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Summary
On episode 512 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Philip Shepherd and Andrei Yakovenko, co-authors of Deep Fitness. Philip is a leader in the global embodiment movement and creator of the Embodied Present Process, while Andrei is the founder of New Element Training in Toronto and creator of the Net Method behind the book.
They lay out Mindful Strength Training to Failure (MSTF), a method built around very slow, deeply focused reps taken to genuine muscle failure, done in as little as thirty minutes once a week. The conversation covers why muscle loss (sarcopenia) drives so much chronic disease, how myokines released during hard muscle work benefit nearly every system in the body, and why bringing full attention to the working muscle matters as much as the exercise itself.
They also tackle a common fear head on: that joint pain or arthritis means resistance training is off the table. Using the concept of biotensegrity, they explain why strengthening the muscles around a joint, even a painful one, tends to reduce pain rather than make it worse.
Links
- https://deepfitness.life
- https://newelementtraining.com
- https://embodiedpresent.com
Key Takeaways
- Muscle loss (sarcopenia) is tied to nearly every chronic disease of aging. Researchers found that the conditions we associate with getting older, from heart disease to diabetes, are consistently linked to loss of muscle mass, not just the passage of time itself.
- Less muscle means less place to store sugar, so more of it becomes fat. Muscle and the liver are where the body stores glycogen. With less muscle mass, that storage capacity shrinks, pushing more incoming sugar toward fat storage and raising inflammation.
- Working muscle releases myokines that help the whole body. Over 600 of these messenger molecules have been identified, and the harder and more intensely a muscle contracts, the more are released, benefiting mental function, bone density, and inflammation levels.
- MSTF is built on very slow reps taken to true failure. Rather than counting reps, you track time under load, lifting and lowering the weight slowly until the muscle truly cannot continue, often in a minute or two per exercise, then move on.
- Feel the muscle before you focus on the movement. Andrei explains that people who cannot mentally connect to the muscle they are working end up training everything except the target muscle. Paying close attention actually rewires the brain’s map for that muscle, which is why cueing “feel the muscle” comes before the standard form cues.
- Breathing through the effort, not holding it, changes the experience. Continuous breath rather than a held breath under strain reduces pressure on the internal organs and, in their view, helps power the movement itself.
- The last fifteen to thirty seconds before failure do most of the work. Approaching failure triggers an adrenaline response tied to specific adaptations. In one cited animal study, mice with elevated levels of a related protein gained over 100 percent more endurance than a control group doing the identical amount of exercise.
- Joint pain is not always a reason to avoid resistance training. Biotensegrity describes how bones float in a web of muscle, fascia, and connective tissue rather than sitting bone on bone. In a cited arthritis study, people who strengthened the muscles around a painful knee got stronger and their pain decreased.
- Philip and Andrei’s three strategies to get and stay well: watch what you put in your body since you cannot out-exercise a bad diet, do proper strength training to failure once or twice a week, and renew your relationship with your body by dropping out of your head and trusting what it can do.
“You can’t out exercise a bad diet.”
Philip Shepherd
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