Regeneration

Partial Transcript:

This is the beach barbell podcast. I am Nick Marki of Beach Barbell physical therapy and strength training gym. Check out beachbarbell.com for details, f you'd like to join. This is episode 45. You may have noticed I've changed the name of the podcast. I want to link it to our company name so that everything is congruent. I'm going to keep the theme, the weekly, the daily themes Monday through Friday. So, today, episode 45, will still be fun Friday. So fun Friday is where we talk about different subjects that are maybe interesting or maybe a little bit out there Sci-fi possibly kind of things. So, today what I wanted to talk about was, regeneration. So currently muscles don't really regenerate too well. Some other animals regenerate. Well, you hear lizards and starfish. Other animals have those properties.

We don't have it too well. Bones regenerate obviously a little bit. Muscles do it a little bit. But ultimately if you lose a lot of muscle from some sort of trauma or accident, you're kind of stuck with whatever's left. Obviously those remaining muscles can be strengthened and grown with strength training, but ultimately you're going to be probably capped at a certain point because you just won't have the actual muscle fibers. So regeneration would be regrowth of those muscle fibers. currently there is research going underway that, they're using a pig matrix. So what that basically is, is sort of the, framework for the muscles. so what they do is they take a pig muscle, they strip it down to the matrix and then they implant that in people with traumatic injuries, with loss of muscle.

And as long as they had remaining muscle in that area, the muscle regenerated around that matrix. And a lot of those people were able to regain better function. Like maybe they had a limp when they walk, but now they walk pretty well and they can do stairs as well. And then some of them have even been able to return to running. So a lot of these are military, so they, they're, they were riding in an armored carrier or something, some vehicle overseas or something or patrolling and some sort of explosive device went off and took part of their leg. So what the Holy Grail would be, would obviously be some sort of combination of this matrix or maybe some sort of an injection with biologics, like maybe growth hormone and/or testosterone combination.

Maybe also combining with, some sort of STEM or satellite cell, type of work. There's other things that we would also like to be able to regenerate and not just muscle but also maybe cartilage. That would be probably more of this satellite cell type type deal. The bone regenerates reasonably well, as long as the, the, system is well taken care of and the bones are lined up. Not crooked or, well, I mean, they will, they will heal crooked, but you want them to obviously heal the most optimal way. There's that movie Starship Troopers where one of the soldiers gets killed by one of the nasty bugs they're fighting and, he goes through a regeneration process. So I guess he wasn't fully killed, but, he's listed as dead, as his friends point out to him as he's going through the regeneration process and they have some kind of machine that is a gradually kind of, it's almost like regrowing and stitching together, his injuries to make 'em basically brand new.