Barbell Medicine Podcast

A Halloween story about a man who does every wellness protocol, then an honest grading of each one. Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum tells the story of Dale Mercer, Unit 4471, who lives through a fully optimized Sunday in the year 2049: morning light panels, cold plunges, a 31-capsule supplement tray, grey-market peptides, methylene blue, an eccentric-only lifting machine, a protein IV ...

How much cardio should you do, and does more of it ever become harmful? Cardiorespiratory fitness keeps improving with training load and nobody has found a ceiling. Getting fitter keeps lowering mortality risk as far out as anyone has measured. The one dose dependent harm that survives scrutiny is atrial fibrillation, and it shows up around six to seven hours a week of hard e...

How much resistance training do you actually need, and is there a point where more stops helping? We trace the "lift weights twice a week" recommendation back to the 1989 study it came from, which found that three days beat two, and to the citation loop that turned it into a guideline anyway. Then we go through the evidence on whether lifting is dangerous, including the heart...

Nearly every warning you've heard about lifting weights was written down before anybody checked it. We trace where those warnings came from, starting with a Harvard student in 1854 and ending with a curve on a graph that's being used today to argue you can lift too much.

Along the way: the men who built themselves with barbells and then sold the public five-pound dumbbe...