What If Weight Loss Wasn't the Point with Dr. Nick Broskey

Exercise is always a hot topic in wellness. What’s the best way to move your body? How often should you do it? Weights or cardio? Pilates or Yoga? Running or Walking?There are a lot of people with opinions who suggest different routines to follow all referencing a lot of different information and theories. Dr. Nick Broskey is a translational scientist at Eastern Carolina University focusing on skeletal muscle physiology. In his current position as Assistant Professor, Kinesiology, College of Health and Human Performance, Dr. Broskey is interested in the role of mitochondria in health and disease and how exercise can help improve conditions of metabolic disease.He started studying an older population to see how different types of exercise and routines could impact health and overall wellbeing. This isn’t just watching for people’s muscles to grow or waistlines to shrink - it was deep study into the cells of the participants to see if their cells actually started to become more healthy and efficient in managing energy. Dr. Broskey is the kind of person who can both be with patients as they walk on a treadmill and then head to the lab, study their cells and use advanced scientific methods to understand how those cells are functioning. If you’ve heard the buzz around the mitochondria - the powerhouse engine of our cells - he studies them and how well they perform under all sorts of conditions. After seeing how exercise improved the health and cell function in older populations, he got curious - if diseases like type 2 diabetes improved or showed signs on clearing in the older population - why weren’t they studying people when they were younger to understand if they could prevent or avoid those diseases all together?Eventually this curiosity led him all the way to birth and pregnancy. He learned of another researcher who wanted to study the impact on babies and their eventual overall health depending on the mother’s exercise habits while pregnant. That’s his passion and area of study right now. We talk about his journey to get into this work and what he’s come to learn across age groups - some truths that seem to be universal about the role exercise plays in the body. And we talk about what we don’t know and what’s still needs to be studied more to be more deeply understood.And in his work he’s also come to find credibility in things some may consider a bit ‘woo’ - the life force energy and ‘signal’ that we all carry and how he sees this show up in our cells every day in the lab. Dr. Nick Broskey is great to breaking down complex scientific concepts into easily to understand terms. He’s taking all of this knowledge and currently working on putting it into a book - so everyone stay tuned for that. If you want to learn more about him and his work you can find him here - https://scholars.ecu.edu/display/F96995729Listen to this episode and let me know - does this change the way you think about exercise? I’d love to hear your thoughts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit findingmyfrequency.substack.com/subscribe