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Today’s Health Upgrade
More power, more lifespan
The diet switch that prevents muscle loss
Are you eating too much protein?
Fall in love with “what if”
Longevity
It’s Not Just How Much You Lift, But How Fast You Lift It
A new study suggests most people are missing a critical piece of the resistance training equation, and it has nothing to do with how much weight you're lifting.
Training your muscles to move fast may predict longevity far more powerfully than raw strength alone.
Researchers followed middle-aged and older adults for nearly 11 years, tracking both muscle strength and muscle power, which captures how quickly you can generate force. After controlling for key variables, participants in the lowest power quartile had a sixfold higher mortality risk (in men) and a sevenfold higher risk (in women) than those in the highest power quartile.
And it’s worth noting that, at least in this study, muscle power was a better indicator of longevity than grip strength.
It’s worth noting that this is observational data, and the power test used an upper-body rowing device while the strength test used grip, so these aren't perfectly matched comparisons. Still, a separate meta-analysis of RCTs in older adults found that power training produced greater functional benefits than traditional strength training, which gives the observational finding some biological teeth.
The mechanism makes intuitive sense. Power is force times velocity, the speed at which your muscles recruit and fire. As we age, we lose fast-twitch muscle fibers faster than slow-twitch ones, which degrades reaction time, balance, and the ability to catch yourself from a fall. Strength alone doesn't maintain that speed-strength connection.
The practical application is simpler than it sounds. Add explosive movements to what you're already doing. Medicine ball throws, jumps, or performing the lifting phase of any familiar exercise as fast as possible with a moderate load (roughly 30–65% of your max) shifts the stimulus toward power.
Together With David
How Much Protein Do You Need to Lose Fat Without Losing Muscle?
If your goal is weight loss, the scale going down is progress. But it doesn't tell you what you're actually losing, and fat loss and muscle loss can look identical on the scale.
A body composition test gives you the clearest answer, but your diet is a pretty reliable signal too.
An analysis of 47 studies found that eating enough protein while cutting calories plays a key role in protecting your muscle during weight loss.
Researchers analyzed thousands of overweight adults who were actively focused on weight loss. Those who consumed enhanced protein levels showed significantly less muscle loss than those who didn't.
They found that eating more than 1.3 g/kg/day of protein was associated with muscle mass gains during weight loss. On the other hand, intake below 1.0 g/kg/day increased the risk of muscle loss. For a 180-pound person, that puts the protective range at roughly 105 to 130 grams per day.
Higher protein didn't produce meaningful improvements in muscle strength or physical function, a finding that shows how protein and training work together. Protein preserves muscle tissue; resistance training is what makes that tissue perform.
When you eat less than your body needs, it looks for fuel wherever it can find it, and muscle is on the menu. Protein gives your body the amino acids it needs to maintain and repair tissue, making stored fat a more appealing target than your hard-earned lean mass.
Other research suggests that anywhere from 1.3g/kg/day up to 1.6 g/kg/day can help maintain muscle and prioritize fat loss when weight loss is the goal.
You don't need to log every gram. You just need protein at the center of each meal, rather than squeezing it in at dinner. Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, eggs, lean meats, legumes, protein shakes, pick your anchors, and build around them.
If you struggle to hit your protein needs and need a low-calorie option that you’ll enjoy, David checks those boxes with 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, and 0 grams of sugar. With 75 percent of its calories from protein, it’s 50% higher than the next closest protein bar.
David provides a blend of diverse protein sources — milk isolate, egg white, and collagen — that creates a perfect 1.0 Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS), making it ideal for muscle building and overall health.
David fits the mold of what a good protein bar should be: an on-the-go solution for anyone who struggles to eat enough protein and needs a convenient option that doesn’t waste calories.
As an APC reader, buy 4 boxes, and you'll get an additional box for free.
Fact Or Fiction
Are You Eating More Protein Than Your Body Can Use?
The item above helps you understand how much protein you need if your goal is fat loss. But oftentimes, too many people believe “If protein is good, more must be better, right?”
Research suggests that once you’re eating enough protein, your body hits a point where extra stops paying dividends.
Researchers followed active participants who trained 4 days per week for 16 weeks. They were assigned to eat either moderate protein (1.6 g/kg/day or about 0.7 g per pound) or very high protein (3.2 g/kg/day or about 1.5 g per pound).
Despite eating twice as much protein, the high-intake group saw no additional improvements in muscle growth, strength, or muscular endurance. It’s worth noting that there were no health issues from eating that much protein, but it didn’t enhance results, either.
While protein has many benefits beyond building muscle, growth appears to have a maximum threshold.
If protein is too low, it limits progress. Once it’s adequate, training quality, intensity, and consistency — not more protein — become the bottleneck.
If you’re not very active, as little as 1.2g/kg of goal body weight can give you what you need. If you’re active, anywhere from 1.6g/kg to 2.2 g/kg of protein might help. And don’t worry about overeating at a single meal. Research has found that your body can utilize up to 100 grams within a single meal.
Choose sources you enjoy, whether meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, protein shakes, legumes (lentils, beans, peas), soy, seitan, or tempeh. And remember, with protein, the goal isn’t excess. Its adequacy and specificity to your goals. Give your body what it needs, then let your training do the rest.
Adam’s Corner
Fall In Love With “What If”
The other night, I was in my kitchen, going through questions and messages from members of the Pump Club app and readers of this newsletter. It’s something I do often, but that night, I couldn’t ignore a pattern I have noticed many times before.
When people start to improve — really improve, not just the first two weeks of motivation but the kind of change that starts to feel real — a funny thing happens. There’s excitement, yes. But underneath it, there’s also pain.
When things start going better, you start to hear more about all the times they went worse.
What if I had known how to work out like this 20 years ago?
What if I could have eaten better and stressed less?
What if I didn’t hate my body all those years?
What if I had a community of people who believed in me?
It’s amazing how quickly the mind travels backward. How fluent we become in the language of regret. We can dissect a mistake from fifteen years ago like a surgeon. We can rewrite conversations that already happened with Oscar-worthy dialogue.
Most of us have earned a PhD in regret, and we pursued it with more consistency than anything else in our lives.
We’ve been trained to use “what if” as a weapon against ourselves. And they are doing more damage than you might realize.
You’ve experienced the questions on some level, whether you’ve said it or heard it from a friend: What if I hadn’t quit? What if I hadn’t gained the weight? What if I had more discipline? What if I hadn’t messed it up?
Those questions don’t create possibility. They create paralysis. They anchor you to a version of yourself that no longer exists.
Sitting in my kitchen, I kept on writing people back with the same response: What if you aimed your “what if” somewhere else entirely?
The Question Isn’t Bad. The Direction Is.
Kevin Kelly — writer, technologist, someone who has spent decades thinking about where we’re going — said something I haven’t been able to stop turning over:
“Asking ‘what if’ about your past is a waste of time. Asking ‘what if’ about your future is tremendously productive.”
Most of us don’t think of imagination as something with a location. But for a lot of people — those who’ve been disappointed, burned, or just tired of hoping — imagination has taken up permanent residence in the past. It lives there because the past is safe. It’s already happened. You can analyze it, replay it, and revise it in your mind without risking anything.
The future asks more of you. It asks you to want something you don’t have yet. To believe in a version of yourself that hasn’t proven itself.
That’s the scarier room. And it’s the only one worth walking into.
Here’s the part nobody tells you: you can’t genuinely ask “what if” about your future while you’re still trapped in the “what ifs” of your past.
Because the past doesn’t stay in the past. It follows you forward. It becomes the blueprint you don’t remember signing off on. The times you fell short become the baseline for what you expect of yourself. The patterns that failed you become the lens through which you evaluate every new beginning.
You tell yourself this time will be different. But somewhere underneath the optimism, an older voice has already answered the question.
I’ve seen this everywhere I’ve worked in health and fitness. Someone starts a new program carrying the full weight of every other program they’ve quit. They don’t announce it. They might not even recognize it.
But when things get hard, a voice with a longer memory shows up: we’ve been here before. We know how this ends.
That voice isn’t sabotage. It’s protection. Your mind is shielding you from a disappointment it remembers too well. The problem is you’re using old data to predict a future it hasn’t seen yet. It’s applying the rules of who you were to the story of who you could become.
Those are not the same story.
Take “What If” Forward, Not Back
The people who genuinely reinvent themselves don’t seem to work harder than the rest of us. They ask different questions.
Instead of cataloging past failures, they get genuinely curious about what’s possible. They treat the future less like a test they might fail, and more like a canvas they haven’t touched yet.
What if this time I build in more support?
What if I design for the hard days instead of hoping they don’t come?
What if the version of me that succeeds looks different than the version I’ve been trying to recreate?
What if I stopped writing with the old pen?
These questions aren’t naive. They’re not wishful thinking. They’re harder than that because they require you to hold the past loosely enough that it can’t determine what comes next. They ask you to believe, before you have the evidence, that this chapter doesn’t have to end the same way.
The what-if that faces forward isn’t about ignoring where you’ve been. It’s about refusing to let where you’ve been write the next chapter.
Here’s the most honest thing I can tell you about letting go of the backward what-if: You don’t have to forgive it. You don’t have to make peace with it. You just have to recognize what it actually is: something that cannot be changed.
The past is the only thing in your life that is completely, permanently outside your control. Not your health. Not your habits. Not your relationships. Those all still have variables. The past has none. It is done. Fixed. Closed.
Every hour you spend in the backward what-if is an hour spent trying to move something that will never move. It’s not just painful. It’s a waste of the one resource you actually still have.
The forward-facing what-if is the opposite of that. It is the only direction where anything can actually change. Where choices still exist. Where the person you become hasn’t been decided yet.
None of us can rewrite what happened. We can only write what comes next.
Regret is a closed room. You can spend years in it and walk out exactly where you walked in.
The forward-facing what-if is a door.
Fall in love with it. Aim it at the future you actually want. Then ask the harder follow-up: what would have to be true for that to happen?
That’s not a question about who you were. That’s where the next version of you begins. -AB
Better Today
Take any of these tips from today’s email and put them into action:
1. Low Muscle Power Predicts a Sixfold Higher Risk of Death in Men (And Strength Alone Won't Fix It)
An 11-year observational study of middle-aged and older adults found that those in the lowest muscle power quartile had a sixfold higher mortality risk (men) and a sevenfold higher risk (women) than those in the highest quartile, with grip strength showing no significant difference between groups. A separate meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials in older adults confirmed that power training produces greater functional benefits than traditional strength training, providing mechanistic support for the association: aging preferentially destroys fast-twitch muscle fibers, degrading the speed-strength connection that grip metrics don't capture. To train for power without overhauling your program, perform the lifting phase of any compound movement explosively at 30–65% of your max, or add medicine ball throws or jump squats. The intent to move fast is the stimulus.
2. The Protein Threshold That Separates Fat Loss From Muscle Loss, According to 47 Studies
A meta-analysis of 47 studies involving thousands of overweight adults in caloric restriction found that protein intake above 1.3g per kilogram of bodyweight per day was associated with muscle mass preservation during weight loss, while intake below 1.0g/kg increased the risk of muscle loss. Notably, higher protein did not improve muscle strength or physical function independent of resistance training, confirming that protein preserves the tissue, while training determines what that tissue can do. Build around protein-first meals—Greek yogurt, eggs, cottage cheese, lean meats, poultry, fish, legumes, soy, or any other preferred protein source.
3. More Protein Isn't Building More Muscle. Here's What the Research Actually Says.
A 16-week randomized controlled trial found that active participants training four days per week who consumed 3.2 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight daily — twice the established effective dose of 1.6g/kg — saw no additional improvements in muscle growth, strength, or muscular endurance compared to the lower-intake group, with no adverse health effects observed at either level. The finding establishes a practical ceiling, when combined with other research: 1.2g/kg is sufficient for less active individuals, 1.6g–2.2g/kg covers most people who train consistently. And separate research confirms that the body can utilize up to 100 grams of protein from a single meal, removing the need for rigid meal-timing anxiety. More protein beyond the effective threshold doesn't slow progress; it just stops accelerating it. Your training quality becomes the bottleneck, not your macros.
4. The Direction of "What If" Determines Whether It Paralyzes You or Drives You
There’s a big difference between your mind applying "what if" backward to fixed events rather than forward toward modifiable ones. It’s up to you if you want to treat past failures as data points that determine undetermined outcomes, or if you view the future as something you can still influence. Backward-facing "what if" creates paralysis by analyzing what cannot be changed, while forward-facing "what if" generates possibility by targeting the one domain — the future — where choices still exist. The practical reframe is precise: aim your “What if” forward, then ask what would have to be true for the answer to become real.
The Positive Corner of The Internet
About Arnold’s Pump Club Editorial Standards
We do things a bit differently here, starting with transparency.
The Content: All APC emails are researched, written, and fact-checked by the APC editors (see bottom of the email), with written contributions from Arnold (noted with “Arnold’s Corner”). Links take you to original studies (not second-hand sources).
Does AI play a role? Not for the primary content, but it is used in two ways. The main items are original content written by the APC team. The summaries at the end are AI-generated based on the human-written content above. We also use an AI tool to review our interpretations of the research and ensure scientific accuracy. We don’t assume AI is right, but we use technology to hold ourselves accountable.
Yes, we have partners (all clearly noted). Why? Because it allows these emails to remain free. We first test products, and then reach out to potential partners who offer ways to help you improve every day. The bar is set high, and to date, we have turned down millions in ad deals. (Example: we will not partner with any non-certified supplements or those without evidence in human trials). If we won’t buy the product, we won’t recommend it to you. And if there’s no evidence it works, then there’s no place for it here.
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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell
