Craft MD

The best anti-aging treatment I can prescribe doesn't come from my OR. 💪

I'm a plastic surgeon. I make my living working on faces and bodies. And the single most powerful longevity, function, and aesthetic intervention I can point a patient toward is not a syringe, a laser, or a scalpel — it's a barbell.

This whole post was sparked by Dr. Howard Luks's excellent piece "Muscle is Medicine." I want to bring it to my audience because muscle is the most under-prescribed drug we have.

A few things I want you to take from this:

💊 You lose 3–8% of your muscle per decade after 30 — and it accelerates after 60. Most of that loss isn't "just aging." It's from not challenging muscle. Your body removes what you don't use.

💊 Muscle isn't vanity. It's an organ. It's your largest glucose sink (the thing protecting you from insulin resistance), an internal pharmacy releasing signaling molecules called myokines, and the literal scaffolding that keeps you from breaking a hip when you trip on a rug at 75.

💊 Grip strength predicts all-cause mortality better than systolic blood pressure (PURE study, The Lancet, 139,691 participants). Each 5kg drop in grip strength tracks with a 16% higher risk of dying from any cause and a 21% higher risk of cardiovascular death. Read that twice.

💊 When muscle goes, everything else follows: bone density, balance, metabolism, recovery from illness or surgery, function, and ultimately — independence. Most people don't lose their independence from a single dramatic illness. They lose it from weakness, accumulated over a hundred small hits no one was training for.

💊 My favorite framing, borrowed from Dr. Luks: muscle is a retirement account. You deposit into it in your 30s, 40s, 50s. You withdraw from it in your 60s, 70s, 80s — after a surgery, after an illness, to keep living on your own terms. Compound interest works in muscle, too.

The dose that actually works:

🔹 Resistance training 2–3x per week. Progressive overload. Not "toning." Actually lifting.
🔹 Protein — roughly 1g per lb of goal body weight, spread across meals.
🔹 Walk. 8–10k steps. The cheapest medicine ever invented.
🔹 Sleep 7–9 hours. Muscle repairs while you do.
🔹 St