Sully's talk at St. Vincent College on Oct 17th

[MarkFera]

I attended Sully’s talk on Friday October 17th that was sponsored by the St. Vincent College Health and Fitness club in Latrobe, PA.SSC Nicholas Racculia invited everyone to this second lecture a few weeks ago and he’s an advisor to the club. Once again, I was impressed by the friendliness of the students who devoted their time to the event. They and Nicholas are great ambassadors of the college.
I really liked Sully’s talk which dealt with resistance training and the metabolic syndrome. Sully’s knowledge, understanding, conviction and compassion are borne of his daily experiences in the emergency room.His description of the “Sick Aging Phenotype (SAP)” was straightforward and is both as illuminating and terrifying as Scrooge’s visits by the three ghosts of Christmas.His recounting of the studies that for the most part demonstrate the far ranging positive effects of resistance training beyond getting stronger can contribute to the foundation of a shift in health care as we know it.Sully also offered a practical first psychological step to those of us who accept our rate of physical and metal diminution as natural and need help overcoming the pain associated with restricting our diets and the discomfort of training and conditioning by asking us to view ourselves as athletes with life and its challenges being our sport.This last point was lost on one person who challenged Sully on his choice of certain words in the talk and brings to mind a sentence by Sully that rings in my mind today.“I wish you could walk a mile in my shoes.”
Once again, there were more questions than was time to answer them. I was thankful to attend this event.

[Nicholas Racculia]

Mark, thank you for the kind words, it was good to see you again. I agree with you, Sully (and Rip and Jordan and the rest of these brilliant people) are talking about a fundamental shift in the way we view healthcare and amazing things are on the way.

We are grateful that you and several Starting Strength forum members (Brad, Brad, Beth, Josh, Jay and Marie) made it out on a Friday night. Thanks also goes to Chris Kurisko, SSC (www.blackirontraining.com) who drove in from Michigan. Both he and Sully spent a lot of time with our students training and coaching them. The kids were ecstatic and have been talking about it all day today.

Most importantly, we are grateful for Dr. Sullivan and his outstanding presentation. Sully combined devastating and thorough analysis with a precise and logical delivery and genuine passion (and compassion).

Judging by the length of the applause at the end, he knocked it out of the park.

Thank you Rip for inspiring all of this and supporting the lecture series.

[KurtN]

Any chance a video of the lecture will be posted?

[Mark Rippetoe]

Yes, there is a slim chance.

[stronger]

hah - back in 2008 I used to post on the old Strengthmill forums from the St. Vincent dorms as a college student. Years later, Starting Strength coaches are giving lectures there. Very cool!

[KurtN]

Yes, there is a slim chance.

That would be fantastic. Sully's stuff is some of the most powerful when it comes to making the health argument for strength training to friends and family. Much of it is because 'he's a doctor' (as unfortunate as that reality is, it's still how our society works) but also because he is just so damned good at presenting his material in an intelligent, interesting an easy to understand way. The guy's a gem.

[Brodie Butland]

I'm looking forward to the video on this--unfortunately I was up until 3am on Thursday night and put in a long slog the next day to get a brief out.

I will say this, Sully--IMHO, your talks are consistently some of the most profoundly interesting and well-presented that I have seen on any topic. And I've sat through a lot of presentations. I really think that if we had a critical mass of doctors like yourself that talked about this stuff, the fitness industry would look radically different from what it does today.

[Mark Rippetoe]

And so would the treatment of elderly patients.

[sbhikes]

Until then, I saw a pretty good talk from the Ancestral Health Symposium 2014 called "the Underappreciated role of muscle in health and disease." He touched on muscle as an endocrine organ, on how we tend to see everyone as fat/not-fat and fail to recognize that lots of not-fat people are so undermuscled and weak that they are every bit as unhealthy and headed for disease in their old age as fat people. Basically all the health-related stuff that gets talked about here, but lacking in some of the dynamic personality and experience coaching people and also being a doctor at the same time.

[dpinsen]

Maybe it's time to take a page from the pharma companies and send Starting Strength reps around to physicians' offices. Instead of free drug samples they could hand out coupons for discounted strength coaching.