What if aging well isn’t about losing weight, but building strength? This conversation challenges everything we’ve been told.
For something so fundamental to how we move through the world, muscle has had a surprisingly minor role in how we talk about aging. We obsess over weight, track our steps, chase metabolic hacks, but often ignore the one system quietly shaping it all.
In this week’s episode of Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED, hosts Dr Nina Patrick and Phil Newman sit down with nutrition and fitness expert JJ Virgin to argue about an important question: what if muscle isn’t just part of the longevity equation, but the foundation?
“If I could leave one legacy, it would be that we would never use a traditional scale and look at weight loss again,” Virgin says. “We would only look at what your weight is made up of.”
It’s a simple shift, but one that runs counter to decades of health messaging. For years, weight loss has been treated as a universal proxy for health. Virgin’s argument flips that logic entirely: lose weight the wrong way – by losing muscle – and you may be accelerating the very decline you’re trying to avoid.
We tend to think of aging as something that happens to us over time, an inevitable biological drift. However, Virgin pushes back on that narrative, questioning how much of muscle decline is truly age-driven and how much is behavioral.
“I keep looking at this, going, how much is aging and how much is not using it anymore?” she asks. It’s an uncomfortable question because it implies agency. Muscle doesn’t just disappear; it responds (or fails to respond) to how we live. Sedentary habits, poor metabolic health and under-eating protein all quietly chip away at muscle long before we notice visible frailty.
The consequences go far beyond aesthetics. Muscle is deeply tied to how the body regulates energy, handles glucose, and even supports brain function. As Virgin puts it, “You can’t have good muscle protein synthesis if you’re not metabolically healthy.” In other words, muscle is about system-wide resilience, not just about strength.
Why does strength matter more than steps? There’s a cultural comfort in low-intensity health metrics. Step counts are easy to track, socially reinforced and relatively safe…but they can also create the illusion of progress.
Virgin doesn’t dismiss movement (far from it), but she draws a sharper distinction between activity and adaptation. Walking keeps you moving; resistance challenges force the body to change. That change is measurable in unexpected ways. One of the simplest tools she recommends isn’t a wearable or a lab test, but a hand grip dynamometer, a device that measures grip strength.
“Hand grip strength is a proxy for overall strength,” she explains. “People with the lowest grip strength…have the highest risk of all-cause mortality.”
It’s a striking insight: something as mundane as grip strength can reflect the state of your entire body. Not because opening jars is essential to survival, but because strength itself signals deeper physiological capacity – muscle quality, neural coordination, and metabolic health all wrapped into one.
Rethinking “aging gracefully”
If muscle is central to longevity, then the language we use around aging starts to feel outdated. Virgin is blunt about it. The idea of “aging gracefully,” she argues, often masks a quieter acceptance of decline. “As we age, we lose muscle, but we lose more strength, and we lose even more power,” she says.
Power, our ability to move quickly and forcefully, is what allows us to catch ourselves from a fall, climb stairs or simply react to the world. And it’s the first thing to go.
The danger is both physical and psychological. When people internalize the idea that aging means slowing down, they begin to train that reality into their bodies: choosing gentler movements, avoiding resistance and gradually shifting from capability to caution.
Virgin’s alternative is what she calls “aging powerfully,” a mindset that treats strength as something to be built, not surrendered. It’s not about chasing youth, but about maintaining agency.
The muscle-first approach
This philosophy becomes especially relevant in today’s landscape of quick-fix solutions. The rise of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy has made weight loss more accessible, but also riskier when muscle is ignored.
Virgin doesn’t reject these tools outright, but she reframes their place in the hierarchy of health. “You should not be on a weight loss program if you’re not tracking where the weight loss is coming from,” she says. “If 40% is coming from muscle… you’re making yourself worse.”
Her solution is what she calls a “muscle-first” approach: prioritize building or preserving muscle before cutting calories. It’s slower, less dramatic, but ultimately more sustainable.
A broader critique is embedded here. Longevity, as a field, often gravitates toward biotech, supplements and advanced diagnostics among others. However, in doing so, it can overlook foundational biology.
“I would argue that the most powerful medication there is out there is a muscle contraction,” Virgin says. It’s a line that lingers because it reframes exercise not as lifestyle advice, but as an intervention. Every contraction triggers a cascade of biochemical signals – affecting metabolism, inflammation and cellular health in ways that no single drug can replicate.
Building a different future of health
What emerges from the conversation isn’t just a case for lifting weights, but a call to redesign how we think about health systems altogether. If muscle truly sits at the center of longevity, then it challenges everything from clinical practice to public health messaging. It suggests that gyms and movement spaces are foundational to medicine.
More importantly, it puts the individual back into the equation. Muscle is one of the few longevity levers that remains highly responsive, even later in life. It can be built, rebuilt and strengthened often faster than people expect. The possibility carries optimism. Aging may be inevitable, but how we move through it is far less fixed.
New episodes of Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED come out every Monday, featuring founders, researchers and thinkers shaping the future of longevity. A weekly news roundup follows each Friday. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.
