There’s a lot of shrugging that goes on when people get older, particularly in relation to their health and wellbeing.
Why bother making an effort with your fitness when death might snatch you away at any moment?
Those every-day slips of memory seem to reinforce this attitude. As do the weird cracking sounds that come from odd places in your body, starting in your forties.
This isn’t as entirely morbid as it seems, more cozy and comforting in a what-the-hell kind of way.
Instead of fighting the grand mortal slide, why not gain pleasure from a bucket of fried chicken with ice cream on the side?
Welcome to fatalism and ageing, an area of research that looks at, among other things, how we make decisions later in life.
If we believe our best days are behind us, we are less likely to put effort into thinking things through. Especially things that affect us personally.
One of the difficulties: we might be more inclined to rely on assumptions than make the effort to ferret out the facts when making these decisions.
It’s something I will look at more deeply down the track.
Responding to muscle loss
I’ve written previously about muscle loss and how, over time, it puts you at much greater risk of falling, becoming disabled or accidentally killing yourself.
A bleaker take can be found in a Harvard Health essay which advises, “Loss of muscle strength can put everyday activities out of reach – activities such as walking, cleaning, shopping, and even dressing. They hinder your ability to cope with and recover from an illness or injury.”
To best keep yourself fit for everyday life, and to slow the loss of muscle, engage in regular strength or resistance training.
As the Harvard piece notes, there are “other specific health benefits to strength and power training, such as better blood sugar control and a slowing of bone loss”.
Great, so what’s the beef?
One of the assumptions when taking up strength training is the ideas that a heavier load delivers more muscle and strength than lighter loads.
Another, is that if you work hard enough – and I’m talking about you being a person aged 50 and over – you can grow as much muscle as the youngsters.
It’s partly a competitive impulse, but also a wistful desire to regain all that has been lost.
I went through a sorry stage of thinking and hoping that this was the case. Then I did some research.
How older people respond to exercise
Last year, I read an interesting article at The Conversation, authored by Roger Fielding, a professor of medicine and researcher at the University of USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging.
Professor Fielding leads a team of scientists “who study the health benefits of exercise, strength training and diet in older people”.
He writes: “Old and young people build muscle in the same way. But as
you age, many of the biological processes that turn exercise into muscle become less effective.
“This makes it harder for older people to build strength but also makes it that much more important for everyone to continue exercising as they age.”
The short version
The short version: In young muscles, “a little bit of exercise produces a strong signal for the many processes that trigger muscle growth”.
In older people’s muscles, by comparison, “the signal telling muscles to grow is much weaker for a given amount of exercise”.
These changes begin to occur when a person reaches around 50 years old and become more pronounced as time goes on. This explains why there are no super athletes aged 50 or over at the Olympics.
So what’s the good news?
Strength or resistance training will help keep you upright, capable and full of beans. You’ll also lose more weight than just going for a walk or bike ride, and your muscles will get bigger and you will feel stronger.
Not only will you live better, a study published last September offered new evidence that you will live longer. As reported then in The New York Times:
“Researchers found that while doing either aerobic exercise or strength training was associated with a lower risk of dying during the study’s time frame, regularly doing both – one to three hours a week of aerobic exercise and one to two weekly strength training sessions – was associated with an even lower mortality risk.”
Heavy or light weights?
When I was going through that mad stage of trying to turn back the muscles clock, I was advised repeatedly by young trainers that going heavy with the load was the way to go.
I was careful and reasonably conservative. Even so, what followed were niggles and strains and clicks in the shoulders, biceps and wrists.
The youngsters, who were seeking to build much bigger muscles than I aspired to, were also complaining of injuries but argued the old “no pain, no gain” line.
Then I got a different line of advice from a couple of physiotherapists:
“Use lighter weights, do more repetitions, many more, until the muscles are tired.”
No more injuries (from weights, anyway), greater strength and flexibility, and it’s easier to maintain the return of lost muscle. I won’t get back the muscles from my twenties. I won’t get my original hair colour back either.
Way it goes. I’m fit enough and planning to stay that way for as long as possible.
What science says
A new study, from the State University of Campinas in São Paulo, set out to resolve this basic question. What kind of resistance training promotes more muscle growth: low load with many repetitions or high load with fewer repetitions?
The researchers found: it makes no difference.
The study lasted eight weeks. It involved 18 volunteers, half of whom performed high-load exercises with fewer repetitions. The other half did low-load exercises with more repetitions.
The high-load group lifted up to 80 per cent of their weight.
The low-load group were limited to lifting 30 per cent. B – but they repeated the exercises “until their muscles could no longer lift the loads”.
Muscle mass was measured in the first and last exercise sessions.
The authors found that “a comparison of the two groups did not show any difference in muscle growth”.
There was also no difference in metabolic stress. This was “measured in an analysis of substances released into the bloodstream by the exercises”.
In other words, the body responded to the different levels of exercise in the same way.
To read more about the study, see here.
