Jonathan Sullivan Pensacola Evening lecture

Strength training is a critical form of exercise medicine for healthy aging. I will describe how this medicine is formulated with barbells and prescribed with careful programming at the Greysteel clinic. This will bring me to a more 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. Training is an instantiation of universal process, process is purpose, and human purpose may be characterised 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 US 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 was funded by the NIH, the American Heart Association, and the Emergency Medicine Foundation, and 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.

Host or Publisher Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition