Brain Aging and Barbells (How Lifting Weights Slows Cognitive Decline) | Ep 474
Can lifting weights slow how fast your brain ages?
A new study used brain scans to measure exactly that. The results show that resistance training is a uniquely beneficial tool for brain health that works through different pathways than cardio.
Lifting weights can make the brain test younger on functional MRI, and the benefits may keep compounding even long after you train.
Learn what brain age measures, why the prefrontal cortex matters for Alzheimer's and cognitive aging, the muscle-to-brain signaling system activated by strength training, and how heavy lifting compares to moderate intensity for protecting the brain after 40. Plus a quick self-check for strength-related dementia risk, especially after 40.
Enroll in Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to lift heavy, build muscle, lose fat, and stay strong and sharp for decades.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Lifting weights and brain aging
0:47 - Dementia risk and strength training over 40
3:58 - Aerobic exercise and the hippocampus
6:00 - Prefrontal cortex and muscle signaling
7:48 - Recent study and brain age scans
10:21 - Brain age gap and dementia risk
11:30 - Results across both lifting intensities
13:12 - Myokines, irisin, and BDNF
16:57 - How to build skills for lifting weights
18:30 - Lifting protocol for brain health
20:45 - Entry points for new lifters
24:15 - Grip strength and dementia risk
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Lifting weights and brain aging
Philip Pape 0:00
If you've heard for years that aerobic exercise is what protects your brain from dementia, a brand new randomized controlled trial might give you a new perspective. One year of lifting weights made people's brains test almost two years younger on a functional brain scan. And then the effect kept growing for a full year after the training stopped. And the brain regions involved are not the same ones targeted by cardio. Today I'm walking you through what is happening inside your skull with your brain when you lift weights, why it works through pathways more associated with lifting weights than cardio, and a dead simple lifting protocol with the most evidence behind it if you're trying to improve your brain age. Welcome
Dementia risk and strength training over 40
Philip Pape 0:47
to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape. And if you are aging, which we all are because we can't go back in a time machine, especially if you're over 40, over 50, you know, I'm 45 years old. My grandmother had Alzheimer's. There's dementia in our family, there's dementia risk in my genetics. And you, maybe in the back of your head, there's a worry about dementia or Alzheimer's. And maybe it's a parent or grandparent that has it. You have personal experience. Maybe it's, you know, just you walk into a room and you forget why you walked in, or somebody asks you a question, and you forget what you were going to say. Maybe it's all the headlines about Alzheimer's and the anxiety behind that. And every time you, you know, hit the Google machine about what to do about it, a lot of the advice is super generic because a lot of this is cutting edge right now. The research into Alzheimer's, and a lot of it is more bio more about the biology and the pharmaceuticals and things like that. Or you see advice like, hey, you've got to just move more, you've got to walk more, you've got to run more. You know, just general, generic, kind of worthless advice, in my opinion. And so I'm all for encouraging people to move. I definitely think the vast majority of the older population is way too sedentary, and it has led to the frailty and the lack of strength and also often lack of function, polypharmacy, you know, all the things we're trying to avoid in general, but it also affects your brain massively. You know, things like muscle mass affect your brain massively. We're going to be talking about lifting weights today, but really the brain is so important. I mean, just doing this podcast and the work I do and being an engineer and all that, having a family, trying to solve problems, wanting to live a long life, wanting to lift weights. I'm like, if I didn't have my brain, where would I be? And the research on resistance training and the brain has been building over the last few years. I'd say the last decade and a half, uh, we've seen some more studies. And there's a study that came out a few months ago that's really strong evidence, yet again, I will say, that lifting weights uniquely does something for your brain that nothing else, including aerobic exercise, can replicate. And it's not just like one area of your brain, like the hippocampus, it's not just memory. It's it's how the front of your brain kind of wires together, the whole, you know, neurostructure of the brain, if you will, if that's even a proper word. Forgive me, I'm gonna butcher a lot of probably fundamental science here for the neurofolks out there, but I'm gonna do my best. So today I'm gonna walk you through that study. I'm gonna show you the mechanisms that make it work, and I'm gonna give you a lifting protocol that is evidence-based that can go along with all of this. And then stick around to the end because I'm going to share a 30-second self-test that might give you a little bit of a read on your own dementia risk having to do with this topic. I'll tell you the muscle metric that we really care about the most, a statistic from one of the biggest cognitive aging studies ever done, a specific stat that you want to care about, and then what to do if you don't like what the information is telling you.
Aerobic exercise and the hippocampus
Philip Pape 3:58
What do we need to do differently, guys? Okay, so I'm gonna give you a little history here because this is one of those situations where I think the advice is probably outdated or there just isn't good advice. So, starting in the early 2000s, a group of researchers led by Art Kramer at the University of Illinois, they ran a series of randomized trials and they showed that aerobic exercise, especially walking, increased the size of the hippocampus in older adults. Now, that's the part of your brain that handles the formation of memories. And then their 2011 study in adults over 60 found that one year of walking grew the hippocampus 2%, which is very meaningful when the typical trajectory with age is a one to two 1 to 2% shrinkage per year. And so that study and a bunch like it became the foundation for the exercise protects your brain message that you hear everywhere now. And that's a good message, right? Walking is great, cardio is great. I'm definitely not anti-any of that. We need to move more. Almost everybody listening to this podcast probably has to move more in the right ways, let alone also lift weights. But where I think a lot of this gets oversold, which could be detrimental, let's say, is that, you know, because it's easy to standardize aerobic exercise and research and it gets more studied than lifting. And because the assumption is, okay, the brain is all about blood flow and oxygen delivery. So of course cardio is going to be aligned with that. I would say the resistance training side just didn't get studied to the same level for a long time. And so, you know, it's it's more of an omission, let's just say, or a lack of study. It's kind of like women's health, you know, where there's a lack of a lot of information because certain populations of women just aren't being studied. So I would say there are three things I want to challenge with some of the research to date so that we can lead into talking about the topic. The first one is the brain is really, really complicated. It isn't just one tissue, right? It's
Prefrontal cortex and muscle signaling
Philip Pape 6:00
a very complex structure that we still don't know a lot about. And the hippocampus is one part of it. And I think, you know, looking at the research, cognitive aging and the hippocampus has been tied together quite a bit. But there's also the prefrontal cortex, and that's right behind your forehead, a different, completely different part from the hippocampus. That part handles decision making, planning, your working memory, it's called, and impulse control. And it's also the part that we look at that tends to fail early and the first thing that goes in Alzheimer's, as well as in just normal cognitive aging. And it responds to different stimulus in the hippocampus. So again, now we we add to some of the nuance. The second thing I want to challenge is that muscle, muscle mass is just incredible and does things to your body that we did not know about 10 years ago. For example, when you contract your muscle against load, against resistance, it releases proteins called myokines into your bloodstream. Now, myokines by themselves are incredible. Some of those proteins cross the blood-brain barrier. Some of them support the growth and survival of brain cells. We have discovered an entire muscle-to-brain signaling system we didn't know existed not long ago. And it's primarily activated by lifting weights and having muscle mass. So, and this is just a tiny scratching the surface. I'm gonna do an entirely separate episode soon, very soon. It's on my list, about why you need to bring build muscle and it and it's gonna cover the holistic view of it, you know, well beyond just general health and fitness. The third thing I'm gonna challenge is, or not challenge, the third thing I want to bring up is that we now do have resistance training studies. And I'm gonna walk you through the new one that I mentioned earlier. So here we go.
Recent study and brain age scans
Philip Pape 7:48
The study is a Danish trial published in the journal GeroScience in February. So February 2026, I'm recording this in late May 2026. It's out of a group called the LISA study. LISA stands for Live, Active, Successful Aging. And I did come across this study again through Bill Campbell's Body by Science Research Review. I love that guy. I love Bill. He was on Lane Norton's podcast recently too. That's a great episode you guys should check out. And if you don't subscribe to his review or really any reviews and you're into this stuff, consider it because it's a good way to get the latest and greatest studies that's kind of filtered through some of the good uh evidence-based academic guys today. So, anyway, Bill Campbell's been on the show. He's a great science communicator, and it was him, his review that turned me on to this. So, what they did is they took 309 adults aged 62 to 70, they randomized them into three groups for an entire year. Okay. Group one had heavy resistance training three times a week on machines, and it was supervised, so they were working in the 70 to 85 percent of their one rep max range. And they did six to 12 reps per set. Okay, so good heavy traditional resistance training. Group two did moderate resistance training, so they did mostly bands and body weight, and it was just one supervised session a week, plus two at home, in the 50 to 60 percent rep range or yeah, one RM. So lighter, right? Light, lighter work. And then group three was the non-exercising control group. They were just told to keep doing what they're doing. And so they did this for a year, they trained for a year, or didn't train for a year, depending on which group, and then they stopped and then they checked everyone again later. Oh no, then they checked everyone a year after that. So it's like a two-year arc to the study. Now, here's the wild part, okay? They didn't just measure strength or body composition, they actually put everyone in an MRI scanner and they ran a machine learning model on their brain scans. And the model had been trained already on over 2,400 other brains. It looks at how different regions of the brain communicate with each other. So the patterns of functional connectivity between the brain, and then estimates how old the brain looks compared to a typical person of that chronological age. And then the difference is called the brain age gap. So I wanted to set it up this way so you guys know this is some pretty serious science. It's not just some random, you know, DNA test or something like that. Now, I want to explain
Brain age gap and dementia risk
Philip Pape 10:21
why this matters. I'm gonna let me slow down on this for a bit. Okay, so first, the brain age gap. Let's just explain that real quick. It's been linked in multiple large studies to dementia risk, to mortality, to Alzheimer's risk. There's a 2025 paper that looked at the UK Biobank. This is over 38,000 people, and they found that every one-year increase in brain age gap was associated with a 16% higher Alzheimer's risk and a 12% higher all-cause mortality risk. So a younger-looking brain is actually a healthier brain when it comes to things like dementia Alzheimer's. Okay, so back to the study. They scanned everyone, they ran the model, you had the two-year time frame. So, what were the results? All right, the heavy lifting group, their brain age dropped by 1.4 years after the first year of training. The moderate group, it dropped by 1.39 years, so almost exactly the same. So 1.4, 1.39. So it's 1.4. And then the control group had no change. So both lifting groups at both intensities, they they
Results across both lifting intensities
Philip Pape 11:30
cut a year and a half of their measured brain age a year later, you know, within a year. And then I would say one of the surprises from the research is that when they checked again a year later, after everyone stopped the formal training, the brain age reductions actually grew. So the heavy group was now even younger with their brain, 1.8, 40 years younger. The moderate group was 2.26 years younger. So the brain kept getting younger after they stopped lifting. This is just so good. I mean, think about that for a second. Okay, it wasn't just the benefits in the moment or right after they were done, but they continued, they compounded. How often do we talk about that principle when it comes to health and how much good you're doing for yourself by starting now? It's never too late. And then there's another piece of data I want to give you for the practical stuff today, in that the researchers looked at which brain regions change the most. The heavy lifting group, only the heavy lifting group, right? Not the moderate, definitely not the control group, only the heavy lifting group showed significantly increased functional connectivity in a big cluster of brain regions, primarily the prefrontal cortex, the exact part of the brain that handles executive function, working memory, decision making. Like we mentioned earlier, the part that tends to degrade first in aging, in dementia, in Alzheimer's. So both intensities of lifting weights helped reduce the brain age. And then only heavy lifting also reshaped the connectivity of the prefrontal cortex. And that's gonna be useful when we come back to the protocol a little bit later in this episode.
Myokines, irisin, and BDNF
Philip Pape 13:12
So let's talk about why this works. I think the mechanisms are really cool to understand. This is where I nerd out, and I hope you enjoy this podcast for this reason. Muscle is an endocrine organ. It's an endocrine organ, something that we didn't even really frame it as like a decade ago. When you do a heavy set of squats or rows or pulldowns or whatever, your muscle fibers contract and release a bunch of signaling proteins into your bloodstream. I mentioned the myokines earlier. And the two that get the most attention right now in brain health research specifically are irisin or ericin, I think it's ericin, I-R-I-S-I-N, and cathepsin B. So iricin is really, again, I don't know if I'm pronouncing these right, guys. So iricin is released from the contracting muscle and crosses the blood-brain barrier. And in animal studies, boosting the levels of iricin in your brain actually retrieves memory or recovers, helps memory recover in Alzheimer's models. And in humans, erizin levels in the cerebrospinal fluid are actually lower in people with Alzheimer's. This was, I think this was published in Nature Medicine in 2019, if you want to look it up. Cathepsin B is another myocine and also crosses the blood-brain barrier. It directs directly supports the birth of new brain cells in the hippocampus. So that's what we call neurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells in adulthood, and it's driven by muscle contraction. I mean, that is so cool. I'm smiling as I record this because I just love how we have control over this, guys. We really do. Just by using your body as it's meant to. And I think this paper was from cell metabolism in 2016. So these are legitimate publications, legitimate scientific groups, you know, oftentimes, well, these aren't randomized controlled trials, but they're high quality, let's just say. And then there's BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor. You probably heard about this on lots of different podcasts. I've talked about it on the show before. It's like miracle growth for your brain. Other than maybe that's a bad analogy because then we think of pesticides and stuff. Don't think of that. It's like steroids for your brain. That's not a good analogy either. Anyway, it supports the survival of neurons, and it also supports the growth of new connections between neurons. There was a 2024 meta-analysis of 35 randomized trials in older adults, and they found that resistance training raised the resting BDNF levels with an effect size larger than aerobic exercise did. Okay. So the mechanism, like summary, it goes as follows. If we would put all this together, lifting weights tells your muscle to release these chemicals, these myokines. Those chemicals tell your brain to grow. Aerobic exercise, right? Cardio does some of this too, but not all of it and not always to the same degree. And the prefrontal cortex connections and structure, that seems specifically responsive to heavy mechanical load from resistance training. So not only lifting weights, but making sure it's at a high enough level, which is interesting because I've been talking about osteoporosis as well and how some of the benefits of preserving bone density come from higher loads. So it's not just about hypertrophy. If all you care about is muscle size, fine. A lot of this wouldn't necessarily apply. But if you care about the other 90% of things that affect your health and dementia, brain risk, all of this, then lifting heavy occasionally could actually be its own unique benefit. So doing cardio for your brain, no longer the whole picture, right? There's this entire signaling system activated by resistance training and muscle mass. And this is just one study that's a pretty good piece of evidence that lifting weights is good for your brain.
How to build skills for lifting weights
Philip Pape 16:57
Speaking of lifting weights as brain medicine, if you need a little bit of help with lifting, how to lift, how to progress, how to support your lifting with your nutrition and the other things that support your brain and your lifestyle, everything from sleep to stress, whether you're in perimenopause, menopause, over 40, dealing with hormonal changes, you've tried things before and they don't work, or what you did in the past doesn't work anymore. That is what I created Eat More Lift Heavy for. This is our six-month program. It walks you through building skills one week at a time, and we help you hit your goals in a sustainable way so you can maintain them. Not only that, by the end of the program, we will have taught you how to judge your own data and approach so you really never need a coach again. That is the ultimate goal. And if you want to accelerate your results far more than what you can get just by absorbing information on this podcast, I encourage you to check it out. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. The reason I bring it up in this episode is because, you know, the women and men in EMLH are not lifting to look a certain way necessarily. Of course they want to look better and they're going to look better. I mean, they like the muscle, but the deeper motivation is what we're talking about today. They want to be sharpened to their 60s, their 70s, their 80s. They want to read books and play with their grandkids. They want to keep their independence. And lifting heavy, now heavy is a subjective term. We can get into that on another episode, is how we do that. So eat more liftheavy.com. Check it out.
Lifting protocol for brain health
Philip Pape 18:30
Now we're gonna get to the protocol, right? So you've heard the study. What does the research show? What are the mechanisms? Now what do you do? And the answer is pretty simple. You want to lift weights at least twice a week. Three if you can swing it. I generally tell people three is a good solid minimum to get the most of the results, but two will get you a lot of results. And honestly, one will get you far more results than zero as well. But I really hope you strive for at least two, if not three. Anything less than twice a week from the brain perspective, we're just not sure. But in general, I would say you need a bit of frequency to stimulate your muscles to grow, to get enough mechanical tension from the volume, et cetera. Okay, so that's the amount per week. I would say full body sessions are perfectly fine and sometimes quite effective as opposed to splitting it until you get a little bit more advanced. Today we're talking about brain health. So I want something that is, I'll say the minimum you will absolutely do the shortest sessions you could do, again, at a minimum, to get your muscles moving and also to give them the load they need. And so this is where things like compound movements, variations of squatting and deadlifting, you know, hip hinge, pushing, pulling are hugely beneficial. You don't have to do the power lifting variations of those, like the conventional deadlift per se. I'm gonna do another episode in the future talking about why most lifts are safe if you do them right. So that's not the concern here. It's just a function of what you want to do and why. As far as the actual programming, that is an episode in and of itself. But if you're working in, say, the six to 12 rep range and the last two to three reps feel genuinely hard and you are, you know, two or three reps shy from failure, or even as little as zero to one if it's a smaller movement, that's gonna give you the mechanical tension you need to support strength and muscle growth. And so if you could do two or three sessions a week, 30 to 45 minutes, it's a great protocol to start with. And that is the whole thing. Now, obviously, I have lots more resources behind this. If you join Eat More Lift Heavy, we give you
Entry points for new lifters
Philip Pape 20:45
all sorts of training templates. We give you the protocols on breathing and bracing and adjusting programming and all that, but that is the basics. Now, you might be saying, Philip, I am listening to your show. I'm 55, I've never lifted a barbell, or I've never lifted out lifted weights, or I'm really not sure what to do in the gym. It sounds intimidating. All right, two things. First of all, the LISA subjects or the participants in the LISA study were 62 to 70 years old, and the moderate lifting group that still got a benefit from the brain age. And remember, they were using bands and body weight. They weren't even using barbells or going to the gym. So it's still far, far, far better than not lifting weights. That's that's the first thing I'm gonna say is like, what is your entry point? It doesn't have to be barbell squats per se. The entry point is like showing up and getting some load that is difficult for you so that you can grow and difficult in a good way, right? It challenges you and you're gonna get stronger and progress over time. Start where you are. Number two, I'm gonna say that heavy, heavy is relative. Heavy doesn't mean a ton of weight or more than the next the person next to you, or you know, strong for your body size or weight. No. Heavy means it's challenging for you on this day, and for someone. Who's never lifted, you've got to test that out as you get started. It's okay to go too light and then realize, oh, that's too light and easy. And now I get it. I get what Philip's saying. I need to get to where I don't have too many reps left in the tank. Okay. And there's lots of ways to test that and push that and ever. But as long as you're progressing on the same lifts over time, you're going to be able to find where that is and start to hit those walls that make it feel heavy enough where you know you're at that point. All right. Now that said, remember the heavy group got an extra advantage with the prefrontal cortex. All right. So there are definitely advantages to lifting heavy loads, and there's ways to do it safely. And there's a payoff to all that, including bone density, including strength, et cetera. Function, we can go on. But I want you to start where you're at at least two or three times a week, full body, compound movements, make the last few reps hard. Do that for six months. And I'd love to hear how that affects your brain, especially if you're on the older side and starting this out in your 60s, 70s, maybe 80s. I mean, look, people have built muscle mass in their 90s who didn't lift before. We've seen it in some of the literature. Before we close out, I promised you a 30-second self-test for your own dementia risk. I'm going to share that in a second. But, you know, quickly just another reminder: if today's topic landed for you, if you've been hearing me talk about lifting weights for your brain and for your bone health, for body composition, for visceral fat, all of that stuff. And you're like, okay, where do I even start? That is what Eat More Lift Heavy is for. I mentioned it earlier. I mentioned it one more time. Just check it out. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. It's a nutrition and training program that includes human coaching, includes live calls, and includes tons of support and accountability, but it helps you build skills. It doesn't just help you get quick weight loss, it helps you build skills. And that is the point. So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com, take a look, see if it fits. Doors always open. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. So here is a finding from a study called the Rush Memory and Aging Project. This is this is the thing I promised you, okay? Researchers followed over 900 older adults for four years and they measured their muscle strength at the beginning. And then every one
Grip strength and dementia risk
Philip Pape 24:15
standard deviation increase in muscle strength was associated with a 43% lower risk of developing Alzheimer's. Now, the most, I'll say accessible, the easiest way to measure your own muscle strength is grip strength, in terms of if you're trying to compare it to uh charts and data points and studies and things like that. It's not something that I train. I don't ever, I've never told anybody to train them grip strength. Some old school, you know, factory workers and manual laborers and like our grandpa probably had stronger grips just from their day-to-day job. And it predicts a lot of things, including dementia, mortality, recovery from illness. I know that when I had my, what was it? One of one of the first surgeries I had, they had me test my grip strength later on. I think it was for my shoulder, right? For my rotator cuff, uh, by squeezing this device. And I remember how, you know, the physical therapist is like, okay, we never have to do this again. You've got more than sufficient grip strength. And that's because I had already trained for years before that point. I stayed strong. I started training after I had surgery right. And it's a good, you know, the fact that they're telling me to test that, and there's some expectation that some people will not have good enough grip strength tells you there's a link there. And you don't need a fancy device to do it, though. You can hang from a pull-up bar and see how long you can hold and then kind of like progressively overload that, if you will, which comes with strength. You can, you know, obviously, if you know that it's hard to open a jar or something on a good day, like that gives you a signal as well. There are grip strength little devices you can get, like at Amazon or whatever. But regardless, my point is you're not trying to fix your grip specifically. You're just trying to get stronger generally. And so if you start lifting, if you do it regularly, if you do all the different parts of, you know, exercise all the parts of your body, build that engine, your grip strength will also go up as well. But I'm just telling you that this is a good sign that if you feel like you have a very weak grip, you're probably not very strong and you have a lot of potential. That's that's where I'm going with that. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, your muscle strength and muscle mass isn't just about looking good in the mirror, being generally healthy. It protects everything else, including your mind. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
