 Question is from McFlex. What are the benefits of strength training when battling depression and anxiety? Oh, wow. So first, I want to preface this by saying that we're not doctors or therapists. But I'm going to speak from just experience from working with clients and also working with clients, doctors for training clients for years and oftentimes when they had a situation pop up that would come up in their questionnaire, I would contact their doctor and then we would kind of work together. Now, the studies are pretty clear now that any kind of physical activity or exercise has a very positive effect on anxiety and low to moderate types of depression. In fact, in head-to-head comparisons against some of the most popular anti-depressant medications, exercise is as good in the medium term and in the long term, some studies even say that exercise is more effective. So it's definitely something that is extremely effective. Now, the problem, of course, is if I'm depressed and anxious, the last thing I want to do is go exercise. So it's kind of like, OK, which one do I do first? I've got to get rid of this and this is how I get rid of it. But now, because I feel this way, I don't want to go exercise. So that's the hard part. Let's just say that you can will yourself to get to a gym or start being exercised. Number one, any type of activity should have a, as long as it's appropriate, should have a positive effect on both anxiety and depression. That being said, I will make the case that strength training is the best form of exercise for these things, for a few different reasons. One, resistance training, when done properly, has a very positive effect on hormones. And we know the role that hormones play in how we feel. So in men, resistance training has been shown to raise low levels of testosterone. Low levels of testosterone definitely can cause depression or anxiety in men. In women, resistance training, when done appropriately, is a more effective way of balancing out your progesterone and estrogen balance, which, when that's out, it can cause anxiety and depression. Resistance training also is pro muscle, pro tissue. Your body actually starts to burn more calories as a result, and that just tends to feel good. When a body becomes efficient with calories and slows itself down, as is the case with lots and lots of cardio, over time, this is just my own observation. Over time, that can start to make you feel a little bit depressed because your energy is lower. Your body is becoming more efficient with calories, burning less calories. You may find that you have less energy. Strength training, when done properly, is very invigorating for the body. And it's also complex. It requires you to be present more than other forms of exercise, which tend to be repetitive. If I'm riding a bike or walking. Yeah, riding a bike for an hour could really make you sit in your depression a lot more. You could sit in your looping thoughts, but when you're lifting weights properly, you're especially strength training. Yeah, you got to pay attention. You got to pay attention. Yeah, back squat 200 pounds and think about how depressed you are. Yeah, you're focused. That's hard to do. And it's also extremely, what's the word, empowering. If you go to the gym, let's say you're feeling down or whatever, but you're like, I'm willing myself to work out. I'm going to work out. I'm going to do it properly. Let's say you follow maps or you have a trainer. So you know what you're doing is right. You go to the gym and let's say, today I did 100 pounds on the bench press. Or I did seven push-ups. Say I did seven push-ups. I come to the gym tomorrow. I did nine push-ups. Then I come back. Three days later, I did 12 push-ups. It's hard not to recognize the connection between the work and the progress. It's very, very clear with strength training. I'm getting stronger. And then, of course, you're proving. Yeah, and that makes you feel good. Because your hard work result, that's like a great combination right there. No, I want to add to that. And again, not a therapist by any means, although I've experienced feeling like this, especially in the last couple of years coming off the Testosterone. And this is close to home for me. And one of the things, though, that I want to add to the point that Sal made is that I do agree that strength training of all the things that I was working on during this time was one of the number one things that helped me through it. But I also had to be OK with the fact that I might go to the gym today, and it may be all yoga. Because here's the thing, when you get caught in a depression loop or have a ton of anxiety and stress going on in your life, and then you also know that a heavy squat session is ahead of you today, sometimes I just didn't have it in me to do it. And so I had to be OK with sometimes doing a workout that was less strength focused and more recuperative or working in, where maybe it was sauna and stretching that day or it was all mobility work, or I just didn't quite have it in me to get after it. And so then I would just chase a pump and call it a day. It's OK that too. But nothing I think will physically benefit you more in the gym than strength training. But also know that you don't have to put so much pressure on yourself that I've got to go in there. And because that's hard sometimes when you're in that place to get the muster to get up and go get after it like you know you can do. And so I had set for myself personal goals, and I would recommend the same thing for a client that was going through this. For me, who was used to training six, seven days a week consistently, I told myself, listen, if I can get it in there and I could give myself three good lift days, of course, my goal is to go every day still. But as long as I get two to three good lifting days, that's an accomplished week for me. And so a lot of times I would go to the gym and it wouldn't be a hard, heavy day. But I'd still make sure that two or three days of the week I was doing that. Yeah, I'm definitely not a, I'm going to put out a disclaimer as well. But I know that too, just a lot of times there's that internal chatter. And there's all this like excess of energy that needs to be expended, that your body a lot of times like it just wants to get rid of it. And that feeling of exhaustion, a lot of times it helps to then like limit a lot of that excess amount of energy that's just stored in your body that like makes its way up into your thoughts. And I think that just to be able to expel that too, it definitely has its own benefits on its own. Yeah, there's, when you look at exercise and you look at the literature on exercise and this is just from my understanding and depression and anxiety, you have the acute effects where right after the workout you tend to feel a little bit of a mood lift and you feel a little bit better. When we look at strength training versus aerobic activity, they're pretty equal there with the acute effects. Now the long-term effects argue resistance training is better. Mainly because of my experience training clients and seeing how strength training just has better long-term effects on people generally anyway. Again, it speeds up the metabolism. It's very individualized. You can train your resistance training according to your goals, where it's with cardiovascular activity tend to be stuck in the same repetitive motion or whatever. It's pro-anabolic hormone. It's pro-tissue, which is muscle. And so long-term is where I'll argue that strength training probably shines. I think it shines even more head to head I think that it's pro-posture. And we know the connection that posture has with like depression. That feedback, right? Yeah, a lot of times when you see someone who's depressed you get to see it in their posture. Definitely. Their head is down, their slouched way forward. Man, you get a great workout. How many of you ever walked out of the gym slouching? Oh, your chest is up. You feel more upright than you felt all day after a workout and that definitely has got to feed into feeling better also. I would make the case, Sal, that it's even better than cardio because you could run on a treadmill or slouch over a stair master for an hour. Strengthen that slouching posture. Right, and still get a dopamine rush that's equivalent to what you got from weight training. But then weight training, you're also getting the benefits of posture. So I think it definitely supersedes cardio in that case.