, or all the time, I have to take over.

Dr. Rob: She does.

Shannon: Um, so metabolism decreases one to two percent.

Mm-hmm. Okay, you just explained why that is, so we have to adjust accordingly. Mm-hmm. Everybody in my realm complains, “Ah, I’ve gained about five to ten pounds a year. I don’t really know how.”

Dr. Rob: That is wild. Guess what?

Shannon: If you’re losing muscle mass and your metabolism’s going down, yet you’re doing the same things, that is why. Yeah. You already mentioned sarcopenia. Mm-hmm. So we have to strength train to keep our muscle mass, right? Joint health and recovery take longer after 40. Mm-hmm. Therefore, we have to adapt, and we’re gonna get into what that actually looks like. Mm-hmm. And then probably more in my realm, maybe more so than yours, are the hormonal shifts that are—yeah. That’s huge happening. Because I see a lot of perimenopausal and menopausal women who say, “I have been doing the exact same thing I’ve always done, yet I cannot lose weight. Doesn’t matter how many calories I’m eating, what I’m doing in the gym—I am not losing weight.” And this has to do with those hormonal changes and how you need to change the way you’re exercising so that you are not making it more of an issue and are actually adapting to that change in life.

Cortisol and Hormones

Dr. Rob: Can we give an example of what you’re talking about? Remember the whole Orange Theory thing? And again, not trying to throw Orange Theory under the bus, but if you’re perimenopausal—what does that mean?

Shannon: Before your change in life—your hormones are still in that transitional phase.

Dr. Rob: Okay. But you’re fluxing, basically.

Shannon: You’re—it’s definitely a change, but you’re not completely menopausal.

Dr. Rob: Yeah. So women and men who are basically getting a little bit older—it’s really important to control cortisol, which is our stress hormone. You need some cortisol ’cause it spikes in the morning. It gets you going and gets you outta bed. But if—

Shannon: It helps you get away from a snake.

Dr. Rob: Yeah.

Shannon: That’s good.

Dr. Rob: Like when you were yelling at me the other day, “Rob, get here now!” It wasn’t quick enough. I should have sprinted to you, right?

Shannon: Yeah, for sure.

Dr. Rob: Anyways, so the whole thing with cortisol is: you need it. Okay? But you have to control it because it will blunt the good hormones that you and I both need. And certain types of exercise—specifically for women at a certain age—will spike cortisol. So why don’t you jump into that example.

Shannon: Well, this is an example of when you are in that hormonal shift—when things are shifting as far as your joints aren’t quite the way they used to be, they’re getting more and more taxed. You know, we’re getting older. However, if you are doing the wrong type of exercise—so for instance, I did Orange Theory for two years, and it’s legit. A very difficult, very taxing workout. And I kept wondering why I was not getting—I mean, as much as I still stayed extremely active and as hard as those workouts were, why was I not seeing the changes on the scale? Actually, I was getting worse. Yeah. I started getting adiposity—meaning fat in my midsection—which is very common for women as we lose our hormones and get older.

What was happening is I was putting so much stress on my body that it perceived me as—my cortisol was so high, it perceived me as being in danger. Yeah. And it actually caused hormonal problems, which caused me to deposit fat instead of burn fat. So that’s really kind of the premise of why we’re doing this: as we age, we have to realize that we also have to adapt our exercise. CrossFit the same. Mm-hmm. I mean, there’s so much data right now on the fact that—even Mark Sisson talks about this, ’cause he used to be a marathon runner. Mm-hmm. Well, guess what? He’s now transitioned into a huge walker. Mm-hmm. Because the data shows that when we’re running, or when we’re doing those taxing, very difficult things for sustained periods of time—right—your body perceives that as “I’m running away from a lion that is getting ready to kill me.” Mm-hmm. And it blunts your ability to burn fat during that time, because you’re in that fight-or-flight.

Dr. Rob: Yeah.

Shannon: Did I say that right? I always get that backwards.

Dr. Rob: You just reversed it, but you said it right. Okay. But also the reason you’re adding that adiposity is your body is kicking up cortisol and saying, “We better store some energy because I don’t know when this lion is gonna stop chasing us.” Yeah. So your brain is depositing that fat going, “We need these reserves just in case we need that extra fuel for later.”

So again, CrossFit, Orange Theory—not bad. Good stuff. I did a couple of the workouts, ’cause you wanted me to come and see how it was and assess for some issues you were having injury-wise. It was a great workout, but it’s intense. It is high-intensity interval training, but not for a short period of time, which we’re gonna talk about. It was sustained—an hour straight. Yeah. So it was really intense. So that’s again what we’re talking about. We’re gonna try and clear up some of the gray area of “Okay, what should I do, basically?”

Shannon: Okay. I’m going to now quote a stat here, but I gotta put on my—

Dr. Rob: Glasses.

Shannon: That was not—

Dr. Rob: Good—age-related changes.

Why Strength Training Is an Important Part of Aging

Shannon: Yeah. A 2022 meta-analysis in Sports Medicine showed that strength training twice a week in adults over 40 reduced all-cause mortality by 21 percent.

Dr. Rob: And there are studies out there that show over 30 percent.

Shannon: So—

Dr. Rob: That’s just one of a gazillion studies that show this.

Shannon: Now we’re going to get into why it is that strength training is such an important part of aging—why is it so important to put muscle on and keep muscle on?

Dr. Rob: Okay. My turn.

Shannon: Am I allowed to talk? Take it over now.

Dr. Rob: Okay. He wouldn’t mind me telling the story. I’m not gonna give his full name, but my friend Bill at the gym—who you’ve met—he’s hilarious. We clown around all the time. He’s 81 years old, I believe. I’ve known him for three years, and it’s his social time to go into the gym. But he works out, and we didn’t see him for three or four months.

Do you remember we ran into him two Saturdays ago? I was like, “Where have you been?” And he said, “Well, I almost died.” He ended up having some weird genetic heart condition—basically, he has—

Shannon: Congestive heart failure.

Dr. Rob: Okay. But it put him into the hospital on and off for three months.

Shannon: Yeah.

Dr. Rob: And he was pretty thin.

I said, “So what are you weighing now?” And he said, “I’m about 140 pounds.” And I said, “What did you go in at?” And he said, “175.” And he was pretty lean, fairly muscular for an 80-year-old guy. And I said to him—and this goes to a lot of the stuff Gabrielle Lyon talks about with muscle-centric medicine and what I’ve been telling my patients forever—“Imagine he had gone into the hospital at 140 pounds, not 175. He lost 35 pounds, and now he’s building it back.” But if he had gone in at 140 pounds and he was down to 105 pounds, at that point you’re a bag of bones. Your bones, you have no reserves—your bones and organs basically.

Yeah. So there’s data that shows the more muscle you have, the better you’re going to do with falls. The better you’re gonna do postoperatively from certain types of orthopedic surgeries, postoperatively from cancer surgeries, from chemotherapy—all of the above.

Shannon: Or just, you know, like we’re gonna talk a lot about staying mobile and the importance of stretching and all of that. You have to start thinking that as we age, it’s all about taking care of your body in a way that’s protecting those foundational things. Yeah. You already mentioned being able to squat, because you’ve gotta get up. You know, if you fall on the floor, you gotta be able to get up. Yeah. Fall risk. Mm-hmm.

If you’re not mobile, one of the first things that you start to see before there’s a fall—where potentially somebody breaks their hip—is they start to shuffle. Mm-hmm. Because they change their gait and they start to shuffle. Then before you know it, they’ve fallen, broken their hip, and then they go in the hospital and they get pneumonia. And then we’re at a completely different state in them being able to care for themselves anymore.

Deaths Caused by Falls Per Decade

Dr. Rob: So Peter Orteau on a recent podcast—I don’t remember the exact numbers, but he went through the ages of each decade: 30, 40, 50, 60, 70—and it was deaths caused by falls per 100,000 people per decade.

Shannon: Okay.

Dr. Rob: Okay? So per 100,000 people in their thirties, about three people died from falls. Right? And those are gonna be catastrophic falls—like off a cliff kind of thing, right? Yeah. In the forties—so in the thirties it was like 3.5; in the forties it was, you’d think, 4.2; in the fifties it was 5.5, and then all the way up into the sixties it wasn’t very much. Then you get to the seventies and eighties—seventies it went up to a couple hundred, eighties it went up to like 550. So it’s an exponential amount, and that’s only because of age-related weakness.

Shannon: I just think what happens is: one, people don’t know the proper way to move and work foundationally, which I think you’re really good at showing that.

How to Mitigate Injuries

Shannon: Mm-hmm. Then what happens is they get injured trying to do it, and they stop doing it. Then that injury is still there—they change the way they’re moving because they’re injured. Mm-hmm. Like this weekend, I had a situation where I could barely walk. Mm-hmm. Because I had impinged my hip.

Is that correct? Is that what I did?

Dr. Rob: Yep. That was good.

Shannon: Um, so I could barely walk. And I thought, “At least we know what to do to get me out of that situation, and we know how to rehab me so I could get over that.” But my gait changed because of that. Even yesterday, I went to your office and said, “I’m still walking funny. I can feel it. It’s putting some pressure on my back, and now my back’s starting to hurt, and I feel like people just go, ‘Oh, no big deal,’ and then they keep going and then they don’t address that. Then they get into the next thing and the next thing. Then before you know it, you’re in your sixties and seventies and eighties—you can barely move. Yeah. Because you’ve never properly addressed it.” The point is: you have to stay in good shape. You have to be able to—if you’re exercising, do it in a way that you’re not going to injure yourself so that you can continue. That continuity is really important.

Dr. Rob: Yeah. So that’s all fine and good until somebody hurts themselves and then doesn’t know what to do about it. That’s why it’s super important to have somebody like me in your life. Okay? Find yourself wherever you are regionally—find a really good PT or a really good chiro who understands movement, not somebody who’s just gonna rub you and say, “Come back in a week for your 30th treatment.”

Shannon: That’s nice, but we better partner that with something else.

Dr. Rob: Yeah. Listen, I—

Shannon: I—

Dr. Rob: Do something called active release. I do adjustments when they’re necessary, but my biggest thing is: every patient that comes into my office gets some form of movement medicine. Okay? Whether it’s one or two exercises, or they’re on a plan with me where I’ve written something for them, you have to mitigate the injury that you have.

Unfortunately, we’re living in a world where people think, “Oh, I just injured my knee. It’s over now. My knee’s just bad. I’ve got a bad knee,” and I don’t buy that. Because I’ve got, if you look at my knees, I’ve got arthritis behind both kneecaps. But you see me play tennis and squat and get on the ground. If you look at my Instagram, I’m as flexible now, if not more, than I was 10 years ago, because I don’t allow myself to succumb to what my joints tell me.

This is not supposed to be medical advice, but if you get a diagnosis of, “Oh, you have arthritis in your knee,” I want you to walk out of that doctor’s office and say, “Thank you,” and then go find somebody who understands movement—who understands how the body works—because more often than not, if you have a little arthritis in some place in your body, if you manage the musculature and the stability around that joint, you’re not even gonna notice there’s arthritis there.

We’ve gotten into this weird model where, “Oh, you’re married to this diagnosis.” We did a podcast on this. Yeah. Now, if you’re at the point where your ball-and-socket—your hip—is completely gone and there are bone spurs everywhere and you can’t even see the joint, then you probably need a hip replacement. But I’m telling you right now, after a hip replacement, if you do the right things, you can be back to doing everything you did before. The technology’s very good.

Shannon: Okay, so now let’s focus in on: what would that ideal weekly plan look like?

Dr. Rob: Okay, so—so here’s…again, not trying—

Shannon: May I finish?

Dr. Rob: Absolutely not, ’cause I’m more important.

Shannon: That’s what I thought.

Dr. Rob: Go ahead.

Shannon: Sorry to interrupt.

Strength Training

Shannon: So we’re going to give this information because this is based on over 15 studies reviewed in 2023 from journals like The Lancet, The Journal of Aging and Physical Activity. There are a lot of studies that are making these recommendations as we age—this has been studied as to why we are recommending this.

The first thing is strength training. Yeah. So let’s go through each of these and talk about what that means. You gotta be on the right page, Dr. Jones.

Dr. Rob: I’ve already studied it, and I have it memorized.

Shannon: I don’t think that’s the truth.

Dr. Rob: Thanks, Mom.

Shannon: You’re welcome. So we’re gonna start with strength training.

Dr. Rob: Yes.

Shannon: And why is that? We’ve already talked really a lot about this, but let’s talk specifics now: what are the basics if somebody’s going to do this, how many times a week, and what are the basics that they should be getting down?

Dr. Rob: So the minimum you should be doing in strength training is two to three times a week. I believe you should be doing more—like four times a week. That’s why, and I’m not trying to shamelessly plug here, but the GBNO protocol, which I wrote, is over—I think it’s over 12 weeks—but it’s three to four days every week, and it’s progressive. The way I wrote it was: you have a day where you do a little bit of lower body, a little bit of upper body. Then the next day you do a little bit of lower body, a little bit of upper body in different areas. So you’re splitting it up. I don’t like to do all legs in one day because it’s just too much. You’re too tired the next day. You can’t function very well if the intensity is enough. And that’s another thing: studies show that if your intensity is—if it’s good enough, at our age in our fifties or even in your sixties and seventies—you can still build as much muscle as people a couple of decades beneath you age-wise. What does intensity mean? It means that the weight is challenging enough, or on your last three to four reps—without losing perfect form—it’s very challenging. You can’t wait to be done the set ’cause you’re going, “Oh, this is hard.”

Shannon: And I think that’s something important that we’re gonna double-click on: form. Like if you are tiring in such a way that your form is broken down, you’re done. You need to know when to stop.

Dr. Rob: Yeah. You know, so there’s something called a rest-pause set that I do with people that I train, and I do myself. Let’s say the program calls for 12 reps of something and you do eight and you’re gassed and you can’t go on—set the weight down, count to eight to ten, finish your last four. That way you’re still in a bit of a fatigue state, so the intensity stays high but your form doesn’t break down. So to answer the question: minimum two to three days a week. Ideally, more—three to four days a week.

Shannon: People could work up to that. Again, it’s always so important to remind everybody that you’ve got to do what’s realistic, what’s sustainable. Mm-hmm. So if you’re not doing it at all right now and you jump into this lofty goal of doing it three to four times a week—

Dr. Rob: Good point.

Shannon: —it’s not going to be reality. So start with the goal of at least—no, you know—no less than two times a week.

Mm-hmm. Then ideally, you would work up to that part of three to four days.

Dr. Rob: Okay? So if you are gonna do it two to three days a week—or just even two—you want what we call multi-joint movements. Okay? Stand up, sit down from a bench. That’s a squat. Maybe hold some weight, okay? To do a deadlift—like a sumo deadlift, which is all over my Instagram—where you have a wider stance, picking up a kettlebell from the ground, which would mimic picking up a baby from the ground. Sitting down and pressing weight overhead, like a shoulder press. Sitting down and doing a lat row. So you’re doing multi-joint movements, meaning a movement where you’re using multiple joints. So if you think, “I’m gonna go to the gym and just do bicep curls,” well, that’s a unilateral or bilateral single-joint movement. It’s not a bad movement, but it’s not a multi-joint movement. It’s not gonna stimulate the whole-body response like a multi-joint movement would.

Shannon: So two things I’m gonna give as examples—and this will be in the show notes: currently, in our GBNO community, you are training me. Mm-hmm. One of the things I’ve learned through this experience is that I’m really sore the next day, but also when I feel like normally I would stop, you drop the weight—

Dr. Rob: Yes.

Shannon: —and make me finish the set—

Dr. Rob: Exactly.

Shannon: —while monitoring my form. So there are examples of that in our community; we post weekly. Mm-hmm. Then the other thing is on our website, HeyDrRob.com, there are all these strength-training programs that people can follow.

Dr. Rob: Yeah.

Shannon: So everything you’re mentioning here, you actually guide them through and tell them exactly how to do it.

Dr. Rob: A hundred percent. It’s all video-based. I’m there explaining how it’s done and you just follow—it’s plug and play, basically. You just follow along. You can do it with bands, you can do it with weights. If you don’t have a gym, we have stuff to do at home and body weight. I know in

Shannon: My mind—

Dr. Rob: It’s overwhelming.

Shannon: Like I need to see it written down, or—

Dr. Rob: It is. Yeah.

Shannon: The cool thing about your videos is you give everybody those hints: “Okay, pack your neck, put your shoulder back, tighten the core”—all the things you should be thinking about before you start that particular exercise. It’s nice in the video that you can sit there and rewind it and watch. Mm-hmm. ’Cause it takes a while to think of all the things.

Dr. Rob: So can I mention one more thing specifically for women? Because of age-related bone loss—osteopenia, which leads to osteoporosis, which is bone loss. Men get it too—my grandfather had it, ironically, before he passed, which is very strange; he just stopped moving later in life. But women get it more than men because of hormonal changes. The main thing to remember: there’s something called Wolf’s Law, and Wolf’s Law dictates that bone responds in accordance with the stresses placed upon it. Okay? So if you are diagnosed with osteopenia or osteoporosis, your best thing is to do load-bearing activities. Okay? So you need to hold weight and do some squatting. Jump training is actually something that needs to be done as well—some jumping jacks, some skipping rope, that sort of thing. Okay?

Shannon: We’re gonna get to that.

Dr. Rob: Starting slow, of course. But again, these are things that we have to do as humans. Okay? So back to weightlifting: start a couple days a week. Again, we have programs at HeyDrRob.com, and we have community programs that people can follow. Once you get a little bit better and you feel you’re gleaning the benefit and you’re making time, yeah, you can up it to three, four days a week. It’s all spelled out there.

Shannon: And here’s that study I was referring to earlier: 2023, Frontiers in Physiology—quote: “Older adults gain similar strength benefits as younger adults when training intensity is moderate and consistent.”

Dr. Rob: Did we hear that before?

Shannon: Consistent—to me.

Dr. Rob: Is it weird that you’re married to somebody so smart?

Shannon: I just can’t believe it every day. It’s unbelievable.

Dr. Rob: I’m sorry, I just have to—

Shannon: Okay, moving on. So strength training is our number one?

Dr. Rob: Yes. 

Cardio Training

Shannon: Let’s move into cardio. Okay? Here is where I feel—as a woman—that’s all we think about in a workout: cardio, cardio, cardio. We’re afraid we’re gonna get bulky if we go to the gym and we strength train, and we don’t wanna look like you.

Dr. Rob: Yeah. So can I dispel that myth right away? ’Cause I can’t—

Shannon: I think you’ve done it pretty well on all our stuff. I need—

Dr. Rob: To say it again, of course you do—’cause I’ve got people that—I’ve got a couple women that I actually train. ’Cause I do train some people. And one of them will always say to me, when she knows it’s not gonna happen, “We’ll do an exercise. You say, ‘I’m not gonna get bulky from this,’ right?” And I always go, “Oh my gosh. Unless you’re on steroids, you’re not gonna get bulky from this.” Okay? It’s a myth. It’s a myth. It’s a myth, okay? And also—

Shannon: I think women don’t like to be in a gym where there’s a bunch of grunting, sweaty men all around, and I just think—in general—I don’t want to be around sweaty—

Dr. Rob: Men, either. So I get, I get, I get that.

Shannon: —going to the gym, but it doesn’t have to be in a gym. You can have weights at home. Yeah, some kettlebells at home—100 percent—some bands at home.

Dr. Rob: But you’re not gonna get bulky by lifting. What’s gonna happen is you’re gonna burn some calories, you’re gonna burn a little fat, and then, guess what? You’re gonna have more muscle mass, which is gonna rev your engine at rest. So then, guess what? You’re gonna burn fat at rest. So you’re actually gonna get leaner and you’re gonna feel better.

Shannon: I always say it’s the metabolic Spanx—meaning muscle helps us hold everything in, and it’s also a metabolic sponge. Mm-hmm. So the more muscle you have, the more you store the sugar—you store the carbs you’re eating—in your muscle. Mm-hmm. And that is very important as we age, when we’re trying to keep our weight down and midsection adiposity fat. Mm-hmm. Controlling our blood sugar is very important. The more muscle we have, the better control we have of that. A hundred percent.

So with cardio, zone-two training is really—at our age (40-plus)—a very important one. Quite frankly, the statistics and the studies are not great for exercise for weight loss. That’s gonna be disappointing to a lot of people. But it is great for disease reduction, mm-hmm. but it is not great for actual weight loss, and I think that’s shocking to a lot of people.

You have to understand metabolically what your body does when you exercise: it’s all about survival. If you’re out running for 45 minutes or you’re on a treadmill for 45 minutes running—again, go back to these primal needs—your body perceives that as you are running from something that is chasing you and you’re in danger, so you’re gonna actually lower your metabolic rate during that time to conserve. One of the things we know that happens when you increase cardio like that is your appetite really increases.

Dr. Rob: Because you’re burning calories when you’re doing cardio. You’re not really burning fat, and it’s super easy to eat those 300–400 calories. Mm-hmm. So you spend an hour on the treadmill with moderate to low intensity—just an easy jog—you’re burning 350 calories, and you’re like, “Oh, I’m hungry.” You go home and eat two slices of pizza, and now you’ve consumed 500 calories. Exactly.

You know, I don’t know if you know this, but maybe people can Google this to substantiate it, but I remember hearing in a seminar years and years ago—and I’m not an archaeologist, but I believe the guy (’cause I trust him; he’s a great researcher)—he said there’s nowhere in archaeological literature that shows humans jogging, other than the Tarahumara natives in Mexico. They’re the ones that the book Born to Run was written about. It’s part of their religious passage; they run a lot. But nowhere in history did ancient men and women jog because it was a waste of energy. They ran away or toward stuff they were gonna kill, or they walked.

Shannon: Yeah.

Dr. Rob: And walking—

Shannon: We were out foraging, right? Yeah. So you were out hunting; you were foraging. We were made that way a hundred percent—we were gathering, we were hunting, you know—and that “level two” is the type of cardio where zone-two is where you walk and your heart rate is up, but you could still carry on a conversation. Mm-hmm. And that’s really what’s most important at our age, as we’re aging, is getting to that level two. And zone-two is actually fat-burning.

Dr. Rob: Mm-hmm.

Shannon: So that is good. Yeah. So if you turn that into a run, that’s not going to be fat-burning. But if you are walking, that is fat-burning. Okay, so that’s good.

Dr. Rob: So now we do need to do some cardiovascular because you need elasticity—cardiovascular meaning your heart and your vasculature: your veins and arteries. We want those elastic; we don’t want those hard. Okay? So you do need to do some cardio—so a couple of times a week, with your heart elevated, where your heart rate is elevated and you’re huffing and puffing and you can’t hold a conversation. We do need to do that a couple days a week.

Shannon: It’s like sudden-spurt-type exercise. Yes, and they do recommend that a couple of times a week. Mm-hmm. But it’s very short periods of time.

Dr. Rob: Yes.

Shannon: I mean, you want to present Tabata or—

HIIT Training

Shannon: So what we try to do ourselves and what we try to talk to patients about is more Tabata, or high-intensity interval training. Okay? Shorter periods. So again, zone-two is going out for a 20- or 30-minute walk—specifically after dinner; you’re gonna burn fat, it’s gonna lower your insulin levels. It’s important. Go for a walk when you wake up—zone-two walking, where you can hold a conversation but your heart rate’s elevated. HIIT—high-intensity interval training—is just designed for short bursts. I personally like to do Tabatas. I believe there’s a Japanese researcher who created Tabata where you go four minutes nonstop: 20 seconds on, really intense; 10 seconds rest; just moving. So I do it on a bike, basically. You can Google these; they’re easy to find. It’s T-A-B-A-T-A, yeah.

Dr. Rob: Very simple. And I’ve got a Tabata timer on my phone. It’ll go “ding, ding, ding,” and it’ll show 20 seconds. So if I’m on an exercise bike or on my road bike, I sprint as hard as I can for 20 seconds. Then it goes “ding, ding, ding,” and then it goes 10 seconds—and that’s my rest interval. I’m not stopping; I’m just going at a moderate rate. Then I’m like, “Oh, crap, I gotta go again”—20 seconds—“ding, ding,” and I go as hard as I can, and I feel like I’m gonna die by the fourth minute. But then it’s over. Then, depending on how good I feel that day, I try to do two rounds of it.

Shannon: Do you know they say—which is in the literature—that those four minutes of Tabata are better than 30 minutes of an aerobic class? Yeah. So there was—

Dr. Rob: There was a researcher up in Canada—measured a constituent of metabolism—citrate synthase, which is a metabolic enzyme. He wrote a book called The One-Minute Workout. What he did was he took a group of people and put them on an exercise bike for 20 minutes at a moderate pace—just trudging along, somewhere above zone two. Then he took another group and, over a 10-minute period, had them do a two-minute warmup, two-minute cooldown—so that’s your four minutes—and in six minutes they went 20 seconds as hard as they could, three times. The remaining five minutes were one minute of steady-state cardio. Those people, who did three 20-second bursts of all-out effort over one minute, burned 80 percent more citrate synthase than the steady-state group. It shows the intervals did a lot more metabolically than steady state.

Now the cool thing about HIIT is you crank up your metabolism for as long as 36 hours after the event, so you’re burning calories at rest, burning fat at rest, without doing anything.

Shannon: So you couple that with strength training and then four minutes of those Tabatas.

Prehab & Mobility

Shannon: Now we need to talk about mobility and recovery and flexibility as an important part, because everybody just gets done and then they walk away and wonder why they can barely move the next—

Dr. Rob: Day. So this is my rule of thumb: what I’ve done with my programming is I’ve included prehab and mobility with my programs. If somebody buys—for example, on our HeyDrRob.com—they buy the chest blaster or the chest workout, I always call it “shoulder safe,” or if they buy the core workout, it’s “back safe core.” What I do is I do activation: I do mobility and activation of the specific joint we’re gonna work. So you’re actually doing the stretching and the rehabbing before you even start. Then I always finish with one or two flexibility exercises at the end.

What I do myself—what you see me do: invariably, I’m on my little mini roller before we go to bed every night, or I’m stretching something on the couch. For example, today I lifted. Later today I’m gonna play tennis with my buddy Ivan. We go pretty hard; we sprint around a lot, which is great, HIIT of course, because we’re sprinting and stopping. But before I go to bed tonight, I know I worked my shoulder, I know I worked my back, I know I worked my glutes, quads, and feet. So I’m gonna stretch all that before I go to bed: I put on toe spacers, I roll with a tennis ball, I stretch my quads, my glutes, and then I do a little bit of back mobility. That’s it. Two to three minutes before bed.

Shannon: Would you say the roller is a big part?

Dr. Rob: So foam rolling before you go to bed—whatever you worked that day: if you did a chest workout, stretch your chest through your bathroom doorway before you go to bed, that sort of thing. It doesn’t need to be an hour-long stretch every single night. What you worked that day, do a couple of stretches before you go to bed. I always say roll and stretch before you go to bed. Because when you wake up feeling crappy in the morning, it’s not, “Oh, I slept wrong.” It’s, “Oh, you didn’t mitigate what you did the day before; you took it to bed with you.” It snowballed in the form of stiffness, and then you wake up feeling like crap. So do what you worked that day—two or three minutes before you go to bed—and it’ll go a long way for your mobility and your recovery. And I think we need to—

Balance & Core

Shannon: Include balance and core. Mm-hmm. As an important part—in the show notes, we’ll put an example of a typical week, encompassing everything we’ve talked about, what this looks like in a week for the 40-plus.

Dr. Rob: Yep.

Shannon: A good little example of what they should be doing. So—

Dr. Rob: Here’s what I do with my patients and myself. People don’t think they’re doing balance work, but when you do a hip airplane: guess what you’re doing? You’re mobilizing your hip, but I’m also queuing your foot to tripod on the ground. Guess what that is? That’s balance. Balance comes from the foot, the core, and the inner ear. People lose balance as they age because they don’t work their core, they don’t work their foot, and they wear those giant Hoka shoes because they’ve been told—sorry, guys—if you’re wearing Hokas in here—

Shannon: You gotta look around.

Dr. Rob: Um, yeah, good group in here. We’re wearing sensible shoes—very smart. But people wearing these big bouncy shoes, because it feels good, well guess what? You’re taking away your brain’s connection to your foot and the ground. So you have no feeling. So guess what? Now you’re walking on clouds. Yeah. Now you’re walking on—like my friend Lisa said—it’s like putting your foot in a shoebox or a Kleenex box, walking around on a pad, which feels good, but you’re losing the sensation to the ground. We need that feedback. That’s why walking barefoot, even if your feet are sore, walk barefoot. It’s good for you. That will help with your balance.

Again, this is all in the programming—so watch the workouts in the community that I do with Shannon. I’m gonna be doing some of them too, but we’re doing flexibility, strength training, and balance and core training all at the same time. We’re killing six birds with one stone, basically.

Shannon: Okay. And we do need to wrap up, yeah—

Fuel, Recovery & Protein

Shannon: …but we can’t not mention fuel and recovery. This is really about making sure that you are nourishing in a way—and hydrating in a way—so that you’re fueling these workouts. And so we talk about protein first: obviously, if we’re trying to build muscle, you have to have protein. I will just say simply: women across the board should try to get 100 grams of protein a day. The reason I’m not gonna give so many grams per kilogram or so many grams per pound is because I’ve been working with women for so long, and if they can get to 100, I am impressed. Okay? So 30 grams per meal is really kind of what I know is realistic. If you’re not getting that, that’s what you need to focus on.

Dr. Rob: And if you’re a guy, it’s easier for guys. But let’s say you’re 200 pounds or more, like I am—maybe I’ve got 10 pounds of fat on me; I don’t know. Your ideal body weight should be your grams of protein per pound, basically.

Shannon: And that’s important to say “ideal” by the way, because if you’re carrying extra weight, you don’t want to calculate it that way, yeah.

Dr. Rob: So for me, I try to get anywhere from 175 to 190 grams a day. Yeah. It’s hard some days, but—you know, you do your best.

Shannon: Yeah. It sounds daunting.

Dr. Rob: It’s not.

Shannon: Yeah. However, you know, the size of a deck of cards of a piece of chicken is how many grams per ounce, Dr. Rob?

Dr. Rob: I always fail this—seven grams per ounce.

Shannon: And how many ounces are in a deck-of-cards-sized piece of chicken?

Dr. Rob: Four, right?

Shannon: Three. I’m so, so bad. Are you kidding me?

Dr. Rob: I’m just not very smart.

Shannon: Oh my gosh. Okay, so the size of a deck of cards—let’s just review this—Dr. Rob is three ounces, and there’s seven grams of protein per ounce. So that’s not very much. You’re probably gonna want to get at least two deck-of-cards portions if you’re eyeing it. Mm-hmm. Or more if you’re a man.

Dr. Rob: So confused—just eat a lot of protein.

Shannon: Okay. Thanks for confusing everybody.

Dr. Rob: (laughs)

Shannon: And then hydration for joint lubrication, and just overall getting—

Dr. Rob: …for joint lubrication.

Shannon: Oh, my—we’re getting into supplements. Yeah.

Rho Nutrition Supplements

Dr. Rob: Well, we’re gonna do a simple plug for Rho: everybody should be taking these collagen peptides that are liposomal, absorb great, anti-inflammatory—from Rho Nutrition. Code: DRROB. I swear by these things. I don’t work with any company unless I try it first, and my recovery has been fivefold better since using these two products. But we don’t eat enough collagen in our diet ’cause we’re not gnawing on bones or cartilage. We’re not—

Shannon: …in the cave gnawing on our kill.

Dr. Rob: Yeah, exactly. So you need some extra collagen. This is a great way to do it. Um, and then for energy, ketones are great, but again—balanced diet.

Building Muscle During Sleep

Shannon: Well, and then sleep: I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention it, because during sleep is when you build muscle. Yeah. So if you’re not getting proper sleep, you’ve just done all of that work for nothing.

Mm-hmm. If you’re not sleeping properly. So doing the strength training properly, getting the right type of sleep, and making sure you’re getting enough protein and fluids is really important. And then the supplements that we do talk about quite a bit—you just mentioned some of them—but creatine: we did a podcast recently on the importance of supplements, and we included creatine, omega-3, and vitamin D—all very important.

Yeah. Okay, so Dr. Rob, this is the time where you get very sad, but we do have to land the plane.

Dr. Rob: Oh, yeah—I don’t get to keep talking?

Shannon: No. So I think—

Dr. Rob: Do you know she actually looks at me some nights and she goes, “You talk too much.”

Shannon: I do say that—like—

Dr. Rob: For real? She says that to me, and it hurts my feelings.

Shannon: Oh, I’m so sorry—your feelings. Okay, so let’s talk about our takeaways here—which a lot of times you repeat—so maybe take a look at the paper, but I’m gonna let you do it. I think more than anything, making sure everybody understands that you’ve gotta be knowledgeable as you age to ensure that the efforts you’re putting in are actually healthy and not to your detriment.

Yeah. And consistency is really important. Mm-hmm. In other words, we will put an example of what a week looks like in our show notes. If somebody’s not moving at all and then sees that, it can be a little daunting—so I’m always about sustainability, being realistic, saying, “Hey, listen, let’s start. Find a starting point. Just understand that eventually that’s what it should look like.” I think if you can say to yourself, “How many steps are you getting a day?”—yeah—“Let’s see what your baseline is. If it’s not around eight to ten thousand, that’s where you start.” Then once you get that down, say, “Okay, great. I need to start working on strength training.” Then go to the website, find all of Dr. Rob’s great information, and start strength training. Then start thinking about balance—all the stuff you’re giving them to work on. All in all, this is going to prevent injuries as you age so you can get better, not older.

Outro

Dr. Rob: Very nice wrap-up.

Shannon: Did you see how I did that?

Dr. Rob: That was great, and you didn’t ramble.

Shannon: I didn’t ramble.

Dr. Rob: That was amazing. So the bottom line is this: be the turtle. Here he goes.

Shannon:

Dr. Rob: Yeah. Be the turtle, not the hare, right?

Shannon: Are turtles consistent too? They’re persistent and consistent. Do you not—

Dr. Rob: Do you not know this story?

Shannon: …okay. We’re not gonna go—do you—

Dr. Rob: Do we need to have a bedtime story? So that’s—

Shannon: It for podcast number 20. Thanks for joining us today.

Dr. Rob: For my awesome wife Shannon, who’s always putting me in my place.

Shannon: I am good at it.

Dr. Rob: I’m Dr. Rob Jones. Thanks for tuning in. Hope to see you next time. Remember: get better, not older.