Exercise 101: Muscle-Organ Charging

A few common exercises to build resilience for overcoming a future health crisis.

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Mar 16, 2025

In my recent review of Jerry Tennant’s book Healing is Voltage: Acupuncture Muscle Batteries (2014), it was learned that our muscles are basically batteries arranged in circuits, and they are used to store energy. Our bodies need that stored energy to rebuild and repair the tissues and organs on each circuit. That means that your resilience to disease and injury are directly related to muscular strength: stronger muscles are able to store more energy.

That got me thinking about whether there are a small number of common exercises that could efficiently recharge each of the twelve organ circuits in our bodies?

Jonathan at Nerve & Fitness

Not possessing any real depth of knowledge about exercise physiology with which to opine on the subject, I turned to

Jonathan

and his

Nerve & Muscle

Substack to make up for my lack of expertise.

I’ll let Jonathan introduce himself and his interests:

In my early 20s, I was opened to the possibility of improving my strength and building muscle by using my own body weight. In my mid-20s, while serving in the Marine Corps, I realized I could improve my strength, speed, and conditioning without moving a muscle. This is what I focus on and teach others about, whether they are young, old, male, or female. The human body is amazing and there is a long history of folks who have attained great strength and muscular development with none of the gadgets and pills we have today.

I was immediately drawn to Jonathan’s Substack message because:

He was searching for the best bang for the buck with exercise: how to get good results without investing a lot in either time or equipment,
He takes a simple, minimalist approach: less is more, rather than bigger is better, and
He’s a fan of Jerry Tennant, and the notion that deficient energy is a root cause of most chronic disease.

In short, we seemed to be on the same wavelength - we both sought more health, gained with less pain and expense.

For Jonathan, he seeks a lot of bang for his exercise and health buck in order to have more time and money to spend with his family.

For me, I need more bang for my exercise and health buck because I no longer have the stamina to exercise at the level that I did just 15 years ago. If I try to go that hard today, I’ll be napping for a few hours in the afternoon, in a partially successful attempt to recover. Which is a good indication that that level of exercise is simply too much for me anymore (or perhaps more likely, my body is hinting at yet another health puzzle for me to eventually solve).

Jonathan is a big fan of the physical culturalists of the early part of the last century, many of whom worked solely with simple calisthenics (bodyweight exercises) and isometrics (the static contraction of muscles).

People my age probably recall viewing Jack LaLanne in the 1960s on a big ol’ black-and-white console TV. He would demonstrate how to do lots of calisthenics to rev up your mom’s metabolism, plus some isometrics designed to tone up specific parts of her body. I got a big kick out of the funny faces he made whenever he demonstrated isometrics designed to target sagging eyelids and droopy chins!

Jack LaLanne, 1961. Photo by Cliff Riddle.

So you could say that Jonathan is old school. He realizes that most of us don’t need Big Iron or specialized gym contraptions to become more fit and resilient. We also don’t need to produce buckets of sweat in doing so.

Muscle Mass

From 2015 to 2018, my wife and I spent our summers tagteam-bicycling around the country. One day I’d ride my bike to the next campground, while she drove there while towing our camper and watching our dog. The next day the roles would be reversed.

I believe that the muscle mass I acquired during that time is a big part of why I survived severe heart issues in September 2018. Since that event, I’ve lost some muscle mass, so I believe that my odds of surviving a similar health crisis are lower now, and I would like to change that.

The average 68-year old, non-gym rat (like myself) probably doesn’t fully appreciate the importance of maintaining muscle mass as we age. But the risk of all-cause mortality in people with low muscle mass can be three times higher than those people who can maintain high muscle mass.1 That means that as you age, and experience the occasional health crisis or acute physical trauma, you are three times more likely to survive if you have high muscle mass than if you have low muscle mass. That is largely because those muscles are storing the extra energy that your body needs to heal itself.

It’s important to note that it’s not the size of the muscles that is important, it’s the amount of functional strength that they give you. So going to the gym to try to achieve big pumped-up superhero muscles isn’t necessarily the best strategy, though gaining any type of muscle is better than not having enough.

Sarcopenia

The biggest challenge to maintaining functional strength as we age is sarcopenia, our tendency to lose muscle mass over time. This starts slowly around age 40, picks up some momentum in our mid-50s and continues a very gradual increase each year until around age 85, at which point our brakes start to fail and the pace of acceleration quickens significantly.

At around age 85, it is believed that our central nervous system starts to break down.2 And once a muscle loses its nerve supply, it will wither and die. No ifs, ands or buts about it. No amount of exercise can change that.

How much muscle mass you have when you reach your mid-80s will determine how many muscle nerves you will be able to sacrifice before you start to lose the ability to perform common skills needed for living independently. Thus, the number of nerves that you have to lose will likely determine the quality of life that you will experience during your final years on Earth. More muscle nerves equate to a longer period of good quality of life remaining.

The more functioning nerves you have when this decline starts, the longer it will take before you lose sufficient enervation to experience some form of debility. In addition to building resilience to health challenges, creating and maintaining functional strength is an investment in keeping your good health and independence for as long as possible.

Mitochondrial Dysfunction

Sarcopenia is largely caused by mitochondrial dysfunction, which in turn is caused by either deficient cellular energy,3 deficient nutrition,4 or both.

When you exercise, you’re doing more than burning calories or building muscle. You’re giving your cells a complete overhaul. This includes the tiny powerhouses within them, the mitochondria. These microscopic energy factories are key to your vitality - physical activity is a turbo boost for their function and production.5

Jerry Tennant describes how our muscles are able to do this:

If you take a quartz crystal and squeeze it with a pair of pliers, it will emit electrons. This is called the piezoelectric effect. Our muscles are like piezoelectric crystals. Thus, when we exercise, our muscles create electrons. The muscles are also rechargeable batteries. The movement of our muscles recharges our muscle batteries. Exercise is a major way by which the body acquires electrons.6

Fixing mitochondrial dysfunction, beyond the few exercise we’ll be recommending, is outside the scope of this article. As are nutrient deficiencies.

Thyroid function is the first thing to evaluate in trying to determine why your cellular energy is deficient, and why you may be experiencing more sarcopenia than necessary. That’s because the thyroid is essentially the thermostat for your body’s energy production.7 If it is broken, your body is not working optimally, and you will have a harder time gaining muscle mass. And if it is in too bad of shape, it can also increase your risk for cancer.

It is possible to easily monitor an aspect of thyroid health at home, by taking your body temperature each morning, immediately upon waking. The specifics on how and why to do this can be found in the Substack article Ray Peat: Where to Start by

Yago

, which also deals with some very simple strategies to help restore your body’s ideal range of waking body temperature to between 97.8 F and 98.2 F (about 36.5 C to 36.7 C).

So, we know that sarcopenia is a problem of mitochondrial dysfunction, and that exercise is an important part of fixing our mitochondria. But what exercises should we choose?

The short answer to that question is whatever exercise you are motivated to do. Hopefully by understanding how particular exercises improve your organ resilience, you’ll be more motivated to incorporate into your daily routine the few simple exercises that we recommend.

Muscle-Organ Circuits

I provided Jonathan with lists of muscles from Jerry Tennant’s book, which correspond to each acupuncture circuit. I was wondering if there was a short list of exercises that could be used to recharge the majority of circuits, with an emphasis on exercises that most people are already familiar with?

He came up with three simple calisthenics that mostly fill the bill. For anyone who is unsure about how to perform these exercises, each is linked to the corresponding Wikipedia entry that explains how to do so:

It’s to the benefit of each of us to figure out how to incorporate these few exercises into our daily routines. Doing them can be challenging for some individuals, and YouTube has plenty of videos for how to adapt or modify these exercises to overcome any personal limitations that you may have. As your strength increases, most people should eventually be able to do them without modification.

Exercise Bites

One of my favorite ways of incorporating more exercise into my daily routine is

Jim Brown

’s concept of exercise bites:

Say you set a goal for yourself to do four hundred push-ups within a week. That’s nearly sixty per day, which very few well-conditioned people could do with good form in one session. But if you do six sets of ten, and spread them out throughout the day, the goal becomes a lot easier to achieve. And the message to your body is pretty clear: these muscles are important to our survival. They need to adapt, so that it is easier to do these exercises.

I spend too much time seated than is healthy for me, doing research and writing. I’ve learned firsthand that there’s a lot of truth in the mantra that Sitting is the New Smoking. The longer you go without stoking up your metabolism, the more mitochondria you end up losing. It’s literally like a slow death by a thousand tiny cuts. Sprinkling those exercise bites throughout your day is an easy way to counter this destructive tendency.

Fortunately for me, my bladder, thirst or hunger forces me to take a break from the computer every hour or so. If I get up to go pee or grab something to drink, I’ll bang out 20 squats or push-ups, do a pull-up or two, or dead hang for 30 seconds or more. Over the course of a day it adds up, and I never have to break a sweat doing it.

Organs Benefited

The following describes which acupuncture circuits are recharged by each of these exercises. You can use this list as a starting point for strengthening your personal resilience for a particular organ or organs. But with such a short list of exercises, it is very easy to use them all and improve all circuits.

In acupuncture theory, organs are paired: they are two parts of one whole. They are Yin and Yang: a unity of opposites. Yin organs are warm and solid, Yang organs are cool and hollow.

In the list below, the Yin organ is listed first, with its corresponding Yang organ listed next.

Lung (Yin) 1) Push-ups, 2) Pull-ups
Large Intestine (Yang) 1) Push-ups, 2) Pull-ups
Heart (Yin) 1) Push-ups, 2) Pull-ups
Small Intestine (Yang) 1) Push-ups, 2) Pull-ups
Spleen/Pancreas (Yin) 1) Pull-ups, 2) Squats
Stomach (Yang) 1) Pull-ups, 2) Squats
Pericardium* (Yin) 1) Push-ups, 2) Pull-ups
Triple Burner* (Yang) 1) Push-ups, 2) Pull-ups

* Jerry Tennant believes that acupuncture concept of the pericardium (the protective membrane surrounding the heart) correlates to the parasympathetic nervous system, and the triple burner (the body cavity containing all the body organs) correlates to the sympathetic nervous system.

The remaining organ circuits are mainly only benefitted by squats, so Jonathan added two isometric exercises, planks9 and bridges,10 so that we can recommended two different exercises for each acupuncture circuit.

Kidney (Yin) 1) Planks, 2) Squats
Gall Bladder (Yang) 1) Planks, 2) Squats
Liver (Yin) 1) Bridges, 2) Squats
Bladder (Yang) 1) Bridges, 2) Squats

In a future article, we’ll discuss a way to slightly modify push-ups, pull-ups and squats that can make injury or delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) less likely, and which allows you to gain more muscle in less time.

Conclusion

Concentrating on performing a few simple exercises, spread out throughout your day, can be a simple and effective strategy for prolonging a good quality of life, and increasing your resilience to any future health challenges.

Stay tuned for additional articles in this series with additional insights from Jonathan.

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