This one was a hard pill to swallow for the team at DMARGE — who have spent years covering all aspects of wellness, helping blokes work on their fitness, mental health, relationships and much more — and always boasted a particular soft spot for the ancient art of bodybuilding and building muscle.
Only a week after we reported on Dr Mark Hyman’s advice that if he could turn back the clock he’d start weightlifting sooner and pro-bodybuilder Eddie Abbew’s ‘bicep exploding’ workout, Dave Asprey — another biohacking pioneer with a longtime speciality in longevity — has revealed that excessive weightlifting may actually shorten your life.
WATCH: David Goggins’ “Nickels & Dimes” Calisthenic Workout
Referencing a study from the March to April 2023 edition of Missouri Medicine, a systematic review and meta-analysis showed that, as you might expect, regular, moderate-intensity weightlifting — around 30-60 minutes per week — is very good for the body, producing significant risk reductions for mortality across the spectrum.
However — and this is where things get tricky for the most committed lifters — more than 130 minutes per week, a mere two hours, could actually be doing you more harm than good, bringing your life expectancy back to the same levels as if you’d been adopting a sedentary lifestyle the entire time.
It turns out that ‘more is better’ for moderate-intensity exercises like walking, but very large volumes of strenuous exercise — including the movement of heavy weights — may not be the ideal means of optimising longevity.
Captioning his post, about which Asprey clearly had understandably mixed feelings, the biohacking bigwig said this:
“Can you imagine being a best-selling ‘longevity’ doctor right now? Just after you wrote a book saying we can’t extend human lifespan, and the single biggest thing you can do to live longer is exercise more? Science hurts. 🤷♂️ I’ve always recommended you lift enough to have muscles and strength and no more. Over exercising is anti-longevity. Muscles are pro-longevity.”
Dave Asprey
Divided Response
Interestingly, this advice directly contradicts that given by Dr Mark Hyman on a podcast only last week when asked what three things he would do differently were he able to turn back the clock to when he was 40 years old. His second listed piece of advice was to hit the gym and hit it hard:
“Start working out sooner: I mean, I always did bike riding and tennis and yoga but I was like ‘gyms are stinky, I don’t like weights’… when I was 50, I couldn’t do 10 push-ups, now I can drop and do 80 without stopping… I would have doubled down on that a lot sooner… the sooner you start building muscle the better, [it’s] central to longevity”
Dr Mark Hyman
Seemingly aligning more closely with Hyman than Asprey, many commenters took against Asprey, with some quoting studies that seemed to suggest weightlifting is actually a boon for longevity and others, a little less polite, getting straight to the point: “This is garbage”.
However you may feel about Asprey’s point of view, it’s important to remember that this is a question of volume; weightlifting is still good for you in moderation, no one is denying that. This means that, sadly, leg day is still on… I’ll go and get my shorts on.