Muscle – The Gland You Can Optimize Your Health With Naturally
I came across an article over ten years ago that stopped me in my tracks. It was written by Dr. Les Cole, a physician practicing anti-aging and functional medicine, and it asked a question I think everyone would say yes to. Don’t you just want a gland you could squeeze every day that would optimize your health?
Decrease your risk for heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s? Improve your sleep, your memory, your skin? Reduce depression, anxiety, and stress? Increase your lifespan?
And then he dropped the bomb. You already have it. It’s your muscle.
I remember my brain fizzing a bit when I read that. A gland? But the definition of a gland is simply a cell, group of cells, or organ that produces secretions. And it turns out, muscle is exactly that.
Every time you contract a muscle under real load, you trigger the release of powerful chemicals called myokines that travel through your bloodstream and signal every other organ in your body, including your brain, to stay young, stay sharp, stay resilient.
The science behind this is not new. Around the year 2000, researchers discovered that contracting muscles release a protein called Interleukin-6 directly into the bloodstream, proving for the first time that muscle is active hormone-releasing tissue, not just a mechanical motor.
By 2003, Dr. Bente Pedersen and her team had coined the term myokines and formally established skeletal muscle as an endocrine organ. By the 2010s, hundreds of myokines had been identified.
Twenty-five years later, we are still not talking about this the way we could.
Your annual physical does not include a conversation about muscle as an endocrine organ. Your doctor is probably not asking about your strength training the way they ask about your cholesterol. The pharmaceutical industry has medications for nearly every condition on Dr. Cole’s list, and yet the one intervention that addresses all of them simultaneously, through your own biology, for free, barely gets mentioned. I find that to be negligent.
This was not on the syllabus when I was studying to become a Physical Therapist Assistant. The endocrine system meant thyroid, adrenal glands, pancreas, and the usual suspects. Muscle was the thing that moved your bones.
Slow Down Aging & Make You More Youthful
What we now understand is that muscle does double duty. Every contraction affects the expression of at least 400 genes, up-regulating the building processes associated with youth and down-regulating the breakdown processes associated with aging. Your mitochondria multiply. Nitric oxide production increases. Antioxidants move into action. Growth hormone rises. Inflammation quiets. And, let us not forget that inflammation is at the root of most diseases we fear the most.
I noticed something when I first started training with intensity and intention. As my muscles strengthened, my inner self strengthened right along with them. The confidence that came from not completing a repetition one week and getting it, plus more, the next, taught me something I could not have learned any other way. Failure leads to success, and I would never know what I was truly capable of unless I gave it another try.
My confidence improved. My mood lifted. I did not make that connection immediately, but once I did, I saw that the mental strength I was building was every bit as important as the physical strength gains. Training twice a week with intention, and staying active on the days in between, changed not just my body but my entire relationship with what I was capable of.
Are you tired of feeling sluggish? Worn out from burning the wick at both ends? Running on fumes between work, being the head of the household, trying to get healthy, and still have time to yourself? The good news is you don’t have to be, and the better news is that the solution only costs you less than an hour per week. Getting your energy back like you felt when you were younger isn’t a matter of taking a pill and it isn’t about overcommitting your time, which you already don’t have, to 5 different exercise routines that you do daily. Instead, spend more time doing the things you love to do, with the people you love, and with the energy you want back. All you need to do is re-think exercise. Discover the way to workout better — with better results, less wear and tear on your body, and in only two 25-minute workouts per week.
Muscles Replacing What Your Medications Were Doing
Over the years I have heard that story hundreds of times from members who came in wanting to lose a few pounds and found themselves getting off medications for anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Their biology changed. Their muscle was doing what it was designed to do.
One story stays with me. A client who had been a Type 1 diabetic since childhood wore an insulin pump. When she added strength training, her doctor kept having to lower her insulin dosage. Again and again.
Contracting muscle pulls glucose out of the bloodstream and uses it for fuel, acting similarly to insulin, driving blood sugar into the cells. Her pump settings that had been fixed for years were being rewritten by her own biology. That is not a fitness story.
That is not a fitness story. That is a physiology story. And it is one of many remarkable things I have witnessed in over thirty years of working with the muscles of the human body.
We can do so much better than the conversation we are currently having about strength training.
This is why I built High Intensity Safe Strength Training®. Not to help people look a certain way, though that is often the side effect, but to empower and challenge them to have optimal, functional, real health. Safe, precise, intentional resistance training that actually activates the gland.
The gland is already there. It just needs to be squeezed.
Ready to activate yours? Call us at Rock Solid Fitness in Dunedin and become part of the community seeing health benefits from contracting more muscles. Let’s talk about what your body is truly capable of. Or better yet, come get them squeezed in a free session and feel the effects right away you can book it below.
