STRENGTH TRAINING in older populations
When in your younger years, you likely don’t think about the impact that being strong is having on your body ten, twenty, even thirty years from now. However, the work you do today, as well as continue to do long term, can greatly impact your health for decades to come. Today--my goal is to give you the background on how strength training now and through the rest of your life, can have you living a much longer, more fulfilling life.
We often think about strength training for the now--the increased muscle in our legs or arms that look great in photos, the gym gains, the loss of inches in our waist, and while these are important to keeping us consistent, we don’t focus on what long term effects are actually taking place. The two main pieces I want to address today are osteoporosis and sarcopenia, essentially, the loss of bone mass and muscle mass over time due to aging. Again, you may think, I don’t need to worry about that right now, but the truth is, the more consistent you are now, the better off your future self will be.
When we say fitness is for life, we mean it--it’s for life.
LET'S DEFINE OUR TOPICS: SARCOPENIA & OSTEOPOROSIS
Sarcopenia: Sarcopenia is a condition characterized by loss of skeletal muscle mass and function. Although it is primarily a disease of the elderly, its development may be associated with conditions that are not exclusively seen in older persons. (from NIH article “Clinical Definition of Sarcopenia” PMID: 25568649)
Sarcopenia literally means “lack of flesh.” It's a condition of age-associated muscle degeneration that becomes more common in people over the age of 50. After middle age, adults lose 3% of their muscle strength every year, on average. (Healthline article written by Matthew Thorpe) This limits their ability to perform many routine activities (commonly referred to as ADLs or activities of daily living) and can make later years much less enjoyable. We commonly think about retirement as time for travel, doing all the things we didn’t have time for when we were younger, but if your body isn’t in good health, the likelihood of you doing those things is pretty low.
Osteoporosis: Osteoporosis is a disease that weakens bones, meaning that as your body is constantly overturning bone tissue, new bone creation cannot keep up with old bone removal. This leads to having porous bones that are more vulnerable to fractures and breaks. This can happen due to a lack of calcium over the lifetime, being underweight, or severely restricting food intake. Osteopenia is essentially that first step prior to osteoporosis, where the inside portion of your bones becomes more brittle and you are turning over old bone quicker than forming new bone. It is less severe than osteoporosis.
Again, you may be thinking--this doesn’t affect me right now, I’m not in the older adult category yet, this isn’t something I need to be concerned with! But the truth is, the less you do through your life time to prevent these things from happening, the higher the likelihood in you experiencing them in your older adult years.
So…how do we prevent this? Eating adequate food, training hard, and continuing to do so for years to come.
THE SCIENCE BEHIND BUILDING MUSCLE MASS WITH STRENGTH TRAINING
Strength training is known for its purpose of building muscle. When we utilize our muscles to move a load (whether bodyweight or through added load), we are causing our muscles to undergo what is known as the CrossBridge Cycle, which causes the muscular contraction we think of when we do a bicep curl, or a squat. (If you want to know what the CrossBridge Cycle looks like in action, check out this video here.) When our muscles contract, we create what are known as microtears to our muscles, that signal the body to have to rebuild what was broken down.
Think of your body as a house trying to withstand a storm. If at first your house doesn’t survive the storm, the next time around, you will likely build it back stronger so that it doesn't happen again. The same thing happens with muscle fibers. When the work done (strength training) exceeds what the muscles are capable of, microtears occur, your body adapts, and muscles are built back stronger and larger. Thus, the gains.
THE SCIENCE BEHIND BUILDING BONE TISSUE WITH STRENGTH TRAINING
Many don’t think about the increased bone density that also occurs with strength training. Musculoskeletal health is the combination of both muscular and bone health, as the name implies, and they are directly connected.
Your muscles are attached to your bones by tendons (not to be confused with ligaments, which attach bone to bone). When we decide to stand up, walk, squat, or perform any movement, your muscles pull on your bones to cause these movements to happen fluidly. The direct mechanisms of how bone density is increased through exercise is not fully understood, but the thought is similar to how muscle mass increases--adaptation.
With an increase in mechanical load on the bones due to muscular contraction, there is an increase in osteoblast (bone mass creating cells) activity. Strength training specifically, is shown to be of utmost importance due to its level of difficulty beyond the normal ADLs.
WHAT CAN YOU DO TO HELP?
If you DON’T Have Osteoporosis, Osteopenia, or Sarcopenia…
The best thing you can be doing is continuing to strength train regularly at progressively more difficult loads to continue the cycle of building or maintaining strength and bone mineral density.
2-3x/week hitting major muscle groups and eating adequate amounts of food is your best defense against these!
If You DO have Osteoporosis, Osteopenia, or Sarcopenia…
Consult a physician prior to starting a new exercise program. Low weight bearing exercises are usually recommended first for overall health, and while these are beneficial to overall health, they do not help prevent worse damage (due to the lack of load). Resistance training can and should be performed, but under supervision of a health and fitness professional to make sure exercises are performed safely and effectively. Utilizing low loads to assess tolerance should be a starting point. Severe cases should be incredibly mindful. Remember that resistance training does not have to be barbells and dumbbells, but can be bodyweight, suspension training, and machine based to keep safety at the forefront.
To recap, our goal here at Level TEN is to always provide you the understanding of your health and fitness to not only serve you now, for your current goals, but for life. We want you to walk away knowing more than when you came, and to feel confident in the WHY behind it all.
If you want to be a healthy, thriving, older adult, strength training and adequate food intake will help you along the way. Consistency is king, and that’s the truth.
So keep moving forward, keep training hard, and keep that body of yours fed!
Further reading: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6279907/
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