This reminds me of something Goggins said, along the lines of working out is almost entirely a mental thing.
You access parts of your brain and your being when you’re giving everything you got to squeeze out that extra rep, or when you are going for a new PR with heavy weight. Or even when you don’t feel like working out, and you say okay I have to get my brain out of this and just do it, similar to life where I have to do work when I sometimes don’t want to.
The physical benefits (muscle mass, testosterone, appearance, strength) for me are entirely secondary to the mental/emotional benefits of working out.
100% agree. Working out for me is often an exercise in learning to be fully embodied and seeing what my limits are. At the age of 40 I finally feel like I understand myself a bit more on some deep level, probably because I'm not trying to ignore the reality of having a body.
Re: testosterone, for men it helps keep your marriage together, I’ll let you figure that out
Muscle mass starts to erode with age (I think correlated with decrease in test) separate from the looks, you don’t want to be losing muscle mass because it means you’ll be weaker. Being weaker makes you more prone to injury and increases your risk of all-cause mortality.
The other thing is muscle mass takes time and effort to put on, so you really need to start early, I missed out on my prime years (teens and early 20s) but better late than never I guess!
Peter Attia (Stanford MD, longevity researcher) great source on this subject
You don't need a lot of muscle mass to stay strong enough to avoid injury. Any form of regular medium intensity exercise will probably be fine from that point of view.
Of course if you want to build big muscles, that's fine. I am always a little wary of people extolling the health benefits of doing so. Eating well and doing a moderate amount of exercise will get you 90% of the way to any purely health-related benefits that you'll get from more intense exercise. And more intense forms of exercise carry their own non-negligible risk of injury.
Attitudes to health, diet and exercise seem increasingly to vacillate between extremes. There's a happy medium between sitting on your couch eating cheetos and straining to lift huge weights four times a week.
You access parts of your brain and your being when you’re giving everything you got to squeeze out that extra rep, or when you are going for a new PR with heavy weight. Or even when you don’t feel like working out, and you say okay I have to get my brain out of this and just do it, similar to life where I have to do work when I sometimes don’t want to.
The physical benefits (muscle mass, testosterone, appearance, strength) for me are entirely secondary to the mental/emotional benefits of working out.
It’s all mental