Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
Strength training is a critical form of exercise medicine for healthy aging. In this lecture, Jonathon Sullivan will describe how this medicine is formulated with barbells and prescribed with careful programming at the Greysteel Clinic. Sullivan will share a general consideration of training programs, and how athletes and coaches develop fitness attributes by exploiting a biological stress-recovery-adaptation process. This SRA cycle has deep isomorphisms with other physical, developmental, and evolutionary processes, particularly with regard to generation of complexity, emergence, and purpose. These observations compel an expansion of the concept of the athlete beyond biology, Sullivan believes. Training then is an instantiation of universal process, process is purpose, and human purpose may be characterized as the ascent of the athlete to the condition of mastery in manifold domains of meaning. The athletic paradigms of training and practice will become more important, not less, in a transhuman future.
Jonathon Sullivan, MD, PhD, SSC, PBC, is the co-author of “The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After Forty.” After service in the U.S. Marine Corps, he studied chemistry and attended the University of Arizona College of Medicine, completing his training in emergency medicine at Wayne State University as Chief Resident in 1995. He then completed a neuroscience research fellowship and earned a PhD in physiology in 1999. He served as Attending Physician at Detroit Receiving Hospital Emergency Department for 24 years, as Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Wayne State University, and as Associate Director of the WSU Cerebral Resuscitation Laboratory. His research focused on cell signaling-modulated molecular mechanisms of neuronal death and salvage after ischemic and traumatic brain injury. He opened the Greysteel Clinic in 2014 and retired from medical practice in 2019. He continues to train Athletes of Aging and hosts a YouTube channel on related topics. He is a published science fiction author and a practicing 3d Dan in Tang Soo Do karate.
This lecture is part of the IHMC Evening Lecture series.
ihmc.us/life/evening_lectures
Strength training is a critical form of exercise medicine for healthy aging. In this lecture, Jonathon Sullivan will describe how this medicine is formulated with barbells and prescribed with careful programming at the Greysteel Clinic. Sullivan will share a general consideration of training programs, and how athletes and coaches develop fitness attributes by exploiting a biological stress-recovery-adaptation process. This SRA cycle has deep isomorphisms with other physical, developmental, and evolutionary processes, particularly with regard to generation of complexity, emergence, and purpose. These observations compel an expansion of the concept of the athlete beyond biology, Sullivan believes. Training then is an instantiation of universal process, process is purpose, and human purpose may be characterized as the ascent of the athlete to the condition of mastery in manifold domains of meaning. The athletic paradigms of training and practice will become more important, not less, in a transhuman future.
Jonathon Sullivan, MD, PhD, SSC, PBC, is the co-author of “The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After Forty.” After service in the U.S. Marine Corps, he studied chemistry and attended the University of Arizona College of Medicine, completing his training in emergency medicine at Wayne State University as Chief Resident in 1995. He then completed a neuroscience research fellowship and earned a PhD in physiology in 1999. He served as Attending Physician at Detroit Receiving Hospital Emergency Department for 24 years, as Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Wayne State University, and as Associate Director of the WSU Cerebral Resuscitation Laboratory. His research focused on cell signaling-modulated molecular mechanisms of neuronal death and salvage after ischemic and traumatic brain injury. He opened the Greysteel Clinic in 2014 and retired from medical practice in 2019. He continues to train Athletes of Aging and hosts a YouTube channel on related topics. He is a published science fiction author and a practicing 3d Dan in Tang Soo Do karate.
This lecture is part of the IHMC Evening Lecture series.
ihmc.us/life/evening_lectures
