Build for Health with Srdjan Injac

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Build for Health is a show that flips the script on fitness. Hosted by longtime podcaster Pete Wright and strength coach Srdjan Injac of ELEV8 Fitness, this show isn’t about gym culture or getting shredded—it’s about why building muscle is the most important investment you can make in your long-term health. Each week, Pete and Srdjan break down the science, bust the myths, and offer real-world insight into how resistance training supports not just strength, but brain function, metabolic health, emotional well-being, immune resilience, and aging with independence. If you think lifting weights is just for looks, think again. It’s time to rethink strength—and build a body that’s built for life. --- Meet the Hosts Srdjan Injac is a certified strength coach and the founder of ELEV8 Fitness in Portland, Oregon. With a background in kinesiology and a lifelong passion for movement, he’s trained everyone from elite athletes to everyday professionals to feel strong, live pain-free, and age with purpose. Srdjan’s coaching style is built on evidence-based training, long-term sustainability, and a deep belief in the power of muscle as medicine. Pete Wright is a veteran podcaster, storyteller, and—most importantly—a guy who used to avoid the gym at all costs. Srdjan’s just so happens to be his trainer. As such, Pete tries to bring curiosity, candor, and a deeply personal perspective on what it really takes to change your relationship with strength... no matter how much it hurts. With a background in health communication and habit-building for adults with ADHD, Pete asks the questions we’re all wondering—and helps listeners stay curious while getting stronger.

  1. Why Strength Is the Vital Sign Your Doctor Never Measures

    Jun 25

    Why Strength Is the Vital Sign Your Doctor Never Measures

    At a routine physical, a doctor charts blood pressure, weight, cholesterol, and triglycerides — a page of numbers meant to forecast the years ahead. None of them measure how strong you are. That's a strange omission, because muscle strength is one of the most reliable predictors of both lifespan and healthspan that researchers have found — in some studies, a better predictor than the blood-pressure reading sitting right next to it on the chart. This episode of Build for Health, with host Pete Wright and ELEV8 strength coach Srdjan Injac, examines the gap between what the exam room measures and what actually keeps a body running — and why that gap exists in the first place. The trail starts in medical training itself. Across four years of U.S. medical school, students receive on average roughly nineteen hours of nutrition education — under one percent of total instruction — and most of that is biochemistry, not how to counsel a patient on what to eat for breakfast. The result isn't ignorant doctors; it's a system built to diagnose and treat disease rather than prevent it, and one that gives a clinician about eight minutes per visit to do it. From there the episode turns to what the research actually rewards: grip strength, leg strength, walking speed, and total muscle mass — each of which tracks with how long and how independently people live. Low muscle mass even has a clinical name, sarcopenia, and a real cost, from falls and fractures to the loss of being able to stand up unassisted. The throughline is that strength isn't cosmetic. It's infrastructure. Underneath the specifics is a harder question about who owns prevention. When a visit is built around treating the number — a statin for cholesterol, a pill for blood pressure, another for blood sugar — the lifestyle changes that move the underlying condition can go unmentioned. Type 2 diabetes is the sharpest example: in clinical trials, substantial weight loss has put nearly half of shorter-duration cases into remission. The takeaway isn't that medicine is the enemy, and it certainly isn't that anyone should stop a prescription on their own. It's that absence of advice is not absence of importance — and that the strongest move a patient can make is to walk into the exam room asking not just how to fix a number, but how to keep it from coming back. KEY TAKEAWAYS Strength is an unmeasured vital sign. A standard physical records a dozen numbers that predict your health — but not how strong you are, even though strength rivals or beats several of them as a predictor.Grip strength is a whole-body signal. It correlates with all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and future disability — in large prospective research, more strongly than systolic blood pressure. (The point isn't to train your hands; grip is a proxy for total-body strength and resilience.)Walking speed predicts survival. Especially after age 65, usual walking pace integrates strength, balance, cardiovascular fitness, and nervous-system function into one accessible measure of vitality.Leg strength buys independence. The legs hold the largest muscles in the body; maintaining them lowers the risk of falls, fractures, and the loss of everyday autonomy — including the ability to get up off the floor, or off the toilet, without help.Low muscle mass has a name and a cost. Sarcopenia — age-related loss of muscle — is linked to higher disease and disability risk. You can carry less mass and still be strong, which is why strength, not size, is the goal.Med school barely covers nutrition. U.S. medical students average ~19 hours of nutrition across four years, under 1% of instruction — and most of it is biochemistry, not practical dietary counseling. The gap is structural, not personal.Lifestyle can move the underlying condition, not just the number. Resistance training, better nutrition, and weight loss can improve blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar at the source. Type 2 diabetes remission is well-documented in shorter-duration cases following significant weight loss.Ask prevention questions, not just prescription questions. "How do I keep this from coming back?" is a different conversation than "What do I take for this?"Safety note: Nothing here is medical advice, and no one should start, stop, or change a medication on their own. Decisions about prescriptions — including any wind-down — belong with your own clinician. GLOSSARY Sarcopenia — Age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength; associated with higher risk of falls, disability, and disease.Grip strength — Force generated by the hand, typically measured with a hand dynamometer. Used as a low-cost proxy for total-body strength and a research-validated predictor of mortality and disease risk.Gait speed (walking speed) — Usual walking pace, measured over a short distance. A simple, strong indicator of healthy aging and survival because it draws on multiple body systems at once.Sarcopenia vs. weakness — You can have less muscle mass but still be strong; the episode stresses that strength and function matter more than size alone.Type 2 diabetes remission — Return of blood sugar to a non-diabetic range without medication, sustained through lifestyle change. Remission is documented (especially in shorter-duration disease) but is not the same as a permanent cure; it depends on maintaining the habits.Statin — A class of drugs that lowers cholesterol; cited as an example of treating the number rather than the cause.Insulin resistance — Reduced response of cells to insulin, a key driver of type 2 diabetes; improved by activity, muscle, and fat loss.Naturopath / naturopathic medicine — A practitioner approach that, as described in the episode, emphasized longer visits, lifestyle, and prevention. (Scope of practice and licensing vary by state.)LINKS & NOTES Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine — Dr. Sydnee McElroy and Justin McElroy's medical-history podcast (Maximum Fun): https://maximumfun.org/podcasts/sawbones/ELEV8 Fitness: https://elev8fitnesspdx.comThe evidence behind this episode Nutrition in med school: "The State of Nutrition Education at US Medical Schools," Journal of Biomedical Education, 2015 — https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2015/357627Grip strength vs. blood pressure as a mortality predictor: Leong et al., PURE study, The Lancet, 2015 — https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62000-6/abstractWalking speed and survival: Studenski et al., "Gait Speed and Survival in Older Adults," JAMA, 2011 — https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2010.1923Type 2 diabetes remission via weight loss: Lean et al., DiRECT trial, The Lancet, 2018 — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29221645/

    28 min
  2. Staying Lean on Vacation with Devon Castro

    Jun 18

    Staying Lean on Vacation with Devon Castro

    ELEV8 trainer Devon Castro joins hosts Pete Wright and Srdjan Injac to take on a familiar fear: that a vacation will erase a year of training. It doesn't hold up. Muscle is durable: meaningful loss takes weeks of true inactivity, not a long weekend, and the "deflated" look people notice after a few days off is water and glycogen shifting — not muscle disappearing. Cardio fades faster than strength, which is why a swim, a hike, or a morning run protects the fitness that actually slips first. Maintaining doesn't require a real gym, either. A handful of big compound movements or a short bodyweight circuit — roughly twenty minutes, a couple of times a week — is enough to hold muscle, because the largest muscle groups recruit the smaller ones for free. Then there's everything that doesn't look like exercise: walking a new city, stairs, carrying bags. That non-exercise movement adds up to real energy expenditure, and it's often higher on vacation than at a desk. On food, the episode pushes back on a familiar rule — breakfast isn't a metabolic switch that makes or breaks weight, but a protein-forward first meal does a real job on a chaotic travel day: it adds structure and keeps you from arriving at dinner ravenous. Skipping it works fine for some people; what matters is the whole day, not the clock. And sleep turns out to be the quiet anchor under all of it — short sleep nudges you toward more food and worse decisions the next day. Vacation isn't a training phase, and treating it like one is the actual mistake. The goal isn't progress — it's coming home without losing ground and without white-knuckling the whole trip. Move a little, eat with a couple of anchors, protect your sleep, and enjoy the thing you traveled for. KEY TAKEAWAYS A week or two off costs you almost nothing. Real muscle loss takes weeks of inactivity; "mature" muscle built over years is even more durable.Feeling "flat" isn't losing muscle. It's water and glycogen shifting, and it bounces back fast once you're eating and moving normally.Cardio fades faster than strength. If you keep one thing up, make it a swim, hike, or run — that's what slips first.You don't need equipment or an hour. Three compound movements, or a bodyweight HIIT circuit, ~20 minutes, twice a week, maintains muscle.Train the big stuff. Large compound movements recruit the smaller muscles automatically — skip the isolation work on the road.NEAT is real and underrated. All the incidental walking, stairs, and sightseeing is genuine energy expenditure, often higher than your normal desk-bound day.Breakfast isn't magic for weight. But a protein-forward first meal adds structure and prevents the over-hungry dinner blowout. Skipping is fine for many people; total daily intake is what matters. (Exception: people with blood-sugar regulation issues should eat earlier — confirm framing, see production notes.)Sleep is the keeper. Poor sleep drives overeating and worse choices — protecting it beats forcing a workout.Moderation beats restriction. The enemy isn't the gelato; it's the all-or-nothing rebound that turns one treat into a five-day write-off.

    35 min
  3. GLP-1, Cortisol, and Cycle Syncing: A Women's Strength Training Reality Check with Brooke Passey and Kaila Gallion

    Jun 11

    GLP-1, Cortisol, and Cycle Syncing: A Women's Strength Training Reality Check with Brooke Passey and Kaila Gallion

    Spend ten minutes on the wellness internet and you'll learn that women's health runs on one vengeful hormone, that carbs are a betrayal, and that the fix is a protocol synced to your cycle. The kernel of truth — most fitness research was done on men — keeps getting buried under products, calendars, and miracle drugs. This episode digs for the science underneath. What actually changes when you train a woman instead of a man? Less than you'd think. From there: the real cost of GLP-1 drugs, what fasting and keto quietly do to hormones and energy, whether cycle-syncing is science or a $40 grift, and why cortisol isn't the villain your feed makes it out to be. The throughline is the least marketable advice in fitness: balance beats extremes, and the scale is the wrong thing to track. Every shortcut here sells speed at the expense of the one thing that compounds over a lifetime — the muscle and bone you build the slow way. Key Takeaways Programming for women and men is more alike than different. Same core exercises; the real variables are intensity and recovery, adjusted to where someone is in their cycle and how they feel day to day."Bulky" is largely a myth. Building significant size is genuinely hard and isn't a default risk of lifting heavy.GLP-1 medications carry an off-label cost. Roughly a quarter of the weight lost can be muscle, and falling estrogen accelerates bone loss — a setup for osteopenia and, later, osteoporosis.The drugs are legitimately useful for real medical need, but become a problem when used as a permanent shortcut with no nutrition education and no training to protect muscle.Fasting and keto trade fast scale drops for thyroid suppression, disrupted estrogen, irregular or missing periods, and lower energy — and the effects hit lean, active women hardest.Carbs aren't the enemy. A floor of about 150g per day supports estrogen and thyroid function; too little for too long reads to the body as a famine signal.Cycle phases are real, but cycle-syncing products oversell them. Strength tends to peak in the follicular-to-ovulatory window; the luteal phase brings fatigue, cravings, bloating, and water retention. The answer is personalization and adapting effort — not quitting the gym.Cortisol is essential, not evil. It regulates energy, blood sugar, and the sleep-wake cycle. Chronic elevation is the issue, and even then it works through behavior (cravings, poor sleep, low recovery) rather than directly causing fat gain.The scale lies daily. Two-to-five-pound swings in 24 hours are normal and almost never fat. Track body composition and performance instead.The shortcut is the trap. Medications, extreme diets, and trend protocols sell speed; muscle and bone are built slowly and pay off for the rest of your life.Liked what you heard? Srdjan, Brooke, and Kaila are all coaches at ELEV8 Fitness — and you can train with them in real life, not just in your earbuds. No shortcuts, no $40 cycle calendars. Just real programming built for your body and your life. Start at elev8fitnesspdx.com.

    37 min
  4. Your Bones Are Alive

    Jun 4

    Your Bones Are Alive

    Most people picture the skeleton as a rigid frame — inert scaffolding that holds everything else up. It isn't. Bone is living tissue, constantly broken down and rebuilt, and it responds to stress exactly the way muscle does: load it, and it grows stronger and denser. That one fact changes the whole question. Bone health isn't something you're stuck with — it's something you build, and the same training that builds muscle is reinforcing the skeleton underneath it. The rebuilding runs on a process called remodeling: specialized cells called osteoclasts clear away old, damaged bone while osteoblasts lay down new tissue. Peak bone mass arrives in the late twenties to early thirties, and from there it's a slow decline — faster for anyone inactive, under-eating, or skipping resistance work. The most effective defense is loading bone on purpose. Strength training pulls on bone and signals it to densify, and it builds the balance and stability that prevent the falls that fracture weak bone in the first place. Plyometrics — jumping, hopping, the explosive movements most people skip — add the dynamic, high-impact load that bone responds to best, especially in the hips and lower body where osteoporotic fractures tend to happen. And these habits compound, so the work done in your twenties, thirties, and forties sets your fracture risk decades later. Movement only pays off if the raw materials are there, and strong bone is a team effort. Calcium is the building mineral, but it needs vitamin D to be absorbed, magnesium to keep its balance, and vitamin K to direct it into bone rather than into blood vessels. Protein matters more than most people assume — bone isn't pure mineral, it's built on a protein matrix, largely collagen, that gives it flexibility and structure (and collagen isn't just for women). Chronic under-eating and crash dieting starve that whole system. Sitting on top of all of it are the hormones: estrogen slows bone breakdown in both sexes, which is why loss accelerates after menopause; testosterone supports bone-building; and chronically elevated cortisol — from stress, poor sleep, or long-term steroids — tips the balance toward loss. That interconnection is what makes the GLP-1 question more complicated than the marketing suggests. The medications aren't villains — for the right person they're a genuine tool. But rapid weight loss strips muscle along with fat, and appetite suppression can drop protein and nutrient intake too low to maintain bone. Push the first domino — the number on the scale — and muscle, bone, and recovery fall behind it. Current research ties the bone concern more to that muscle loss and reduced loading than to any direct effect of the drug, and it points back to the same protections that build bone in the first place: enough protein, calcium, and vitamin D, plus resistance training. Which is the reassuring part — bones are more in your control than they feel. Ask for bone-density and hormone markers at the next blood draw, train with load and impact, eat enough protein, and start early, because this is a skeleton you build over decades, not weeks. No adamantium required. KEY TAKEAWAYS Bones are living tissue, not a static frame. They constantly remodel — osteoclasts break down old bone, osteoblasts build new — and they respond to load just like muscle does.Use it or lose it. Peak bone mass arrives in your late twenties to early thirties; after that it declines, faster if you're inactive, under-eating, or skipping resistance training.Muscle and bone are directly linked. Building muscle pulls on bone and helps maintain density — so strength training does double duty.Plyometrics matter and get ignored. Jumping, hopping, and explosive movement load the hips and lower body where fractures happen. Start early; they get harder to begin later.Bone nutrition is a team. Calcium needs vitamin D to absorb, magnesium and vitamin K to be directed properly, and protein/collagen to maintain the bone's structural matrix. Collagen isn't just for women.Hormones set the balance. Estrogen (in both sexes), testosterone, and cortisol all influence whether you're building bone or losing it — which is why bone loss accelerates after menopause and with chronically high stress.GLP-1s deserve nuance. Useful for the right patient, but rapid weight loss can cost muscle and bone, especially if protein and training fall off. Current research links the concern to muscle loss and reduced loading more than to a direct drug effect — and resistance training plus adequate protein, calcium, and vitamin D are the recognized protections.It's a domino chain. People focus on the first domino (the number on the scale) and miss everything connected behind it. Looking skinnier isn't the same as getting healthier.Links & Notes Submit your questions to the show!

    27 min
  5. Throw the Scale Away

    May 28

    Throw the Scale Away

    t starts with one of the most common questions Srdjan gets at the gym: "What should I weigh?" A client asked it that very morning — wanting one number, for her height, that would mean she was healthy. But that number doesn't exist, and chasing it might be the thing holding people back. Healthy weight isn't a point on a scale; it's a range where your body functions, recovers, and performs well. From there, Pete and Srdjan take apart the whole toolkit we've been handed. The bathroom scale tells you nothing about muscle, metabolism, or health — two people at the same weight can be worlds apart inside, which is how "skinny fat" happens. BMI is worse: Pete traces its strange pedigree from a Belgian astronomer named Adolphe Quetelet, who built it in the 1830s to describe the statistical "average man" and explicitly warned against using it on individuals, to physiologist Ancel Keys, who rebranded it as the Body Mass Index in 1972 after studying white European and American men. It stuck because insurance companies wanted to predict how likely you are to die. The conversation moves into what Srdjan does measure instead — muscle mass — and why the body fat percentages you see on social media are a temporary, miserable, peak-week illusion that even competitors can't hold onto year-round. A genuinely healthy, strong person looks kind of normal. You'll know it by how you feel — energy, strength, good labs, the ability to get out of a chair unassisted at 80 — not by whether your abs show in July. And because a body that's causing you stress and anxiety isn't actually healthy, the real goal is feeling good physically and mentally, without the extremes. Build muscle, stop measuring the wrong things, and throw the scale away. KEY TAKEAWAYS Healthy weight is a range, not a number. It's where your body functions well — balanced muscle and body fat, stable energy, good recovery, healthy labs.The scale measures the least useful thing. It can't see muscle, metabolism, or visceral fat. "Skinny fat" — thin on the outside, metabolically unhealthy on the inside — is the proof.BMI has a questionable pedigree. Built by an astronomer for population statistics, never meant for individuals, popularized by insurers tracking mortality. It can't tell muscle from fat, which is why Srdjan himself gets classified as "obese."Muscle mass is the number to watch. More muscle speeds metabolism, lowers body fat (including visceral fat), and regulates nearly everything. And it declines with age, so building it early matters.Focus on what you're gaining, not losing. Reframing from "I need to lose weight" to "I need to build muscle" is what actually produces fat loss — and it sticks.Single-digit body fat is a peak-week illusion. Those shredded photos are taken right after a competition; even competitors can't maintain it. Around 20% body fat can be perfectly healthy with good muscle mass.Health is psychological too. If a target weight or body fat is causing stress and anxiety, that's a sign it's the wrong target.The stuff that matters doesn't photograph. Joint health, mobility, getting out of a chair at 80 — none of it shows up in a Speedo shot, and all of it matters more.Links & Notes Submit your questions to the show!

    31 min
  6. The Four Engines of Your Metabolism (And Why Three of Them Aren't the Gym)

    May 21

    The Four Engines of Your Metabolism (And Why Three of Them Aren't the Gym)

    Most of us treat metabolism like a mystery dial somewhere inside the body — one that worked fine in our twenties and quietly broke sometime after. In this episode, Pete brings that exact theory to Srdjan, who gently dismantles it and replaces it with something far more useful: a four-part system you can actually influence, starting today, without setting foot in a gym. Srdjan walks through the four components of total daily energy expenditure — your basal metabolic rate, the thermic effect of food, exercise itself, and NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis, a.k.a. the steps, fidgeting, and standing-up-from-your-desk that quietly run the show). The numbers are surprising. BMR alone accounts for sixty to seventy-five percent of what you burn in a day. Exercise? A modest five to fifteen percent. Which means the hour you spend grinding in the gym is genuinely valuable — and also not the lever you think it is. The conversation moves into the supporting cast: sleep, stress, and hormones. Srdjan explains why under-sleeping cranks up ghrelin and tanks leptin, why chronic cortisol makes your body fight your goals, and why protein does double duty — it builds muscle and costs your body twenty to thirty percent of its own calories just to digest. Pete arrives at the radical conclusion that the most effective thing he could do for his metabolism right now is take a nap and eat a steak. Srdjan, to his credit, does not disagree. The episode closes with a listener question about manual labor — does a physically demanding job count as training? — and a clear takeaway: focus on what you can control in those other twenty-three hours, and the gym becomes the multiplier, not the whole equation. KEY TAKEAWAYS Metabolism isn't one thing. It's four: BMR (60–75% of daily burn), thermic effect of food (digestion costs), exercise activity (a modest 5–15%), and NEAT (everything else you do all day)."Broken metabolism" is almost never the right diagnosis. Metabolism is highly adaptable and responds to sleep, stress, diet, movement, and muscle mass.Protein is the most metabolically expensive nutrient — your body burns 20–30% of those calories just digesting them. Carbs are 5–10%. Fat is around 3%.Muscle is metabolically active tissue. More muscle means a higher resting burn, which is why resistance training pays compounding dividends.Sleep is non-negotiable. Under-sleeping raises ghrelin (hunger), lowers leptin (fullness), worsens insulin sensitivity, and drives sugar cravings.Chronic stress sends the same signal to your body whether it's coming from work, relationships, money, or excessive dieting — and it sabotages recovery either way.The 23-hour rule: what you do outside the gym matters more than the hour inside it. Ten thousand steps, standing, walking, daily chores — that's where the real burn lives.Cardio and resistance training do different jobs. Cardio burns calories now. Resistance training protects the system that burns calories later.Links & Notes Check out ELEV8 Fitness in Hillsboro! Submit your questions to the show!

    27 min
  7. The Sitting Disease

    May 14

    The Sitting Disease

    You can hit the gym four times a week and still be quietly undone by your chair. That's the uncomfortable thesis behind what's been called "the sitting disease," and in this episode, Pete Wright sits down (ironically) with strength coach Srdjan Injac to walk through exactly what eight to ten hours of daily sitting does to the human body. The conversation moves region by region. The thoracic spine stiffens. The diaphragm gets compressed and breathing goes shallow. The hip flexors tighten until the glutes — which are supposed to be one of the strongest muscles in your body — essentially clock out. Lower back pain gets blamed on the back, when the real problem is everything around it. And then Srdjan goes inside, where the sitting disease gets genuinely uncomfortable: glucose handling declines, insulin sensitivity drops, and within sixty to ninety minutes of sitting, an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase — the gatekeeper that pulls fats out of your bloodstream — falls off a cliff. The payoff is practical. Stand up every hour. Take walking meetings. Get the steps in, not because anyone needs to see them but because your metabolism needs the movement. And when you do get to the gym, expect the work to be uncomfortable in the right way — split squats that finally stretch what's been flexed all day, exercises that activate muscles you forgot you had. The mindset shift here is the whole episode in one sentence: hurt is not broken. Hurt is on the mend. Movement isn't a workout you complete and check off. It's a feature of your day. If you've ever wondered why you're doing everything right and still feeling stiff, sluggish, and slowly heavier — this episode is the answer, and the way out. Links & Notes Submit your questions to the show!

    30 min
  8. The Incident: How Srdjan Broke His Arm and Started Beating the Clock

    May 7

    The Incident: How Srdjan Broke His Arm and Started Beating the Clock

    A few weeks ago, ELEV8's Srdjan Injac went on a bike ride. He came home with an oblique fracture of his radius, a Saturday-night ER trip, and a Tuesday surgery that left a plate and eight screws in his forearm. This week, the strength coach who teaches people not to get hurt sits down to explain how he got hurt — and what he's doing about it. Then we get into the comeback. Srdjan walked out of surgery with a six-week timeline for the bone to heal and three months before he could lift heavy. He's quietly trying to cut that to two, and he's running a one-man clinical experiment on his own arm to do it: red light therapy two to three times a day, weekly IV cocktails of B vitamins, vitamin C, magnesium, amino acids, and NAD, a hyperbaric oxygen chamber that nearly broke him at sixty feet of simulated depth, an electro-muscle-stimulation suit, and a strange-but-real protocol called the cross-education effect — training one arm to keep both strong. Pete walks Srdjan through what each of these actually does, what the evidence says, and what it feels like from the inside. (Spoiler: the chamber is a lot.) But here's the part that matters whether or not you've ever broken a bone. Srdjan is recovering ahead of schedule, and the doctors and PTs are crediting muscle memory — the plate and screws stayed put, the bones snapped back into place, and the rehab is moving fast. Not because of any single therapy. Because there was something to come back to. This is the case for muscle as insurance made visible. If you've been waiting for a sign that strength training is worth the effort, watching your strength coach come back from a plated forearm surgery ahead of schedule is probably it. Links & Notes Submit your questions to the show!

    30 min
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Build for Health is a show that flips the script on fitness. Hosted by longtime podcaster Pete Wright and strength coach Srdjan Injac of ELEV8 Fitness, this show isn’t about gym culture or getting shredded—it’s about why building muscle is the most important investment you can make in your long-term health. Each week, Pete and Srdjan break down the science, bust the myths, and offer real-world insight into how resistance training supports not just strength, but brain function, metabolic health, emotional well-being, immune resilience, and aging with independence. If you think lifting weights is just for looks, think again. It’s time to rethink strength—and build a body that’s built for life. --- Meet the Hosts Srdjan Injac is a certified strength coach and the founder of ELEV8 Fitness in Portland, Oregon. With a background in kinesiology and a lifelong passion for movement, he’s trained everyone from elite athletes to everyday professionals to feel strong, live pain-free, and age with purpose. Srdjan’s coaching style is built on evidence-based training, long-term sustainability, and a deep belief in the power of muscle as medicine. Pete Wright is a veteran podcaster, storyteller, and—most importantly—a guy who used to avoid the gym at all costs. Srdjan’s just so happens to be his trainer. As such, Pete tries to bring curiosity, candor, and a deeply personal perspective on what it really takes to change your relationship with strength... no matter how much it hurts. With a background in health communication and habit-building for adults with ADHD, Pete asks the questions we’re all wondering—and helps listeners stay curious while getting stronger.

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