Maintaining Muscle Mass and Strength to Support Healthy Aging [Podcast Series]

• [:55] Dr. Bantham introduces her guests, Eric Levitan and Dr. Katie Starr

  • Eric Levitan is Founder and CEO of Vivo

  • Dr. Katie Starr is Assistant Professor in Medicine at Duke University, Research Health Scientist at Durham Veterans Administration, and Scientific Advisor to Vivo

• [1:20] Vivo inspiration

  • “And the more I started looking into that, the more I started recognizing that we all lose muscle as we age and how impactful this is not just to increase fall risk, but impactful for our quality of life, impactful for making us more susceptible to the diseases of aging.”

• [3:29] Maintaining muscle mass 

  • “[A]s we are aging, that strength training component is so important, because not only does it help us maintain muscle mass, it also helps with the quality of the muscle.  It helps us reduce that fat that starts to infiltrate that muscle, so that the muscle will continue to contract like it's supposed to, allowing us to continue to do the activities that we want to do, stay independent, and really be able to have that independence that we all crave as we get older and age and want to still do the things that we love with our families, with our spouses, with our friends.”

• [5:48] Creating shared experiences 

  • “We know that, not for everybody but for most people, community and social engagement is really at the core of behavioral change. And so if we can provide this kind of underlying shared experience with other humans, even though we're remote, and that's meeting people where they are, that’s also really helpful.”  

• [9:15] Measuring success

  • “And so what the assessments allow us to do is really identify where people are coming in at, so that we can truly develop a program that fits them.  It's not a cookie cutter program. And that's the purpose of these assessments is really to try to help meet people where they're at, identify some of those barriers, identify some of those fears, so that we can really try to talk through those.” 

• [12:42] Importance of strength training

  • “This is functional movement where you are challenging yourself so that you can do activities of daily living really comfortably for the rest of your days. And so this is important stuff that we get people comfortable with. But it's not intuitive. And it's not being talked about enough.”

• [17:14] The role of fitness professionals

  • “So your relationship with a trainer is everything. And even a mediocre program in the hands of a great trainer is a fantastic experience. Whereas a great program in the hands of a mediocre or poor trainer is a terrible experience. And so we understand that the trainer is the single most important part of that relationship and what we're doing.”

• [21:07] Creating community and social engagement online

  • “And what we're doing by delivering this in an online interactive way is removing some of those barriers that people have to working out to begin with.  You don't have to get into a car, you don't have to drive to a gym, you don't have to deal with traffic or parking or an awkward experience where you don't know what you're doing in an actual fitness studio. It's not as good as being with people, but it's pretty darn close.”

• [24:18] Physical resilience and aging

  • “And so what I really try to instill in our members and any person I get to work with who is aging is the fact that we don't know when some of these stressors may arise. But what we really want to do is focus on how can we strengthen our body, get our body primed and ready for anything that we don't, we're not ready, we don't know it's coming.”

• [26:46] COVID-19 pandemic impact on vision and model

  • “We got an opportunity to really impact three or what I would consider different groups of people. First and foremost, there's people that just don't have access to do this otherwise, right? You may not live by a gym, or a boutique fitness studio, or a senior center, or any kind of community access that would facilitate a fitness experience, and how amazing to be able to get that wherever you are. The second part was people who were really intimidated by going into more of a group fitness experience.  We had the opportunity to give them a safer place that you could try this, you could try this in the comfort of your home, where it just felt a little bit more approachable. And then the third group is people that we're probably going to work out anyway. But we just made it a whole lot easier.”