Best Of 2024 With Ginny Yurich, Dr. Olivia Lesslar, And Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

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Our end-of-year gift to you is this “highlight reel” of sorts, featuring excerpts from the most listened-to episodes of 2024! Ginny Yurich covers how our children benefit from being outdoors. Dr. Olivia Lesslar explains how to communicate to our body that the coast is clear and that we’re in a safe space to heal. And Dr. Gabrielle Lyon goes over how strength training can help us avoid the “diseases of aging”: obesity, cancer, and diabetes. Listen and benefit from the insights each guest brings!

And check out each episode in its entirety:

Wise Traditions podcast 458 “Get Your Kids Outside” with Ginny Yurich

Wise Traditions podcast 464 “Repair and Reset Your Body with Safety Signaling” with Dr. Olivia Lesslar

Wise Traditions podcast 466 “Build Muscle To Stay Strong & Live Long” with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Ginny Yurich, Dr. Olivia Lesslar, And Dr. Gabrielle Lyon.

How do our children benefit from being outdoors? How can we help our body know that the coast is clear and we’re in a safe space to heal? How can strength training help us avoid the diseases of aging like obesity, cancer, and diabetes? This is Episode 507, and this is our end-of-year gift to you. An episode sampler of sorts with excerpts from the most popular episodes of the year.

In this episode, you’ll read about Ginny Yurich, Dr. Olivia Lesslar, and Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, whose interviews were the favorites in 2024. We’ll start with a segment from Episode 458, Get Your Kids Outside with Ginny Urich. She’s the Founder of 1,000 Hours Outside, and she covers how our kids’ physical well-being, cognitive and emotional health, creativity, and social skills all improve from time outdoors.

Before we get the ball rolling, why don’t you give your family a gift of the Weston A. Price Foundation book 11 Dietary Principles? This book gives an overview of how to eat more ancestrally now. There’s something in each chapter that you can implement for better health. Get your copy now. It’s only $10 or $5 if you place a bulk order of 10 or more. Maybe you could spring for a copy for each member of your entire extended family. Either way, go to westonaprice.org and click on the order material button on the homepage to find this new eleven principles book.

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The Importance Of Kids Playing Outside

Okay, so we’re kicking off with excerpt number one from Episode 458, Get Your Kids Outside with Ginny Urich. Enjoy.

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Kids are not outside anymore, and they’re not naturally in the neighborhood. There’s a fantastic book by a man named Mike Lanza named Playborhood where he talks about how your neighborhood is dull and boring. When generations past looked out their window, there were other kids playing and that would entice them out. That just does not exist anymore. The whole shift in society has moved inside.

When a kid’s trying to decide what to do, he says there’s 100% chance that something’s going to be on TV. There’s 100% chance that something new is going to be on their social media app, but there’s sometimes a 0% chance that there’s going to be another kid outside. What we are doing is we are being intentional about getting our kids outside.

Often, that looks like making plans with other families because that is really the most enticing thing for a child, is to have someone else to play with. It’s a little bit of extra work. It’s definitely different than how it used to be, but it’s very worth it for the family unit as a whole because I think as parents, we need that outside time and that green time just as much as our kids do because we’re immersed in this technological world, too.

I often say more is caught than taught. First of all, we need to model it. It’s good for us as well. Tell me this, is it true that on average we spend 4 to 7 minutes outside each day and 4 to 7 hours on our screens?

Yes. It’s a huge imbalance. That’s the issue. We are not anti-screen. We are just about bringing back balance because kids need this. That fact is well-researched. Kids and adults, but especially kids for this developmental period, they need it for their cognition, for the way their brains are wired. They need it for their emotional respite, for their social skills to practice coming up with something out of nothing, for creativity, for negotiating rules for pickup sports, and all that stuff. They need it for their physical bodies.

We’re talking about their bone structure, we’re talking about exposure to sunlight, Vitamin D, we’re talking about their body rhythms. I love seeing you’re up in the morning, you’re up in the morning in your tank top, and it’s 20 degrees outside. This is really important for our children’s development. What we’re seeing is we’re seeing a mess. Kids are struggling, and this is one of the main reasons why.

I didn’t realize this until you started talking, Ginny. I remember when my husband and I were youth group leaders and we took the kids on a retreat, and this young man was running through a field. He got his feet somehow stuck in a little pothole in the field, and he broke both of his legs. I was puzzled as to why until now. I’m realizing he spent most of his time inside. He probably didn’t have bone density, not to mention that his diet was probably nutrient-poor, but I didn’t think until now that he wasn’t used to moving around.

The Importance Of Weight-Bearing Exercises

Kids need load-bearing exercises and so do adults. One of the things that I’ve learned about in the past couple years is just carrying weight. If you’re a parent and you’re going to go on a hike with your kid, put an extra weight on your back because that’s going to help with your bone density. One of the things that Katie Bowman talks about, she’s one of my favorites from Nutritious Movement, and she’s got great books, but she says, “Osteoporosis is a childhood disease that shows up in adulthood,” because childhood kids are meant to jump and land, and that’s what they do naturally. My kids, even my teens, they’re constantly jumping up onto things. Can they get up higher? They call it box jump and they’re trying to jump off and then they jump off. Every time they land, that is strengthening their skeletal system, that impact.

 

Kids are meant to jump and land. That’s what they do naturally. Every time they land, that strengthens their skeletal system.

 

We have kids that are sitting and they say kids are sitting six hours a day. Just most of childhood has become sitting for schoolwork, sitting to drive to this extracurricular activity and sitting for screens. Kids are not getting that impact, those load-bearing activities. Here we are in the winter, so same with you, it’s like in the twenties, each season offers new activities for load-bearing work. For example, if you’re in the winter and it’s snowing and your kid’s dragging a sled up a hill, that’s heavy work.

Moving up through the snow and using their quadriceps, or if they’re shoveling or if it’s the middle of the summer and you have them carry a log for the campfire or something like that. Nature provides these opportunities for kids and they’re fun and they want to do them. While they’re doing them, it’s helping them develop.

How To Encourage Kids To Play Outside

I live in a city, and what if someone’s not a homesteader or a homeschooler, and being outside actually doesn’t seem very safe? I can see why a parent would choose to have their kid play a video game or something indoors. How can we get them out when we’re not in that scenario?

I think we’re back to the same thing. We got to go with them or we have to send them with friends. That depends on their age, obviously. People ask this question a lot, like, “What if I live here and what if I live there?” The answer really is that each place offers its own unique advantages and disadvantages. There’s a man named Dan Butner who is with National Geographic, and he talks about people who live into their 100s of centenarians.

He says, “Your ideal is to live in a walkable city so that you can walk to get your groceries and walk to get this or that.” He would really recommend a city. You’re going to go out, you’re going to walk to the restaurant, and you’re going to walk to the library. You can do that if you live in a city, but you maybe don’t have as much green space, or maybe you can’t send your kid by themselves because there’s all sorts of people out there and it doesn’t feel safe.

You have this advantage, but a disadvantage. If you live in a suburb, maybe you’ve got a lot of neighborhood kids and your kid can go bike the neighborhood, and there’s going to be some other kids that they can go knock on the doors, but you don’t have the library that you can walk to. You have to drive to that. You’re not close enough. Advantages and disadvantages.

If you live in the country and you’re in a rural spot, you may have no neighbors, there’s no other kids. Maybe you have animals, but there’s not that piece of other children to entice your kids out. You’ve got space to roam, but you don’t have this neighborhood, this hubbub. My father-in-law grew up in a neighborhood where there were 72 kids on either side of the street within like 6 houses or something. There’s always something going on. There’s always someone to play with. If you live out in the country, you may not have that, but you have more space. In each situation, there’s something to be celebrated and there’s a challenge. I think we look at what is it that we can do and just try and focus on that.

The Divide Between Virtual Life And Real-Life Experiences

At the same time, I want to go back to what you were saying at first. There is this chasm now between virtual life and real life. I’ve never seen a child throw a tantrum because he couldn’t go outside. I have seen toddlers get upset when their parents take the device away from them.

Dysregulated. There’s a really good book about it. I love it. It’s one of my favorite books about it. She talks about how screen time dysregulates you. Kids are off. Their whole systems are off, and it’s that flashing screen and it’s meant to lull you into this zombie-like state. It is hard to come in and out of that. I’ve noticed, even with myself, so let’s say we go to the park and I’m there with my kids and I bring a book, like a really good book, like a good story. It’s so easy to pop in and out of that when kids are like, “Mom, look at me,” or, “I want to show you this,” or they come over to have a conversation.

It is extremely difficult, I think, to pop in and out of a screen, even for an adult. You’re just sucked in in a different way. Kids are experiencing that, too, I think with a brain that’s less developed and with the frontal cortex and all of that stuff that’s going on. It can really be hard for them, I think, to step in and out. Transitions are hard, anyway. Transitions are hard for kids no matter what. That’s a really big transition when it’s messed a little bit with their nervous system, their eyes. There’s a lot going on there.

In fact, this author who, I can’t think of what her name is, she said it’s better for a kid to just watch an old movie, one that’s a little slower paced, than to have this interactive screen time. It’s almost like a misnomer. I would think it’s better for my kid to be creating on this app, or it seems like it’s less lazy. She said, “No, it’s better for their system.” She talks about like doing a reset. During this reset, they don’t do any interactive screens, but she does allow a movie now and then, because it’s not quite so jarring to the nervous system.

I can understand why a reset might be needed because many parents use the devices as babysitters. The episode I was talking about, the toddler throwing a tantrum, literally was at a soccer game. I think one of the parents was on the field, the other parent was at on the sidelines with his kid. The kid wanted to be entertained not by what the people were doing on the field, and not by creative play, but by a device. We’re using it as a babysitter and then the kid gets accustomed to it and becomes dysregulated, I imagine.

I found the book. It’s by Victoria Dunckley. She’s a doctor. It’s called Reset Your Child’s Brain: A Four-Week Plan to End Meltdowns, Raise Grades, and Boost Social Skills. It’s a phenomenal book because I really was confused on the topic of what type of screens should we be doing. I just saw the same thing. I was sitting at a basketball game and this little boy next to me, who couldn’t have been more than five, had the phone and it was right up in his face. He was watching YouTube and it was inappropriate. It was a situation where I think his dad was a coach and the grandma was watching the game, so they did give it to him as a babysitter. I thought, “You could be talking about so many different things.” Whatever. I’m not going to interject myself. It’s a tricky situation.

It’s not your business but you’re observing what’s happening. You’re right. I’ve heard that it’s actually even bad for their vision because our ancestors were looking out at the horizon. It’s bad for all of our vision, as you’re saying, not just the children. They were looking at the horizon. They were changing the things. They were scanning the environment and instead, we’re all looking at devices within six inches of our face.

It’s two dimensional. There’s a whole piece there too. That’s also in that book by Victoria Dunckley. Katie Bowman talks about it, too. She says when we’re inside, our eyes are always constricted. There’s a ciliary ring that goes around the eye. It’s always constricted, like if you’re lifting weights like your bicep or something like that. It’s even constricted when you sleep. This is flexed, this muscle around your eyes, a ciliary ring.

The only time that it relaxes is when you have distance looking, like you said, like our ancestors, where there’s an opportunity to see far. We’re seeing this major increase in nearsightedness. I just read a book called Renegade Beauty by Nadine Artemis. She was saying the ophthalmologists and a lot of people are saying that kids need about three hours of time outside a day for that optimal growth and development for their bodies.

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Read the entire episode with Ginny, Episode 458, Get Your Kids Outside.

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Coming up, we’ll read about Dr. Olivia Lesslar. Olivia offers simple yet profound ways to let your body know it is safe to heal.

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How To Tune In More To Our Bodies

Here is the excerpt from Episode 464 Repair and Reset Your Body with Safety Signaling with Dr. Olivia Lessler.

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Help me and help the reader right now understand how we can start to maybe tune in more to our body so that we can feel safe and more in harmony with it and seeing even the symptoms as perhaps a sign of the direction in which our body is trying to help us heal.

I think that the medical fraternity has actually done quite a big disservice because I feel that we are one of the people that have been stoking this idea that if a symptom needs to be quelled, a symptom needs to be cut out, needs to be burned, needs to be medicated because then, we have fostered three generations of people that can no longer read those symptoms.

They no longer see symptoms as a way for the body to communicate. They no longer see symptoms as the body trying its best. In fact, I’ve started to look at symptoms as, “My body’s working.” We’ll probably get into it, but I used to be very sick and when I started to see things differently, when I help my patients not only try to dampen the threat signaling, but also to increase safety signaling, they do better.

How do they do that? Threat signaling is going to be anything where obviously you don’t feel safe. For some patients, that could be certain foods. Some certain foods are going to trigger them, whether it’s oxalate heavy foods or histamine foods or whatever it is. In context, you also have to see that a lot of the time, foods can trigger you because those threat signals are up, which is why patients with issues, with digestion or whatever it is, they’ll tell you it’s worse when they’re stressed.

The corollary must be true. It’s better when you are happy when you are safe or satisfied or whatever. It’s about understanding how to manipulate the entire situation. The psycho-neuro-immunology means that you can try and use behavioral sciences, you can use your psychology, you can use your hormones and so on and so forth.

We are friends with lots of hormone doctors. They talk about how all these other symptoms that you sometimes think aren’t related to hormones get better with hormones. That’s the whole point of having all these different push points. Trying to deal with the threat signals, whatever those may be. Increasing safety signals is actually very simple. Increasing safety signals is going back to evolutionary science, basically.

There are three basic ones and that’s light, nutrients and temperature. From an evolutionary perspective, there are five threats. Plague, famine, winter, predator, damage to your eight senses because any issues with these five things are going to send you in high alert. If you know that those five things can be a problem, feeding the safety of those five things is going to help you with the situation.

Predator, for example, is anything where you feel unsafe even anything that’s going to spike your cortisol or your adrenaline losing your car keys, for example. We know, do some deep breathing, for example, or change your behavior. Know that you put your car keys in a particular place every time. Little things like that helps to increase safety signaling.

I always say to my patients, “It’s really important to get out into wide open spaces because only apex will do that. You don’t care if another apex predator can see you from the hills. You are going to be in a wide-open space, chest up, head up, arms open, palms out because you are not harboring a weapon or anything like that. You use your head moving it side to side with your eyes scanning the horizon because just the fact that you can look around for threats puts your nervous system at ease. The fact that you can look, can see, can hear, can touch.

That is why when we wear shoes all the time, these sensory deprivation chambers, your brain doesn’t get information from that, which is always meant to be in contact with the ground. That sets a lot of people’s nervous system on edge. The fact that we’ve always got our head down looking in one direction, IE, our laptop or our phones, that also gets the nervous system really agitated because it’s saying subconsciously you haven’t looked around for a while. You haven’t looked to see if there’s a threat. “Hello? Hi? You haven’t looked to see if there’s a threat.”

The very fact that you can turn your head puts a nervous system at ease. I actually have another patient. He was already on edge with other things. He had some issues and then he had to go into like a neck brace for a little bit and the neck brace completely broke him. He wound up with a panic attack because of it and everything fell apart having the neck brace because he couldn’t look around. He even said when he put the neck brace on, his eyes kept darting backwards and forwards like a scared animal. He took the neck brace off and was able to move, that was the start of his healing journey.

I want to apply some of the things you’ve said in terms of increasing my own safety signaling and I wonder if there are other simple things, Olivia, that you’ve shared with your most complicated cases that might surprise the reader right now, or me.

I’ll take a particular patient, and this is exactly the formula that I gave her. I wanted her to actually have more animal products and in fact, I put her on a carnivore diet. Now the reason being is because meat, carnivore, nose to tail, that’s time of plenty. You are not in winter. You’re eating root vegetables. You are in time of plenty. You are going to have very regular meals because the body loves circadian manifestations of whatever. It doesn’t want to have to worry about that next meal.

We are talking someone who’s nervous system is on the brink. You can take from this what you want, but in her case, I wanted her to eat like clockwork. It’s one less thing for the nervous system to think about and it could redirect its energies into other things. She’s eating regularly, she was waking up at the exact same time. She was going to sleep at the exact same time, just taking away any of these sorts of stressors.

She was exercising at the exact same time and she wasn’t doing hardcore aerobics because I don’t want your body to think in any way, shape or form that you are running from something or you’re putting up a fight. It was all very sort of more resistance and yoga and that stuff. In her case, I wanted her to drink mineralized water. My favorite is Vichy Catalan. It’s got quite a high amount of natural lithium in it, for example. The fact that you are able to somehow source good quality water means that it’s not winter. Flowing water with life in it.

I put her on some supplements, but I only put her on food derived supplements because that’s important. Food derived supplements carries with it, I feel, like an energy to it. Your body recognizes it. I know that some people will argue with that point and that’s fine, too. I use synthetic supplements all the time, but in her case, I really just wanted to just get right back to basics. The prescription for her as well was to have a lot of intimacy, a lot of touching, just being held with someone that you have already made a vow with and trust in their room, which is meant to be this safe space as well.

All the electronics were taken out of the room. You are not to be distracted. This is meant to be your haven. Her husband was very happy about that. The prescription was intimacy. Being held. Also, of course, not just when to eat and what to eat, but how to eat. To start every meal with gratitude. Christians have it with the prayer. Making sure that you are preparing your body to receive nutrients because I believe that when you eat in a parasympathetic way, with gratitude, with enjoyment, with love.

That’s why I’m not particularly fussy with other patients about whether or not they have alcohol or what they eat. When you eat in a parasympathetic way, I have seen patients do a lot better than patients who eat the perfect food but they’re almost orthorexic about it. “How many calories is this? Is it organic? Is it this, is it that?” They get so riled up about that, they don’t eat in a parasympathetic way. That’s this particular patient’s prescription.

It makes me think of Steve Jobs, the guy who was the head of Apple and started all that years ago. He used to only wear a black turtleneck and jeans. I think this was basically his uniform because he was trying to have one less decision that he had to make every day. It seems to me someone who feels off balance in any way could benefit from having these rhythms of how they’re going to live, what they’re going to eat and what they’re going to do bring them a sense of safety and security.

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Read the entire Episode 464, Repair and Reset Your Body with Safety Signaling.

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Skeletal Muscle As A Vital Organ

Finally, batting cleanup is Dr. Gabrielle Lyon from Episode 466, Build Muscle to Stay Strong and Live Long. Gabrielle gets specific about how movement primes the body, lowering inflammation and reducing the risks of cancer, diabetes, and obesity. She also shares her recommendations for exercises that promote optimal muscular health.

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A lot of us talk about the skin being the largest organ in the body, but we overlook the second largest. Can you tell us about that?

The skin, it’s really funny. This is human nature. We believe what we hear over and over again. We believe repetition rather than believing truth. Skin is not the largest organ. Actually, it’s skeletal muscle. Skeletal muscle is an organ system. I highlight skeletal muscle for the reader because there are other types of muscle. There’s smooth muscle, there’s muscle within the arteries, the uterus, cardiac muscle. Skeletal muscle is the muscle in the bicep or the quad and it’s muscle under voluntary control. By the way, it makes up roughly 40% of an individual’s body, making it the largest organ in the human body organ system, which is incredible.

The skin is not. I guess I’ve been misinformed all these years. Why is the skin not, and why has it been perceived as being the largest organ?

I think just because of the surface area. We have really been misguided in medicine. One of the ways in which we’ve been misguided is we’ve really ignored skeletal muscle as an organ system. Skeletal muscle is always, or typically thought about as it relates to exercise or sport performance or looking good. When in reality, there is nothing more critical to our health and wellness and to our longevity than the actual health of our skeletal muscle.

 

There is nothing more critical to our health, wellness, and longevity than the actual health of our skeletal muscle.

 

Maintaining And Improving Skeletal Muscle Health

Let’s get into it. How can we shore up the health of our skeletal muscle?

The way in which you do that, there’s two main ways, and that is through exercise movement, which we’re going to talk all about, and diet.

Let’s start with exercise, because surprisingly, Gabrielle, on this show, we haven’t addressed movement much, though obviously, it’s a part of every culture. Since the beginning of time, we were made to move. What do you know about the benefits of movement to muscle health and are there specific movements and exercises that you would recommend?

I’ve thought about this quite a bit and movement. I love that you said that. When we think about skeletal muscle as an organ system, we have to understand that exercising or in motion skeletal muscle, it does certain things. Why do we care about movement? We care about movement because when we contract skeletal muscle, skeletal muscle, as an organ system, secretes myokines.

Myokines are little proteins that travel throughout the body. We look at the way skeletal muscle contracts, and again, it secretes these myokines, but exercising skeletal muscle also improves things like insulin sensitivity. We’ve all heard about these diseases of aging. They don’t start later on. They start early with the health of our skeletal muscle. Ways in which we are inactive really have a tremendous effect. What does that mean, and why does that matter? There’s no such thing as a healthy sedentary person. A healthy sedentary person doesn’t exist. Walking, rucking. I think we should talk about rucking. I think we should talk about resistance exercise. All of these things impact the health of skeletal muscle.

 

I think you’re right. I think even if we didn’t know the science behind some of these things, when we are sedentary, when we’re seated at our desks all day, and then we come home and we watch TV and we sit on the couch, when we have a sedentary lifestyle, we’re riding around in our cars to get to and fro, we don’t feel great. We know it deep inside. It doesn’t matter if the person who’s being sedentary is thin because it’s not about appearance. As you mentioned earlier, it’s about health.

I know you bring up a really good point. When an individual is sedentary, you don’t necessarily feel the decrease in lipid oxidation, the decrease in glucose utilization, we don’t feel that. It’s not felt. When an individual is sedentary, skeletal muscle, over time, has what we call a decreased flux. If we think about it really high level, we know that skeletal muscle is important. We know that movement is important because it’s priming this organ system.

Just like we exercise to have a healthy cardiovascular system, a healthy thyroid endocrine system, we can’t do much directly, but with skeletal muscle, we have direct control over that. When an individual is inactive, it’s not just that the skeletal muscle isn’t contracting things or isn’t releasing the things, but it also creates low levels of inflammation. It changes the actual tissue. For example, if healthy skeletal muscle looks like a filet, I know that everyone on this show has probably eaten filet, unhealthy skeletal muscle looks like a marbled ribeye steak.

This happens over time. The thing is, is this is really where these disease processes start. My baseline recommendation, it’s interesting. They give these baseline recommendations of 150 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous activity, 2 days a week of resistance training. I think that we can go deeper. If we think about how humans were designed before we became domesticated, I think about what are the actions that we must take to maintain our independence.

To me, it’s not just going to the gym and getting on a machine, very helpful, but very specific things that I would tell people to do would be to carry things. Whether you’re carrying a kettlebell, whether you are carrying your children. I have two little children. You better believe I exercise with them. I strongly believe that that’s probably what people used to do. They used to carry their kids on their back, chest or shoulder. This can also be a form of exercise, this idea of just moving our body in a way that is very helpful, like rucking or throwing on a backpack, etc.

This makes so much sense. I’ve seen this with my own eyes. As you know, at the Weston A. Price Foundation, we value very much the research and work of Dr. Weston A. Price, who traveled the world in the 1930s, finding isolated indigenous people groups that were apart from modernity. He recorded a lot about their diets. Me and some other experiential anthropologists have started traveling the world in his footsteps.

Gabrielle, I’ve seen women carrying water jugs on their heads. They don’t need to go to a gym or do a rucksack thing and wearing babies because they’re incorporating this movement and this training that is so beneficial naturally as a part of their day in and day out lives. Whereas you and I that live in a more developed country or whatever, in a more modern lifestyle, have unfortunately defaulted to a more sedentary form of life. We have to be more intentional about our movement.

I would agree with that. We really do have to create a culture that balances the high technology culture that we have. I’m not against technology. We need it. We get to do this. This is amazing. Also, being very mindful that the influence that it has is one of extreme sedentary behavior. Is walking enough? I don’t think it’s enough. I do think about movements that potentially if we didn’t have a car, we didn’t have an elevator and we didn’t have pulleys and things to move things, what are the actions that we have to be able to do? We have to be able to get up off the floor. We have to be able to carry heavy things. We have to be able to push up heavy things, lifting them. We have to be able to climb, climb up, climb down.

These are all actions that I think that we should incorporate into exercise that we often don’t. I know that there’s primal movement, etc., but really thinking about aging, thinking about balance, thinking about plyometrics. What happens when someone falls and breaks a hip? That typically really changes the trajectory of their life. If we begin to really understand that skeletal muscle is the only organ system that we have direct control over, we can maintain power and strength. It’s interesting because I think for an older individual, it’s very difficult to overtrain. There’s a lot of talk about rest and recovery. I don’t feel that we are on that side of the spectrum. I think that we’re on the side of the spectrum that we have a lot to do.

 

If we begin to truly understand that skeletal muscle is the only organ system we have direct control over, we can maintain power and strength.

 

That’s such a good word. What’s coming to my mind right now is I’ve interviewed people about Vitamin A and how critical that is for your overall well-being, hormonal health and so forth. People often share with me, “I’m concerned about Vitamin A toxicity.” The issue is just like what you say, Gabrielle, we err on the side of too little Vitamin A, not too much. People are concerned about something that may not apply at all.

I absolutely agree with you. We are robust humans, and I’ll tell you this, and this is maybe a little more esoteric, but capacity is cultivated within the arena. Capacity is cultivated within the arena of life. We are designed to do hard things. We are designed to do hard, physical and mental things. The moment that we take away that opportunity and we self-impose a limiting opportunity, that’s when everything changes. The moment we take ourselves out of the arena.

It’s just that human nature is wanting to press that easy button, don’t you think?

I don’t. What I do think, and I’m so grateful that you mentioned that, I do believe that we have been taught that. We have been taught that stress is bad. We have been taught that there is fight or flight, and that’s the only stress response. I have seen a lot of patients in my time. There is also literature that there are other stress responses. I don’t want to go too far off, but I do mention this in the book. There’s fight or flight and that’s just one stress response. There’s also tendon befriend and the courage response. What we believe and how we operate within our life will truly cultivate our response to stress and the meaning of stress.

I understand what you’re referring to. It reminds me of the trend right now of cold adaptation or cold thermogenesis. It’s a purposeful hormetic stressor because it has a fabulous result for the body. Rather than just thinking, “My only options are jump out of the water screaming or freeze to death,” there’s something in between. That’s what you’re referring to, I believe.

Number one, we have to train our body. Even when you don’t feel like it, it’s a non-negotiable. You should be doing resistance training, whether it’s 2 to 3 days a week, 4 days a week. There are multiple different ways to design a program. There are multiple different opportunities to experience that. On the internet, it’s easy.

The other thing to do is utilize your body through rucking. Throwing on a backpack. GORUCK has a great backpack and multiple different kinds of backpacks. Train with your children on your back, figure out different ways to do it. Just do the uncomfortable and continue to do it because that’s what your body needs.

The other aspect to that is could you do cardiovascular activity? There’s a lot of discussion about zone two training. You could. Are there metabolic effects to that? Yes, and/or you could do some type of high intensity interval training. There are multiple different protocols. You could do 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off. You could do a minute at a sub maximal output and then a minute or two minutes to fully recover. Martin Gibala at McMaster University talks all about this one-minute workout. A lot of evidence behind it. Essentially, there are multiple ways to move the needle of muscle.

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Read this episode in its entirety. That’s podcast Episode 466, Build Muscle to Stay Strong and Live Long.

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Our guests were Ginny Yurich, Dr. Olivia Lesslar, and Dr. Gabriel Lyon. Ginny’s website is 1000hoursoutside.com. Olivia’s website is drolivialesslar.com. Gabrielle’s is drgabriellelyon.com. Now for a review from Apple Podcasts from Mrs. May Love. “This podcast, I’ve been listening for years. They get better every year.” Here’s to 2025, Mrs. May. Thank you for your words of encouragement. Happy holidays and happy new year to each of you from me and the Weston A. Price Foundation family. Thank you for reading, my friends. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

 

About Ginny Yurich

Ginny Yurich is a homeschooling mother of five and founder of 1000 Hours Outside, a global movement designed to reclaim childhood. Along with her husband, Josh, Ginny is a full-time creator and curator of the 1000 Hours Outside lifestyle brand, which includes a robust online store, an app, and books. She also hosts the 1000 Hours Outside weekly podcast. A thought leader in the world of nature-based play and its benefits for children, Ginny lives with her family in the Ann Arbor area of Michigan.

 

About Dr. Olivia Ly Lesslar

Dr. Olivia Ly Lesslar is a medical doctor with a background in International Relations. She has completed postgraduate studies in skin cancer medicine and clinical nutrition management. She has an interest and expertise in preventative medicine, psychoneuroimmunology, longevity and complex conditions like neurodegeneration, cancer, and allergies. Her unique skill set is in problem-solving multisystem, chronic conditions and keeping up-to-date with non-pharmaceutical interventions.

 

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